DISQUS

Every time I did a search for my name, I'd end up with stories linked to Jerry Falwell and Dennis Prager.
As a Canadian, I have to say that Americans are capable of ploughing up ground into which some particularly strange mushrooms begin to grow, only instead of leaving them growing, your population ingests them in large numbers, and soon begins to hallucinate some very bizarre realities.
Must be the Cold North Strong and Free, but our social soil doesn't seem to produce such fun guys.
When I think of the Moral Majority I'm always reminded of St. Paul's statement that "we weren't given a spirit of condemnation." I find it quite useful in discerning whether someone is actually a Christian or not. A little condemnation is human, a lot is coming from some other spirit, and it ain't God's. I'm just glad it's not me who has to decide what to do with Falwell in the afterlife. Maybe his name says it all, he fell well.

Vonnegut as Jeremiah.
Jeremiah was the prophet who told court prophets that all their rosy pictures were false, "there will be no peace."
He was also the one who told the Jews to accept the Babylonian captivity and to prosper there because in 70 years they would be allowed to come home.
He also told the Jews who went to Egypt that they would disappear there, but he went with them, because he thought they'd need him.
I needed Vonnegut when I was a teenager, when I thought the court prophets were liars and the road to Egypt looked more promising than Babylon.
My favourite piece of Vonnegut writing is actually something I haven't read in years. It's from Palm Sunday, a book of sundry writings, it was sermon he gave to a Unitarian Church. I don't remember much about it, except that it was witty, and wise and cranky.
Maybe the optimistic cynicism I have comes from Vonnegut as you say, with just a little from Crabby Appleton too.
Perhaps in the same way he freed Kilgour Trout from his own novels, Vonnegut has been freed.

Alright, since you think all my points are inane, the field is yours, not because Truth has been arrived at,
but because your thought is closed
and I am unable to inspire you to see life in much larger context than you do.
You call it objectivism. I don't. Your ideal is subjective, your defintions are subjective, your arguments are subjective.
Your world is very small and unheroic to me. You're welcome to it. As far as I'm concerned people who admit no weakness are dangerous, far more dangerous than people like me who do. To me Roarck is an emotional midget.
And it is that selfish, rapacious pursuit of profit that has the world on the brink of ecological disaster. It's why America is hated around the world, even more than it is admired.
Roarks march in to countries despising their cultural traditions, their religions, their tribal unities, they pillage and they leave lives in ruins all in the name of capitalism's freedom and so the Western World can go on stuffing its face at the expense of every one else, gobbling up most of the earth's resources in the name of their selfish rights.
May I never think another thought about Rand or Fountainhead or her subjective objectivism again.
It was designed to be an apology for the self-serving.All my efforts to expand your definitions of objective experience and the context of the human in the natural world came to nothing. As the villain in the piece, I only came back so you could kill me off before the denouement anyway, because I knew your arguments were set in stone like commandments.

Rootie
if you think you are about to embark on an open discussion, wait for the steam roller, nothing you say will make the slightest difference to them, unless you acquiesce to their arguments.

Nothing has changed in my sense that Randians are cultists either. One with factions undoubtedly, but stuck in arguments splitting the same hairs over and over again.
Don't worry Michael Caution, I'll take my tattered respectability with me and leave you to collectively feed on Rootie's objections to your creed.

Holy bunch of typos Batman.

rootie
Sorry about sending you to a site that didn't make my point I did a quick google search and came up with a quick reference. But I'm glad you found Lewis Thomas delightful.

Actually we do have laws governing how automobiles are built. I think you would find that every kind of nut used in an car has very specific specs and if they aren't meant the car doesn't go on the road.
Just how a mechanistic metaphor touches on the life array of within a living human however isn't clear to me.
Presumably my post 110 makes more sense of my position.

101 Michael
I was basing my statement about Rand being a bridge between old and new objectivism on page 10 of the Romantic Manifesto. There at least she he does not call herself a bridge to Aristotle "Thomas Aquinas is one illustrious example, he was the bridge between Aristotle and the Renaissance" Perhaps else she dispenses with Aquinas and makes herself the bridge, I don't know, but on page 10 she defines her roles as similar to Aquinas'.
"I am a bridge of that kind - between the esthetic achievements of the nineteenth century and the minds of that chose to discover them." she goes to say that she is concerned with defending the achievements of the rational culture of the brief span of less than a century.
Perhaps my mistake is in identify objectivism with the 'esthetic achievements..."

