Tag: The Collective

Book Review: The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand | #SmartReads

TheFountainhead
TheBreakaway | BreakawayConciousness
Zy Marquiez
May 7, 2017

There are writers.  And then there’s Ayn Rand.

Ayn Rand was a very unique individual; an individual that isn’t afraid to stand by her convictions, no matter what anyone said.  That’s what made her so beloved and hated.  Even more so, that’s why people were so bifurcated about her books.

Knowing that, then it isn’t shocking to realize that The Fountainhead was written with her very own ideals embedded within every page, within every character, within every thought.  In that sense, she is rather unique because not only did she create an amazing story, as many authors have, but she went a step beyond and used the book with the essence of her philosophy, which was, and will always be, a  truly daring endeavor for any writer.

The Fountainhead has been described in many ways, but at its core it is about The Individual vs. The Collective; about Freedom vs. Conformity.

With characters that are gripping, settings that are par excellence, and dialogue that displays incredible depth, the book is a well rounded synthesis about the nature of individualism and what it means to be human.

The leading characters all flow through their roles seamlessly, and whether you love them or hate them, you can feel the realism in them, even if at times they are the epitome of Rand’s ideal.

Anyone who values individuality will value this book.  Those that seek to conform will undoubtedly hate it.  That’s the nature of the beast, and always will be.  What Rand did though, perhaps better than anyone else, is show both sides of the coin – Individualism vs. Conformity – in a manner that nobody else had brought about through fiction.  This is why the book is so engaging, because you hate the villains as much as you love the characters you gravitate towards.  It is rare when a book has you personally invested in nigh every character failing or succeeding, but this book accomplishes that in spades.

Ayn Ran went to war for the Individual against The Collective in a torrential manner in a way almost nobody does.  Through her characters, Rand did a salient job of showing the wide range of latitudes within human nature.   All of this was, of course, was to highlight the importance of Individualism.

As Rand herself elucidates in the following passages, the last of the three which is in her own words, the prior two through her characters:

“Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their vision.  Their goals differed, but they all had this in common: that the step was first, the road new, their vision unborrowed, and the response they received – hatred.  The great creators – the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors – stood alone against the men of their time.  Every great new thought was opposed.  Every great ne invention was denounced.  The first motor was considered foolish.  The airplane was considered impossible.  The power loom was considered vicious.  Anesthesia was considered sinful.  But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered and they paid.  But they won.”[1]

“From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man – the function of his reasoning mind.”[2]

“And for the benefit of those who consider relevance to one’s own time as of crucial importance, I will add, in regard to our age, that never has there been a time when men have so desperately needed a projection of things as they ought to be.”[3]

Rand stated those words decades ago, and they apply even more so now.  Given that humanity keeps snowballing down a hill in a world where morality, common sense and virtues keep getting swept under the rug, such statements and their ramifications should be pondered at length.

Whether you love the book or you hate it, it will give you much to ponder about, especially if you value Freedom and Individuality in any way shape or form.

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Sources:

[1] Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead, p. 710.
[2] Ibid., p. 711.
[3] Ibid., p. vii.  Written in the Author’s Introduction to the 1968 Edition.

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This article is free and open source. You are encouraged to share this content and have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Zy Marquiez and TheBreakaway.wordpress.com.
___________________________________________________________
About The Author:

Zy Marquiez is an avid book reviewer, researcher, an open-minded skeptic, yogi, humanitarian, and freelance writer who studies and mirrors regularly subjects like Consciousness, Education, Creativity, The Individual, Ancient History & Ancient Civilizations, Forbidden Archaeology, Big Pharma, Alternative Health, Space, Geoengineering, Social Engineering, Propaganda, and much more.

His other blog, BreakawayConsciousnessBlog.wordpress.com features mainly his personal work, while TheBreakaway.wordpress.com serves as a media portal which mirrors vital information nigh always ignored by mainstream press, but still highly crucial to our individual understanding of various facets of the world.

The Free & Independent Individual

Imagination&Obstacles
Source: NoMoreFakeNews.com | JonRappoport.wordpress.com
Jon Rappoport
April 27, 2017

“Now we have a whole army of experts, whose job is to tell you success only comes with you being part of a group. 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 on the greatest adventure in the world. Take the elevator down to the basement, get off, and join the crowd. That’s where the love is. That’s where your useless courage dissolves into sugar, and the chorus of complaints will be magically transformed into a paradise of the lowest common denominator. Give up the ghost. You’re home. The sun never rises or sets. Nothing changes. The same sameness rules.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)

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.”

I could suggest that 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. And that would be an accurate assessment. But it wouldn’t tell the whole story, for one vital reason:

The individual is the only person who can change his own course. Others can help, but the final decision is his.

That is bedrock.

And here is the superior principle: even if the individual determines that all is hopeless, he should launch his life anyway. Despite all the good reasons to give up, he should ignore all of them and launch his future.

Because if he does that, he soon begins to see his own view change. It’s not the same anymore.

And this is what freedom and independence and power are all about. Bottom line, these qualities are what you take hold of after you know all is hopeless. That’s the acid test.

Every individual, since the dawn of time, has thought himself into smaller and smaller boxes until there is no space left—and then certain individuals, who are spiritual and metaphysical riverboat gamblers, have shoved in all their chips on projecting action in the world anyway…and they revolutionize their destinies.

That’s what some people have called “inequality of outcome.” That’s the basis for it.

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.

The individual, when all is said and done, is his own ship. However much he may learn about navigation, there comes the moment when he and his ship leave the shore. He explores. He discovers. He invents.

