The free and independent individual
by Jon Rappoport
July 26, 2017
In Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel, The Fountainhead, newspaper columnist, arch manipulator, and promoter of absolute collectivism, Ellsworth Toohey, tells his social-climbing weak-kneed follower, Peter Keating: “If you learn how to rule one single man’s soul, you can get the rest of mankind. It’s the soul, Peter, the soul. Not whips or swords or fire or guns. That’s why the Caesars, the Attilas, the Napoleons were fools and did not last. We will. The soul, Peter, is that which can’t be ruled. It must be broken. Drive a wedge in, get your fingers on it—and the man is yours…enshrine mediocrity.”
There is a whole army of experts, whose job is to tell you success only comes with you being part of a group.
They imply your status as an individual is transmitted to you through some diabolical portion of your brain that is loaded with false messages. Therefore, give up. Take the elevator down to the basement, get off, and join The Group. That’s where the love is. That’s where your useless courage dissolves into sugar, and you discover a paradise of the lowest common denominator. You’re home. The sun never rises or sets. Nothing changes. Sameness rules.
Since the 1960s, many people have decided that, in order to create the future they want, they should engage in a certain amount of introspection.
Spiritual or psychological introspection.
I have encountered a large number of such people, who have swung the balance to the point where introspection has become indecision and paralysis.
There are “so many issues to consider.”
Starting in the 1960s, we saw the import of various Eastern philosophies and practices. They arrived here in diluted and distorted forms. They introduced their own versions of “karma” and “balance” and “surrender” and “abdication to the wishes of the universe.”
“If it doesn’t happen, it wasn’t meant to be.”
In the end, it amounts to waiting around in a cosmic station for a train that never arrives.
Or in psychological terms, it is: “I have to resolve my past before I can pursue my future.” “How can I know what I want if I’m trapped in past conflicts?”
The effect of all this was to diminish the potential realm of human action. It was a kind of court case where all the priors of the defendant were allowed into evidence and dominated the verdict.
More recently, another limiter came on to the scene. It is expressed this way: “Now I see through fake reality, I see how reality is being manipulated by the powers-that-be, so what can I do? We’re at the mercy of these forces.”
These vectors were and are an intentional operation, whose purpose is to demoralize the individual and cut him off from his own freedom, independence, and power.
Here is the superior principle: even if the individual determines, in a worst-case scenario, that all is hopeless, he should launch the life and future he desires ANYWAY. Despite all the good reasons to give up, he should ignore all of them and launch.
Because if he does that, he soon begins to see his own view change. It’s not the same anymore.
Many, many individuals, since the dawn of time, have thought themselves into smaller and smaller boxes until there was no space left—and then some of those individuals, who were spiritual riverboat gamblers, shoved in all their chips on projecting action into the world anyway…and they revolutionized their destinies.
We can go even deeper. What is the ultimate purpose of thought and reflection and introspection? Is it to arrive at certain conclusions, after which the thinker (the person) serves those conclusions like a slave? Or is thought itself a process through which ideas then serve the individual and his goals?
It is the latter.
The first great philosopher of the West, Plato, followed the first path. Which is to say, he applied his mind to understand the basis of reality, and he came to the conclusion that there were immortal and pure Ideas that existed in a higher realm, and they were unchangeable. Society, therefore, could only triumph if certain wise men, who could apprehend these Ideas directly, ruled over everyone else. Thus, the freedom and independence and power of open inquiry led to totalitarianism. Freedom led to slavery.
Give us your huddled masses yearning to be free. Masses? No. A mass can never be free. And even if a mass can successfully demand freedom, on whom does that outcome then fall? The individual. This is where the buck stops, and no one can change that truth.
There are those who believe a quiet lake is the marvelous end of all existence.
And then a boat comes along, and new ripples begin spreading. A dynamic individual has arrived.
You can be the person looking at the lake, banking on no-action, or you can be in the boat, forwarding your best ideas and visions and dreams, despite all the reasons not to.
In 1891, Oscar Wilde wrote: “Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. There lies its immense value. For what it seeks is to disturb monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.”
Every individual has the potential to be an artist and maker of reality. He achieves this by walking through the corridors of what he has learned from others, until he emerges into the sun of his own self-generated thoughts.
No one else can tell him what his thoughts are. Those thoughts don’t follow machine patterns. They don’t cling to any system. They don’t wind up in some superficial trash of generalities.
An individual’s mind and imagination aren’t asking for convenient generalities.
The key question, as always, is: what do you want to create?
Answering the question and then acting on it transforms a life.
(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix, click here.)
Jon Rappoport
The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.
Rand, Einstein, Freud, Castro, Guevara, on and on and on. All sub-human “heroes/geniuses” created by the kosher media. Put forth as icons to the human spirit when they were the types of demons needed to…. ruin a man’s soul.
Would you care to expand?
Why do you consider them sub-human?
paschnn1 is correct. How can someone explain years of research in one blog comment?
I can see Castro and Guevara as demons. But I’m curious why you include Rand, Einstein and Freud in that mix? Would you include Marx?
I was a teen when Rand was at the height of her popularity in the 60s. I was feeling the walls of social conformity closing in when I found Fountainhead. I read a few more of her other works and then went on to other things. It was enough to get the idea of how to think like a free person. Over the years, I found a lot of other great libertarian writers and logicians with other points of view.
If you think she ruins souls, you’re missing something. The kind of knowledge acquired by logical thinking gave me a power that can’t be acquired by being dependent on groups and authorities. It’s not a power that comes at the expense of others. It’s a power based on self-knowledge and mutual gain.
We live in a highly irrational and self-destructive society. Better to be on the outside of the asylum looking in then being on the inside looking at walls.
