17 Remarks

1. jer says:

   hi! i listened to the smokey johnson song and realized that it’s the same drum beat to theresa andersson’s birds fly away. you might like it!

2. MichaelM says:

   James

   If you are serious about your stated desire to understand the powerful draw of Rand’s philosophy, you must read her in the nude — intellectually nude that is. You need to first strip off the prejudices you take for granted and don’t even know you have in many cases and substantially comprehend the system as a whole before you attempt to apply it and integrate it with your judgments of the persons and events of your everyday life.

   Few are those who can do that from just The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged alone. They are the abstract philosophy concretized into persons and their lives. They enable you to experience the ideas in realtime as it were. However, the thinking, the principles, the nuts and bolts of the ethics and politics underlying those concretizations are so radically different from the ideas you and I were reared with, considerably more effort is required to become fluent, and for that you will eventually have to read the essays gathered in her nonfiction works like The Virtue of Selfishness, For the New Intellectual, Capitalism The Unknown Ideal, The Romantic Manifesto, etc.

   Beware, above all, any temptation to passively absorb agreement with the hearsay rampant in blogs and forums that comes without facts to substantiate the connotations. Very few of her most vociferous critics are well informed about the actual content of the philosophy. False assumptions are endemic. Be sure you can identify her actual position before taking their word for it. The Ayn Rand Lexicon is a great reference for that purpose [ aynrandlexicon.com ].

   Be immediately careful at the outset to get a grip on the words “selfishness” and “empathy” etc. as she defines them. Learn to distinguish in every instance rational selfishness from irrational selfishness, and at the same time, grasp that the former is a redundancy while the latter is a contradiction. If reason is our primary means to further our existence, irrationality cannot possibly be selfish.

   Rand’s politics is derived from her ethics which is derived from objectively defining the nature of man at a fundamental level. And at that level my nature and your nature and the nature of every man who is, was, or ever will be is, in principle, identical. In that sense then, Rand is the ultimate egalitarian!

   The most fundamental alternative all living creatures face is life or death. Man is the only living creature that can and must choose between them. He must choose to think and choose to act accordingly to produce the means for himself to survive and thrive as what he is. His choice of life instead of death as his goal establishes his life as the highest of and measure of all his values. If my life is my highest value and I am objective and logical I must grant that yours is your highest value. If I want my autonomy in its pursuit to be respected by you, logically I must reciprocate. Rand has raised “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” to a height beyond the reach of any Christian’s understanding.

   From Rand I learned that politics is the extension of ethics in the context of the life of an individual man into the context of the life of an individual in a society of men. Without a valid and coherent ethics there can be no valid and coherent politics. If my ethics mandates individual autonomy, it has only one enemy, physical force. Therefore, my sole social need, as a human being, is the absence of the use of force to interfere with voluntary human interrelationships. Hence, a laissez-faire capitalist government that may do nothing but remove the use of force from social interactions is the only moral political system.

   This is where most people stumble in their characterizations of Rand. Her radical capitalism is neither left wing or liberal nor right wing or conservative. Those are a false alternative in that each of them institutionalizes the use of force to usurp individual autonomy. They divide only on which particular aspects of mens lives they prefer to dictate and confiscate. The division is an instance of the fallacy of the mind vs. body dichotomy — the spiritual vs. the material. The left frees the mind and spirit while confiscating and dictating its product, the material means of survival. The right frees the material (and temporal) while seeking to control the intellect and spirit.

   Recognizing that the mind and body are but aspects of the human unit, Rand demands the preservation of their integration. The right to life means to her the right to think, the right to act, and the right to dispose of the product of thinking and acting. She does not find truth in perpetually changing subjective whim as the liberals do, nor does she find it intrinsic in authoritarian traditions as the conservatives do. She finds truth only in objectively defining the nature of existence.

   Thus it is wrong to characterize her as conservative or right wing just because those on that side agree with her belief in an absolute right to one’s property. It is likewise wrong to characterize her as liberal or left wing just because those on that side agree with her belief in an absolute right to abortion. She is not on the left side or the right side, she is on the free side.

   Looking forward to Part 2 (in a year or so?).

3. Don Simon says:

   Also I’m very keen on hearing more of your personal reflections on living on a “socialist” country. As a Scandinavian I must must say we’d never call our free market based (but sure, somewhat regulated) society that. And in comparison, Obama gets compared to Stalin when trying to take the smallest baby step towards the European model.

