Peter Morris

I literally chuckled. Haha. Yes, I realize the irony.  And yeah, I have stopped frequenting and relying on these forums myself.
Most of us are not even really Objectivists. *gasp* I said it.

No. You have a very wrong idea about Rand's philosophy. 
It absolutely is not. If you think this has anything to do with Objectivism then you are completely mistaken. And I mean in a very deep way. No where in Rand's writing did she even come close to calling less skilled workers useless moochers.
Rand's fiction focuses on great men. Her philosophy and morality, on the other hand, is for everyone of any ability. Her fiction also does not cast people of lesser ability as unworthy, immoral moochers.
In Atlas Shrugged, there are passages such as this: 'He saw a bus turning a corner, expertly steered. He wondered why he felt reassured'
This is a nod to the skill involved in driving a bus. If that is what you have chosen to do, and you do it well, then you are entirely moral. The same goes for electricians, plumbers, and all other trades. They are all moral, rational careers for people. They are skills, and they take a thinking mind when done right.
Important to whom? To society? To themselves? And what does rich and powerful have to do with anything? Rand's heroes are not the rich and powerful, but the rational, skilled and highly capable. I don't know how this can be missed in Atlas Shrugged without reading the book and deliberately ignoring anything to the contrary. If you cannot see this, simply recall that James Taggart is rich and powerful and is in fact the president of the rail road, (Dagny Taggart is vice president) and he is a major villain. John Galt, the ideal man, the major hero, does not have much money at all. It is not in Rand's morality to judge things by social usefulness. However, if you were to do so, the people of greater ability - especially businessmen - are more important and lift everyone up higher than otherwise possible without them. Of course, without electricians there would be no lights on, but without the businessmen and scientists who run the businesses, the electricians would have nothing to do, and would not be able to perform the same task. Atlas Shrugged shows exactly what would happen if the men of great ability went on strike. Eddie Willers is left to wander the train track as a symbol of what happens to moral, good men without the men of greatest ability. But this is irrelevant to morality. Each individual's life is their own greatest and most important value. Whether you are a genius or below average, you can be morally perfect within your own sphere of ability.
Moochers are people who do not rely on the efforts of their own mind, but rely on other minds. It has nothing to do with ability.
By the questions you ask and the misunderstandings you show, I have to assume you are new to Objectivism, and that you have gleamed a few basic things by have not done any real deep investigation as to what it's all about. You may have also taken in false ideas propagated by enemy's of the philosophy. I would suggest reading Atlas Shrugged and reading a few Objectivist texts. I suggest Objectivism: the philosophy of Ayn Rand by Peikoff, and also audio lectures available at the aynrand estore. Also, try not to get too much information from forums like this, but instead from actual source texts by Objectivists like Rand, Peikoff, etc. (http://www.peikoff.com/tag/miscellaneous/page/427/#list) Once you've done some reading and/or listening you will have quality questions to ask that are based on a more accurate, developed idea of Objectivism, and not based on (what seems to me) a caricatured, misrepresented idea of Objectivism.

No.

Actually no. I, in particular, discuss things here only to get reinforcement from people who share my illusions. So, be warned: any attempt to do otherwise and you will be banned.
Next question.

Welcome to the adventure.
 
I suggest you read with an active mind all the basic Objectivist literature, and also get some recordings from http://estore.aynrand.org/. For purpose, I highly recommend 'The Value of Purpose' by Tara Smith from that site. (but that lecture may be beyond you at this stage, it might require more an advanced understanding to grasp it properly.) I also highly recommend Nathaniel Branden's work on self esteem. This stuff goes deep, deeper than you may realize, and it is enormously powerful to improve your experience of life. Whatever philosophical ideas you end up adopting, they are powerful and necessary, it's not about Objectivism per se, but about gaining an accurate understanding of reality on which to base your values, the guidance of your thinking, and the course of your life.

