rameshkaimal

The hypothetical example I gave in my post could happen the other way too. It's also possible for an honest married man to be in love with two women at the same time and to be in a temporary state of conflict about the issue so as to enter into an affair with one, while remaining married to the other, where the affair is known to, and is with the consent of, the other. In such a case, the conflict could quickly get resolved by the woman throwing the man out of the house without waiting for him to make up his mind. But if she doesn't throw him out, I guess that would probably make her a "doormat", right?

Hello, I recently received from the owner of the Ayn Rand In India group in LinkedIn, the link to a survey about following Objectivism while pursuing one's career. The survey can be filled out by clicking on the link below: Objectivism at Work - Survey Please pass on the link to others who might be interested. Thanks, Ramesh Kaimal

aequalsa, Since you haven't read Valiant's book, I would suggest that you read it when you do find the time. I think some of the questions you have raised in your post are answered in the book. I think Ayn Rand's affair with Nathaniel Branden is such a private aspect of her personal life (unlike her musical tastes, for instance) that it would be totally inappropriate to speculate about it in a public forum for discussing her philosophy, such as this one. Having said that, I think it's possible for an honest married woman to be in love with two men at the same time and to be in a temporary state of conflict about the issue so as to enter into an affair with one, while remaining married to the other, where the affair is known to, and is with the consent of, the other. Such a woman is honest on two counts. Firstly, she is honest enough to recognize that there is a conflict, which is what leads to the affair. Secondly, she is honest enough to have the affair with the knowledge and consent of her spouse. Usually, such a conflict ultimately gets resolved when either the woman goes away with the man she is having an affair with, thereby ending her marriage, or comes back to the man to whom she is married (if he accepts her), thereby ending her affair.

A determinist would probably suspect the "coincidence" to be Mr. Death's desperate attempt to manipulate more and more people into discussing the quote to death!

In The Passion Of Ayn Rand's Critics: The Case Against The Brandens, James S. Valiant has clearly discussed the "jealousy", "unhappiness", "alcoholism", etc. concerning the affair, which the Brandens have speculated on in their memoirs. So for those who seek the truth about the arbitrary claims the Brandens have made in their books, I would suggest Valiant's book. Given the moral character of both Nathaniel and Barbara Branden, which is also discussed in Valiant's book, no honest person (Objectivist or otherwise) could or would trust the Brandens' distorted version of what actually happened.

The following quotes are taken from The Passion Of Ayn Rand's Critics: The Case Against The Brandens by James S. Valiant: "Branden reports that 'one of the often asked questions' following his lectures at NBI was: 'Is it possible to be in love with two people at the same time?' He reports Rand's own answer to students: 'It's a project that only giants can handle.'" “Rand's answer to these questions is highly revealing. She implies that a high degree of moral character is required -- and, perhaps, that the intensity of the commitment required is equally high -- and that such demands would probably make this a rare circumstance. The situation is not inherently evil, however, as the positive implication to the word 'giants' makes plain.” "In effect, Rand's position is 'great -- if you can handle it.'"

Dr. Brook's keynote address at the July 4 Boston Tea Party protest is now available on the AynRandInstitute channel on YouTube. It's in 2 parts and can be viewed in HD. The links are: I simply loved Dr. Brook's statement towards the end of Part 1 of 2: We need to dump that (the idea that you're your neighbor's keeper) in the river with the tea! Bravo!

There’s an online petition to stop the Cap, Trade & Tax legislation. The link for signing it is: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/stopcaptradetax?e

Would anyone here know of any investment newsletters managed by Objectivists? Recently, I was surfing the net for such newsletters, which recommend asset allocations based on objective analyses of market trends and I came across Dr. Richard Salsman's publication, The InterMarket Forecaster. Is anyone here a subscriber to this monthly newsletter? I checked out the InterMarket Forecasting website but it looks like the target audience of Dr. Salsman's publication is professional asset managers rather than individual investors.

If, as a rational person, one objectively judges someone to be one's enemy, one is under no moral obligation to deal with him in any manner whatsoever. An enemy is not someone who has a point of view different from one's own or with whom one can share positive values notwithstanding the differences between oneself and the other person. On the contrary, an enemy is someone who rejects reason and practices ideas that are a threat to one's own life and values, which is why one judges him as an enemy to begin with. So one can neither reason with him to consider one's own point of view nor deal with him on the basis of shared positive values, notwithstanding the differences. Friendship, like everything else in life, is a value, which has to be earned and an enemy, unlike a stranger, is someone who does not deserve one's friendship. If he deserved to be one's friend in the first place, by what objective moral standard is one then judging him to be one's enemy?

