Mitchell Heisman Quotes

Uncertain of uncertainty, skeptical of skepticism, it seems that the most important question is whether there is an important question.

What does despair mean to someone who interprets that emotion as a chemical reaction in the brain?

There is a very popular opinion that choosing life is inherently superior to choosing death. This belief that life is inherently preferable to death is one of the most widespread superstitions. This bias constitutes one of the most obstinate mythologies of the human species.

I might be a nihilist except that I don’t believe in anything.

To be serious about an idea, one must push it to its most extreme consequence and conclusion. Are moderns serious about the idea that biology does not matter? Are moderns willing to push economic materialism to its logical conclusion?

If there is no extant God and no extant gods, no good and no evil, no right and no wrong, no meaning and no purpose: if there are no values that are inherently valuable; no justice that is ultimately justifiable; no reasoning that is fundamentally rational, then there is no sane way to choose between science, religion, racism, philosophy, nationalism, art, conservatism, nihilism, liberalism, surrealism, fascism, asceticism, egalitarianism, subjectivism, elitism, ismism. If reason is incapable of deducing ultimate, non-arbitrary human ends, and nothing can be judged as ultimately more important than anything else, then freedom is equal to slavery; cruelty is equal to kindness; love is equal to hate; war is equal to peace; dignity is equal to contempt; destruction is equal to creation; life is equal to death and death is equal to life. Nihilism represents the ultimate logical conclusion of our great values and ideals- because we must experience nihilism before we can find out what value these "values" really had.

Americans do not apply egalitarianism to the organization of their individual minds. I have yet to see the American Project for freedom and equality applied by an individual to free the neurons of his or her brain from mindless obedience to his or her mind.

While there is no way to definitively distinguish between the ancient and the modern, “culture” is more ancient and closer to biology, while “civilization” is more modern and closer to technology.

Valuing individual humans as ends in themselves thus opposes biological evolution on many levels. If humanity is collectively treated as end in itself, moreover, then all the rest of the world can be conceived as means at the disposal of humanity’s ends and purposes.

To expose the roots of liberal democracy in ethinic conflict is an act of destruction that is necessary to lay the foundations for a far greater construction. Creating God is the last and greatest goal that the human race is capable. If and when there exists an artificial intelligence greater than all the greatest philosophers of human history combined, philosophy will quite likely be different because the philosopher will be different. The AI God philosopher is the overcoming of Nietzsche in the overcoming of the conflict between "reason and revelation".

What really happens in the Western countries that adopt feminism and individualism is not the complete end of the human race, but rather, the relative demographic decline of the native populations of liberal democracies. The individual irrationality of the self-sacrificial parent to child relationship helps produce genetically suicidal birthrates.

The land of opportunity", "The American dream", "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness": these are the sounds of the great sucking mechanism of the American parasite. The reliance of seduction and persuasion over coercion that sold democracy to the American people eventually sold it to the rest of the world. Although there are a minority of examples of the direct parasitism of involuntary immigration, especially slaves from Africa and the "legal" incorporation of Native Americans, voluntary immigration through the lure of freedom and and equality is only a more indirect form of parasitic predation. What is voluntary can be no less predatory than coercion, just as capitalism can be no less predatory than military imperialism. From the point of view of competition among nations, the point is not whether a citizen or their ancestor originally arrived voluntarily or involuntarily, but whether a nation or ideology is successful in harnessing its human resources towards its national interest or way of life. American parasitism works because it offers the secular Judaism of liberalism rather than the secular Christianity of communism. Communism could never compete with the immigrant American hope that they themselves might one day be a filthy rich capitalist.

The Saxon/Norman origin of liberal democracy in the English-speaking world is the key to understanding why the discoveries of sociobiology have appeared to be so congenitally politically controversial.

Biblical moral laws or commandments often oppose biologically based human behavior. Mosaic law is not “natural”. The laws of Moses violate many natural, biological inclinations and impulses, i.e. many violent and aggressive impulses. If nature is biological inclination, then to follow Mosaic law is to engage in “supernatural” acts. To be like God is to be supernatural in the literal sense of overcoming the grain of one’s natural, genetic inclinations.

