The purpose of this blog is to introspect through writing--to use writing to clear my mental field of land minds buried by my childhood or otherwise so that I might invigorate the soil of my soul to yield a lifetime of healthy fruit. Working the land to achieve this end goal has been, and will continue to be, a difficult process. The end result, however, is not the only benefit of such an endeavor: as the old countryside Romans knew, and as the mid-Westerners of America know today, there is a hard honesty in working the earth, a kind of honesty that is irresistibly pervasive and shapes one's life in unexpected ways.
I have tried my hand at blogging once before with some level of a certain sort of success. Whereas here I hope to achieve a type of success measured by internal metrics, my first hack at blogging was successful to the extent to which I impressed others with my writing and intellectuality; here I aim to practice tying my self-esteem solely to a very personal virtue, back then I derived my sense of worth from my intellectuality as measured by my peers.
This shift is associated with my total rejection of a dangerous, underlying premise: intelligence is a virtue and/or the brightest measure of a man's greatness. It is a premise, in one way or another, that I picked up and adopted within the Objectivism community (Objectivism being the philosophy of Ayn Rand). A quick scan of the AR Lexicon yields this for "intelligence":
"Intelligence is not an exclusive monopoly of genius; it is an attribute of all men, and the differences are only a matter of degree. If conditions of existence are destructive to genius, they are destructive to every man, each in proportion to his intelligence. If genius is penalized, so is the faculty of intelligence in every other man. There is only this difference: the average man does not possess the genius’s power of self-confident resistance, and will break much faster; he will give up his mind, in hopeless bewilderment, under the first touch of pressure."
I don not disagree that an intelligent man already in possession of courage is better equipped to resist a world that is oppressive than an average man, but does genius necessarily give rise to the courage to mount such a resistance, or does non-genius preclude attainment of such a courage (which are the implications in the above)? Courage and strength here go hand-in-hand with genius. I respectfully disagree--experience and history show otherwise.
I have resolved to not allow myself to establish my cunning in mind--my degree of intellectuality--as my greatest virtue, or as the greatest contributor to my sense of moral self-worth. I have also resolved to not surround myself with people that perpetuate the sense that genius makes one a great man; people who spend their time on the one hand lauding each other to the skies for understanding philosophy and on the other hand decrying society's inability to think intelligently, further entrenching and justifying a faux self-worth backed by the cheap currency of intellectualism. The fake self-esteem is bad enough, but the glee and pleasure some of these people express in criticizing society, in tearing each other apart, is depressing.
For now, I hope this first post is a sufficient crack at establishing this blog's preliminaries.
