"laissez faire" philosophy did not prevent the economically powerful from establishing control over wages, prices, and distribution of goods; it only prevented the government from doing so.

http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

Count your horror stories of attempted trust. Recollect. We then compare and decide we’ve equally been outdone by strangers we’ll never see again. Afterwards, mutual disinterest is the universal result; the only exceptions proving the rule: love takes a little distrust of self.

I can love you because I want to feel less alone, or I can love you because I want you to feel less alone. But only the latter requires me to imagine a consciousness independent of my own, and equally real.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/magazine/why-write-novels-at-all.html?pagewanted=2&_r=4&ref=books

“I cannot here withhold the statement that optimism, where it is not merely the thoughtless talk of those who harbour nothing but words under their shallow foreheads, seems to me to be not merely an absurd, but also a really wicked, way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the unspeakable sufferings of mankind.”

Schopschop

http://www.the-spearhead.com/2010/10/01/a-plea-to-the-feminine/

“One side of the mouth spews empowerment and independence (from men), the other side asks, “Where are all the good men?” Where? You don’t need us and we need to be needed by you.”

Earlier in my life there seemed to be unlimited possibilities, but my mind was closed. Now, years later and with an open mind, possibilities no longer interest me. I seem content to be continually rearranging the same furniture in the same room. My concern at times is nothing more than establishing a series of practical conditions that will enable me to work. For years I said if I could only find a comfortable chair I would rival Mozart. - Morton Feldman

http://www.therestisnoise.com/2006/06/morton_feldman_.html

Ethics—self-interest. For Rand, all altruists were manipulators. What could be more seductive to kids who discerned the motives of martyr parents, Christian missionaries and U.S. foreign aiders? Her champions, Nathaniel Branden still among them, feel that Rand’s view of “self-interest” has been horribly misrepresented. For them, self-interest is her hero architect Howard Roark turning down a commission because he couldn’t do it exactly his way. Some of Rand’s novel heroes did have integrity, however, for Rand there is no struggle to discover the distinction between true integrity and childish vanity. Rand’s integrity was her vanity, and it consisted of getting as much money and control as possible, copulating with whomever she wanted regardless of who would get hurt, and her always being right.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif To equate one’s selfishness, vanity, and egotism with one’s integrity liberates young people from the struggle to distinguish integrity from selfishness, vanity, and egotism.

Bruce E. Levine

http://www.alternet.org/reproductivejustice/153454/how_ayn_rand_seduced_generations_of_young_men_and_helped_make_the_u.s._into_a_selfish,_greedy_nation/?page=3

“Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure. In Freud’s time, hysteria and obsessional neurosis carried to extremes the personality traits associated with the capitalistic order at an earlier stage in its development— acquisitiveness, fanatical devotion to work, and a fierce repression of sexuality. In our time, the preschizophrenic, borderline, or personality disorders have attracted increasing attention, along with schizophrenia itself. This “change in the form of neuroses has been observed and described since World War II by an ever-increasing number of phychiatrists.” According to Peter L. Giovacchini, “Clinicians are constantly faced with the seemingly increasing number of patients who do not fit current diagnostic categories” and who suffer not from “definitive symptoms” but from “vague, ill-defined complaints.” “When I refer to ‘this type of patient,’ he writes, “practically everyone knows to whom I am referring.” The growing prominence of “character disorders” seems to signify an underlying change in the organization of personality, from what has been called inner-direction to narcissism.
Allen Wheelis argued in 1958 that the change in “the patterns of neuroses” fell “within the personal experience of older psychoanalysts,” while younger ones “become aware of it from the discrepancy between the older descriptions of neuroses and the problems presented by the patients who come daily to their offices. The change is from symptom neuroses to character disorders.” Heinz Lichtenstein, who questioned the additional assertion that it reflected a change in personality structure, nevertheless wrote in 1963 that the “change in neurotic patterns” already constituted a “well-known fact.” In the seventies, such reports have become increasingly common. “It is no accident,” Herbert Hendin notes, “that at the present time the dominant events in psychoanalysis are the rediscovery of narcissim and the new emphasis on the psychological significance of death.” “What hysteria and the obsessive neuroses were to Freud and his early colleagues.. at the beginning of this century,” writes Michael Beldoch, “the narcissistic disoders are to the workaday analyst in these last few decades before the next millennium. Today’s patients by and large do no suffer from hysterical paralyses of the legs or hand-washing compulsions; instead it is their very psychic selves that have gone numb or that they must scrub and rescrub in an exhausting and unending effort to come clean.” These patients suffer from “pervasive feelings of emptiness and a deep disturbance of self-esteem” Burness E. Moore notes that narcissistic disorders have become more and more common. According to Sheldon Bach, “You used to see people coming in with hand-washing compulsions, phobias, and familiar neuroses. Now you see mostly narcissists.” Gilbert J. Rose maintains that the psychoanalytic outlook, “inappropriately transplanted from analytic practice” to everyday life, has contributed to “global permissiveness” and the “over-domestication of instinct,” which in turn contributes to the proliferation of “narcissistic identity disorders.” According to Joel Kovel, the stimulation of infantile cravings by advertising, the usurpation of parental authority by the media and the school, and the rationalization of inner life accompanied by the false promise of personal fulfillment, have created a new type of “social individual.” “The result is not the classical neuroses where an infantile impulse is suppressed by patriarchal authority, but a modern version in which impulse is stimulated, perverted and given neither an adequate object upon which to satisfy itself nor coherent forms of control.. The entire complex, played out in a setting of alienation rather than direct control, loses the classical form of symptom—and the classical therapeutic opportunity of simply restoring an impulse to consciousness.’”
—

Christopher Lasch

My philosophy

Well, in reality, they're my best attempt to amalgamate what I've read from Christopher Lasch, Plato, Aristotle, Schopenhauer, and Freud. Essentially we are results of a will, as Schopenhauer calls it. From this will, all things in reality eventually come to be, each varying in their form of perfection.

Like the physical world, the abstract world, what we know and contemplate that isn't tangibly represented by objects in our field of vision, varyies in grades of perfection. Thus some justice is more ideal than other forms. And thats pretty much half of my ethical system: that some deeds are preferable to others because they're the ideal outgrowth of the will's perfect form of an act that provides justice, kindness, love, compassion, and so on.

The other half is where Aristotle and the others come in: ultimately a good deed is too much of nothing, but just the right amount. What Freud posited to be the structure of the psyche reinforces this because the ego is the middle ground between demands placed upon the individual from without and the id is composed of those from within. Therefore the just, virtuous person is one who mediates the two extreme ends of their psyche best; best meaning most ideal, and therefore closest to perfect.

And lastly Lasch comes in because he understood, as best as I've seen, that we must understand the limits we place on ourselves and we must make sure those limits are not so impossible that they become more than ideal, they become absolute perfection: a condition incapable of being achieved by human beings. So what we have to do is strive to be perfect human beings but understand what limits our nature and environment have beset us with. And we must never forget that becoming perfect is not the goal in itself, but the attempt to do so is the goal. This last point I've got from that Wallace quote about Kafka. But also, I got it from about a year ago when I contemplated what I perceived as some girls disullusionment; how she seemed to believe either in perfection or failure. I came out of that situation thinking that perfection is, as Mangum said, "endless revisions to say (or do) what I mean."