   Personally I don’t know what we have a state for if not for guaranteeing the most basic needs (e.g. health and education) to all citizens. But then again, I’m a victim of my surroundings. My perspective is based on growing up here, and I might be oppressed and missing out on numerous freedom incited virtues and indulgences…

4. James says:

   MichaelM, thanks for the thoughtful breakdown of Rand. Very nicely explained and I’ll certainly do my best to approach her novels with an open mind.

   Don, I’m still wrestling with comparisons between Finland and America. The emphasis on equality versus individuality is certainly a key difference, but it’s difficult to detach this from matters of scale (America is so big!) and demographics (Finland is nearly 97% Finnish). In a more homogenous country, it’s much easier to agree on a shared set of values and put them into practice — in America, we’re absolutely schizophrenic and these arguments about the individual vs. the state are often fought in the most adolescent and embarrassing manner possible.

   Perhaps it makes more sense to compare the values of Finland or Sweden to, say, Wyoming or Oregon?

   I can say this: while living in Helsinki, I was absolutely mystified by the American debate about healthcare. What is there to debate? But the moment I came back to the USA and flipped on the radio, I remembered: Oh right, we don’t trust the government. Sometimes that’s a good thing — it’s why America was created in the first place. But we also made a national hero out of a president/actor who said “The eight scariest words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’” and I can’t imagine any European leader saying something like this.

   I’m going to keep kicking this around and I’ll keep you posted. There are a lot of pros and cons to both approaches — e.g. I like the general sense of social empathy in Finland (sorry, MichaelM) but I was shocked by the extent of unnecessary intrusion over day-to-day commerce, housing policies, and the like.

   “Personally I don’t know what we have a state for if not for guaranteeing the most basic needs (e.g. health and education) to all citizens.”
   — I absolutely agree, Don. Very nicely stated.

5. MichaelM says:

   James,

   “e.g. I like the general sense of social empathy in Finland (sorry, MichaelM)”
   
   There is more genuine social empathy in a room full of Objectivists who hold the autonomy of each other as sacrosanct than could even be pretended for a room full of Finns who view each other as potential means to their ends, aka sacrificial animals. Empathy arises from voluntarily sharing values and trading values, not from intrusions in those acts.

   ———

   “Personally I don’t know what we have a state for if not for guaranteeing the most basic needs (e.g. health and education) to all citizens.”

   We need a state to preserve your freedom to use your own mind and body as you determine. We do not need a state to coerce childless persons to fund the responsibility of parents to educate their own children, especially when that education teaches the children ideas the victims do not agree with. There cannot be unchosen obligations!

6. James says:

   MichaelM, I want to understand where you’re coming from, but this sort of thing —

   “. . . a room full of Finns who view each other as potential means to their ends, aka sacrificial animals . . .”
   
   — that’s just crazy talk (unless you’ve spent any amount of time in an old school Finnish sauna, in which case I’ll play along with the notion of sacrificial animals). This kind of melodramatic language is exactly why I’m wary of Rand and anything else that promises such a black and white reading of the world. Sacrificial animals? Victims? If you can unpack these ideas in a less extreme way, I’m all ears.

   Same thing for the broad swipe at public education: I have a feeling childless citizens who live in neighborhoods with failing schools and their attendant violence and poverty would disagree with your argument. I’m curious to know where you’d weigh in on something like Freire’s ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ or hell, even ‘The Republic’. That said, having worked in public schools I do think their funding should be detached from property taxes and, while we’re at it, we may as well go ahead and privatize our schools because, sadly, we’re pretty much there already.

   Thanks to crackpot radio, I can’t help but think that phrases like “holding the autonomy of each other as sacrosanct” are a fancy way of talking about indifference and selfishness (not in the good Rand way). But I will read ‘Atlas Shrugged’ and judge her ideas on their own merit — and I really do appreciate the dialogue and hope we haven’t reached a dead end.