Also Michael, my point is that faith founded on pre-suppositional philosopphy is founded on reason. My God is Creative Love. Granted there has been a lot of the irrational in my developement due to home life circumstances that don't matter here, the point is that I set out to discover evidence for my faith. Faith is just a choice that one makes about what to trust.
You may deny that your belief in Objectivism is a faith, but that's precisely what it is to me. You chose to be an objectivist, and not just any kind of objectivist, but one with an allegience to Rand's thought. You have faith in her, you trust her methodology.

As for my comments about my having only a high school education, it is not because I feel daunted by intellectuals that I made the comment, it's because I don't have the debating techniques of trained philosophers. I employ whatever methods are at hand to make my points, especially when I think that I am being steamrolled.

And finally capitalism, I'm actually baffled by the defense of it. I cannot imagine why an individualist would not suspect everything a corporatist does.
I was asked to produce examples of corporate crimes against humanity as if the concept had never crossed any of your minds. That alone made me suspicious of Rand's influence on your thinking. There's a whole world of corporate malfeasance a google search away.

Richard, I am not saying the universe is random, far from it, I am saying that the only pre-supposition about the existence of the universe that allows for the logical conclusion of meaning is that it was intentional created.
As you pointed out Rand explicity stated that it was not created.
What I am saying is that those who pre-suppose that the universe exists as consequence of chaos theory or that it came out random fractal processes cannot build a philosophical case for the existence of meaning based on their presuppostion.
Most scientists appear to propose that Cosmic Spontanenous Generation is responsible for the existence of the universe, and thus for the existence of life, and thus for the existence of meaning.
I suppose what you're saying to get around the necessity of the pre-suppositional argument is that Rand pre-supposed that life always existed, always operated by the laws it operates by now ?

So now we come to some points of agreement.
My notions of individualism cannot be separated from mutual benefit, they can be distinguished but not divided.
As for the need of animals to think or not, quite frankly I don't think humans know enough about the subject to be conclusive, and there is ample evidence that animals learn from humans, and in a sense learn to think like humans, not in abstract ways perhaps, but in concrete ways.
I think that given our symbiotic nature words like intuition and instinct have to be re-examined. It is why I took umbrage at your out of hand dismissal of them in favour of a solely rationalist basis for human understanding.
My case is that single-celled lifeforms in our cytoplasm individually do not amount to much more than transmitter-receivers of energy-information, but one human being is a mulit-zillion array of information processing lifeforms, on top of the 75 trillion human nuclei that constitute each one of us.
How is the energy-information processed, certainly not just by the brain.
The human body produces three electromagnetic fields: the brain field extends outside the body about one foot, the lung field is slightly larger and the heart field is about ten feet around us.Electro-magnetic fields contain ionized particles, every breath the lungs for example breathe out ionized particles (free radicals), within each particle is an information 'bit', some of which energy remains within the lung field, creating a field of 'memory' particular to each of us.
For my purposes, given the lingustic connects of spirit and breathe, I regard the lung field as the spirit.
The brain field (mind) is similar, but obviously the brain doesn't breathe ionized particles into its field, nonetheless it streams with ionized information, memory related to us personally.
The heart field (soul) does the same, only it is much more powerful because of its size. It streams with information presumably linked to neural peptide transmissions.
While this whole system is rational in the sense that it can be discovered and understood by science (See the HeartMath Institute's website) it is itself far more of a source of intuitive insight than mere thinking could ever provide.
According to Christian Huygen, the Renaissance Dutch clockmaker who wondered why every clock in his clockshop ticked in unison, despite the fact that he could not set a clock going simultaneously with every other clock in the room, he deduced that the clocks in the clock shop were entraining to the largest one in the room, the grandfather clock. It does so because it produces the largest electro-magnetic field in the vicinity.
In the same way, the heart's EM field , being the largest, is capable of entraining both the brain and lung fields.
According to the HeartMath Institute's experiments, in moments of stress, when brain waves are spiking, and breaths are short and ragged and the heart is racing, the rational thing to do, is to turn to the Heart field.
Values that they call core heart values produce immediate results, finding something to appreciate in a situation, something to care about, something to love triggers the entraining power the Heart field and the mind and the lungs lose their stress patters and produce coherent ones.
Yes it took a rational mind to discover the phenomenum, and it takes a moment of thought for an individual to chose to turn to the heart, but thought itself cannot entrain a human being and restore them to energetic coherency.
At the same time every animal on the planet with a brain, lungs and a heart has the same power, and without coherency no mammal would survive long. Animals are much better at staying within their coherency states than humans are, (not because they are less rational than humans, but because humans are irrational in ways no animal ever appears to be unless it has rabies.)

