More on the Maverick Way

By Ed Ramsey

We have the opportunity for this to be the best of times. For this to come about, we must embrace and enact God's plan for us, which is the Maverick Way. Should we refuse to cooperate, this may be the worst of times.

This book is a grader, smoothing the route to New Jerusalem. Get in your car and travel the route.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ed Ramsey
• Release date: Jun 23, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301325245

Ed Ramsey

I grew up on a family farm in northeastern North Dakota. We were a lower middle class family, struggling to make it on a small farm. My folks were honest, church-going, decent, hardworking folk that kept struggling to feed their large brood, and make their farm business succeed. All things considered, they did pretty well for us. They are both gone now, but I can never repay them for what they did provide. For the last 32 years my family and I have lived in worked in the Twin Cities area. I have always worked in the facilities field, and have been a building engineer for the last 14 years. God, my wife, my children, work, and writing are the main loves of my life. I hope that I have made them proud. There are thousands of professional thinkers representing academia, governmental agencies and various think tanks. The advantage to being an amateur thinker is that one 's thinking is not distorted by professional or institutional biases. Living and working in the every day world, and in the marketplace, have allowed me to see the world from a more practical, free market perspective. As the years pass, and Mavellonialist thought becomes accepted, mainstream and popular, please remember that this outlook grew out of battling hostility, poverty, hardship, ridicule and indifference to bring this wonderful, God-derived philosophy to the world. All in all, so striving has been a joy, honor and privilege. Enjoy everyday, and grow in every way! Ideas have always been a passion of mine. For 39 years I have been jotting down my ideas, and these three books are the first fruits of that labor and refinement. More books are forthcoming.

Book preview

2-20-2012: Radio Remarks From Prager

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Here are four 2011 paraphrased remarks from him that I wish to respond to: first, The good arm themselves so they are not slaughtered by the bad. Standing armies in Latin America and Africa have not kept the masses in those places free and unharmed. Outlawing guns in Mexico has not interrupted rampant narco-mafia violence there.

Let all people everywhere have the right to own, keep and bear small arms. Then gangs, predatory elites, fascist armies and criminals will not have their way. With democracy, law and order, citizens that are brave, violent in self-defense, civilized and active, can make a neighborhood—even the whole country—safe and free.

Second remark: Leftist elitists regard themselves as enlightened: if I do not like reality, so I coerce a change. The only real, lasting protection against hostile elites is to raise up a generation of aristocratic, very educated, very fiercely independent group of citizens-individuators who will not tolerate and will shout down or overthrow anyone seeking to deprive them of liberty and control of their own destiny.

Third remark: Great values have to be taught each generation or they die out. We are basically wicked and become civilized only if well taught the proper civilized values for each member of each new generation, every generation. The new generation of parental, and authority teachers can make their mark, by advancing the science of individuation so these refined techniques are passed on to the current crop of children.

Fourth remark: More people are killed by secular governments than by religion. I was unfamiliar with this fact, but am sure that Dennis has it right. That being the case, this fact should be well advertised. We need separation of church and state, but killing people in either the name of God or in the name of the Fatherland is an abomination unto God. Institutional killing is best countered by deinstitutionalizing governmental agencies; the scope of the killing, and the ideology driving it are much reduced in vehemence and toxicity.

2-20-2012: Forms

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When the writer, artist or sculptor fabricates his product, is it purely original? No, its degree of originality is proportionate to how far along his original path to self-realization has he traveled.

An angel or God would craft marvels original, striking and beautiful quite identical to some perfect archetype. We humans will be less successful in this regard, but our efforts and outcomes are still worth it, and God wants to view them as they are completed. We must keep at it, and in some way our novel products occasionally may be startlingly original or approaching perfection in some new way. Let it unfurl!

2-25-2012: Harping On My Favorite Subject

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We are haunted by original sin, and the Left will scream at me or turn their backs at my mistaken obsession with such a crude, backward, unproven and unverifiable spiritual doctrine.

If evil did not exist, our free will would be meaningless. The presence of evil and the majority stake that it has of our souls and bodies makes us prime candidates for expertly knowing how to overcome it. Evil in our hearts presents for us hurdles and difficulties that give our lives meaning and drama. Evil in our hearts gives us something to live for—mainly to best it, by wresting control our souls and bodies for good and service to the Almighty.

The moderate is good, for it is the synthesis, the answer to the brutal omnipresent clash between antagonistic opposites. Generating this synthesis by the individuator allows for love, creative solutions, heroic needs and the problem-resolution solutions to be crafted.

