[HN Gopher] The Curse of Ayn Rand's Heir
___________________________________________________________________
The Curse of Ayn Rand's Heir
Author : Michelangelo11
Score : 101 points
Date : 2025-04-04 16:23 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
| gcp123 wrote:
| The tragic irony of Objectivism is perfectly captured in
| Peikoff's life story. A man who dedicated himself to a philosophy
| of radical independence ended up defining his entire existence
| through dependency. First on Rand, now apparently on his
| caregiver-turned-wife.
|
| I met Peikoff at an ARI event in 2009. He was surprisingly warm
| in person, but you could see the weight of being "the heir" in
| how defensively he responded to even mild questions about Rand's
| work. Now reading about the fracture with his daughter over the
| estate, it's like watching Atlas Shrugged's plot play out in real
| life: the bitter disputes over Rand's intellectual property
| mirroring the novel's battles over physical resources.
|
| What's most disturbing isn't the personal drama but what this
| reveals about how Objectivism operates in practice. For a
| philosophy obsessed with reason and independence, its
| institutional guardians seem remarkably focused on
| excommunication, loyalty tests, and controlling access to primary
| sources. The gap between preaching individualism while demanding
| conformity has always been the movement's central contradiction.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Whenever I go reading about these people and this ideology and
| community it reminds me a lot of the various Trotskyist or
| other far left sects and personalities I encountered when I was
| younger. Similar dramas and egos and personality quirks and
| strident philosophical emissions, ideologically-focused groups
| built around persons/personalities. Often involving sexual
| relationships and dubious power dynamics. Just from, y'know,
| 180 degree philosophical positions.
|
| Maybe it was a product of her original linguistic/cultural
| extraction, but when I read Rand's "Capitalism: The Unknown
| Ideal" as a teen it reminded me very much of Stalinist or
| Trotskyite tracts I encountered around the same time. Different
| positions, same tone of absolute certainty and similar
| polemical flourishes.
|
| All of which to say, it all strikes me as more theological than
| philosophical.
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| I think this is an astute observation. Taking any extreme
| position will inevitably put someone in the position where
| they find it difficult or impossible to live up to their own
| ideals. At the far ends of the spectrum everything starts to
| look alike.
|
| Ayn Rand herself died while collecting Social Security and
| Medicare.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I mean, I dislike Rand's outlook _passionately_ but I would
| not hold it against her to withdraw from a system she paid
| into or from living in the framework of society she lived
| in, even if she resented it.
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| She wanted to let the disabled starve or beg on street
| corners so she'd have a tiny fraction more wealth to
| fritter away. We don't owe her the benefit of the doubt.
| olalonde wrote:
| I think that's a misrepresentation of her views. She
| opposed self-sacrifice but she wasn't against charity.
| She supported it when it came from a genuine personal
| desire to help others (as opposed to a moral duty).
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| You are half-right. She did say that it should be left to
| charity, but that of course implies that when nobody
| gives the street corner beggar money they will starve.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| _> She wanted to let the disabled starve or beg on street
| corners so she'd have a tiny fraction more wealth_
|
| _> She opposed self-sacrifice but she wasn't against
| charity. She supported it when it came from a genuine
| personal desire to help others (as opposed to a moral
| duty)._
|
| These do not seem like contradictory statements. They are
| just different ways of phrasing the same concept: There
| is no moral duty to help others, and if people can't get
| somebody to desire to help them, they deserve to die.
| olalonde wrote:
| Phrasing is important though.
|
| "She wanted to let kids die from accidental drownings so
| she'd be able to have a pool."
|
| vs
|
| "She wanted pools to be legal."
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| When you say that those unable to work "have to rely on
| voluntary charity" it is functionally equivalent to
| saying that people should be left to starve when others
| don't have extra money (IE - During a recession). She was
| either a short-sighted simpleton who couldn't see that,
| or evil enough to see it and ignore it.
|
| I suspect that it was the latter.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rM4HqlqQYwo
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| You're engaging in a false dichotomy. The possibilities
| are not "Rand was a dum-dum" or "Rand was evil". There's
| also the (very likely) possibility that either she was
| wrong, or you are wrong (and yes, you could be wrong in
| your analysis even though I don't blame you for not
| thinking you are), through no fault of character. These
| sorts of big issues are _hard_ to analyze and get right.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| You seem to be implying there's some moral gray area on
| the issue of allowing disabled people to starve? Am I
| misreading what you're saying?
| Pixelbrick wrote:
| Too right. Never trust someone who thinks they have all the
| answers.
| lukan wrote:
| "All of which to say, it all strikes me as more theological
| than philosophical."
|
| Oh yes, when marxists debate about the interpretation of the
| holy words of the manifest and how dictatorship is not bad,
| if only the right people with the right ideological mindset
| are in charge, then it always annoyed me, that they claim to
| be rational scientists.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I mean, I'm a Marxist, and I don't say those things.
| lukan wrote:
| That would be a good start for a debate then.
|
| (But maybe not the right place and I don't have my
| arguments at hand, has been a while that I engaged with
| marxists)
| hannasanarion wrote:
| I think they're just trying to inform you that you're
| painting with a broader brush than you might realize.
|
| There are lots of flavors of Marxism out there, the one
| you're describing is often called "Orthodox Marxism" or
| the closely related "Marxism-Leninism".
|
| It's now considered pretty outdated, with most of Marxist
| thought having moved on to less rigid modes of
| conceptualizing history and geopolitics, like Western
| Marxism (Frankfurt School), Autonomist Marxism, Eco-
| Marxism, Libertarian Marxism, Structural Marxism, etc.
|
| There is a reason that "leftist infighting" is a century-
| old meme. Leftism is fundamentally a political movement
| grounded in moral philosophy, but since moral philosophy
| is an unsolved and likely unsolvable field, fractionalism
| is guaranteed.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| It is incredibly hard to separate three things,
| perceptually, before even having a discussion with
| anybody about these topics, so I rarely try.
|
| 1. Marx and -- various political-economic thinkers who
| came after him inspired by him -- who were _analysts_ of
| capitalism and modern society. Maybe also dabbling in
| prescriptive aspects -- but a lot less than laymen would
| think. Just full on boring economics or political
| philosophy concerned with analyzing _the present_ , not
| describing any future.
|
| 2. Eastern bloc & Maoist "Marxist-Leninism", Stalinism,
| or whatever which became official state ideology in
| eastern bloc countries with simplifications of _some_ of
| the above along with a series of rationalizations for the
| "way things were" in the USSR and related countries.
| Usually mangling some form of #1 to do that.
|
| 3. Various Marxist political action/groups/parties/sects
| which merged varying aspects of #1 and #2 along with
| whatever else, in various combinations and permutations,
| to intervene in politics at either an activist level or
| in political parties, or armed groups etc.
|
| Especially people who grew up in the eastern bloc
| definitely perceive I think a lot more correspondence
| between #1 and #2 than I'd personally say is valid. A
| whole educational industry was built around it there for
| the purpose of ideological legitimation of some Really
| Bad Stuff. With some of that leaking into the west, too.
|
| And I don't feel it's really a "no true Scotsman" type of
| statement to say that either. Marx himself had little to
| say about the future, and just a lot to say about the
| present (which is still our present). What #2 said about
| themselves doesn't bear much resemblance to #1 because it
| wasn't actually the _concern_ of Marx or many of the
| thinkers who came after. They were critics of capitalism,
| not prophets attempting to come up with recipes to be
| used as justification by Slavic autocrats for crimes
| against humanity...
| sevensor wrote:
| > it reminds me a lot of the various Trotskyist or other far
| left sects and personalities
|
| I think she never stopped being a child of the Russian
| Revolution. It was the formative event of her youth.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >it reminds me a lot of the various Trotskyist or other far
| left sects and personalities I encountered when I was
| younger.
|
| because that is exactly what it is. Rand idolized and
| worshipped great men and industrialists the way the Soviets
| taught you too, except through an American funhouse mirror.
|
| Her individualism wasn't an authentic lived inner freedom of
| for example Tolstoy (in a religious way) or Stirner (in an
| atheist way) but simply worship of individuality and
| particular individuals. It's why it made for a fantastic mass
| movement and fandom of sorts.
| yapyap wrote:
| That is pretty funny, in the ironic sense.
|
| What it feels like to me is the leaders of the Objectivism
| movement are all narcissists and the followers are
| paradoxically not Objectivists because they're following a
| philosophy instead of being guided by the self.
|
| Being a peak Objectivist would be to not care about being an
| Objectivist or not, basically making it impossible to be an
| Objectivist if you follow the philosophy, even at the top of it
| because you are dependent on your followers for influence,
| status and power.
|
| The irony of it all, turns out a philosophy based on self
| sufficiency is as big of a grift as a political movement trying
| to convince everyone that in this day and age self sufficiency
| is the best move, mostly cause they can't fathom sharing.
|
| One of the _most_ ironic bits being that if everyone were truly
| self sufficient there would be no social hierarchy and no money
| anymore.
| seanhunter wrote:
| Objectivism has many of these sorts of contradictions. Most
| famously, Ayn Rand herself collected medicare and social
| security as her health deteriorated towards the end of her
| life.
| lumenwrites wrote:
| Is that really a contradiction? We all have our ideals, and
| we all fail to live up to them sometimes, because life can
| be brutal.