Put a group of humans in a room full of stressed out individuals and if the group employs heart entrainment they can produce a large enough field of coherency to effect the stress levels of other people in the room. One human could not do it to a room full of other people, several people can.
Lewis Thomas, in one of his essays suggests that humanity may be the central nervous system of the planet, in that our existence could be rooted in the need for life to articulate itself to itself.

It could be that the price of that role is our capacity for enduring paradox, highly stressful situations of understanding - which I think you call contradiction, and which you dismiss as irrational. To me paradox MAY be the knife edge on which human consciousness is split open and out of which a planetary awareness MAY be developing.

It won't put an end to individuality, and nor will it make me indistinguishable from you or from the fly on the wall, and nor will it put an end to rationality, but it will be an awareness that will change us forever.

I guess this site on symbiosis will do on a simple explanation of symbiosis.
http://www.geocities.com/jjmohn/endosymbiosis.htm
The SET theory they refer to is the work of Lyn Margulis, of course she would argue that her works puts an end to God forever, but God has a way of surviving such pronouncements.
I'll just leave that aside for the moment to deal with symbiosis.
My all time favourite writer on this subject is Lewis Thomas the essayist, the former dean of both New York University and Yale schools of medicine.
In a chapter called Organelles as Organisms published in 1974, he says this
"Finally there is the whole question my identity, and, more than that my human dignity. I did not mind it when I first learned of my descent from lower forms of life. I had in mind an arboreal family of beetle-browed, speechless, hairy sub-men, ape-like, and I've never objected to them as forbears. Indeed being Welsh, I feel the better for it, having clearly risen above them in my time of evolution. It is a source of satisfaction to be part of of the improvement of the species.
But not these things. I have never bargained on descent from single cells without nuclei. I could even make my peace with that, if it were all, but there is the additional humiliation that I have not, in a real sense, descended at all. I have brought them along with me, or perhaps they have brought me."
"It is no good standing on dignity in a situation like this. It is a mystery. There they are, moving about in my own cytoplasm, breathing for my own flesh, but strangers. They are much less closely related to me than to each other and to the free-living bacteria out under the hills. They feel like strangers, but the thought comes that the same creatures, precisely the same, are out there in the cells of sea gulls, and whales, and dune grass, and seaweed, and hermit crabs, and further inland in the leaves of the beech in my backyard, and in the family of skunks beneath the back fence, and even in that fly on the window, Through them I am connected; I have close relatives, once removed, all over the place."
"This is new information, for me, and I regret somewhat that I cannot be in closer touch with my mitochondria. If I concentrate, I can imagine I feel them; they do not squirm, but there is, from time to time, a kind of tingle. I cannot help thinking that if only I knew more about them, and how they maintain our synchrony, I would have a way o explaining music to myself."
Lewis Thomas

That was written in 1974, the science is not even new anymore. But it is there, and when symbiosis is taught to our children and they grow up in the world Thomas writes about, and when that world is combined with membrane physics, everything about the way we think and feel about the universe will shift, and our children's children will live in a world where mutual benefit is the central reality.
We won't need state collectives, and we won't need corporate collectives, but life will be seen to be composed of independent communitarians.
Individual because we will always be able to distinguish ourselves as such, but part of an organic whole, from which we cannot be divided, and from which damage to a part is damage to the whole.
And if humans cause too much damage it will be humans who suffer extinction, the symbionts have survived billions of years of evolution. They don't need us as as much as we need them,. And the sooner we live that lesson and stop deluding ourselves that we are the gods of this planet, the sooner we might get around to figuring out how to survive the damage that has already been done and the consequences of our hubris that are already bearing down on us.

Come, let us agree to disagree about many things. I say faith is rational when rooted in presuppositional philosophy's arguments for a created universe because a meant universe is the only source of meaning, the only kind that could produce reason.
Randomness can only produce randomness.
Cosmic spontaneous generation is no more rational that spontaneous generation of maggots in decaying matter, Spinoza notwhithstanding.
You say capitalism is wonderful, I say it is seriously flawed.
And as my seventeen year old son points out there is a difference between the state and the government, the state being the ongoing, the government being the temporary. If I understand you correctly and I probably don't, you think both are evil, although the state more evil than the government.
I don't think either one is evil. In fact, I think only individuals are capable of evil. Granted I may sometimes sound like I think corporations are evil, but what I really think is that they are like guns, un-need in a civil society, and dangerous because they are facades for avoiding responsibility.
I think an individual should be liable for his economic actions, and not be able to hide behind a legal fiction. I also think corporations are so interwoven with organized crime that there is no way of separating them.
I think we need to free enterprise by making it individual, and associational.If you want to think of us all as free traders, I don't have a problem with that, but if you think there is some equality between me and corporate gollum than we must agree to disagree.
I think the environment is so intrinsically bound up in who were are as human beings because of symbiosis that trying to divide what can only be distinguished does violence to both man and the environment and that is why we are poised on the edge of one of the worst ecological disasters in the history of the world.
I don't think altruism is evil, I think false altruism, false self-sacrifice is foolish. Forced sacrifice by someone else is evil. Sacrifice out of shame and the fear of standing up for yourself isn't evil, it's either tragic, or bathetic.
But if an individual chooses to give themselves to a cause or for the sake of another person, and their heart and soul and spirit and mind and body are in it, then something profoundly heroic is going on. Their choice as an individual should be honoured not debased.

