dream_weaver

Too much of it. Fortunately there came to be philosophers not in that cascade. One of them made high virtue of keeping the trains running on time.
By the way, the most productive theoretical work to come out of ancient Greece, I'd say, was Euclid, not Plato-Aristotle nor even the syllogistic.

Granting Adam the experience of husbandry in the garden of Eden, where no thorns (weeds) grew, this is addressed in Atlas Shrugged, (FTNI, paragraph 214)

—ask yourself whether you would be able to discover how to till the soil and grow your food

something Adam was more likely going to need learn having been expelled from the 'low-maintenance' fields to which he had become accustomed. 

A Greek Sham
The fire of the gods stolen by Prometheus was actually stolen by the story maker from man and given to the gods, omitting credit to man of having learned to start, control, and use fires without outside help.

Well, yes, it is an evasion, and a repression requiring continual reinforcement that has been going on since one understood that we each die. 
My picture is that all people live under a terror of death once they learn solidly that each life ends. And it looks to me that an awful lot of people's behavior should be looked at as how they are responding, how they are carrying on, under that terror. How do they skirt around their eventual (or imminent) absolute annihilation? Or perhaps they face it squarely, brutally honestly, as I do. I've endured deaths of quite a few loved ones and family members (starting during the American war in Vietnam). I lived under a specific death-expectation horizon (2-year) myself for many years. I was with my first life-partner when he died, and I think about when I or my husband die and the other is left alone. I think about it squarely, and although some of my poetry is about death, there is no skirting it there either.
I gather that not all religions are such a blatant skirt-around of death as Christianity. My conjecture is that all of them are importantly, if not wholly, about that mental coverup and relief. My relief is by getting as much correct setting of death in mind as possible, including not only recognizing that it is end of existence, but end of specific fundamental categories of existents. Sort of like cleaning better and better any stowaway remnants of existents and our conscious experience lurking in one's head in conceiving death.
Rand apparently thought about her own death as ending of the world. I don't much like that perspective, even as some sort of metaphor. I keep my eyes set on the world as it continues beyond my death, not on me going out; set on the continuing existents, especially the human world, which is what I most cherish; then too, on where I got to in my work and remember my dear ones. Clearly, Rand didn't always think of her death that world-ending way; she prepared best she could to have her work remain a mark in the world after her life and find minds who would respond to it as others of us did while she was alive.
The social element I notice in one's mind encountering the world has a spring for belief in spirits beyond nature, and this is not the social element Rand stressed in her 1957 composition concerning mystics of spirit. My take is here.
 

Original Sham – Rand and Nietzsche (continued, completed)
I remarked earlier: "Notwithstanding his naturalism, Nietzsche comes up short of admitting the absolute, complete finality of the end of one’s one and only sequence of episodes of life, the life engaging one last week, yesterday, and at this moment." 
I suggest that Nietzsche's elaborate wrestling with an eternal return of the same is a self-deceit decked out in a Yes-saying to a false contrivance. (Contrast with the commendation by John Richardson in his Nietzsche's Values [2020].) The real gravity Nietzsche cannot get rid of is mundane and plain: his own death will necessarily occur, and that will be his complete annihilation. Some non-metaphorical and sensible lifting of that gravity is here:
Nietzsche moved his pen to much upset of Christian doctrines. (His father was a Lutheran minister.) One erroneous view he failed to jettison in his own philosophy is the presumption (of Moses, Socrates, and many others) that knowledge of human constitution is the most important kind of knowledge for the human world, whether life of the individual or situation of the species. It is important, I say, though not most important and most-maker of humanity’s epochs.
Knowledge more important in making the human world: how to make a spear and a bow for arrows; script for language; a wheel and its bearing; a plow; metals from minerals; irrigation channels; working animals; power from water wheels, combustion engines, and electric motors; computation, communication, and illumination from electromagnetism; and scientific medicine. 
Rand championed such knowledge as that, but for her atypical miss of the productivity of the gardener in the myth of the Garden of Eden. “All work is creative work if done by a thinking mind” (AS 1021). Frankly, one is not going to have supper on the table or fire in the fireplace without some labor and some thinking mind preparing those results, and either there are going to be some sparkles of creativity all along the way or the required thinking and the result will not be attained.
Rand held advances in science, mathematics, logic, and engineering to be exemplars of noblest human morality. That in man which makes those advances possible and actuated is identically moral goodness, both-and-one of which man should be rightly pleased and proud. “A rational process is a moral process” (AS 1017).
Nietzsche disdained and belittled such knowledge. He fancied new epochs in the human world by new ways in new religions (viz., as when Christianity overran Greco-Roman religions) and new philosophies (for the future, particularly his own philosophy) bringing forth from man the following: higher, nobler, more active beings (who evidently omit working for a living) (GM I.10).
Nietzsche thinks European fellows of his time are a value-dead, sorry lot much in need of new, exciting values now that God is no longer a live source of credible values. So far as I know, this claim of deficiency in his fellows and their consequent need of a solution is a fake, a sham. It remains an unfounded estimate concerning plebeians, folks in production and trade, nothing more.
Nietzsche writes, plausibly, that he cannot refrain from philosophic thought, such as he conceives such thought, and its continual improvement in himself (GM I.2). He claims of himself a durable will to knowledge, but only knowledge of a sort he would enshrine as the purpose of scientific knowledge. Nietzsche was in fact an ignoramus concerning scientific, mathematical, and engineering advances of his own time, and what interest he had in them was for twisting them into bolsters for his psycho-dynamical speculations, his favorite activity.
Nietzsche is awake to the existence of physical goods such as life on earth. He is awake to psychological goods such as the absence of suffering and unearned guilt. He knows to reject moralities of guilt, Sin, Original Sin, debt to God, and duty; moralities against sexual enjoyment (GM II.21, III.16, III.22–22). He and Rand, in their different ways, survey past moralities and expose their defects. Nietzsche failed to find any new, coherent morality corrective of the past ones and based in life and its enjoyments. Rand succeeded.