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| To be fair, Rand herself said (to paraphrase) that
| because the state took it from her against her will it
| was fair play to take it back and I think that was self-
| consistent.
|
| That said, she wanted to let the disabled starve to death
| so I don't think anyone really has to be fair to her at
| all. Empathy is only for the empathetic.
| marknutter wrote:
| Ayn Rand did not "want to let the disabled starve to
| death". What a ridiculous lie.
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| It is not a lie. She felt that the government had no
| right to assist, and that they should be left to depend
| on "charity" (IE - Begging).
|
| There are also tapes of her saying that the retarded
| should not "be allowed to come near children," and that
| children cannot deal with the "spectacle of a handicapped
| human being."
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| Question from audience: [muffled audio which sounds
| like:] "...why is this culture..."
|
| [loud noise which sounds as if it represents a point
| where the tape has been edited]
|
| Rand: [mid-sentence] "...for healthy children to use
| handicapped materials. I quite agree with the speaker's
| indignation. I think it's a monstrous thing -- the whole
| progression of everything they're doing -- to feature, or
| answer, or favor the incompetent, the retarded, the
| handicapped, including, you know, the kneeling buses and
| all kinds of impossible expenses. I do not think that the
| retarded should be ~allowed~ to come ~near~ children.
| Children cannot deal, and should not have to deal, with
| the very tragic spectacle of a handicapped human being.
| When they grow up, they may give it some attention, if
| they're interested, but it should never be presented to
| them in childhood, and certainly not as an example of
| something ~they~ have to live down to."
|
| - Ayn Rand, The Age of Mediocrity, Q & A Ford Hall Forum,
| April, 1981
|
| *EDIT* Youtube video: https://youtu.be/Q1HD8KXn-kI
| glenstein wrote:
| Great pull, thank you for the quote and the link.
| try_the_bass wrote:
| > Children cannot deal, and should not have to deal, with
| the very tragic spectacle of a handicapped human being.
| When they grow up, they may give it some attention, if
| they're interested, but it should never be presented to
| them in childhood, and certainly not as an example of
| something ~they~ have to live down to."
|
| There's an irony in here, since this is more of less a
| summary of the ideology that wants "safe spaces" in
| schools.
|
| Just, you know, with an entirely different set of things
| that proponents want to shield children/young adults
| from.
| autoexec wrote:
| "Selfish person happily takes from the government, but
| feels bad about having ever given the government
| anything" seems pretty consistent to me too.
| seanhunter wrote:
| Socrates allowed himself to be put to death even though
| his supporters had bribed the jailer to allow him to
| escape. Given his philosophy of ethics, even though his
| trial had been unjust, he felt it was incompatible with
| his teachings for him to avoid the sentence that had been
| handed down to him.
|
| Some people believe that their ideals are important
| enough to live up to even though life can be brutal.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| I don't agree with her worldview, but it isn't a
| contradiction. She paid into the system.
| MadnessASAP wrote:
| > Being a peak Objectivist would be to not care about being
| an Objectivist or not, basically making it impossible to be
| an Objectivist if you follow the philosophy, even at the top
| of it because you are dependent on your followers for
| influence, status and power.
|
| So basically objectivism is the punk of the philosophical
| world?
| gopher_space wrote:
| Punk is more about positive nihilism, from my perspective.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| If you have the extremist definition that says that nobody
| can actually be punk.
| gnramires wrote:
| It should be noted: Rand's definition of objectivism doesn't
| exactly match what you expect from the common sense usage of
| the word.
|
| I think Objectivism fails because at least in part it doesn't
| establish solid enough foundations, and takes as fact
| unproven things that rely on mountains of suppositions and
| not always reliable evidence.
|
| For example, whatever you think of "laissez-faire capitalism"
| (as supported by Rand), it's very weird to make its defense
| part of a philosophy, more so as a kind of axiomatic
| statement. Imagine someone were deep into some math book, say
| a dense Algebraic Geometry textbook, and it was just declared
| out of the blue that "laissez-faire capitalism is an ideal
| system" or something like that. That could even be true
| within some context, but I think it's out of place. It also
| relies on so many assumptions and is far from conclusively
| proven (the way capitalism is implemented also varies
| considerably today, and I don't agree that being maximally
| "laissez-faire" turned out to be better, at least not
| obviously)[1]. I would even understand she divulged her
| political ideas, but kept separate from the basis of a
| philosophy.
|
| Also, like many philosophies, I don't think objectivism
| survives a closer scientific scrutiny. I suppose there was no
| firm grasp on what the mind was, or the nature of conscious
| (there is still some uncertainty, but much more clarity). I
| like how Dr Rachel Barr (a neuroscientist I follow on social
| networks) put it: old philosophies, specially about the human
| mind and soul, made great observations some of which
| unfortunately (such as that the 'Pineal gland is the
| principal seat of the soul' as regarded by Rene Descartes)
| can be "swept away" and basically definitely disproved by
| science from a better understanding of the nature of our
| brains and minds. Some assertions about perception and
| consciousness seem to be outdated.
|
| I particularly object (no pun intended) to the basis of
| ethics as individuals. As I've argued previously[2], we now
| understand the nature of consciousness to, in my view, not
| justify an ethics that is based solely on the primacy of
| self-interest. We are part of a giant network of
| interactions, and although the self seems like a very
| important concept for our society, metaphysically it doesn't
| make much sense to prioritize the self at all costs (even
| when this prioritization includes some strategic concessions
| for altruism), though I think it's important that we take
| care of ourselves for pragmatic reasons, because we basically
| are the ones that understand ourselves the most and live with
| ourselves 24/7.
|
| I think Objectivism (although again I am no specialist, I
| haven't studied it profoundly) has merits around notions of
| reality being singular and shared by everyone in one way or
| another, and (hypothesis mine) if everything derives from a
| singular reality, by understanding this singular reality we
| should be able to in a certain sense understand everything
| (including ethics, art and morality, which I think is highly
| counterintuitive) -- because our brains and minds which form
| the basis of such questions are part of reality, as well as
| any internal processes within those that enable subjective
| perception and subjective reality.
|
| I wrote more about this here[3]. Please take a look if you're
| interested.
|
| [1] Not to mention, we hardly got to try out 2 (or maybe 3)
| political systems in any serious way: capitalism and
| socialism (also perhaps social democracy), although there are
| a myriad of variations to experiment with as well (forms of
| voting, systems of regulation, the design of various
| institutions) that aren't considered when talking about
| "political systems". Who knows if something else could be
| better? I think a more general view of society as a whole as
| a kind of giant system is necessary to understand how to
| design better societies in general.
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43528352
|
| [3] https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1iv1x1m/
| the... Please see the questions where I expanded a little
| upon those ideas :)
| glenstein wrote:
| Caveat that I used to be into Objectivism but now would say
| I'm extremely unsympathetic to it as a project. I don't
| think it's so odd that a philosophy would venture into
| economic systems as part of the course to staking out moral
| axioms and preferred conditions of relations between
| people. I'm not laissez-faire by any stretch, but there are
| such things as economic philosophies that wrestle with
| questions of liberty. Economics is a very philosophical
| subject, and moral, political, and economic philosophy can
| become quite entangled, for good reasons.
|
| While I think your math example is basically right, it
| would be surprising there, I don't think economic order
| emerging out of moral and philosophical reflections is
| particularly surprising.
| hannasanarion wrote:
| > Objectivism has merits around notions of reality being
| singular and shared by everyone in one way or another, and
| (hypothesis mine) if everything derives from a singular
| reality, by understanding this singular reality we should
| be able to in a certain sense understand everything
| (including ethics, art and morality, which I think is
| highly counterintuitive)
|
| But this is a violation of Hume's Guillotine. You cannot
| derive "ought" statements from "is" statements. There is
| only one reality, and science can tell us how it is, but
| science cannot tell us how it ought to be, how much we
| should like it, or in what ways we should want to alter it.
|
| Rand and her followers fail in their attempted logical
| chain by leaping from "humans evolved rationality as a tool
| to survive and enhance their lives" to "enhancement of each
| individual's life via self-interest is the standard of
| moral value", which is non-sequitur. Rationality is the
| ability to make plans and accomplish goals, the fact that
| it exists does not tell us which goals we should use it in
| the service of.
|
| She smuggles in her own pre-existing moral preference when
| she defines individual flourishing as the ultimate moral
| good. You can see this very easily if you take the exact
| same syllogism and substitute "community interest" for
| "personal interest". In fact this modified version of the
| argument may be even more valid, since a defining feature
| of humanity even more than our rationality is our unique
| community organizing power, which is also evolved, and thus
| community service also serves perfectly well as an
| evolution-informed yardstick of moral value.