Anyway, this is one of the reasons I gave up so called rational debate a long time ago, human self-deception is profoundly elaborate, and echoes of self-righteousness permeate all such debates. Pride and arrogance have a way of nestling into utterance and passing themselves off as wisdom.
I don't trust it in myself and I don't trust it in others.
That's why political philosophy is so filled with rancour, it is the most common means we have for displacing our anger from our own lives onto others.
And if you don't want to admit to doing it, don't. I know I do it, and I've spoken to very few people who don't do it.
So, let us agree to disagree shall we ?

Rand herself said she was a bridge between a past and a future Objectivism, I guess that can't mean old and new because you say so.

Faith is rational when you use presupposional philosophy. We all choose our beliefs, and those beliefs create sequences of ideas. Yours create one sequence, mine create another. Mine aren't good enough for you, yours aren't good enough for me. Sounds like individualism to me.

As far as religion itself goes well I'm a rather extreme protestant in that too. I believe what I choose to believe. To me religion is the coral reef of spirituality, the after-image.

I also think Rand is only partially correct about religion's effect on morality. What she means by religion I think just means politics by clerics.
Her simplification and reductions of spiritual practice into an evil religion/good rationalism are a false dichotomy to me.

The human reality of the metaphysical actuality is far more complex than your philosophy.

As for your threats to my respectability if I continue to disagree with you, surely that's a just a little silly.

I could be completely wrong, and heaven knows you obviously think I am, but this discussion began as an attempt to grapple with Rand and her ideas, not as a staging ground for a lecture series.

You may not have noticed, but the field has been vacated by everyone who disagrees with you. I'm just stubborn I guess. And somewhat dogged. That doesn't mean I'm respectable to those who left, but look around you, other than me, you're preaching to the choir.

Since I appear to be the villain of the piece, I thought I should put in an appearance at the denouement,so that the heroes can stamp me out for good.
I don't even really want to begin picking up the pieces that I'd have debated earlier, because I discovered the process to be futile.
I'm accused of a faux open-mindedness but that was precisely the reason I left, I felt like I was facing that in others.
Granted I guessed that New Objectivism has its flavours, it's sectarian disagreements and while the heroes of the piece may think I'm irrational, I actually think I'm relatively rational.
The old rationalism/objectivism was based on faith, faith rooted in notions of a created universe governed by Law, divine, natural and man-made.
The new objectivism is founded on the metaphysics of a randomly create universe; random creation is akin to cosmic spontanenous generation.
Its quite astonishing to me the number of people who people in cosmic spontaneous generation.
The logical conclusion of a world created by randomness is randomness, not meaning.
From my perspective, I was not really addressing Rand's views so much as those of her followers, the assembled New Objectivists. You all share an essential POV. And as I said, I have a high school education, I'm not trained thinker, unless you count self-training. I'm not quite a street kid, but I don't pretend to fight fair either.
You use a theological term, evil, to describe things you don't like. But since New Objectivism is founded on randomly created metaphysical laws of nature, your statements about environmentalism being evil, or altruism being evil, or collectivism being evil or etc etc, being evil, all just random pronouncements.
The ideology of New Objectivism ie. Randianism, therefor has a quality to me of cult-like behaviour.
Your pronouncements are random collections of dislikes not objective realities. And I got tired of the wall of heroic good-guyism that New Objectivism brings to the discussion.
Sure I made a dramatic exit, I'm a playwright, I pushed your collective buttons because I still have a trace of cruel streak and I knew you would be upset by being named as being what you most despise, a collective, a hive.
I just happen to think you have a small world-view, it's my objective and subjective opinion. I don't trust people who don't admit self-weakness, they're usually hiding something. I especially don't trust people who hide behind veneers of rationalism founded on random metaphysics.
I'm both open-minded and closed minded enough to know every strength and weakness I have, and I'm old enough to admit them freely.
So anyway
"Of all the money that 'ere I spent
I spent it in good company
and all the harm that ere I done, alas
it was to none but me,
and all I've said, for want of wit
to memory now I can't recall,
so fill to me the parting glass,
goodnight and joy be with you all."

