BOOK REVIEWS: “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand (1957 - Part III)

>>>I do think is that all efforts to actively teach people reason over faith have had the unintended consequence of teaching them directionless rebelliousness instead (the young are more likely to be susceptible to rejecting religion and aren't mature enough to be rational, so they adopt irrational atheism or "angry atheism"). Instead of hanging on to morals on reasoned grounds, they rebel against their own culture and say "to hell with morals."<<<

Nietzsche (I'm a big fan)actually lost a lot of sleep over just this. He feared that since our society and outlook and morals had been held in place by the concept of "God" for such a long time, removing it meant untying society, outlook, and morals from any kind of foundation, which could give rise to nihilism. Nietzsche was flatly terrified of Nihilism, and felt that it was unreasonable to take something away from people (Religion) without giving them something in place of it. He felt this was both for pragmatic and psychological reasons, though I'm paraphrasing when I use those terms.

He came up with a sort of self-actualization through art concept that - speaking as a guy who's been in a lot of bands, and who writes books - is pretty frackin' satisfying. I could explain if anyone's interested.

>>>I agree with the founders that a free society requires a moral people and a moral people require a religious foundation. Not so much in the case of every individual, but for people in general.<<<

Franklin said as much.

>>>I'm inclined to the position that we need both believers and skeptics if our society is to function at all. To hand the reins to one or the other is to risk intellectual stagnation.<<<

Oh, absolutely we do. Absolutely. Society needs believers to remind everyone that life has worth, and to live and hope and feel and aspire, and I'll even go so far as to say that Society needs atheists to call us on our bullsh!t now and again. An entirely religious society would be Medieval, which sucked, and an entirely athiestic society would be Maoistic, which also sucks. We need each other, even though no one wants to admit it. And if each didn't have the other to annoy it and kick around, it would generate its own opposition to fill the niche.

>>>But as for actual belief, I'm an agnostic because I think that the only answer I can give to the question "Is there a God?" -- the only intellectually honest answer that I can give -- is "I certainly hope so, but I don't know. I can't know. It seems to me that that's kind of the whole point."<<<

Once upon a time, I hated Agnostics because every one I met was simply an atheist who didn't want to get preached at. In the last 5 years or so, however, I've met a lot of *real* agnostics, and I've come to respect it. Intellectually, you're right: none of us know for sure. We all believe, but none of us know.

Maybe we need new terms? Instead of "I know" ("Gnosis") maybe something like "I think I know?" Bowie was asked recently if he believed in God, and he said that he considered himself a "Hopeful atheist," in that he flat out didn't believe in God, but on some level he still sorta' did, and he hoped that level was right. (I paraphrase heavily)

>>>"I cannot project the degree of hatred required to make those women run around in crusades against abortion. Hatred is what they certainly project, not love for the embryos, which is a piece of nonsense no one could experience, but hatred, a virulent hatred for an unnamed object . . . In compliance with the dishonesty that dominates today's intellectual field, they call themselves 'pro-life.'"<<<

That doesn't even make sense, it's like doublethink. That's like saying "All those people who marched with Dr. King hate black people." It's demonstrably nonsense.

Of course Rand has one of her characters cavalierly say "Every man, woman and abortion in town..." in Atlas Shrugged, sooooooo I'm not terribly surprised.

>>>Sorry you've had a bad experience with a Randian.<<<

"Bad" probably overstates it a bit. Basically, my impression was that MichaelM was one of those garrulous old guys you see hanging around AFL-CIO meetings or Unitarian churches. The kind who've spend their whole lives chasing an ideal, and then they get old and alone, and the ideal doesn't really keep 'em safe or warm or loved, or give 'em any support. So they're kinda' lonely and empty and not sure quite why or what to do. (The rest of us fill those empty spaces with God and a religious community of some sort, like a Church or Lutheran Retirement Home, or whatever). I ended up feeling bad for the guy because, I dunno, I just got the feeling he had nothing in his life, and no one else would talk to him.

But...well...you can read how it went. Based on your explanation of "Open Objectivism," I think we'll get along far better than MichaelM and I did.

>>> (I disagree with her stance on abortion<<<

Oooh! Interesting. What was her stance on Abortion?

>>>and feel that, though an atheist myself, the benefits of religion outweigh the harm).<<<

See, that's my feeling, too. Even in my Atheist periods, I never thought religion was *bad* any more than, say, Star Trek is bad: Both are untrue, both make ethical stances, both posit a better world to come, and believers in each seem to get a lot out of it, so what if it's fictional? I never got the hate.

Of course I'm not an Atheist anymore. I tried it twice, It wasn't a good match for me.

>>>Not all open objectivists agree with each other, but the basic difference is we believe it's okay to disagree, whereas the closed objectivists seem not to.>>>

Thank you for explaining that!

With regards to Objectivism vs Libertarianism...as a philosophy holding that the initiation of force against another is wrong (and retaliatory force necessary) it is very much a libertarian philosophy (but try telling a closed objectivist that.) Simply view the short film "the philosophy of liberty"; there is nothing in it contrary to Objectivism.<<<

>>>it was written at a point in time when there were also many polemics written for the collectivist mindset. In that context, Atlas Shrugged was a useful literary counterweight. It has some interesting stuff and some valid philosophical inferences about individualism.

