A perspective on cults and how to stay out of them:

Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it—that no substitute can do your thinking, as no pinch-hitter can live your life—that the vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence.(Rand)

I suspect that people looking for a “guarantor” of truth is one of the drivers of religion—an attempt to escape the fact that, basically, we’re all cognitively alone.

Not only is it important to know at what age Rand was read but what was going on in America at that time.  In 1963 I heard her lecture at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles and she spoke on her escape from Communism and her acknowledgment of Free Enterprise Capitalism.  She also endorsed Senator Barry Goldwater for President.

I admit that I was very impressed with her books, essays and films.  I was also naive and believed that Capitalism was important to American values.  Not everyone has a degree in any money making classes but even the lowest among us Secretaries understood that putting savings away for future investments in American corporations would give us a better chance at wealth.  In those days this worked.  We also learned that electing President Johnson was a poor choice as he put many people on welfare removing their chances of staying in school and training for jobs.  It became popular in those years for women to have many babies without husbands and the cost of welfare was horrendous and cut into the federal budget with no purpose except to encourage more babies.

Rand taught me the meaning of individualism and self esteme to guide our daily actions.  When my kids were finishing up high school I bought copies of “The Foundtainhead and Atlas Shrugged” and suggested my girls read on or the other.  They read both and included her essays.  They headed off to Berkeley and managed to stay out of trouble.  They worked to support themselves but I picked up the tuition. 

The family was Atheist so nothing was changed as far as our believe in an afterlife.  We put our energies into the present time but being Fiscally conservative we piled up our investments for retirement. 

Free enterprise capitalism can work if ethics are in control.  America is wallowing in law breaking and cutting corners and, of course, taking what we did not earn from others.

Sandy - 22 September 2009 06:52 AM

Free enterprise capitalism can work if ethics are in control.

No it can’t.

Set aside the meaninglessness of “if ethics are in control.”  Which ethics, and in whose control, are crucial issues this statement completely avoids, not to mention, “in control by what means?” 
“Ethics in control” by means of a coercive state whose first principle is to defend corporate capitalism is a long way of saying “fascism.”

“Ethics in control” of each person’s sudden and unwavering devotion to the free market suggests some sort of free-market rapture, in which the unemployed by virtue of insufficient productive capacity to utilize the labor power of all citizens, or by virtue of some physical disability, starve to death in uncomplaining silence rather than rock the free-market boat.

But even if through mass lobotomies or otherwise, everyone bought into the free-market myth, it still wouldn’t work.

Two things would happen.

1.  As some businesses were more successful at making profits than others, and began concentrating capital, they would be able to use their capital advantage to drive competitors out of business, and take out a monopoly position.  This has been true of the railroad trusts of the 19th century through Walmart and Citibank today.  These monopolies have formed in the face of regulation;  imagine the field day these corporations would have if they were unfettered by “regulation,” such as it has been since Reagan became president.  Once the few surviving corporations staked out their monopoly positions, they would charge what it pleased them for providing such goods and services as it pleased them to offer.  But that’s not even the worst of it …

2.  Capitalism is an inherently unstable system, which inevitably lurches from crisis to crisis.  Yes, Marx said that, but let’s hear from two of the most outspoken and “respected” devotees of free-market capitalism.

First, alan greenspan, an unabashed acolyte of Ayn Rand:

REP. HENRY WAXMAN: The question I have for you is, you had an ideology, you had a belief that free, competitive—and this is your statement—“I do have an ideology. My judgment is that free, competitive markets are by far the unrivaled way to organize economies. We’ve tried regulation. None meaningfully worked.” That was your quote.

You had the authority to prevent irresponsible lending practices that led to the subprime mortgage crisis. You were advised to do so by many others. And now our whole economy is paying its price.

Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?

ALAN GREENSPAN: Well, remember that what an ideology is, is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to—to exist, you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not.

And what I’m saying to you is, yes, I found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is, but I’ve been very distressed by that fact.

REP. HENRY WAXMAN: You found a flaw in the reality…

ALAN GREENSPAN: Flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works, so to speak.

REP. HENRY WAXMAN: In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working?

ALAN GREENSPAN: That is—precisely. No, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I had been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.

Now, Richard A. Posner, whose new book, A Failure of Capitalism, was reviewed by the NY Times.  from that review:

“This recession,” President Obama said recently, “was not caused by a normal downturn in the business cycle. It was caused by a perfect storm of irresponsibility and poor decision-making that stretched from Wall Street to Washington to Main Street.” Richard A. Posner is having none of it. A perfect storm, yes: but a storm of responsibility and reasonable decision-making. The Crash of ’08 happened because businesspeople and consumers did what markets and society expect them to do. Don’t blame capitalists or, for the most part, government. Blame capitalism.

It comes as something of a surprise that Posner, a doyen of the market-oriented law-and-economics movement, should deliver a roundhouse punch to the proposition that
markets are self-correcting.

[…]A typical recession is a market correction, usually of inflation or other economic imbalances; a depression is a market failure. And it is a failure (here is grenade No. 2) that the market is powerless to prevent. “An interrelated system of financial intermediaries” — a banking system, broadly defined — “is inherently unstable,” Posner writes. Think of it as “a kind of epileptic, subject to unpredictable, strange seizures.”

