December 2013 Update: Staying Power, "Friends," The Hobbit, Upcoming Titles

Staying Power: In one week, on December 20th, I celebrate the four year anniversary of quitting smoking cigarettes. How did I stay quit? In all honestly, I drink 2 to 3 cups of coffee everyday, so I get my upper fix from caffeine instead of tobacco. That, combined with iron determination and willpower, is the reason why I haven't had a smoke in the last 4 years.

"Friends": My most recent legal document review project ended. The thought I want to post about in this blog, in regards to my job, is that working is a lot of stress, and to be a good worker you need a way to relax while at work in high pressure situations (e.g. deadlines, quotas, etc.). My coworkers would relax by talking a lot, e.g. about their girlfriends and sneakers, but I developed a very useful trick for how to relax at work. I own all 10 seasons of the TV show "Friends" starring Jennifer Aniston on DVD, and I have seen all 200 episodes at least 20 or 30 times. So while I am at work I will literally play jokes or scenes from "Friends" in my mind while I am working, over and over again, because I have probably 1000 jokes and scenes memorized. This puts me in a constant good mood at work, which I think makes me a better worker and breaks up the monotony.

The Hobbit: I saw the second installment of The Hobbit trilogy today. It was escapism at its best. A rich, vividly imagined world, with great acting and an awesome dragon (and I love dragons!). The only problem was that it cut out in the middle of the story when I was looking forward to the ending with great anticipation, and it will be a pain to wait, and wait, and wait for the third movie to come out. Here let me note a story common among fantasy fans, that the two founders of the fantasy genre, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis had a conversation, in which Lewis asked "they say our novels are escapism? What sort of person hates escapism?" to which Tolkien replied, "Jailors."

Upcoming Titles: I am putting the finishing touches on my two new nonfiction books, tentatively titled "The Apple of Knowledge" and "Golden Rule Libertarianism." You will be the first to know because I will post it here as soon as they are released, probably for Kindle, Nook and iPad via Amazon, BN and the iBookstore.

Just Checking In

I have been "working like a dog" recently, billing 55 to 60 hours a week at my job in Manhattan doing legal document review. My project ends soon, so expect a longer blog post around Christmas. I continue to plan to release my two independently published nonfiction books soon, so anyone reading this should have something to look forward to. Happy Thanksgiving and Hanukkah, belatedly!

Work Portrayed on Television

The essay Thoughts on Work and Working in the October 2013 issue of The Freeman is the inspiration for this blog post, which will discuss the portrayal of working and jobs on television. In the essay, author Sarah Skwire reviews the book "Working" by Studs Terkel, which contained oral narratives of different types of workers talking about their jobs. The author uses her analysis of the book to argue that the public's view of free market capitalism is influenced by how we view and talk about work. Specifically, if we hate our job and view working for a salary as slavery to the rich then we will hate capitalism, and if we enjoy our job and take pride in doing good work then we are more likely to favor capitalism.

Ms. Skwire cites cases in Mr. Terkel's book which show that this hate-my-job vs. love-my-job dynamic does not line up neatly with poor vs. rich or working class job vs. upper class job. She describes blue collar workers, like cashiers and assembly line workers, who love their work. Here I will elaborate on this point that working class jobs are not exploitation with reference to the portrayal of jobs and working in two TV shows: Shark Tank and Project Runway. Up front I must confess that I watch and enjoy both of these shows, for reasons that should become clear below.

(1) Shark Tank is a show about a group of wealthy venture capitalists called "sharks," including famed Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who hear presentations by small business owners and then decide whether to invest in the business. This show is interesting to a libertarian because the rich investors are not portrayed as exploiting the small businessmen. Although the sharks do often make predatory initial offers, like buying 75% of a business for $10,000, the five sharks compete with each other and if the investment opportunity has merit then they frequently undercut each others' offers in ways that favor the entrepreneur, e.g. the initial offer could become a final offer of $20,000 for 20% of the equity.

The entrepreneurs who pitch ideas to the Sharks are frequently people who started off in a working class job and loved what they did and wanted to start or expand a business where they take their expertise and passion of an area and develop that passion into a brand or product, for which they need capital. Indeed, many of the Sharks themselves, including Mark Cuban, began as small businessmen and then got rich due to hard work and success. Shark Tank depicts in reality what it looks like for capitalism and Wall Street to help small business and create jobs, rather than describing that in disembodied abstract theory as so many libertarian economists have done.

