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Miss Rand used it in The Ayn Rand Letter Vol. II, No. 2 October 23, 1972 A Nation's Unity--Part II Individual rights is the only proper principle of human coexistence, because it rests on man's nature, i.e., the nature and requirements of a conceptual consciousness. Man gains enormous values from dealing with other men; living in a human society is his proper way of life—but only on certain conditions. Man is not a lone wolf and he is not a social animal. He is a contractual animal. He has to plan his life long-range, make his own choices, and deal with other men by voluntary agreement (and he has to be able to rely on their observance of the agreements they entered). For more on "a lone wolf", consider The Ayn Rand Letter Vol. II, No. 18 June 4, 1973 Selfishness Without A Self I consider Selfishness Without a Self a part III of The Missing Link, Vol. II, No. 16 and 17 As to long range planning, it is referenced in Galt's Speech: "So long as men, in the era of savagery, had no concept of objective reality and believed that physical nature was ruled by the whim of unknowable demons—no thought, no science, no production were possible. Only when men discovered that nature was a firm, predictable absolute were they able to rely on their knowledge, to choose their course, to plan their future and, slowly, to rise from the cave. Now you have placed modern industry, with its immense complexity of scientific precision, back into the power of unknowable demons—the unpredictable power of the arbitrary whims of hidden, ugly little bureaucrats. A farmer will not invest the effort of one summer if he's unable to calculate his chances of a harvest. But you expect industrial giants—who plan in terms of decades, invest in terms of generations and undertake ninety-nine-year contracts—to continue to function and produce, not knowing what random caprice in the skull of what random official will descend upon them at what moment to demolish the whole of their effort. Drifters and physical laborers live and plan by the range of a day. The better the mind, the longer the range. A man whose vision extends to a shanty, might continue to build on your quicksands, to grab a fast profit and run. A man who envisions skyscrapers, will not. Nor will he give ten years of unswerving devotion to the task of inventing a new product, when he knows that gangs of entrenched mediocrity are juggling the laws against him, to tie him, restrict him and force him to fail, but should he fight them and struggle and succeed, they will seize his rewards and his invention. This should give you a decent start.

This still strikes me as an inversion. It stems from the knowledge that being right is not automatic. It is a choice. Once that choice to be right is selected, this sets in motion the identification of what elements need be in place to be right. Insofar as "being right is a choice," as you say, we must identify the requisite elements to be right (inclusive of all that man requires habitually to be right). The mindset I advocate is not an "inversion" of this, but an expression of it. Or in other words, if you choose to be right (generally speaking, or characteristically), then you should not despise the experience of being proven wrong, but value it -- because I believe that such a mindset or orientation will assist you in the lifelong project of recognizing contradictions among your thoughts. And insofar as you despise the experience of being wrong, or being shown wrong, as so many do, I believe you will be more prone to the phenomenon of evasion, which is not under direct conscious control but can be addressed obliquely through the conscious choices you make, and the attitudes you cultivate within yourself. But this is taking responsibility for one's own rightness. To get recursive for a moment, if I am right about this (as I believe that I am) and you do not heed me (accounting to a lack of focus), then you have failed yourself in your responsibility; you will not be correct, so often or so much as you could have been -- accounting to your own choice. It's not a question of delegating one's responsibility to others. That's like saying that the CEO delegates the success of his concern to his workers; but no, it is through the rational management of his workers (in part) that the CEO accepts responsibility for the success of his concern and fulfills it. The phrase "being proven wrong by others" is furthermore specific to the context of debate and conversation (such as this forum hosts), which I thought particularly relevant and worthy of consideration, but that's not the only context in which the mindset I describe is necessary. A man alone on a desert island must be searching for his mistakes just as much, or more, and he must greet the discovery of these mistakes (so long as he can survive them) with something like gratitude; it is the scientist's mindset, who does not look at the "failure" of a given hypothesis as bad, but as knowledge gained, and a necessary step taken towards further or eventual success. (I would expect that in the history of science, there have been scientists who either so desperately wanted to be right -- or not to be wrong -- that they made critical and uncharacteristic failures in their interpretation of vital results; fundamentally, this is the same sort of phenomenon.) Evasion, at its heart, is a kind of "looking away." And I maintain that the reason why people look away in this fashion -- albeit subconsciously -- is because they do not want to be wrong, on a deep level. And so, I believe that one large part (though not the entirety) of the battle against evasion is to cultivate an appreciation for the experience of being wrong -- said appreciation to be gained by understanding the vital role of being sometimes wrong in the pursuit of knowledge, and finally being right.

