Mister A

I already answered your question and provided you a source. I'm not going to spoon-feed you further.

The Comprachicos http://xanthippaschamberpot.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/ayn-rand-the-comprachicos.pdf

Approval is the initial (and later, subtextual) motivation but after the powerluster feels adequately practiced in his manipulation abilities, the passive need for acceptance twists into an aggressive, uncompromising demand for what was previously withheld.

On a recent appearance on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher, actor Sean Penn lapsed into his Jeff Spicoli role when he defended fellow scumbag Hugo Chavez: "Every day, this elected leader is called a dictator here, and we just accept it! And accept it. And this is mainstream media, who should – truly, there should be a bar by which one goes to prison for these kinds of lies." Yep. Imprison those who would dare call an elected leader a dictator. No contradiction of principles there. The disturbing part is: if you came up to Penn and calmly explained to him that imprisoning reporters for not validating his perspective is actually dictatorial, he would have no idea what you are talking about. Helpless and agitated in the face of logic, his default response would be snarling insults and histrionics (probably with vague references to Fox News and the “military industrial complex”) and after you back down in disgust and confusion, then in Penn's mind, the matter is settled and he is in the right. It makes no difference if he wins the debate with syllogisms or invective; because there is no objective reality to him, only the beliefs of people. Penn is really just a product of his time. When most of us think of the word ‘dictatorship’, we associate the word with specific individuals in history and current events. History doesn’t dwell on the legions of enforcers, enablers, followers and all the anonymous collaborators who enthusiastically act out the whims of an otherwise impotent thug. At best, they are portrayed as hoodwinked dupes, magically hypnotized by the dictator to act against their nature. What’s left unexamined is the psycho-epistemological paradigm that fuels these lost souls, turning them into mindless Powerlusters. Lets get one thing straight first: it is a fatal misconception that power-lust is a synonym for ambition. Ambition is a persistent desire towards achievement and personal growth. The concept is neutral in the moral sense. Powerlust is the actively malignant drive to subdue the minds of others under the belief that doing so would grant control over reality itself. Powerlust is also not a synonym for narcissism. It is self-evident that all narcissists are Powerlusters but not all Powerlusters are narcissists. The distinction is that the primary subject of a narcissist’s fantasies and evasions are his own self-image which he seeks to inflate beyond proportion. A Powerluster can be personally down-to-earth and sensitive to the needs of his friends but his illness manifests in other areas, usually those outside the boundaries of his personal life. If you ever knew a person who seemed charming and intelligent during casual conversation but became obnoxious and irrational whenever the subject turned to politics or philosophy that is an example of a Powerluster. The primary trait is a willful rejection of reality coupled with counter-aggression as the default response to any intellectual challenge regardless of substance (note: counter-aggression is not to be confused with frustration or outrage; natural reactions to perceived idiocy or offense respectively). The chronic Powerluster is a broken creature who long ago abandoned intellectual autonomy for the approval of others. Faced with the choice of trusting his own judgment or being judged by a random passerby, the Powerluster destroyed his self-esteem for the sake of being esteemed. At some point further down his childhood, simply fishing for approval is not enough to satisfy the little shit; he seeks to seize approval by aggressively manipulating anyone around him. Lying, intimidating, taunting, seducing, flattering -any tactic will do. The more the Powerluster continues and gets away with his manipulations, the deeper he entrenches his dependence and the deeper he supresses his better judgment. Over time, the fantasy he constructs in the minds of his victims takes priority over observable reality -he effectively deceives himself with his own cons. By implication, he develops a deeply-seated and automatized fear of reality -he loses the ability to function in it while still being technically sane. Alienated from an objective reality to serve as the basis of healthy associations, the Powerluster regards all humans not as intelligent beings to be reasoned with but as animals that have to be tamed (“for the common good”). To the Powerluster, the universe is an unintelligible, formless void through which we float blind and aimless. Metaphysical concepts like consistency, causality, logic, etc. have no relevance in this void since there is nothing solid they can be anchored to. Instead, there are only people, desperately trying to shape the plastic material of the void with the mystic power of words, images and emotion. This ‘plastic material’ is actually the minds of others and the 'mystic power’ that the Powerluster employs are fraud and force. Fraud is the presentation of information that contradicts with reality; the intent is to misdirect the mind. Force overpowers people with the threat of violence or humiliation to make them act in conflict with the mind. Whichever strategy the Powerluster employs, the mind is always the bitter enemy that threatens to topple the house of cards that passes for his endopsychic structure. There are three things that invoke mortal terror in the heart of the Powerluster: the words ‘why’, ‘what for’ and ‘how’ (in regards to abstract thought rather than physical objects). No, he does not fear mouthing those words or responding to them with vague, canned bromides. He fears the prospect of having to seriously answer them! 'Why’ is a request to consult the past for validation. 'What for’ is meant to conceptualize the future for validation. 