Capitalist Chris

In the US Thoreau’s Walden has been very popular since the 1930’s. I was introduced to this work in junior year of high school which is when students had a course in American Literature. Do your high schools have a course in Canadian Literature?
It’s hard for me to imagine someone coming out of high school in the US without having gotten into some of the writings and ideas of Thoreau and Emerson. But perhaps they do. Perhaps some come out with no exposure to any literature and philosophical ideas or to their connection to books and essays that went before, and perhaps they just wouldn’t be interested in that sort of thing.
I enjoyed Walden very much when I read it back then. It had much with which I identified. There was its love of and fascination with nature. There was its love of of solitude and self-sufficiency (somewhat as those elements in Anthem). Our family had built our own house, and on that acreage we grew all the vegetables and fruit we would need for the year. In the neighborhood, I sold such things as berries and honey. We went to grandparents’ farms to cut firewood and to butcher livestock. Our folks had grown up on those farms, in Oklahoma, during the Great Depression. They were largely self-sufficient: meat, produce, milk, eggs, molasses. By then farm children went to high school, and they were taught literature by the same teacher I had in the city much later (1960’s). They knew Walden.
I don’t know if you’d find much of value in this book, Chris. Surely, that depends partly on your own life history and way of life. I find now I dip into it things quite detestable that in youth would have washed right over me.
That is a perfectly repulsive attitude—a casting down of life-making and life-bettering labor, a casting down likewise (and likewise contemptible) later on in Nietzsche.

edit: Yes, the associated thoughts are non-volitional because they are memories with automatized associations.

The sum and substance of volition is choosing to pay attention, and to one thing versus another. I remembered this story about "feeding the wolf", so I Googled it and will paste it in here:



A Cherokee Legend

An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life. "A fight is going on inside me," he said to the boy.

"It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil - he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego." He continued, "The other is good - he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you - and inside every other person, too."

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, "Which wolf will win?"

The old Cherokee simply replied, "The one you feed."

"Feeding" here means "paying attention to". Though I would not sort every emotion into same category as listed in this story, the principle that "you get more of what you pay attention to and less of what you don't" is psychologically sound. There is also Aristotle's maxim "Excellence is a habit". It takes time get results this way, so not being able to instantaneously banish depression or self-esteem issues by wishing they would disappear is no disproof of volition.

This is not to be confused with any of that "law of attraction" magical thinking which purports to make things outside your consciousness come to you. Just as working any muscle in the body can make it stronger and make it grow, tending to good habits of thought will strengthen and make them grow. The brain is biological so this is in principle possible, and there is actual evidence for it neuro-plasticity. Nor will this overcome certain psychiatric problems, no more than lifting weights can fight off the emaciation due to malnutrition.


What matters is what you do, not what you can remember if you care to. Memories once gained are kept largely automatically and non-volitionally, but paying attention to them and acting as if they matter or are true is under volitional control.

Thanks for the recommendations StrictlyLogical and Repairman. It has been recommended to me a few times now to go through Peikoff's History of Philosophy. I've heard nothing, but good things.
Repairman, that books sounds like a really good one for me. A good overview of all that is out there. I don't need (or expect) to be an expert in everything, but I think it's valuable for me to have a decent understanding of what is out there. I also hear you with regards to physical books, especially when I was moving (they're heavy), it's one of the reasons I purchased a Kindle. I'll add the book to my on going list.
'For the New Intellectual' and 'The Voice of Reason' are both on the list still. Plus I want to go through Peikoff's OPAR. This is the problem with only 24 hours in a day, I can't consume them all.
Thanks again.