The problem with Atlas Shrugged is the people who take a fictional polemic performing a valid function at one moment in time and treat it as holy writ for the ages.<<<

That's pretty astute! I hadn't thought about it in that sense, I was just reviewing it as a book, but now that you mention it that makes a lot of sense. Lots of things that made sense in 1950 don't make sense now, and a lot of things that make sense now would have seemed like utter nonsense sixty years ago.

>>> I always found it fascinating that Rand, a refugee from totalitarianism, effectively turned Objectivism, an idea with very rational roots, into a dogma almost as rigid as that she fled. It just goes to show how deeply ingrained in human nature is the potential for intellectual corruption. Original sin, anyone?<<<

People often end up becoming the thing they fear, often without realizing it. Stalin felt the Czar was oppressive and dictatorial, which justified his actions, but then he himself became far worse than any Czar in history. Hitler essentially acted out his own paranoid delusions about what he *thought* the Jews were doing to Gentiles, and bumped it up to an industrial scale. Napoleon and and Cromwell - neither entirely negative nor entirely positive examples - essentially became the very things their respective revolutions fought against, though (In their defense) much much more enlightened. This doesn't *always* happen, but it happens a lot, so it's not surprising that it'd happen to Rand.

As Dave Barry once wrote, "'Power to the People' invariably means 'Power to me and a few of my friends who know what's best for the People.'"

I posted this elsewhere on the most current thread in which we've discussed Rand and this book, but I figured I'd re-post it here too as it's applicable. This is John Scalzi's comment on the novel:

>>>[it] a totally ridiculous book which can be summed up as Sociopathic idealized nerds collapse society because they don't get enough hugs. (This is, incidentally, where you can start your popcorn munching.) Indeed, the enduring popularity of Atlas Shrugged lies in the fact that it is nerd revenge porn -- if you're an nerd of an engineering-ish stripe who remembers all too well being slammed into your locker by a bunch of football dickheads, then the idea that people like you could make all those dickheads suffer by "going Galt" has a direct line to the pleasure centers of your brain. I'll show you! the nerds imagine themselves crying. I'll show you all! And then they disappear into a crevasse that Google Maps will not show because the Google people are our kind of people, and a year later they come out and everyone who was ever mean to them will have starved. Then these nerds can begin again, presumably with the help of robots, because any child in the post-Atlas Shrugged world who can't figure out how to run a smelter within ten minutes of being pushed through the birth canal will be left out for the coyotes. Which if nothing else solves the problem of day care.

All of this is fine, if one recognizes that the idealized world Ayn Rand has created to facilitate her wishful theorizing has no more logical connection to our real one than a world in which an author has imagined humanity ruled by intelligent cups of yogurt. This is most obviously revealed by the fact that in Ayn Rand's world, a man who self-righteously instigates the collapse of society, thereby inevitably killing millions if not billions of people, is portrayed as a messiah figure rather than a genocidal prick, which is what you'd call him anywhere else. Yes, he's a genocidal prick with excellent engineering skills. Good for him. He's still a genocidal prick. Indeed, if John Galt were portrayed as an intelligent cup of yogurt rather than poured into human form, this would be obvious. Oh my god, that cup of yogurt wants to kill most of humanity to make a philosophical point! Somebody eat him quick! And that would be that.

The fact that apparently a very large number of people don't recognize Galt as the genocidal prick he is suggests a) Rand's skill at stacking the story-telling deck is not to be discounted, and b) as with any audience with a large number of nerds in it, a non-trivial number of Atlas Shrugged readers are possibly far enough along the Asperger spectrum that they don't recognize humanity does not in fact easily suss out into Randian capitalist superheroes on one side and craven socialist losers on the other, or that Rand's neatly-stacked deck doesn't mirror the world as it is, or (if one gives it any sort of genuine reflection) model it as it should be.

To be fair to Rand, she's certainly not the only science fiction/fantasy author who has lashed together a universe out of twine and novel but shallow philosophical meanderings (Objectivism: the spongy white bread of the Great Buffet of Human Ideas), and then populated it with characters tuned to exist in that universe and that universe only. She's not even the only author to have enthusiastic nerds confuse that Potemkin universe with a possible one, who then go about annoying the rest of us, who have no desire to be characters in that sort of universe, thank you kindly. But on the other hand, Rand did spend a lot of time getting high on her own supply, which most pushers are smart enough not to do, and at the moment, her claque of enthusiastic nerds certainly seems to be the most energetic, which doesn't really please me. I wish they could be more like Heinlein nerds, who keep to their own freeholds.

So that's how it susses out for me. As a pulpy, fun read about an unrealistic world that could never happen, I give Atlas Shrugged a thumbs up. As a foundational document for a philosophy for living in reality with other actual live human beings, I rank it below Jonathan Livingston Seagull and The Secret, both of which also have the added value of being shorter.<<<

MichaeIM,

First and foremost, I want to thank you for taking the considerable amount of time it must have required to comment on my comments, and I want to also thank you for sharing your lifetime of thought on the subject with us. It’s all well and good for an outsider like me to look at something and pick at it like items on an unfamiliar buffet, but it’s quite another to get input from someone who’s lived and breathed it as long as you have, giving us a sense of the overall meaning of things, rather than just the experience of reading it. So thank you very, very much for that. I think we’re in your debt.