Original Sham – Rand and Nietzsche (continued)
Allowing ‘tree” as metaphor for any organically unified process and resulting formation, the “tree of life” in the Garden of Eden is a sham: there is no provider of eternal life ready-made for humans to take. The “tree of knowledge” in the Garden of Eden can be metaphor for something not entirely a sham, though its dedicated fruit (bringing knowledge of good and evil [most particularly, knowing of sexuality]) and the reverence accorded exclusively to that specific sort of knowledge is the stock in trade of shaman and tribalist, and it is in truth not superior to knowledge of how to cultivate a garden. There is only one valid tree for human existence, and this is a tree of limited, but growing knowledge protecting and improving mortal, human life.
In all that, I think this apple (my mind) does not fall far from the tree Objectivism. Here are thoughts from Rand on Original Sin.
This is some great writing, but for inaccuracy in what the old story says. The story says that man was made in the image of God. A reasonable and traditional reading of that is that man was given the power of reason. He was given the rule to not eat from a certain tree, and at that stage, there is no indication that the man lacked the power of free choice in that matter. It was not from eating the forbidden fruit that man got reason or free will in the picture set forth in the Garden of Eden story. “The devil made me do it” would not have been a valid defense if we stick to the scenario crafted in Genesis.
Rand is of course correct in condemning the subsequent determinism towards evil of humans who were descendants of Adam and Eve. That is, she is correct, like many before, to condemn the doctrine of heritable evil in human nature (humans with healthy brain), which is from the doctrine of Original Sin (which does not mean merely the first sin) lain over the story of The Fall and expulsion from Eden, lain over by early Christian theologians.[1] [2]
It has occurred to many a thinking Christian that the concept of Original Sin is unjust and does not square with the manifest free will of individuals. They are told by the higher-level defenders of the faith that God’s justice is not the same as human justice, and we cannot fathom the rightness of all the actions of God. There is excellent human irrationality at that Stop sign.
Rand errs again, as many do, in thinking of Adam as not already a producer in the Garden of Eden. But the old story says he was a gardener (unlike Tarzan). And he was allowed to eat most any of the produce far as I see in the story. That arrangement might reasonably be seen as commercial transaction in which one’s only asset is one’s labor. Getting expelled and cursed meant for the gardener not that he would have to begin working for a living, only that there would be less success in agriculture, more pain in the labor of it, and a need for overalls.
The old story goes that God breathed life into his creature Adam. It would seem unlikely that God needed a garden or gardener, but It might realize a man needs purposeful projects. The Genesis story of the origin of man on the earth does not entail condemnation of human life, reason, morality, or productivity.
From Augustine’s sick angle, the story does entail taking sexuality as evil. He and many others take Adam hiding from God after eating the forbidden fruit to be on account of Adam coming to have sexiness in his naked body and to know that sense is shameful. I’d think it more obvious in the story that Adam was hiding mainly because he figured he was in a heap of trouble, regardless of his excuse that he was hiding because he did not want to be seen naked. But, heaven knows, social regulation of sex is ever a burning issue of religions from tribes to Bible-thumpers of today.
Kyle Harper concludes in a meticulous study of the Christian transformation of sexual morality in late antiquity: 
The next installment will be the last in the present study. There I’ll let Nietzsche have his say.
To be continued.
 
