Jump to content
Objectivism Online Forum

Human Identity and Choosing a Political System

Rate this topic


jacassidy2

Recommended Posts

This short essay is not original ideas.  It is a restatement of Objectivist ideas in a language that may grab the interest of a person who has only limited familiarity with Objectivist ethics/politics.

 

Ms. Rand called them the "Mystics of Spirit" and the "Mystics of Muscle" to describe the categories in history of irrational human beings attempting to dominate the people in their lives rather than producing wealth for themselves.  For my purposes in this OP, I would like to summarize these types of people into one easily understood category.  BULLIES.

 

Bullies are people who find value in controlling others for any number of irrelevant reasons.  "Bullies of spirit and bullies of muscle" is a corollary to Ms. Rand's ideas.  I substitute "bullies" for "mystics" because while "mystics" is conceptually better for the arguments, "bullies" is the most common, concrete expression that people are familiar with in their everyday lives.

 

Mystics/bullies are a fact in the range of human, sense-of-life,  identity and these people are drawn to governing in private associations and public government  The primary, natural, purpose of instituting a government is to insulate citizens from the effects of bullies, but bullies are attracted to the organization of a governing body because the governing body is given the power to control with sharply reduced requirements for justification.

 

The above being the natural evolution of communities and nation states among reasoned individuals, it should be obvious, that giving a governing entity any function over and above protection of citizens from force and fraud, opens the governing entity (and the bullies attracted to it) to the misuse of the power they are given by the citizens.

 

Ignore these clear facts and you end up with crony capitalism at best or Nazism/Stalinism at worst.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

I assume Harrison posted a reply and then decided to remove it. However, since the forum software did not allow him to actually delete the post, he removed the text and replaced it with "never mind".

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'd affirm the gist of the OP. I had just posted a lengthy explanation of how "bullies" is a nonessential and problematic term to use, when I reread (a bit more carefully):

...while "mystics" is conceptually better for the arguments...

Hence the "never mind".

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...