I've always associated this type of thinking as moral relativism or cultural relativism, but at least looking at these terms they don't seem to quite fit (though related).
So you have someone that is a cultural relativist. They don't view any culture as particularly right or wrong, better or worse, than any other. But when they look at different cultures, they see obvious differences. Some cultures do better than others. Some result in higher standards of living and others are poorer. This also applies to countries. Some countries are wealthier and some are poorer.
And this is where the fun happens. There is a balancing act. Since no culture is better than any other, I assume they expect similar outcomes. Since there are obvious differences between cultures, there is some sort of injustice. The culture doing good is brought down and the culture doing bad is often given the benefit of the doubt on its transgressions.
An example of this: In the Israel - Palestinian conflict, Israel is often described as committing genocide and the Palestinians are provoked into aggression. Israel is guilty of every evil and the Palestinians are misunderstood, victims that really aren't doing anything harmful.
Is there a term that describes this?

Fair enough. I don't expect an answer to this, but I just wanted to add that academic economics typically uses a very "rationalistic" approach to argument. By this, I mean abstract but without a check that the abstractions are confirmed by reality. A journalist would take the opposite approach: empirical, but sometimes jumping to unjustified abstractions. Both are to be guarded against.
 
Consider a journalist trying to prove that land-ownership has caused a huge disparity in wealth that has been compounded over generations. He may start with the ten richest people in the country and demonstrate that their wealth is primarily the result of the original unfair land-ownership granted to their great-great-great grandfather. he would show that this is true of specific billionaires: Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Larry Ellison, the Koch brothers, the Walton family, Bloomberg, Zuckerberg, the Google pair. Failing here, he might focus on the more moderately rich. he might focus on the 250K + plus crowd. He might try to show that these people who work for banks, and consultancies, and live in New York apartments also own decently large land-holding (more than any modest farmer). That's the type of reality-check that can make a theory really convincing.

"My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in · single axiom: existence exists — and in a single choice: to live. The rest proceeds from these. To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason — Purpose — Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge — Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve — Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living. These three values imply and require all of man's virtues, and all his virtues pertain to the relation of existence and consciousness: rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride. — Galt's Speech
 
Can you achieve your values without arguing and trying to spread Objectivism? If so, do so. I would suggest that any credit you offer to Ayn Rand and/or Objectivism for surrounding yourself with the values you seek, would be an act of arguing for and/or spreading Objectivism. 
 
If you find no positive impact in donating to ARI, you would be surrendering a value to do so. See self-sacrifice, selflessness, and altruism. Or in another word, don't.
 
The intellectual battle, far from being an end in itself, is the battle for the mind. Are your own personal values worth fighting for? If you are fighting for them as an egoist, you are in essence fighting for the mind — your mind. Is the cultural and intellectual inertia stacked against you such that you have no chance to prevail at achieving your values in your lifetime? If so, the hour is later than you think.

It's your life "job" to be as happy as you can be until you're dead -- Rand says happiness is the "moral purpose of [your] life." People can change and thus society can change, but you can't make them. So, you can view a lot of the wrong around you as unchangeable as any other metaphysical thing over which you lack control. Yes, your life would be better if society were more rational, so maybe it makes sense to try to influence people in a positive way. But while you try, consider: is it making you happier? In your 80 years alive, are you happier spending 50% of your time trying to change minds? 80%? 30%? None?
You'll have to decide that for yourself. But logically, it doesn't make sense to try changing society at all if you're going to be less happy trying to do it. You might very well be happiest mostly ignoring society and working on an oil rig (or whatever). If you're happiest also maybe spending some time presenting arguments on the Internet, that only makes sense because you enjoy doing it. And of course, you'll do a better job because you enjoy it. That's why the advice, "Be the best you," makes sense in response to, "How can I change society?"

34% of the 1,402 people executed in the past 40 years in the US have been black. In a roughly similar time period (1980-2008), 52% of homicides have been committed by black offenders.
So there's no systematic racial bias against blacks. Possibly the opposite (though there would have to be a finer breakdown on the kind of homicides we're talking about before we go down that road, and, frankly, no one cares enough about white murderers to go around researching whether they're being treated more harshly).

That doesn't prove that there are no isolated cases of racial bias, of course. But that's about all it leaves room for.