With man as the epicentre of your philosophy, your need for the terms good and evil is very curious, as a pair of opposites good and evil are theological in origin, not moral, because the moral pair is right and wrong.
There is a mechanism in language known as the excluded initiative, in which for example, a purely descriptive passage uses a rhetorical device because description is not enough.
The same happens in analogic language, when Plato says poets are liars and then proceeds to use the metaphor of the cave it is because the analogic is not powerful enough, not evocative enough to say what he means, so he has to use a poetic image, not because it's a lie, but because analogic language can't convey what he's trying to say.
The philosophical is a mode of language that cannot express what poetry can, just as poetry cannot express what prophecy can.
Rand's god is man, and your cults's ethical distinctions between what is good and what is bad, has to reach beyond philosophy into the language of theology, and thus we get Randians incanting the utterances of their prophetess.
Theirs is rationalism of cant. They collectively intone that capitalism is good and everything else is evil because the prophet says so, not because it is objectively so.
They collectively intone that selfishness is good and that sacrifice is evil because the prophet says so, not because it is objectively so.
Resistance is futile to the great hive of Randian worker bees because the prophet says so.
I think their god is a delusion and their prophet even more so.
Rand saw herself as bridge between the old objectivism that arose out the biblical notion of a created universe with laws that man comprehended and by which man developed science; and the new objectivism that came along after philosophy nose-dived into despair after God was pronounced Dead, an objectivism in which she was the prophetess.
And now her followers collectively declare that only the things that she declared to be objectively true are objectively true.
I objectively perceive Capitalism to be nothing more than the worship of Mammom in business suits. And that all their cant about how it brings freedom is meaningless when all the crimes against humanity that can be laid at its feet are taken into consideration.
But they will not take them into consideration that cannot see them because Rand did not point them out to them.
Human beings are not isolates, we are not just individuals, in our very cells were are communities of lifeforms, and that is an objective fact that will permeate the future of human understanding.
They speak of freedom, and then they limit everything they say about it to what Ms. Rand thought, what Ms. Rand said.
I also believe she was entirely mistaken about rationality being the entire source of our understanding. And just because the collective says it is so doesn't make it so, we receive gadzillions of bits of information from the universe every second, all kinds of positive and negative charges, all kinds of nuances and while it's true we have neural pepitides in our guts and throughout our bodies, what all those bits of information add up to is a complex of emotional/intellectual leaps and insights and thought processes and intuitions. And just because the Collective says it is not so, does not make it not so.
In the chemical theory of opposites when we see the colour red we see an after image of green, and the green proves that what we are seeing is red. When I see individualism I see an after image of communitarianism, and when I see communitarianism I see an after-image of individualism. I don't think, O, the green is evil because its the chemical opposite of red.
With all due respect I'm not interested in joining their cult, because I would rather think for myself than have Ms. Rand think for me, dead as she is like some succubus attached to the imaginations of her followers to keep them from thinking for themselves.

Tom and Jennifer, thank you for the party, if you throw another and if it's okay by you I'll be back. Bye all.

As I guessed, life goes on, it will not roll up into a ball, and nor will this thread.

Therefor I'll toss this into the coporate capitalist critique.

The main problem with it in a contemporary sense is the fact that they are entities rather than indidviudals, golems, which means that organized crime has taken advantage of the fact that they have no conscience to bind them and that the pursuit of profit is their primary purpose. Since organized crime not only globalized before corporate capitalism, but commands billions upon billions of dollars that are being laundered through 'legitimate' corporations, the entire global economic is toxic with crime money.
Interpol is fighting a war against criminal economic forces so interwined in the global market that winning that war is seriously in doubt.
The relationship between arms and drugs is well known and well documented, it was even at the heart of the Iran contra scandal.
Believing as I do that corporate capitalism can not be unentangled from organized crime, something can be done by taking away the legal fiction of corporate citizenship. Free enterprise should be conducted by individuals, they can cooperate as much as they want, they can pool their resources, combine their buying power and their market reach, their technological developments, they can be individually repsonible for the actions of their companies, but they should not be allowed to play corporate shell games.
Consumers aid and abet organized crime because we do not have the transparency we need to know who owns what and how.
You can dismiss the argument that the global economy is toxic with crime money, but that doesn't make it any less real.

