Invictus2017

Then using one's emotional evaluation can be a reasoned approach. Or is that considered a whim? Keep in mind the context: situations where "reasoning is impracticable or impossible". In such situations, you still need a guide to action, and you're stuck with your emotions, whether you're an Objectivist or a whim worshipper. Well, unless you want to do the equivalent of flipping a coin.... Such situations do arise in ordinary life, so it behooves a rational person to ensure that his emotions generally prompt him to the same action he would take were he to have the ability to employ his reason. This is not whim, since a whim is an unexamined desire. (Actually, any contradiction would be with the epistemology, not the ethics.) Context, again. When you're engaged in a process of reason, it is clearly both practicable and possible to reason. It's what you're doing. No emotions are then allowed. In other contexts, the requirement to not use emotions as a tool of cognition does not necessarily follow. (Rand made this point with respect to ethics: It applies to a specific context and, when the context does not obtain, such as when one's life is in immediate danger, the principles of the ethics are not necessarily true. As she acknowledged, there needs to be a separate "ethics of emergencies" to deal with such situations.)

The discussions about the structure of an Objectivist society have been general, largely because there has been no concrete society to hang the discussion on. The issues that need addressing are concretes, and their support. E.g., What should go in a Constitution and why? Also, are there social structures that should exist aside from the government? A fire department? A noncoercive social safety net? Right now, the stock answer is "We'll deal with these issues when they become relevant." Building the city would make them relevant. I am saying this, and also that, as part of the project, we have to write it. There needs to be a body of work that expresses the proper method of interpreting the Constitution, either as part of the Constitution or incorporated by reference in the Constitution. I do not know of any specific discussion of this issue in Objectivism: this is an example of the lacuna in discussion. As your later discussion indicates, we do not need anything like the existing, or for that matter, the originally intended Commerce clause, we need a proper statement of the nature and structure of the courts. Aside from calling it propaganda -- resolving this would be a practical necessity in my project -- I agree. An analysis that uses principles, but which rejects all foundational principles, is not a principled analysis. So when SCOTUS decided that (in essence) mere dictionary definitions sufficed to give meaning to the Constitution, nothing they did after was truly principled. I note that also that you took objection to my view that the Founders' intent was relevant to interpreting the Constitution. I would agree, as a general proposition, that the intentions of a constitution's writers should not be consulted when interpreting the constitution. However, that's because I think (and I believe that you agree) that this interpretation should be with reference to a proper set of principles. But what should a court do when there is no such set of principles, the situation confronting the Supreme Court? It can't make such a set of principles, for practical reasons if nothing else -- cases need to be decided reasonably quickly, not after years of debate. Never mind that the Supreme Court was really not the right group to take on the task. The closest thing to a set of interpretational principles they had was the Founders' intentions. What the Supreme Court should have done was to start with those intentions, as best they could be determined, and -- as each case demanded it -- state the principles they found in those intentions. In the event that they got it wrong, there was the process of amendment, which could be used to override the Court. That's not quite what I said. Gibbons had nothing to say about whether the government should serve private ends. Rather, by removing the Founder's intentions (as a substitute for explicit interpretative instructions) from the equation, Gibbons made it possible for later courts to ratify the view that the government should serve as a means of serving private ends. I wouldn't call Gibbons a good decision. There's the fact that it eliminated any means of limiting the size of the government. But also, the substance of the decision was not as you described. Rather, it was: Only the federal government has the authority to grant monopolies on the waterways; the states are forbidden to do so. A good decision would have rejected the notion that any government had the authority to grant a monopoly.

(I'm going to respond to your message piecemeal, to keep the size of my responses down, and to try to avoid having to deal with unrelated items in one message.) ("Propaganda" is often used pejoratively, but it is not necessarily a pejorative term; I mean it in a neutral sense, to refer to any material used to advance a cause.) It's an observation, not an assumption. Be that as it may, I will agree that there is much Objectivist propaganda of questionable quality, and that this has done a lot of harm. But there's plenty of high quality material, and it hasn't been persuasive. Also, that was only part of my reason; I also drew on my personal experience of trying to persuade. I found that the nature of my arguments really didn't matter, as the people were unable to reason accurately about certain key concepts. I do not propose a "retreat" for Objectivists, I propose a place where Objectivists can gather to live an appropriate life. The city I envision would remain involved with the world. Also, building the city would improve the argument for Objectivism in two ways. First, the city cannot be built unless a lot of that fleshing out is done. The project -- even if unsuccessful -- would focus Objectivist attention on the practical aspects of the philosophy and the underlying support for those aspects. Second, a functioning city would, in itself, be a powerful argument for Objectivism.