For example, in the last season of Shark Tank a boy in middle school, who happened to be from a town close to where I live in Connecticut, dreamed of making gourmet dog food, and cooked up batches of dog treats in the early morning before school and sold dog treats to his friends and teammates' families at his sports teams' practices. Despite what some Marxists would assert as child labor, his story felt like an ambitious passionate young person wanting to work and make an honest living for himself. He pitched his dog treat business to the sharks and, although four of the sharks did not really take him seriously due to his age, one of the sharks liked his product and gave him a reasonable offer. He decided to take her offer and he did the deal to get her investment capital.

(2) Project Runway is a show, hosted by supermodel Heidi Klum, where a group of fashion designers compete in a series of challenges to win a $500,000 prize. Most of the contestants in this reality shows are poor and/or gay, and many of them have fascinating and eccentric personalities. Although the challenges are grueling and difficult, like sewing and working all day and all night to design a runway-ready evening gown from idea to finished clothing in 24 hours, the show does not depict the contestants as slaves in a sweatshop who are exploited by the $500,000 prize's control over them. The opposite is true: the show depicts the money as a prize for the worthy, not as an evil system of oppression. The contestants are young and ambitious and have a deep love of clothes and they enjoy the work they do despite it being very difficult. Most of them view Project Runway as an opportunity to show the world their talent and be rewarded for all their hard work and skill.

In the most recent season, the show ended in a competition between two designers, Alexandria and Dom, with everyone else having been eliminated by the end. Alexandria ended up losing and was very upset and bitter (despite winning $25,000 as runner up), but Dom, a poor young black woman from Philadelphia, had done what was in my opinion the best collection to show on the runway in the finale, with clothes that were exotic and attention-grabbing, and she worked hard and deserved her prize. Project Runway depicts work as good and something that earns its just reward, not as a necessary evil that we should all complain about and try to abolish.

Television, like Hollywood and the news media, has its fair share of Marxists. But these two shows, and others like them, are getting people to talk about work in ways that are accurate in assessing the values of freedom and capitalism.

Deconstructing the Motives of Marxist Professors

Deconstructing the Motives of Marxist Professors

By Russell Hasan

Most ideas which are too smart for their own good eventually end up in a Woody Allen movie. Continental philosopher Jacques Derrida’s theory of deconstruction was no different, showing up in the movie Deconstructing Harry. Deconstruction looks at something, typically a text, and peels away the layers of explicit meaning and logical order in order to see the bloody reality that lurks beneath. It is interesting to attempt to apply the theory of deconstruction for a libertarian analysis, specifically by deconstructing the motives of Marxist professors on college campuses and examining why so many academics are Marxists.

Marxist professors appear to preach the political philosophy of Marx because they believe in it. Or, perhaps, they are Marxists because that is what they were taught by their professors way back when they were themselves students in college. But a deeper motive can be discerned by looking underneath the surface. In Ayn Rand’s opus Atlas Shrugged, the physicist Dr. Robert Stadler justifies his betrayal of John Galt and his support for the State Science Institute by telling Galt that he wanted to set the mind free from money by getting government funding for scientific research. The deconstruction of this statement shows that the free market either does not, or might not, place a high value on the work that professors do, such that some scholars could go unfunded if left without state assistance. Generally, in a free market traders trade value for value, so that in order to buy something you must first be productive and actually make some money. What is it precisely that a Marxist professor of sociology, history, or political science really produces? Unless their scholarship and ideas have some sort of concrete financial value, the free market would not pay them very much in return for their work. On the other hand, government funding for universities, especially in the form of Department of Education-backed student loans but also from government grants for research, results in a situation where the salary of the typical college professor bears no relation whatsoever to his or her productive value.

The situation in the economics behind university education might accurately be called a higher education bubble. Spending on education, motivated by the Department of Education’s policies, goes ever higher and higher, as seen in data presented in the Wikipedia article Higher Education in the United States, while the actual productive value that results from a college education bears no real relation to rising spending. The university administrators and professors in general don’t seem to care. Indeed, the theory of a “liberal arts” education, as articulated by Progressive education pioneer John Dewey, believed that the purpose of an education was to free the mind, not to help the student make money. Dewey also asserted a belief that part of the purpose of education is to convert youth to Marxism, as seen in the Wikipedia article John Dewey, and Dewey’s influence upon modern education cannot be understated. Today’s students should thank Mr. Dewey for the fact that their minds have been set free while their bodies need to eat in a job market that has been mercilessly crushed by the Great Recession, which resulted from the statist policies of Bush and Obama.

