By Pallas Athena, this is encouragement. Everyone seems to understand it except Smears, but he doesn’t need to because he is already being an example of how to effectively self-value. Smears, I will gladly make use of your vital advices. It’s funny to me but I mean that, like with the Capitals. You know what, I am going to write your name in capitals from now on.
I agree. And VO is as elusively simple as Stuart suspects it to be. And this accounts for it’s depth as well as its frequent unintelligibility. It’s simply always referring to what is going on, no matter how you look at it.
A self-valuing, which I have taken as the ontological standard of the observable universe, is simply an “independent something”. It is dependent on the fact of existence, but the fact of existence is also dependent on it. It is how existence exists. It must be ultra-simple, applicable to literally every proper entity == everything that can be said to exist without being created to suit a purpose by another entity. In such a case it would not exist because it values reality (consciously and/or unconsciously selects its responses to reality) in terms of itself, of what perpetuates itself, but because another entity values it in terms of itself.
So one use-value that VO produces is an irrefutable distinction between entity and tool. We can know with absolute certainty that, if man employs himself in the service of a purpose that he has no or negative benefit from (negative self-value), regardless if this brings him money, he is participating in his ontological undoing.
Precisely, we band together based on what we are used to interpreting as “ours” “what we have and they don’t.” Or in case of more reactionary morality, “what they have and we don’t”.
But in every great society there are strong contrasts and contradiction opinions. This is because what has become common is a derivative of relatively similar self-valuings connected and concentrated throughout time. But because of the fact that culture is a pre-existing derivative, a self-valuing born into a culture will always be at odds with it, as it discovers its own physiological being, its drives - its real values become apparent to it, and it must in many cases break free. Whether it can or can’t break free when it wants to determines whether it will be an entity or a sub-entity, a thing that operates purely as a derived function of a family or a culture.
Don’t get so close and then casually say the thing you know is wrong. No. Not an average. That is looking at it the wrong way. You will derive the human nature from that which is the derivative of many human natures.
What VO implicitly proposes (that’s why it is of value to me), is that cultures begin to slightly adapt to their human nature, to their being derivatives, and not active functions. Sometimes, when a culture has become so sweeping and stimulating to be born into, the name of the town or land will take on a mythical sound and people will be happy to value themselves as a Roman or an American. When that is voluntary, it is the greatest thing in the world. But then the sun sets and the state becomes an absolute rather than a freedom… and that’s where we are. There is no way out. There’s just a way deeper in.