I'm trying to wrap my head around this whole debate and find that I am conflicted in various places: one of course is by my own ignorance, another is my own displaced anger. On the hand I don't appear to mind being challenged by Rand's ideas, on the other there are some positions I distrust altogether. On the one some of those positions may not be Rands but merely those of her supporters, which of course throws it back upon me to read more Rand, and yet there is something about her ideology I don't trust, and it probably has to do with her metaphysics, or what I think of as her lack of them. I don't believe in the purely rationale, because I think life is much too large for man to roll up into a ball of thought and toss around, and yet I clearly believe there is an Objective 'other' that we can know and understand.

Perhaps there are a number of lurkers who have been reading along and saying little or nothing who could roll this discussion up into a ball that contains all sides and put their finger on the nature of the beast we have created here.

And now back to the bacteria.
Your environmental policy appears to be as self-motivated as a bacteria's, consume as much as possible and if the whole agar agar plate dies in its own wastes then we'll have heroically individuated ourselves by conquering life on earth.
All life represents at least a minutae of awareness, all energy= equalling information. With a multi-zillionic array of information gathering going on inside each of us, every human has capacities undreamed about in your philosophies, and yet, the agar agar plate awaits bacterial-mindedness if I can call it that. And since a mindset that believes that raping the planet is a perfect acceptible form of behaviour for an ideal human, I beg to differ, I think human consciousness has been elevated by life for a much higher purpose than that: the dominion over the earth that humans have been given is not so we can die in our wastes.

Extremely good to see you're all still at it.
We The Living is still so far a good read. At this point it's the story of a spoiled young woman whose spoilers have lost the capacity to spoil her any further, but since she's strong willed she's excited by playing with fire and is basically against whatever the people who frustrated her spoilers are for: there has already also been a touch of titillation. Clearly Rand is setting her character on a path of some kind maturation, within the context of her anti-Soviet sensibilities.
There is theory of anger that I culled from called from a book called The Angry Marriage: basically there are six types of anger 2 are overt, venting and provocation, and four are covert: enactment, displacement, invalidism, and utter suppression.
Politics is the art of displaced anger, it's always us versus them. In a marriage, it's the couple against the in-laws, against the people at work, against the Jews, the black's the Randians, the coporatations, the Rand corporations, everything outside the marriage, that way the marriage survives huge amounts of anger, because it's all displaced onto other people.
The marriage that is a nation is almost always displacing anger onto the 'other', it's all the Russian's fault, it's the communists fault, it's the terrorists falut.
Because nations are governed primarily by political parties with specific ideologies, the parties themselves stay together because the fault is likewise always the other party's. It's always the conservatives fualt, it's liberals fault. America is rife with a very severe form of anger displacement, and the marriage of peoples that is your nation is in serious trobule because of it.
Which is why I'm EXTREMELY happy with the way this debate is going.

Good morning, I see your party is still going on Tom and Jennifer. Stray thoughts on what's been said since I left

The Novel of ideas is a perfectly respectable form of literature, criticizing Rand for writing one seems a little churlish.

I started reading We the Living but I'm afraid my brain is so excited about this particular debate I'm not paying attention. She clearly is an observant prose writer and her language is adept.

A note on my use of 'collectivism', yes, it's true I was 'having you off' as the Brits would say, precisely because you seem to take the word itself so seriously, it's Rand's Satan.
I have no problem seeing that a hockey team is not the evil state that she so abhors.

And yes I'm sure I wouldn't fare particularly well in any collectivist state, as I said before, my form of individualism reels at the way Randians
adhere so strictly to her particular code. That's why I call myself an Independent Communitarian, because I reserve the right to hold my own opinions about the common good. But unlike Randians I actually perceive such a thing in Reality, it's objectively there, and it's called mutual benefit.

As for PMB 52
"In case there’s any doubt, let me say that, yes, Objectivist advocates the rape of the earth. (Due credit to Harry Binswanger for that statement.)

To put it more precisely, we believe that human beings survive by reshaping the earth to meet our needs. That is what Roark does through his buildings. That is what animates the characters of *Atlas Shrugged* as well. And it is the root, heart, and soul of morality."

This I think is the nub of the matter for me, it's why I stopped reading Rand I now realize.

As symbiotic lifeforms it has no basis in reality. The average human being has 75 trillion cells in his or her body and their are several symbionts with their own DNA in every one of those cells. They're proto-bacteria and they're in every other life forms on the planet.

Rand's position is a bastardization of the Biblical notion that man was given Dominion over the Earth. Your position remains of what happens when you start a bacterial colony on an agar agar plate, it soon dies in its own wastes.