Well, if the goal is simply to have more Objectivists, regardless of whether this will prevent the coming catastrophe, then we're on the same page here. Likely, given the lack of success of previous efforts. I've been looking around and I've found a lot of Objectivists and near Objectivists writing blogs. And there are no doubt are many more people like them who just aren't interested in being publicly identified as Objectivists. Unfortunately,it's not a label that sheds much light. There are too many Objectivists, like some currently engaged in a catfight in another topic, who really are not good examples of the benevolent people we can and should be.

We have two points of contention, I think. The first is a matter of goals. You want to spread Objectivism to save, or at least improve, this society. I want to do so partly because it would be a good thing to have more Objectivists in the world whether or not this society benefits. But I also need there to be more Objectivists so that my proposed city has a better chance of success. The other is the method of persuasion. If effective persuasion is the goal, it needs to take into account the nature of the people who are to be persuaded. You have two choices, You can try to reach the evaders, in which case you need to take into account the causes of their evasion and do something therapy-like. Or you can focus on reaching those who are amenable to persuasion alone. Both approaches are reasonable, since therapy is much more resource consuming than simple persuasion. I agree. But I'll bet that, if you look, you can find lots of Objectivists and near Objectivists like the bartender of my acquaintance, people living an ordinary and happy life out of the limelight. They'd be the better examples, and they might have something to teach the academics (and us). Most of what we're brainstorming, I am probably incapable of doing much about personally. But this...? I'm going to give this some serious consideration. My artistry is limited to singing of questionable quality and computer programming, so wouldn't be useful. But I can write essays, critique, and edit. And I work cheap, too.

In persuasion, you try to convince someone of something. In therapy, you try to remove mental roadblocks, often with the intention that, once those roadblocks are gone, either persuasion will not be necessary or will be much easier. In education you try to impart information, often, but not necessarily, with the intent to persuade. I did notice; I at least skim everything posted. However, I decide to sit that one out, due to limited time. It's a real test of won't power, let me tell you! Mindfulness and reason, more or less. "Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man." There have been attempts at Objectivist schools. I don't recall anything good coming from them, but it's been awhile since I paid attention. But it still seems a place to start. When's the last time you heard of someone over 30 coming to Objectivism? I'm sure it happens, but not that often. In general, these groups rely on things we can't. Christians, when they don't get to the children early, rely on the fact that the Christian world-view underpins both the secular and religious popular thought in this country. You brought up Scientology, but what I know of them suggests that they target the mentally vulnerable, as do most other "successful" proselytizers. Handing out IQ tests might get people in the door, but you have to "sell" people by giving them something they think they want, whether it be a religion that tells them that, though they are scum they can be saved, or a cult that promises certainty without the effort of thinking. What can we offer that will be seen as desirable? I spend way too much time in and around religious people -- they're the ones that do charity and I am forced to live off charity for now -- and no one finds me objectionable, even if I tell them I'm an atheist (only when asked). I actually agree with them on many of the virtues, as would any Objectivist, and in my behavior, I mostly fit right in (except when they're doing something explicitly religious, and I then just wait politely for them to be done). By contrast, you wouldn't want the sort of person you described anywhere near. But they're the face of Objectivism. Why don't people know that you can find Objectivists all over the place, from tending bar (one of the first Objectivists I met in person) to running Wikipedia, being ordinary and sometimes extraordinary good citizens? The problem here is that one is asking a lot: someone who understands Objectivism, practices it, is comfortable with public speaking, quick on his feet, not prone to overreaction...and still is noticeable in the crowd. Such people do exist, but I don't know of any Objectivists who would qualify. There's kooky like Scientology and then there's kooky as in off the wall. The former is what hurts us; the latter can be helpful. One thing you have to watch for is the nature of the recipients. Rather a lot of charity is focused on those who are simply never going to make anything of themselves. Objectivist charity can extend to, say, a single mother trying to become a productive citizen, but not the drug addict who is perfectly happy to live a life of dependence and self-abuse. There's a lot of entitlement mindset among the poor, which is why liberals can always find someone to claim they need this or that program. But, yeah, helping that single mother become a steady breadwinner by teaching her to think for herself and otherwise act independently would in itself be a big win for everyone, especially if she is exposed to Objectivist ideas in the process. But that means that those ideas have to be simplified without being dumbed down.... "Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man." I wasn't clear. I was talking about publishing works of all types. Imagine a book that expresses Objectivist ideas through a combination of essays, visual art, poetry, and short stories. Center different books around different themes. Get some good editors and artists to work with those who are to be published to ensure reasonable esthetic quality and people who are philosophically minded to keep everything on theme. Has anyone considered writing a tragedy with an Objectivist underpinning? Catharsis has its value.... (Remember Tony? Non Absolute? I still tear up remembering his death scene.) Nothing profound here....I just found her writing too often pointlessly abrasive. I really didn't like having to read through reams of diatribe. And I just didn't see the point of screaming at people who were not listening. Yeah, but if the sign says, "This way to the egress", people might be expecting a bird, not the back door. More seriously, whatever brings them in must attract non-Objectivists while not offending Objectivist principles. That might be a trick. Most people don't think yelling is reasonable.... And, true, the focus on Rand is probably counterproductive. If for no other reason than, if you can't explain a thing in your own words, you don't really understand it. There are, of course, places where Rand's words or a slight paraphrase are really the best way to express an idea, but there are other areas where her expressions are simply confusing. "Existence exists"? Too ambiguous. The other thing is that a focus on Rand plays right into the cult narrative. I suppose there are Randian cultists around posing as Objectivists, but they're not a part of my world, and they shouldn't be a part of any effort to spread Objectivism. Instead, we need people willing to stand on their own two feet, verbally speaking. I have a real problem with cultural commentary. Objectivist ethical and social principles are valid only in a certain context and we do not live in that context. A lot of Objectivist conclusions are simple nonsense as applied to the world we actually live in. E.g., the principle that all commerce should be unregulated is often used to support the notion that a particular bit of deregulation is a good thing. But this often ignores the fact that in a world dominated by government interference in the economy (which is not the Objectivist context), one piece of government regulation may demand another, and the latter cannot safely be removed unless the former is as well. When we ignore that, we often come across as fools...because we are. So go sell the idea to ARI? The party line has been to teach the teachers and they'll teach everyone else. Your ideas have been to go directly to those who you would persuade. Objectivism is an individualist philosophy, not an atomistic one. We shouldn't be metaphorical helium atoms, unwilling to associate with anyone, nor flourine, willing to associate with anyone who'll have us. Think carbon, cooperating with a wide variety of others...to produce life. Putting aside rhetoric...Of course. Unfortunately, no one seems to be doing this, at least not well. ARI has its thing, but it's not very effective, largely because it doesn't reach the masses. ARI, no doubt, would respond that the masses are ... oh never mind, I won't repeat that joke ... not listening, and won't listen until they are taught better. History, I would reply, has proven that their approach is not effective, so we should try a different one. That too might not work -- I don't think it will -- but even a failure would have some value.

