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  1. Considering the OP An important meditation of all Objectivists is "What does human flourishing consist of?" Now, consider the entire "Sense of life" surrounding non initiation of force, the trader principle, the dire admonition of systems turning individuals simultaneously into Robbers and Victims on some horrid ladder, the strong sense that no one is to be sacrificed, neither oneself to others nor others to oneself. And recall the comment Rand made about the leash having loops at both ends... And consider the virtues of rationality, justice, independence, and honesty. Even if one were to surmount the extreme adds against its success, becoming a tyrant relies on the vices of others, as well as the vice in oneself, depends on injustice, dependence, dishonesty, irrationality. It requires the repudiation of all that is admirable, and central to the ethics of Objectivism and its sense of life, which I mentioned above... it entails a direct dependence upon unreality, irrationality, and the worst in humanity... it embraces the essentials of what Rand would have identified as evil. Is this what human flourishing consists of? Show that, and perhaps you will sway some Objectivists to the merits of the predatory parasitism which tyranny is... but I suspect it will be a difficult row to hoe with most.
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  2. If one holds that Objectivism is a philosophy for living on earth, the question of 'saving the world' or 'saving others' should only come up in the context of what value the 'world' or 'others' have to you as an individual. Living in a rational society provides benefits that could not be acquired living on an uncharted island or a struggle to be self-sufficient off the grid. Personally, I like growing a small vegetable garden, even though a portion of it often gets pilfered by the local wildlife. It reminds me of how convenient it is to have grocery stores that rely on professionals that grow much of the world's food much more efficiently than I can on a modest suburban lot. For what it's worth, @The Laws of Biology, The Psychology of Psychologizing is available at the ARI Campus. It reminded me of how Hank Rearden offered Lillian (among others) the benefit of the doubt at so many steps along the way. It ties in with part of Galt's Speech as well: "While you were dragging to your sacrificial altars the men of justice, of independence, of reason, of wealth, of self-esteem—I beat you to it, I reached them first. I told them the nature of the game you were playing and the nature of that moral code of yours, which they had been too innocently generous to grasp. I showed them the way to live by another morality—mine. It is mine that they chose to follow. Man, by the grace of nature, is a moral being. And with another H/T to Miss Rand, she saw it too when she expressed in her essay Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World: There is a tragic, twisted sort of compliment to mankind involved in this issue: in spite of all their irrationalities, inconsistencies, hypocrisies and evasions, the majority of men will not act, in major issues, without a sense of being morally right and will not oppose the morality they have accepted. They will break it, they will cheat on it, but they will not oppose it; and when they break it, they take the blame on themselves. The power of morality is the greatest of all intellectual powers—and mankind’s tragedy lies in the fact that the vicious moral code men have accepted destroys them by means of the best within them.
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