The Lion of Wall Street

Forbidden Philosophy

2015-04-27T17:55:00.000-04:00

Forbidden Philosophy

Restore Reason
"Truth, Freedom, Beauty, Romance"

Very few of us could - or, for that matter, would even want to - dispute the reason and logic behind the principles promoted by Enlightenment philosophers of the 18th century, namely:

the concept of humanity as beings of free will, who can choose their own values, achieve their own goals, and control their own existence;
the individual right to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness;
the separation of state and religious power from the natural rights of an individual;
the equality of all people before the law, regardless of race, gender, religion, social status, or previous condition of servitude;
the advance of society through knowledge and scientific inquiry.

The method by which these concepts were presented to the public, however, may be a bit more shocking.

According to Robert Darnton's The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, there were three primary categories of books the people of France were reading in the years leading up to the 1789 overthrow of the French monarchy (this material was oddly referred to as "philosophy books" by the merchants of the time in an attempt to hide the revolutionary nature of the material being sold).

The first two may seem somewhat obvious, even by today's standards:

Utopian Fantasy: better known today as Science Fiction, these volumes dealt with imaginative content such as futuristic settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, time travel, parallel universes, and extraterrestrial life, and were used as a framework to explore politics, identity, desire, morality, social structure, and other literary themes;
Political Slander: better known today as Propaganda, these volumes unleashed a veritable barrage of lies and slanders against whatever adversary seemed the most dangerous, until the nerves of attacked persons broke down, resulting in the deconstruction of the legitimacy of the monarchy and the church.

The third has absolutely no equivalent today: Philosophical Pornography.

Interspersed between prurient tales and images of sexual dominance and submission, philosophical issues would be discussed by the characters portrayed in these books, including materialism, hedonism and atheism. Issues like "all phenomena are matter in motion," and "religion is a fraud, though useful for keeping the poor and working classes in line" were common topics for these discussions. These works also drew attention to the sexual repression of women, and rejected the notions of hereditary privilege, state religion, absolute monarchy, and the divine right of kings..

These issues became the spark that would eventually ignite a passion for an individual right to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness (as enshrined in the Declaration of Independence), and fan them into the burning flames of revolution in both America and France.

Maybe this be why our message of individual rights, private property, non-aggression, and unregulated free trade has not been embraced by the entire world yet?

Just imagine what it would be like to watch an adult movie, and getting a philosophy lecture on the benefits of reason and self-esteem, and the dangers of faith and self-sacrifice, in between the scenes of hardcore sex.

Could be we've just been been promoting our message in the wrong places!

For more information on how to become a member of Restore Reason, click on the following link:

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Atlantis Master Lease

2015-04-11T09:22:00.000-04:00

Atlantis Master Lease

Restore Reason
"Truth, Freedom, Beauty, Romance"

One of the most intriguing concepts presented in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged was her description of the capitalist utopia called Atlantis - the secluded community founded by Midas Mulligan, and composed entirely of participants in the great strike of the men and women of the mind called by John Galt. Analyzing this arrangement through the eye's of an investor, this community was most likely organized around a real-estate concept known as a multi-tenant income property.

There are advantages to keeping the title to the land component of a real-estate development intact - parceling the land into various lots by land leasing rather than subdividing. This creates a concentrated entrepreneurial interest in the success of the development, enabling it to be administered as a long-term investment property for income. The incentive for those holding the ground title is to supply public services and amenities to the place, creating an environment that a free market of producers will find attractive. To the extent the ground title holders provide these services and amenities, they can then recover their costs, and earn a profit for themselves and their investors. Whole settlements and communities can be established using this non-political model, with each development competing with the other in the market for clientele, and community services becoming a major growth industry.

The modern hotel is a great example of this development model in action. A hotel resembles a community in having private and public spaces. Its corridors are its streets, its landscaped lobby the town square. Its public transit happens to operate vertically rather than horizontally. In-house medical and security services assure round-the-clock safety of guests, visitors, and property. The hotel provides utilities and zones its space in an orderly manner for shopping, dining, entertainment, and other appropriate land uses. All it lacks that we customarily find in communities is a city hall exercising tax and other kinds of discretionary authority over the inhabitants and their property.

The resulting master lease becomes the critical programming language of the social software, capable of generating an elaborate but internally consistent web of relationships, all spelled out in the wording of the leases, subleases, and sub-subleases, etc. The sum of agreements actually in effect at any given point in time would be the written constitution of the community. Agreements could be as specialized and distinct as circumstances might warrant, so long as they did not contradict the master lease.