He invents his own future. No matter what.

We would be fools if we didn’t realize that, down through human history, individuals have grasped, for themselves, all these points.

And when the American Republic was invented, these same points were “background.” What were the checks and balances and the separation of powers all about? What was the reason for the enumeration of federal powers and the granting of all other powers to the states and the people? Why was the federal government squeezed at its extremities? Because the free and independent individual was the true coin of the realm. He needed latitude. He needed legal protection, in the best way it could be provided, from arbitrary power.

Otherwise, why bother?

The Constitution was far more than an extension of independence from England. The men who wrote the Articles and the Bill of Rights, and the men who voted for them and ratified them—to now argue for or against their “deeper motives” is, in the end, a distraction from the fact that the Constitution contains ideas that aid the liberation of the free and independent individual.

The ideas still stand.

They are predicated on the notion that these individuals exist and will launch, despite all reasons not to, their own creative desires and make them fact in the world.

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 bounty 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 end of all existence. And then a boat comes along, and the ripples begin spreading. An 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.

Read More At: JonRappoport.wordpress.com
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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.

What Chuck Schumer Is Revealing Out In The Open

Secrecy
Source: NoMoreFakeNews.com | JonRappoport.wordpress.com
Jon Rappoport
April 26, 2017

Senator Chuck Schumer on MSNBC: “We’re no longer fact-based. The founding fathers created a country based on fact. We don’t have a fact base. If Breitbart News and the New York Times are regarded with equal credibility, you worry about this democracy.”

First of all, in Schumer’s opening sentence, who is this “we”? There is an implication that the “we” is somehow monolithic and centralized. But people have been in disagreement about facts and what they mean since the dawn of time. People have rejected centralized sources of facts, from kings and queens and priests, to newspapers and television news.

In the same way that 99% of economists assume society must be planned and centralized, Schumer and “the people in power” assume media must operate as a centralized force—as if it’s a natural law.

They just assume it, because until recently, it was the case, it was cozy and easy. But not now. And they’re angry and shocked. They see their foundation of propaganda and mind control slipping away.

You must appreciate how secure they used to feel. It was a cake walk, a picnic in the park. The definition of “fact” was: whatever centralized media said it was. What could be simpler? And to them, that was “democracy.”

Feed the people lies, hide deeper truth, slam dunk.

Then along came independent media.

Boom.

It turned out millions of people were interested.

The cat jumped out of the bag.

I know about this. I’ve been letting cats out of bags since 1982.

That’s longer than some of my readers have been alive.

I also know about censorship, because almost from the beginning of my work as a reporter, I had stories turned down by major media outlets and even alternative outlets. I saw the handwriting on the wall.

Chuck Schumer is echoing what many of his colleagues—and far more powerful people—are worrying about. Their vaunted mouthpieces, the NY Times, the Washington Post, etc., are failing. They can’t carry the same old freight with impunity.

So Schumer “worries about the future of democracy.” What he’s actually worried about has nothing to do with democracy, and it certainly has nothing to do with a Republic, which was the form of this nation from the beginning.

Schumer is worried about decentralization.

He’s worried that people are defecting from the authoritarian arrogant Castle of Truth.

And, given his position, he should be worried.

We are at a tipping point. Needless to say—but I will say it—independent media need your support. Your choice about where you obtain your news makes a difference.

Until a few years ago, I never considered that I was relentless. I was just doing my work. But as I saw the counter-efforts of major media, social media, government, Globalists, and other players, as they tried to reassert their primacy, I found a deeper level of commitment. A person can find many reasons to stop what he is doing. Every person eventually realizes that. But will he give in? Or will he decide to keep going? My choice is reflected on these pages, where I write every day.

Many of my colleagues have made the same choice. As for myself, I take the long, long view. Whatever befalls this civilization, the individual survives. He cannot be erased. I know that as surely as I know I am sitting here.

People like Chuck Schumer are living on a foundation of sand. Their power depends on obfuscation and deception and exchanging favors. When they feel the ground shifting under their feet, they growl and accuse and declaim and resort to fake ideals. If they see their con isn’t working and isn’t selling, then they panic.

Which is a good sign.

Many, many years ago, I had a good relationship with a media outlet. Then one day, the man in charge told me I was “positioning myself” outside the scope of his audience. I was speaking to “different people,” and therefore I should “go my own way.” I could tell he wasn’t happy about saying this, because he thought of himself as an independent, but there it was. He was bending to the demands of “his people.” So we parted company.

I was now further “out there” than I had been before. I was “independent of an ‘independent’ media outlet.” It took me about five minutes to see the joke. A good and useful joke.

As the years rolled on, I kept finding myself in a more independent position, which meant I was writing what I wanted to write, and in the process I was discovering deeper levels of what I wanted to write.

Understanding this changed my political view. If I didn’t stand for the free and independent individual, what did I stand for? If I didn’t keep coming back to THAT, what could I come back to?

It made sense to me then, and it makes sense to me now.

This is why I keep writing about…

Read More At: JonRappoport.wordpress.com
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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.

The Individual: The Foundation Of Society

Individual2
TheBreakaway | BreakawayConciousness
Zy Marquiez
April 26, 2017

“They [conformists] think society wiser than their soul, and know not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the whole world…Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members….Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist…. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The collective is often promulgated as the vanguard of society – the gears that keep society moving forward.  Truth be told, nothing could be further from the truth.  This is because any collective, or any group, is nothing without the individual – it doesn’t even exist.  It can’t even exist.