Perhaps the situation will be rectified when the higher education bubble bursts and the forces of supply and demand wreak havoc on college funding and drag spending back down to what is fiscally justified by the return on investment for a college education. Bubbles usually burst when state-controlled systems run out of other people’s money, in this case, the taxpayer’s money which funds student loans and grants. If the economics of supply and demand are allowed to correct the higher education bubble, then many Marxist professors might be fired unless they can provide something to students which furthers the students’ careers or future earning capacity, which would mean that the professors are actually productive. A plausible deconstruction of the motives of Marxist professors is that the professors just want to maximize the amount of money in their salaries, because the state’s influence over education accomplishes a vast disconnect between the professors’ salary received and the value that they produce. Note that the state also receives a quid pro quo from the professors in the form of the Marxist propaganda which they teach to their students in order to persuade impressionable young minds to believe in statist economic policy, so that the achievements of Marxist professors would have no value in a free market economy but have a high importance in a centrally planned economy.

Author Update

My two new nonfiction books, the first about the politics of libertarianism and the second about the philosophy of science, have now both been completed! The first drafts are written and I am editing, and I hope to release them within the next 6 months. Of course, the indie ebook self-publishing phenomenon has been driven by fiction, so indie nonfiction is something of a charting a new path, but hopefully it will go well! Although fiction is fun and entertaining, with nonfiction it is possible to sell ideas or information which are unique, so a nonfiction book can be truly one of a kind, whereas with most novels it is possible to find similar novels or substitutes. And both of my books offer content that is original and can't be found elsewhere.

In other news, I have been working a new job recently, a legal job in Manhattan. I have done legal internships and pro bono work in the past, for example I used to be an intern at the Connecticut Attorney General, but this is my first full time law job. For a lawyer to have a job that requires a law degree and bar admission, which my job does, is a great blessing, especially given the oft-chronicled collapse of the legal job market in the Great Recession era. The job is a temporary position which ends soon, but it is a nice step forward for my career. I am very grateful for the opportunity.

The Lamestream Media: Democratization vs. Nationalization as Solutions

This blog post is my reaction to the article Did Capitalism Give Us The Laugh Track? in The Freeman July/August 2013 issue. The article's main point is that the laugh track in television comedies, e.g. sitcoms, is ugly and stupid, and its widespread use was a flaw due to homogeneity caused by the fact that FCC regulations gave an oligopoly to the broadcast radio stations (ABC, CBS and NBC), and the laugh track was done in by evolution and innovation caused by the rise of free market competition in television, first with Fox and then with cable TV like HBO.

This article highlights a point that is hotly debates among the general public: what is the solution to the horrible, atrocious quality problem in the media? Most people agree that the most of the news shows on the media are stupid and offer cliched, hackneyed tripe, not deep, biting insight. Not surprisingly, the Left and the Right differ in their characterization of the problem, and in their proposed solution. The Left says that the profit motive drives news stations like CNN (and Fox News) to dumb down their news and turn the news into entertainment in order to get higher ratings. To the Left, the media can only improve if the profit motive is removed and the news is made into a public good, like PBS or the BBC. The Left in particular criticizes Fox News for being biased and stupid. The Right makes an argument not unlike Freeman author B.K. Marcus, that the government-sponsored FCC-administered monopolization of the media has stifled innovation, and the solution is deregulation and competition to improve quality. The Right complains that networks like CNN and MSNBC have a liberal agenda and view all policy debates through a Leftist lens.

In any political analysis which pits libertarian policy vs. statist policy, it is interesting to speculate about whether the findings lead to the conclusions as the result of empirical research, or whether the analysis uses a priori assumptions which conform the data to fit the desired result. The former is a neutral unbiased analysis, whereas the latter is bias contaminating the research. Can we say that the FCC helped the laugh track, or was it the low taste of the public that contributed to the laugh track? In the absence of empirical data capable of distinguishing these two possibilities with precision, we cannot achieve an answer to this question that possesses scientific certainty.