You said >>>All knowledge is contextual. The assumptions of navigation are valid within the confines of its context. In another context those assumptions may not be applicable. You acknowledge this, but seem to be saying that it constitutes and existing contradiction. It doesn't. What exists is two distinct contexts.<<<

While I agree with that rationally, I’d argue that Rand is very emphatically opposed to contextual interpretation in the book. “A is A” after all, and she says it over and over and over again. If she backpedaled on this particular point later on, or expounded on it to allow a degree of moral relativism, I can’t say, but I have only this book to go on, and in the book there is no ‘context’ to knowledge, it is absolute, and either true or untrue.

You said >>>You are trying to use two definitions of "exist" simultaneously. To say that God does not exist metaphysically is not the same thing as saying that God does not exist epistemologically as an idea or a fantasy or a figment of the imagination or whatever. It is the latter that has the effect not the former. Nonexistence can never affect existence.<<<

Fair enough on the face of it, and yet no one can argue the fact that there is not now, nor has there ever been a Yoda. And yet Yoda’s watered down super-Grover version of Zen has affected hundreds of millions of people in their formative years. Star Trek doesn’t exist, and yet it’s affected US Foreign Policy. John Galt doesn’t exist, but he’s causing us to have this discussion. We can quibble about terms, but my point is that dreams aren’t real in any objective sense, yet they have the power to shape reality, and they do all the time.

You said >>Who said that the perceptions from which a concept is formulated had to be directly experienced?<<

Ok, you got me on this one.

You said >>>The distinction between real and unreal has nothing to do with the difference between relating and meaning.<<<

Can you expand on this, please?

You said >>You are conflating the meaning of rational in the context of using your rational faculty incorrectly and erring with using your rational faculty correctly. The standard to measure the latter is not how many people "consider" something to be rational. The standard is something actually being in accordance with the fundamental nature of man and reality.<<

The problem here being that the fundamental nature of man varies based on who you talk to, and when. There’s an endless parade of people lo these last 400 years who have claimed that atrocities are for the good of everyone, and they’ve based this on inescapable logic. And for the most part, I think these people actually believed they were doing the right thing, the evil bastards. As someone a thousand years ago what the human fundamental condition is, and they’ll tell you something different than a man a hundred years ago, or a hundred years from now.

You said: >>>This is determinism, and it's untenable. Advocating that any idea can be hardwired is self-refuting. You must forfeit all claims to objective truth, because it cannot be distinguished from "truths" that are hardwired. So you may not claim that your advocacy of it is true.<<

I don’t think anyone really buys the “Tabula Rasa” idea anymore. It’s more a combination of environment and genetics. I’m not arguing that we have genetic memory or anything stupid like that, but, come on, you’re a kid, you’ve got no interest in sex, then one day, bing, things change in your head, and it’s all you can think about. Obviously there’s some programming unfolding there.

You said >>You over interpreted this. It is not a quantitative judgment. The act of annihilation referenced is any choice to draw conclusions about the nature of reality and act on them without and/or in spite of reason. The emotional experiences you describe are automatic responses to values already adopted deliberately or otherwise. They enable us to translate those values instantaneously into the spontaneous actions of which our lives consist and subsequently provide normative feedback. The "act of annihilation" is the choice to treat those emotions as if they were knowledge (faith, for instance).<<

Ok, though I’d argue that Faith and Knowledge are different aspects of the brain entirely. If I am misinterpreting Rand - which I might well be - it’s because every word of the novel seems to be repeatedly saying “There is no interpretation. This is, period. A=A.”

You said >>>You have unjustifiably narrowed the meaning of "it". You take it that she means one can never deny the existence of anything without denying the existence of oneself. She actually is saying that one cannot deny the existence of *everything* without denying the existence of the self. The self-evident axiomatic concept implied in all others is existence in toto. The axiom that expresses it is "existence exists". Grasping it implies the existence of the grasper and his recognition that "I am".<<<

Ok, assuming “It” means “Everything” and not just something, then you’re right and I’m wrong.

You said >>> No. Its value is there because of the fact of a long history of it being a viable storage of value, albeit coerced to be such in the present manner. The danger of that value vanishing overnight is also a fact of history we take into account by responding in the market to any tendency to inflate the supply. The unreality of government assertions is already and always accommodated in the actual value of the currency. <<<

And yet the value of currency is, itself, ultimately based on something arbitrary. Rand would base the economy on gold (“Galt”), ok, fine, but why is Gold valuable and tin not? Because, ultimately, our club-lugging remote ancestors thought it was pretty, and it was scarce enough that they didn’t see it a lot, but common enough that they didn’t forget it existed. I’m not attaching a great evil to this, I’m just saying that it’s a case of something being valuable simply because we decide it is.

You said: >>This is the kind of non-thinking that constitutes an annihilation of existence and ultimately oneself. It is the ultimate act of intellectual desperation that is the consequence of failing to grasp that your real life is your highest value and standard of all other values and that reason applied through action is your only means to achieve and perfect it. If you have no evidence of the existence of something, what evidence could you have that it could have either a positive or negative value to your existence? Wishes are no substitute for knowledge. <<

If I have an imaginary friend named “God,” how does that annihilate reality? If my imaginary friend tells me that I matter - when I very clearly don’t, I’m just a monkey after all - and this belief that I matter moves me on to do grand things in His name - feed the hungry, house the homeless, write a great sonata, split the atom in a quest to understand His glories as manifest in the universe itself, how is that a bad thing? Yeah, sure, God may not exist, He may simply be a kind of self-programming that I use to cause myself to do things, but the fact remains that I wouldn’t have done them if I didn’t have my imaginary friend. And the fact that the Hallelujah Chorus is beautiful is in no way undercut by the fact that it’s unrepentantly religious. And if my imaginary friend tells me to hold on a bit longer in the death camp, and your objective reality tells you to just give up in the same circumstance, clearly the advantage is mine.