Notes
[1] On the power and the glory of human free will, highly recommended: East of Eden by John Steinbeck (1953), his masterpiece.
[2] When I was a child in the 1950’s in America, there was an additional determinism of human nature being put about by millions of Christians. The tale was that Negroes were descendants of a son (or grandson of Noah. Noah's son, in that Bible story, had seen his drunken father lying naked, for which Noah awarded a batch of curses and made the grandson a slave. Going beyond the biblical text, the linkage of the cursed son (or grandson) of Noah to Negros—accursed man begetting the Negros—was part of a characterization by Whites of Negroes as being by nature inferior to Whites. I heard that story a lot. I have other memories of ordinary thinking in those days of badness in individuals being due to “bad blood” at the level of family heredity and hatreds. But enough.
References
Harper, K. 2013. From Shame to Sin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rand, A. 1957. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House.

Original Sham – Rand and Nietzsche
I said the Original Sham was that death was not naturally inherent in life. A little-sister sham is misrepresentation in the thought that one’s death is one’s eternal nonexistence. The truth is that a nonexistent has no passage, no situations, and no character. Those are the fundamental categories of things in existence. Some traces of one’s existence from before its end—traces in existents continuing to exist, with their passage, situation, and character, beyond one’s own death—indicate to succeeding humans some of the particular passage, situation (and situating), and character that had been oneself. There is an eternal nonexistence of one before one lived and after one lived, but those do not belong to one. Talk of one’s eternal nonexistence is a lie if the eternity is insinuated to be something attaching to one or endured. Posters reading “Where will you spend eternity?” are a sham multiple times over. 
Blaise Pascal (1623–62) famously formulates putatively rational arguments—which are known  under the umbrella “The Wager Argument,” for why it is not irrational to believe in God.* Pascal first argues that because God would be without limit in Its nature, we who are finite, can know by reason neither the existence or nature of God. I should say such a conception of something, here labeled God, ensures that it does not exist. A thing without limit in its nature can be identically one with my axe and not identically one with my axe. Existence is Identity, as Rand would say. More specifically, and in terms of my own metaphysical categories, Existence is passage, situation, and character. The existent is not free of those limitations (as I have proven elsewhere). Further, if God is not conceived as a particular, indeed a concrete particular, then Its worth is a batch of empty words.
Should we allow Pascal, for the sake of further examination of his wager, his false premise that we cannot know by reason whether an infinite thing called God exists? No. His argument requires one enter a game-choice situation in which one is being invited to base belief on desirability of outcome rather than on grasp of fact. Rather, what should be done is this: set aside such morally disrespectful tom-foolery and find the truth. Virtue lies in aiming for truth, and we have gotten it (as surely as we’ve gotten that there are no contradictions in reality because we’ve gotten the Law of Identity): There is no such thing as God or anything supernatural and no such thing as eternal life nor any happiness, suffering, or perspective of one before one existed or after one existed. Nor is there an infinitely long period of non-existence attaching to one before and after one existed.
From Pascal’s Pensées:
 
