Leaderboard

So far, this is the strongest and most simplified argument for NOT proselytizing Objectivism to anyone other than your children. Why bother trying to change the minds of those unwilling to embrace the fundamentals of Objectivism. Why bother probing the minds of people who likely would not be good company. The connection between fun and popularity needs little explanation. But satisfaction does not come from being popular; satisfaction comes from being successful. One can easily attract all the friends one needs after one has achieved success, and it's entirely possible that one, two, or more of your friends will activate their minds enough to reconsidering their views. They might even become Objectivists. But if they don't, there's no reason they couldn't remain one's friends, as long as one wishes them to be. If one is striving for success, I have found that it is of little benefit to strive for fun or popularity, when one's time could be better spent reaching one's next goal. The greatest impediment to Objectivism's popularity is the atheist component. From personal experience, sharing Objectivism with people who plan to retire for eternity with their good buddy, Jesus, is a bad idea. I don't expect such people to be receptive to reason, nor would I expect them to have much in common with me. And while I realize that this is not at all an either-or-proposition, I'd rather be right than popular. No one proselytized to me. I had to discover the works of Ayn Rand after many years almost entirely at random. While I suppose it's better late than never, I am hopeful, that is, I am still able to rise to a higher level of personal success. I am hopeful that one day a franchise of secular private elementary schools may make The Fountainhead part of its required literary studies. I am hopeful that just such an effective learning environment could discover new ways to make philosophy fun, and thereby more popular. Maybe someone will invent a popular video game that promotes reality-based morality. I will leave that task to much younger innovators. Persuasion can yield results, but early indoctrination would work much better. Just look at the results early indoctrination as had for the government and parochial schools.

You're both right, and I would agree with both statements I quote below. We all adapt Objectivism to suit ourselves in our own lives. That is the purpose of philosophy, to serve man's life. Do we all follow Ayn Rand's ideas to the letter? Of course not. Nicky's philosophy is different from Ayn Rand's philosophy. Harrison's is different from both. All are versions of Objectivism.

The fingerprints that Sanskrit has placed on other languages come in three main varieties. First, there are direct descendant fingerprints on Hindi, Panjabi, Sindhi, Bengali (etc: the list extends to hundreds of languages), which are the modern descendants of Sanskrit. Then there are the massive traditional cultural influence fingerprints, as in Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, which are unrelated languages of India which nevertheless have adopted many Sanskrit words (and even parts of grammar, in the formation of compounds). This cultural influence decreases and becomes harder to recognize in the case of languages which adopted Sanskrit terminology due to the expansion of Buddhism (and Hinduism, to a lesser extent). So there are many words in Thai, Lao, Khmer which come from Sanskrit, and even some words in Chinese and Japanese. The name of the national language of Indonesia, Bahasa Indonesia, comes from Sanskrit bhāṣa “language”. There are also a few quasi-universal words which derive from Sankrit, such as “sugar” (śarkarā) and “rice” (vrīhi). These are influences on the order of a thousand years old. Finally there are contemporary ubiquious words like “dharma, karma, yoga, avatar, nirvana, Buddha, guru”, and even more words probably not taken from Sanskrit itself but instead taken from a modern Indic language, for example “rupee” (used in East African language) is from Hindi, where the word ultimately comes from Sanskrit rūpyakam, likewise “gunny (sack)”, “guar”, “jungle”, “thug”, or “juggernaut” which is said to some from a less-known modern language Odia. There are Indic words in languages of East Africa – “bhang, gunny”. It is hard to tell if those words went directly from Indic into Swahili, or indirectly via local English; but these words come from modern Indic languages, not Sanskrit (except, of course, anybody with an internet connection in Nairobi can select their own avatar and blog about how yoga classes are good karma, or something like that). There is an arcane industry of figuring our word-origins, whereby we determine how a particular word got spread. “Butter” has been in English for millenia: it got there from Latin butyrum, which comes from Greek boutyron (βούτῡρον) which itself could be a compound of Greek for “cow” and Scythian for “cheese”. On those grounds, I would suspect that Hindi “guru” (गुरु) is a cultural re-borrowing from Sanskrit. It seems to have gained traction in English in the early 1800 when Western interest in India rose, but there is no question that William Jones, a British official, became fluent in Sanskrit and very well knew the word guru, and myriad other words of Sanskrit. Because of the ubiquitous words plus the fact that it’s easy to adopt a word for a new thing, especially if you didn’t already have the thing (I don’t know what else to call a tanbour other than a “tanbour”, and I can’t think of a more convenient Germanic word for kebab other than “kebab”), there will be very few languages that are devoid of ultimate Sanskrit influence. I’m reasonably confident that speakers of Saami, Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian (Uralic) use “kebab” when talking about kebab. I know, TMI.

Seriously? This is the level that you want to bring the discussion to? Is this really a world problem that you want to spend your time solving? There are no more pressing problems for you to think about than a manager in an asteroid company smearing poop in employees face? Pathetic. If these problems are what objectivists are spending their time on, then it's easy to see why more important problems are not being solved.