The quote "Don't bother to examine a folly - ask yourselves only what it accomplishes." was taken from Ayn Rand's essay: "Extremism: The Art of Smearing" (Chapter 17) in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. I searched The Objectivism CD-ROM for this quote and discovered that Miss Rand had used it in 2 other essays, namely, The Comprachicos in The Objectivist (November 1970) & Apollo And Dionysus in The Objectivist (December 1969.) In the former article, she even asks the reader to apply Toohey's advice from The Fountainhead! So though the quote is originally from The Fountainhead and spoken by its arch villain Ellsworth Toohey, given the purpose of my post, I have used it in the same way Miss Rand had used it in her 3 essays. The purpose of my post was to prove how irrational the idea endorsed by Branden is, since its practice leads to the horrible consequences I have mentioned. I don't think pointing out the consequences of practicing certain ideas indicates a pragmatic approach. On the contrary, it shows a reality-oriented approach. In fact, it is an approach which Miss Rand consistently used in her own essays to convince her readers.

In his essay "Objectivism and Libertarianism", Branden says:

The second hazard Branden states in his essay, is encouraging repression. He says:

Diana Hsieh has written an excellent post titled Nathaniel Branden's Campaign Against Objective Moral Judgment on her blog NoodleFood, in which she thoroughly analyzes Branden's third hazard from his essay, namely, encouraging moralizing. I highly recommend this post to anyone who is seriously interested in understanding why his essay is a complete distortion of Ayn Rand's philosophy.

I disagree. Being objective means you are focused on nothing but adhering to reality in the exercise of your rational faculty. This means in dealing with other people, you are primarily concerned NOT with what they regard as rational or reasonable but with how it is related to reality, i.e., if it can be related to reality, to begin with. If it cannot be so related, then what they regard as rational or reasonable is not objectively so, regardless of the fact that it is what they regard as such. It is this fundamental principle (of relating everything to reality, including the rational or reasonable according to any individual or group) that Branden fails to practice in his false criticism of Ayn Rand. Instead, he says, in addition to being rational, it is also important to focus on what other people regard as rational or reasonable, since (according to him) there is a fundamental difference between the two. And that Ayn Rand was only focused on the first and negatively judged anyone whose idea of the rational or reasonable clashed with what she regarded as such. I would have accepted this criticism of Ayn Rand if she was the kind of person who habitually rejected what other people regarded as rational or reasonable, regardless of whether she could relate it to reality. But there's no evidence of her being such a person. And I'm definitely not going to take on faith what Branden has written about her in his memoirs as evidence of such a possibility. Had Branden explicitly mentioned that in dealing with other people, it is ultimately reality and nothing but reality which is the standard for objectively judging what they regard as rational or reasonable, I wouldn't have bothered to criticize him. Because in that case, I would have correctly identified him as a person who really knows what it means to practice the principle of objectivity in dealing with other people.

The first hazard Branden states in his essay, is confusing reason with "the reasonable." He says:

SPOILER alert . . . . . . . . . . My favorite scene is from The Da Vinci Code: At his hotel, Dr. Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) accidentally cuts himself and the line of blood on the sink reminds him of the Rose Line. He follows the Rose Line and finds the location of the Holy Grail, buried under the pyramid in the Louvre. Dr. Langdon then kneels above Mary Magdalene's tomb as the Templar Knights did before him. Throughout the scene, Hans Zimmer's plays in the soundtrack.

There's an important aspect of faith which is relevant to this thread. Faith involves belief in the arbitrary whereas reason involves belief in facts and values. Facts can be perceived (e.g. one sees a tree) or inferred (e.g. a scientist detects photons) by Man, and values, if they are derived from facts, can be considered as a type of fact. For more information, please refer to Dr. Peikoff's essay Fact And Value. So expecting one's legs to support oneself when one gets out of bed (in the absence of specific evidence that they cannot) is a rational belief based on facts. Whereas seeing something on a mantle used to transport roses which seems to resemble an image of the Virgin Mary and holding it as absolute proof of a miraculous vision, is an arbitrary belief based on nothing but a desire to believe whatever one wants to believe. In other words, what motivates a belief in the arbitrary is the primacy of consciousness or the futile attempt to view existence as a product of one's consciousness. To paraphrase from Dr. Peikoff's OPAR, the arbitrary: 1. has no referent(s) in reality and hence cannot be reduced to the perceptual level, 2. has no place in a conceptual hierarchy and hence cannot be integrated with the rest of Man’s knowledge. Since the arbitrary has no relation to both physical evidence and mental content, none of the concepts formed to describe human knowledge: true, false, possible, probable, certain, etc. can be applied to it. Furthermore, an arbitrary belief does not even qualify as a hypothesis since a hypothesis, to quote Dr. Peikoff, should have at least some evidence to support it and no evidence which contradicts it. Since the arbitrary cannot be reduced to percepts, in practice, it leads to the mind-body dichotomy, or thinking in one way and acting in a diametrically opposite way, e.g. an altruist who arbitrarily believes it's wrong to pursue one's self-interest, contradicts his belief by pursuing it anyway to remain alive, feels guilty for doing so, and atones for it by sacrificing the values which further his life. Likewise, since the arbitrary cannot be integrated with the rational concepts that make up one's knowledge, in practice, it leads to a fragmented mind which compartmentalizes its content, e.g. a religious conservative who arbitrarily believes an embryo is a human being and is unable to reconcile his views on abortion with his views on property rights.

