Collaboration

Adam Reed has returned to blogging (YAY! and FINALLY!) with a typically fantastic post that bears close study and reflection. Here's an excerpt:

If you want to work against the culture of self-sacrifice, and for the Human's individual human right to pursue his own happiness on Earth, then, and especially in contexts where you find yourself on the same side of the barricade with people of mixed premises who on other issues advocate for evil, the advocate of individual rights must make sure that his own basic principles are clearly and openly defined. The alternative, of hiding principles in the name of collaboration, amounts in the long-term to philosophical and practical suicide. And to those who "cited" the exact opposite of what Ayn Rand wrote: if you venture to cite Ayn Rand, at least try first to grasp what she actually said.

Does this mean (thanks, to Al Brown, for asking in Comments) that Objectivists must refrain from any and all collaborations and alliances in our political activism? No, not at all. When a potential collaborator shares our basic basic principles, the most consistent among the allies - the Objectivist - has the most to win. It is only in collaboration with those, whose basic principles are different from ours, that Objectivists lose. In politics, those basic principles are:

1. Individual human rights, the necessary preconditions for being able to live a life appropriate to a human, are facts of reality, objectively knowable from the evidence of the human senses, and neither arbitrary nor supernatural.

2. These pre-conditions include non-interference by others with one's life, liberty, and the pursuit of one's own happiness on Earth.

3. The only proper function of government is to secure these rights - by bringing the legitimate use of force among individuals under the control of objective law.

This is a huge issue here in Oklahoma due to the prevalence of social conservatives who seek to have religious dogma encoded into law and is one of the reasons why I created my new website at www.robabiera.com. Some liberals in Oklahoma, as elsewhere, have chosen to follow social conservatives into this religious quagmire.

On that site I declare my own basic principles, as well as my past experience with liberal and libertarian groups in Oklahoma - which I no longer work with. I have decided to conduct my own personal activism on an ad hoc, case-by-case basis focused on specific principles rather than groups. My current activism remains focused on this blog, which has contributed greatly to the development of my ability to express my understanding of the principles of Objectivism.

The campaign for Objectivism and freedom remains - at this time - a primarily moral one rather than a political one.