But in the case of freedom vs. tyranny in explaining the "Lamestream Media", reality is handing us something that approximates a neutral scientific experiment. This is, obviously, the internet, and podcasts and Youtube channels as independent media. The government has not yet shackled the internet media with regulatory controls, so independent internet media has the chance to break free from conformity and be innovative. If the Right interpretation is correct, then internet-based competition will produce lean, hungry new media stations which will abandon stupid shallow news shows and two-dimensional biases in favor of deep, honest, insightful analysis, and the free market will reward the new media, and the good media feeds will prosper and evolve and improve. But if the Left interpretation is correct then the profit motive will afflict new media just as it did old media, with the need for ads and ratings driving down the intelligence of the analysis. As a libertarian I predict that the evolution of media to an internet-based mode will lead to competition among thousands of news feeds, which will destroy the "lamestream" mainstream media and break the news free from the orthodox conformist paradigm through which the news is filtered in the process of being taught to the news-consuming public. Indeed, the internet is bringing new libertarian media like The Freeman of FEE, as well as other libertarian media like Reason Magazine and Liberty Magazine, to the attention of people who would never have had access to it in the absence of the internet. Internet media will enable libertarian news feeds to compete with the mainstream statist news feeds, and let the public, not the experts, decide whose accounts of the facts are most trustworthy. The eventual result of whether or not media enrichment happens once we fully transition to an internet-based media model will be a scientific proof supporting either the Right (if media gets better) or Left (if it does not) interpretation of what is wrong with the media.

What I'm Working On Right Now

I recently read an article in the KDP Amazon.com newsletter about how indie writers should blog about their works in progress, so I am blogging about the two books I am writing right now. It's been about a year since I published "Rob Seablue and the Eye of Tantalus," and it has not been a commercial success, and it was recently rejected by the Libertarian Futurist Society in their nomination for finalists for their awards. I am taking this as an indication that my fiction writing needs technical improvement, so I am now trying my hand at writing nonfiction books. Unlike my fiction, many of my nonfiction articles in Liberty Magazine have been quite popular, so apparently my nonfiction is better than my fiction. I am writing two nonfiction books right now.

The first nonfiction book is a combination of a policy paper outlining the libertarian positions on various issues, combined with a new theoretical justification of libertarianism which draws upon politics, economics and the law to show a new principle as a basis for liberty. The principle of liberty that I present in the book is more simple than Rothbardianism or Randianism, but in a sense it is also more elegant and less grandiose, and my hope is that it will appeal to a wide audience and bring in people who might not agree with Rothbard or Rand. I don't want to say what are the details of the theory of liberty that I expound in this blog post, since I think I should save that for the release date when the book comes out. I expect to finish this book this summer and publish it before the end of 2013. The book looks like it will be about 150 pages long (although for e-books in e-readers page count is less predicable than paper books).

The second nonfiction book is a treatise of pure philosophical epistemology. In this book, I make the case for the ability of science to achieve something that can be properly called "knowledge." I offer my argument for why science is capable of proving that God does not exist. And I offer a new, detailed theory of how reason and perception work as a theoretical foundation for the scientific method and experimental verification. This book should also be done by this summer. It looks to be about 200 pages long.

As a concluding note, my practice has become to post a blog post on a monthly basis, and I am now declaring monthly posting to be the new official policy for this blog. So I promise to post something each month, and you should come back once every month to see what's new. Thank you for reading this!

Fairness and Equality, Libertarian-style

I recently had a vigorous, healthy (i.e. mean and nasty) debate in a Libertarian discussion group on social media. I argued that rich children have an unfair advantage over poor children because poor children are trapped in failing public schools, and rich children can attend good private schools. The two people I was debating (one of whom was nice but foolish, the other absolutely vicious) could not think past the mistaken idea that I was saying it is unfair because the rich have more money and can afford to send their children to private schools, and poor people can't, which is NOT my argument. My argument was the libertarian argument that the government uses VIOLENT FORCE to compel poor children to attend the failing public schools, because of our rotten socialized k-12 public education system and compulsory attendance. Because the government uses this force against poor children, but not rich children, it is UNFAIR for the poor children, and the law is treating rich children differently from poor children, and giving them preferential treatment. I was making a libertarian argument against government and for the privatizing of primary school, yet the dim, dull people I argued with somehow could not get it around their brains that I was not making a Marxist/Socialist argument to outlaw private schools. Very frustrating, but, obviously, political dialogue is a good and vital element of a functioning democracy.