I wouldn't put it quite so formally, but yes. Actually, both the place and the political structure are necessary. But clearly, the place is useless without the structure, so the structure must be defined as part of the project. And, I agree (if I take your meaning) that, so far, Objectivists have shed more heat than light on the topic of how to put together a free society. Given the Objectivist failure to flesh out its politics, the notion that the Constitution, even a Constitution v 2.0, or any other document for that matter, is the proper foundational document is untenable.. We need to settle down and deal with these issues, not just talk around them. Then, and only then, can we write the foundational document. Well, in an ideal world, the Framers would have left us with a detailed explanation of what their intent was. In the real world, we have to make to do with their published debates. That's not ideal, to say the least. It's also irrelevant to my immediate purposes, as I would expect to be writing a new foundational document from the ground up. The Constitution would probably serve mostly as a bad example..... Yes, Gibbons. Indeed, the Constitution really says nothing about how it should be interpreted. Even so, I fault the Supreme Court for abdicating all principled analysis. Where the Founders failed to provide the proper principles, the courts could have gone back to first principles -- individual rights, limited government -- to derive them. The Court's decision essentially left the interpretation of the Constitution to the political branches, and that was guaranteed to result in disaster. The obvious solution for any proposed constitution would be for it to explicitly state what body of principles are to be used to interpret it. Actually, one would have to ask first: Do we need something like a Commerce Clause and, if so, why? Then, and only then -- and assuming there's a Yes in there -- would it be worthwhile to answer the questions you pose. I've been very carefully staying out of the Trump discussion. And, yes, we definitely do need to think about the legal system. There are all sorts of problems with the American system that need fixing, and that need to be carefully avoided in any Objectivist political system. E.g., there must be nothing like a guilty plea, and prosecutorial "discretion" must be sharply limited. (Why? As the Founders knew, a judicial system that does not involve the public will go awry. Both of these things remove the public from the legal process. Also prosecutorial discretion as implemented is entirely subjective.) Indeed. To my mind, a critical part of the project is a rewriting from the ground up of Objectivism, in a clear, non-polemic, and well organized way. There will always be points of unclarity and dispute, but those need to be outside the mainline reasoning. This rewriting needs to cover everything except Esthetics, because all of the other parts are critical to putting together a proper government. (I'd love to set up a wiki somewhere, structured something like Kelley's "The Logical Structure of Objectivism", but in greater detail and with clearer reasoning. The idea would be one proposition per page. The contents would, of course, reference official Objectivism, but the main text would be written primarily for precision and clarity. Any thoughts as to where to host such a thing?)