That's my idea of, er, humor. See? I'm a fun guy! This is an inversion of how I've sought to identify error in my thinking. That potentially gives us something to discuss. I agree that "the potential to be wrong" isn't grounds for thinking that we hold any wrong belief, in specific. But I do believe that this potential necessitates a certain general mindset which is constantly on guard for, and even probing for, the possibility of error. Besides which... how can I put this...? Sometime ago, when discussing the arbitrary, I raised the question as to whether the (somewhat absurd) statement of, "At the moment, someone in Sweden is eating an egg," is a proper example of the "arbitrary." For I would lay money on the claim that there is someone in Sweden eating an egg, right at this very moment, although I have no specific evidence of any individual currently doing so. Yet perhaps it is evidence of a kind in knowing how many people there are in Sweden, and knowing human dietary habits, and so forth, which justifies that sort of claim. And so, while I don't know the contents of anyone's mind in total, such that I could enumerate every last belief (not even my own), I feel confident in saying that among that vast multitude of beliefs, with respect to any individual, some beliefs are bound to be wrong. Or another way of approaching this is, consider this forum. Note the multiplicity of opinions here, and disagreements -- and this is among people who (at least to some degree) identify with the same core philosophy. I would dare say that an average adult human holds what we might consider to be thousands (or perhaps orders of magnitude more) of distinct beliefs. And if you were to compare the beliefs of any two people -- any two people in the world -- the odds are strongly against their aligning perfectly, down to the very last. Now I suppose, even given all of this, it is possible that one individual may, in his beliefs, be 100% correct. Perhaps that person is you. Or perhaps it is me. But even were it me (and I do consider myself correct in all of the beliefs I currently hold; that's the very thing it means to "believe" them), I would still want to be on guard against the possibility of error, just as I may have the constitution to be able to smoke, eat, drink, never exercise, and still live to 100, fit as a fiddle... but regardless, I still plan on exercising, refraining from smoking, eating sensibly, and etc. Just as we should have good physical habits, should we wish to remain healthy, we also need good mental habits, to guard against error. Agreed. I agree with you that, should a person discover an internal contradiction and fail to correct it (to the extent that he is able), this would represent a moral failure. The thing is, with respect to this thread, that evasion works against an individual's ability to recognize that he is holding a contradiction in the first place, by keeping him from focusing on some particular evidence, argument or what have you, sufficiently to see it. And so, we cannot wait for the insight of seeing an explicit contradiction among our conscious thoughts -- not if we mean to work against our own potential to evade. We must be sensitive to more subtle clues, focusing and guiding our thoughts accordingly, such that we can come to discover any contradictions in our thought -- and then work to correct them. I think that what I mean by pursing the experience of being proven wrong by others is to create a general attitude or mindset that fosters the ability to recognize a contradiction; so I don't see this as choosing one versus the other, but aspects of the same general approach. This is in contrast to those who dread being proven wrong (I suspect a common condition), which I think hampers and impairs the ability to recognize a contradiction through evasion.

That's exactly the right generalization; very good. The phrase I've found most useful is that man is a "contractual animal". And being able to respond appropriately to any individual's nature (which can sometimes mean the difference between life and death) requires social awareness. We don't need each other to survive, though (yet another strike against survivalism), nor should we be each others' primary concerns. Other people can help you to flourish (indeed, I don't know if it's possible in isolation) but you cannot and must not attempt to flourish through them. The difference consists of autonomy. Human life consists of two kinds of motion. Existentially we walk, eat, breathe, plant crops, make tools, build factories, trade and organize companies (etc); we do all of the countless things we must do to survive. It would be impossible us to flourish if we stopped because we would be very dead. We're also in constant personal motion throughout our lives. We learn and grow, we forget, our preferences wax, wane or change entirely; who we are as people is always changing. And you have no choice about whether to change or not; as long as you're alive, it's built into your nature. The only control you have is in which direction to go. Now, the key to being a healthy, happy and successful human is to consciously determine the course of your own motion, in both senses. If you take charge of your own personal development and live to be whoever it is you want to be then you'll be able to walk into any job interview or first date with your head high and without a trace of fear, guilt or doubt; if you live your life just doing whatever strikes your fancy then you may or may not become somebody you can tolerate. If you choose carefully when and where to plant your crops and how much to keep in reserve (etc) then you'll always have food on your table; if not then not. But a choice requires knowledge of and feelings about its consequences. Letting some momentary impulse or habit dictate your behavior is doing what any animal can do; not deciding. And no two people on Earth have the same beliefs or desires to decide by. Even if we somehow cloned a human mind (from childhood memories to their feelings about the previous night's dinner), after any length of separation it'd be uniquely different from the original (since both would've gone on acquiring new experiences and changes independently). This makes independence essential to flourishing. You have to be able to think for yourself (pursuing in your own way whatever knowledge you find important, revising anything that doesn't make absolute sense to you and maintaining everything that does), want what you want (exploring, evaluating and expanding on your emotional mechanism), "see through your own eyes and think with your own brain", go out to act on your decisions and change your mind as frequently as may be necessary - without having to explain or justify a damn thing to anybody else. If you can't take autonomous action then you're not in charge of your own life and you're screwed. This is part of why you should never make another person your highest priority (the other part being that to emotionally invest your self in things you can't control -such as other people- is a recipe for frustration and self-torture). We can (and should) value each other to some degree because we can make each others' lives immeasurably better in so many different ways (and, again, I'm not sure it's even possible for us to flourish alone) but at the end of the day each of us has to be allowed to come or go as we please, without restriction. And that's "the point at which social consciousness becomes second-handedness". That was an extremely sloppy and misleading for me to phrase it, and I'm sorry about any potential confusion; I hope this at least alleviated some of it.