A set of natural-law principles together with supporting procedural rules would also need to be incorporated into the master lease. This would enable a system of law to be in place from the very beginning of the development, from which point it would evolve of its own accord. It would be a law, moreover, to which everyone in the community had consented.

For those of you who have ever dreamed of following in the footsteps of the heroes and heroines of Atlas Shrugged, and giving practical expression to an isolated community of like-minded individuals united together around the principles of liberty, private property, and unregulated free trade, click on the following link:

Sample Master Lease Agreement for Atlantis

For more information on how to become a member of Restore Reason, click on the following link:

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Romantic Realism

2015-04-05T10:01:00.000-04:00

Romantic Realism

Restore Reason
"Truth, Freedom, Beauty, Romance"

The Question:

How do I apply the principle of Romance to my life?

Our Response:

Romanticism is the conceptual school of art that depicts life, not as it is, but as it might be and ought to be, and mankind as erotic and heroic beings of free will, who are capable of choosing their own values, achieving their own goals, and controlling their own existence.

Since each of our lives is our own greatest creation and legacy, Restore Reason endorses the use of Romantic Realism as the means by which we can all create (or recreate) our own personalized reality.

One of the defining characteristics of our mentality and our social life is the human capacity to create alternate realities beyond the reality presented to us by our five senses. We have also developed this capacity into a range of specialized practices that we label with terms like "art", " religion", and "play". All human societies imagine and create these alternative worlds upon which they shape and model this reality.

In contemporary society, enormous resources are harnessed to sustain this tradition of mimicry using Romantic Realism. Romantic Realism refers to the tremendous variety of images of perfection that saturate our cultural environment - television programs, airbrushed photographs, erotic films, theme parks, romance novels - the list of examples is virtually endless. All of these forms of media depict some part of mundane life — they are realistic — and all of them are also more meaningful and appealing than mundane life – they are romantic.

One of the most obvious examples of Romantic Realism is advertising, in which we observe a world which looks a lot like our own world but is somehow better. For example, we are familiar with the concept of friends gathering to eat at a restaurant, but a TV ad depicting such an event is likely to feature spectacular looking people eating spectacular looking food and having more fun than us mortals ever get to have.

Romantic Realism is a form of entertainment because it follows the same basic pattern as, say, a television drama: we are presented with a fantasy that is similar to everyday life, but with all the boredom edited out and everything that stimulates us (attractive people, sex, suspense, violence, music, etc.) turned way up. Once you start looking for it, Romantic Realism can be experienced everywhere.

Think for example about all the attention our society lavishes on celebrities — romantically realistic people. Even much of our food could be considered a form of Romantic Realism, in that it is designed to maximize arousal through precisely the right blend of salt, sugar and fat. Or consider what may be the original form of Romantic Realism — romance itself: the idea that an ideal sexual partner will allow us to transcend all the challenges of a long-term relationship.

More importantly, Romantic Realism is the means by which one can overcome the use of faith (i.e. feeling) as a means of cognition for determining the reality of existence. Religion must encourage faith because it cannot actually show the believer the coming paradise. This creates a challenge of timing — just when will paradise be realized? A very widespread technique, of course, is to link heaven to the transition that occurs at the end of life, but that could be a very long wait.

Romantic Realism, when used in conjunction with Virtual Reality (click here for more information), is the method by which each of us can experience that which we find most aesthetically pleasing as context for our lives, or as an escape from the harshness of the real world.

For more information on how to become a member of Restore Reason, click on the following link:

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What is Virtual Reality?

2015-03-08T18:45:00.001-04:00

What is Virtual Reality?

Restore Reason
"Truth, Freedom, Beauty, Romance"

"We have not even to risk the adventure alone for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known ... we have only to follow the thread of the hero path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a God. And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outwards, we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.” - Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces

The Question:

What is Virtual Reality?

Our Response:

The purpose of Virtual Reality is to employ the functions of mythology and ritual to allow a man, woman, couple, or group to experience their own personalized adventure - using the sensory experiences they find the most aesthetically pleasing - as a context for their life or as an escape from the harshness of the real world.

Mythology is the collected stories of heroes and heroines, and how the lives of these heroes and heroines intersect with the stages of our own lives, and become the model of behavior for ourselves and our community. Throughout history, rituals and ceremonies were used to enact these mythological stories for the purpose of moving an individual through the stages of throwing off an old role, moving into and identifying with a new role, and entering into a state of personal responsibility.