'How’ is the foundation on which we interact with reality to fulfill our desires. If pressed to be sincere, the Powerluster would answer the first two with “Because I feel like it!” and the third with “Somehow!” (or he would point a gun at your face). Of course, these are not really answers but the dismissive grunts of a neanderthal who can only perceive the present in the context of his arbitrary whims. The fear comes from having to glimpse into the Nietszchean Abyss (more like a mud puddle actually) that the Powerluster has allowed his mind to become. The Powerluster’s epistemological ideal that he desires to achieve is the mind of an animal. Nature provides an animal with instinct; an automatic, unerring knowledge of the actions needed for its survival. An animal never concerns itself with ethics, philosophy or any other form of conceptual discipline (i.e. it never asks ”why”, ”what for” or ”how”). It never dwells on the past or speculates on the future. It never sets goals for itself or belly-aches over missed opportunities and failures. It has no concept of responsibility and by implication, no concept of guilt. In essence, an animal is intrinsically innocent -but that does not imply that man is intrinsically guilty. Lacking instinct to provide automatic knowledge, man’s survival is reliant on his capacity for reason; the faculty that identifies and integrates the facts of reality as they are detected by his senses. Unlike instinct, the practice of reason is not reflexive or infallible and it is not independent of an objective reality (i. e. one learns nothing of practical value by trying to commune with a supernatural dimension through the use of prayer or drugs as a medium). It is understandable why one would prefer to evade the risk of error that presuppose reason but humans do not have the luxury of becoming animals; whenever they try, they become monsters instead. By dominating others and forcing or bilking their unearned consent, the Powerluster acquires the automatic epistemological validation that reality and his human mind deny him. As long as he is surrounded by fellow true believers who repeat his bromides and biases, the Powerluster feels safe to repress the chronic fear and guilt that are the natural result of voluntarily shutting down his own survival mechanism. He can fool himself into believing that he is an all-knowing, universally-competent, morally-impeccable authority who channels raw genius through his whims and emotional outbursts. People tend to reserve their bitterest hatred towards those who withhold something of great value from them like respect, money, love, etc. Keeping that in mind, it becomes easy to understand the visceral antipathy and rage experienced by the Powerluster when someone looks him in the eye and says, “Sir, that is just wrong.” Such a statement (or often, just the passive existence of such a person) has the equivalent impact of a sledgehammer swung into the chest except the damage is not physical but epistemological. What is damaged is not the body or even the Powerluster’s particular beliefs (he actually has none) but rather his protection against reality which he has conditioned himself to regard as a mortal hazard. With this protection compromised, all the fear and guilt that he keeps repressed and festering erupts through the surface in a spectacular and unsightly meltdown. The poor bastard has no real defense against this. Saying “No, you’re wrong” does not have any satisfying kick without the mental effort to back it up. The only recourse is to utterly destroy the offender through brute force to prevent further mental injury. A Powerluster living in a society that respects individual rights has an arsenal thankfully limited to insults and petty mischief. At best, he can “network” with his own kind or his dominated cronies to gang up on offenders but without the resources of a functioning mind, the tactics of a gang of Powerlusters are just as disorganized, bull-headed and self-defeating as those of a solitary Powerluster; even with superior numbers, intimidation is finite in efficacy. But what happens when the restraints of a rights-honoring society are absent? Here we can begin to isolate the secret that draws the Penns to the Chavezs. To put it bluntly, the Powerluster admires dictators as if they were rock stars; the more ruthless and amoral, the greater the admiration. He has no problem whatsoever with bending knee to a tyrant. Having already jettisoned his self-respect early in life, he experiences no degradation from his kow-towing. On the contrary, nothing else makes him feel more empowered. In the dictator, the Powerluster sees an epistemological bodyguard; a champion who can protect the Powerluster’s fragile mental structure from reality better than his manipulations ever could. There are two essentials that a Powerluster looks for in a dictator: he must have disregard for individual rights (as opposed to the “collective” rights of arbitrarily favored groups which negates the concepts of responsibility and self) and be intellectually non-demanding; this means he should promote no principles that are even remotely related to personal integrity and instead demand blind faith to a collective (state, race, class, etc.) or a supernatural entity. With the dictator setting up ironclad intellectual dominance over society, the Powerluster no longer needs to rely on petty bullying to shout down free thinkers; a tip to the local commissar can make them disappear forever, allowing him to blank out their existence and continue his delusions of automatic omniscience in peace. The economic devastation that is common to all rights-denying shitholes is no cause for concern but actually welcome; it’s easier to control menial laborers on the verge of starvation than educated professionals with disposable income. Since indifference to reason implies indifference to life, the Powerluster feels no outrage when the regime takes increasingly lethal measures to suppress public discontent; if humans are unthinking animals, then fear is the only practical way to deal with them when they get stubborn. The Powlerluster will tolerate the sight of corpses piling in the streets and blood flowing through the gutters before he allows a syllogism to violate the sanctity of his delusional consciousness. A reliably repeating pattern that can be observed in history is that it takes some monumental disaster to discredit bad philosophy. Europe endured centuries of intellectual stagnation before religious mysticism was discarded (although it’s enjoying a comeback elsewhere). The wars of the 20th century exposed collectivism as a genocidal fraud. Now with the Information Age reaching its peak, blatantly totalitarian and eliminationist attitudes are commonplace in the intellectual discourse of a constitutional republic. This is perhaps appropriate since the accessibility of information must be extremely straining for those inclined to be Powerlusters; it is desperation that has dragged this sickness out of the shadows and into the light of day for all to behold and identify. Tensions can only escalate from this point onward but the key to intellectually survive the next inevitable disaster is the recognition of the Powerluster's abject impotence. Fiction and literature tend to idealize the Powerluster as a Machiavellian mastermind with limitless resources and ability devoted to realizing his ambition. The real Powerluster is actually an ignorant mediocrity whose power comes second-hand from those willing to give him the benefit of a doubt and what drives him is an antithesis of ambition that is much closer to the nihilistic pessimism of a suicide bomber. Trust your rational judgment or you will be baited into his blast radius.