Pascal was a booster of the Original Sin idea. In §446 Pascal relays text he takes from a text he thought to be Jewish; it was really written by a Christian monk:
Nietzsche does not throw Pascal’s faculty of “heart” out the window. He throws philosophy without such faculty out the window.
“Carefree, mocking, violent—this is how wisdom wants us: she is a woman, all she ever loves is a warrior” Nietzsche writes (GM III, §1, 68). For Nietzsche, finding truth is a ravishment, with the press of perspective that requires. The possibility of an objective standpoint for metaphysics and morals, such as Rand’s standpoint, is out the window.
Nietzsche and Rand rejected the supernatural and, along with it, traditional stories on the origin and mortality of human life. The natural and plain view, when supernaturalism is set aside, would be, I say: a person’s self being identically a living process, when an individual dies, it is the complete end of that individual, that self.[1] Notwithstanding his naturalism, Nietzsche comes up short of admitting the absolute, complete finality of the end of one’s one and only sequence of episodes of life, the life engaging one last week, yesterday, and at this moment. I’ll return to this in the sequel.
Rand takes religions to contain some amount of mysticism, and that seems correct to me. In her Atlas Shrugged, she takes religious folk to be “mystics of spirit.”[2]
In my experience, that picture by Rand of what is going on in the heads of mystics is a poor fit with what is going on (I say in part from my own case). The mysticisms I’m much acquainted with are those holding as part of their faith the Genesis story of the origin of the earth and humans. Probably those were also the faiths most familiar to Rand. She evidently understood, correctly, that much mysticism is planted in the minds of children (see her next paragraph), but she imputes lack of critical, independent mind in the child, as in the adult, to a failure in choices. “Faith in the supernatural begins as faith in the superiority of others” (ibid., 1045). Applied to a first-grader, that is an equivocation on the word “faith.” It is a fact rationally known to the child that the knowledge of adults is superior to her own knowledge. Applied to an adult in the audience of a Billy Graham crusade at the time Atlas Shrugged was published, yes, then the word “faith” is used in constant voice in that statement: a willful suspension of one’s critical independent rationality, thereby aligning with the views of others. I should add, however, that a man getting “saved” at the crusade was able to change his belief about the world and his situation in it only because of the ability of humans to let (to some extent) their beliefs be taken on board by some overriding feelings and wishes, which is intellectual dishonesty and a malfunction of mind.
Rand is mistaken in taking placement of other minds above one’s own authority as the root of mysticism of spirit. What will be the content of a mystic’s belief will have been contoured by sermons and childhood indoctrinating stories, to be sure. But the root of all mysticism of spirit is hard-mystic experience. That is a solitary thing. It can spring from miscreant brain states and can be set to holding in abeyance primal fears of absolute annihilation at death. Such a solitary experience was pivotal in the life and mind of Pascal (Hawton 1952, chap. III).
One is blameless for accepting mystical beliefs, such as Original Sin, in childhood from one’s elders. In adulthood one is intellectually capable and responsible, and, due to one’s love of God and one’s love of any other faith-imbued family members, one is intellectually courageous to disabuse oneself of such beliefs and the method of faith. Einstein’s childhood religious faith ended abruptly at age twelve. I was eighteen, and the shift was likewise abrupt. No doubt it came to me with my growing background in modern science, but the explicit thought was elementary: Is it possible the universe is just holding itself up, just existing, without assistance from anything supernatural, namely God?—parallel the earth holding itself up without a character such as Atlas? This was somewhat before I began to read Ayn Rand. As soon as I allowed the question to come seriously before my mind, I conceded the affirmative, indeed the actuality of the possibility (and felt a great cleanness, followed by feeling a great benevolence towards all mankind).
Rand draws attention to some elements of the Garden of Eden story in its Original-Sin overlay that are profoundly false and morally perverse. Nietzsche rates highly, in some respects, the mindset of Pascal, as we have seen. Nietzsche rejects, however, the supernatural and the notion of Sin. He sees Pascal as of noble soul, but crushed by “the Christian understanding of the weakness and depravity of man” (Pippin 2010, 10).
To be continued.
 
Notes
[1] Likewise for the species: When the last members needed for reproduction die, the species is ended absolutely, left to nature.
[2] Close kin of mystics of spirit would be the idealists in metaphysics from the traditional spectrum idealist-realist-materialist, as well as epistemological skeptics.
 
References
Hawton, H. 1952. The Feast of Unreason. London: Watts.
Nietzsche, F. 1887. On the Genealogy of Morality. C. Diethe, translator. 2017. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pascal, B. 1662. Pensees. W.F. Trotter, translator. 1958. New York: Dutton.
Pippin, R.B. 2010. Nietzsche, Pychology, and First Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rand, A. 1957. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House.
 

Some handy helpful background:
Original Sin –from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Kant famously wrote: "out of such crooked wood as the human being is made, nothing entirely straight can be fabricated" (Idea for a Universal  History with a Cosmopolitan Aim, 1784, translation by Allen Wood). The context of this quote is an acknowledgement that formation and exercise of a political constitution for a society, is in human hands and minds, which means no constitution and its exercise can be perfect. The conclusion, I say, is fair enough truth, but the antecedent thought that humans are made of crooked timber—human nature is corrupt—seems very likely nothing original with Kant; rather, a common view, come down from the likes of Augustine and put about from Christian pulpits of Kant's era (and ours).
 
