Dustin86

Louie, I don't really understand either your short or long answers. It can? Who gets to make these decisions? Does one person disgruntled by laws or taxes that he disapproves of gain the right to violently overthrow the government from an entire country?

So you think that violent rebellion with the aim of overthrowing the government is justified whenever any government "initiates force", as you put it?

In The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand states that "The United States was the first moral society in history." In Atlas Shrugged, Rand states that "morality ends where the gun begins". If the USA was "the first moral society in history" and "morality ends where the gun begins", how does that square with the fact that it was created by violent revolution in which tens of thousands of people were killed and 5% of the population1 was displaced from territory claimed by the USA, the vast majority of whom ended up fleeing to territory still held by the "irrational" monarchy of George III? 1Rothbard, Murray. Conceived in Liberty, Vol. 4.

I truly don't see the difference. On one hand, Objectivism is asking those who are poorest and most vulnerable to (at best) postpone their self-interest, indeed to postpone their very existence, until "conditions are better" for their existence, on the hope, the mere hope, that of all things a resurrection machine will be invented in the distant future which will resurrect their dead bodies at a time deemed more "opportune" for their existence. On the other hand, Objectivism is telling the richest, those who "have theirs", to go ahead and indulge in their self-interest right now, not in some hypothetical future.

Now with that out of the way, Epistemologue, your ultimate argument from the "Stealing" thread (and please correct my paraphrase if you feel I'm misstating it in any way), is that although in certain cases the desperately poor and starving may be required to 'die on that hill' (as you put it) in order to avoid stealing food, ultimately this is not a sacrifice because doing the proper Objectivist thing in this scenario will bring the world one step sooner to an Objectivist future in which biotechnology has advanced to the point where they can be resurrected and have eternal life. The problem I have with this is that although you say this isn't a sacrifice to me it still sounds an awful lot like a sacrifice. And in the case that this biotech resurrection machine is impossible, or if it takes so long to invent and built that the bodies have hopelessly decayed, it will indeed have been a sacrifice and it will have been some of the poorest, most vulnerable people who will have been asked to make this sacrifice. At best, the poorest, most vulnerable people will have been asked to postpone their self-interest for what would seem to be at least thousands of years, while those who "have theirs" will get to indulge in their self interest immediately.

I appreciate Epistemologue's intellectual honesty and earnestness even if I don't agree with his conclusions. Guys, you can't just punt on what you call "emergency situations" or "lifeboat situations". When you read works by real ethicists, they're chock-full of scenarios where a person's life or many people's lives are on the line and the moral agent in question has to decide what to do according to the ethical system in question. Real ethics, while not exclusive to these kinds of scenarios, takes them into account when devising and reasoning about ethical systems.

Doctor, I've already gone over my own personal story about my experience with my parents, who were exactly like you, who were into the "Tough Love" stuff you mentioned here and that you support, who had all the James Dobson books, the "Tough Love" books, who parented that way. I've already gone over how I'm a broken man with medical problems in no small part because of my experience with my parents and my 14 hour workdays beginning at age 11 when I ran around like crazy for 65-75+ hours per week fulfilling obligations thrown at me by parents, teachers, and coaches from school sports teams that I was required to be a part of. Oh, and any "slip-up" earned double-punishment from both home and school. Doctor, if you're making your living charging $90 an hour to tell people this sort of stuff, I don't see how that's any better or more productive than playing video games. The fact is Doctor, most of these kids worked far harder than you ever did when you were school age. And by the time they hit adulthood they're broken people, oftentimes they've also developed an "invisible illness" like I did.

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Doctor, what was the alternative, him starving to death? But Objectivism says follow your self-interest. Objectivism says don't sacrifice. If he had just laid down and died and not "inconvenienced" anybody, that clearly would have been a sacrifice of his life by any reasonable definition. Or is sacrifice actually morally required in some cases in Objectivism? You can't have it both ways, Doctor.

^^^ Just for anybody reading this, he (Craig) was responding to something that I had posted and then realized "shit, shouldn't have posted that" and then deleted it, not because it's not true, but because I realized I didn't want to fan the flames any more than they have been already. But somehow he got ahold of what I'd wrote before it got deleted and quoted it and responded to it, and then I did feel like I needed to respond to his question. Anyway, it's very clear that things need to cool off once again, so I'll be leaving the forum for a while once again.

Because Objectivism, in no uncertain terms, divides people into "producers" and "parasites", that's why. And it implies that the solution to human problems is the "removal", in one way or another, of the parasites from the producers (Galt's Gulch). As it implies that the "parasites" cannot survive without the "producers", it implies that the former will die, and that this will lead to a new golden age of human progress. This is without considering that many of the "producers" are where they are today because somebody carried their burden earlier on in their life. Somebody who may be a "parasite" today (according to Objectivism) because they can't work anymore because their health is now shit.

Nicky, if man is an automaton without a soul, then thinking is an automatic process.

"Thinking is not a mechanical process", Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, John Galt's Speech But if atheism is true and man is a biological machine lacking what theists would call a soul, then how is "thinking not a mechanical process"?

