NSFW The Ugly Heart of Objectivism, A Criticism of AnarchoCapitalism and American Libertarianism

Don't get me wrong. I love Ayn Rand as a thinker. She is the synthesis of Aristotlean Logic and Hedonism. She is what Nietzsche would have become if he had never given up and embraced nihilism.

Her primary mistake is that she lumped all mystics together.

A). All Mystics were not created equal. B). Not all Mystics fight towards the same goals.

There are Nihilist Mystics and there are Evolutionary/Independent Mystics. Pick your poison. Ultimately you either work for one team or the other. There is no escaping this inherent existential struggle.

Granted, Evolutionary Mystics are not a coherent group. Getting them to work together is worse than herding cats. Getting them to work together is like trying to get an electron and a proton to exist in the same time and location simultaneously without some cataclysmic event occurring.

Stop worrying so much about people casting shadows on the walls of the cave. The living have the ultimate power over this reality and theirs is the highest jurisdiction, but Ayn Rand does have much to teach. If you can journey through her philosophy like Ulysses, avoiding all of the siren songs, when you climb out the other side, you will be the better for it.

I'd recommend the Fountainhead and We the Living or Anthem before Atlas Shrugged, saving her actual philosophical writings for last, although the Virtue of Selfishness is concise, and might be a quicker path to the same end. I do consider her to be a classical writer although her literary talents are questionable. Her characters are unrealistic idealists and very rarely have complexities in their personalities or motivations. They are better as hyperbolic examples of her own philosophy than an enjoyable and realistic emulation of a possible human scenario.

a reply to: Nechash

So at the end of the video, who is the "we" who have been protecting us from the effects of our chosen beliefs and who is the "I' who is calling in the loan.

The overlying hyperbole of this video is sad. A beginning premise is that we not give consent to those who would control us to those who would brainwash us etc. The video points out that the only road to freedom from this is to not allow ourselves to give into these power lusters. However nothing is mentioned about the baby, the child. That from the beginning we, as we would like to consider ourselves to be, was not even there in the beginning of ourselves to say no, to say hold it, that is not rational, it is not correct, it's false. By the time we have reached an age to even consider ourselves to be, ourselves, we are already a mixture of all the that stuff that made us who we are without our even having had the self to say no, I don't want that.

a reply to: TerryMcGuire

This is a dramatic interpretation of a monologue performed by a character in one of Ayn Rand's books named John Galt. He is a protagonist of sorts who gathers together all of the most intelligent inventors and businesspeople from the United States in order to create a Utopian society in the mountains of Colorado, shielded from detection by a cloaking device. The "we" he is speaking of are the objective thinkers and proactive producers who revolutionize life on this planet for everyone else. The "I" of course is himself, John Galt.

The premise of the book is that people who buck the system and try to invent new things are treated as heretics by the puritans in their society and thus instead of suffering along with their torments, they should abandon them wholesale to be consigned to a path of auto-annihilation.

I can agree that many of our most immediate responses are imprinted into us before we even possess any semblance of self awareness, but there are strategies for dealing with these conditions. One thing I did was a modified version of some of the psychological deprogramming methods that L.Ron Hubbard designed for his cult. Some of them are actually effective consciousness expanding mechanisms that did allow me to disassociate from myself enough to begin to observe the difference between self and other within my own impulses and opinions.

There was a rogue agent from within Scientology called the Pilot who pirated many of their teachings and made them available for the entire internet. 99% of what Hubbard taught was really borrowed techniques from eastern schools of philosophy mixed in with a lot of his more zany ideologies. Given that most mystics have a pearls before swine attitude of the uninitiated, Dianetics is relatively transparent and accessible to the novice by comparison. You can learn from almost anyone. Kabbalists, Mormons, Sufis, Hindus, you just have to be careful. Take everything piecemeal. Test it out. Find out in what way is it useful for your purposes and put the parts that you appreciate in your toolbox for future utilization, disregarding the rest.

I would say this: the will has an awesome way of manifesting itself into reality when it is brought into present awareness often enough. If you simply said to yourself once per hour, I want to decondition myself from the crap my parents did to me, that would probably be enough to seed within yourself the kinds of interests that will drive you on a path of discovery towards the keys to unlocking that exact possibility. It takes a lot of work from you. It isn't some magical solution the way that modern New Agers want to make it out to be, but desire is the primary agent which drives all of the future efforts and outcomes.

a reply to: Nechash

Let's not forget modern Satanism viz. the Church of Satan. It's well known that Anton LaVey was a fan and in his own words he'd stated that he took Objectivism and packaged it up with some ritual. That in of itself is an inadequate reason for condemning Objectivism. Pointing out that Ayn Rand used her position within her own little cultish group to manipulate people to serve her own desires and ultimately set the stage for her husband's untimely death is also an ad hominem attack.

Let's just cut to the chase. Philosophers almost universally dismiss Objectivism. The only reason anyone is still talking about it is because of its popularity as a justification for being a sociopath that appeals most often to those in right-wing political circles. It's analogous to how something like trickle-down/supply-side economics is embraced by politicians and a small group of their pet economists and not the mainstream.

a reply to: theantediluvian

Or that she was a fan of serial murder, or that she collected social security? Yeah, there are tons of ways to dissolve her persona. lol.

I do appreciate her work. I think it has something to offer and it is unique enough that you can't easily duplicate what she has to teach from any other source. LaVey himself was pretty good, but he didn't devote a lot of his ideology to print. If you could somehow collect all of his statements over the years, it would be a worthwhile philosophy to confront.

I think her big mistake was claiming she was an epistemologist. Had she described herself as a hedonist, I think she'd be taken slightly more seriously by philosophers.