I think you're trying to focus on the point-in-time thing we should try to optimize. Rand's "Objectivist Ethics" highlights two key linkages: first, that this pleasure is -- in turn -- based on our biology.. on the survival of life (today we might speak of this in terms of the role of pain/pleasure in evolution). "Good" (i.e. recommended action) is thus (mostly) tied to survival in its original cause second, she takes the focus away from point-in-time pleasure, to acknowledge that there are causal links between things. Seeing the pain in a dentist's visit is not good enough, we have to understand the pleasures and pains from the visit as a causally linked set. That's how we get to: "how to we get a better mix". The decisions move from considering a single thing (imagine someone making an excuse not to visit the dentist, because he's focusing on the pain alone). "Good" is the concept that embraces the evaluation of such mixes, and going far beyond these small bundles, to encompass one's life. Good it is the integrated evaluation of pain and pleasure. Only by starting from these two ideas can Rand end up saying Productive Work is one of the highest ideals. That's quite a huge integration that includes hundreds of observations that aren't mentioned in the essay. That's her key achievement: not her focus on pleasure -- which hedonists already took a shot at -- but explaining how we go from there to a message that sounds like "work hard". The hedonists had already praised pleasure, but nobody can take a short-range approach too seriously. Aristotle spoke of Eudemia, and his golden mean is one way of conceptualizing the various choices we have to make all the time. The Epicureans had spoken about enjoying life in a relaxed way. These were attempts integrate the idea that selfish pleasure is the core of Ethics with other observations about the world. The Stoics took a different tack: they recognized that men are driven to do "big things" which cannot be explained by "live a relaxed life" or '"do only what you need to be comfortable". They admired these men. At some level, they were admiring productivity, but could not quite explain why it was the good. They ended up with a somewhat "duty ethics". The Bhagavad Gita got to the same point too: work (karma) is good because it is, because it is a universal law. They both assumed a feedback: where the universe rewards us for doing our duty. The only alternative to work seemed asceticism, and Eastern philosophies thought that was good too...but, we can't all be ascetics. So, working hard was what the typical person had to do... just because. There was no tie to happiness, leave along to pleasure. Rand stepped through the horns of this ancient dilemma. In summary: I agree with you that pleasure is key, but it is key the way a dot of paint is key to a painting, or a word is key to Atlas. It's a starting point, but the bulk of Ethics is explaining how it comes together across our lives. Post-script: I think your focus on pleasure is important though, because some people read Fountainhead and Atlas as enshrining the virtue of hard work, but do not keep the link to pleasure and happiness in mind. By dropping that link, and by seeing work as an end in itself, drops the crucial justification for work. Work then is a duty: an end that we just do, because it is good... don't ask any more questions! This is why I think the recent moves by The Undercurrent/Strive: abandoning the focus on Politics, and linking Objectivist Ethics to individual happiness, is great.

Peikoff: “ [T]he takeover of America by [religious fanatics] is not certain. In my judgment, it is only probable. But it is so highly probable as to border on certainty…Given America’s present condition and the historical factors, it is almost impossible to overestimate the likelihood of its occurrence.” [DIM Hypothesis, p. 341] For Peikoff to have used the word “certain,” he would have to endorse historical determinism—and that would be directly contradictory to Objectivism. He comes as close to that as is possible for someone who endorses free will. How long is the book? 347 pages. How many pages does Peikoff devote to the importance of resisting the historical forces he describes? 6. Someone operating from the benevolent universe premise would have devoted at least half of the book to an explanation of what can be done to stop the “inevitable” from happening. And the book would have been subtitled: “Why the Lights of the West are Going Out—And What You Can Do To Stop it.” He obviously regards that last part as comparable to pissing into the wind. I wonder what Ayn Rand would have said about her most prominent spokesman throwing in the towel so easily.