You’re familiar with the concept of the muse, right? A muse isn’t real, I’m not even sure the ancients believed the Muses were real, it’s obviously just a creative game you’re playing with yourself, but eventually, with enough self-programming, enough recursive logic, enough exposure and free-association, enough personal establishments of value and significance that have meaning to the individual alone, then a part of your mind begins working like a continually running subroutine, processing ideas without the artist being consciously aware of it. The ideas get remarkably honed, and then they just sort of pop in to your conscious mind as a sudden flash of inspiration, and they do feel as though they are coming from somewhere else entirely. Obviously they’re not. Obviously this is just a game I play with myself, but the fact remains that a muse is a really good thing to have for a creative person, and being creative is entirely what Rand is on about, yes? Producing? Establishing value?

So let’s say that God doesn’t exist, let’s say that God is merely my own Muse? How is that a bad thing? How is that denying reality? How is that somehow an affront to your own values? If my nonexistent God amuses me in to going to work for Habitat for Humanity, and your objective assessment of existence doesn’t, then, again, it would seem the advantage is mine. And if my amused God doesn’t motivate me to do anything, and your objective assessment DOES cause you to do something, then, you know, Advantage: yours. We’re all just making up life as we go along, and I’m not one to be didactic. More power to ya.

I do not pretend to understand the total intolerance for another viewpoint. I’m not saying you have to admit I’m right, I’m not demanding that you bend to my will, but you’re demanding I bend to yours, and implying that somehow my mental processes are feeble because they’re different than yours.

You said: >>Contradiction: All claims regarding the nature of man apply equally to all human beings that are, were, or ever will be. What is good for one individual human *in principle* is good for all. There are no contradictory "rights" morally, and when those are extended properly to the social (political) context, there are no contradictory political rights either.<<

This isn’t expressly stated in the passage I was citing, but I’ll accept it.

You said: >>>You are over assuming again. Men are rarely consistent. It is perfectly possible for mystics to simultaneously be rational. In order to correctly judge her statement here, you must first analyze these contributions to see whether they have a rational base or do they rely on mystical truths. Does justice require a mystical base or is it a demonstrably rational concept. There are many conclusions as well drawn ostensibly by mystics for allegedly mystical reasons that are simply coincidental contradictions or inverse rationalizations. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is asserted to be a law of a phantom God, while Rand can derive the same idea from objective perception and conceptualization of the facts of reality.<<<

I’m not assuming anything. I’m giving my own reactions to passages of Rand’s philosophy that jumped out at me. This is part of the learning process. No, justice does not *need* to be based on the gods, though I do think it would be a mistake to simply ignore the fact that our concept of justice *did* evolve from the things the gods are reputed to have said. So whether or not justice can evolve independently from the gods - which I believe it probably can - the fact remains that it *didn’t* do so.

>>She got the most important point: that ignorance is not bliss. That it is only the alternative of life and death that gives rise to the necessity for values and thence the concept of happiness. Only humans can experience bliss. For the rest, the equivalent experience is called bliss metaphorically. <<<

That’s kind of got nothing to do with the point I was making, which is that the Garden of Eden story isn’t really about humans per se.

>>>There is more to reality than physical existence. Aspects of and relationships among physical entities are also real. Definitions are essentially descriptions of relationships. The idea of God is populated by assumptions of relationships between us and a form of existence that cannot be evidenced in the same manner that the rest of existence is i.e. through concepts abstracted from direct or indirect perceptual experience.<<<

You’re playing both sides of this argument, or so it seems. Up above you’re saying that I’m using the wrong definition of existence, and here you’re doing the opposite, or so it seems.

In any event, the idea of God is actually formed by several interlocking ideas, among which are the primitive idea that someone must be driving the stuff they see around them, the concept of some ultimate ancestor from whom all descend, a fundamental mistaking of the preternatural for the supernatural, an inability to fully conceive of our own nonexistence in death, a healthy survival reflex telling us that there’s always something bigger and more dangerous out there than ourselves, human sadness, human aspiration, our love of the big question mark, and the fact that occasionally luck seems inexplicably to go our way, and of course the fact that we can not *disprove* God’s existence. It’s not *one* cause, it is a myriad of causes and what seems to be some kind of genetic predisposition to personify the unknown, as Chrichton and a number of neuroanatomists have said.

I don’t know that there *is* a God, though I believe in Him. But I’ve gone back and forth on that argument at times, I’ve been a died-in-the-wool atheist. I’ve been a fundamentalist Christian. I get it. But Atheism didn’t work for me, and I came back. I left by logical argument, and I came back by logical argument. But the point isn’t that we can know if there is or isn’t a God, but rather the fact that God keeps popping up in our thoughts and societies. This doesn’t mean there *is* a God, but it does strongly imply there’s a purely biological evolutionary advantage in believing in Him. Even Nietzsche inferred this.

Ok, so you say differently. Can we accept that perhaps you’re wired differently than me, and leave it at that? Because eventually your constant insistence that I’m wrong and my constant insistence that you just don’t get it becomes a lot like heterosexuals beating up on gay guys and saying “Just be straight, just admit you’re wrong and be straight!” Clearly, they can’t.

