The Binary Circumstance

From The Virginian-Pilot Online:

U.S. Rep. Ed Schrock abruptly announced his retirement late Monday, citing unspecified allegations that “called into question my ability to represent the citizens of Virginia’s 2nd Congressional District.???

The two-term Republican did not answer questions or address the allegations.

A Washington-based activist claimed on his Web site that Schrock engaged in homosexual activity, but offered no evidence. Schrock has refused to confirm or deny the allegations for two weeks.

“After much thought and prayer, I have come to the realization that these allegations will not allow my campaign to focus on the real issues facing our nation and region,??? he said in a written statement. “Therefore, as of today, I am stepping aside and will no longer be the Republican nominee for Congress in Virginia’s Second Congressional District.???

[…]

Schrock served two terms in Congress, focusing his efforts on military and conservative issues.

His sprawling Second District includes all of Virginia Beach, and parts of Norfolk, Hampton and the Eastern Shore. It is a politically conservative district that includes several military bases and the Christian Broadcasting Network.

Allegations about Schrock, 63, emerged two weeks ago, on Aug. 19, when a Web site called blogACTIVE.com posted claims that Schrock engaged in homosexual activity. Schrock is married and has an adult son.

Michael Rogers, the Web site publisher, accused Schrock of being a hypocrite for opposing gay-rights issues.

The Web site – a one-man operation out of Washington that focuses on gay issues – has a history of “outing??? gay congressional staff members. The site did not offer any proof of its allegation that Schrock engaged in homosexual activity.

The Web site urged readers to write to Schrock and “let this congressional hypocrite know how you feel.???

Rogers said Schrock’s positions on gays in the military and a proposed constitutional ban on same-sex marriage hurt the gay community. [hypelink to blogACTIVE inserted by me for your convenience]

First, Gov. McGreevey, a Democrat, resigns because he’s a closet case who supported the Defense of Marriage Act, and now Rep. Schrock resigns because he’s been a closet case supporting the Defense of Marriage Act and opposed to gays in the military.

blogACTIVE promises more high-level Republicans will follow. Who’s next?

Have you figured out yet why some people see gay unions as a threat to their heterosexual marriages?

Jay McCarthy links to an article by Nathaniel Branden, The Benefits and Hazards of the Philosophy of Ayn Rand.

My own position is that Ayn Rand was a genius. That doesn’t mean she was right about everything. The fact that she had flaws only means that she was human. That does not take away from her genius, it only reminds us that geniuses are human beings. That’s what’s so remarkable about them: they are not Gods but humans. They are humans who are way ahead of their time in their capacity to understand the world we live in.

No human can be a God, the best he/she can aspire to is genius. One cannot be a genius without first being a human being.

I highly recommend that you read the whole article or at least Jay’s more extensive quotes. I only want to address one thing that Branden says:

We must be guided by our conscious mind, Rand insisted; we must not follow our emotions blindly. Following our emotions blindly is undesirable and dangerous: Who can argue with that? Applying the advice to be guided by our mind isn’t always as simple as it sounds. Such counsel does not adequately deal with the possibility that in a particular situation feelings might reflect a more correct assessment of reality than conscious beliefs or, to say the same thing another way, that the subconscious mind might be right while the conscious mind was mistaken. I can think of many occasions in my own life when I refused to listen to my feelings and followed instead my conscious beliefs — which happened to be wrong — with disastrous results. If I had listened to my emotions more carefully, and not been so willing to ignore and repress them, my thinking — and my life — would have advanced far more satisfactorily.

When I read Ayn Rand’s The Art of Fiction I was particularly struck by her discussion of the process of concretizing your abstractions and abstracting your concretes. She said that if you did that properly, your subconscious would do much of the work for you in writing a piece of fiction. She said the result would seem like “intuition” but it was really a rational process being done in the background by your subconscious mind.

When it came to writing her fiction, and she regarded herself as the greatest writer of her time, Rand put her faith in the subconscious mind.

I think this process is similar to what Branden has described above. Our emotions are important information and many of those “gut level” responses have been programmed into us by millions of years of evolution. They are background processing–genetic wisdom. They are to be trusted, but as Branden suggests, not blindly. They are simply more data that we must process along with all the “external” data coming from outside our bodies.

This is all part of being a human being. And one must be a human being before one can be a genius.

Our perceptions of the “outside” world and our inner emotions and processing of the data form our Unique Consciousness of Universal Reality (UCUR.)

Universal reality is not dependent upon our consciousness for its existence, but our unique consciousness is dependent upon our existence for its existence. Universal reality is processed by each individual in his own unique way, his own unique consciousness.

Universal reality–existence–is what we all share, it’s our common ground. Our unique consciousness is our own domain, nobody else can share it. It is our own private universe. It dies when we die. Universal reality lives on.

Jay McCarthy quotes Murray Rothbard:

A guy said to me, ‘yes, but the whole theory of evolution is based on a tautology: that which survives, survives’ This is tautological, therefore it doesn’t mean anything. I thought about that for a while and it finally occurred to me that a tautology is something that if it means nothing, not only that no information has gone into it but that no consequence has come out of it. So, we may have accidentally stumbled upon the ultimate answer; it’s the only thing, the only force, arguably the most powerful of which we are aware, which requires no other input, no other support from any other place, is self evident, hence tautological, but nevertheless astonishingly powerful in its effects.

Things either exist or they don’t.
That which exists is true, that which does not exist is false.

Having been almost run over by them on more occasions than I care to remember, I’m not surprised at the results of this study.