| kashunstva wrote:
| > what this reveals about how Objectivism operates in
| practice...the movement's central contradiction
|
| Is it only the gatekeepers of Rand's legacy that exhibit this
| discrepancy, or was it contradiction from the beginning? I seem
| to remember the first Objectivist herself accepted assistance
| from the Federal government near the end of her life.
|
| Anyway, to someone with a distant outsider's view of this
| movement, it can seem that it misses something fundamental
| about the human psyche as it evolved to operate in co-dependent
| groups.
| thrance wrote:
| Not really a defense of this clown ideology, but Rand would
| be acting rationally (if a bit hypocritically) by accepting
| the Government's check. In her views, it's the State that's
| acting irrationally by offering support in the first place.
|
| On a similar subject, she believed disabled people (or more
| generally, people unable to work) should not receive any help
| other than from "voluntary charity" [1], a fact I find
| absolutely disgusting and should discredit this ideology to
| any sane person.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/rM4HqlqQYwo
| notahacker wrote:
| Even her fictional utopia Galt's Gulch is basically a
| commune, a commune where people cosplay at being hardnosed
| capitalists who won't give anything for free by charging each
| other token amounts for everything...
| lazystar wrote:
| Exactly - theyre all non-conformists, and you can be a non-
| conformist and join them in their commune if you act just
| like them in every way.
| kbelder wrote:
| She addressed the problem with accepting assistance in
| relation to student tuition assistance. Briefly, she said
| hate the game, not the player. The students have a structure
| imposed upon them, and it's not irrational or unethical to
| take the aid the government provides since the government
| still regulates them and taxes them in various ways. However,
| it would be unethical to advocate for increasing that
| assistance (because the benefit is taken forcibly from
| others).
| btilly wrote:
| Accepting assistance is perfectly in accord with her
| philosophy.
|
| You can verify her position from
| https://courses.aynrand.org/works/the-question-of-
| scholarshi.... She views taxation as theft. Those who agree
| and advocate against this theft, may morally accept
| government largesse as restitution. But those who accept both
| the taxation and the redistribution become complicit in the
| theft, and are therefore immoral.
|
| There is a lot to criticize in her views. But this piece of
| it is not inconsistent. Only bizarre to someone who doesn't
| understand her.
| glenstein wrote:
| Right, and I think there has unfortunately been an
| avalanche of low effort gotchas along these lines.
|
| My favorite (or least favorite?) example is from Jennifer
| Burns' biography Goddess of the Market, which charges that
| title "The Fountainhead" was a haphazard last second
| choice, selecting a word that never appears in the novel.
| But slight problem with that, a climactic conversation
| about ideals, perhaps the climactic articulation of values
| in the book, occurs between two main characters who use the
| term "fount" as a stand-in term for the wellspring of human
| creation, value, and meaning. Fountainhead, then, is who
| the main character is, and nothing other than typical
| artistic restraint in selecting a title that simultaneously
| points to the intellectual center of the novel without
| being browbeating about the term itself. I actually emailed
| Jennifer Burns and pointed this out at one point but didn't
| hear back.
|
| I do think the collapse of many of Rand's closest
| interpersonal relationships, the depression and drinking
| that her husband went into, as well as the legacy of her
| institute and estate, are quite damning. As of course is
| the shallow treatment of complicated topics, the
| fundamental misunderstanding of Kant that inspired the name
| of the whole philosophy, and the inapplicability of
| principles to mortals who wrestle with personal flaws.
| Those are real, but the social security thing isn't.
| btilly wrote:
| One of the major reasons why there are so many low effort
| gotchas is that her message is so emotionally
| uncomfortable for many. Facing what is legitimate in her
| criticisms is hard. And so people only consider her views
| long enough to come up with easily rejected caricatures.
| The arguments that they then use to reject those
| caricatures show how they did not actually process her
| point of view.
|
| But this is not just a problem that faces non-
| Objectivists. For example consider how Ayn Rand rejected
| the scientific evidence for smoking causing harm. She
| never had a logical argument. What she had was such an
| overwhelming emotional commitment to smoking being good
| that she would latch on to any plausible sounding
| argument against smoking being bad.
|
| For a more current example, look at Alex Epstein's
| arguments on global warming. It quickly becomes apparent
| that he has such a strong emotional alignment with the
| great good caused by fossil fuels that he easily accepts
| any argument, no matter how flawed, that they might also
| cause harm. Compounding the trouble, global warming
| presents the exact kind of tragedy of the commons that
| undermines the economic theories by which Objectivism
| should lead to an economic utopia. This fact adds to the
| emotional dynamics for ignoring evidence that reality
| doesn't actually work in the ways that Ayn Rand claimed.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The ability to _explain away_ hypocrisy is not the same as
| a _lack_ of hypocrisy.
| glenstein wrote:
| I mean if it's a good explanation, then it most
| definitely _is_ the same as lack of hypocrisy.
|
| I do see how you can squint and feel that there's
| _something_ there, after all Rand imagined a capitalist
| utopia. But it 's not at all a crazy argument to
| understand accepting the benefits as a recovery of
| resources that were rightfully yours to begin with. It's
| actually refreshingly coherent and responsive, and a huge
| contrast with how modern public figures don't even
| pretend to address instances of personal hypocrisy.
|
| I might raise a _little_ bit of an eyebrow but I don 't
| see the knockdown gotcha, and if you do, well, you've
| gotta make the argument.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > But it's not at all a crazy argument to understand
| accepting the benefits as a recovery of resources that
| were rightfully yours to begin with.
|
| I rather suspect Rand's politics didn't include giving
| land back to Native Americans, or paying reparations to
| slaves.
| glenstein wrote:
| Great point and no disagreements from me there, it's
| actually a great illustration of an intellectual blind
| spot her philosophy is practically helpless to address.
|
| But one comment ago the subject was social security, and
| I don't think the charge of hypocrisy sticks on that one.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > But one comment ago the subject was social security,
| and I don't think the charge of hypocrisy sticks on that
| one.
|
| But that difference _is_ the hypocrisy!
|
| "I get to have this... because it was taken from me! No,
| that doesn't apply to _your_ thing, because... uh... "
| glenstein wrote:
| We could live in a world where there was no injustice
| visited on Native Americans and Ayn Rand still either was
| or was not a hypocrite about Social Security. But I think
| Rand neutralized that by putting it in the context of
| losing money via taxation and recovering it as a benefit.
|
| What's essential to that argument is what's contained in
| Rand's philosophy about taxation and her personal actions
| in electing to receive the benefit. Broadening the scope
| of the argument to include Native Americans in order to
| sustain the charge of hypocrisy is an indicator that the
| Social Security argument is not able to stand on its own.
| btilly wrote:
| The fact that it is a good explanation, doesn't mean that
| hypocrisy is missing. It is quite common for us to do
| things for one reason, while actually being motivated by
| a second, unacknowledged, reason.
|
| For example consider this case. When we become dependent
| upon another's largesse, it is easy to emotionally deal
| with it by holding the other in contempt. Thereby making
| it emotionally comfortable to accept the largesse, and
| hiding from any potential feeling of guilt. For example
| Ayn Rand did an excellent job of portraying this dynamic
| on a personal level with the example of Lillian Reardon.
| Who holds Hank in contempt exactly because it keeps her
| from having to face how much of a parasite she has
| become.
|
| I've seen Objectivists fall into exactly this dynamic.
| When their contempt for the government becomes a way to
| avoid thinking about how dependent they have actually
| become on said government, continuing to spout Ayn Rand's
| justification becomes hypocrisy. And as long as the
| underlying emotional reality is ignored, it remains
| hypocrisy no matter how logical and reasonable the
| explanation may be.
| glenstein wrote:
| We must have fundamentally different ideas of what it
| means for something to be a good explanation. It takes
| more than gesturing toward the _hypothetical possibility_
| of acting due to unacknowledged motives for it to count
| as a best, or even good, explanation.
|
| I used to follow a lot of RSS feeds and the political
| blogosphere when that was a thing. And one of the best
| was Brendan Nyhan, and he had a routine segment
| criticizing op-ed sections for fabricating internal
| monologues of political actors, making assumptions about
| internal states of mind that could never be disproved and
| proceeding to analysis that depended upon such
| unfalsifiable speculation.
|
| I think it was a good principle against which to judge
| media accountability, and I would generalize by saying
| that such speculation involves relaxing the norms that
| usually apply to critical thinking writ large. At the
| level of genre, this category of speculating I would say
| does not enjoy default legitimacy due to its departure
| from normal critical thinking principles relating to
| substantiation and a fundamental lack of interest in
| responding to arguments on their merits.
| btilly wrote:
| I'm arguing for the hypothetical possibility that an
| Objectivist could have hypocrisy on this. The argument
| that any individual Objectivist actually does requires a
| tremendous amount of additional information.