At society’s core, the individual is the main gear that makes the world go round.  Like imagination is the foundation of creativity, the individual is the foundation of society.

It’s crucial to comprehend this concept of Collectivism Vs. Individualism, because it’s not something pondered deeply in society nowadays.  Individuals are often given a bad rap, as if wanting to be your own being is a bad thing.  The term ‘lone wolf’ is often bandied about in negative light regarding individuals.  But individuality is not about living life alone, but about maintaining your identity – your individuality, what makes you distinct from everyone else.

No matter what societal structure, job, or group the individual is in, the individual that maintains their identity will be one step ahead of the curve because they will hold the ability to think like an individual, rather than forgo their mental faculties for the group.  This is vital, because many times the mental faculties of individuals wither within groups, which is rather deleterious.

For instance, we all have heard of group brainstorming, the epitome of collectivism.  Group brainstorming is one form of collectivist structure that seeks creation ‘by the group’ at the expense of the individual.  However, this tool is fraught with issues.

Focusing on why brainstorming often fails, author and psychology researcher Susan Cain explains in her milestone book, Quiet – The Power Of Introverts In A World That Can’t Stop Talking:

“Psychologists usually offer three explanations for the failure of group brainstorming.  The first is social loafing: in a group, some individuals tend to sit back and let others do the work.  The second is production blocking: only one person can talk or produce an idea at once, while the other group members are forced to sit passively.  And the third is evaluation apprehension, meaning the fear of looking stupid in front of one’s peers.”[1][Bold Emphasis added, Italics Emphasis In Original]

How many individuals suffer from such a system?  It’s certainly not optimal, although the illusion of it is always pushed as such.  Furthermore, due to all those reasons, the imagination and creativity individuals could employ otherwise remain stagnant, rarely if ever used except in rare circumstances.

Moreover, the larger the group becomes, the less efficient it is.  This, of course, makes individuals mere cogs in a machine when they could be harnessing their own endless creative potential.

Regarding large group inefficiency, Cain further notes:

“…some forty years of research has researched the same startling conclusion.  Studies have shown that performance gets worse as group size increases: groups of nine generate fewer and poorer ideas compared to groups of six, which do worse than groups of four.   The “evidence from science suggests that business must be insane to use brainstorming groups,” writes the organizational psychologist Adrian Furnham.  “If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity and efficiency is the highest priority.”[2][Emphasis added]

Furnham’s words boil down this particular issue to the individual.  It’s at that level that individuals shine the brightest.

Hearkening back to issues regarding individuals taking part in groups, Malcom Gladwell, author of the book The Tipping Point, states:

“…when people are asked to consider evidence or make decisions in a group, they come to very different conclusions than when they are asked the same questions by themselves.  Once we’re part of a group, we’re susceptible to peer pressure and social norms and any other number of other kinds of influence…”[3][Bold Emphasis Added]

As we can gather, the collective is not where an individual’s maximum potential lies.

When the individual becomes part of the collective, creativity suffers, and thus, his imagination.

That is why it’s up to the individual to make sure they retain their identity if they are ever forced to work in a group, such as in school or work.

Ultimately, what choices an individual makes are dictated by what they see available.  When the availability of choices is forcefully narrowed down, the path the individual walks on is limited rather than boundless, and the individual’s choices are less than optimal to say the least. 

There is a great saying: “Knowledge is power. Lack of knowledge is lack of power.” A corollary to this would be: Individual potential is based on choices; lack of choices create lack of power.  The most significant ways an individual will lack power is when they merge with a group, thus limiting their choices, and as the example above details.  As we have learned, brainstorming sessions in large groups are not terribly efficient.

Furthermore, as the individual identifies with the group, they tend to merge with the group mind and rarely ever voice their opinion, for various reasons. This is also highly inefficient because the whole point of group work is to cultivate idea and possibilities.

The ironic part is that group brainstorming, on paper, is about imagination, and yet group brainstorming is antithetical to it since it doesn’t maximize on the potential imagination of every individual and only employs a fraction of it.  On the opposite side of that spectrum stands the individual and their maximum potential, every single time.

Individuals which use imagination are self-sufficient in many ways.  The Individual that uses imagination not only seeks solutions, but creates them.  They don’t take anything at face value.  They check, recheck – they research.  Why?  Because individuals realize they control their own path and are responsible for it.  They live a better life, a healthier life, because they imagine better possibilities and put them into action.

These individuals don’t allow themselves to be stopped because they’re incapable of being stopped.  That’s not within their DNA.  It’s not part of their reality structure. 

Curiously, the proclivity to create is so ubiquitous in creative individuals that not creating seems rather foreign.  They always seek create beyond the lines, outside ‘the box’ – always in action, always creating.  This is why ultimately the individual is the foundation of society.

The canvas of endless possibilities is there for everyone.  It requires the desire to create to the nth degree coupled with conscious action for the canvas to become something more than a mere possibility.

What would happen if we all realized our canvas is reality itself?

As the philosopher Sun Tzu once intimated:

“Can you imagine what I would do if I could do all I can?”

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Footnotes:

[1] Susan Cain, Quiet – The Power Of Introverts In A World That Can’t Stop Talking, pg. 89.
[2] Ibid., pg. 88-89.
[3] Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point, pg. 171.