My own thought, on which I expanded elsewhere, is that we're fighting, not ignorance, but evasion, and that what we need to do to spread our ideas further is more akin to therapy than persuasion. Although it is impossible to make a person stop evading, it is certainly possible to encourage them to do so. But doing so requires one-on-one interactions or, at worst, small groups with live interactions -- individual and group therapy -- and the focus has to be not so much on the ideas we want to spread but on what people think and feel that keeps them from giving our ideas a fair examination. You mean a flamboyant personality not afraid to provoke? Objectivism doesn't encourage flamboyant personalities; as it stands, it reaches people whose relationship with thought is much stronger than with the public. Also, there's the question of whether such a person would help or hinder the spread of Objectivism. On the one hand, there is the notion that any publicity is good publicity. On the other, there is the risk of cementing the view that Objectivists are kooks. The essence of missionary work is going one on one to engage the potential convert, teaching by precept and example. Going out into the community and engaging one on one could be more effective than relying on general missives, because it allows tailoring our message to each person's context. You need to define the goal. Is it to get Objectivism established in the community, viewed as another cultural group that is as legitimate as others? Or is it to reach the people who receive the charity? Or both? Certainly. The churches do just this, providing services to the poor while surrounding them with symbols and ideas of religion. Many of the churches, as well as secular organizations that provide similar services, actually include many virtues in their teaching that are consistent with Objectivism. There's no reason that Objectivists couldn't provide similar services, minus the supernaturalism, of course. I also think that the younger the better -- best to get to them before the evasion becomes too ingrained. Presumably you know that ARI holds an essay contest. What might be more effective than an essay contest is publishing the works. The writers and other artists would get some cash and exposure, the public would get their works, and we'd benefit from the ideas expressed in the works and the publicity of having published them. A win all around. I doubt this would be worthwhile. They get headlines, but thoughtful people tend to dismiss protesters as kooks. Rightfully so, since most are.... Because noise alone won't do it. Rand made lots of noise, but it got her nowhere to speak of. Many of us are Objectivists in spite of Rand..... The common feature to your ideas is to work bottom up rather than top down. Official Objectivism has tried the top down approach, and that clearly hasn't made the expected progress. The bottom up approach -- community engagement, talking to individuals -- has the benefit that its results can be measured in terms of lives changed rather than ideas spreading. It's hard to measure the influence of ideas on society, easy to measure the number of individuals adopting some or all of the ideas one is trying to spread. Besides, Objectivism is an individualist philosophy; it seems odd to think it could be spread by collective action.....

Of course not. But everyone's different. Some people would jump at the chance to get away from their relatives. But, if I'm right, about the same amount of money as moving across the country. People do that all the time, given a more attractive destination. I think you overestimate the costs. Most of the cost of living in the sky would be construction costs. As for transport, you'd use the same technology to move people as holds the city up, which should be a lot cheaper than a jet. Much less fuel, for one thing. Or find some competitive advantage. A place to do genetic research unfettered by government regulations, perhaps? The bottom line is that this project won't do for everyone. Or even a lot of people. But all it needs to do is find enough of the right people.....

[This thing deleted your quote while I was doing an edit and won't let me put it back. Bleep!] Unfortunately, the "gook" that people accept makes it impossible for them to really believe that freedom is desirable. So you get people who live rationally where their ethics do not hold sway, who even give liberty lip service, but who do not practice it when it comes down to their politics. I just don't see that changing, because people have too much invested in avoiding the requirements of freedom. I'm not saying that persuasion isn't possible, only that it won't happen quickly enough to prevent the chickens' coming home to roost. But I certainly do think that persuasion is valuable for other purposes. "Give me a place on which to stand and a lever long enough, and I shall move the world." The project I propose might be such a place -- a concentration of those who value freedom in a viable and healthy society would do wonders for the Objectivist argument. Persuasion would be the lever....