Original sin may be God greatest gift to humanity. For our complex, mixed natures allow us the magnificent opportunity to love, to become and to struggle ever upward and outward. This painful, fuddled state of existing drives us to great heights if we learn to overcome it, are trained to actualize our potentiality, have the confidence to believe that we will succeed, and possess the strength of will and purpose to see it accomplished.

The Left believes that our nature is basically good or neutral at worst. Human nature is perfectible with the right social institutions and laws in place. The inauguration and perpetuation of evil arises from deadly games swirling about and dominating the social arena. Eliminate these games and societal problems wither away.

Classical conservatives like would believe in original sin, but regard human nature as not perfectible. Since the masses could not control themselves or wisely run their own affairs, traditional ways directed by class elites, philosopher kings, self-appointed to run society and the affairs of the little people so society may survive, function and perpetuated at all.

I am a conservative, believing in original sin, but also recognize that the recessive goodness in human nature is strong enough and perfectible enough, under a program of strict, smart social conditioning provided for the rise of a generation of individuators, to allow for people to be good, self-realize, individuate and set up God’s kingdom right here on earth. Perfectible or not, we can get better through receiving Go’s grace and working perpetually, very hard to be good people. Satan will not have disappeared or been banished forever. Instead he will be shackled up in the shed out back.

3-3-2012: The Practical Sense, Chapter 7 from The Ordeal of Change

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One of the most remarkable traits exhibited by Eric Hoffer as a writer and thinker was his knack for uncovering an important, fundamental truth diametrically opposed to conventional thinking on the subject in question.

In this chapter he inserts such a truth by connecting the Occidental rise of the practical sense with the arrival on the scene of individualism and individual freedom. H. the humanist realizes that the worldly, individual, material, practical and the utilitarian are not just trivial, mundane and anti-intellectual. The advance of science, technology and the materially affluent society elevates and liberates humanity.

Without the practical researched, valued and worked with extensively with praise and rewards in the open bestowed on its practitioners, and without bourgeois democracy as the political and economic base, high civilization for individuators will not come about let alone be sustainable.

H. points out that America is the land of the masses and traders and they are practical. The intellectuals, bureaucrats and scribes have been kept at bay in America, so the practical had a chance to flourish here. This tradition must be kept alive.

3-5-2012: 150,000 Communities

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A nation of anarchists would be a loose confederation of 150, 000 small communities or isolated farms or residences all separate and independent yet interconnected and united.

3-8-2012: Journal Entry11-24-2012: Pat Answers

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People like everything pat: pat answers, pat classifications. That tendency and preference are good more than not. Logic and categories, applied to facts, input and information provided by people and reality, make all this jumbled stuff meaningful and ordered.

Pat classifications no, but from generalized classifications are useful and promote efficiency—with the caution that the categorizer accepts some elasticity at the edges of his classifications for exceptions.

3-8-2012: Journal Entry: 11-25-2011: Pain

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I came out of knee surgery the day before yesterday. The pain was excruciating for about twelve hours. Now it is not bad, even manageable.

I am not in much pain right now. I am more cheerful and feel like writing.

Pure, physical pain can be so pertinacious, so omnipresent that it takes over one’s life. Interests, goals, relationships and objects of desire fade into the background.

We cannot totally eliminate physical pain except through totally drugging someone up on morphine. Instead, if we were able to eliminate or greatly reduce pain to tolerable levels by means of some psychological, spiritual or computer-aided technique, suffering would be greatly alleviated in the world. Some assert that physical pain ennobles and deepens a person. Perhaps so. Mostly, it just hurts and degrades the sufferer.

3-8-2012: Journal Entry: 11-25-2011: Rite of Passage

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Eric Hoffer, Robert Bly and many others have recommended that all boys—I would add all girls too—must pass through puberty into young adulthood by graduating from their community-selected right of passage event, procedure, course or organization. Some such events or practices could be getting a driver’s license, graduating from high school, getting a part-time job, helping in the family business, or serving two years compulsory service (while in high school or right after high school) to the country, through a hitch in the armed services, the Peace Corps, or some other national service.

Childhood mostly should be about being a child free of worries and responsibilities. Parenthood is about slowly guiding a child consistently and steadily, a gentle but firm nudging of them, preparing them forward to grow up, to mature, increasingly taking on and volunteering to take on adult duties.

It is not cruel to pressure kids to act more grown up over time and assume their expected adult roles and responsibilities. We cannot rear a generation of individuators to run our first Mavellonialist society unless the average child is a hustler, a go-getter eager to become an adult and make her mark.