|
| I do personally know some Objectivists who I believe are
| hypocritical on this matter. But that is based on years
| of interaction, and I wouldn't expect you to be convinced
| of that simply because I said it.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| That's still very self serving. The taxes she paid were
| spent on something else, the largesse she received was
| stolen from somebody else. I guess receiving stolen goods
| was ok in her philosophy?
| jollyllama wrote:
| > The gap between preaching individualism while demanding
| conformity has always been the movement's central
| contradiction.
|
| Check out Adam Curtis's documentaries for work that zeroes in
| on this.
| hinkley wrote:
| Something life and then later therapy has taught me is that
| intellect can paper over a lot of shortcomings, but it's just
| paper. At the end of the day situations that involve humans
| always involve feelings. And you stunt your growth (personal or
| organizational) if you try to pretend it isn't the case.
|
| The problem with intellectualizing is that it's very good at
| employing itself to avoid all other options. If you get too old
| pretending otherwise, the road back is full of brambles and
| many would rather double down than accept it.
|
| Once you understand this it's easy to see the hollowness in
| what Rand offers, if it wasn't already patently obvious to you
| before.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> At the end of the day situations that involve humans
| always involve feelings._
|
| My more cynical take is that humans are emotional beings
| first and foremost, and reason is a distant second at best.
| And even our pretenses to reason can't be trusted, as they
| are often just emotion masquerading as reason, and the most
| insufferable of the reasonpilled are those that refuse to
| understand this.
|
| I'm not trying to say emotion/reason are good/bad. What I am
| trying to say is that any hopes for a human society that
| place reason above emotion are fundamentally unachievable.
| hinkley wrote:
| I know some people are pushing back on Thinking, Fast and
| Slow's assertions but whether everyone's brains work that
| way or not, there's at least a visible minority of people
| whose brains do, and I'm among them.
|
| We do many things based entirely on intuition, and then
| afterward gin up a reason for having done them that doesn't
| make us sound insane, or like five year olds. It's part
| explanation/excuse and part description, but presented as
| description.
|
| And if you've read anything on anger management, there's a
| split second where the angry individual is experiencing
| some other emotion, like vulnerability or betrayal, before
| they sublimate it into anger. The problem is in how fast
| and to what degree they perform the substitution, and often
| even they miss the event, which takes away their own agency
| in the response. Recovery involves clawing back that
| agency.
| hannasanarion wrote:
| Thinking Fast and Slow's biggest issues are in the middle
| chapters that rely heavily on priming research, which has
| been pretty thoroughly disproven since the book's
| release.
|
| The general gist of the core idea: that there are
| multiple modes of thinking and some of them are more
| likely to produce the most rational decisions than others
| in a given circumstance, is pretty trivially true.
|
| I think where Kahneman's book does harm is in the
| implication (intended or otherwise) that "fast thinking"
| is bad. It's not. Thinking is expensive in time,
| attention, effort, and skill. We have instincts and
| emotional reactions for good reasons, they help us
| navigate crises when there isn't time for deep thought,
| and they are the consequences that reverberate through
| the complex web of interpersonal relations that makes up
| society.
|
| Your note about anger management is really interesting
| though. I think there may be a tendency for people to
| generalize emotions that they feel into flavors that are
| more externalizable and less actionable. Vulnerability
| and betrayal are things that inspire changes in behavior,
| like building up defenses or reorienting loyalties, but
| when you're angry, well then you're just angry, and the
| only thing that will make you stop being angry is the
| world being different.
|
| I think there's another version that I experience often,
| where I see my partner doing cool fun things with other
| people, and my brain triggers jealousy, which like anger
| is externalized and inflictive. If I slow down and spend
| some time with that feeling and drill down into it, I
| usually conclude that what I'm actually feeling is envy,
| which is more actionable: i can go get/do the thing that
| I am envious of (like make a plan to do the cool fun
| thing with my partner or somebody else in the future) and
| then I won't be envious anymore, without having to make
| the world change for me.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > We do many things based entirely on intuition, and then
| afterward gin up a reason for having done them
|
| This is much better covered in Haidt's "The Righteous
| Mind". He goes into detail on when this happens and when
| it doesn't.
|
| What studies have shown (and jives well with my
| experience): For topics you believe involve morality,
| this is precisely what happens: You make the decision,
| and the rationale follows. It happens so fast even you
| believe the rationale comes first.
|
| One of the ways they tested it was by showing that moral
| decisions tend to have no cognitive load. If you ask
| someone something that requires cognitive load (e.g.
| analyzing some data), they slow down significantly while
| multitasking with trivial activities (e.g. putting lots
| of food in an organized way in the fridge). But when
| posed with issues of morality, they show no slowdown.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| > any hopes for a human society that place reason above
| emotion are fundamentally unachievable.
|
| Hopes for mutual checks and balances between the two might
| be, for some if not all.
| QuadmasterXLII wrote:
| we spend most of our lives playing iterated prisoners
| dilemmas, a game which presumably can be cracked by some
| godlike intellect, but which is far beyond the capabilities
| of our current philosophy. Emotions, put well to use, do
| well at this task.
| hinkley wrote:
| That's probably why we evolved emotions in the first
| place. First to create and protect your own offspring and
| then to allow allegiances against the elements and other
| creatures.
| klank wrote:
| To add to the conversation:
|
| If it is accurate to consider the philosophical concept
| of a valence as a fundamental building block of emotions,
| then I think I'm fairly comfortable going a step further
| from just the evolutionary explanation of emotions to a
| more positive directive around emotional development
| within ones self and the support of that development
| within others as being a _deeply moral_ action as well.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > What I am trying to say is that any hopes for a human
| society that place reason above emotion are fundamentally
| unachievable.
|
| What is sad is that you label this with cynicism, whereas
| everyone else considers this fundamental to life.
| kibwen wrote:
| Again without trying to make an overall value judgment on
| emotion vs. reason, one of the things that is attractive
| about reason is that it has built-in capacity for self-
| correction, i.e. we can use logic to prove that our own
| logic is faulty, and this is an ordinary and non-
| traumatic event. In contrast, self-correcting an
| emotional process is something an individual might spend
| a lifetime struggling with, if they can even identify a
| problem in the first place. To suggest that people are
| fundamentally emotional animals is to suggest that
| individuals cannot be expected to improve themselves.
| drdaeman wrote:
| > any hopes for a human society that place reason above
| emotion are fundamentally unachievable
|
| If you haven't read it, you may enjoy Robert Sapolsky's
| "Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will". I
| haven't yet finished it (only halfway through the book) but
| I found it a very fascinating read so far, no matter
| whenever one agrees with the conclusions or not. And I
| think it resonates and kind of confirms your comment,
| coming at it from a neurological viewpoint.
|
| The book basically outlines which parts of the brain are
| responsible for our decision making. While I understand
| that he's drastically [over]simplifying things for readers'
| sake (as it's always the case with pop-sci), it provides a
| nice overview (a bunch of fun facts, with references to the
| actual scientific research where they came from) of how our
| decisions are _heavily_ influenced by a lot of various
| things, in the context of your comment specifically - the
| processes going on in our brains that we can roughly call
| "emotions".
| randysalami wrote:
| I think this exact phenomenon is shown pretty well in the
| series, Better Call Saul with Chuck McGill.
| klank wrote:
| I had what I thought to be an immensely successful 25+ career
| and personal life based upon my intellect.
|
| And, as you mention, I grew older, wiser, and realized it was
| not at all what I thought it was. In my professional life
| alone I have caused immense harm. Indirectly, sure, but no
| less real, serious, harm and death. Being unable to escape
| this fact has caused depression and massive disruption to my
| personal life.
|
| But I am not unhappy that I have learned what I have, about
| myself, about this world. It's horrible, but a more clear,
| diverse understanding is worth the pain. And as a person,
| even with the pain, I'm far more comfortable with my newfound
| place in the world and I'm a far, far better person to the
| people around me.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I can't imagine what your career was.
|
| I was a programmer at Apple and have to really scratch my
| head to think of any way I might have even slightly
| worsened someone's life.
| klank wrote:
| I (along with others) created pricing optimization
| software for the multi-family housing industry.
| wileydragonfly wrote:
| Let me gather some pitch forks..
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| A good apology requires:
|
| - overt recognition that I have harmed someone else
|
| - following through on whatever reparations I can make to
| undo part of the harm
|
| - actively trying to change myself to avoid making the
| same type of mistake again.
|
| --
|
| It sounds like you have taken this to heart.
| BeetleB wrote:
| As someone who has dabbled in real estate, this doesn't
| sound all that bad.
|
| Yes, some (most? not sure) such companies did some wrong
| stuff - and perhaps you were involved (you don't really
| say, so I'm guessing).
|
| But the category itself? It seems fine as long as they
| follow the regulations related to price fixing.
|
| When you said you caused great harm in your professional
| life, I was thinking more along the lines of "being a
| terrible person to work with", which is probably more in
| line with the original person you responded to was
| thinking.
| chimpanzee wrote:
| You're getting some flippant, dismissive responses, but I
| applaud your perspective and your acceptance of the
| partial responsibility you (and most of us) bear. It
| takes courage, introspection, selflessness, and a
| broader, empathic worldview. If more people were like
| you, the world would be a far better place. Thank you.
|
| That said, I am sorry you've been burdened to the point
| of depression and personal struggles. It can be a natural
| outcome of difficult realizations and guilt, but I don't
| wish it upon someone for longer than necessary to make
| positive changes in their life (which you seem to have
| achieved, given your openness).
