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Showing content with the highest reputation on 03/22/17 in all areas

  1. " Family and the reality of it CAN have deep personal meaning and value " This IS moral weight. " Also in large part, what you are is by Nurture, who you are, what you think, has been formed and shaped by who they are, what they think and feel. " This too. Who you are is a moral issue. " Objectivism is NOT antithetical to Family or the idea that Family can have and provide special Meaning in one's life. " Special meaning is moral weight. Your posts show that genealogy is part of your concept of family and that genealogy matters to some people. That means some people -should- value their genealogy. But no person at all -should- find meaning in it is my claim. " Consider now a family rich in civility and tradition who provided great educational and philosophical instruction, inspired and demanded of their children high standing and achievement and the pattern repeated generation after generation for a statistically significant offspring " This is not genealogy anyway. Each generation has to establish values anew. You can only observe a continuation based on a person believing the people they know personally and culture. That a great grand parent taught your grandparent taught your parent egoism is not to be judged differently than Rand's great grand parent that perhaps taught egoistic ideas. If someone learned to be a racist and lynch black people, that's on them, and only brought on by accepting their culture, not linked to ancestors qua ancestors. The causative link is no different if there is also a genealogical link. Thus, no special meaning exists. " These to families did not become EXACTLY the same after ONE generation. " Each generation is wildly different than the last. No family will be the same. So we judge people as individuals or their values, with no consideration on lineage. If it does affect who I am, even a little (say, 5% of who I choose to be), if you had particularly admirable ancestors, then I can judge some of your moral worth based on your ancestry. But I say 0%. " It's almost as if you take my sense of family and meaning personally? Does it threaten you somehow? " I think you're wrong is all (weird to ask, I'm practically zen about it).
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  2. Rand put at least six partial genealogies in Atlas Shrugged. Consider the insights derived from providing genealogical tidbits about the Starnes heirs and the quite detailed background of Wesley Mouch provided on page 498. Ragnar had a briefly summarized past, as did Cherryl Brooks-Taggart. John Galt was even identified as the son of a gas-station mechanic. These are coming from someone who stated in The Art of Fiction: I can give the reason for every word and every punctuation mark in Atlas Shrugged—and there are 645,000 words in it by the printer's count. I did not have to calculate it all consciously when I was writing. But what I did was follow a conscious intention in relation to the novel's theme and to every element involved in that theme. I was conscious of my purpose throughout the job—the general purpose of the novel and the particular purpose of every chapter, paragraph, and sentence.
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  3. It can be, sure. It's the history of how you, as an individual, came to exist. It only becomes tribalism if you assign significance to the tribal or ethnic background of your ancestors. But, if you are simply interested in who they were as individuals, it's a selfish, individualistic pursuit.
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