Mythology serves four functions in the life of a human being:

a mystical function: aiding the human in his or her experience of a higher or transcendent reality;
a cosmological function: providing an order to the world and the hierarchical relationships between the cosmos and society;
a sociological function: giving order to the members of a group, especially laying down behavioral norms;
a psychological function: aiding the individual in personal growth and coming to grips with a personal reality.

Virtual Reality is the creation of sensory experiences (including tastes, sight, smell, sound, and touch) that simulate the physical presence of real or imagined characters, locations, settings, and props. These sensory experiences serve as a pressure relief valve by unleashing pure ecstatic emotion in a controlled but intellectually free environment, thereby allowing the psyche free reign to focus on the pursuit of happiness without the burden of pent up emotion.

The experiences we encourage members (and non-members) to participate in, either alone or with others, can be summed up in the following three statements:

to know peace, one must first experience courage (i.e., aggression, heroism, competition, sacrifice, conquest - the warrior dynamic);
to know liberty, one must first experience discipline (i.e., authority, militarism, obedience, abstinence - the dominant/submissive dynamic);
to know rationality, one must first experience passion (i.e., carnality, instinct, rebellion, inspiration, hedonism - the romantic dynamic).

Virtual Reality should be recognized as a theatrical performance, with the participant or participants knowing full-well that they are practicing a form of contrived ignorance in order to expand their will. Restore Reason promotes this as one of humanities best defenses against all forms of self-deceit that forbid such recognition, or that even allow others to admit such a thing as self-imposed ignorance!

For more information on how to become a member of Restore Reason, click on the following link:

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The Five-Point Program

2015-01-11T10:19:00.001-05:00

The Five-Point Program

Rational Self-Interest is a life-loving system based on objective reality and reason that we, the members of Restore Reason, passionately adhere to. We are now ready for something that goes quite a few steps beyond just explaining our principles. Every revisionist movement needs a set of goals and guidelines that are clear, concrete, and that will effect significant change.

Restore Reason
"Truth, Freedom, Beauty, Romance"

The following Five-Point Program reflects attitudes which allow others to decide whether they wish to align themselves with us or not. Each is necessary for change to take place. When you're asked what we're "doing," here's the answer:

Overhuman Ideal: the conceptual model of men and women as erotic and heroic super-beings of free will, with their own happiness as the moral purpose of their lives, productive achievement as their noblest activity, sensuality as an expression of their self-esteem, and reason as their only absolute;
Rational Self-Interest: the thoughts, choices, actions, and feelings that express a morality based on objective reality and reason – more practically expressed in The Eleven Statements of Rational Self-Interest;
Private Property: the individual right of every man and woman to choose their own values, to control their own existence, to achieve their own goals, to choose the work the they like, and to trade their own product or service for the products and services of others;
Individual Sovereignty: the natural and inalienable right of every man and woman to life, liberty, property, voluntary association, self-determination, and the pursuit of happiness;
Natural Order: the ability of every man and woman to survive by their own strength, to succeed by their own merits, and to leave a legacy of good health, high intelligence, and noble character to future generations.

This is the encapsulated version of our current thrust of defining the conditions that make an ideal man or woman possible. So now when someone asks you, "Well, what do members of Restore Reason do?", you will be qualified to tell them.

The Eleven Statements of Rational Self-Interest

I mold my appearance and environment to suit my aim
I take full responsibility for my life
I use reason to explore the realities of existence
I communicate patterns that influence outcomes
I live my purpose everyday
I never give up
I keep myself in peak physical condition
I make money work for me
I indulge my senses regularly
I only associate with individuals who share my values
I survive by the strength of my mind and body

For more information on how to become a member of Restore Reason, click on the following link:

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Join the Restore Reason Revolution

2014-10-12T10:42:00.000-04:00

Becoming a Citizen of the Empire of the Mind

Restore Reason is now taking applications from those individuals who are interested in becoming a member and declaring themselves a Citizen of the Empire of the Mind. Our mission is to demand the right to live in a rational society and to halt the distortion, coercion, mediocrity, and indifference that are currently plaguing this world.

Restore Reason
"Truth, Freedom, Beauty, Romance"

Click here to Join the Restore Reason Revolution

Those who proudly carry our Sign of the Dollar pendant identifying themselves as a Citizen of the Empire of the Mind have the strength and dedication to implement the tools of truth, freedom, beauty, and romance to create a rational society based on individual rights, private property, non-aggression, and unregulated free trade.

The Sign of the Dollar pendant is an impressive die-cast pendant featuring the red, white, black, and gold emblem of Rational Self-Interest.

For more information on how to become a member of Restore Reason, click on the following link:

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