Civilization”, and everything that characterizes cities as artificial shelters from nature, works in opposition to the nonhuman environment’s ability to inflict natural selection. While the logical corollary of ending natural selection among humans is the equal valuation of each individual, moral treatment of each individual as an end, as opposed to a slave or a means, works against the selfish gene. While the selfish gene views an individual organism as only a means of perpetuating itself, Biblical-modern valuation of individuals as ends in themselves “in the eyes of God” works like a monkeywrench in the gene machine.

Valuing individual humans as ends in themselves thus opposes biological evolution on many levels. If humanity is collectively treated as end in itself, moreover, then all the rest of the world can be conceived as means at the disposal of humanity’s ends and purposes. From this perspective, one can discern how the Biblical-modern valuation of each individual human life works, both against biological evolution through natural selection, and towards a general technological worldview wherein humans define the ends that justify treating all the rest of the world as technological means. Capitalist economic technological development follows logically from the premise that the entire world should revolve around infinitely valuable human lives created in the image of God.

The human race will possess the technology to create God. Why not build this being? Emerging technologies such as nanotechnological molecular manufacturers will likely be so powerful and potentially destructive that it will take God to master them. God may turn out to be inevitable simply in order for the human race to save itself. If virtue as excellence is ultimately identical with evolutionary perfection, then virtue is ultimately identical to whatever leads evolution towards a higher state of perfection. Virtue as excellence is thus ultimately inseparable from evolutionary ethics. Evolutionary ethics ties or morality with whatever is conductive to evolutionary progress. If politics is control over evolution, then is virtue the values that best steer political control over evolution?

For the Hebrew slaves of the Exodus story, a cyclical cosmos implied a repeating pattern of “good and evil” in which one side never ultimately triumphed over the other. The Egyptian cosmos could not account for slaves that escaped the “cosmic” system. But to completely break out of the cyclical conception of the cosmos in the cause of life over death was to posit an end goal of history. The Exodus paradigm of evil slavery followed by the good of freedom in God would be writ large. A directional conception of history would culminate in the ultimate, messianic triumph of good over evil. Instead of the eternal recurrence of repression, the theory went, the ultimate pattern of human history would begin from the trough of Egyptian slavery and peak with the coming of the messianic era. In this idea, alien to the ancient Greeks but central for seventeenth century Puritans, one can discern the seed of the modern idea of progress.

Death is only relevant to "genetic adaptation" insofar as it relates to the capacity for self-reproduction (what is relevant is not that an individual died, but success in gene propagation while alive). The potentially misleading phrase "genetic adaptation" means that either because or despite an organism's adaptedness to external conditions, genes were or are successful in propagating themselves. Success in reproducing genes, in other words, is the ultimate measure of so-called "genetic adaptation". The possibility of adaptation unto extinction through individualism does not contradict the Darwinian notion of adaptation for survival. On the contrary, it is only a confirmation of it. The question here is what survives, the individual or its genes? The genes, and not the individual organism, provide the measure of survival in biological evolution. This point is illustrated by the modern corporate executive who adapts to the changing economic conditions better than any of his or her competitors, but fails to produce any children.

Biblical moral laws or commandments often oppose biologically based human behavior. Mosaic law is not “natural”. The laws of Moses violate many natural, biological inclinations and impulses, i.e. many violent and aggressive impulses. If nature is biological inclination, then to follow Mosaic law is to engage in “supernatural” acts. To be like God is to be supernatural in the literal sense of overcoming the grain of one’s natural, genetic inclinations.

Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations,” Marx claimed, “the relations within which these individuals stand.” Yet Marx interpreted these relationships as economic relationships. Hitler, when observing the same phenomenon, generally interpreted these relations as kinship or racial relations.

Now if God does not exist, but the spark of the mind of God existed in the imagination of the authors of the Bible, then the entire scenario looks very different from tradition views. The question may then become, if God existed, and if God were king, what would God do? What would the God of the human imagination do to alter the world so that the real God would be brought into actual physical existence? How would his subjects behave differently if God ruled — and if God ruled in his own self-interest? If the highest interests of God are identical with the highest interests of the human, how would God change human behavior to serve the ultimate interests of God: bringing God into physical existence?

The individualism of the human organism is modern holism. Democracy is an attempt to replicate the political master's social division of labor in every individual so that every human organism is an individual whole unto him/herself. Anglo-Saxon democracy, at its most idealistic, attempted to establish an order qualitatively different from the Norman Yoke. Divided against themselves, wanting power, yet resisting power, some Anglo-Saxon found a new answer, a modern answer, to their dividedness: to be a whole individual.