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Hello to all.

My name is Luke Haynes and I am an artist who is also studying philosophy in England.

I must admit that for the majority of my life I have struggled to live my the altruistic (and I know realise, self destructive) teachers of the collectivists and as you can imagine this lead me to a state guilty vacillation that left me tired, angry and confused.

Fortunately I never relinquished my only weapon in the fight or my own happiness and throughout it all I realised that there was a right way of doing things and a wrong way that everything was not (as most would contend) relative.

I started lifting weights when I was sixteen and as I always do when a subject grabs my attention I read all about the subject, looking for the correct approach.

Bodybuilding for the most part is full of collectivist relativists who state that everybody is different and we should all train our own way. Fortunately for me a came across the work of Mike Mentzer (greatly missed) whose approach was rational, logical and correct, it was also here that I was introduced to Ayn Rand.

Rand is difficult to get a hold of in England and I only recently gotten copies of Atlas shrugged, The Fountainhead and The Virtue of Selfishness.

My, what a surprise.

Here was the logical statement of fact that validated every feeling that I had ever felt about my own worth but had previously been told by the collectivists was corrupt and wrong.

I still have moments of doubt when I catch myself behaving according to the collectivist code of self sacrifice but with everyday I realise more and more that I exist for my own sake and no other.

As a student of philosophy it is amusing to me to note that 99% of modern philosophers struggle over questions that I find simple and true, morality to them is some mystical statement to be forced upon those around you whilst to me it is so simple as to be almost without recognition.

To give you an example the other day my lecturer was talking about morals and how they must be universalised and how this proved difficult, he then stated that egoism could be universalised but that the flaw was that it would not be in the interest of individuals to universalise egoism and that instead we would want others to look after our own interests but not there own

I almost laughed out loud at that, this mistake wasn't in egoism but in his view of egoism; remember in Atlas Shrugged when Galt says that no one gets into Galts Gulch by faking reality? Well that’s what a egoist would have to do in order to maintain that others should look out for his interests and a true objectivist could not do this as to do so would require them to abdicate the standard of values that their existence is based upon, their own mind.

Existence exists.

Now I come to the reason why I have signed up to this site; to be frank I am lonely; I’m not looking for others to complete me and sacrifice themselves on my behest but I realise that after 26 years of life I have not met a single individual with whom I have anything uncommon with and by that I mean an individual whose uses their own mind and their own life as their standard of value.

So what I am looking for is to trade ideas with others who realise that existence exists.

Thank you.

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