I'm pretty sure I know exactly what you're talking about, OP. I feel the same thing. Not to the degree you do, but what I read from you is familiar to me.   I've searched and formulated my own problems with working in much the same way as you. But I've essentialized it further. It seems that in order to attain the values we require, we must also suffer. Suffering and pain are each signals that we are dying.   So the essential formulation of this problem is: Life seems to require death.   I can think of two problems that are causing this feeling: 1. Your work doesn't serve a good purpose to you, or you have lost sight of the purpose of your work. 2. Your work is torturous work in and of itself. So even if your work is serving purposes for you, the work itself is still killing you.   The solution for 1 is to make sure that your work is serving your purposes, and that you don't lose sight of the purpose your work serves. The solution for 2 is fairly obvious: To choose work that doesn't torture you when you perform it.   To concretize, I'll show examples from my own life. (Since I don't know anything about yours.)   When I first got into my own apartment, I didn't have my computer. My new apartment was in Minnesota and my computer was in Washington. I had nothing to my name and I was going to be getting welfare to sustain myself. (Unemployment for rent. Foodstamps for food.)   My computer and my internet are some of the highest values in my life. I really, really needed my computer back. So I really really needed a source of income so I could get my computer back.   I normally dread the idea of work, and I would have been tempted to stay on the doll. But because I wanted my computer so badly, I applied for work and I got a job as a dishwasher.   It didn't feel like torturous work then. It felt like every day I worked was a day closer to having my computer and internet again.   I had my sights set on a goal, and my work was not just work; it was what I had to do to attain my goal.   Nowadays though, I feel much like you do. Partially because I've lost sight of why I work. It has become a duty that I have to do every day. A duty to get up in the morning and drag myself to work, and to wash dishes, and then go home again. I get my paycheck still, but while I'm at work, I don't mentally associate the work with the money.   This breach between the work and the reward in my mind could be one cause of the feeling that work is suffering; that life is death.   The other problem is, of course, that the work itself is torturous.   There's only so far you can make it on keeping your eyes on the prize. If the work kills you inside, you're still going to start feeling like work is suffering, no matter what rewards you get for your work.

You ask what it's like for work to be life rather than to be pain? Here's another example, again from my personal life.   I'm a self-taught web programmer who codes in php. Back in the day, when I used to actively code, I would code because I had amazing ideas that I wanted to bring to life. Ideas that I daydreamed about and then eventually set about coding.   Once I started coding, I couldn't stop. The only thing on my mind was the idea that I was bringing to life. I was unable to resist, because the idea I was creating was so important to me that it was an end in itself to me. I would work 8+ hours a day, in my own free time, perfecting my code, so the entire program perfectly revolved around my idea for it.   This is work that feels like life, as opposed to work that feels like death. Think back to your past. Have you ever performed a productive hobby where you enjoyed the thing you were doing, as if it were an end in itself?   That is what Ayn Rand means when she says that work is life.   So as far as I can tell, your answer is two-fold.   1. Find work that serves your purposes and never lose sight of the connection between your work and your purposes. And, 2. Find work that is an end in itself to you. Work that you can't resist doing. This way, you can serve the other purposes in your life with work that feels like life as well.   You should be able to truly live if you can do these two things.

I've been having a few disturbing thoughts. I need someone to slap me down and explain why I'm wrong.
 
Every value that we hold dear requires effort to gain and keep. We must fight entropy. We must fight comfort. We might struggle through the pain to get it. How can we live this way and still be happy? If every little thing that makes us happy requires so much voluntarily accepted pain, in order to escape some other pain, how can we ever see life as anything other than pain and relief from it? How can we get up each day and see a life filled with constant pain and struggle and not feel down about it?
 
Ms. Rand said, "To a Money-Maker, as well as to an artist, work is not a painful duty or a necessary evil, but a way of life; to him, productive activity is the essence, the meaning and the enjoyment of existence; it is the state of being alive."
 
How on earth could I live that way? How can work be enjoyment? How can work not be pain?
 
It makes me want to cry reading her words sometimes. I want to believe such a life is possible. Listening to the audiobook of the Fountainhead on the bus on my way to uni, I have nearly cried.
 