You said >>>I'm not sure you get this. The fundamental alternative for living entities is life or death. If you choose death, all questions of good or evil of sacrifice or not are moot. The word sacrifice is pertinent only to those who choose the alternative to pursue life. In that case, Life becomes ipso facto the highest value and standard for all others. From then on all alternatives must be judged for whether they contribute to life or not and arranged hierarchically per the degree to which they do or do not. The moral imperative is then to never forfeit a higher value in order to gain a lower one. Thus altruism and sacrifice are immoral.<<<

No, I get it. I disagree with the last portion there, obviously, but I agree with the first part.

You Said >>>The issue is not whether you believe or not. It is whether your belief is an accurate representation of the immutable nature of yourself and the rest of reality or not, and whether you can demonstrate it.<<<
That’s not the way it works. The way it works is this: Some Jewish tailor says “Live sucks here in Russia, I’m moving to America where the streets are paved with gold.” Then he ends up living in a tenement on the lower east side of Manhattan, having about as awful a life as he would have had in Russia, but then one of his kids says “You know what? The problem is this whole ‘being a tailor’ thing, not where I’m located” so the kid goes off to California and becomes Louis B. Mayer or whomever, and creates a new industry that his father couldn’t have forseen, and probably would have been opposed to.

We are always, all of us, making half-assed decisions every day, based on wonky information. But you pays your money, you takes your chances, and though the situation generally doesn’t work out the way you intended it to, it gives rise to something unforeseen which adds to the complexity and beauty of life and the economy.

You said: >>>Not. She is an unequivocal advocate of the primacy of existence over consciousness.<<<
I think we’ll have to disagree on this point. My reading of her in this novel teaches me that she only values things she perceives as ‘real’ and anything she perceives as ‘unreal’ - up to and including contra factual ideas - are basically nonexistent, not worth having, immoral, and probably fattening. I’m being facetious, I apologize, but a fundamental failing in this line of investigation is “I can’t understand what the hell you crazy monkeys are talking about, and I don’t want to take the time to find out, so therefore you’re wrong and that’s the end of it.”

I’m not saying that one needs to accept every stupid idea. I myself have shut down logical fallacies on more than one occasion, particularly the annoying hokey new agey ones. But I’m saying that when it gives people a sense of value, and does no harm, why would you want to take it away from them?

Yes, maybe the baby doesn’t need the security blanket to survive, but really what kind of horrible person goes around taking security blankets from babies anyway?

You said >>>No. One can only mislead oneself by improper conceptualization. Sense perception is inherently valid.<<<

Read Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, then we’ll talk.

You said: >>>This is put forth as the basic creed of the savage who lives in a demon-haunted world. Overextending again. Characteristics included in the word "savage" that were common among primitives were not necessarily ubiquitous.<<<

Ah, but didn’t you also say >>>All claims regarding the nature of man apply equally to all human beings that are, were, or ever will be. What is good for one individual human *in principle* is good for all. <<<<<

You Said >>>The absolute is implicit in the axioms that are self-evident. It is a contradiction to propose that existence or our recognition of it as being is not absolute. You can't make any argument without assuming it. Reason and faith are opposites by definition. Get used to it. A minus A equals zero.<<<

I’m not arguing against that. I’m pointing out that Rand’s belief in an immutable absolute is perilously similar to a religious view of a deistic universe.

Reason and Faith *ARE* opposites. I’ve never said differently. I’ve even posted a lengthy article on the site about it recently. They are *useful* opposites, in the same way that your feet are opposites, but they work together. You would chop off your left foot because it’s not as rational as your right one?

You said >>> Again, Rand repeatedly cautions: all knowledge is contextual. Whether you grasp it or not you are understanding "belief" to be "knowledge". So it too must be contextual, i.e. limited to the available evidence. Knowledge based only on available evidence will not be contradicted by evidence yet to be discovered. That leaves a lot of partial knowledge hanging that we hold in degrees as "possibility" and "probability". Beyond that one can have some evidence that something "could be", because there is nothing now known to contradict it. It is imperative that these stages of knowledge be properly valued in a hierarchy appropriate to the task to which ones knowledge is to be applied. That is a discipline that would serve you well, particularly with the hodgepodge that is your de facto epistemology.<<<

Now, now, don’t get all condescending. That never suits a missionary well. And there’s nothing wrong with a hodge-podge if it works well for the individual. If, as you say, Rand is saying that knowledge is contextual, then I’ll accept that part of your argument, but the novel doesn’t say so, or if it does I somehow missed it. Again, I’m not a scholar of these matters, I’ve only this one book to go on, but my reading of the book makes it pretty clear to me that she’s not one for interpreting things in situ, it only is or isn’t.

You said: >>>Rand: "What is mysticism? Mysticism is the acceptance of allegations without evidence or proof, either apart from or against the evidence of one’s senses and one’s reason." [Philosophy:Who Needs It, p.62] Get it now?<<<

Yes, thank you for the definition. So then, was Stalin a mystic? Was Mao? I’m not saying they weren’t, I’m simply confused as to how to fit them in to this definition. If you could explain, I’d appreciate it.

You said: >>>No, it is you who lumps! Being a mystic is a matter of degree measured by the number of principles and choices one bases on faith or reason out of all of those in one's life. Being a mystic on one issue does not guarantee you will be a mystic on another. Let us take one single instance as an example. Did either of your mystical friends ever advocate or vote for public education? By what standard did they endorse the claim that childless persons were responsible for the education of others' children and could be enslaved for that purpose? You can't get there with reason.<<<

Ok, I see what you’re getting at.