Populists and libertarians will hate this book, though I wouldn’t want to predict which group will hate it more. A perfect storm of irresponsibility? Hardly. The crisis came about precisely because intelligent businesses and consumers followed market signals. “The mistakes were systemic — the product of the nature of the banking business in an environment shaped by low interest rates and deregulation rather than the antics of crooks and fools.”

When Posner and Greenspan admit that “free-market capitalism” is fantasy with a fatal flaw, I hope the rest of Aynheads will give up on this nonsense.

teuchter,
Seeing Greenspan and Posner juxtaposed like that is shocking. It’s hard to believe it’s them, but there they are in black and white. I wonder if conservative America has digested this, or is ignoring it. Maybe they hysterical angry crowds simultaneously screaming “Fascism!” and “Socialism!” are simply disoriented. Perhaps they know, or intuit, that their economic foundation is now exposed as fatally flawed and they are flailing?

Some of Rand’s comments about capitalism: Ayn Rand on Capitalism.

A general philosophic index to comments: Conceptual Index.

Looking at many statements by the pious,  it’s clear that they know that reason is their worst enemy and they constantly attack it. At least in many cases, the attacks boil down to the claim that anything that cannot be proved is just arbitrary and the claim that it’s true is a matter of faith just as much as their “axiom” of the truth of Christianity. Aristotle dealt with this as discussed here in a short section of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. This important topic is the “principle of non-contradiction (PNC)” in The Fundamental Principles: Axioms. (The statement about the PNC as written in the Encyclopeida is—to me—a thing of beauty.) Rand takes this further in her views of axioms and axiomatic concepts. The holy men have spent centuries learning how to attack reason at the most fundamental level; they know they can get away with it. To see some consequences of the—implicit—attack on axioms, see the Presuppositional Apologetics that’s so popular among U.S. holy men. I’ve not seen the “New Atheists” deal with it yet although I heard Hitchens mention it recently so maybe he’s on the case; I hope so because this “starting points” approach is a pure a mind prison for sure.

BTW, the Ayn Rand people are in opposition to Greenspan. See this article: Bubble Boy: Alan Greenspan’s Rejection of Reason and Morality by Gus Van Horn.

I guess its just a matter of class outlook.  If you own the thing, you think you are quite the John Galt genius.  If you built it, you know better.

When the union’s inspiration through the workers’ blood shall run,
There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun;
Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one,
But the union makes us strong.

CHORUS:
Solidarity forever,
Solidarity forever,
Solidarity forever,

For the union makes us strong.
Is there aught we hold in common with the greedy parasite,
Who would lash us into serfdom and would crush us with his might?
Is there anything left to us but to organize and fight?
For the union makes us strong.

CHORUS:

It is we who plowed the prairies; built the cities where they trade;
Dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid;
Now we stand outcast and starving midst the wonders we have made;
But the union makes us strong.

CHORUS:

All the world that’s owned by idle drones is ours and ours alone.
We have laid the wide foundations; built it skyward stone by stone.
It is ours, not to slave in, but to master and to own.
While the union makes us strong.

CHORUS:

They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn,
But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn.
We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom when we learn
That the union makes us strong.

CHORUS:

In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold,
Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold.
We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old
For the union makes us strong.

Well, as luck would have it, a new Objectivist site has gone online today: Principles of a Free Society. I think it’s been more difficult than needed to find out about Objectivist views in an integrated manner. I’ve spent about half an hour looking around and I’m impressed with the integration of summary, theory, and detailed applications that’s in this site. They’ve included written work as well as audio and video. The information structure seems quite good, but I have a small quibble with one aspect of the page layout. Anyway, I hope this same approach is someday taken with—at least—ethics. Perhaps even epistemology.

esnyder - 25 May 2009 06:26 AM

Man is an indivisible being composed of matter and consciousness. That is the atheist principle at which Ayn Rand starts. That is as far as I can go with her. From there she developes a view of humanity which glorifies egotism. She weighs the moral value of a human being in terms of dollars and cents accumulated. She says that if you are not self-reliant to an ultimate degree, then you are parasitic. Starting from an atheist principle, she invites her readers to look down on everyone else.

I outgrew her too. Very quickly. Starting from the same atheist principle, it is much more reasonable to realize that no one has ever achieved in isolation. Even the most original and innovative mind has stood upon the shoulders of those who came before. Put simply, everything evolves. We all rely upon each other.

Yeah, I suppose Rand does lack empathy huh? I think she resonates a lot with Nietzsche in her isolationist mentality and her vainglorious devotion to her own importance and worth. Her chauvinistic egoism appeals only to the ultra-haughty and financially self-dependent who simply don’t want to give back to society… perhaps because they don’t believe in society, but only themselves. Their own god, how quaint. I have problems with her insistence of always being right and the cult like following she created as a result. Her acolytes are indicative of the moronic blind obedient sheep she supposedly condemned.

Here’s a video summary “Introduction to Objectivism” presented to students with no background in philosophy. The video is by Leonard Piekoff who is the leading expert on Objectivism. He presents an elementary account of the structure of Objectivism, the Objectivist view of the role of philosophy in human life, and Objectivist answers to some basic questions. I recommend not skipping the Q&A at the end; these young students ask some very good questions.

Another source that I’m (slowly) reading now is a book about Objectivist metaethics: “Viable Values: A Study of Life as the Root and Reward of Morality” by Tara Smith. Besides the Objectivist metaethics, she covers some other views of metaethics, the question “why be moral”, and the objections that have been raised against the “why be moral” question.