7. MichaelM says:

   James, Again, from my above comment:”The most fundamental alternative all living creatures face is life or death. Man is the only living creature that can and must choose between them. He must choose to think and choose to act accordingly to produce the means for himself to survive and thrive as what he is. His choice of life instead of death as his goal establishes his life as the highest of and measure of all his values.”Our ability to choose how we apply our reason to our actions in the service of our life is simultaneously the ability to make choices that actually do further our life as well as choices that detract from it, i.e. we are fallible. That fact establishes intellectual (reason)  and physical (action) independence in a position of the greatest importance in any human code of values. It is inherently appropriate that each fallible human being be able to accept or reject the advice, requests, and demands of other equally fallible human beings. There are no grounds for any one person to substitute his own judgments for those of anyone else. And no group of persons can have any grounds that no component individual among them has. Long before you arrive at a discussion of the relative benefits of socialism vs. capitalism, you must deal with the ethical issue described above. If that description accurately accounts for the nature of human creatures, no list of alleged benefits can justify a politics that contradicts it.Now, while your promise to judge Rand’s ideas on their own merits is both admirable and rare, the corollary of that promise must be that you will critically judge your own ideas on their own merits — something you have not even begun to do. The “extreme” positions you reacted to in my comment were consciously designed to expose errors you don’t even know you are committing and thereby to challenge the honesty of your mind. First of all, since ideas stand and fall on their merits, whose ideas they are or how many agree or disagree with them, how melodramatic they are or are not, how extreme they are or are not, how crazy they sound or do not, are irrelevant facts. Only the merit of their actual content is important. You cannot ever support or rebut any idea simply with connotation-packed adjectives. Most important, you may not make a black and white statement that you are wary of black and white statements. You contradict yourself in saying it. Every existent in the universe and every relationship among them has a specific nature definable with words that stand for specific concepts in any given context. A statement about the nature of anything in the universe that is an accurate identification is true, period! So long as such statements are limited to the context of available evidence, absolute certainty of their truth is also possible. And that is the only standard for measuring the worth of any idea. Is it true? Yes or No. You and I and many others have been raised to condemn extreme black and white truths, because they constitute a threat to those whose lives have been one long string of evasions of the responsibility and effort required to deal with such questions and judgments. We were simultaneously raised to solve the resulting dilemmas raised by holding that certain knowledge is impossible by acquiescing to asserted authorities.The challenge you face is to choose between Rand, who says you have the capacity to know and understand reality and to choose your own actions in the service of your life and the Finns (and Republicans and Democrats and kings and dictators as well as crackpots on radio and MSNBC, etc., etc., etc.) who willing to use physical force to coerce you to actions contrary to your judgments for benefits they can only allege as meeting their own personal standards.Ultimately, there is only one fundamental political alternative, freedom vs. force. To opt  for freedom means holding that no person may initiate the use of force to gain, withhold, or destroy any tangible or intangible value of another who either created it or acquired it in a voluntary exchange. It means that physical force may only be used to stop, prevent, or punish its use to interfere with interrelationships among men that are voluntarily entered into. That principle is Rand’s challenge to all you presently take for granted. It is at that level that you should begin to rethink your own premises. From that level, you will not be able to arrive at a justification of majorities’ rights to confiscate the product of any person’s mind and actions without regarding all men as sacrificial animals. The simple act of producing a child does not create a claim on the lives of others. Citing statistics about violence and poverty cannot establish such a claim.Do not fret about the children. You cannot justify an assertion that moral men will leave children uneducated or that they could not achieve it without resorting to theft. On the other hand, you can easily justify an assertion that immoral men will want to control the education of children for their own purposes. That is to say that there is no dichotomy between the moral and the practical. The immoral can never be regarded as practical precisely because it is immoral. So the first task in defining a human politics is to formulate a human ethic.Here is Rand’s: http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=ari_ayn_rand_the_objectivist_ethics

8. James says:

   MichaelM, thanks again for your time (and I apologize for the frustrating no-paragraphs issue — you caught me tinkering with my site).

   I can certainly say “I am wary of black & white thinking.” There is nothing contradictory here (unless I said “I reject all…”) and I stand by it. Word games aside, I was hoping for specific details and examples w/r/t ’sacrificial animals’ and ‘victims’ that would allow us each to find our footing, but the generalized rhetoric in your response and the motivation behind this type of behavior —

   “The ‘extreme’ positions you reacted to in my comment were consciously designed to expose errors you don’t even know you are committing and thereby to challenge the honesty of your mind.”

   — well, it confuses me and I’m afraid I’m not bright enough to keep up. I was hoping for a conversation but, to be frank, the tone here sounds unnervingly similar to lectures that I’ve received from roadside preachers (”Child, you don’t understand what I’m saying because you’re still in the dark”). So be it. I’m going to bow out here.

   To be fair, the lack of paragraph breaks probably made your response come across as a disparaging lecture where it may have been well-intentioned. Or perhaps I’m in a sensitive mood because I had three teeth yanked out of my head this morning. There are always grey areas. Regardless, I will read ‘Atlas Shrugged’ next week and you have indeed got me thinking harder about the relationship between the individual and the state as well as how people react to hardline dogma — and thank you for that. I’ll drop you a line when I finish the book and perhaps we can go from there.

9. MichaelM says:

   James,

   “The ‘extreme’ positions you reacted to in my comment were consciously designed to expose errors you don’t even know you are committing and thereby to challenge the honesty of your mind.”