___________________________________________________________
This article is free and open source. You are encouraged to share this content and have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Zy Marquiez and TheBreakaway.wordpress.com.
___________________________________________________________
About The Author:

Zy Marquiez is an avid book reviewer, researcher, an open-minded skeptic, yogi, humanitarian, and freelance writer who studies and mirrors regularly subjects like Consciousness, Education, Creativity, The Individual, Ancient History & Ancient Civilizations, Forbidden Archaeology, Big Pharma, Alternative Health, Space, Geoengineering, Social Engineering, Propaganda, and much more.

His own personal blog is BreakawayConsciousnessBlog.wordpress.com where his personal work is shared, while TheBreakaway.wordpress.com serves as a media portal which mirrors vital information usually ignored by mainstream press, but still highly crucial to our individual understanding of various facets of the world.

Creating From The Center

TrailBlazer
Source: NoMoreFakeNews.com | JonRappoport.wordpress.com
Jon Rappoport
April 6, 2017

There are some people who hear the word CREATE and wake up, as if a new flashing music has begun.

This lone word makes them see something majestic and untamed and astonishing.

They feel the sound of a Niagara approaching.

They suddenly know why they are alive.

It happened to me one day in 1949 when I was 11 years old. I was boarding a bus in upstate New York for a full day’s ride back down into New York City. I was sitting by the window as the bus pulled out of a parking lot, and I opened the first page of Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, a perfect children’s book.

The word CREATE wasn’t on that first page, but I felt it. It sounded like a great bell in my ear, and I knew I was in a different world.

I’ve been writing about the creative life for some time. For me, this life is a far cry from the pallid oatmeal of “peace through avoidance.”

The creative life is not about slogans and systems. It is about EXPERIENCE.

It’s about diving in. It’s about a kind of transformation that shreds programming and gets down to the energy of the Fire.

Most people don’t want to travel to that grand arena because they have been trained like pets by some sector of this society to be good little girls and boys.

The truth is, if people want to live the creative existence, they have to be willing to destroy—and the main thing that awaits their destruction is their own illusions and their commitment to the World of Nice where doily power is the only power. Where that tired phrase, “the approval of others,” is the guiding precept and the stick of fear.

The creative life isn’t about little changes done in little penguin steps. It’s about putting your arms and your mind around Deep, Big, and Wide Desire. It’s about making that Desire come to life.

99% of the world has been trained like rats to adore systems. Give them a system and they’re ready to cuddle up and take it all in. If they have questions, or if they want to argue, it’s about how to tweak the system to make it a little better. And with every move they make, they put another blanket over the Fire Within.

Maybe you once saw something truly free that didn’t care about consequences, and it blew you away and turned on your soul’s electricity for an hour.

Maybe you’re sick and tired of bowing and scraping before a pedestal of nonsense.

CREATE is a word that should be oceanic. It should shake and blow apart the pillars of the smug boredom of the soul.

CREATE is about what the individual does when he is on fire and doesn’t care about concealing it. It’s about what the individual invents when he has thrown off the false front that is slowly strangling him.

CREATE is about the end of mindless postponement. It’s about what happens when you burn up the pretty and petty little obsessions. It’s about emerging from the empty suit and empty machine of society that goes around and around and sucks away the vital bloodstream.

People come to the brink, and then say, “I’m waiting for orders. I’m looking for a sign. I want the signal that it’s okay to proceed.”

People pretend they don’t know anything about imagination, about how “it operates” (as if it were a machine), about what it can do, about where it can go, about how it can take them into new territory. They feign ignorance.

“I want to stay the same, and I’ll do anything to maintain that.”

It’s a test of loyalty. Do you want to remain faithful to an idea that is just a small piece of what you can be, or do you want to take the greater adventure?

The propaganda machines of society relentlessly turn out images and messages that ultimately say: YOU MUST BELONG TO THE GROUP.

The formula is simple. Imagination transcends the status quo. Therefore, belong to the group and avoid the possibility of transformation.

Day after day after day, year after year, the media celebrate heroes. They inevitably interview these people to drag out of them the same old familiar stories. Have you EVER, even once, seen a hero who told an interviewer in no uncertain terms: “I got to where I am by denying the power of the group”?

Have you ever heard that kind of uncompromising statement?

I didn’t think so.

Why not?

Because it’s not part of the BELONGING PROGRAM, the program that society runs on to stay away from the transforming power of CREATION.

Read More At: JonRappoport.wordpress.com
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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.

Howard Roark & The Collective

breakaway3
Source: NoMoreFakeNews.com | JonRappoport.wordpress.com
Jon Rappoport
April 4, 2017

Why go to fiction to learn about power?

Because in art we can see our visions. We can see ideals and archetypes. These fictional characters have the energy we strive for.

When Ayn Rand, the author of The Fountainhead (1943), was asked whether Howard Roark, the hero of her novel, could exist in real life, she answered, with annoyance, “Of course.”

Her implication was: don’t you have the desire to discover your own highest ideals and live them out?

Roark is an architect who creates buildings no one has imagined before. His refusal to compromise his vision is legendary. He suffers deprivation and poverty and rejection with an astonishing amount of indifference. He is the epitome of the creative individual living in a collective world.

For reasons no one can discover (must there always be reasons?), Roark has freed himself from The Group. Perhaps he was born free.

Roark’s hidden nemesis is a little man named Ellsworth Toohey, an architecture columnist for a New York newspaper, who is quietly building a consensus that has, as its ultimate goal, the destruction of all thought and action by the individual for the individual.

But Roark, in his personality, spirit and force, is The Exception to the Rule.

He stands as a force that transcends the complication of Need and, instead, is pure Desire.

Desire, plus intelligence, plus creative power.