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| Working for a megacorp famous for blatant anticonsumer
| practices, I have to scratch my head to think of an
| innocuous IT position inside it. Maybe infrastructure?
| Even seemingly innocent roles like design have dark
| patters at their core that use things like green bubbles
| and social pressure as part of their sales strategy.
| hinkley wrote:
| I'm sure the employees of Bayer and their suppliers told
| themselves the same thing during WWII. We're just making
| tools and equipment that let the bad guys do their work.
| We aren't actually involved in the bad stuff.
|
| I took a job at Boeing when the 787 was being built, with
| those fancy engines and airframe designs that improved
| efficiency considerably. But I did the math and I want to
| say you still have a bigger footprint in the new planes
| than driving a family of 3 to the destination in a
| private car, and that's before you include Jevon in the
| picture. Never mind rail or other forms of transit.
|
| I left that place much less proud than when I arrived. I
| left before that turned to shame, however.
| klank wrote:
| After I left the MFH industry I took a position at AWS.
| My thinking at the time was this was a safe
| "infrastructure" position where I could apply myself in
| relative safety just worrying about bits being pushed
| around the internet.
|
| However, after taking a good hard look at my past career
| contributions, it was impossible for me to not apply the
| same moral framework to my involvement at AWS. And while
| it wasn't quite as direct harm in the way of my MFH
| optimization work, it still wasn't difficult for me to
| see that if I succeeded, while the bits would flow fast
| and the metrics would rise high, I wasn't _doing good_. I
| was, at best, furthering an exploitive system.
|
| While I don't feel the same level of regret for my
| contributions to AWS, I don't feel good about my
| contributions either.
| jeltz wrote:
| I have worked with online gambling. An industry where for
| most companies the bulk of the income comes from the
| addicts, not the non-problematic gamblers.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| I thought I could dissociate work-for-pay from my sense
| of self enough for this not to matter. It's all mercenary
| work, right? I've never _cared_ about most of it, right?
| What 's the difference?
|
| I made it about three months in that industry. The pay
| was great but I was hardly sleeping by the end of the
| first month.
|
| I found my limit, I guess.
| klank wrote:
| I too dissociated from my work and I did it for decades.
| This is not a healthy thing for a human to do and there
| will be an emotional debt paid, at some point even if
| only done for weeks, or months.
|
| I'm glad you did not last long in the industry, for your
| personal and our collective goods. I hope you're in a
| good place today.
| klank wrote:
| Sadly and unfortunately, in addition to the MFH ills that
| I have done, I also was involved with optimization for
| gaming hospitality as well as systems and tools around
| slots optimization.
|
| I regret my involvement here as well and am sorry I did
| what I did.
| squigz wrote:
| Is it so hard to imagine areas of the software industry
| that produce real measurable harm? One doesn't even need
| to go so nuanced as gambling or other such things - how
| many software engineers does the 'defence' industry
| employ?
| KittenInABox wrote:
| There's also software engineers that work in ads.
| Instagram [known to have a causal effect in eating
| disorders, which is one of the more deadly mental
| illnesses]. Health insurance [unitedhealthcare was using
| software to automatically deny people healthcare-- this
| definitely has killed people].
| autoexec wrote:
| > I was a programmer at Apple and have to really scratch
| my head to think of any way I might have even slightly
| worsened someone's life.
|
| If you were responsible for itunes I could give you a few
| examples.
| zerealshadowban wrote:
| >the road back is full of brambles
|
| v.good image, thank you
| zpeti wrote:
| I think you have to consider personality types when
| discussing things like this. Rand seems to me like she
| probably had Asperger's, which explains why she is attracted
| to rationality, and her heroes are like that too.
|
| That works for some people.
|
| I read Nietzsche after rand and I thought his philosophy had
| some similarities to rand but from a more emotional
| perspective. They say very similar things about being
| yourself and being selfish, but one from rationality the
| other from emotions.
|
| For me the difference between musk and Steve jobs
| demonstrates this. One is an engineer entrepreneur the other
| an artist entrepreneur. Both incredibly successful but
| couldn't be more different, but of course both are assholes
| too and took what they wanted from the world.
| hinkley wrote:
| I'm talking to a group of people I assume to be
| substantially software developers, and the facts on the
| ground are that many of us are attracted to this field by
| logic, and we are all encouraged in college and for a few
| years after to invest every spare moment into CS and not
| any other endeavors. Don't socialize without an agenda,
| don't develope your EQ, just computers and logic all the
| time.
|
| That consumes most of the years when your prefrontal cortex
| is still malleable.
|
| Once you understand that, the consequences are everywhere
| you care to look.
|
| And while it's true we have twice the density of the
| general population of neurodivergent people, we nearly all
| of us make ourselves neurodivergent in the pursuit of this
| field, whether we are born with it or not. When we
| eventually find time for hobbies and charities we find out
| we don't think like everyone else, and often not in a good
| way. We have "missed out" on experiences others take for
| granted.
| godsinhisheaven wrote:
| People certainly can make themselves neurodivergent, but
| I think most people are born that way. I think there are
| lots of reasons why CS and tech at large is full of
| neurodivergent people, but I think people are joinging
| because they are neurodivergent, not the other way
| around. That being said, there are lots of neurodivergent
| people in finance and (the higher levels of) politics,
| they're just mostly psychopaths.
| BosunoB wrote:
| I fell into Rand in high school and it took me a few years to
| climb out.
|
| The problem with believing in the primacy of reason is that
| it's incredibly distortionary. In reality, we all think and
| reason with respect to our ego and our emotions, and so if
| you believe that you are engaging in pure reason, it can lead
| you to pave over the ways in which your emotions are
| affecting your line of thought.
|
| In this way it can quickly become a very dogmatic, self-
| reinforcing way of thinking. The ironic thing is that
| becoming a better thinker is not done by studying logic, but
| instead by learning to recognize and respect your own
| emotional responses.
| autoexec wrote:
| Most of our choices aren't thought out and logical. Our
| emotions and lizard brain drive most of our actions, but
| some of us are very good at quickly coming up with
| justifications and rationalizations for what we've just
| done that are plausible enough that we end up feeling in
| control.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| Great post! I think it all comes down to self awareness.
| The more you are aware of your conscious and unconscious
| biases, you are the more empowered to mitigate the
| resultant rational failures.
| sevensor wrote:
| Yeah, "think for yourself, and if you disagree with me that
| means you're doing it wrong" is a heck of a way to run a
| school of philosophy. It's no wonder she hates Plato, he's
| constantly challenging people in their settled beliefs.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Why did she (explicitly) hate Plato so much?
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| > The ironic thing is that becoming a better thinker is not
| done by studying logic, but instead by learning to
| recognize and respect your own emotional responses.
|
| This is the single thing that in my opinion both the young
| and also the naive miss. But people who are wise usually
| seem to understand.
|
| Not everyone learns it with age, but it usually takes some
| amount of life experience for people to learn it.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| Despite heading in more and more romantic directions in my
| thinking--from a very-analytic start--I don't find the core
| problem with Rand's thinking to be primacy of reason, but
| _sloppy_ (or, motivated--it can be hard to tell which)
| reasoning that leads to ultra-confident conclusions. A
| consistent pattern is you 'll see a whole big edifice of
| reasoning out of her, but peppered about in it, and usually
| including right at the beginning, are these little bits
| that the cautious reader may notice and go "wait, that...
| doesn't necessarily follow" or (VERY often) "hold on,
| you're sneaking in a semantic argument there and it's not
| _per se_ convincing at all, on second thought " and then
| those issues are just _never_ addressed, she just keeps
| trucking along, so most of the individual steps might be
| fine but there are all these weird holes in it, so none of
| it really holds together.
|
| I've even, after complaints about this were met with "you
| just didn't start with her fundamentals, so you didn't
| understand", reluctantly gone all the way to her big work
| on epistemology(!) and... sure enough, same.
|
| I find similar things in basically anything hosted on the
| Austrian-school beloved site mises.org. IDK if this is
| just, like, the house style of right wing _laissez faire_
| or what.
| tmnvix wrote:
| I've always considered reason to allow for emotional
| motivations, as opposed to rationality, which does not.
|
| Edit: Iain McGilchrist makes a useful distinction here
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUJDsdt7Pso
| chubot wrote:
| _I 've learned that people will forget what you said, people
| will forget what you did, but people will never forget how
| you made them feel._
|
| - Maya Angelou
|
| This applies to so many things ... people don't remember what
| happened, or what's true. They remember how they felt! [1]
|
| And it makes from a psychological perspective - emotions are
| basically an evolutionary shortcut for remembering. You can
| compress a 5- or 10-year experience into an imprecise feeling
|
| [1] For anybody who thinks they are rational or objective,
| try keeping a journal for a few decades, and then reading it.