Einstein = Plagiarizing class three patent clerk deified by the kosher media who abandoned his wife/children to marry his cousin.
Freud = a rather repulsive deviant who himself said, after disembarking from the ship (paraphrase), I bring the plague to america and they don’t even know.
Rand = A bona fide Bolshevik. Which, when you consider the rhetoric spewed in her “Atlas Shrugged” is ANYTHING but a pro-business, anti government soul. The Bolshevik movement was and IS “collectivism” at it’s most obscene.
Case in point, after the destruction of Russia by the Bolsheviks, they quickly moved into neighboring countries to “bleed” them, Ukraine, 8 million murdered by the CHEKA, their food stores, farming equipment stolen, borders closed = HOLODOMOR. The profits from selling all on the open market? Who knows, but the corpses were left there to rot.
Marx = Talmudic Jew. Arguably the most evil/racist tribe on earth. The “deal” made with Britain to draw the U.S. into WW1 and 2 on the WRONG side which culminated in Palestine being “gifted” to a third party banking dynasty by a nation with NO authority to do so has brought decades of organ harvesting, genocide, theft of property, (collectivism?), white slavery… ALL sanctioned by the west, All brought about by Marx ideology and the “snowflakes”/Millennials who help deify him.
“We live in a highly irrational and self-destructive society. Better to be on the outside of the asylum looking in then being on the inside looking at walls.”
The final sentence of your comment is very succinct. But I doubt we feel that way for the same reasons.
I couldn’t agree with you more!
Thank you Jon, I got your message and it is all true.
Not many today discuss or even think about what it means to be free. Thank you, Jon, for hitting this theme over and over.
In a previous post mentioning Ayn Rand, one commenter correctly pointed out her faults. However, she is worth considering exactly because she was the controlling tyrant personality. We can learn from her and others.
Another comment to a recent article mentioned that having to make a living was drudgery. It is all in how you look at it. Many people would do nothing if they didn’t have to work, and that would be a waste of their lives. Having to work is a good thing causing you to interact with others, providing value while earning a living instead of sand-bagging as I am seeing too often these days. A free person takes responsibility for themselves. While working at an entry-level job, you can be learning and thinking about what you would like to do next to better yourself and figure out more enjoyable work. Jon is exactly right about thinking being a creative act. Self-employment, by starting your own business, is the ultimate independence, so it is no wonder that government makes it so difficult with onerous regulations and taxes sold to the masses as benefits. We are willingly going along with our enslavement.
I apologize if this seems disjoint–wanted to share a few thoughts in too little time.
I’m reading The Fountainhead, and it is a great book.
Hence the war on Christianity. Through Christ we can be made free and whole. The ZOGs know this. Christianity works through individual enlightenment and progression. it works along a set path established by God. Everything the ZOG nations do attempts to deflect the individual from that path, or tries to convince him there is no path and thus no point in trying to find it.
Reblogged this on John Barleycorn and commented:
An important mainstay to the American dream.
If individuals are unbroken, then they can band together to create something greater than the greatest of them. But if they are are broken, they will only create something lesser than the least of them. To reference “Atlas Shrugged’,” I believe Galt’s Gulch was intended to be an idealized example of a band of fully-realized individuals working together on purely cooperative terms. There have been close approximations in real life, including: Lockheed’s Skunkworks, elite military forces, championship sport teams, certain Silicon Valley startups.
Sometimes individualism of the prima donna variety can undo a group whose members are impressive individually. Much more often, it’s the structure of the organization they find themselves in–a structure that’s anti-human.
Broadly speaking, having healthy relationships with other individuals is a key ingredient in the ecology of human flourishing. It’s like an evolved ecosystem where diverse living beings mutually reinforce each other’s flourishing. But other people are a two-edged sword and can make a hell as easily as a heaven.
It takes a developed imagination to go beyond the oft-presented alternatives of dog-eat-dog individualism versus tyrannical collectivism. The anti-human forces arrayed against us know well the dictum: “Amateurs talk strategy; professionals talk logistics.” And they know well that the imagination–as Jon frequently reminds us–is one of the most powerful weapons at our disposal. No wonder so much of the evil that’s done is aimed at crippling the imagination. People will put up with a tremendous amount of unnecessary evil if they lack the imagination to see how unnecessary it is.
It’s too bad cowboys didn’t eat much pizza back in the Old West, because I think a good painting would be a cowboy giving his last slice to his horse. – Jack Handy
“And they know well that the imagination–as Jon frequently reminds us–is one of the most powerful weapons at our disposal.”
…….What would imagination do with weapons? why just take a look around and you will see!
If you are thinking that better more powerful weapons will win you the freedom you aspire well congratulations, your perceived ‘enemy’ has taught you to play ‘its’ game quite well!!
In the end, it amounts to waiting around in a cosmic station for a train that never arrives. (Jon)
This sentence, reminded me of one painting that I did in the 1980,
It was a beautiful woman standing up with one foot on her suitcase, an umbrella in her hand and a huge hat on her head, She was there on this unknown planet, waiting in the dark sky for a train to come along..
It was one of my best paintings. if not the best. You could feel all the emotions, hope and fear.
You could also imagine how long she has been standing there, from all the little lights coming from distant stars who were illuminating her tired face.
I wish that I could see that painting again, but I sold it and I have no idea who has it
The Title was: Waiting for a train in a cosmic station.
I know you use this same basic format, Jon, but you’ve up with something a little bit special here. You have commuted understanding to comprehension.
That sums up “the issue”. As soon as humanity “the group” desires to dial out of the picture independently, the system will collapse, but not a second before.
Best
OT