Yes, true altruism is impossible by design; it's fueled by the unplacatable guilt experienced by its frustrated pursuers.

I'd define evil as a hostile disposition towards the values needed to sustain man's life and a voluntary rejection of reality for the sake of wish-fulfillment. The altruist is at least passively evil since he rejects his own valuing faculty for the demands and whims of others, which leads to a profound loss of self-esteem and moral conviction. He may not be actively on the hunt for victims, but he experiences no outrage when confronted with deliberate evil; his default response is to rationalize, appease and accomodate. Worse, he'll be driven to discourage and demonize the efforts of those combating evil (or even promoting any sort of life-affirming value) since he believes such efforts are judgmental and needlessly antagonistic; privately, he has internalized the moral-practical dichotomy and associates evil with power.

At least they had the integrity to follow through with their anti-life dogma.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/2010...t_blamed_o.html Guess they were anxious to leave this Malevolent Universe.

I was about to say.

And if the hatred is irrational?

The operative word is "intensely" and in proportion to the actions and character of the object being hated. Even then, I can't picture a psychologically healthy Objectivist taking the time to type a 6-page incoherent bitch-fest against Kant.

http://www.gq.com/entertainment/books/2009...ks-fountainhead Wow. You just can't hate someone this intensely without hating yourself first.

The irreducable primary among all the left's boogiemen is the threat they pose to the statist agenda. When you're an anti-conceptual drone who's traded his consciousness for pack approval, you'd viscerally hate whomever your tribal elders tell you to hate and memorized talking points are adequate justification. Not that I find Palin that appealing myself. Spare the psychologizing and let the wannabe-tyrants expose themselves in pursuit of their bloodlust.

Yeah it was kinda indirect but supposedly he debunked that pragmatism is not another form of subjectivism which I believe was Rand's position.