Yaron Brook's talk for the first public event of The Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights (ARC) is now up on the web: http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pag...nif7wwms5.app5a The Q&A is not included, but it is included on the DVD/audio CD, which can be ordered from The Ayn Rand Book Store: http://www.aynrandbookstore2.com/prodinfo.asp?number=LS086DV To quote from the description of the talk, "It is time America heard the moral case for laissez-faire capitalism."

All living organisms, unlike inanimate matter, are aware of reality in some form and pursue some values to sustain/further their life. But animals and plants, unlike Man, are automatically aware of reality and automatically pursue values in it. In contrast, Man: 1. chooses to become aware of reality (at the conceptual level), 2. chooses to discover the values which sustain and further his life, and 3. chooses to take the actions necessary to gain such values. So, free will, in Man, involves (in essence) the primary choice to focus on things in reality, and the primary choice to live in reality (by discovering values and acting to gain them.) If Man has no free will, there's nothing he can focus on in reality and nothing he can pursue in it. And if he cannot focus on anything in reality, nothing he asserts, (including the assertion denying his own free will) refers to anything in reality at all!

How does having a 'reason' for believing in God prove its existence? How does a religious person's assertion that their faith is based on reality prove its basis? God does not come into existence merely because a theist has 'reasons' for his irrational belief or because he arbitrarily claims God's existence. Why does one need to know the metaphysical differences between the instances of causality one observes in reality before one can integrate them to formulate the Law of Causality? It's the task of science, not philosophy, to discover any such differences. So it hardly makes sense to say that unless and until one scientifically knows what in reality makes possible living organisms as against inanimate matter, or volition in Man as against automatic behavior in animals, one can never really conclude that things in reality act in accordance with their nature, no matter how much one observes them acting that way. This is nothing but an assertion for which no reasons have been given. So simply making such assertions proves nothing. You say physics is about nothing but making observations and creating models which accurately predict the observations. Observations of what? And models about what? This is such a sloppy description of physics which says nothing about the specific aspect of reality it studies that one can barely distinguish it from any other science which also makes observations and creates models for predicting them. So it's you who clearly don’t have any idea of what you are talking about here. What I said about the philosophic bankruptcy of physics has been discussed at length by Dr. David Harriman in his lecture: The Philosophic Corruption of Physics. So I would suggest that you listen to his lecture if you are seriously interested in understanding what physics was at one time and what it has become now. It is epistemology which prescribes how Man should gain knowledge of reality. So it would be impossible for the scientific method to prescribe what a scientist should do to gain knowledge of the specific aspect of reality which his science studies, unless it implicitly followed the fundamental principles of knowledge discovered by epistemology to begin with. The very device I'm using is a product of technology/engineering which applies the principles discovered by scientists of a better era who, unlike modern physicists, did not fantasize about things coming into existence only after Man discovered them! No offense, but the more you argue in this forum, the more it appears that you know little or nothing about the crucial role of philosophy in Man's life, and the logical dependence of all fields of human knowledge, including science (and its method), on philosophy, particularly epistemology. So I'll do you a favor and suggest that you read the following: Philosophy: Who Needs It by Ayn Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology by Ayn Rand, and Objectivism: The Philosophy of Any Rand by Dr. Leonard Peikoff