Whatever dross may once have existed in Roark’s character has been burned away.

Rand allows us to see that society encourages everything an individual does and thinks that keeps him from being self-sufficient. That is what society, in its advanced stage of dissolution, is for.

Therefore, as Roark moves through space and time, he ignites in others, without trying to, all the emotions that signal their self-betrayal: shame, fear, disgust, resentment, hatred.

Their dedication to endless compromise remains intact. They tell themselves whatever stories they need to, in order to protect their second-hand existences.

They enact the range of feelings that allow for entombment in The Group.

These days, when people talk about “self-improvement,” they unerringly manage to avoid the starkness of these matters. And this is why the so-called “helping professions” fail.

Those who own the systems that run the world enforce, celebrate, champion, and fund life-by-need.

Drug dealer and his addicts—that’s the societal model.

But then, what of community? What of family? These are often thrown in the face of The Fountainhead as accusations, as if Rand wants to stamp them out and leave them in the dust.

The obvious answer is, which community, which family? Are the individuals intact, or are they sacrificing themselves to an “ideal” of diminishing their power?

The Matrix has an entrance, a gate on which is transcribed, “Reduce your vision and surrender your separate power.”

Yes, “separate.” A word that is now considered taboo. “Separate” was what we defended before we “understood” that the only salvation was attained in “coming together” and melting down.

We can even find this Melt in physics. The latest version of coming together is the interpretation placed on quantum entanglement, in which atoms light years apart react simultaneously from a stimulus placed on either atom. We are supposed to believe that the whole universe is arranged as a spontaneously reacting Whole, with no part distinct from another. And this is confirmation that the Collective is the preferred pattern of life in every venue. In other words, political collectivism mirrors cosmic collectivism.

Are you sensing something strange here? You should be.

Once upon a time, in a document called the Constitution, separateness was considered a key element. There was separation of church and state. There was separation of the rights of an individual from what the state could arbitrarily do to the individual. There was separation among the three branches of federal government, a plan enacted to limit overall federal power. There was separation of the enumerated powers of the federal government from the far more numerous powers of the states.

DISTINCTIONS that created separation were absolutely necessary. Making and abiding by such distinctions were made possible by minds that could think, minds that could utilize logic—rather than minds that boiled down in a puddle of gray sameness.

Roark is shown to us as a man who stands separate from the mass, the crowd, the mob, the group, the collective, the majority, the minority. He isn’t seeking permission or approval or praise or consensus for his work, his art, his buildings, his creations.

The stunning intensity of his Desire isn’t watered down by a Need to be drawn into what the group wants or accepts or believes in.

The hallmark of The Matrix is a collective lens, through which the individual is supposed to view his life, his work, and the world.

“I see what everybody sees, and they see what I see, and we all see together.”

Talk about fiction. The collective lens is built, step by step, piece by piece, along a path of self-betrayal and corruption.

To speak about individual freedom while living and seeing and thinking through the collective lens is a contradiction and impossibility of titanic proportions.

“I have the inalienable right to see things as others see them. To melt down what might, in other circumstances, be my Separate Vision. To melt it down for the sake of the Whole. So that I might better serve others.”

Well, thank you for your sacrifice. I’m sure a gold star is waiting for you in some cosmic classroom. Now, if we all sacrifice all the time, someday soon we will all be invisible. We will all live in the great mouth of a great nothing. No one will have power. No one will be free. But we will speak as if we are free.

Our false words will sound important. Our rhetoric will, perhaps, convince us and everyone else that freedom still exists.

We will, in fact, be speaking like those politicians do, the ones we accuse of acting on ulterior motives.

Modern leaders have found their power through promoting a concept of endless need. This need can never be solved, it can only be accommodated.

Groups are educated and tuned up to demand more. They must have more of this and more of that. Without limit.

The individual, if he is thought of at all, is depicted as a bundle of needs.

Naturally, when someone defects, he is looked at as a betrayer. Actually, he is exposing the game.

That is when things become interesting.

That is when life takes over.

Read More At: JonRappoport.wordpress.com
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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.

Ayn Rand Reconsidered

breakaway3
“Why carry the burden of creating something and then having to stand for it and be proud of it? Why think and imagine and create your own way into the future of your most profound vision? Why bother? And why, therefore, allow others to do so for themselves and cause disordered, disharmonious ripples in the great silent lake of humanity? Pull them down. Make them equal. Make them empty.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)

Source: NoMoreFakeNews.com | JonRappoport.wordpress.com
Jon Rappoport
March 31, 2017

I wrote the following article five years ago. Since then, I’ve had a chance to set down a few more remarks about Ayn Rand. Here they are:

The one glaring problem in her work is the overall effect of her hammering mercilessly on behalf of freedom and the individual—after 400 pages, her prose takes on a programmatic aspect. It grips the reader with iron. The moral imperative to be free replaces the exhilaration of being free.

On the other hand, she obviously wrote her two great novels in the middle of a feverish exaltation. Every page burned. Most characters went down in flames. A few rose into the sky. She knew she was up against the most powerful forces of society, and she was not going to compromise or relent one inch. She fully intended to destroy collectivism at its root. On the basis of that decision, she refused to suspend her attack, even for a moment.

Most people who brush up against her work can’t stop to consider the depth of her admiration for the independent and powerful and creative individual, or the nature of her aversion to the collectivist who can only borrow from such individuals—and then distort and undermine what they have misappropriated.

She means to be extreme. It is no accident. With no apologies, she splits the world down the middle. In her own way, she is an ultimate riverboat gambler. She shoves in all her chips on the self-appointed task of illuminating the great dichotomy of human history and modern life: the I versus the WE.