   Your assumption that I am patronizing you in that statement is false. I am just explaining that I intentionally chose extreme positions as examples to provoke you into grasping that “extreme” is an entirely extraneous and useless consideration when exchanging ideas. Only “true” and “false” or “partly true” or “partly false” are useful characterizations of a statement. Also, calling thinking “crazy” says nothing about the content of the thinking. Instead it seeks to intimidate the reader into agreement with you without having to actually refute targeted idea.

   Relying on connotation-packed adjectives when communicating ideas is an error, and you were not aware it was, or you would not have done it. Pointing it out challenges you to either defend it (dishonest mind) or admit/stop it (honest mind). Of course, if you think I am wrong, then we can have an honest discussion about arguments from intimidation in the process of exchanging ideas.

   While I see nothing patronizing in this at all, I must add that even if I was consciously trying to be patronizing, indignation or puzzlement is not your best retort. Those reactions are in themselves an evasion of the content of the disputed ideas. Rather you should withhold from anyone who attempts to intimidate or patronize you any satisfaction of detecting a registered effect. Fact based rebuttal is the only and ultimate valid and most effective reply if you have the facts available, and a cogent question is when you don’t.

   As for victims and sacrificial animals, yes, better we wait until after you read Atlas, because by then you won’t wonder why I said it anymore. And you will have many other questions and criticisms to deal with.

10. Don Simon says:

    My God, I’m gonna have to save these essays for my holidays. But as a short comment I can say that even though I generally like theory and ideology, that was a few lightyears too far from reality to be even close to persuading me. Unfortunately though I lack the liguistic artillery to take the debate.

    I do however want to salute you James, for being so open minded. I am as you might have noticed quite happy about living in a country with the basic welfare needs supplied, as well as bonuses such as daddies being paid to stay home with their kids, legislated five week holiday etc. It’d be hard to move away from that permanently.

    I have however lived in the States, and I am aware of the different situation. And even though I like the basic idea of the government being our representatives who take a share of our money to produce what WE think is for the common good, I also have an awareness of the dangers of it being too powerful. Also I think that in lack of simple solutions we need a bit of bureaucracy to put a just welfare system into practice, but we do struggle with wasting too much money on sorting out that all details are super fair.

    Another obvious back side is of course that people stop thinking of what they can do to earn their living but rather on how the government can halp them. Instead of looking into how they can contribute in spite of their shortcomings, they think of how the latter can be used to get benefits. An inevitable problem in a welfare state I guess, but still a problem. People who get no help whatsover are forced to more productive and creative.

    Oh, one last thing. All these thoughts on the relationship between state and individual are very dependant on the size of the former. As a citizen in a tiny country like Sweden I do feel quite close to my representatives, and it’s possible to keep them somewhat monitored. This would of course be different in the USA (or in the USSR for that matter). So even though things might more equal when centralized, I think decentralization is a neccessary prerequisite.

    Lunch break is over. All for now. Cheers.

11. MichaelM says:

    Don

    It does not require linguistic artillery to deal with the issue of proper relationships between the individual and the state if you don’t try to answer all of the questions at once. Focus on the one single most important question and construct a principle to guide you in dealing with the subsequent questions.

    Here is that fundamental issue:

    “I like the basic idea of the government being our representatives who take a share of our money to produce what WE think is for the common good”

    The Objectivist will agree that you may authorize the government to take a share of your money to produce what YOU think is for the common good, for that would constitute a voluntary contribution to the necessary funding of government. What Objectivism condemns socialism for is not that, but rather for authorizing the government to take a share of other people’s money to produce what THEY do NOT think is for the common good.

    To do that, your “WE” does not persuade or entice them to join you, you just TAKE a share of their money. If they resist, you follow through on your threat to use force against them.

    So in the matter of how to define the nature of man and existence and define the values one must pursue to maximize the quantity and quality of one’s life (i.e. one’s ethics), you and your WE claim the superiority of your ethics and the right to supplant theirs with it.

    Thus, it is not capitalism that promotes greed. Capitalism does not allow anyone to obtain values from others without enticing it from them in exchange for something they value more. The epitome of greed is the socialist idea that majorities may take the product of the minds and actions of others without having to earn it, i.e. the quest for unearned wealth.

12. Don Simon says:

    “I know Ayn Rand is dead, but she isn’t dead enough for my tastes!”

