Lindsay Perigo
The Politically Incorrect Show - 12/09/2000
[Music - Die Fledermaus]
Good afternoon, KAYA ORAAAA & welcome to the Politically Incorrect Show on the free speech network, Radio Pacific, for Tuesday September 12, proudly sponsored by Neanderton Nicotine Ltd, the show that says bugger the politicians & bureaucrats & all the other bossyboot busybodies who try to run our lives with our money; that stands tall for free enterprise, achievement, profit & excellence against the state-worshippers in our midst; that stands above all for the most sacred thing in the universe, the liberty of the human individual.
[Music up, music down]
The question my colleague Paul Henry is posing this week in his regular poll on his everyhorizon.com internet site is: Should traditional morality be promoted & reinforced in New Zealand? There is NO question that we need something to fill the contemporary moral vacuum, but I'd be loath to answer "yes" to Paul's question since he doesn't specify what he means by "traditional morality" nor by whom & how it should be "promoted & reinforced." If he's talking about simple honesty, integrity & respect for the rights of others, then "traditional morality" is something I could endorse wholeheartedly. But there is a tradition in our morality that I am most emphatically opposed to, which engenders dishonesty, lack of integrity & contempt for the rights of others, which is that a person's moral worth is measured by the extent to which he is prepared to sacrifice himself: for God, his country, his tribe, his neighbours - it matters not which or whom, as long as he is prepared to sacrifice.
This tradition has permeated all major belief systems & soaked human history in blood. You can find it wherever you look. Here's the late scholar Dr Lewis Fretz with the Christian version of it:
"Human beings will always disobey God because they want to be their own gods, not the faithful & obedient servants that their Creator wants them to be; no amount of human striving can make us worthy of God's approval because no one can break through the circle of self-centredness that imprisons us."
Karl Marx condemned the classical liberal emphasis on individual & property rights because it was "selfish." Adolph Hitler averred that the true idealist is someone with "the capacity to make sacrifices for the community, for his fellow man." His National Socialist colleague Joseph Goebbels stated that "To be a socialist is to submit the I to the Thou; socialism is sacrificing the individual to the whole." Mao-tse-tung said,"Serve the people." John F. Kennedy exhorted his fellow-Americans to "ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." Richard Nixon claimed that a person's life is not worth living "until he sacrifices himself for a higher cause." Bill Clinton has called for "a generation of service" enforced by "mandatory volunteering." Here at home, Roger Kerr of the Business Roundtable has written that "people have OBLIGATIONS to look after their neighbours."
Yes, it's everywhere, this tradition in morality - & it's poison. It is treason against reality, against the simple fact that each of us, by virtue of his mind, is the owner of his own life, that that ownership is freehold - no one else may take out a mortgage on it without the owner's consent. By our nature as human beings, each of us has the right to exist for his own sake, in Ayn Rand's words, "neither sacrificing himself to others nor others to himself." Only she & a handful of others throughout history have had the courage to say so. No, this is not "dog eat dog" - "dog eat dog" is part of the morality of sacrifice. People who respect each other's self-ownership do not eat each other.
So I think my answer to Paul's question would be, "Traditional morality can go burn in the hell it has created." As Ayn Rand put it, "The choice is clear-cut. Either a new morality of rational self-interest, with its consequences of freedom, justice, progress, & man's happiness on earth - or the primordial morality of altruism, with its consequences of slavery, brute force, stagnant terror & sacrificial furnaces."
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