Was browsing in RealClearPolitics and this comment caught my eye: This is little more than the worn out attack on moral relativism with an appeal to paleoconservative values, claiming on a spectrum between realists and relativists, that he, Goldberg, is the realist and Obama is the relativist, particularly with the critical flaw that pragmatists and relativists are the same, debunked long ago by Richard Rorty. Goldberg is as flawed as Ayn Randian Objectivism, claiming that he is the knower of certainty, which abides in an unchanging objective reality outside the capacity of mental perception to shape it, only there to be known in the raw, by seekers of knowledge, portrayed to them by the knowers of it, a chronic condition of infinite regress. And all this culled from a casual statement by a president claiming he's not an ideologue, which of course makes common sense, because admission of the same is effectively committing political suicide on either side of the aisle. It's a pragmatic means towards other ends. Aside from validating my hypothesis that Rand-haters harbor a resentment against certainty (because people who are certain cannot be bullied into consensus) he name-drops some obscure D-lister without any elaboration. Can anybody here in the know enlighten me?

Denial and counter-aggression are the defense mechanisms of dictators and their cronies. Antagonizing the electorate is just the means to fight back against an imposing reality; consciousness is primary so influencing the consciousness of others (preferably at gunpoint) changes reality itself. You can't educate or reason with this mentality; they are essentially bipedal animals who use random words instead of growls and grunts.

We're talking about the US military not a viking horde. Jeez...

As long as the Venezuelans enable and aplogize for this medieval throwback, there's nothing to be sad about.

An observation: It seems that in the cases of Rafenstahl and Einstein the compartmentalization of rationality focused around highly technical, esoteric disciplines (ie. film-making and physics) where personal judgment is largely insulated from the corrupting influence of the pack; the majority of people are simply too ignorant to react to unconventional ideas in specialized fields. In contrast, everybody has an opinion on ethics and politics and going against the grain could provoke hostility from any random passer-by who overhears you; the threat of pariahdom and approval withdrawal is much stronger and ubiquitous.

Related to topic: http://www.syracuse.com/have-you-heard/ind...michael_bl.html Here's an excerpt from The Comprachicos regarding drugs: The most damning refutation of the theories of all the hippie-activist-Marcusian hordes is the drug-glazed eyes of their members. Men who have found the right way of life do not seek to escape from awareness, to obliterate their consciousness and to drug themselves out of existence. Drug addiction is the confession of an unbearable inner state. Drugs are not an escape from economic or political problems, they are not an escape from society, but from oneself. They are an escape from the unendurable state of a living being whose consciousness has been crippled, deformed, mutilated, but not eliminated, so that its mangled remnants are screaming that he cannot go on without it. The phenomenon of an entire generation turning to drugs is such an indictment of today’s culture—of its basic philosophy and its educational establishment—that no further evidence is necessary and no lesser causal explanation is possible. If they had not been trained to believe that belonging to a pack is a moral and metaphysical necessity, would high-school children risk the physical destruction of their brains in order to belong to a pot-smoking “in-group”? If they had not been trained to believe that reason is impotent, would college students take “mind-expanding” drugs to seek some “higher” means of cognition? If they had not been trained to believe that reality is an illusion, would young persons take drugs to reach a “higher” reality that seems to obey their wishes, except that they are smashed on pavements in attempting to fly out of windows? If a trained pack of commentators, sharing the same beliefs,. did not glamorize the obscene epidemic of self-destruction—by means of such estimates as “idealistic,” “revolutionary, … new life-style,” “new morality,” “drug culture”—would the young have any cover left to hide their own deep-down knowledge that drug addiction is nothing but a public confession of personal impotence? I'd say societal acceptance of drugs is the endgame in the War on Brains.

They also never explain what we should do about it. There is conspicuously little to no talk of revolution, civil disobediance, or any form of seeking justice for the 9/11 conspiracy. Trooferism is not about logic, truth or justice. It's about validating one's alienation from society, i.e. "I'm one of the few who know the truth and the rest of you are sleeping sheep."

Basically yes; an intellectual fraud can go far by telling those who are similarly self-crippled (but connected) what they want to hear: scripted sounds void of profundity but full of self-congratulation. They gather themselves into insular echo chambers where they can bounce the sounds off each other without risking awareness of their own impotency. Nobody is behind it. There is nobody's will being executed. Just aimless movements.

Nah. He would probably just dodge the task by saying something like, "Well, that ith thertainly a unique take but way far outthide the mainthream." followed by a condescending snicker and darting eyes.

Sounds like how a perceptual-based mentality works in academia; absorb and memorize enough material so you can appear to converse intelligently about it but any challenge (valid or not) to the memorized material provokes uncomfortable emotional responses underscored by the anxiety (and guilt) of not being able to form your own counter-argument in real-time through the use of concepts. Such 'intellectuals' would make great historians but little else.

Saw the trailer. It's like Toohey started a Council of American Filmmakers.