"The form in which man experiences the reality of his values is pleasure . . . . A chronic lack of pleasure, of any enjoyable, rewarding or stimulating experiences, produces a slow, gradual, day-by-day erosion of man’s emotional vitality, which he may ignore or repress, but which is recorded by the relentless computer of his subconscious mechanism that registers an ebbing flow, then a trickle, then a few last drops of fuel—until the day when his inner motor stops and he wonders desperately why he has no desire to go on, unable to find any definable cause of his hopeless, chronic sense of exhaustion." - Ayn Rand
 
I identify with this feeling. I don't get much pleasure out of anything I do. And I cannot figure out why anything should give me any pleasure, physically or emotionally. I can't figure out how I can value anything. If I'm meant to value my life, and my life is a drag, then how can I go on valuing it?

Of course, it's impossible for people to privately coordinate large projects for profit...

No way. It may actually be the most perfect introduction to physics ever written. Harriman explains all the details, and there is very little mathematics involved. I felt for the first time I could actually understand physics, not only what it was, but the actual physics, and I also felt a true appreciation for what the early physicists had done. The history of science is actually like a fascinating mystery story, but academia manages to make it into a dry process of boring calculations and memorization.
 
Just to name a few things, I understood for the first time in my life what a vector was and why it was important, why it had to be invented, and why a circling body is actually accelerating. I finally understood what F = ma actually means. I grasped the non-intuitive nature of 'mass' and why it had to be invented as a concept distinct from weight or 'heaviness'. None of that ever made any sense to me in high school or later. It was so simple and actually ridiculously interesting.

What evidence is there that suggests that you do live in the matrix?

I agree with the article. I literally just read that article before logging on here.
 
Focusing on politics and who to vote for to me is a gross mis-allocations of one's time and effort. You are better off focusing on your interests. I plan to donate to people spreading good ideas like reason and self-interest.
 
Democracy is a farce. It's a show. Your vote is nearly worthless. If you do vote, you should vote for the person you actually want in, not the party you think 'has a chance' of winning. Your vote doesn't matter anyway. People actually have the fantastic delusion that their vote has more worth if they vote for one of the two major parties.
 
I cannot change the world. I cannot save people from their own irrationality and self-destructive path. I only focus on what I can do for myself, and I treat government like the weather, something outside of my control that I have to deal with, plan for and accept.
 
Suppose they held an election and nobody came.

So, if you like your politics, you can keep your politics. I’m not trying to take it away from you. I’m just saying that I wish good people wouldn’t pour their time and energy down that particular drain—I don’t think it benefits them.
 
Why I Stopped Spending My Time on Politics… And Why I Think You Should Too
 
Discuss.

Well, I have roughly two ways of handling it. If I do engage, I do so in a quite detached way. I make sure not to feel angry or frustarted. I accept that I won't be able to change anyone's mind, so I only do it as an exercise in fleshing out my own understanding. If the person is clearly irrational or emotion or angry or abusive, then I simply stop. I have no interest in going further, I don't feel frustration. If I felt frustrated, it meant I thought they should change their mind and that they have to and I can't make them. That's totally wrong. Just live your life, don't worry about them. Their not getting it doesn't change you, your life, or how you live. Be content with your own understanding of reality. And occasionally, someone will point out a lacuna or contradiction in your thoughts, and that is a real delight!
 
And secondly, I simply avoid it or I talk around it. That is what I do 95% of the time. I just don't care. People will believe what they believe. I have mentioned only briefly to my own girlfriend my own interest in philosophy and objectivism. Even she has really very little idea about it and about my interest in it. She was surprised, after two years dating, when I said the point of life is to be happy. She had not imagined I would think that, and she was very pleased. I found that amusing.
 
I'm an individualist in every sense. I want to understand reality. I don't care about others. Write a blog post if you want to get your ideas and arguments out of your head. Writing is really the best way to spread your ideas because people who are interested will read, agree or disagree, respond or not, and that's that. Release them into the aether, and leave it. Polemics sucks.
 
I have occasionally felt guilty that I have exactly zero interest in engaging in politics. But it soon disappears into contempt for the whole thing. My life is too short to spend any minute of it on politics. I will donate some money to people who like doing that kind of thing when I'm able to, and that will be my futile contribution. Besides, I'm much more interested in how people can find happiness, a career they love, joy, pleasure, interesting careers and that sort of stuff. I'm a firm believer that people should just focus on themselves.
 