The Philosophy of Science

This mini-essay was expanded upon in my e-book The Apple of Knowledge. If this interests you, please take a look at my book.

The Philosophy of Science. Many famous philosophers have sought to take the approach and methods of science and translate science into philosophy to create a truly scientific philosophy. These thinkers include Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein, and Quine. I argue that each failed, for the reasons below:

Hume seemed to think that because scientific theories are always capable of being disproved by new empirical evidence, that skepticism was the scientific attitude. He ignored the fact that science, when theories have been proven and experimentally verified, seeks to provide us some degree of knowledge. We can know that the sun will come up tomorrow, because of the scientific postulates of astronomy, which science has empirically verified. Whereas Hume claimed we cannot know that the sun will rise tomorrow. Hume’s rejection of faith was rational, but his rejection of knowledge based on analysis of the physical world, was irrational.

Kant argued that science can achieve certainty and universality only because the mind imposes scientific laws upon the subjective experience of reality. His basic argument was that subjectivism is the justification for scientific knowledge. This is, of course, completely backwards. The scientific attitude is that the mind revolves around the physical world. Kant’s view, that the physical world revolves around the mind, is a religious idea, that faith and belief can alter reality. And any intelligent academic generally recognizes that Kant’s actual purpose was to protect religion from the rise of science. Science achieves knowledge that hydrogen and oxygen can combine to form water, for example, from an examination of the molecules and atoms, which are things in themselves in physical reality. The scientific mind learns from reality, it does not impose its subjective beliefs onto sensory experience.

Wittgenstein sought to apply the principles of mathematics into philosophy, specifically in the form of formal symbolic logic. My favorite argument against him applies a theory called the Chinese Room, originally developed by Searle. If someone in a room is given Chinese words, and a computer software program to process them, then he could put together Chinese sentences, but if he doesn't speak Chinese then he will have no idea what any of it means. The argument is that symbolic logic can reach conclusions, but if you don’t know what the symbols mean, if you don’t know what the words in a language refer to in reality, the objective physical objects in reality to which the symbols refer, then the language, and logic, are meaningless computer programs, devoid of actual meanings relevant to human experience. For example, “sun” is not actually a word, it is a star in the sky.

Quine argued that the philosophical equivalent of scientific experiments, in which theories are experimentally verified using empirical data, is thought experiments, in which a person “tests” a theory by analyzing whether the theory matches the person’s “intuitions,” which are teased out by thinking about the thought experiment. This idea has been widely accepted in academic philosophy. The obvious flaw is that, whereas empirical data comes from objective physical reality, intuitions come from internal subjective feelings, and therefore a thought experiment is nothing like a real scientific experiment. Quine shares the Kantian fault.

The truly scientific approach to philosophy, would be to take philosophical ideas, and actually design real scientific experiments to try to test their truth or falsehood. I call this approach “experimental philosophy.” For example, if you think that sensory experience revolves around the mind, and subjectivism and solipsism are true, then test your belief. Pick up a piece of hot metal, and see whether your mind can impose a phenomena, the experience of the feeling of ice, upon the noumena, the thing in itself which you are holding in your hand. If the iron burns you and your mind could not control it, this scientifically proves, or at least lends credence to the idea, that sensory experience comes from objective physical reality, and not from your mind. On the other hand, if your mind can make you experience a feeling of ice, then your mind is creating your sensory experiences. The Kantian might reply that the structure of the mind could not be controlled by a desire to feel ice, but when we speak of “the mind,” we generally mean something that can be influenced by our feelings, desires, thoughts and beliefs.

The Veil of Ignorance

The Veil of Ignorance

by Russell Hasan

            DECIDE, God said to us. CHOOSE YOUR STYLE OF CIVILIZATION. I WILL RESHAPE THE WORLD BASED UPON YOUR CHOICE. KNOW THAT EACH OF YOU WILL BE BORN INTO ONE OF THESE SEVEN LIVES; WHICH ONE, I WILL NOT SAY…

            We seven souls stared down into a vast chasm of star-scarred space-time, looking far off into the distance at a small blue-green planet orbiting a raging fireball; we were standing in a circle, our feet sunk ankle-deep into the mists of eternity. Highlighted for us to see with special clarity were seven of the fetuses taking shape within wombs of females of the ape-like dominant species on this planet, the seven bodies that we souls were going to be placed into by God: one, the daughter of a drunken wife-beating mechanic; another the son of a Senator and a wealthy heiress; yet another a son gestating within a teenage crack-addicted prostitute; still another, the yet-to-be-born child of a lower-middle-class used car salesman and his violin-playing wife. Four of the lives were white, two dark-skinned and one mixed; three were boys and four were girls. Some were looked upon as joyous blessings by their parents as their bodies grew within the womb, others were viewed with frustration and anger, still others were a source of mixed hope and fear.