On a personal level, she possessed enormous ambition, and she wrote her two novels to achieve deserved recognition. Again, no apologies. She knew she and her work would be attacked by numerous critics who didn’t themselves own a tiny fragment of her talent. So be it.

To say she revealed “a thorny personality” in her relationships would constitute a vast understatement. In her later years, she no doubt contributed to bringing the house down on her head. But by then, her work was over. She stood behind it. She had achieved what she set out to create.

And every official cultural messenger of her time reviled her.

Here is my 2012 article:

“…nearly perfect in its immorality.”
Gore Vidal, reviewing Rand’s Atlas Shrugged

“…shot through with hatred.”
The Saturday Review, on Atlas Shrugged

“…can be called a novel only by devaluing the term.”
The National Review, on Atlas Shrugged

“[The] creative faculty cannot be given or received, shared or borrowed. It belongs to single, individual men.”
Howard Roark, The Fountainhead

When people perceive their society is being infiltrated and taken over by collectivism, how should they respond? What is their ultimate fuel in the battle for liberty?

What do they resurrect as the ideal that is being scorched by collectivism?

Yes the Constitution, yes the Bill of Rights, yes the Republic. But what were those documents and that form of government there for in the first place? What WAS the great ideal that lay behind them?

And if very few people can recall the ideal or understand it, what then?

The ideal was and is THE INDIVIDUAL.

But not just the individual.

The FREE INDIVIDUAL.

But not just the free individual.

The FREE AND POWERFUL INDIVIDUAL.

Which is why I’m writing about Ayn Rand.

To grasp her Promethean effort and accomplishment, you have to read her books at least several times, because your own reactions and responses will change. She was attempting to dig a whole civilization out from its smug certainty about the limits of freedom, from its compulsion to borrow and steal worn-out ideas.

I write this because the matrix of modern life has no solution without a frontal exposure of the meaning and reality and sensation and emotion and mind and imagination of INDIVIDUAL POWER.

Ayn Rand, in her unique way, climbed the mountain of power and told about the vista that was then in her sights. She exercised no caution. She knew the consequences would be extraordinary.

The characters she creates who embody power are electric. You experience them beyond mere fiddle-faddle with symbols.

Rand wrote two novels that still reverberate in the minds of millions of people: The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

The books have inspired unalloyed adoration and hatred. They are received as a magnificent tonic or a dose of poison.

Readers who hate Rand’s work hate her for daring to present the power of an individual in full force.

Rand’s major heroes, Howard Roark and John Galt, are artists. Creators. They bow before no one and nothing. They invent. They decide. They imagine. They refuse to compromise. They leave the group and the committee and the bureaucracy and the collective behind them in the dust.

Society is ever more, over time, a mass concept. Society’s leaders, through illegal dictum, deception, and force, define a space in which all life is supposed to occur. That is the “safe zone.” Within it, a person may act with impunity. Outside that space, protection is removed. The protection racket no long applies.

Once a controller owns a space in which others live, he can alter it. He can make it smaller and smaller. He can flood it with caterwauling about “the greatest good for the greatest number,” the slogan of the mob. He can pretend to elevate the mob to the status of a legitimate “democratic majority” who are running things. He can con whole populations.

On the other hand, we are supposed to believe that individual power is a taboo because men like Hitler, Stalin, Napoleon, Attila, and Alexander once lived. That is the proof. We are supposed to believe individual power is always and everywhere the expression of dominance over others and nothing more.

If we only take into consideration “what is best for everybody,” we will see our way out of the morass. That’s what we’re told.

Civilizations are being made more puerile because it is children who are most vulnerable to the “greatest good for all” maxim. It is children who can be suckered into that ideal overnight. And those adults who buy the maxim do, in fact, revert back in the direction of being children.

At this late date, significant numbers of people are waking up to the fact that “greatest good” is being managed and manipulated by new Stalins and Hitlers, who care about humanity in the same way that a bulldozer cares about the side of a building.

Ayn Rand, after growing up in the USSR, knew something about the paradise of the common man. She saw it play out. She could eventually look back and see, with certainty, that writing her two novels in the Soviet Union would have cost her her life.

Rand refused to compromise her exaltation of individual power.

But she was acutely aware of the nature of compromisers. Such characters, brilliantly and mercilessly drawn, are there in her novels, in the full bloom of decay. Peter Keating, the pathetic and agonized hack; Guy Francon, Keating’s boss, a socially connected panderer and promoter of hacks; Jim Taggart, moral coward in extremis; Ellsworth Toohey, prime philosopher of the mob impulse; Robert Sadler, the scientist who sold his soul.

Around us today, we see growing numbers of these very types, peddling their phony idealism over and over. Among them, Barack Obama, promoting class warfare, dependence on government as the source of survival, generalized pretended hatred of the rich, and a phony empty “we are all together” sing-song collective mysticism.

Again, keep in mind that Rand’s two major heroes, Howard Roark and John Galt, were artists. This was no accident. This was the thrust of her main assault. The artist is always, by example, showing the lie of the collective. The artist begins with the assumption that consensus reality is not final. The artist is not satisfied to accommodate himself to What Already Exists.