The Law of Causality is formulated after observing what exists and how they act (or are acted upon) in reality. Whereas a belief in mysticism or mystical things is arbitrary because they are based on nothing in reality and have no relation to Man's knowledge of it. By simple observation. One sees inanimate billiard balls being acted upon without acting to pursue anything. Then one sees animals acting automatically to pursue values based on automatic sensory knowledge. Finally, one sees men (including cavemen) choosing to discover the values required for their survival and taking the actions necessary to obtain them. God is an invalid concept in epistemology because as I said earlier, a belief in mysticism or mystical things is arbitrary because they are based on nothing in reality and have no relation to Man's knowledge of it. And one needs no authority (except one's independent perception of reality) to identify existence, consciousness, sensory evidence and human volition as self-evident primaries in philosophy. Philosophy is the study of the fundamental nature of reality, of Man, and of Man's relationship to reality (from Philosophy: Who Needs It by Ayn Rand.) So it is the only science in human knowledge which deals with the broadest abstractions possible. This means none of the special sciences (be it the physical or the social) deal with the most fundamental truths because they study only specific aspects of reality or of Man. So there's absolutely nothing (emphasis added) they can discover about anything in reality which can invalidate the axioms of philosophy or the immutable fact that they are irreducible (since they are at the base of all knowledge, both philosophic and scientific.) In fact, no scientific knowledge could even be possible if these axioms are not implicitly accepted by every scientist. As example, take the current bankrupt state of physics in which physicists routinely reject the primacy of existence by their arbitrary claim that subatomic particles come into existence only after they have been detected by Man! That is like saying if a tree fell in a forest uninhabited by any animal, no sound will be transmitted since there's no one to hear the sound! This is what happens when a scientist's bad philosophy eventually corrupts his science. In order for Man to gain knowledge of reality (so that he can live in it) he has to be in focus first. If he's not in focus, then he's not conscious at all, at least not in the sense required for his survival. And focus is not automatic; it's the first choice Man makes which enables him to be aware of things in reality. So the first cause in human volition is necessarily the primary choice to focus or not.

Firstly, human volition is not a contradiction of the Law of Causality. The Law of Causality states everything in the universe acts according to its nature. That's all it says, nothing more. If everything in the universe did not act according to its nature, it would mean things could be something other than what they are when they act. But that would be a contradiction of the Law of Identity. Nothing can exist, whether in the course of action or otherwise, apart from, or against its own nature. So if a billiard ball's motion is ruled by mechanical causation that's one instance of causality in the universe. Likewise, if an animal's actions are determined by automatic knowledge and values that's another instance of causality in the universe. Finally, if Man's behavior is governed by the primary choice to focus or not that's still another instance of causality in the universe. So it hardly makes sense to say everything in the universe is governed by a single instance of causality, namely, deterministic causation. That would be like saying a car is nothing more than a specific model. Just as a concept unites all the units subsumed under it, a metaphysical law integrates all the instances covered by it. Secondly, just as existence and consciousness are axiomatic concepts in metaphysics, sensory evidence and human volition are axiomatic concepts in epistemology. An axiomatic concept, according to The Ayn Rand Lexicon, is the identification of a primary fact of reality, which cannot be analyzed, i.e., reduced to other facts or broken into component parts. It is implicit in all facts and in all knowledge. It is the fundamentally given and directly perceived or experienced, which requires no proof or explanation, but on which all proofs and explanations rest. In other words, reason (without which there would be no such thing as rational argumentation) presupposes a mind which can: 1. choose to focus on things in reality and make assertions about them, and 2. reduce its assertions (if valid) to the evidence provided by its senses about things in reality. So it hardly makes sense to deny human volition because if Man cannot choose to activate his own consciousness then he cannot focus on things in reality at all. Hence no assertion he makes, including the arbitrary one denying his own volition, refers to anything in reality! Likewise it hardly makes sense to deny sensory evidence because if Man's senses are invalid then he cannot reduce his own assertions to the evidence provided by his senses. Hence no assertion he makes, including the arbitrary one denying his own senses, can be tied to reality!

A right, in Ayn Rand's definition, is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man's freedom of action in a social context. To paraphrase from Dr. Peikoff's OPAR, sanctioning here means: within the sphere of action delimited by a rational moral code based on Man's life as the standard, every man is free to act (in society) without the agreement or approval of others, or without interference from them. So a right does not require anyone's agreement. In other words, Man's born with certain inalienable rights, regardless of whether anyone chooses to recognize them. Also, a right is not a claim to anything, including specific objects like healthcare, be it government funded or otherwise. Instead, it's a sanction (as described above) to take specific actions and keep the products of those actions.

Ifat, The joke is really not about the boy giving a test to his girlfriend on an Ayn Rand novel. In fact, the narrator does call it a stupid test. Rather, the humor is about how engrossing/riveting Miss Rand's novels are that it would probably be not such a good idea to hold open book tests on them. Even for schools that teach literature.:-) In other words, when it comes to humor, one could (like Francisco d'Anconia) laugh at things because one sees something much greater in them. At the same time, one could also use humor to ridicule the things one has contempt for. And that includes people (like the boy) who take an intrinsic and/or rationalistic approach towards the art and philosophy of Ayn Rand. Ramesh