            This decision of how to structure our society is perhaps the most important decision that we will ever make. I knew roughly what I wanted the world to look like, but I hoped that the other souls would agree so that we could reach a consensus….

            “I think that it is only fair,” one of the other souls said, “once we are all born into our lives down below, for us to pool our assets and wealth and divide it up evenly among us… just as everyone should form a collective and pool everything among everyone on that planet. Let us destroy property. Since none of us knows which of the lives we will be born into, this would take some wealth away from those of us lucky enough to be born into the rich families… but some of us will be born into want and poverty, and this way we will all have a guarantee, right now, prior to the accidents of birth, of a fair share of money to live off of, so that we will no longer need to be afraid of an unfortunate birth. That way we can proceed into our new lives with confidence and vigor, rather than panicking about the possibility of the curse of bad luck.”

            “But how can we truly be free if there is no property?” I asked. His vision was the precise opposite of the society that I intended to advocate for. “I will do the work that I do, and it will produce wealth, and that wealth will be mine, if there is ownership. I want the freedom to choose to be successful. If there is no property, if everything is shared, then what is to stop you all from taking the money that I make, and giving me nothing for it in return? That doesn’t seem right. That doesn’t seem fair.”

The other souls all looked at me, some with shock and others with placid annoyance; a few of the other souls nodded their heads in agreement with me. I was the youngest among the souls, baked in God’s oven a mere sixteen trillion years ago. The soul who had spoken first, a very, very, very old soul, gave me a stern gaze, as if to say that I would be forgiven for my foolishness but only if I learned his wisdom quickly.

            “Your success will only be the result of the luck and circumstances that you were born into,” the old soul said. “Therefore there is no such thing as a right to the money that you make. You have no right to it, it was a gift that was given to you… and we are entitled to our fair share of your profits.”

            “A gift?” I asked incredulously. “But I have looked at this blue world of oceans and clouds, and the ape-things do work in order to build their towers of stone and glass and to slaughter their meat, they do work to build the mighty metal ships that sail them across the sky. It seems that I will be expected to work, and if I am assiduous and industrious then I will deserve to own the gold coins that people will pay me for my cleverness. Surely I am correct?”

The older soul laughed at my words, and a few of the other souls arced their lips up in smiles of sympathetic humor. “No, surely you are wrong. You cannot possibly know that you will be able to succeed. After all, you might be born into poverty or illness or be born into a stupid body. If you are prosperous then it will be because you inherited your wealth, or, if not, because you were born into a body with strong muscles or a smart brain, because you had good DNA, or because you were lucky enough to have loving, nurturing parents who raised you to feel pride and self-esteem. But only a few of those  seven lives are blessed; the others are doomed to torture and misery, and you should not condemn the unlucky souls to such agony. After all, you yourself might be born into the worst of all of the lives, raised by a pimp and a prostitute on the mean crime-filled streets of the ghetto, where a bullet in your head is both a constant possibility and something to look forward to as a blissful escape from a nightmare reality. Would you risk everything to play the game of luck and bet that you will be born into good fortune, will you cling to your lack of wisdom, or will you embrace the light and concede to our plan for the elimination of fear and poverty? Equality is not something that is merely noble, it is also eminently practical as a way for you to be safe from bad luck.”

“Luck?” I asked, and a note of indignant anger crept into my voice. “No, not luck! I know that I will succeed or die trying, and I am not going to let any of the pain, agony, or misfortune down on that beautiful, miraculous blue world prevent me from accomplishing my destiny. I will choose to be a success… and I will not yield to you who would steal that accomplishment away from me. You are thieves and I will not obey you!”

“Young fool, you’ll ruin everything for me!” the older soul snarled. “For us, I mean! For us!”