Grace, Predestination, and Original Sin –from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
 
Catholic Encyclopedia – ORIGINAL SIN

The Original Sham was that mortality was not naturally inherent in life. According to this sham, death as a general phenomenon among humans needed an explanation outside the nature of life, the explanation on offer being that there had been an artificial devising of a systematic preclusion of endless life, making all humans mortal.
“The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and care for it. He told the man ‘You may eat from every tree in the garden, but not form the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; for on the day that you eat from it, you will certainly die’.
. . .
“God answered ’Who told you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree which I forbade you? , , , , 
 
“To the woman he said:
‘I will increase your labour and your groaning, and in labour you shall bear children.
You shall be eager for your husband, and he shall be your master’.
 
“And to the man he said:
‘Because you . . . have eaten fruit from the tree which I forbade you, accursed shall be the ground on your account. With labour you shall win your food from it all the days of your life. It will grow thorns and thistles for you, none but wild plants for you to eat. You shall gain your bread by the sweat of your brow until you return to the ground; for from it you were taken. Dust you are, to dust you shall return.’
 
“The Lord God said, ‘The man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; what if he now reaches out his hand and takes fruit from the tree of life also, eats it and lives forever? So the Lord God drove him out of the garden of Eden to till the ground from which he had been taken.”
 
So there I was, a child in the 1950’s tilling the ground, where we would raise all the fruits and vegetables our family would need for a year. It was hot as promised, and there were sand burrs, goat heads, and thistle, and thorns on the dewberry vines for getting your hands all scratched up. We canned; we stored—in the basement of the house we built—jars of green beans, lima beans, black-eyed peas, stewed tomatoes, (pared, sliced, cooked) apples with a cinnamon stick, peaches, apricots, cherries, pickles, pickled crab apples, strawberry preserves, and apple butter; along with honey from my beehives, wine we made, potatoes and sweet potatoes, onions, and pork we had butchered on the farm of relatives and which we sugar-cured in our basement. Someone had invented freezers, and we stored food also in there. Including bread made by our stepmother. Wheat was grown on farms of wider family, but at that stage of economic development, we bought the flour in a grocery store. Unlike the family of Adam and Eve, we were smarter and more fortunate than the Lord God had hoped, and we did not have to eat none but wild plants. We did pick wild sand plums that grew along roads such as Rt. 66, but they were wonderful, boiled for dessert or made into jelly.
There are many puzzles arising from the text I have quoted from the New English Bible. Theologians of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religions have thought about them for hundreds of years. I’m sure they have many interesting things to say about this story known as The Fall and the attendant doctrines of Original Sin and mortality, heritable from Adam and Eve on down to me picking off potato bugs. I have too many researches going on at this time to dig into the writings of those great theologians. It is another, shorter study I’ve wanted to do for years that I’ll finally do in this thread. That is a comparison of what Ayn Rand and Friedrich Nietzsche had to say about the doctrine of Original Sin, which became a setup for the Christian story of salvation from death and terrors of death.
(To be continued.)

How did life on Earth begin? The chemical puzzle just became clearer.
Story by Kasha Patel
<snip>
People have long scratched their heads trying to understand how life ever got going after the formation of Earth billions of years ago. Now, chemists have partly unlocked the recipe by creating a complex compound essential to all life — in a lab.
</snip>

I was provided evidence of Pokyt's appointment when I received several e-mail notifications informing me of warnings being issued.
I added EC to the roster as well.
As I mentioned last year, of late I've limited myself to updating the forum software with Invision sends out a notification that the software has been updated.

I was provided evidence of Pokyt's appointment when I received several e-mail notifications informing me of warnings being issued.
I added EC to the roster as well.
As I mentioned last year, of late I've limited myself to updating the forum software with Invision sends out a notification that the software has been updated.

Someday, in a month or so, I'll make a thread about religion and title it "Critical Semite Theory".  Then we'll find out some things.