The dark opposite of that was once told to me by a retired propaganda operative, Ellis Medavoy (pseudonym), who freelanced for several elite non-profit foundations:

“What do you think my colleagues and I were doing all those years? What was our purpose? To repudiate the singular in favor of the general. And what does that boil down to? Eradicating the concept of the individual human being. Replacing it with the mass. The mass doesn’t think. There is no such thing as mass thought. There is only mass impulse. And we could administer that. We could move it around like a piece on a board. You see, you don’t hypnotize a person into some deeper region of himself. You hypnotize him OUT of himself into a fiction called The Group…”

Rand was attacking a mass and a collective that had burrowed its way into every corner of life on the planet. If you were going to go to war against THAT, you needed to be fully armed. And she was.

Rand was also prepared to elucidate the physical, mental, and emotional DEPTH of her heroes’ commitment to their own choices, their own work, their own creations. She wasn’t merely dipping her toe in the water of that ocean.

Howard Roark, her protagonist of The Fountainhead, remarks:

“And here man faces his basic alternative: he can survive in only one of two ways—by the independent work of his own mind or as a parasite fed by the minds of others. The creator originates. The parasite borrows…”

Parasites don’t want anyone to stand out from the group, the swamp. The presence of someone who is so separate from them could trigger alarm bells and confirm their deepest fear:

An individual with power and his own singular creative vision can exist.

Parasites want you to believe you’re just a drop of water in the great ocean, and once you attain “higher consciousness” you’ll give in and float in the sea, and you’ll offload that oh-so primitive concept of yourself as Self. You’ll be One with all the other undifferentiated drops of water.

In their ritual of joining, people are awarded a mantrum: “I’M NOT VERY MUCH.”

Just that little phrase can open the door into the collective.

In The Fountainhead, architect Peter Keating utilized a second assertion as well:

“I AM GREAT BECAUSE OTHER PEOPLE THINK SO.”

Keating, the social grasper, finds acceptance from people of influence. They welcome him and reward him with architectural commissions because, well, they think they are supposed to; after all, his name has been bandied about by “those who should know Quality.”

It’s a world in which no standards apply except the opinions of people who carry weight.

And Peter is conventionally handsome, he’s the golden boy, he’s quick, he can design buildings that look like other buildings, he can work with others, he can look like he’s enjoying life, he’s good at parties, he’s congenial.

On what other basis should rewards be handed out? What else exists?

Unfortunately and fatally, Keating knows the real answer to that question, since he’s the boyhood friend of Howard Roark, the architect who does have a singular and astonishing vision, who stands beyond the crowd without trying.

Keating returns to Roark time after time; to insult Roark, to beg him for help, to be in the presence of a Force and breathe clean air.

Not determined enough to be himself, but still possessed of a shred of conscience, Keating is caught in the middle, between the man of vision and power (Roark) and new friends who offer him “the glittering world”—and the grips of this vise are unrelenting.

Adulation, money, success, fame, acceptance…Keating is given all these things, and still he destroys himself.

Here is why The Fountainhead provoked such rage from the self-styled elite: they’re committed to live on an insider’s rotting feast of mutual admiration and support, and in Keating they see themselves reflected with a clarity they’d assumed was impossible to construct. But there it is.

The very people who launched attack after attack at Rand, for “pawning off such preposterous characters as real,” were boiling inside, as they viewed themselves on the screen of her imagination: characters riddled with compromise, bloated with pretension, bereft of integrity.

Keating is eventually reduced to an abject yearning: would that his life had been lived differently, better—yet at the same time he maintains a dedication to hating that better life he might have had. He’s consumed by the contradiction. He sees his own career fall apart, while Roark’s ascends. The tables are turned. Keating has administered a poison to his own psyche, and the results are all too visibly repellent.

The Keatings of this world carry water for their masters, who in turn find bigger and better manipulators to serve. It’s a cacophony of madness, envy, and immolation posing as success.

The world does not want to watch itself through the eyes of Ayn Rand. It does not want to see the juggernaut of the drama playing out, because, as with Keating, it is too revealing. And yet Rand has been accused, over and over, of being an author of cartoon personae!

She elevates characters and destroys other characters. She picks and chooses according to her own standards and ideals. She never wavers. She passes judgment. She differentiates vividly between the forces and decisions that advance life and those that squash it.

Again and again, she comes back to the fulcrum: the featureless consensus versus unique individual creative power.

Creative power isn’t a shared or borrowed quality. One person doesn’t live in the shadow of another. The creator finds his own way, and if that weren’t the case, there would be no basis for life.

We are supposed to think existence by committee is a viable concept. This is a surpassing fairy tale that assumes the proportions of a cosmic joke.

For those whose minds are already weak, in disarray, unformed, the substitution of the collective for the individual is acceptable. It’s, in fact, rather interesting. It has the kick of novelty. And the strength of hypnotic trance.

The strategy is obliquely described in The Fountainhead by Ellsworth Toohey, a newspaper columnist and philosopher of the collective, a little man who is covertly and diabolically assembling a massive following:

“…if I sold them the idea that you [an ordinary playwright] are just as great as Ibsen—pretty soon they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference…then it wouldn’t matter what they went to see at all. Then nothing would matter—neither the writers nor those for whom they write.”

Reduction to absurdity. An overall grayness called equality.

If the public is told the owner of a business didn’t create that business, but instead the public sector, the collective did, and if this theme is pushed and emphasized by others, eventually the absurd notion will take hold. Then it won’t matter what is done to the independent individual, because he was never really there at all in the first place. He was just an invisible nonentity.

Contrast this treatment of the individual with the stand that Howard Roark takes during his climactic trial, at the end of The Fountainhead:

“But the mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought.”