“This isn’t about safety from fear, is it?” I said, as horror dawned on me. “You know that we will forge our own destinies by our choices, which come from us, our souls, and not the situations which we inherit. You just want to be lazy and let me do all the work while I carry you on my shoulders! You know that if everything is pooled then you can take without giving! Isn’t that right? Isn’t it?”

“No!” the old soul screamed. “Don’t listen to him! Look into your hearts and listen to your inner voice, and listen to your fear! Only with my plan can your fear of failure be eliminated! Only with socialism can we all achieve true safety! We must make the brave decision, the one that takes our weakness into account!”

WHAT HAVE YOU DECIDED? God asked us.

“We choose socialism—”

“No!” I interrupted. “We have not yet reached an agreement!”

I HAVE NO PATIENCE FOR WAITING UNTIL YOUR BICKERING ENDS. I AM SENDING ALL OF YOU DOWN TO EARTH RIGHT NOW. YOU CAN MAKE YOUR DECISION ONCE YOU HAVE ASSUMED THE FLESH, AND THEN FIGHT TO SEE YOUR CHOICE REALIZED.

So I was born into a human life, and now I must fight to make freedom a reality, and to make something of the life that I have been given. And I stand by what I said, because, ironically, the body that I was born into is….

The Philosopher's Stone

The Philosopher’s Stone

by Russell Hasan

            “Here I was, sleeping in a comfortable mattress I made using my Philosopher’s Stone, sleeping off a hangover from a delicious beef stew and two exquisite bottles of Pinot Noir I conjured up, and then you come and rudely toss me from bed and point a sword of fire at my throat. Good gods, man, have you no decency?”

            “Be silent, heretic! People died to make your accursed Philosopher’s Stone. Now tell me where you’ve hidden the Stone, infidel!”

            “That’s just a myth, you know. We don’t make the Stones from human blood. We distill them from dragon scales and fairy nectar. No one is harmed by the fun that we have. Not that I would expect a Councilman like you to know what fun is, Count D’Imir.”

            “I am wise to your wiles, Patrickus. You Alchemist scum tell lies about how the Stones are made; deceit is merely another entry in your long list of sins. You Alchemists used the powers of your Stones to live lives of luxury and you refused to share them with the rest of the Nation. Didn’t your mother ever teach you to that it’s nice to share?”

            “My mother taught me not to be ashamed of the fact that I’m alive or to feel guilt when I enjoy pleasures. And she taught me not to be afraid of filth like you.”

            “Watch your tongue, sinner! You would let a town of villagers starve while you washed your tongue with Stone-made rum. Fortunately we of the Ruling Council have taken the Stones away from you, liberating them and putting them to use for the good of society. Now tell me where your Philosopher’s Stone is.”

            “So I surrender my Stone and you let me go? Is that it? Or is it merely a quick death that you’re promising?”

            “I made no promises, Patrickus. Give me the Stone and then we will see how merciful my mood is.”

            “Never. Kill me if you want to, D’Imir. I won’t tell you where the Stone is.”

            “Fool! I too have a Philosopher’s Stone, the one that I took from your old Alchemy teacher Albertus before I killed him. I have become adept at using the Stone’s magic to torture, and you will scream in agony and beg for death if you do not yield your secrets to me. The glory of our Nation demands that the Council have all the Stones, and you will not be allowed to thwart our will!”

            “I have grown tired, Count D’Imir. Ever since your Ruling Council came to power we Alchemists have been outlawed and hunted like foxes by you and your hounds. I want only the sweet release of oblivion, rather than to continue fighting for a hopeless cause. All I care about is enjoying a really satisfying sin, and you’ve made the world, how shall I phrase it, sinfully boring. I would be willing to tell you where my Stone is, provided that you grant me certain conditions.”

            “The Stone for a clean, painless death? I can agree to that.”

            “No, I want that and something else also. I want to know the truth. The Philosopher’s Stones brought wealth to everyone in the Nation; we made giant ears of corn and gigantic potatoes and stalks of broccoli as big as trees, and we sold what we made to the villagers at very reasonable prices. Then you and your Council cronies come and declare war on us in the name of the people, and persuade our own soldiers to join you. Why? I understand the envy that motivated the Nation’s peasants, but what of the Council? You don’t care about using the Stones for the good of all, isn’t that true? You just want the Stones so that you can do magic, so that you can grow more powerful. You called yourselves selfless but you are really insanely greedy for power. Am I right? I just want to hear the truth from your own lips, and then I will yield.”