| Your memory is very selective!
| cle wrote:
| The irony isn't one of dependency. The philosophy celebrates
| interdependence and the achievements of groups of cooperating
| people who take care of each other.
|
| The irony and tragedy is broader and encompasses both the cult
| leaders and the cult detractors who are both unwilling separate
| the ideas from the people.
| glenstein wrote:
| Could not have put it better myself! After finding myself very
| inspired by the novels, mostly as an introduction to the
| virtues of critical thinking and how those can be foundational
| to a worldview (which is good!), the cracks in the armor really
| started to show when looking at the community, and especially
| Rand's relationship with Nathaniel Branden.
|
| There's lots to say about how Objectivism oversimplifies and
| attacks caricatures, and doesn't address itself to
| sophisticated economic thinking. You _can_ get good out of it
| (I read it during the Bush admin and felt like it was making
| the same warnings against the excesses of state power that 1984
| was), and it 's not terrible to expose a person to the virtues
| of philosophy, and critical thinking. In my case it opened my
| eyes to moral realism, at which point I traded in any interest
| in Objectivism for that instead.
|
| Even if you want to take the novel on its own terms that it has
| super-intellectual heroes, how humans work is every bit as much
| a part of reality as the physics of inventing a new metal. And
| the talent of administering human organizations is never
| present. It also never really models how mere mortals can
| reconcile their imperfections to the standards articulated, and
| is not self aware enough to speak to the population of mere
| mortals who would misdiagnose themselves as misunderstood
| heroes.
| richardanaya wrote:
| Your understanding of objectivism is deeply flawed if you think
| the philosophy sees no possible value in the trade between two
| people. Radical independence in objectivism as a virtue is
| independence of judgment, not some caricature you present of
| being an irrational loner.
| btilly wrote:
| The central problem of Objectivism is that they tie their
| logical conclusions into emotional knots. You can see this in
| their use of loaded language such as "theft".
|
| The problem is that this causes them to believe that their
| conclusions are purely logical, even when they are not.
| Therefore any disagreements are "proof" that the other is being
| illogical and should be rejected. This leads to an intolerance
| of disagreement, that in turn leads to the excommunication,
| loyalty tests, and so on. All of which will be expressed in the
| rhetoric of the philosophy, which is designed to appeal to
| reason while connecting to emotion.
|
| It is perfectly predictable emotional behavior. As is the
| inability to process inconvenient information that does not
| align with what the philosophy wishes to believe is true.
| _wire_ wrote:
| All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace - Adam Curtis
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines...
|
| See ep-1 "Love & Power," on contradictions of Ayn Rand's life
| versus her philosophy; can be found on yt / vimeo
|
| Series supplies interesting history for any nerd interested in
| systems analysis and provides a survey of California Ideology.
|
| His documentary on the legacy of Henritta Lacks' immortal cells
| and biology, "The Way of All Flesh" is also interesting food
| for thought on systems analysis.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I have the pleasure of living in a pretty "red" part of the
| country, and everyone I know who is a self-described libertarian
| (or otherwise worships at the altar of self-sufficiency) lives
| utterly dependent on societal systems. They're on Medicare,
| Disability or Social Security, live in neighborhoods with solid
| public services, rely on the rule of law for protection from
| crime, and enjoy clean air and drinking water, safe food and
| medicine, that they only have access to due to strong
| environmental and safety regulations. They were the first ones to
| freak out on Social Media during COVID when they had to actually
| rely on themselves for a bit.
|
| As someone else put it on Twitter, they are like house cats:
| absolutely convinced of their fierce independence while utterly
| dependent on a system they don't appreciate or understand.
| thrance wrote:
| It took thousands of years of technical and social progress to
| produce people that think they can survive alone.
| jonfw wrote:
| Ayn Rand didn't write novels about homesteading- none of the
| characters in her books are self sufficient.
|
| I don't think that participation in society as it exists should
| prevent anybody from holding their philosophy of choice.
| jplusequalt wrote:
| You're right, Ayn Rand wrote about a fantastical world, full
| of make believe people and things.
| jonfw wrote:
| AKA fiction
| slater wrote:
| Always a good time to remember this fantastic quote:
|
| "There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-
| year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas
| Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders
| a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes,
| leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled
| adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other,
| of course, involves orcs."
| MisterTea wrote:
| Who's the source of this quote?
| slater wrote:
| https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/366635-there-are-two-
| novels...
| alabastervlog wrote:
| Her non-fiction isn't any more rigorous or convincing,
| incidentally.
| richardanaya wrote:
| As someone who has read most of her non-fiction. I
| thoroughly disagree.
| glenstein wrote:
| Love it or hate it, her novels, over and over again could
| set generations of young minds on fire, which her essays
| could never do. I think it's fair to say the non-fiction
| was a lot worse.
| glenstein wrote:
| >Ayn Rand didn't write novels about homesteading
|
| Galt's Gulch seems to fit that description.
|
| >none of the characters in her books are self sufficient.
|
| I think they were in the sense that they, within the fiction
| of the books, had irreplaceable economic skills that made
| them fortunes. They were (again just in the logic of the
| books), more than pulling their weight.
|
| Doesn't mean I agree with it as a system but I can see the
| internal consistency in this respect at least.
| int_19h wrote:
| Aside from Galt's Gulch, there's also Dagny's brief stint
| on her own, during which she more or less magically
| automates everything that needs to be done.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Yes, it's all magical for her heroes. There was no
| homesteading in the gulch or whatever. There was only
| magical abundance and sterile happiness.
| garciasn wrote:
| Cognitive dissonance, lack of critical thought, and self-
| introspection is an outcome of the Conservative push for
| education elimination.
|
| This is exactly why Conservatives feel educators are evil; they
| work to enable the ideals/traits in individuals which run
| counter to what's most successful for following Conservative
| ideology.
| jonfw wrote:
| Do you feel that the department of education is responsible
| for your ability to think critically?
|
| Do you feel that it would be impossible to think critically
| without the department of education?
|
| Do you feel that folks from other countries, who grew up
| without our illustrious department of education, lack
| critical thought?
| garciasn wrote:
| You literally put words in my mouth; I said nothing about
| the DoE.
| jonfw wrote:
| > Conservative push for education elimination.
|
| I assumed this was a reference for the conservative push
| to eliminate the DOE.
|
| Or do you believe that conservatives actually want to
| eliminate the abstract concept of education?
| garciasn wrote:
| They are openly attacking university and public school
| educators; calling them liberal agitators with agendas
| which indoctrinate students to ideologies counter to
| Conservative values.
| techpineapple wrote:
| > Or do you believe that conservatives actually want to
| eliminate the abstract concept of education?
|
| What do you mean by conservatives? Do you mean my fellow
| citizens in arms, or certain people who happen to hold
| power right now?
| os2warpman wrote:
| The department of education is not a service provider.
|
| It is a conduit through which funding flows and is a
| standards and enforcement body.
|
| They (or at least, they used to) insure that "state's
| rights" advocates don't implement curricula that teach
| children that the world is 6,000 years old and flat. They
| are in the process of being dismantled.
|
| One's local school district is responsible for a vast
| majority of one's critical thinking skills and it has been
| this way in the United States since at least the early
| 1800s when people realized that only wealthy parents had
| the time, energy, and money to hire private tutors to
| impart critical thinking skills on their children.
|
| I imagine that in other countries, especially western
| countries, the story is the same.
|
| We can look back far into history to see that people have
| used state-run or sanctioned institutions to teach critical
| thinking skills since well before the Platonic Academy,
| from which much of our modern system is derived, based on
| evidence of organized vocational education ranging from
| Siberia to Ancient Egypt to city states that dotted the
| land prior to the Old Babylonian Empire.
|
| The main difference between those ancient systems and today
| is that, for now, all children get the chance to have a
| formal, standardized education, instead of just the
| children of the wealthy, well-connected, or lucky.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > They (or at least, they used to) insure that "state's
| rights" advocates don't implement curricula that teach
| children that the world is 6,000 years old and flat. They
| are in the process of being dismantled.
|
| That is, in my view, a good thing. We _should not_ be a
| monolithic nation and were never meant to be. If the
| people of (insert state here) wish to teach their
| children things I don 't agree with, or even things which
| are outright false, that is their right. Nor does it hurt
| me in any way.
|
| One of the great problems with our country today is
| people trying to get the federal government to control
| more and more things. That is directly responsible for
| much of the division in our country, as federal elections
| (especially for president) turn into this big fight over
| who is going to get to impose their dramatically
| differing way of life on others for the next 4ish years.
| To reduce tensions, we need to return to the original
| design: decisions about government should be made as
| locally as possible, so that the government can reflect
| the very diverse needs and cultures that exist across our
| country.