Onkar's talk has run its course, and has been started anew from the beginning in the mobile university.
Drawing from Galt's speech, Onkar reiterates to whom the speech is directed, the remnant of rational minds still remaining in the world, asking them to join the strike and hasten the reclamation of a world to be reshaped by moral virtue. Onkar indicated that Galt gave his speech thus, contrasting it with the Declaration of Independence being a public declaration of the causes underscoring them as a rational appeal to the rest of the world citing:
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
By writing Atlas Shrugged, Rand likewise broadcasts Galt's speech to mankind, speaking to any mind that reads it, and reaching any mind that understands it. While not as dramatic as hijacking the radio-waves of the entire world for three hours, equally impressive is that the message is being continuously broadcast via a medium available anytime someone wants to settle down with her novel in the privacy of their own mind.
She lays out the incontrovertible demonstration of morality's foundation to and in existence, and in pondering this, consider the incontrovertible demonstrations provided by the ancient Greeks in geometry and mathematics that are universally held today. She shows morality is just, and like justice, can preserve or destroy depending on adherence to it or abandonment of it.
Onkar breaks Galt's Speech up as follows:
The introduction (as the first 19 paragraphs per For The New Intellectual)
The morality of life (paragraphs 20 through 88)
The morality of death (paragraphs 89 through 206)
Your choice is either the morality of life or the morality of death (paragraphs 207 through 296)
The course outline breaks these groupings up further by identifying the paragraphs in accordance with his outline of Galt's Speech provided for the presentation.

Interesting reading: American Pravda: Oddities of the Jewish Religion

Israel's War -- Update | Yaron Brook
 
 

Reminds me of a purported sign on a fence:
 

By “obligation”, I presume you are referring to a moral obligation, one that rationally follows from your choice to create a human being. Some people end up creating a child by accident, or are tricked into it, and I’m not talking about those cases – I mean a conscious deliberate choice. Just to be explicit, I also assume when you say “our” children, I assume you mean your own children, not “society’s children”. What do I owe my child, what do you owe your child, what does he owe his child.
Creating a person should not be done on a whim, one should have a clear understanding of why you are doing so, and not just buying a puppy. A puppy will never become a rational being, a child might. An infant will not actually develop into a rational being without some kind of guidance. It’s irrational to think that children are born with Galt’s Speech planted in their brains whereby they can magically discover how to become fully rational. This is what a parent has an obligation to do: to provide such guidance. It is probably a joint effort between the parents and the parent’s agents, so that mom and dad don’t have to actually devise lessons in reading and writing.
Your question seems to be focused on specific technical content. The list of specific technical things that a child should learn is huge: reading, writing, rhetoric, literature, history, philosophy, physics, biology, economics, fishing, hunting, home economics (i.e. “how to wash your clothes; how to cook a meal”). Personally, I think one should try to explain the basic logic of numeric exponentiation, if you can. You don’t teach long lists of facts, you teach very small sets of facts in the course of teaching methods of reasoning. In other words, all you have to teach is the tools of reason, but you do have to go beyond just saying “A is A”.

Michigan’s Extreme 1931 Abortion Repealed

An article that makes for interesting reading in connection with The Fountainhead and Rand's theories about art. Sullivan was her model for Henry Cameron.
The author's observation that highrise is on the decline in the US but going strong in China raises a question: has technology decentralized work so that such buildings are obsolete? If so, you'd expect freer markets to catch on sooner. On the other hand, maybe politics brought this on by making big cities more expensive, dilapidated and dangerous.

Oops, I got the terms mixed up. Geroch's term was "appropriate," not "adequate." It's his meaning of his term I have in mind: everything in the mathematics has physical meaning and all of the physics one wishes to talk about is describable in terms of the mathematics. Such is an appropriate mathematics for the physics.
Some of our mathematics used in physics, I say, hopefully uncontroversially, is clearly a matter of chosen tool, not the mathematical character of the physical reality. Such would be using base 10 in arithmetic calculations and using various coordinate systems. As fruitful as it was to realize that curves can be described by algebraic equations written with reference to a coordinate system, when it comes to geometric facts of curves in the Euclidean plane, which we may take for planes of the physical geometry around us, the method of Euclid we learn in high school for bisecting a line segment is perfect location and physical; no coordinates lain over things by us and used to describe the curves and their intersections add something physical, which we get directly by synthetic geometry (Euclid's way being an example of synthetic geometry, as distinct from analytic geometry).

Language, concept, number, these we are possessed of and are all part of our grasping of and our relating ourselves to entities.
Entities themselves, however, are not in any way possessed of any of language, concept, or number.
That we "find" them poetic or majestic, of a kind or a phenotype, or multitudinous or stochastic, although somethings of them, something about their identity, is touchable and accessible by our various abstraction apparatuses, those somethings of them are not themselves linguistic, conceptual, or mathematical. 
For those, are only us, as they only ever could and should be.