Most people don't want to be right. They want to win the debate. They have their self esteem wrapped up in their ideas and so being corrected is an attack on them personally, that is why they get angry and will not see clear contradictions in their own arguments. Most people were raised in public schools that fail to teach children proper methods of thinking and of arguing. Moreover, many, many people are second handed and care about appearances rather than reality. Once you identify a person is like that, just stop. Smile, stop talking, and move on.

Well, I have roughly two ways of handling it. If I do engage, I do so in a quite detached way. I make sure not to feel angry or frustarted. I accept that I won't be able to change anyone's mind, so I only do it as an exercise in fleshing out my own understanding. If the person is clearly irrational or emotion or angry or abusive, then I simply stop. I have no interest in going further, I don't feel frustration. If I felt frustrated, it meant I thought they should change their mind and that they have to and I can't make them. That's totally wrong. Just live your life, don't worry about them. Their not getting it doesn't change you, your life, or how you live. Be content with your own understanding of reality. And occasionally, someone will point out a lacuna or contradiction in your thoughts, and that is a real delight!
 
And secondly, I simply avoid it or I talk around it. That is what I do 95% of the time. I just don't care. People will believe what they believe. I have mentioned only briefly to my own girlfriend my own interest in philosophy and objectivism. Even she has really very little idea about it and about my interest in it. She was surprised, after two years dating, when I said the point of life is to be happy. She had not imagined I would think that, and she was very pleased. I found that amusing.
 
I'm an individualist in every sense. I want to understand reality. I don't care about others. Write a blog post if you want to get your ideas and arguments out of your head. Writing is really the best way to spread your ideas because people who are interested will read, agree or disagree, respond or not, and that's that. Release them into the aether, and leave it. Polemics sucks.
 
I have occasionally felt guilty that I have exactly zero interest in engaging in politics. But it soon disappears into contempt for the whole thing. My life is too short to spend any minute of it on politics. I will donate some money to people who like doing that kind of thing when I'm able to, and that will be my futile contribution. Besides, I'm much more interested in how people can find happiness, a career they love, joy, pleasure, interesting careers and that sort of stuff. I'm a firm believer that people should just focus on themselves.
 
Most people don't want to be right. They want to win the debate. They have their self esteem wrapped up in their ideas and so being corrected is an attack on them personally, that is why they get angry and will not see clear contradictions in their own arguments. Most people were raised in public schools that fail to teach children proper methods of thinking and of arguing. Moreover, many, many people are second handed and care about appearances rather than reality. Once you identify a person is like that, just stop. Smile, stop talking, and move on.

The real issue is whether my keeping what I earned is justified or not regardless of any effect on the growth of the economy. The answer is yes, regardless of whether it does or does not slow down the growth of the economy by some metric. Don't fight them on their terms. You will lose if you play their game. The cause of equality or whether inequality has any effect on the economy is not the issue.

Why does it even matter?  It is taking the focus off the greater context.  Either you own it, which means have disposal rights, or you don't, which means someone else gets to decide that for you.  The first is the definition of a free society and the second is not.  
 
Why do you see the need to draw the distinction?  What is the point this is leading to?   

I'm always in awe of people who have one or two narrow interests and throw themselves at them with everything they are. I have always wished I had such a thing in my life.
 
Why do some people have these strong focuses? How can I develop a passion for one thing and focus on it? How can I stop thinking of other things, switching interests, dabbling and never focusing?
 
My interest are too scattered, and I start to feel down and like I'm 'missing out' whenever I focus on one thing for too long. I always think I've chosen the wrong thing or that there's something better, or that I should be doing something else in addition, or that this won't lead to any good.
 
Out of all the many fields of interest and possible careers, how can one possibly just throw themselves into one without being curious about the others? Without feeling like one is becoming too specialized and like an idiot savant? How does one know that is the right thing for them?

It's a fascinating thing to think about. I don't see any country as being a 'great country' the way America once was. There will probably no other super power except maybe China. India, Brazil and Russia are just pipe dreams unless they radically change. Russia has all the potential, but it's too wretched. Also America is going to become oil independent, and it's going to start exporting oil. That's going to lessen Russia's power, politically and economically. Digging up resources and selling them is about all these primitive cultures can achieve. (Too bad Russia sucks so much because Russian women are incredible.) On India, you need only listen to Jim Rogers on why it's simply a mess. And there's an old saying that goes: Brazil is the next great country in the world, and always will be.
 