    Tom Cox/Pipecock. Found here:
    http://basilikacoop.textdriven.com/inner/brothers-on-the-side-infinitestatemachine/

13. Don Simon says:

    Oh, capitalism does by no means promote greed, but it’s a damn good tool for practicing your such. And I think it’s quite obvious that we all have greed in us initially, as humans (just as we have empathy too). As I see it that’s also the main reason communism won’t really work, people aren’t motivated to work harder if it doesn’t pay off for them personally (it’s a bit too abstract that the entire population will collectively gain from it).

    You can line up Ayn’s nicely formulated words forever, but they’ll always be overridden by the fact that the more unregulated capitalist a society is, the more unequal it has become. And an unequal country will be plagued by tensions (and hence, crime). I think that’s what counts, not how much theoretical “freedom” you have.

    History has well proven that nor the full on planned economy nor the totally free market are successful ways. Obviously the desirable path is somewhere in between (as discussed by James). Ayn Rand might be one part in that discussion, but she damn sure is quite far from any solution I’d want to live in.

    And regarding the WE vs. THEM issue. Seeing your government as your representatives naturally requires a functioning democracy, and a neutral media watching them. Which, as stated above, probably is easier in a smaller country. But frankly, that’s what they are. I vote the party who shares my ideology and expect them to spend that given/stolen money as I’d have done if I was in their seat. That trust is fundamental. And even though you always need to be on your watch, I find that the American general disdain towards politicians sad. Then again, I prefer placing my vote on one of seven ideology based parties, than on one of two presidential candidates…

14. MichaelM says:

    Don

    “You can line up Ayn’s nicely formulated words forever, but they’ll always be overridden by the fact that the more unregulated capitalist a society is, the more unequal it has become. And an unequal country will be plagued by tensions (and hence, crime).”

    Your thinking about this is presently concrete bound. You are failing to identify the principles that drive the “capitalism” of the past that has always been mongrelized with socialism from the left and mercantilism from the right. In order to grasp the significance of Rand’s contribution, you must do that and compare it to the principles that constitute her unadulterated capitalism for which there are no historical examples other than extracted isolated instances.

    Under Rand’s capitalism, the government has no task to perform other than to guarantee that no person shall initiate the use of force to gain, withhold, or destroy any tangible or intangible value of any other person who has either created it or acquired it in a voluntary exchange. In such a society any interrelationship among men that is not voluntarily entered into would be a criminal act, and the government’s sole focus would be on preventing crime.

    The harm of anyone’s greed would be limited to those who would choose to be exploited by them. Furthermore there could never be any restriction on others who would choose to defeat the greedy by offering greater values at lower cost. But the primary defense of Rand’s capitalism is not simply that it would work, but rather that it would work, because it is ethically right to prevent people from using force against each other to get what they want from them.

    One who would condemn Rand’s politics faces a daunting ethical challenge. It would require formulating an ethics that can establish and validate as a principle that it is morally right to take by force the product of another man’s application of his own reason to his own actions. It would require taking a stand favoring the threat of violence against others, as a moral principle.

    You are right to say that it would require a functioning democracy and the checks and balances currently in place. But that democracy may not be allowed to authorize any initiation of force by the government to interfere in any voluntary interaction among adults. The democratically elected government would only define the laws that objectify the use of force and manage the agencies of defense to facilitate its use solely in defense against initiated force. All of the problems cause by lobbyists and pork-barrel politics would disappear, because the government would have no power to favor anyone and no funds of any kind to distribute. You would not vote among ideologies, because there would be only one ideology: No Force! Instead you would only vote between parties who advocated protecting from force this way or that way.

    This is not the “capitalism” you have known nor the one that exists today.

15. m says:

    hi MichaelM. how are you doing.

    what I am about to say is not only somewhat dicky, which I take complete responsibility for, but also a kind of critique I don’t expect you’ll take well, but: for the Rand stuff above I pegged you (in a conversation where you came up) as an intellectual lightweight type 17.

    a bit more from my diagnostic files: “most of the things a type 17 says are correct, which they know, and it renders them blind to the fact that their neurotic choice of right thing to say renders them chafing, petty, self-serving, unproductive and jagoffish, and petty a second time.”

16. Don Simon says:

    Hey MichaelM. I’ve was thinking of a longer reply to this, but without being too rude, I must say m here summarizes things pretty well. Those theories you mention are from a hypothetic individualist Utopia and really have nothing to do with how things will turn out if you run a society with more than, say, 12 inhabitants. Welcome to reality.

    I shall read up a bit on Rand some day, it seems like she can deliver some political philosophy amusement. In return I beg you too lift your eyes from your books and take a look at how things seem to go about in the real world. Cheers.

17. m says:

    no wait. michaelm, i just read don’s post and i’m on your side again.

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