You said >>>There is a big difference between acknowledging man is fallible and asserting that flaws are inherent. You are very wrong to claim that inherent defects can urge one to strive to be better.<<<

I dunno. I’ve spent my whole life trying to transcend my basic programming, and I’ve been intermittently successful. I’ve worked around some considerable learning deficits and other handicaps. As to whether man inherently sucks or not, it’s one of those arguments we can never really hope to resolve. It’s like ‘which is better, men or women’ or ’which is better, lefties or righties’ I’m not convinced there’s a solid answer, and even if there is, does it matter anyway? The mideval era argued that people were inherently bad, and that resulted in the renaissance (Kinda’ sorta’ by accident), and the enlightenment era argued that people were basically good, and that ended with World War I. I think personally we need to simply accept that humans are a mix of two natures, good and bad, rational and irrational, and move forward from there. Anything else strikes me as a fundamentally off-balance philosophy doomed to failure.

You said >>>Roughly ... Platonism via Augustine devalued reason, the dark ages followed, Aristotle etc. was preserved by the Moors who carried it back to Spain and St. Thomas, who formulated his 2-world scheme freeing men to pursue knowledge in this world and God in the next that ignited the fire out of which the Renaissance was born....
One of the most important contributions of Rand was to demonstrate how philosophy drives culture, politics and thence history.>>>

Ok, thanks. I’ll assume you’d agree with me that she doesn’t make this point very clearly in the book?

You said >>>Her essay "For The New Intellectual" in the book of the same name elaborates on mysticism of mind and muscle using Attila and the Witch Doctor as prototypical examples.<<<

I’ll have to think on that one for a while.

You said: >>>You're begging the question of validity. If the religion does not constitute a valid philosophy, any "redemption" it offers is a Fata Morgana.<<<

Not really. I’m saying that we create the things we need. If people have a psychological need or an empty spot in their lives, they’ll create or transform a religion to fill it. The history of religion is a history of society hitting some major paradigm shift, society crumbling because of it, and someone stepping forward with a new revelation from above that allows people to make sense of the change, and then go on from there. Zoroaster, Mohammed, St. Paul, take your pick. It happens because we need it to happen.

You Said >>>Just remember, Galt concretizes man at his best in accordance with the nature of man — all men, including you.<<<
Swell, but she’s using deliberately Jesus-like terminology here.

You Said >>>But you correctly agreed that politics is based on ethics two quotes prior. Ethics is the code of principles one must live by in order to survive as man in accordance with his nature. Politics is the extension of ethics in the context of the life of individual human beings into the context of individual human beings living together in a society of men with long term interrelationships. A political principle (right) cannot be valid without a valid ethical principle underlying it. <<<

I said her heart was in the right place, didn’t I? I’d argue that politics is more about the obtaining, partitioning, and continuity of power than it is about ethics, and I can cite literally thousands of examples of unethical behavior by governments to support this.

You said >>>Overextension yet again ... check out the context again ... this only says that the immutable nature of reality will exact its toll on any man who attempts to succeed by contradicting in. That requires one who experiences irrationality in any form to identify it and make sure that you do not act on it as if it were rational. The statement does not preclude us from being able to survive our encounters with irrationality.<<<

If I’m overextending - which I might be - it’s only because Rand is using hyperbole in these points.

You said>>>Absolutely not. Her politics is a consequence of her philosophy, not the reverse. "I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am
not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the
supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows."
Rand, Ayn. 1971. “Brief Summary” in The Objectivist (September 1971), 1089-1090 in
bound volume. <<<

And yet she clearly considers Capitalism to be the only valid form of economic rationalism, yes? As does Smith, who likewise goes on to massively slam an ineffectual and decaying economic system.

You said >>>Her view is that just as morality is the code of values prerequisite for a human to live qua human, and individual rights are extensions of that code, so government laws must exist solely to secure those rights. Here is a quick peek at the thinking
1)There is only one most fundamental alternative for living entities: life or death.
2)Being volitional, human beings can and must actively make that choice.
3) If one chooses death, political questions are no longer pertinent. If one chooses life, then that becomes the highest value and standard of all other values.
4) Implementing the mind (reason) through action is one's only means to achieve the values necessary to maximize the quantity and quality of one's life. .
5) Therefore it is inherently right to be able to implement reason through action without interference (liberty) by applying it to production and voluntary trade in the service of one's life.
6) Physical force and the threat thereof is the only means to sustain or to destroy the liberty to implement reason.
7) Sustaining liberty requires that physical force be used to prevent, stop, and punish the use of force to diminish liberty per objectively defined and proven standards and methods that are knowable to all in advance of any action by them.
8) The only task of a government is to guarantee that no man may initiate the use of force to gain, withhold, or destroy any tangible or intangible value of another person who acquired it by creating it or in a voluntary exchange.
9) Therefore, all human interrelationships shall be explicitly or implicitly contractual and voluntarily entered into.
Marriage will be that to which the parties agree. If extra-marital sex is implicitly or explicitly excluded, then it would be immoral (a violation of a contract) unless it was an intentional means to dissolve the contract accompanied by a willingness to pay all prescribed penalties, if any.<<<

Interesting. Not really directly what I was getting at, but frankly more interesting. Thanks.