Guys, I'm still not seeing "A is A" 's relevance. It is nothing but a theorem in formal logic, and formal logic affects no-one's life except for the very small percentage of the population engaged in either writing proofs or writing computer code. In a nuclear post-apocalypse type scenario, nobody would care about "A is A" or any of formal logic at all for that matter. To real people trying to survive and rebuild what they can of their homes and their lives in such a scenario, formal logic would be only an ivory-tower curiosity, existing as nothing but scribbles in whatever pre-armageddon logic texts survive, to be passed on from generation to generation until enough of civilization had been rebuilt to support professions such as full-time mathematicians and philosophers once again.

sNerd, My questions were brought on when Repairman suggested that parents replace preaching "eternal hellfire" sermons to their kids with sermons about what happens when people don't obey "objective reality". What usually brought on hellfire sermons from parents in our Christian past was when the kid didn't do what the parent wanted. Nowadays, kids are more burdened than ever before by rising expectations coming from parents, teachers, everybody. Also, kids today are given the Objectivist version of the hellfire sermon. They have been at least ever since I was a kid. I worked 65-85+ intense hours per week, much longer than my parents or teachers, of school, homework, and other obligations starting at age 11. I was told that I would fail in life and that I would "end up living on the street" if I didn't do it. I became a broken man with major health problems at the "ripe old age" of 28 in no small part because I slaved away my younger years trying to avoid Objectivist "hellfire". I feel like the biggest sucker in the world. I wish I could have just shut my eyes and lived in "fantasy elf fairy world" all those years instead. I would have enjoyed it much more, to say the least.

No, I truly believe that this is actually at the very heart of the matter of Objectivism. Please just give me a chance, I will show the proper relevance. Okay so what about children who just don't want to be a part of "reality"? At what age should they get to decide? What about children who decide at a very early age that they just want to live in their own fantasy world, and their decision is in all seriousness?

Really the full title of this message should be "If God Doesn't Exist, Then "Objective Reality" Is Really Nothing More Than a Cosmic Fart, So Why Do Objectivists Have Such Deep Reverence for It?" But that would be too long for the forum system. Getting down to brass tacks though, at the end of Atlas Shrugged, after the blowout of Project F, James Taggart, one of the villains, his brain just basically "snaps" and he sits down on the floor of the Project F room and he becomes basically this empty blubbering shell of a man, he reaches this dejected low point that is as abjectly low as a man can go. And this isn't because of sorrow at moral evil (moral evil according to the conventional non-objectivist definition that most people go by), it's because of his supposed inability to accept objective reality, his supposed incompatability with objective reality. Objectivism's atheism seems incompatable with Objectivism's deep reverence for "objective reality". Jim Taggart's downfall, in which he becomes this blubbering empty shell of a man, would be understandable if he were a character in a theist novel who discovered that he had been dissing God this whole time by dissing God's Creation, God's Reality. If he became this blubbering "repentant sinner" down on the floor at that point, in a theist novel, that would be understandable. But in an atheist framework, I just don't see it. At best, Objectivists are telling people to "love the one they're stuck with" even though it's admittedly no more than a cosmic fart that is no more deserving of any reverence than a fantasy world that somebody has built inside their head. Thoughts?

It really isn't hard to find "-some- scientist who claims this". A simple google search has revealed a study from the University of Arizona on this subject: http://www.asu.edu/news/research/prejudicestudy_053105.htm Here is a quote I find interesting:

Jesse, probably what I should have said is "people are genetically hardwired to think in terms of groups, period." Objectivism operates within a framework of individuals and individual rights. The problem is that 99% of the world's people are genetically hardwired to think in terms of groups, not individuals. Or to use Objectivist terminology, 99% of the world's people are genetically hardwired to be what you guys call "collectivists". It is only an extremely small sliver of people who don't have this hardwiring.

Jesse, Every single professor I have ever run into in both college and graduate school believes that human beings have some innate knowledge at birth. To my knowledge it is only ultra hardcore Marxist-Leninist true believers that believe that people start out as "tabula rasas". Not even liberals. Liberals are all about tribalism nowadays, especially if the tribe in question claims some sort of historic oppression.

The other "types of tribalism" did not work because they embraced crazy ideas such as Islam and Christianity (I for one am glad that Christianity is now leaving the West because if you read what is actually in the Bible it is very violent and very similar to Islam.) Let me put it this way: When I have talked to libertarians and Objectivists in the past and asked them how they can survive without a real national army, they always tell me how the atomized individuals in their libertopia can just get together and pay for some Blackwater style organization to provide full armed services for them in leiu of a real armed forces. This would never work. It would collapse within 24 hours if it had to face the full might of a real army. We need a real army, and a real army means, for one thing, conscription. And conscription would never be workable except in the context of the nation-tribe. Does that make it clearer?

New Buddha, things have not changed. Resources are still limited. Tribes are still fighting for control of the limited resources within geographical areas on this globe. So what we need is an enlightened, technocratic, "realpolitikal" tribe to secure the interests of the West in a hostile world.

The cure to tribalist bloodbaths is an enlightened, technocratic tribe consisting of Western populations, controlling Western territory, and protecting it from savages such as Muslims who carry out attacks such as 9/11, 7/7, the Paris attacks, the Nice attacks, the list goes on and on.

Am I understanding you correctly? Rand didn't? Yes she clearly did. She clearly said: "Prehistorical men were physically unable to survive without clinging to a tribe for leadership and protection against other tribes." She clearly thought that this was a prehistoric phenomenon and not relevant in the modern age. The bloodbath that was the 20th century proves that she was wrong and that "clinging to a tribe for leadership and protection against other tribes" is still necessary in the modern age. What we need is realpolitik. Objectivists, if they truly have a commitment to objective reality, should be pushing for this. They should be pushing for an enlightened, technocratic tribe. That is what I mean by realpolitik in this instance.

Nicky, the ideology existed long before the founding of the United States. Nicky, I've gone over this before. I think he was a very laudable man but extremely naive, especially when approaching questions of human nature.