| autoexec wrote:
| > That is, in my view, a good thing. We should not be a
| monolithic nation and were never meant to be.
|
| What we absolutely should be is a nation with a minimum
| standard of education that all American children capable
| enough are expected to have by the time they leave
| school. That standard should include the fact that the
| world isn't flat.
|
| Providing a minimum standard of quality education is
| critical to the security and success of the nation
| because a democracy doesn't function when the population
| is made up of uneducated people who are easily fooled,
| can't read, and whose heads are filled with lies that
| will often conflict with what's been taught to the
| children one state over.
|
| > If the people of (insert state here) wish to teach
| their children things I don't agree with, or even things
| which are outright false, that is their right. Nor does
| it hurt me in any way
|
| If you don't think that it is possible for you to be
| harmed by the votes or actions of people who are
| uneducated, intentionally misinformed, and unable to
| think critically you obviously still have some learning
| to do yourself.
| mckn1ght wrote:
| Look at what happens in poor areas of less developed
| countries. Honor killings, deification of dictators,
| rampant scamming and crime, cartels and gangs... all still
| things.
|
| Your questions betray an ignorance of how a significant
| plurality of the world still lives to this day. You need to
| get out more, and not just at the resort towns.
|
| And new problems are cropping up in the foremost developed
| nations, like depression due to social media addiction,
| that we'll also need to think critically about, instead of
| reverting to medieval religious remedies.
|
| Alternatively, maybe you just think we're better off
| because we're intrinsically better kinds of humans? Gods
| chosen few? No doubt many people actually believe that.
| jonfw wrote:
| To be clear on my intentions- the OP said that
| conservatives wanted to eliminate critical thought. I
| assumed this was related to the elimination of DOE. My
| questions intended to dissect why exactly he thought that
| the DOE was responsible for critical thought.
|
| I am not a fan of the DOE- I think that the relationship
| between standardized tests and funding mean that schools
| prioritize skill development and memorization more than
| they prioritize critical thought / reasoning.
|
| I am not sure where your line of criticism comes from- it
| doesn't seem like we're understanding each other
| mckn1ght wrote:
| You asked a bunch of specious questions about the DoE.
| The DoE is part of a complicated and fragile system. It
| isn't as simple as turning off a light switch for a part
| you don't like, and chances are you probably don't fully
| understand the thing you don't like in the first place.
| Chesterton's fence.
|
| ---
|
| Now, to your point about standardized testing of skills
| vs reasoning, I would love to hear a proposal for
| ensuring "correct" critical thinking is assimilating into
| student populations. This doesn't scale and is subject to
| severe bias. Standardized testing measures more objective
| traits that are indicators for critical thought. IMO a
| solution must build on top of that foundation, not throw
| it away. You add a compass, you don't throw out the map.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| Ayn Rand herself was on social security too fwiw.
|
| https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ayn-rand-social-security/
| dmitrygr wrote:
| "In her later years"....well, yeah! I will structure my
| finances that way too. I get money stolen from me yearly by
| force for "SS TAX", and i surely plan to get every cent back
| out of it that i can. I will not get even 10% back, but that
| is better than 0
| surgical_fire wrote:
| This is not how it works.
|
| Did you ever use the streets in front of your house? Ever
| went to a public park? Ever relied on police to protect
| your property? Ever needed the help of public health
| services? Firefighters?
|
| It's funny that you get money stole from you (while you
| certainly use a ton on infrastructure society provides),
| but never once considered leaving it behind and go live as
| a hunter gatherer in some remote place.
|
| After all, you are posting here.
| grandempire wrote:
| How much of the budget is police, parks, and roads?
|
| When the budget is questioned the response is always the
| most popular examples and ignore everything else.
|
| When was the last time you used a sociology research
| grant? Or an ICBM?
| jeltz wrote:
| The reason we pay for ICMBs is to prevent warmongers like
| Putin from invading countries which would be bad for the
| whole global economy. So you get advantage from ICMBs all
| the time indirectly.
| AngryData wrote:
| I use them daily, in not being some poor serf, by not
| risking famine every year, and not living in a land
| beleaguered by war.
|
| Those things are sort of like having competent IT
| security. If they are doing everything right, they will
| seem like they aren't doing anything at all, but when
| they are gone all of a destruction and doom is always
| just a day away.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| Sometimes I think that the libertarians should be
| condemned to live in their dream society, without laws,
| regulations, public service, etc.
|
| It gets tiresome listening to their "taxes are theft"
| bullshit.
| card_zero wrote:
| Why are they not collected through consent?
| krapp wrote:
| No one would consent.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| What exactly is the problem with sociology research? Is
| it not a valid field of study? Or are you just against
| research grants as a whole?
|
| I think it benefits society to fund academic research.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| "SS TAX" does not pay for roads or parks, you know
| richardanaya wrote:
| When you understand the immorality of taxes, there's nothing
| immoral about getting your money back from a government that
| took it while repudiating the taxes.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| It's all fun and games until you don't have paved streets
| anymore.
| FredPret wrote:
| I love capitalism and am a former Rand fan.
|
| But I don't think taxes are in and of themselves immoral.
|
| A human being is a social animal, and each gets a lot of
| value from the people around us.
|
| These are nice to have:
|
| - clean streets
|
| - police
|
| - non-corrupt judges
|
| - a stable legal framework
|
| - living among educated people
|
| - fire department that just shows up
|
| - not getting bombed and invaded by a foreign army
|
| - much more
|
| These are "true expenses" in that if you didn't pay for
| them... you'd eventually pay the price for them when you're
| the victim of crime, fire, or exposure to the illiterate.
|
| If you lived in Galt's Gulch or some gated community in an
| anarchic society, you'd pay a regular fee for these
| services, like voluntary taxes.
|
| Taxes are infamously as inevitable as death because the
| expenses it's meant to pay for are also inevitable. We
| might as well set up a system.
|
| Government waste is held up as an example of immorality,
| and some/most governments certainly should be leaner, but
| some waste & inertia would happen in any large
| organization, public or private. The only other time a
| government could be straight-up immoral is if it's
| persecuting innocent citizens or foreigners for no reason.
| Thinking through the implementation details of Galt's Gulch
| makes me think taxes aren't so bad after all.
| teekert wrote:
| I also get such energy from Atlas Shrugged, I don't understand
| why. I know that the good guys are very carefully crafted, they
| don't cheat, they don't do things like lobbying to win. They
| don't compromise on their world view to the extreme. They don't
| have children, that makes it all easier, but also less real.
|
| Raised christian but feeling burned out by the contradictions,
| the emptiness of trying to live for others (it's killing for
| relationships I can tell you), the mental struggle to rationalize
| all the rules, I too felt that spark. I realize dogmatism is
| always bad but that voice inside keeps saying: It's not when the
| theory is perfect! The truth is knowable and can be discovered
| through reason. How super comforting (and damn that
| Incompleteness Theorem I learned about later).
|
| I don't know what it is, my hunger for a system? For rules to
| make sense of the world? Whatever it is, Rand's philosophy
| remains so appealing. It's probably the reason I started a
| company, walk into meetings now boldly, with a goal, why I enjoy
| things now, just to enjoy myself. As a rational, healthy human,
| there is nothing wrong with that, in contrast to what my
| upbringing tried to instill in me.
|
| Perhaps that's it, it liberated my from a confining worldview.
| Perhaps another worldview could have done the same.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| > the emptiness of trying to live for others
|
| Someone else was burned one too many times. It's fine and dandy
| until you notice a pattern: others who lack conscience will
| always work your convictions against you. Though the religion
| admits as much - it eschews 'worldly wisdom' - i.e. what you
| need to make anything of a life in this world.
| teekert wrote:
| I mean it's empty because you deny people that love you to do
| nice things for you (I don't care (and it shows!), what do
| you want to do?). Keep it up long enough and you don't even
| know what you like anymore. And then you aren't really a fun
| person anymore.
|
| At least, that is how I experienced it.
