To Aristippus --- a better profit than Jesus

The roots of our Judea Christian tradition (and I would add the influence of the stoics, such as Aristotle and Plato) are deep. America is known for its puritanical look at sex and other moral issues, such as our intolerance and obsession (at least publicly) against drugs that make us feel good.
But does it have to be this way? Is this normality and those who don’t go with the flow somehow a malfunction of our society—a pervert.
We have other ancient roots that are not based on these ideas. One of them is the Ancient Greek school of the Cyrenaics. It may seem pure hedonism, but is considered to be an influence on the Epicurean (of Eπίκουρος ) philosophy, which up until the 1700s was the main opposition to the Western view of the world rooted in the suffocating and sometimes plain oppressive Judea Christian tradition.
By the time Karl Marx, Michael Bakunin, and Frederic Nietzsche came along, with their outright criticism and condemnation of Judea Christian tradition, Epicurean philosophy became obsolete as a world outlook. But let’s make it clear. These philosophies led to one another, at least in influence. Democritus (Δημόκριτος ) clearly was one of Marx’s first influence.
My own opinion is that to break the chains of modern capitalism a person must also break the chains of the Judea Christian tradition that binds us to the capitalist system and the Western ways of belief. While Mao (毛泽东) discovered his own Chinese philosophers, Lao Tsu (老子). So if you have hedonistic tendencies, remember, you’re not the first. They go back almost 3,000 years. You won’t be the last. We must discover our own ancient roots, which run deep and must be cut deep in order to recreate a modern person whose moral values represent our honest human needs and not what our society believes.
So this blog honors Aristippus (Aρίστιππος,) the first philosopher to break with the oppressive Stoic tradition of putting off all pleasures in life until after death or in pursuit of greater knowledge.
Here are some of his quotes:

"The art of life lies in taking pleasures as they pass, and the keenest pleasures are not intellectual, nor are they always moral." – Aristippus.

When asked about his prostitute mistress he said:

“Why, is there any difference between taking a house in which many people have lived before and taking one in which nobody has lived? Or again, between sailing in a ship in which ten thousand persons have sailed before and in one in which nobody has ever sailed?” - Aristippus, Cyrenaic founder – Reprinted in Memoirs of a Drugged-Up, Sex-Crazed Yippie Tales from the 1970s counter-culture: Drugs, sex, politics and rock and roll
By Steve Otto

The ancient Greek school of the Cyrenaic philosophers argued that pleasure is not simply the absence of pain, for that would be similar to being asleep. Pleasure needed motion, they argued. It came from sensations of the flesh and physical world. – quoted in Memoirs of a Drugged-Up, Sex-Crazed Yippie Tales from the 1970s counter-culture: Drugs, sex, politics and rock and roll.
So if you have hedonistic tendencies, remember, you’re not the first. And one more philosopher who adopted some of these ideas was Jean-Paul Sartre, who also believed that pleasure had its place in our lives and may have been married to the author of “The story of O.”