You think you're thinking rationally but all you're doing is thinking selfishly. Yes altruism is more difficult than egoism, it takes a heroic effort to think about other people's needs, but enlightened self-interest is precisely that. Rand's unenlightened Egoism is small and unheroic, as much as you would like to pretend that it's the height of human achievement.
She passes herself off as an ethicist, but write frankly I find Randian thought to be amoral: there is no right and wrong but what you individually allow yourselves to believe, and since limiting your field of action is by definition a self-sacrifice, there is no basis for morality In Randian thought.

Wow, I feel like I'm back in dogma class and everybody has the right catch phrase for every situation.
Having only a high school education I'll see if I can keep keep up.
First off, I do believe in an objective reality that can be deduced from experience. Personally I divide experience into two processes, one is the natural world that I call the Actual, the other is the vast mesh of human cause and effect that I call Reality, therefor I believe that both the Actual and the Real can be understood.
The uncertainty principle is Heisenberg's, and has to do with the fact that we can either know where a particle is or where it is going but we cannot know both at the same time.
The notion that the planet's gases are reactive comes from James Lovelock creator of the Gaia theory who was asked by NASA to determine if they were likely to find life on Mars. He realized that spectrographs of Mars showed it had a stable atmosphere, when he turn his lens around to consider what Earth would like look he realized that the atmosphere was reactive, and he went to Lynn Margulis, the creator of Symbiobitic endogenesis theory to discover that the atmosphere was being regulated by all the life on the planet, which he seemed to him to resemble some kind of planetary consciousness but which he settled on describing as pro-prioceptive, self regulating.
As for notions of contradiction I don't think I once used the word in any of my comments, it seems to be a Randian preoccupation, it's not one of mine.
There is a state of Coleridge's that I use via Northrup Fry that goes some like distinguishing differences for things that cannot be divided. Political economics is a single phenomenon, you can't divide the two spheres of influence, you can only not their distinguishing marks.
The America corporate republic is an Oligarchy, one of Plato's phases of republican decay.
And quite frankly, while I can easily see a collectivist ideology at work in oligarchy that is social Darwinist and predatory while you're happily celebrating how rational you are and how much stuff you get to own while painting pretty little pictures of incentive and reward and a happy-go-lucky world of enlightened traders are just going about their business.
I think you should ask people in the third world or living in the thousands of slums that scatter your unhappy land just how free they are from economic force.
As for the fact that we live on a bi-polar planet, we do for heavens' sake, the north pole and the south pole, I don't think there's much sense of irony in Rand, since irony builds its humour around the all the-too-human and you people are so busy living in the fantasy that you're all-so superhuman that you can actually make the statement that we don't live on a bi-polar planet. Bipolarity does not mean contradiction, electricity is bi-polar, it goes from the negative to the positive. It's not a contraction it's a reality and from that reality one can objectively deduce that life is far more complex than Ayn Rand wants it to be. She had an unhappy collectivist experience in her children and so she set out to denounce common good as a delusion and the world ends up with an America full of individualists so self- absorbed in how well they're doing that they can see the misery and want their socio-political system is causing around the world.
You want to be left alone with your freedom to ignore the suffering that your rape of the world's resources creates. If there's anything rational in your position, you're right, I don't see it, all I see is denial and self-satisfaction.

As for the quality of the debate, well we're sitting in Tom's house, and Tom has invited Jennifer to invite some friends over and here we all are.
First off let me say that I'm a Canadian so my view of the American socio-political system is that of an outsider. Northern countries tend to be more communitarian than southern ones because winter tends to force itself on people and cause them to act in consort more often than not.
Also, while Canadians have left-right divides, generally speaking they don't attain the heights of rancour that I find quite common on American blogs. I'm actually amazed at how deeply Americans seem to hate one another.
As a nation Canada was created by coalition party known as the Liberal Conservatives. For myself I consider myself an Independent Communitarian, which is why I can appreciate some of Rand's perspectives on individualism. Why the community is such an evil thing to such large sectors of American political thought I can't even begin to fathom.
When you talk about business I think what you're saying only holds true about small business, because small business is about as close as you can get to free enterprise, the bigger it gets the less free, the more manipulative and the more predatorial it becomes.
Leaving aside your comments about government because I essentially have no problems with distrusting government, the difficulty for me is that the collectivist aspects of corporate economics appear not to concern you. I cannot see how they can't, objectively speaking they are machines rolling over the landscape and the commons. The privatization of the commons concerns me because it's not about equalizing the bounty but allowing the rich to seize disproportionate shares of it. And its not really privatization, its corporatization, and corporations have no souls, they cannot sign affadivits in court because they have no conscience to bind them, so where is the basis for Rand's ethics when the pursuit of profit by any means but illegal ones is the mandate of corporate America ?
And when you let your corporations loose on the world, they pillage and desecrate ways of life that other individuals hold dear and in doing so bring disaster home to roost on American soil, forcing an incursion of the state into the privacy of citizens in the name of security.
Your turn.