I did say that the city would not be isolated. You'd be able to book transport to any country that would have you. That said, you certainly would be giving things up, just as any emigrant gives things up. You get to keep half your income? No government telling you what you can and cannot do in your profession? No TSA probing your intimate parts? If you are an atmospheric scientist, this might be a wonderful place to be. There are other professions that might want such a perch, too. But seriously, it'd be up to you to decide whether the benefits outweigh the costs, and that only after there's enough of the project design that you could sensibly make the necessary evaluations.

My SWAG is that a project like this could run a billion. Divide that by 10,000 people and it's 100,000 per person. The price of a cheap house these days. More realistically, I'd want many families, not just individuals -- societies need children -- so it'd be more like 200,000 per family. Still around the price of a house. People buy houses. So one goal of the project would be to make it so appealing, from a freedom standpoint as well as a quality of life standpoint, that people will want to buy in. Get enough pre-construction buy-in and financing becomes a possibility. The immediate problem isn't financing, it's getting enough people, with the right mix of skills, to flesh out the idea. For example, I know enough basic physics to do some order of magnitude estimates that say that this should be possible, but it would take someone with an engineering background to say whether the idea is really workable.

Part of my reason for being here was to present this idea, sooner or later. But the discussion over in the "Fun" discussion made it the right time to bring it up. So I took a few days off from posting so that I could write.... I'm guessing that that discussion similarly motivated you, so it wasn't really coincidence.

The two propositions are not incompatible. You know, 2014 was a rude awakening for me. Up until then, I believed that race was no longer a driving force in American society. What Ferguson taught me is that I lived in a privileged position: I mostly hung out with mostly rational people, which made it possible for me to imagine that racism was for all practical purposes dead. Bzzzt! Next contestant..... Nowadays, I make a point to listen to every segment of society, and what I see is that, outside the realm of the concrete, respect for truth is close to nonexistent among almost all groups. Even among Objectivists, there are people who would rather be Randists than right.... So I stand by my conclusion that there are precious few people who care about truth. Many people want to be Right, but that's hardly the same thing. I also agree that Objectivists have not been all that good at proselytizing, but have been quite adept at targeting their feet. But I'll take that up in the topic you started. Not at all. In the post of mine from which you're drawing quotes, you neglected to quote me when I'd said: Actually, I had taken what you said into account, but I expressed myself poorly. What I meant to say is that there is a presumption that things will keep going on as they are, except maybe more pronounced in certain areas, and so it's OK to assume that there's an indefinite amount of time in which to succeed at persuasion. I just don't think that's the case -- we're maybe a generation, give or take, before Something Bad happens, and I don't think we can get our ideas spread quickly enough to prevent it.

I posted some thoughts over in Miscellaneous, and DA has also posted, in Activism, I think it was.