Africa is laughable. It won't happen. Disintegration through and through.
 
So, I'm particularly interested in the Chinese mode. That country is going to grow into 40% of the world's GDP by 2040, unless they stall along the way. China has been the center of the world before. The Chinese are highly pragmatic. They have a communist party that embraced market and entrepreneurship. I think that's because the Chinese are Chinese first, and everything else comes second. They also see knowledge and certainty differently. The Chinese mind sees things in shades of grey rather than black and white. That is a double edged sword. It means that they can open up markets while calling themselves communist and get away with it in their own minds, but it also means that there is room for bad ideas.
 
Think of China as a gigantic Taiwan. If anyone doubts they have the culture and mindset to be a first world country, I ask you what the hell are Taiwan and Hong Kong if not first world Chinese countries? There's nothing about them that prevents them from developing per se. Developing with a 1.3 billion people is just a bit more turbulent.
 
If the economy stalls to any extent, I have no doubt they will happily go further towards even more market ownership to continue their path. They are not stubborn, they are dynamic, and many of their leaders engineers. They are not communists first, they are Chinese first, and they want to see China become a first world country above all, and they will do what they have to get it. They still think of themselves as the middle kingdom, the center of the world.
 
They also have huge foreign reserves. In addition, Chinese people can buy Chinese goods, they don't need to export forever. This has happened before, just look at Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and HK for an idea of how it goes. It is almost formulaic.
 
You said that they will 'collapse' because they have copied America. I think you are misinformed. China's economy is quite different from America's. They produce and export and save a lot. America borrows and imports and saves nothing and goes into debt. There's a big difference there.
 
In addition, many of China's major industries are state owned. Banks are much more state regulated and owned than in the US. The communist party has much more control over their economy. Direct control. But they are moving away from that, as America moves towards more control.
 
Economic power brings potential military power. That is a concern.
 
China's culture is influenced mainly by Confucianism and Taoism. Major religions are Buddhism and 'Chinese folk religion'. Now Confucianism is really mixed. There are good parts and bad parts. Confucianism is better than Christianity, and there were enlightenment thinkers who were quite enamored with Confucianism, considering it supremely rational. If the Chinese focus on the good parts then they will do better. Still, they may be mystical in some aspects of their lives, but that doesn't prevent them too much from being rational and pragmatic in their business and career.
 
I guess I would see their mode as misintegration, definitely not disintegration. As Peikoff states, that mode can last indefinitely, since it's mixed.
 
I don't see them ever moving to integration. There is the sliver of hope though. Yangism was a 'rational self interest' type philosophy. Confucianism itself is apparently a mix of Moism, the altruist philosophy of ancient China, and Yangism, the egoist philosophy of ancient China.
 
I see the communist party as just another dynasty. The leader is just another emperor. And the communist party is full of modern day 'mandarins'. Study hard enough and you can be part of the party too.
 
There are actually benefits to monarchy over democracy, especially social democracy. (Democracy: the god that failed. Hans Hermann Hoppe.) The communist party can make quick changes, and they can make long term plans without worrying about re-election. How many politicians in America were engineers or scientists? The communist party has an incentive to be the ruler of a prosperous country, since it's in power. And many Chinese consider the economic growth to legitimize their rule.
 
And in terms of Russia, I think Rand was once asked if there was any hope for Russia. She said simply, 'no.' I think that's about right. They will probably hover around second world status and throw their weight around, but full development is unlikely. Misintergration.
 
There is no I mode country.

It is impossible for an immaterial, non-physical entity to have physical effects, period. This is the realm of the supernatural: God, ghosts, magic, ESP, etc. Non-material entities exist insofar as they are enabled by concretes, but we abstract away concreteness for purposes of concept formation. As for free will, it too is an abstraction. Epistemologically, free will and consciousness are irreducible, but metaphysically, they are not separate "things" of a special type different than concretes or matter even.

what could possibly show that something in reality is causeless?
 
Nothing. And that's the point. There is not and could never be and will never be any observations that could cast any doubt on causality.