The upbringing of a child has failed unless the teenager exhibits the vigor, work ethic, focus and will to self-realize in a substantial way. Self-realizing requires adult-size commitment, and ironically pursuing it makes a young person grow up well, happy, fast and completely. It is the heroic orientation ordained by God and is that strenuous gift from De bestowed on each young person to embrace the world and amount to something special and significant, altering the world and the self for the better.

3-8-3012: Chapter 10 from The Ordeal Of Change

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Eric Hoffer, in this chapter (Popular Upheavals in Communist Countries) points out that revolt against totalitarian oppressors is most imminent just when things are getting better and less oppressive. Then masses have a sense that things can change. They begin to hope for better days ahead through rising up and overthrowing the government.

People also resent a weak oppressor for a loss of group-meaning, whereas suffering under a vicious, wholesale oppressor is endured not cheerfully, but with grim satisfaction that the group is united and thus people feel warm, huddled and things make sense. A satisfied people will not revolt.

Hoffer also advises that a resistance movement needs ancestors, a foreign government or the traditional religious faith native to the downtrodden people to rally around. Something monolithic that will allow them to resist the status quo, for the isolated individual cannot withstand the terror of the implacable totalitarian apparatus.

3-11-2012: Helpless

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As a building maintenance technician, recently it has occurred to me that office workers are more helpless and without independent thought or resourcefulness than they were a generation ago. I have office workers, with thermostats in their office, who call me for help. They complain that they are cold, and want me to fix it for them. I go visit them and show them the thermostat and show them how to work it. That usually takes care of it.

These people are not klutzes. They are both men and women. The young men requiring assistance are college educated, decent, likeable and sensible. Some of them seem to want to supervise me as beneath them in rank because I am blue collar while they are white collar. They seem to see a class difference, an educational difference, and a difference in rank.

The women are much the same in terms of needing help. Some of them wanted to push a metal sign into the ground here in the Minnesota winter. They took a hammer and half-mangled the sign. I straightened the sign told them the frost was five feet deep so pounding it in was not an option. I cut four strands of wire 18 inches in length and instructed them to wire the sign to an available post to announce their meeting. They agreed to do so. Another lady not in the loop tried to step the metal sign into the frozen ground and mangled it. She came to my shop and asked for a hammer to pound it in. I calmly asked her if she noticed the wires with the sign. She said she did, and wondered what they were about. I told her what to do, and showed her the post to tie the sign to.

We are now an urban people so hooked on computers in our viral age that a sense of inventiveness, practicality and common sense are not environmentally taught or required. We are specialists in our little niche, and outside that niche another specialist is assigned to take care of every need for us. This trend alarms me.

Like small-time farmers of old, every adult should be a jack -of-all-trades before becoming a specialist, a master in one trade. Were all workers coming out of college or the trades cross-trained in home economics, industrial arts, car maintenance, home repair and fine arts, etc., these Renaissance man style specialists would be rounded thinkers and doers able to think independently and outside the box. Think what that would do to boost their Yankee ingenuity contribution back to their employer. Our inventiveness and rate of new technology would soar, and innovation would be the norm.

Highly skilled, highly trained, independent-thinking office workers might be able to figure out to adjust the thermostat on the wall, or try a different way to make a sign stand up on the frozen ground. We need very skilled, confident workers who are creative, versatile and adaptable because they have had previous years of puttering and experimenting. Each past failure was informative; it taught them what does not work on the way to discovering what does work.

We need not a generation of children never playing outside, or working with their hands. We need not a generation of workers totally absorbed in the electronic world so it is a cocoon bleeding them of a sense of adventure, individuality, daring, inquisitiveness and intellectual curiosity. White-collar workers need to get their hands dirty. Blue-collar workers need to think and administrate for awhile.

The specialist in her cubicle dreams no dreams and wonders not about the world beyond the partition. Pack-living and hierarchical derivation of ideas is what they know and practice. This will be the demise of America unless we reverse this trend.

3-12-2012: Being Crossbred May Lead to Awakening as an Individualist

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For racists championing their race as superior to all others, God has some breaking news for them. Since being created or evolved from primates, all humans are crossbred, a hybrid mammal that is half-angel and half-beast. This onus is our curse; this blessing is our boon. Only a crossbred creature lives in two world concurrently, and the cognitive dissonance inherent to so existing and perceiving the world is the most fecund origin of creative output conceivable—that is, as soon as this crossbred creature figures out how to make hay since the sun is shining. Humans are not a pure race, but they are horrifying and wondrous creatures all the same.