Institutes like ARI and TAS follow a specific 'marketing plan', so I think it's worth considering what can and cannot be achieved by those plans. For the rest of us, who didn't choose a career in promoting Objectivism, I wholly agree with you on simply doing our thing and enjoying life.
History abounds with philosopher-writers: Schiller, Dostoevsky, Sartre, Camus are prime examples. I noticed that many of them have at least one organization attached to their name. I think the Ayn Rand Institute is exactly that: an organization dedicated to promoting Ayn Rand's work - of which Objectivism is but one strand among many. Such an organization can expect precisely what, for example, the Albert Camus Society can expect: bringing together veteran fans, attracting a few new ones, and encouraging new scholarly research. 
In this respect, I think the Atlas Society (the open-system advocate) is different from ARI. Imagine that a few intellectuals took it upon themselves to expand the philosophy of Camus. Well, you obviously can't do that, because Camus is Camus. So I think that TAS is, in fact, offering an alternative to Rand's system-as-she-left-it. (Of course, offering such an alternative is compatible with promoting Ayn Rand the philosopher-writer).
If, let's say, 10% of the population read Camus, quoted Camus, attended lectures on Camus every summer, adopted his terminology verbatim, imitated his manner of acting, and excommunicated various individuals, what would we call that? A cult, or a fanatical fan base. Human knowledge is a decentralized business. People can accept Camus' ideas without liking his novels or haircut. No one is commiting a folly by choosing to never read Camus himself, and relying instead on accurate presentations by other authors. This is what it means for knowledge to successfully 'infect' the world. Science and philosophy cannot have Jesus-figures.
Anyone who is committed to promoting Objectivism should imagine the following scenario: a world where everybody learns Objectivist ideas from K-pop and TV dramas, but barely anyone has heard of Atlas Shrugged and Ayn Rand. If said promoters find no problem with this picture, there's a high chance they're committed to spreading the philosophy, rather than to spreading Ayn Rand's writings.

KyaryPamyu
Among people I’ve known who have read Rand’s novels and were critical of them, it was because on about every page, she brings on some ideological or philosophical point. And either they find that a defect in literature as literature or they are grabbed by the ideas, and if they don’t like them, they start ridiculing the characters and story as replacement for arguing out the ideas. For many years, people I met who responded positively to Rand’s novels and ideas were one or two standard deviations above average intelligence. Since the handy internet has come about, I’ve gotten to see the lower levels who respond positively and who are a little sad in their limited ability to stick with reasoning and to make or adopt a consistent and well-understood philosophy of life for themselves.
I do not “get” talk about how to market the philosophy. What is the purpose? Trying to make the world a better place? I don’t think that is actually a sensible goal in life. Just making your own life and the lives of others as individuals better seems the sensible thing to me. But then one’s focus is on individuals one gets to know and interact with as individual persons, not their falling into statistical groups for what looks like political hopes, which is sensibly a second-thought concern in a well-lived life.
I like the local focus of Henry Rearden. Make products. Find traders for it. His focus is on that work, for satisfaction and for making a lot of money. He attends also to persons who are not commercial traders such as the young government man Tony, whom Rearden inspires, and to the philosophical guy Francisco, who gives Rearden much psychological liberation, and of course, he attends to the with-benefits of that trader whose suit he gets into thinking about putting his hand under. 

20 years ago, I came back from my internship at the Ayn Rand Institute's OCON conference excited to meet other Objectivists. 
This was a year before Facebook when IRC Chat was still the most popular venue for Objectivists to chat. So I decided to start my own Objectivism Forum - Objectivism (then )
Here is the post announcing the new site:  
 
 
After I graduated college in 2004, I handed off management to a series of admins and moderators, continuing to this day.  I've continued to host the forum over that time, accumulating the following totals:
10,160 members 31,374 discussions 337,656 posts The site was most popular for the first few years, hosting events such as a live chat with Onkar Ghate, all sorts of features like The Objectivist Metablog, hosting for Ayn Rand clubs, event calendars, hosted email accounts, photo galleries, and much more.  At live events, we would have hundreds of people participating and hundreds of posts per day.  After Facebook became popular in 2009, traffic dropped off a lot, but as you can see, the site is still active today.