[Psudo]

Identity matters. Not just the typical A/S/L introduction that is less than meaningless, but how you would describe yourself to yourself matters. What, more than anything else, drives you to act and choose as you do? To tell someone this powerfully personal information is to establish the foundations of intimate friendship, to persuade in favor of things most dear to you, and to bravely and publicly face your own faults and fallacies. An honest statement of one's identity is a sublime expression of honor and character.

My life has been blessed with a selection of talents and capacities. I am intelligent, able to understand things from study. I am dexterous, able to accomplish difficult and fine manual tasks like typing, piano, or drawing. My senses work well, unfettered by disability or health complications. My will is free, allowing me to choose what I believe and why and how I show it. These are the abilities I hold most dear and for which I am most thankful because they aid me in pursuit of my most prized goal: to understand.

I have no great physical strength or endurance, no unique aptitude for energy or athletics. I have a rather unique disinterest in activity, bustle, and crowds. These mundane traits reflect my relative disinterest in actions or implementation; I'm more interested in knowing than in doing. Still, some action is required to attain the understanding I so highly value especially in the form of study and research. For that reason, I am sometimes deficient in my textbook education and sometimes prone to energetic activity. It is a compromise between disinterest and necessity.

There are billions of people in the world. Knowing them personally and understanding their individual perspectives is an impossible task to fit into a lifetime. Repelled by futility, I try to understand human nature generally and especially the environment humanity universally occupies: reality. I have complete trust in empirical evidence and logical deduction to provide absolute truths about reality.

Logically, there are real things that are rare enough or intentionally hidden from us we may not witness them. Thus, reality is undeniably expansive beyond what we can prove empirically. There is an inherent need for trust and leaps of faith if these parts of life are to be understood. Recognition must be given that faith is not empirical proof, but also that men can fail in their logic as well. Both are useful tools for understanding, but neither alone is as useful as both together.

There is no evidence to deny and a great deal of evidence to support the theory that other people have the capacity for thought, choice, emotion, and reason to rival my own. But there is no deductive, infallible proof. Thus, I accept on faith that every individual human being is equally a person, equal in value of life, and equal in value of potential. Empirically, a diversity of traits exist among people such that no two people are ever identical (and even one person is not identical to himself minutes earlier or later), but I trust that each has the same capability to make themselves valuable and deserves the same justice and that, through personal choice and the passage of time, they become the people their choices make them.

I believe virtues, traits that benefit individuals and society as a whole, include justice, life, happiness, prosperity, family, self-determination, health, aptitude, diversity, and intelligence. Keeping all else constant, an increase in any of these traits is always a benefit. I believe in these traits based on strong but imperfect logical arguments combined with small leaps of faith. I see only benefit in their consequences on personal character and the greater world.

That is the tangle of reasoning that resides in the core of my mind and motivates my choices and actions. That is who I am.

Who are you?

[Scape]

John Galt

[Psudo]

You, Scape, are John Galt? He is a fictional personification of an ideal. At most, it is an ideal you support and exemplify. Even so, you came to know that ideal and decided to pursue it for different reasons: he was authored to have identified it for himself; you, at best, follow it because you read about it and agreed. You are not John Galt.

Even that is my reasoning, not yours. How, then, was your answer a response to my question?

[Axeman]

HELP, MEDIC!!! We have a man on a Rand-rage. He needs an injection of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, John Irving, Walt Whitman and Jane Austen to bring him back to humanity.

[Scape]

I never said I was John Galt, I simply presented a link to John Galt speaking. Which, by the way, has a lot to say in terms of who and what people are.

[Psudo]

Interesting that my criticism of Scape is that he is being vague, but Axeman knows exactly what Scape meant and has already decided it irrational rage from a Randian cultist. It's amazing how much he can know without any visible evidence.

Scape: True. I know his thoughts. However, I was asking people to describe themselves specifically, and John Galt has nothing to say about what differentiates Scape from the other six billion people on Earth.

[Axeman]

Psudo wrote:

Interesting that my criticism of Scape is that he is being vague, but Axeman knows exactly what Scape meant and has already decided it irrational rage from a Randian cultist. It's amazing how much he can know without any visible evidence.

Someone needs to grow a sense of humour.

[Xenterex]

I like to break stuff.

Of the few people I maintain some degree of socialization, that is probably the most frequent thing I say. Why I say is isn't from the notion that I indeed like to destroys objects, or ceasing their function so they can be recognized as being 'broken', but rather that I like to change things, particularly the perspective to which something is seen; especially since something that is 'broken' generally takes on a different appearance compared to its form when 'functional.'

Additionally, this line, and how I chose to utilize it in how I 'break' things, its a means by with I not only identify myself, but also how I identify with myself. I am of the mindset that a person's objective in life is to better themselves, through which the best means is a 'mastery of self'. Muscles are broken down in order to be built up stronger, and so the process can be applied to many things. Breaking to improve, so to speak.

So, who am I? I am one who likes to break stuff.

[Psudo]

Strain in pursuit of strength. I like that.