The Sirris Tenet, as promulgated by V. K. Sirris in his manifesto, is as follows: I must turn the activities and purpose of whatever I am involved with to my own ends. It’s sometimes glibly rendered as “would thoust like to live selfishly” or “corruption is a moral imperitive,” both interpretations that Sirris himself rejected.

In an interview with NBS news and journalists from Liberty magazine, Sirris claimed that the Tenet was morally neutral. “If I wish to do good, and I am a member of a group or organization, I must turn that group or organization toward my purpose, which is good. If I am selfish, then yes, I do it out of coruptness or greed. But either way, it must be done. To be within a group, an organization, and to not seek to turn it in any way whatsoever–to be neutral, is to merely concede power and initiative to others. While they may do good, they may also do evil, so it is of the utmost importance that the individual concedes nothing, either for their own sake or for that of others.”

Those who follow the Sirris Tenet are often compared with devotees of the Objectivism philosophy espoused by Ayn Rand, despite the well-known enmity between Sirris and Rand themselves. In a letter to a follower in Chicago, Sirris declared that his philosophy was “an inherently neutral tool, like a pistol, aimed by its user and fired at a target, while Rand is peddling naked selfishness in a cellophane wrapper.” For her part, Rand was recorded via a hot mic at the 1971 Objectivism Summit in Geneva saying that Sirris was a “deluded old fool” whose philosophy was “obsessed with neutrality at the cost of intelligibility.”

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