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| > I don't know what it is, my hunger for a system?
|
| Karl Popper called it "monocausotaxophilia". Humans want
| everything to have a single cause.
| sram1337 wrote:
| "Aha, 'monocausotaxophilia', finally a name for the thing
| causing all my problems!"
| teekert wrote:
| That's pretty funny. It goes into my drawer with jokes
| like: I'm a biologist, and biologists never generalize!
| thoughtpalette wrote:
| Funnily enough, I felt the same energy after reading The
| Fountainhead by Rand.
|
| It's been over a decade at this point, but I remember Howard
| Roarks(?) endless ambitious energy was infectious. Sounds like
| it's time for another read.
| low_tech_love wrote:
| The Fountainhead is a great book, one of my favorites. Atlas
| Shrugged is also a very good book in a slightly different way
| (but it overstays its welcome). I love Ayn Rand as a writer,
| she was bold, energetic, smart. She could weave a fictional
| alternate reality like nobody else, while keeping the human
| characters at the very center of everything.
|
| The problem is that for some reason she couldn't keep it at
| the fictional level and started thinking maybe the fiction
| was a good model of reality. That kinda taints a bit the
| legacy, in my opinion.
| plusmax1 wrote:
| I read "Atlas Shrugged" but I found it to be a frustrating
| read, mostly because of how simplistic its worldview is.
| When I read it, I felt like the complex issues it tries to
| tackle--capitalism, government, individualism--were reduced
| to black-and-white moral arguments, without much room for
| nuance or ambiguity.
|
| The characters didn't help either. They came across as one-
| dimensional: the so-called heroes are always right, always
| rational, while anyone who disagrees with them is portrayed
| as either stupid or evil. That kind of writing makes it
| hard for me to take her "philosophy" seriously.
| fatbird wrote:
| "It's chaos, be kind" [0]
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sicUhD1n-es
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I have to say, Quakers are cool Christians if you're wanting to
| hold on to your faith but abandon the hypocrisy. (I find the
| Quaker community surprisingly welcoming of me, an atheist.)
| sweeter wrote:
| It's basically "divine right to rule" for rich people, sans
| religion. I remember hearing about Rand and eventually reading
| Rand, and I quite literally thought it was satire. Tbf it would
| be peak if it was satire, but I genuinely don't understand how
| anyone can subscribe to this in earnest.
| jonfw wrote:
| I fail to see the irony of "inheriting" an empire from Rand, when
| the protagonist of atlas shrugged and other main characters were
| heirs to a fortune. Inheritance is thoroughly explored in her
| work.
|
| To me- this article is about the social dangers of taking a
| philosophy to the extreme, and about how easy it is to take
| advantage of the elderly when estranged.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| The thing that I felt came through in this article (or maybe
| it's just my biases) was the hollowness of engaging in
| relationships purely for one's own selfish ends. Sooner or
| later (as happened to these people), the selfish desires don't
| line up any more, and the relationships get torn apart.
| Contrary to Rand, I don't think that love is inherently selfish
| (quite the opposite in fact), and it seems to me that love
| based on altruism is much more stable (and more praiseworthy)
| than love based on what the other person can do for me.
|
| But then again I _would_ say that, so it 's hard to tell if
| that actually is something I took away from the article or if
| it's just confirmation bias at play.
| n4r9 wrote:
| The quote I think you're referring to:
|
| > like many tragedies, this one is marked by a dark irony: A
| man devoted to the principle of individualism has ended up
| living a life defined by a reliance on others.
|
| The irony is that Peikoff believed himself an advocate of
| individualism, while simultaneously subjugating himself, saying
| stuff like "I would let her step on my face if she wanted."
| kleton wrote:
| Confusingly, at various point in this article they refer to him
| in the past tense, "was a good father" etc, while he's still
| alive.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| Was, and then there was a lawsuit with kid. Probably hard to
| claim still is then? Lawsuits tear families apart.
| miltonlost wrote:
| "He was a red head. Now, after the hair dye, he has black hair"
| is perfectly normal way of using past tense of someone while
| they are alive.
| greener_grass wrote:
| Readers might enjoy Mozart Was a Red, a play by Murray Rothbard
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIk5C2qsRH8
| richardanaya wrote:
| Peikoff is a wonderful man who wrote books that inspire me and
| intrigue me to this day.
| glenstein wrote:
| He suggested on a podcast that if a woman had no access to
| resources to perform an abortion she should throw herself down
| the stairs. Presumably as a way to solve it that doesn't
| involve getting freebies from the state.
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| Ayn Rand is the ultimate proof of something I've realized as I've
| grown: doing the right thing is actually really simple. It's not
| easy as in "low difficulty of accomplishment", but it's simple as
| in "low difficulty of understanding". In fact, I've started to
| think of complex decision making as the moral equivalent of a
| code smell: if I'm waffling back and forth over what the right
| thing to do is sometimes it's a genuinely complex situation where
| principles are in conflict but much (Much, MUCH) more often it's
| just that I no what the right thing to do is and just don't wanna
| do it. Objectivism feels like the inverse of this: you can make
| anything feel like the right thing to do if you just expand,
| generalize, hypotheticalize and muddy the question until "Should
| I give a hungry person a sandwich when I've got one I won't
| miss?" becomes something like "How do you expect society to
| function if no one works?"
| grandempire wrote:
| The question of Ethics is what we should we do, With life.
| There is nothing easy or clear about that.
|
| Morality is not just being generally nice when it's convenient
| for all parties.
|
| One of the themes in the Fountainhead is contrasting someone
| with this attitude with the individual with a longer term
| vision and goals.
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| >expand, generalize, hypotheticalize and muddy the question
| arp242 wrote:
| Seems like an unpleasant person.
|
| I read on his Wikipedia page that he called Obama's re-election
| "the worst political event ever to occur in the history of this
| continent" and "worse than the Civil War".
|
| An estimated 600,000 to one million people died in the war. And
| many more suffered life-long injuries, had to deal with the loss
| of their child, spouse, etc. Also seems to me the slave system in
| the US - where people were born in to slavery with no realistic
| hope of freedom - is the ultimate in state control and stripping
| of individual rights that people like him are supposed to be
| against.
|
| You can dislike Obama, nothing wrong with that. But is having a
| president you dislike for 4 years really worse than up to a
| million dead people? And the institute of slavery?
|
| Also denies property rights to Palestinians and native Americans.
| The notion that individual rights are paramount again goes out of
| window at the first sign of inconvenience.
|
| So not just unpleasant on a personal level, also morally decrepit
| and intellectually vapid.
| glenstein wrote:
| The attempt by Randians to apply her to modern politics was a
| major tell when I was young to get out of that crowd. One
| person, supposedly a an intellectual leading light of
| Objectivism at the time, said that nuking Iran was fine because
| Iran pursing nuclear enrichment constituted "initiation of
| force" (important term of art in the Rand lexicography),
| seemingly squaring the circle between Rand's brand of hardcore
| libertarian isolationism and neocon warmongering that was
| popular at the time.
|
| I wanted to see intellectual hero philosophers as the legacy,
| but what objectivism produced, outside of Nathaneil Branden and
| David Kelly who were at least interesting, was largely a
| complete joke.
| GlibMonkeyDeath wrote:
| This is a truly tragic story. Toward the end of the article
| (regarding the 2024 findings in San Diego Superior Court),
| Peikoff sounds like he has his faculties intact, according to
| multiple doctors and attorneys. He has freely chosen to marry his
| caregiver, much to the dismay of his daughter (who believes the
| caregiver is a grifter, and so his daughter forced the court
| inquiry.) His response, "if being unreasonable is choosing to be
| with the woman I love, then I choose to be unreasonable" is peak
| objectivism. He is going to do what he wants - to do anything
| else would be a betrayal of objectivist principles.
|
| He is now estranged from his daughter Cordelia -er, Kira - over
| this.
| 4fterd4rk wrote:
| It's interesting to me how Rand wrote books about socialism
| leading us to a world where irrationality takes over in a
| dysfunctional world and we now live in a world where unrestrained
| capitalism has caused irrationality to take over in a
| dysfunctional world.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| I wonder if the end result is always dysfunction.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Getting famous and having a cult following isn't always the best
| thing for an author. Not for their works. Rand wrote one good
| book [0]. Actually really got to me. Probably not one you think
| of. "We The Living", a pretty bleak account of collectivisation
| and the exodus from communism. A shocking, semi-autobiographical
| account of watching the world you love and know torn up. I think
| it might be more apropos Americans today than any of the
| "objectivism" stuff. All her later work I read in my 30s seemed
| lacking. But that first one really had an impact, not quite
| Solzhenitsyn or Kafka, but a hard hit with a similar interior.
| That book really defines her I think.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_The_Living
| Animats wrote:
| I read both _The Fountainhead_ and _Atlas Shrugged_ , and wasn't
| impressed by either. The author never got the "show, not tell"
| memo. Long, long speeches.
|
| (In the movie version of _The Fountainhead_ , Howard Roarke's
| architecture is terrible. His buildings resemble 1960s US housing
| projects such as the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago. There's good
| minimalism, but that's not it.)
| gavinray wrote:
| My Ayn Rand "unpopular opinion" is that Atlas Shrugged is a
| wordier, less interesting The Fountainhead.
|
| Wouldn't suggest anyone read Atlas Shrugged, saying this as
| someone who also read Peikoff's _" Objectivism: The Philosophy
| of Ayn Rand"_
|
| Just read The Fountainhead and imagine that with trains and the
| railroad.
|
| "Anthem" is a short read and also pretty solid.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Pretty much. Plus her approach to love is completely off-
| putting and inhumane.
| Devasta wrote:
| Atlas Shrugged was one of the most important books I ever read.
|
| A society where the rich destroy the entire world fighting stupid
| battles against each other, even witholding technology that would
| aid all humanity because someone other than them would benefit,
| all the while ordinary men like Eddie Willers are left to die in
| the desert?
|
| Marx couldn't have laid it out so clear to me as Rand has.
| ratrocket wrote:
| https://archive.ph/sXHrb
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