It is received wisdom among Objectivists (and many other freedom activists) that the way to deal with America's freedom deficit is, in essence, through persuasion. Persuade enough Americans to be Objectivists or near Objectivists or even libertarians and America will once again be a free country. Putting aside the questionable proposition that America was ever a free country, I'm of the view that persuasion has no reasonable chance of changing enough minds to make a difference. Two things have led me to this conclusion. The first is the failure of Objectivists and others to change the direction of the country. The second is what I saw when I tried to persuade. 1943 could be regarded as a watershed year, the year "The Fountainhead" was published and, arguably, modern libertarianism got its start. 75 years later, the federal government spends 44% more per capita (after adjusting for inflation) than it did then. The scope of federal regulation has increased dramatically and federal rights violations are now pervasive. Libertarianism has barely a toehold in American politics and thought, and the creatures in Washington who call themselves libertarian corrupt the term. There are plenty of Ayn Rand fans, including some of those same creatures, but few people have truly adopted her ideas. There's little point in even calling oneself an Objectivist -- most people haven't a clue what it means and the rest mostly have it wrong. In short, the modern attempt at persuading people to support freedom has been an abject failure. The conventional wisdom is to blame the messenger, to suppose that the American public would be all for freedom if only its proponents were better at explaining it. I have to call BS on this notion; the quantity and quality of libertarian and Objectivist propaganda, not to mention that reality is on the side of that propaganda, make it impossible to believe that merely improving either quantity or quality would make a difference. Besides, my personal experience with promoting liberty is completely at odds with that explanation. Ask an American if they want the government off their backs and you're likely to get a Hell Yes in response. They're all for freedom and being able to live their lives unmolested by the government. Dig deeper, though, and you'll find that most Americans really want "freedom for me, but not for thee". The government should get off the little guy's back but closely regulate business. Or, the government should get out of the businessman's way, but regulate private behavior. However divergent the particulars, the typical American is like every other one in that he sees the government as the means of imposing his will on others. You see the same phenomenon when it comes to government spending. One group says the government should support social programs, the other business, but both are united in the view that the government should take money from those who have it and give it to some preferred group. In short, liberal, conservative, or "independent", most Americans see the government as a means of serving private ends, rather than public necessities. Those are grudgingly served. Ask any judge or cop. This didn't spring up overnight. I trace it back to 1824, when the Supreme Court decided that the courts were not to take into account the intentions of the Founders when interpreting the Constitution to determine the extent of government powers. With no principles to limit the federal government's power, it was only a matter of time before those powers became effectively unlimited. Progressivism, around the beginning of the 20th Century, demanded and got the extension of those powers, and events since then have turned the government into Leviathan. The effect of the New Deal was to cement into the American psyche the idea that the government was the cure to all ills. Government was no longer to be limited, solving only particular, public problems, it was to solve all problems, public and private. Compulsory education, by precept and example, reinforced this notion. Entitlements went from being the province of those who wielded power to something everyone expected -- and then needed. Freedom and government power are incompatible. A person who believes in freedom and government power must necessarily distort his thinking in order to embrace the contradiction. He must evade the fact that freedom includes the freedom to fail and the freedom to suffer and even die; he must evade the fact that every government action by its nature involves a restriction on others and, when not limited to the absolutely necessary, is necessarily an infringement of freedom. But it doesn't stop there. Any person who accepts what he knows, deep down, to be evil, must necessarily condemn himself. And, to continue as he is, he must necessarily hide from himself both the evil and the condemnation. And all of this is aided and abetted by others around him, by the structures of society and, above all, by compulsory education. (Yes, I think it cemented America's downfall. But that's another topic.) The result is a nation of people who literally cannot think rationally about liberty. To do so, they would have to go against everything they've been taught, from infancy (share your toys!) on. They would have to confront the ways that they have used, or contemplated using, the government immorally. They would have to confront the fact that they do not know how to live free. And this is exactly what I discovered when I tried to persuade people of the rightness of freedom. The closer I got to the central necessity of freedom -- individual responsibility -- the further their counterarguments veered into the irrelevant and the just plain irrational. Americans have, deep down, rejected the idea that a person can stand alone on his own two feet. Sure, they have heroes, but heroes are them, not us, they are not ordinary people living ordinary lives. Americans do not want freedom; it frightens them. Arguing for freedom is, to the typical American, like arguing for stepping off a cliff -- because they have forgotten their wings, they know that doing so can only end in disaster. This is why persuasion has failed. As the saying goes, you can't reason a person out of what he wasn't reasoned into in the first place. Only two things are likely to change a mind so damaged: therapy and bitter experience. There aren't enough therapists to go around, so America -- and we -- will have to wait for bitter experience to teach it to value liberty. Before deciding what to do instead, one really needs to sit back and look at one's goals. If you're really, truly committed to getting America on the road to liberty, I might suggest joining the government and working for its expansion. Well, not really. Such a course of action might hasten the day that Americans get tired of their unfreedom, but it would be profoundly corrosive to you. Another approach would be to become a revolutionary and try to bring down the government, but it's waaaay to soon for that to be effective, and it's a good way to get pointlessly dead. It becomes easier if one's goal is not to save America, but instead to live as free a life as possible. In that case, the idea would be to form a community somewhere that is free at least within its borders. That particular idea has been looked at from many directions and I won't rehash all the things that didn't or can't work. One thing that might work is living on the oceans. You'd have a large floating object where people could live and carry out a reasonable life. This has been looked into, but the only real project I know of is the one by The Seasteading Institute. But they're suffering this political nonsense that makes even libertarianism look reasonable, and they've wimped out on the population and the independence that a viable free community would need. Still, another project for seagoing life, one more philosophically sound and large enough to be worthwhile, is a possibility. That said, my own proposal also involves a floating object, but 24 kilometers up. I've given it some thought and I've seen no show stoppers, but it's still a rough idea, one I hope to flesh out if I can get enough people interested in talking about it. My proposal would support up to 10,000 people (in families) living in an enclosed habitat with 100 square meters per person, for living space, food production, recreation, and so on. With that many people, the city (well, town might be more accurate) would have a real economy, capable of diversity and a little economic slack. Also plenty of people with whom to have a social life. The government would be designed from the ground up, grounded in Objectivist principles. Floating that high and moving with the wind, the city wouldn't be under any government's jurisdiction and wouldn't even be over any country for very long. The city would do its best to maintain friendly relationships with other countries and would be economically integreted with the rest of the world. However, it would also be able to self-sustain for long periods, to avoid being blackmailed into giving up its freedom. I completely expect a host of "No way, can't be done" for a whole bunch of reasons -- it's what I got when I, ahem, floated the idea to some people I used to know. I've gone much deeper into this than I've written, but before I say more, I'd like to see what others have to say. BTW, I'm not wedded to this particular idea. If it proves impracticable, there's always the seagoing approach, and a few less likely possibilities. But I'm serious about getting out of America; unlike most of us, I have -- courtesy of the federal government -- no life to lose and every reason to want to be elsewhere.