You said >>>Just how does rebuking your fundamental means of sustaining and perfecting your own existence make you "bigger" than human? That is consistent with a low opinion of the nature of man which is consistent with a low opinion of oneself. To that, Rand would say, "speak for yourself." She would also advise you to get busy gathering the proof of this claim. As it stands, it looks a lot like a rationalization for falling back on religion to provide you with a framework for your life that you were unable to find in your other philosophical experiments.<<<

Just how does my having an imaginary friend make me *smaller* than human? Assuming that my imaginary friend doesn’t exist, then I’m obviously doing everything I do by myself, and the imaginary friend is just a workaround that I use to get past my own limitations, but does it matter how or why I do it? I mean, does anyone care how a tapdancer LEARNED to tapdance, or is it just a matter of enjoying the performance.

You said >>Man is a volitional animal. In every choice of a man's existence, he is, in principle, as capable of making the rational choice as he is of making the irrational choice. If he persists in the latter, he can corrupt his faculty and its content until he practically loses the ability to be rational. But that process is never irreversible.<<

This is opinion, not fact. Go to a PeTA rally sometime and tell me how rational humanity is.

You said >>>The dual nature thing is the fallacy of the mind-body dichotomy that is second only to the primacy of consciousness on the list of Objectivism's top intellectual villains list. Rand rejects it in its every application because they are not separate parts of us in conflict, but rather they are a whole from two different views. One is an aspect of the other.
You are also still conflating "rational", the ability to be rational, from "rational", actually being rational.<<<

I don’t think I am. I’m capable of great and noble thoughts, but I still have to eat and take an occasional dump, and screw, and lust and have ignoble thoughts, too. I’m capable of angelic glory and beastial horror, and like most of us, I’ve been down both roads on occasion, and unlike most of us, I’m willing to admit that both roads felt really really good on occasion, as anyone who wins a drunken bar fight can tell you, as anyone who composes a sonnet that makes their beloved cry can tell you.

We are monkeys and we are gods, and we’re both at the same time, and this is perhaps why Yahweh is our God: because He encompasses a totality of opposites that we find mirrors ourselves. It is an uncomfortable nature, neither fish nor fowl, so people attempt to grab one side of it or another and say “This is what we are! We’re meat!” or “This is what we are, we’re spiritual!” but in fact, we’re both pretty much all the time. We’re the monkey that farts and thinks about sex in church, and the angel that gives his life to save his brothers not for fame or for glory, but out of love, all alone in the night.

You said >>>Objectivism is not a rationalist philosophy.<<<
My dear sir, how can it not be? You’ve spent thousands of words decrying my irrationalist philosophy. There are only two options here, by your own admission, and you’re clearly not on my irrationalist team, so…

You said >>> I have been an Objectivist for 42 years. I was prepped by endless contradictions and utter irrelevance of my religion to life. I did not grasp those flaws at first, but Rand systematically answered every question the failures of my religion raised. Every answer begged me to ask another and another and so on. Ultimately, and rather quickly, there was nothing left of religion's explanations that were worth holding onto. I count myself fortunate to have discovered her before I was 30, married, without kids, and with no family or peer pressures to overcome. It takes an enormous amount of intellectual courage to discard conventional mores later in life when so many social bonds are firmly entrenched and taken for granted.<<<

Speaking as someone who’s actually discarded conventional mores several times in my life, I can certainly agree with you there: It’s tough.

You said >>Only a relentlessly honest mind can do that — one that never ceases to challenge and re-challenge one's own conclusions at every opportunity. I detect no signs of overt dishonesty in your arguments, and your mind and its content as manifested in the review represents a prodigious achievement, in spite of the gaping hole in your epistemology. But Rand could sew that hole up no time. I would without hesitation recommend that you read as many of her other writings as you can get your hands on and treat them with the same due diligence you have given to this review. <<<

Thank you. I didn’t take any of what you said as insulting or attacking me, just explaining it in more detail. Likewise, I hope you didn’t take anything I said as an attack, or blanket rejection of Rand’s philosophy. I’m trying to learn here, and pass stuff on to others who may be interested. My gut tells me that Rand is not a good match for me, but I did actually find much to merit in her thoughts, and at least some of these I’ve already begun to incorporate in to my workaday hodge podge.

You Wrote >>I would start with "The Virtue of Selfishness". Follow with "Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand by Leonard Peikoff. Then, "Introduction to the Objectivist Epistemology". Later you can read "The Fountainhead" and the nonfiction works: Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal", and "The Romantic Manifesto". Most of her non-fiction works, like "For the New Intellectual" and "Philosophy: Who Needs It" are collections of essays by her and her associates.<<

So then you’d say “Virtue of Selfishness” is the best encapsulation/introduction to her philosophical schema? Ok, on your recommendation I’ll check it out. Thank you! And thank you again for your very lengthy rebuttal to my observations. It was very thoughtful of you to share your lifetime of observations with us, and you have given me a lot to think about.

Again, thank you for your time and your insights, and I’d like to welcome you back to visit and participate in our site whenever you feel like doing so.

Again, thanks a lot, and it’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.

Ok, now that's *VERY* interesting!

That doevails with what I was telling Rufus about how it seems to be replacing one elite with just another elite that she happened to belong to, rather than a fully rational, thought out system that's best for everyone.

