Andy_X69

In a free market economy, there is no way in hell that a businessman will be able to keep his affairs a secret. Markets themselves, including the entire price system, are informational in nature. People make decisions on information, this information eventually is used in a reasoning process that eventually levels out into a price on a market. Someone will eventually get wind of any misdemeanour, circulate it in the market and before you know it, stock prices will plummet. Further, for an Objectivist businessman to sacrifice another to himself would be an ethical sacrifice. It would be to sacrifice a principle for material gain. To abrogate a principle is ALWAYS a sacrifice. The rationally selfish person would value his principles over some material gain and hence choose the principle. You think any Objectivist will allow himself the psychological torment of knowing that he survives like a leech? On blood?

Well I am a post-Objectivist rather than an orthodox (being "If Rand said it, its true") Objectivist, and I tend to have a taste in music that most people consider "Gothic," so I disagree with Rand's aesthetics. Art CAN be a concretization of philsophical concepts but I have never 'needed' to grasp a philosophy through art. In fact, the first thing I read by Rand was a non-fiction essay (Requiem for Man). It took me a while before I started reading her fiction. My favorite artists are Botticelli and Kandinsky. Radically different styles quite obviously. I love Botticelli's romantic, sensual style, and Kandinsky's chaotic abstract interplay of colors and forms appeals to me. Both are things that I find beautiful, albiet in different ways. Also, musically, I listen to electro-Industrial and EBM. This is not happy music. It is dark, depressing, violent, but melodic, catchy and danceable. May I recommend "Empires" by VNV Nation? (Some reviewers have actually stated the lyrics remind them of Ayn Rand) I consider Rand's aesthetics asserted, not proved. I do not consider it a proper component of Objectivism. I enjoy art whose philosophy can be seen as monstrously nihilistic, but I enjoy it on a non-philosophical level. Although I am not an Anarcho-Capitalist (I am a Hayekian Minarchist), I think Murray Rothbard was right in his play "Mozart Was A Red." By the end of it all, Rand was losing it. She preached cognitive independence as a virtue, yet punished any dissent with excommunication. Quite frankly, I think that she ended up being very unreasonable. If I had to rationalise art, I say that any art that represents rebellion and freedom works for me. I love renegades. I find the lonesome, windswept rogue, who neither bows nor subjugates, an incredibly romantic image. Any artist that promotes thinking for yourself and NOT letting others think for you is one I like. Any artist whose work makes me feel defiant and proud is an artist I enjoy. I think, however, that this is a reflectilon of my ethics moreso than my epistemology.

I do not follow fashion, but I care about how I look. I alter my apperance purely for my own enjoyment and I do not care what others think of it. My fashion sense is kind of a "feather in my cap," a representation of my values on the aesthetic level. Since my 'favorite' value is mental independence (yes, I know that my cardinal value should be reason, but 'reason as an epistemology' was never a radical, earth-shaking idea for me, it was obvious to me that it worked and that nothing else did, so I never considered faith an alternative), I dress in a way that I think portrays that. I paint my own portrait.

But if a government cannot initiate force, it cannot be seen as coercive or a ruler. Aristocracy means an elite are allowed to coerce the non-elite. An Objectivist government would be a guardian of non-coercion, not coercive in itself.

Capitalism the Unknown Ideal Virtue of Selfishness Fountainhead Anthem Atlas Shrugged For the New Itellectual The New Left And I do realise that it is not the core philosophy I am dissenting from. The reason I use the term Neo-Objectivist and Post-Objectivist is that "Objectivist" is often conflated with "Ayndroid"/"Randroid," and I am neither.

The word "Aristocracy" implies a "cracy," implies a coercive rule. That is a violation of NIOF. Rand's politics were anti-coercive, and hence there would be no aristocrats. No one can coerce. Of course, people are differing in their skills and talents and as a result they will receive different levels of remuneration. People are different so variance in income is natural. This doesnt imply 'supermen' and 'lesser men.' I happen to be smarter than many people I know, but I am their equal in 'heirarchical' terms, and ethically we are all ends in ourselves. In short, Rand was not an economic egalitarian, but an ethical egalitarian (i.e. people get treated equally under law), and to quote Hayek, "it is only because people are unequal can we treat them equally."

I guess I was naturally Objectivist before I read Rand. I had always accepted, de facto, the Metaphysics and Epistemology. Reality and Reason were, to use crude terms, 'duh' to me. I guess it was a 'sense of life' issue regarding those. I never considered the world bendable to my demands, and I only trusted my mind for knowlege. Poitics came later, but I essentially fell into it from a Utilitarian perspective, and eventually I graduated to a harmonic one (which I still advocate. I consider the fact that markets and freedom work to be the empirical proof of the natural status of rights, Essentially the Bastiat position). It was the ethics that were the revolutionary component of Objectivism for me. I was always rationally selfish, but I did not know that this constituted an 'ethic.' Until I read Rand, I considered morality to be an intellectual conspiracy to make life painful (all the previous ethics I was exposed to amounted to self-immolation).

Well your emotional reaction is a reaction to what you liked about those characters. Rational people have rational emotions. There is no reason/passion dichotomy. But in all honesty, I would advise you not to idolize them, they are floating abstractions designed to represent concepts. And may I dissent from 'popular Objectivism' on one regard: hero worship is something to be avoided because worship, in the true sense of the word, is unrestrained and unlimited devotion, and from my perspective, such a thing is irrational (it undermines cognitive independence for one) for I have never met any being worthy of worship. Admiration, of course, is something else, and admiring heroes is a good thing, but it has its limits. Worship doesn't.

Actually, Objectivism is NEITHER subjective or intrinsic. Subjective, in Rand's terminology, means 'completely arbitary.' Intrinsic means 'valuable in itself, regardless of agents.' Intrinsicism falls prey to the fact that value is meaningless without an agent for something to be valuable to. Subjectivism ignores that as well and says value is a matter of will and being in orgasmic throes of "Saying YES! to life" (Nietzsche). Think of value as, under Objectivism, being analogous to a mathematical derivative of a relationship between an agent and this agents relevant context. The best term to use is the economic term (rational self-interest, or rational selfishness). To my knowlege, the only people that come close to Rand's value theory are the Austrian economists (yes, they called their theory Economic Subjectivism, but they never stated that value was an arbitrary whim).

Greetings, Im an Economics student from Australia, I consider myself an Objectivist of the Post-Objectivist/Neo-Objectivist variety (yes, I do think Rand made mistakes and occasionally contradicted herself, e.g. her stance on homosexuality vs. "A sin without volition is a slap in the face of ethics"). Its great to be here.