After reading your post, I have no idea what you are saying or what your argument is.
 
Physical determinsm must be true since entities behave in accordance to their natures. It cannot behave in any other way. Hence, the idea of cause and effect.
 
I still have some difficulty with free will, but I guess I am at least a capatibilist. The brain is a physical system, and the mind emerges from its functioning, and since it is physical, everything in it is behaving in accordance with its nature, and the brain is also functioning in accordance with its nature in the only way that it can. It cannot not act based on the physical laws that govern it. That is why many say free will is silly. Your brain couldn't have done anything else, it had to do what it did.
 
The way I see it is that although this is so, it doesn't mean that we don't have the freedom to choose. Yet, it still bothers me, because the brain itself could not have done anything other than it did. I think it requires a narrower view of what free will is, and we still have it, but just not in any mystical sense that violates physical cause and effect.

Something about what you are doing strikes me as very wrong and makes me feel weird. I don't know why. It just strikes me as self destructive and odd.
 
It strikes me as though you are going the opposite way. Some people only care about looks, you seem to only care about personality. If you are sexually attracted in looks, since you say they are attractive physically, why not date and have sex with them and see if things are OK? Why do you have to have a long term relationship with every girl you date and have sex with? You are a man. You are not a robot. Ayn didn't intend for us to cast off our humanity. A woman is an integrated being of mind and body. A man is an integrated being of mind and body. You seem to be completely denying your body, and denying the fact that you are attracted to these girls physically. So long as there are no false pretense and no false declarations of love, it's not dishonest. I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. I've always had some issues with Objectivist love making rules.

The essential characteristics
 
It's a table. And it's also flammable and buoyant. Those characteristics are not essentials though. It's possible for there to be a table made of steel, not flammable, or a table that sinks, made of iron.
 
Wooden table is not a concept in itself. You cannot integrate non-essentials into a new concept. There is no concept for '24 year old blondes with blue eyes'. There is no valid concept for 'wooden table', nor 'steel table', nor 'tall tables with polka dots made of chicken wire'. That is the arbitrary. That is the antithesis of cognition.

I second this. To anyone reading this, before you ask a lot of questions of others, go to the source material and read it thoroughly first. You waste your own time by not doing so. You also waste other people's time. You cannot possibly hope to gain any real understanding of Rand's work from snippets or critiques. Rand's philosophy is accessible to all, but it is extremely deep and interconnected. If you fail to grasp her basic ideas, you will run into problems like the OP has. Not to mention, most men are rationalists. I was, or rather am recovering. I know it, and I still struggle with it.

Original sin! You have the original sin of talent, money, or intelligence. They have the original virtue of being dumb and poor. Lousiness must, as a virtue, be rewarded with values taken from you. Your friend has an upside down value system. Virtue is vice and vice is virtue. Such a value system finds remedy only through force. Force replaces the virtue of productivity. Force is now virtuous in that it gives value to the virtueless. It absolves the stupid and lazy of the necessity of virtue. The morality of force deprives its beneficiaries of their virtues.

This is, of course, an attempt to violate the Law of Causality. Normally, values are attained by implementing the requisite virtue. Your friend's goal is to distribute values causelessly. The extent to which his argument is valid is the extent of Crony Capitalism in the government. Great wealth is gained through the inadequate cause of pull. This too is an attempt to violate the Law
of Causality. Its hidden costs are ignored.

Aren't you pragmatic? Don't you go with what works? Concepts are tested against reality. However, are you willing to try a little theft and see how it improves your life? Rob a bank ot two and see if you can live better? Stick a gun in someone's back and take their wallet?

I, for one, am unwilling to initiate force against anyone. Your friend is willing to use a bureaucrat as indirect initiator of force, ultimately leading to a police officer wearing a gun to your door if you do not comply with his will. That will, being directed by whim, will ultimately be directed to benefit those having the most pull. Your virtue cannot be so directed. When it comes to force, it is no vice to be absolute. You absolutely do not beat your wife. Go on, it might greatly improve her behavior. Don't be an absolutist! Try just a little brutality. Be good sometimes and cruel others.

When it comes to victim-blaming, no! You are just unwilling to deprive people of their virtues. You are not judging people.