There's a degress of 'atheist messianism' in her work - particularly Dagny's childhood daydreams of the perfect man at the end of the railroads, which turns out to be Galt, a full-blown messiah - and there's the occasional paralell with Nietsche, but whereas Nietsche's system of self-actualization makes sense on a personal level (Anyone who's ever written a song from scratch, or made a sculpture, or written a really good short story TOTALLY gets what he's talking about), he had seemingly no real interest in instilling in society on an industrial level. For him, it's more like 'meaning for those who feel the need to find meaning." For Rand, it's more oppressive and overbearing, like she feels society should be re-built from the ground up based around her system. That bugs me, but you find that a lot in mid-century philosophy, so I tend to kind of overlook it as just the spirit of the times. Big governments, big wars, big experiments, all that sort of thing.

So that's really fascinating. Thank you! I'm going to have to track that book down now.

Yeah. We're humans. We like to kill each other, and we're really good at it, and left to our own devices we'll do it with little or no provocation. This is something that the left tends to overlook, and it's probably one of the root causes as to why we have religions in the first place, rather than just sitting in circles on the ground and being directionlessly 'spiritual' and yammering about the earthmother. Religion tends to build extended communities and it tends to regulate interpersonal relations on a subtle level. Ugg from the caves worships Hoobajooba, and Bugg from the coast worships Higgaldepiggaldy. Bugg screws Ugg out of some goats or something, so Ugg kills his ass. However, six months later, Ugg gets screwed even worse by Zugg of the hill people, but he lets it slide rather than killing him. Why? Because Zugg and Ugg both worship Hoobajoobam and they feel some kind of connection. Not enough to stop the bad things entirely, obviously - Zugg's a bastard and Ugg's a thug - but it ameliorates their behavior enough that Ugg just kicks the crap out of Zugg, rather than killing him, and thus civilization is born: Don't kill people who worship the same god as you, because the wrath of hoobajooba might come down on you besides. And it tends to promote empathy, too. "Those damn Higgaldypiggaldy worshipers from the seafrong just beat up a good Hoobajooba-worshiping woman real bad." "That's terrible!" rather than "So?" It tends to foster an emotional commonality between people who have no immediate connection. It offers a continuity of culture.

Obviously Communism wasn't intended for the death of anyone, it's just an economic theory, and one that seemed reasonably sound at the time. Just as obviously, Maoism and Stalinism are horrible, horrible things, and completely irreligious, and I'm sure we all remember the pseudointelectuals of the 70s and 80s saying "Well, in theory communism is great, and we can't take the perversions of the Soviet Union as a condemnation of the theory." Fine, but if Communism can be so amazingly easily subverted and perverted, then why should leftists be so pissy about the fact that religion is so often and easily perverted? What? It's bad when we do it, but it's ok when they do it? Disingenuous.

And this is a problem that will continue as long as we humans keep believing in things - religions, doctrines, socioeconomic theories, ecological falderal - all of it can and will be perverted, repeatedly, and will end in blood, because that's who we are: we like to kill each other as a species, and we'll find a way to do it. Religion just makes us work a bit harder to get to that end.

As to Objectivism, I'm not denying the glories of individual physical labor. (For other people, anway. I'm lazy, myself) I'm not saying people get satisfaction from a good day's work, regardless the work. I'm not saying that the sense of purpose that the lowly sandwichmaker and the AFL-CIO worker get from their jobs isn't great. Not at all. What I *am* saying is that there are other aspects of our souls that need a sense of fulfilment as well, and they're not material.

Assuming that people will be happy if you give them soup and a job is a fundamental mistake of materialist philosophies: they will be fed and occupied, but that's not the same thing as 'fulfilled.' If you give them entertainment, they'll be fed, occupied, and distracted, and that's almost enough for a lot of people, but there's always that empty spot that cries out for us to fill it in some nonrational, meaningful way, and it's this that causes people to turn Star Trek and Environmentalism in to whacky-assed religions, and then - zang - you're right back to where you started from.

I'm certainly not going to say that there haven't been a kerjillion religious wars in human history, but there's also a kerjillion religiously-inspired refugee programs, scholarships, soup kitchens, humanitarian aid programs, orphanages, battered women's shelters, and good things to come out of it, too. It certainly wasn't the irreligious Nazis smuggling Jews out of Germany, it was the Lutherans. It wasn't the greedy spanish crown that wanted American Indians defined as 'human,' thereby preventing them from being genocidally wiped out, that was the Catholic Church that did that.

Does the ammount of good from these kinds of things offset the bad that comes out of jihads and inquisitions and such? Probably not. However I *do* suspect that it has a hesitation effect that might prevent some of it. Europeans notoriously disliked Jews for millenia, and they did some terrible, terrible things to them, but actually wiping them all out? No, anyone who believes in God in any sense at all would stop short of that. It takes a motivated atheist with no sense of afterlife consequences to do that.

Which isn't me saying "Atheists are Bad," they're not. I was one myself for a time. But there are things that seem more acceptable to some when one believes people are 'merely' animals that are not at all acceptable when one believes that people are more than just a sperm's way of meeting an egg.

What's curious about this is that Rand's own society was destroyed by an utterly militantly atheist state that would tolerate no religion, and actively punished many of those who practiced it. So why would she be so quick to cast off as valueless something her enemy opposed? There's something going on there that I'm not seeing.

The bottom line, though, seems to be my comment above, "Ayn Rand doesn't believe it, therefore it doesn't exist."