The Judge Of It All

by Carlo Cielo

One of the most significant realizations I’ve ever had, the one which put my intellectual journey across the noughties in full circle, is how Ayn Rand was a piece of shit all along.

See, I’ve always thought of Rand as a sort of ‘loyal opposition’, an ideological counterweight to smarmy pervert dogmas and philosophies that are all about subjugation and intrusion in your life. And yes, some threads within her philosophy are still relevant – at least the operant argumentative tract – and can still be utilized. They still do provide a counter-offense against trespass of unwanted kind - of neo-liberalism, among others.

What I never knew was an Ayn Rand who was a full-on, disgusting human lesion, who groveled at the feet of child murderers, and specifically because of the fact they’re scum. Perhaps enthralled by their resoluteness in representing a defined side of a moral spectrum. Nonetheless, someone who actually ends up LIKING corruption & evil, and subjugation in the end, and is perfectly fine with any of these.

Guess this serves to expose what made my previous predicament so wrong the first time I halfway bought into Objectivist philosophy, peaking at the years 2003-2005. Being so trapped by these mindsets, these doctrinal pissings I got tied up in. And the single most dangerously ironic flaw in Rand's philosophy : its exclusive investment in psychic income; where all of reality collapses into that wonderful space between you and your precious little thoughts, and intellectuality coming down to satiating that condition.

This insularity obviously results in paranoias, in claustrophobia of all correspondences and struggle & feedback being kept within one's own, the absolute goal being nothing more than to slog endlessly through those rationalizations, that internal discourse; and its incentive, the stress. There may be supplemental outside interactions, yes, but the back and forth between that person and the surrounding reality and actual society remains largely transactional, with little acceptance of their separate value and worth; as reason & comprehension is singularly governed by egoist subjectivity, and its indolent emotionalism consuming perspective.

You can only be besieged by pent-up, thought-out ‘claims’, and these are only what would mean anything in your life.

And some of those 'claims' do start to get untenable, even as they all do purport to one thing, and one thing only. If it’s not God, Jesus, or a buncha telepathic aliens you read in the Bible or somewhere, then it’s this illusory, pictured entity of fiction of 'self' - that glorious construct all these would run in contact against, all of which made of personal suggestions themselves, the only responsibility being to preserve and maintain that internal cacophony at all cost.

‘Self’ that has nothing to do with the term. 'Self' that is a construct than the actual subject - or object. 'Self' that isn't the tangible, flesh and blood of your actual organic being, much less the materiality of your being’s welfare. ‘Self’ that is not of the psycho-somatic, yet forcibly maltreats and obligates the psycho-somatic into endlessly feeding its crushing psychopathy. 'Self' that basically comes down to insular bloviation projected on the many.

Amazing how I've managed to maintain my generally ‘Leftist’ footing even as I've been knee-deep in that state. Perhaps it may have been that footing's ingrained angst w/c helped keep up such condition : the adversarial & antagonistic tact, of course, being removed from respective issues and context, and co-opted and utilized to feed EGO : repurposed to prop up & fulfill a tract of arrogance, a juvenile, self-authored modality, waxing right to (over)compensate for its invalidation – a material ‘fix', a special high, along the lines of drugs, ‘90s angsty-shit music, erotic bullshit, and synthetic post-traumatic ambiance. What has probably reduced ‘activism’ into ‘puberty phase’ for most people, and I guess still does.

Thankfully it didn't come down to that for me. I started embracing the substance of Left positionalities, before it was too late.

It helps to claw out of such confinement. It's good to get out of the self-absorption of that view. It aids to wake up to the inanity of it, and see the rudderless world outside, and how inferior the self-inflicted and futile the Objectivist set-up is in comparison, & truly moribund and abandoned by dynamic time. To fully grasp the understanding that you are concurrent to immediate reality, and what is at stake is EVERYONE. And so the single best therapy to this pointless morass - spiritual, political, psychological, or otherwise - is direct social engagement.

It also helps to realize that intellectuality goes both ways : it's not just what your thoughts say about the real world, but what the real world is telling you right now. Once you start accepting this, then you begin to matter again. Inspecting the bullshit, clearing out the mental filters, and looking at the merits and substance of things, and their respective functionalities and practicalities, and APPLYING their lessons, rather than merely using them to satisfy sensation for its own sake.

It’s what ultimately unshackles the Chinese Garter of such elite-engendered formulations. Of their superstructures specifically meant to stifle and disarm, and punish for some reason. It’s what would clear things up and make you realize that this one thing here for example is a wreck, a matrix of corrupt views, there is zero need to defend or suffer or wallow in these, and we should ought to invest our energies and castigations on the attacks from outside. Instead of spending all of those times brutalizing the Self.

The recent exposes on Ayn Rand shows real damn well the decrepit nature of her discourse, in all its pointless violence, the type of which governs our decade's most prominent fuckers as well : namely, the intellectual class parasites who have since nested themselves inside the belly of this socio-cultural imperialism. The creoles heathens who are more than eager to rave about a Filipina's rape-slay on celluloid – in how it’s such an ' uncompromisingly profound acceptance of human ruin '. And what tasty human ruin !

The rest of us just can't appreciate, 'coz we're the ‘masses’. We’re 'little people'. We’re ‘lice’, the ‘ naked, twisted, mindless figure of the human Incompetent’, ‘mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned’. That’s why we don't deserve a piece of the wealth. That's why we ought to 'wait our turn', instead of threatening freedom - their freedom - with demands for equity. We do not deserve to be recognized by these haughty, Dionysian Supermen.


We'll be the judge of that.