If I choose to collect bowls of mud, and declare that mud-collecting is my one true and authentic purpose in life, most everyone would think something is wrong with me.
Unless I cough up a special explanation for why this is so important (maybe there’s a religious context we’re missing), you’d be right to look at me as if I’d lost my fool mind.
If you’re inclined to agree, then you share my belief in the reality of objective values.
That belief sets me apart from all of pop-culture intellectuals with huge followings on the internet.
There is real meaning and it exists independent of our personal psychological worlds.
I don’t believe that human decisions, desires, and feelings are the gold-standard of what’s right and wrong.
You can’t answer the question What is valuable? by pointing to what someone chooses.
That’s the fatal Romantic error infecting our culture right now. There is no right but what I decide from within my own true inner being. No matter how objectively stupid the decision, if someone chooses it, that’s the final word.
I don’t know how people believe that we can carry on a civilization that way.
What is worth wanting?
That’s a hard question to answer, one of the hardest ever asked.
We can’t answer it by doing science.
Logicians and mathematicians won’t find it.
That seems to leave the dream-like fabrications of the human mind as the only place to look.
But that won’t work either.
The belief that choices determine value depends on assuming that, independent of the choice, there is value in that way of living.
There’s a nobility and courage that comes from choosing to shape your own life, human lives go better when we determine our own lives (instead of living as slaves), and this all places a demand on others to respect your choices.
In other words, there’s a certain moral dignity to the mud-collectors which is founded on a sense that there is something worthy and valuable in determining my own life by free choice.
Reality is richer and much more complicated than the simple pictures handed to us by the materialist cult.
Matt Perryman