Ayn Rand is back. Between my persistent search for a home for the Open Source Agency and the related Multinational Decision-Support Centre and World Brain Institute (with Global Game), I read and visit with smart people.
As most know, the global fight that I have led since 1988 for Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) has evolved into both an appreciation for Open Everything, and a recognition that intelligence qua decision-support is infantile at this time, not at all mature, and that integrity is the core value of all time. Together, intelligence & integrity are the definition of what it means to be human.
Most recently, I have been devoted to creating an approach to Liberation Technology rooting in the creation of an Autonomous Internet that is infinitely scalable and inherently empowering of the individual over any falsely-justified hierarchy–it is impervious to corruption by government or corporation.
This past week I've had occasion to revisit the Ayn Rand philosophy, and a couple of ideas jumped out at me that suggest that Ayn Rand is back as a core philosophy more consistent with M4IS2, Liberation Theology, and Open Everything, than any other philosophy, if one exists–I see only pale insipid ideologies. Let me open with a tip of the hat to Wikipedia, where the page on Objectivism (Ayn Rand), is helpful.
Let's start with individualism and rational self-interest. Not only is that perfectly consistent with the Epoch B directions of Jonas Salk and Barbara Marx Hubbard (strive for conscious evolution but let the unevolved die), Kirkpatrick Sale (Human Scale), and others, but it is not at all inconsistent with collective intelligence–rational self-interest in the aggregate.
What we have here is an approach to life that is firmly rooted in individual appreciations of reality at the grass-roots. The top-down ideological and fantasy-driven (“we create our own reality”) politics of those who would “rule by secrecy” is rejected without equivocation. Integrity in intelligence (decision-support) and integrity in politics, underlay how humanity must enter the 21st Century and the immediate challenges confronting us all in 2012 and beyond.
Collective intelligence is a voluntary recognition that the perceptions of reality by others are useful to the individual. When rooted in clarity of expression and diversity of view, an individual with integrity is stronger for having friends with integrity. Together they see more, understand more, and have more “mass” for their collective–but individually-centered–well-being. M4IS2 is collective intelligence taken to its logical conclusion: every individual, and particularly
the three billion poor today at the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid, is empowered to think, to do, to be, a vibrant self in relation to all others, not a serf, a slave, a debtor to, or a follower of, brown shirts or stuffed shirts. This demands that intelligence become mature–focusing selfishly on a world that works for all–and that we stop lying to one another or accepting lies from our politicians and other nominal “leaders.” We exist as individuals in relation to one another and reality, not as “cogs” for the evil side of industrialism, which successfully turned most of us into crude labor, eliminating the human spirit and reducing man to his most base elements, muscle and addiction. Stanford University's Liberation Technology program merits great regard, but it lacks the comprehensive philosophy needed to actually free three billion human minds.
If Liberation Technology is the means by which we free three billion minds and restore the human species to its proper role as a fountainhead for cosmic accomplishment, then Open Everything is the method.
Open Everything is about integrity manifest in every mind every moment. Open Everything demands clarity, appreciates diversity, and rewards integrity. Open Everything is the opposite, the anti-thesis, to “rule by secrecy” and “rule by committee” or special interest. Open Everything liberates every individual from every organization and those mandates and “rules” that are created at the top without consciousness of reality at the bottom.
At the risk of over-intellectualizing this, I want to end with a graphic illustration of how modern society has disconnected from reality, and especially from the consciousness and integrity that only free individuals can bring to bear.
Every single information pathology here–to which we have recently added Weapons of Mass Instruction and Forgotten Knowledge–stems from institutionalized lies by individuals empowered by rankism and elitism, misleading (that is a double entendre) millions.
If intelligence (and integrity) are leadership attributes that cannot be delegated, then leadership is an individual attribute that should not be abdicated. The sovereign individual is the sole basis for a Smart Nation and a Whole Earth. I need to study this in more depth, but my preliminary conclusion is that Ayn Rand is back, and she will not tolerate disciples who “sell out” to special interests and surrender their personal intelligence and integrity.
It's time we got America–and the world–on a path of absolute integrity. None of the current political movements in the USA have a clue about just how important it is that we restore the sovereign individual with absolute integrity of process. Perhaps we need a non-political combination of liberation philosophy and liberation technology. St.
