TheFerr

I've been part of the Ayn Rand Society for about a year, now. However, I'm very much interested in hearing the various forms of philosophy. I never really discovered that Objectivism was correct and that I had a wrong world view. I started thinking many years ago, and came to certain conclusions about egoism what drives decision making, and someone pointed to Objectivism, and it just agreed with everything I was thinking. However, I will be asking many questions, here. I am also a bit distraught at the prevalence of postmodernism, and how so many philosophy students are difficult to talk to, because they encrypt their speech in this erudite language that's impossible for anyone outside of their school of thought (and, thus, outside their realm of agreement) to debate. So, I conclude this summary with a final question: Why is there such virulent hatred towards Objectivism and Ayn Rand? I don't hear that many decent debates against it, and more this general consensus among philosophy students and armchair philosophers to silently agree that the whole philosophy isn't a "real" philosophy, that it somehow lacks rigor, and, in some extreme cases I've heard, that it's outdated and disproven. I see many laypeople understanding Objectivism, while most philosophy students scoff at it as being childish and lacking profundity. It would be easy for a layperson to look at philosophy students and say "Hey, they're probably right, because they've spent years studying the complex issues of epistemology and deontoloy in well-respected universities that are rigorous and have established curricula, while laypeople reading Ayn Rand have not. I only think Objectivism is correct because I have not had time to delve into the deep and sagacious world of philosophy as much as these students and professors have." I can see that argument making more sense among a scientific profession, whereby the experiments conducted really do require a set of derived skills that have been learned over many years, but I fail to see how this applies 1:1 with philosophy. Could someone please address my concerns with this? Of course, this is an Objectivist forum, so it might not be entirely unbiased, but if you could be as much of an outsider to it all as you could, it would help me greatly to provide some understanding to this huge antipathy between Objectivism and non-Objectivism.