I don't know what would qualify as "evidence" for this Given the more than half century of efforts by Objectivists and other freedom lovers to persuade modern America to embrace freedom, and the dismal failure of those efforts, why should anyone believe that more such efforts, no matter how tweaked from what has been done before, will succeed? There needs to be more than mere hope. There must be something, grounded in reality, that persuades one that the effort can be effective. Otherwise, it's just throwing good money after bad. Acknowledging reality is not fatalism. And, yes, people can change their beliefs, but -- and this is the most important but -- they must change them. When there is good reason to believe that people don't want to change -- and there's 50+ years of such evidence, and never mind my own conclusions on the matter -- it's foolish to base one's course of action on the presumption that they might change. Oh yeah, the world is in a whole lot of trouble! But today's US is in far worse shape than even at the time of the civil war. Then, half the nation would have abandoned its essential principles in order to keep their slave-owning lifestyles intact, but the other half was willing to go to war to preserve those principles (among other reasons). Today, no one but a tiny minority even understand those principles, and the rest run away from them whenever they see them coming. I don't intend to be offensive here, but I have to say that this is one of the stupidest comments I've heard, no matter that I've heard it innumerable times from Objectivists. It mistakes truth for reality. Reality is, if you will, omnipotent -- it wins every time. But truth depends on a human mind to grasp it and to act on it. All the truth in the world will accomplish exactly zip, if no one will listen to it. Unfortunately, there are precious few people today who care about truth. The rest would much rather have their bread and circuses, and leave it to their children to pay for their irresponsibility. With this, I wholeheartedly agree. I agree. But..."If first you don't succeed, try, try, again. If that doesn't work, don't be a damned fool about it, try something different!" I'm not arguing that Objectivists should give up on the world; I'm arguing that they should do something other than what has been tried and found ineffective. But that same technology works for bad ideas...and there are a lot more people sprouting bad ideas than there are of us....Technology is at best neutral in the war of ideas. What we need to do is not simply impart knowledge, but rather to change peoples' fundamental world views. That isn't teaching, it is therapy. And you can't do therapy wholesale. This, ultimately, is why persuasion has been and must be ineffective. This, and many of your other remarks, reflects a basic belief that all change will be incremental. This is something I just don't think is true. As I see it, we can't just keep muddling through as a nation and someday a rational philosophy will rescue us from our foolishness. We are consuming our physical and spiritual capital at an alarming rate and when it's gone, the remainder will be an animated corpse of what was. Even before that, we will have become a starving police state, no fit place for a human to live. It is my contention that a different course of action than incremental persuasion is warranted, if one is to work for the future. It's bedtime, or I'd launch into some of my ideas of that different course of action. Maybe tomorrow when I'm awa..z..zzzzzzzz

I can't do video, so I can't comment on what he said. But I will say that the common Objectivist (and libertarian) view that it'll just take a little more effort and then everything will turn out fine seems like mere "optimistic determinism" to me. Frankly, I find the efforts of Objectivists to change things akin to Dagny's efforts to keep her railroad running while it was being systematically destroyed by the looters. Our looters -- plutocrats, politicians, and the public -- are committed to a course of action that can only have one outcome. We should leave them to it and take thought for our own futures, keeping in mind their coming self-destruction.

Huh? The mere fact that an issue is man made does not in any way change its reality. What is, is. What presently is, is a population that is not amenable to persuasion. If you have evidence to the contrary, I'd be delighted to hear it. So far, all the evidence I've seen, from reading, from decades of my own failures of persuasion, and from my observations of the people I failed to persuade, is that effective persuasion on anything other than a small scale cannot work, and the cause of this is not fundamentally in the persauders, it is in those they would persuade.