3-13-2012: Journal Entry: 1-13-2012: The Great System

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I approve of the great metaphysical system cobbled together by the speculative idealists in Europe 200 to 300 years ago. Were they successful and correct?

As a moderate, epistemological skeptic, I have no easy answer to those two questions: I would have to respond that they were successful and correct more than they were not. Likely they broke through absurdity, Maya and the cognitive limits built into our sensing the world out there. They seem to have tapped into and described the Absolute rather well. In their delving they mined some certain gems and acquired some sapphires that were highly, probably true.

As a self-appointed mentor to potential individuators, I am very Liberal: speculate away. Fantastic, outrageous theories and implausible arguments stir and send racing our mental activity. Many profound, fertile, wonderful and worthwhile concepts will be born out of these efforts—all generated by engaging in open-ended, daring philosophizing.

Now a note of caution: the Conservative in me admits that those of us freely philosophizing may at times be talking gibberish and nonsense. It does not matter. The chaff will separate out from the wheat in this most promising of enterprises.

The analytical philosophers, the sour deconstructionists and hard core empiricists will help bring us back to earth upon occasion, as warranted, making us account for our extravagant claims.

Let the free and open discussions be undertaken. We will all grow and benefit from the interchange.

3-20-2012: Certain Knowledge to Be Had

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We can have certain knowledge or even highly probably true knowledge based on what review and immediately categorize. What has been categorized may be internally or externally sensed. The instant categorization is our intuition at work. This inerrant or generally inerrant recognition and categorization of what is sensed may be felt, thought or both.

3-2-2012: Chapter 12: Concerning Individual Freedom

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This quote from page 78 of his book, The Ordeal of Change, by Eric Hoffer, is the closest to an open admission by him that he is a moderate: It takes a vice to check a vice, and virtue is the byproduct of a stalemate between two opposite vices."

Consistent with his thesis that the rise of Western individualism came about as competing authoritarian interests canceled each other out, Hoffer notes that individual freedom is the byproduct of a contest between two more or less equal parties. Implicit in this conclusion is that the moderate middle allowed individualism and individual freedom to come to the fore. Also implicit in this line of reasoning is that liberation leads to free, wholesome and skilled individuals. The more skilled people are, the more they are individual, rational, moderate, good and free. Following this line of reasoning a little farther, one could conclude as I have that the Author of all of this is God the moderate, the individualist, the thinker, the extraordinarily skilled craftsman, good, free, freedom-bestowing and freedom-loving.

I would refer to the arrival of individual freedom on the historical scene, this accidental freedom identified by Hoffer as negative freedom. Intentional, sustained, positive freedom is something that can be achieved for millions of people through good will, careful planning, superb execution and a love of liberty. Where the masses are raised to individuate and live anarchist lives as Mavellonialists, these millions of free but peacefully coexisting doers will cancel each other out power-wise on the negative side of freedom.

On the positive side of freedom, they will love God and liberty. They will so cherish their tradition of individual freedom and individual investigation that their devotion herein will lead them to love themselves and their neighbors. Where love is the emotional and intellectual link among people, giving and maintaining the gift of freedom to a neighbor to excel and do her own thing is a powerful, poignant and profound act of love. It also enables the establishment and perpetuation of individual freedom.

Hoffer goes on to delineate how the outbreak of poisonous 20th century totalitarianism was an attempt to reverse and wipe out the gains in individual freedom. It was very successful, this destroying personal freedom and fostering evil in the world; these dark powers may yet carry the day. We hope not and work to prevent it.

Hoffer recommends a durable effective, democratic opposition (The counterpoise of opposites negatively leads to freedom and virtue.) The strains of political tussles need not weaken the nation if it is a unified people in good shape, where operating at room temperature quietly, efficiently and calmly, endure repeated crises in good cheer without freaking out. This confident citizenry must be very skilled to muddle through. H. the moderate wants no fervor, no enthusiasm. He urges that a society be affluent and operate at in a temperate, ordinary fashion to make the open wonder of a society grounded in individual freedom function and hum along. Where individual freedom reigns, the intellectual will not acquire his sense of superior status and comforting sense of social usefulness by bossing around the masses. He will have to make do with finding fulfillment and satisfaction just in doing his own thing, minding his own business and leaving others alone. That way both they and he can experience and enjoy their individual freedom.

3-25-2012: Let Nature Provide The Evidence

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Moderation is the wise, wholesome, spiritually and morally preferential way to go most of the time. Nature provides tons of empirical evidence to this end. Watch a cat or dog for very long. They work and fight when they have to. They raise their young. They also rest and relax in a sunbeam or on a soft couch when they have time. Their instinctual programming allows them to lead a rather balanced life.