            “You are cynical and oh so inaccurate. While we only pay lip service to the Nation and care not for the villagers, we do nothing for our own glory, we care nothing for our own power. Our goal is not to use the Stones to become gods, but rather to give the Stones to a god. Once we have gathered all of the Philosopher’s Stones we will have enough magical energy to open the Portal of Olympus and to call forth the god whom we serve. Once he arrives we will we deliver the stones to him, and he will reward our loyalty.”

            “But all the gods are long dead, aren’t they? They all died in the Pantheon Wars.”

“Not so. The greatest one, the one whom Death himself could not kill, has returned. The Council serves him, the greatest of the Pantheon of Elders. The Cult that has long slept and lived only in nightmares has been reawakened. And we will know everlasting life while the people of the Nation taste fatality.”

“It’s the Cult of Death you speak of! So, the Ruling Council is a front for Saturn, the God-King of the Undead! I expected something horrible, but not this. The legends say that the Cult of Death’s plan is to massacre humankind and resurrect us as zombies to be your slaves. Is that true? How could we have been so blind?”

“I don’t know. We left clues for you to see. We sent out preachers who preached that enjoyment of physical pleasures was a sin and that self-abnegation was the path to eternal life—a doctrine which anyone who bothered to read the ancient texts would have recognized as the gospel of the Cult of Death. Saturn showed us how to twist the peasants’ compassion for their fellow men into a feeling that their own desires are dirty and sinful. We help the Nation’s people to be very selfless, in the name of helping their brothers they surrender everything to us, and we will give them exactly what they do not want, exactly what will give them no guilty pleasure at all. Their bodies sin, so we will kill them and give them the blessing of release from the flesh. They believe that the body is a prison for the soul, so we will do the merciful thing and set their souls free to journey bravely into the afterlife, and we will take the bodies they leave behind and animate them as zombies. Our teachings made the peasants miserable, so that they became insanely jealous of anyone who was happy—and, of course, you Alchemists with your Philosopher’s Stones are generally quite cheerful. Is it any wonder, then, that we turned the Nation against you?”

“A ghastly plan, D’Imir. You want to kill us all—and yet the people believe that you are their champion. I never paid any attention to what the preachers were saying; I just assumed that everyone would appreciate the prosperity that the Stones would bring to our Nation.”

“You should have understood, Patrickus. After all, you Alchemists were the main power in the Nation before we came along, and power inevitably corrupts. Don’t think that I believe your pretense of being so naïve and innocent. You are upset because you no longer rule the Nation and we do, but you might as well accept the inevitable. Soon this Nation will consist entirely of our zombie slaves and Saturn will rise to rule humanity once again. But enough chatter. I gave you what you wanted, I was frank and honest. Now, before you die, you know the truth, that you and the Alchemists never had a chance against my omnipotent Master. So tell me, where have you hidden the Stone? You swore an oath, and I will force you to answer!”

“The Stone is all around you, D’Imir. I gave it to my friend Muzickus, who used it to create an illusion of the Floating Fish Inn of Hamtown, which you entered, never bothering to cast a sight of truth spell while you hunted, and then stormed into my lodging room and captured me and used your spells to bind me and point this flaming sword at my throat. The Stone is in these walls; this room is a cage.”

“A trap? Impossible! You are not smart enough!”

“We, Muzickus and I, aimed a Mirror of Memories at you, and we recorded your whole little confession. It’s a shame that idiots like you are so proud of how vicious you are, Count D’Imir, otherwise you wouldn’t be brash enough to brag about your Cult. Now, if we can make it past the Council’s army and reach the Tower of Sages, we can use the Crystal Orb and broadcast your confession to the world, and the people of this Nation will rise up and dethrone the frauds who claimed that it was a sin to live well and that the interests of the people demanded war against the Alchemists.”

“I will never let you! Prepare to die!”

“Muzickus, my friend?”

“No, stop it, stop! Help! Saturn, save me! You Alchemist sons of….”

“Phase one of your plan has succeeded, Patrickus. The Cult of Death has developed a weakness. Life still has a slim but glittering hope.”

“Indeed, Muzickus. Now, onto phase two. To the Tower!”