27. Paris: 8th Philosophical Meeting (2 pgs.)

ACT I - CHAPTER 27

8th PHILOSOPHICAL MEETING

PARIS

Saturday May 5, 2018

Paris France

They had played against Club Lion of Paris, one of the two that made its weight to its team in France. Alexandre had recovered from his instep injury. The public had dressed in yellow, like the shirts of their rivals, but “Roar”, the mascot that had encouraged the rival team’s players, had not achieved its objective. That afternoon Alexandre and his dressing room mates had won three to zero.

Everyone was thinking about the World Cup that was just around the corner. The GFO had reached an agreement with the Russian government so that the additional security measures would not ruin the business aspect.

During that month Alexandre had stayed up several nights working on the rest of the book. As always, Yellow picked him up at the hotel. In the same armored sedan that had saved his life, they arrived at an office building. They went up to the heliport and took off in one of Mr. Walker’s helicopters, commenting on the beautiful aerial view of Paris on that sunny day.

They landed in a luxurious Provençal-style house on the outskirts of the city. They passed the heavily armed guards at the entrance, along with two tanks.

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In the great dining room, he met with Arturo and Ricardo. When they were ready, he turned on the recorder. They talked about morality, but objective morality. They understood that morality was the study of the most appropriate actions for a human being to be happy in their life. The rational, was good; the irrational, bad.

But they differentiated an objective morality from a subjective one. An objective morality was based on objective metaphysics and epistemology. The objective values were by which we acted and to achieve them there were the objective virtues. These were concrete actions to achieve values, which was what was desired and all of the above implied living with principles.

They understood that the most important thing was to achieve self-esteem, which began with focusing the mind to have mental clarity and be able to differentiate one thing from another when making decisions.

The conclusion of the meeting was that erroneous premises deceived man and left him without self-esteem. Alexandre read them part of Galt’s speech from the novel Atlas Shrugged, written by Rand, which said that the morality of reason was based on a single axiom: existence, exists, and on a single choice: to live. Its values were: reason, purpose and self-esteem; and its virtues were: rationality, integrity, honesty, justice, productivity, independence and pride.

Although Ayn Rand had inspired them and they agreed with her in metaphysics, morals, epistemology and art, they disagreed in politics, since implementing capitalism while ignoring geopolitical realism and wars made it a utopia. International economic sanctions and a global financial system without gold backing prevented free trade and democracy. If man was a rational animal, he must act in good faith and make rational individual decisions without initiating force or deception with others.

The football-philosophers had come a long way and they only needed one meeting to finish writing the book. But then it needed to be compiled, edited, revised and published, and that was a whole other story, another thing, a new and long work that had to be done somehow.

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