We should not drink too much water or too little water. We should not eat too much or too little. We should not sleep too much or too little. We should not exercise too much or too little.

To grow crops, it must not be too hot or too cold. It must not be too wet or too dry. Humans do not thrive if they are too close to nature or too far from nature. If it is too sunny or too dark, we do not thrive. It is too dry or too wet, we do not thrive. There is an optimum range that works for us, and natural, nature-generated corrections help keep it on even keel.

These natural, empirical proofs of the desirability of the principle of moderation are impressive in being plentiful and illuminating. Moderation is they way to go. It works.

3-31-2012: Chapter 16: The Role of the Undesirables

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Eric Hoffer, in this chapter of his book, The Ordeal of Change, writes of his experience in a camp of transients and tramps in a federal camp in California in 1934. They were cultural dropouts and misfits, not part of the middle class, not working a steady job year after year, living at the same address. They took the easy way out.

After he left the camp, Hoffer came up with one of his most brilliant, original ideas; the undesirable tramps, these misfits, were avant garde types no different from the misfits who were the bulk of the pioneers that settled America.

From this Hoffer generalized that undesirables are the avant garde of every new cause, new ism, mass movement, migratory push or new ideology. The pioneering, undesirable, misfitting offcasts from Europe, these peasants and common people, were the ancestors that made the great American mass civilization, the most advanced civilization the world has ever seen. Those of lower class or outcast status are not inferior or genetically different from those running things or ensconced in the middle class. We are all-equal and pretty much of the same ability and capacities.

4-1-2012: Genetic Alteration

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We are half-beast and half-angel. If we were genetically altered (The science may take us to this juncture faster than scoffers believe,) so that we were all werewolves let loose upon society and each other, society would die and the species would not survive. As willless, zombie creatures of pure destruction, without curbing natural instincts to control us, our race would go extinct.

If we were genetically altered so that we were programmed only to be good, we would lose our free will. Where doing wrong or evil is not even an option that we can consider, we would be but perfect, pleasant, sunny robots leading dull but brilliant lives. Sameness and stagnation would soon set in.

Where our natures are mixed, where the clash of alternative instincts, alternative values and alternative agendas happen, there, there are interesting developments, fresh ideas, creative solutions. Free will flourishes there.

4-1-2012: Page 1

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Eric Hoffer, in his book, Working and Thinking on the Waterfront, commends workers for their original thinking concerning practical matters. He contrasts them with the stale, shallow, conformist discussion of union intellectuals over abstract issues of the day. Yes, the workers would be creative thinkers as they tackled intellectual issues. And the intellectuals would be creative thinkers on intellectual subjects and practical subjects if they lived in, engaged themselves daily in the issues of both worlds as work and play topics.

4-1-2012: Page 3

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Eric Hoffer, in his book, Working and Thinking on the Waterfront, lauds workers for asking if the government works and how smoothly. The specifics of a program aside, any program has to be well executed and function well with a certain automaticity.

4-2-2012: Journal Entry: 11-27-2011

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It is admirable to be a good person. It is commendable to be open, warm, trusting and kind.

However, it is a rough world out there with a lot of people on the make at your expense. Things may not be what they seem to be on the surface, or are presented as being. To survive the countless stumbling blocks and to navigate successfully the perilous straits called the business world, one must take some precautions.

First, be shrewd: know who is about, and what they are about. Know who you are and what you are about and hope to accomplish in relation to these others.

Second, do not show people the cards that you hold.

Third, enjoy people and like most of them, but move slowly until you know them better.

Fourth, do not sell your goods and services either too cheap or too dear. Make an honest profit. Pay your taxes; fairly compensate your employees and operate within the law.

Fifth, be clever but not dishonest in your dealings with others. Be alert.

4-9-2012: Journal Entry: 11-29-20122: Effective Manager

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The effective manager makes the crucial decisions critical to running her department.

She has hired competent lieutenants who will handle the carrying out of her decisions. She will spot check their administering and implementing her decisions, but she will not micromanage the process as that is unnecessary and undermines the confidence of productive subordinates.

4-11-2-12: The Worrisome, Fanatical Aspect Of Islam: Page 54

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Eric Hoffer, in his book Working and Thinking on the Waterfront, notes that Islam so fills every need for its adherents, that it tranquilizes them; then fatalism and stagnation set in. He characterizes this great faith as without internal contradictions. He is correct and the absence of internal contradictions