CONSCIOUSNESS AND FREE CHOICE
Consciousness allows human beings to escape the automatic controls of nature. At the same time, only through consciousness can a person be subjective and mystical. Thus, only through consciousness, can a person choose to act in discord with nature. Unlike all other animals, conscious beings can choose to act better or worse than their nature to benefit or harm themselves and others. Choosing to deny or contradict nature or reality is mysticism, which is an unnatural, irresponsible abuse of the conscious mind. But, conscious beings can also choose to act better than their nature to gain power and advantages over all else in the universe. Because consciousness allows choices and actions beyond preset nature, only human beings can choose to be honest or deceptive, objective or mystical, responsible or irresponsible, competent or incompetent, striving or lazy, productive or destructive, beneficial or harmful, noble or evil. …With consciousness, anyone can choose either alternative at any time.
All other animals have no choice but to automatically respond to nature. They cannot be deceptive, irresponsible, mystical, or purposely harmful to themselves and others. They have no such choices, thus, they bear no responsibility for their actions. …Animals cannot be mystical, dishonest, or self-destructive.
With consciousness, only human beings can freely choose to live better or worse than their natures.
Free choice determines the future of all human beings: Through mystical choices, people diminish themselves and their potentials to live happy lives. But through Neothink® choices, people reject mystical choices. Thus, in turn, they prosper and live happily, far beyond nature’s preset course. In fact, only by choosing the integrated effort of Neothink® over the automatic laziness of mysticism can people build lasting prosperity and happiness.
THE KEY CHOICE
The choice between exerting effort or defaulting to laziness determines the course of all important human actions. The three choices constantly confronting every human being are to (1) exert integrated effort, (2) default to camouflaged laziness, or (3) act somewhere in between.
The choice to exert integrated effort or to default to camouflaged laziness is the key choice that determines the character, competence, and future of every human being. That crucial choice must be made by everyone, continually, throughout life. …That key choice determines the:
- direction of an infant’s life beginning at the first moment of consciousness.
- development of a child’s implicit nascent philosophy which determines that child’s developing psychology.
- development of an adult’s implicit and explicit philosophy which develops that person’s psychology to determine the quality of his or her life.
- philosophies that guide entire nations, eras, and civilizations with the resulting cultures, economies, and degrees of enlightenment or darkness.
- evolvement or regression of human consciousness, power, prosperity, happiness, and love.
- prosperous survival or eventual destruction of human life on this planet.
- development or rejection of youth-perpetuating biological immortality.
That same key choice determined the direction of all original philosophers: For example, the prime immoral philosophers, Plato and Kant, chose to formulate sweeping, out-of-context abstractions in conjuring up all-encompassing mystical idea systems that were “validated” with brilliantly deceptive inner logic. Thus, their basic choice was a default to laziness. For they chose the neocheater’s “shortcut” to unearned power or “greatness” by formulating out-of-context, non-sequitur, “higher- cause” philosophies.
Such specious philosophies are designed to assault the supreme value of the conscious mind. Their destructive, death- oriented “greatness” contrasts sharply to the productive, life- oriented greatness of the prime moral philosophers: Aristotle and Rand. For, those moral philosophers chose to exert hard efforts and fully integrated honesty to build full-context, rationally integrated systems of universal value for all people of all times.
Those choosing to live through automatic laziness survive by usurping or attacking values produced by others. Those usurpers and attackers include essentially all politicians and theologians as well as many dishonest professionals, attorneys, psychologists, academe, elitists, journalists, philosophers. Well-known usurpers and attackers of values include Plato, Hitler, Stalin, FDR, the Pope, Al Capone, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, Ralph Nader, Jesse Helms. By contrast, those who choose to live through integrated effort can thrive by producing or building values for others. Those producers include working people, business people, industrialists, scientists as well as honest professionals, artists, musicians, philosophers. Well-known value producers include Aristotle, Ray Kroc, Henry Ford, Edison, Einstein, Pierre S. du Pont, Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould, Galileo, Michelangelo, Beethoven, Ayn Rand.
That choice between laziness and effort determines if one becomes an unhappy destroyer of values or a happy producer of values.