Jennifer,
can we go back to your point about how titillating Fountainhead was because I'm sure that while Randians may not enjoy the mutuality of sex, in the privacy of their own individuality they are obviously as titillated as you were (and I was in high school.)

Not to have personal conversation in the midst of this little chat Viscount but I'm essentially a tax credit unionist that sees government as a business owned by citizens, with bureaucrats as staff, and meant to be run on cooperative principles, that's not of course the way it's run now.
I also wouldn't use the government to destroy corporate capitalists I'd used all those individualist poor people and middle class people to combine their buying power to dismantle Social Darwinism one predator at a time. As capitalism has shown the means of production is actually money, if you have you can produce whatever you want. The poor and the middle class don't have a lot individually but by pooling it they produce a mutually beneficial society, without ever losing their individuality.

So here we come to a whole new kettle of fish.
"Moreover, it is not *always* true that great creations are the work of multiple people. Think of the great discoveries and creations in history and what you generally see is the work of one great human being: from Aristotle, to Newton, to Edison, to Darwin, to Ford, to Shakespeare, to Beethoven, to Ayn Rand."

In this I think like a social creditiste, science is rooted in the work that others did before, Shakespeare based Romeo and Juliet on earlier texts, everyone adds their piece to the puzzle, nobody creates in a vaccuum. Rand herself in 'manifesto' calls herself a bridge between the past and the future.

"We have two choices: either leave people to make their own way on a free market, where they must try to persuade others of the value of their achievments–or give the government the power to decide which artists and producers are entitled to patronage."

How is a market run by corporations any freer than a market run by government ? Personally I'd like to see free enterprise unshackled by corporate capitalists (precisely I suspect because corporate capitalism is collectivist. so maybe I'm more extreme than Rand, maybe her support of capitalism is nothing more stemming from the weaknesses of her anti-communist childhood biases.) The idea that the market is free is absurb, and the Social Darwinism I spoke of earlier is beginning to rear its ugly little head. Social Darwinism is dominant predator bio-economics. But the Fact is, the REALITY is we are symbiotic life forms, humans don't breathe for ourselves, the symbionots in our cells do, we exist only because of Mutual Benefit.

Don't get me wrong, I think the state is as dangerous as corporations, and I certainly don't think capitalism as a political system enables the poor to do anything but serve their predatorial masters.

I think I'm even more of radical individualist than Rand was because I don't fear common good, I don't fear self-sacrifice. I guess my ideal man is a little closer to Jesus than to Roark.

Unfortunately my library didn't have a copy of Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged checked in, but I did get We the Living and the Romantic Manifesto.
I won't say anything more about Fountainhead until I've re-read it. I started the manifesto, and clearly I too believe there is an objective reality that exists and which can be understood and dealt with.
She does write clear philosophical prose without horns growing out of her tongue, and I agree with much that she says without much difficulty, so far...
So perhaps our Randians can explain whether she addresses notions of paradox,since she appears to want to deal with both reality and ideals in the same breath...seemingly without recognizing the importance of common good distinct from individual good.
As per the Viscount's comments about the Beatles, I too am discomfited by what I sense as an extreme individualism in her thought. Granted her Soviet childhood gave her no reason to trust collectivism, and granted that two individuals like Lennon and McCartney (as opposed to Lenin and Trotsky ?) transcended their individual strengths by combining them precisely because they were confident in their individual abilities, and equally assuming that if Ms. Rand had a large rock to move in her yard she would have not tried to move it alone but would have asked for help from however many people it might have taken to move the rock, and thus isn't actually as extreme as some of us are assuming she was, can the Randians (not collectively of course) watching us muddle through this say that she did recognize paradox, but was simply trying to build a society one human at a time ?

Michael, I suspect that humans are the only animal that is irrational, and I think there is a good reason for that,
perhaps arising out of uncertainty, the dependence of our survival on imaginative insights from skewed perspectives, and something to with improbability theory and the fact that two of earth's most abundant gases are reactive and should be blowing up and putting an end to the planet except for the highly improbable fact that all the life on the planet appears to be engaged in the common purpose of regulating the planet's gases by breathing an atmosphere beneficial to all the life on Earth.

Help I'm posting between posts.