You'll have to provide evidence that there is something that Objectivists can do about the state of the world; at the moment, all of the evidence is to the contrary. In my view, it's a waste of time trying because, even if some genius were to discover a means of squaring this circle, it takes generations for ideas to work significant change. The old guard must die out, and the new replace them in positions of social power. This takes time. The West simply does not have that time. Long before a new renaissance, there will come the chaos from barbarians within and economic collapse. While Objectivists certainly have their flaws when it comes to presenting their ideas, it is mere codependent thinking to imagine that if only we were somehow better, other people will understand. The libertarians have tried this and, indeed, more people pay attention to them than used to, but they're still not making any real headway with their ideas. The reality is that the responsibility for thought belongs to the thinker, and blaming oneself for another's irresponsibility is self-destructive. Are we including Rand's own efforts in writing essays to describe her philosophy, and etc.? Because as far as I can tell, she designed arguments in order to convince others of what she believed to be true, which is part and parcel to what I consider "proselytization." For what it's worth, that worked for me. From what I see, Rand wasn't exactly a happy person, and her efforts have not significantly affected the direction of history nor the speed of our downhill slide. But never mind. I withdraw what I said in favor of: Proselytizing in the hope of social change is an utter waste of time. Proselytizing for other purposes may be valuable, in that it may sweep up the occasional soul who has not been totally twisted by prevailing ideas. This is precisely what has been tried and found wanting. The problem is not our presentation, even though our presentation could be better; the problem is in the minds of the overwhelming majority of the people we would hope to reach. No improvement in presentation will reach a person who will not listen with his reasoning mind. Just as an aside, I've been using that line for decades without attributing it to Dorothy Parker. I never checked until today. (She apparently was asked to use the word "horticulture" in a sentence. Heh.) If one's goal is simply to reach those relatively few people, that can be a worthwhile goal (though not for me). But if one's goal is to reach those people in order to effect meaningful social change, one will simply waste one's time, just as your predecessors (including me) did.

Pretty much. Also, few people are really capable of blanking their minds and, instead, perforce must replace an unwelcome thought with something else.

Yes it does. Reasoning people can fill the gap as much as they want, but the plain fact is that people do not listen. Not with their thinking minds. They listen with their emotions, and their emotions tell them that what we have to offer would require them to give up Mommy and Daddy government and to take full responsibility for their past, present, and future. This they will not do. Both theory and experience confirm this, and no amount of wishful thinking will change it. As Objectivists, we must take people as they are, not as we wish or need them to be.

"Not thinking" -- failing to think -- is not evasion. Evasion is an active process whereby unwanted thoughts are suppressed. The essence is that there must be something that makes one aware of an upcoming thought and then some action, intentional or an automatized intention, to keep the thought itself out of one's awareness.

I don't think this is true. Then you're rejecting the evidence of decades of many attempts by people far more committed and possibly far more capable than you and me. Do we wait until the Gestapo comes knocking at the door before admitting that reasoned persuasion has failed? Or do we acknowledge that doing the same thing that has been done before while expecting a different outcome is not rational? In a word, "compartmentalization". Or, if one prefers, dis-integration. Damaged people can do great things with their rational faculty in one area of their lives while refusing to employ it in others. The commitment to evasion is not found in how people deal with practical matters, it is in how they deal with things that run contrary to their deepest feelings. The person who feels that someone must help them will be totally unswayed by the argument that reducing taxes while keeping the social programs intact -- or growing -- cannot work. And it is that person who literally cannot grasp an argument for freedom, because freedom means that there will not be anyone who must help them. For ourselves, those close to us, and those few who bring their reason to the table. But proselytizing is an utter waste of time that can only produce unhappiness. It for sure won't bring on social change. That way lies codependency. "He'll change, I know he will, if only I just say the right words. He will!" I couldn't tell you how many (mostly women) have tried to change a man -- a man who had every reason to listen to that woman -- and failed. Changing peoples' minds in the face of their deepest held beliefs is a job for a skilled professional in a one-to-one interaction over a long period of tiime. It cannot be done wholesale. And even retail, there is no guarantee of success. You can lead a whore to culture but you cannot make her think, to mangle a phrase....

A tangled mess of forces, not just a loop. There is no one point where one can make a change and the whole nightmare comes apart. I note that the powers-that-be have a strong interest in this state of affairs. It is very easy to manipulate a person who "thinks" with their emotions, much less so a person who reasons, and nearly impossible a person who lives by reason. You betcha. For the forces of unreason, unfortunately. The best the rest of us can do is try to stay out of the way of falling debris and then pick up once the storm is over. Kinda like the end of Atlas.