“We inherit the products of the thoughts of other men. We inherit the wheel. We make the cart. The cart becomes an automobile. The automobile becomes an airplane…The moving force is the creative faculty which takes product as material, uses it and originates the next step. This creative faculty cannot be given or received, shared or borrowed. It belongs to single, individual men. That which it creates is the property of the creator.”

“Yet we are taught to admire the second-hander who dispenses gifts he has not produced above the man who made the gifts possible.”

We are now in an age where EVERYTHING BELONGS TO EVERYBODY.

Obama is the latest in a line of demagogues who fully intend to reverse the course of history. That timeline shows us the heroic struggle to replace WE with I.

From the earliest days of our planet, since its habitation by humans, the tribe and the clan and the priest class and the monarchy, all claiming divine right, have enforced the WE. Finally, the I, which was always there, emerged fully enough to overthrow the criminals and murderers who were restraining the individual.

But now we are being pulled back into the primitive swamp of the past, through the systematic application of a pseudo-philosophy. The I is turning back into the WE.

To people who carry advanced technological devices around with them wherever they go, which give…

Read More At: JonRappoport.wordpress.com
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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.

The Individual Vs. The Staged Collective

individuality
Source: NoMoreFakenews.com
Jon Rappoport
December 26 2016

Trumpets blare. In the night sky, spotlights roam. A great confusion of smoke and dust and fog, and emerging banners, carrying the single message:

WE.

The great meltdown of all consciousness into a glob of utopian simplicity…//

There are denizens among us.

They present themselves as the Normals.

And once again, I find it necessary to return to the subject of The Individual.

This time, I’m prompted by the madness swirling around the film, Vaxxed. I’ve written about the film and the controversy from several angles, but here I want to point out another factor. The CDC whistleblower at the heart of the story is one man going up against The Group.

I don’t call William Thompson an unsullied hero. Far from it. He lied, he committed fraud, he hid the fraud for 10 years, he buried evidence that the MMR vaccine increased the risk of autism in children, and finally, perhaps because he was caught in his own web, he confessed.

But the group, his employer, the grotesque CDC, his fellow scientists—and especially the hideous rotting press, a dumping ground for professional agents, front men, con artists, shysters, wormy night crawlers (and I’m speaking more kindly of them than I should)—have attacked Thompson and the film mercilessly.

Beyond all political objectives in this attack, there is a simple fact: those group-mind liars who have given up their souls will rage against the faintest appearance of one who tries to keep his. And in this rage, the soulless ones will try to pull the other down to where they live.

And somehow, it all looks normal and proper and rational.

In the 1950s, before television had numbed minds and turned them into jelly, there was a growing sense of: the Individual versus the Corporate State.

Something needed to be done. People were fitting into slots. They were surrendering their lives in increasing numbers. They were carving away their own idiosyncrasies and their independent ideas.

But television, under the control of psyops experts, became, as the 1950s droned on, the facile barrel of a weapon:

“What’s important is the group. Conform. Give in. Bathe in the great belonging…”

Recognize that every message television imparts is a proxy, a fabrication, a simulacrum, an imitation of life one step removed.

When this medium also broadcasts words and images of belonging and the need to belong, it’s engaged in revolutionary social engineering.

Whether it’s the happy-happy suburban-lawn family in an ad for the wonders of a toxic pesticide, or the mob family going to the mattresses to fend off a rival, it’s fantasy time in the land of mind control.

Television has carried its mission forward. The consciousness of the Individual versus the State has turned into: love the State. Love the State as family.

In the only study I have been able to find, Wictionary partially surveys the scripts of all television shows from the year 2006, to analyze the words most frequently broadcast to viewers in America.

Out of 29,713,800 words, including the massively used “a,” “an,” “the,” “you,” “me,” and the like, the word “home” ranks 179 from the top. “Mom” is 218. “Together” is 222. “Family” is 250.

This usage reflects an unending psyop.

Are you with the family or not? Are you with the group, the collective, or not? Those are the blunt parameters.

“When you get right down to it, all you have is family.” “Our team is really a family.” “You’re deserting the family.” “You fight for the guy next to you.” “Our department is like a family.” “Here at Corporation X, we’re a family.”

The committee, the group, the company, the sector, the planet.

The goal? Submerge the individual.

Individual achievement, imagination, creative power? Not on the agenda. Something for the dustbin of history.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World: “‘Ninety-six identical twins working ninety-six identical machines’! The voice was almost tremulous with enthusiasm. ‘You really know where you are. For the first time in history.’”

George Orwell, 1984: “The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought.”

The soap opera is the apotheosis of television. The long-running characters in Anytown are irreversibly enmeshed in one another’s lives. There’s no escape. There is only mind-numbing meddling.

“I’m just trying to help you realize we all love you (in chains).”

“Your father, rest his soul, would never have wanted you to do this to yourself…”

“How dare you set yourself apart from us. Who do you think you are?”

For some people, the collective “WE” has a fragrant scent—until they get down in the trenches with it. There they discover odd odors and postures and mutations. There they discover self-distorted creatures scurrying around celebrating their twistedness.

The night becomes long. The ideals melt. The level of intelligence required to inhabit this cave-like realm is lower than expected, much lower.

Hypnotic perceptions, which are the glue that holds the territory together, begin to crack and fall apart, and all that is left is a grim determination to see things through.

As the night moves into its latter stages, some participants come to know that all their activity is taking place in a chimerical universe.

It is as if reality has been constructed to yield up gibberish.

Whose idea was…

Continue Reading At: JonRappoport.wordpress.com