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What would you do if you met Ellsworth Toohey?

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Have you met anyone who is like the Fountainhead character? I could boast of having met people who are as intellectually dangerous or have similar ideas as those of Toohey's. In fact whenever I meet some of these people, I am immediately reminded of Ayn Rand's masterful execution of this character and the similarities Toohey has with some real-world characters.

Another question: Who in today's public world of intellectuals would you classify as closest to Toohey in their thinking. Of course, Chomsky comes to my mind... :thumbsup: Reality is starnger than fiction.

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Have you met anyone who is like the Fountainhead character? I could boast of having met people who are as intellectually dangerous or have similar ideas as those of Toohey's. In fact whenever I meet some of these people, I am immediately reminded of Ayn Rand's masterful execution of this character and the similarities Toohey has with some real-world characters.

Another question: Who in today's public world of intellectuals would you classify as closest to Toohey in their thinking. Of course, Chomsky comes to my mind... :) Reality is starnger than fiction.

I think Hillary Clinton might fall into this category. She is a shrewd, clever woman and very evil.

She's extremely intelligent but continues to create policies to keep the american public in a passive, dependent position.

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I wouldn't think of him at all...
On pondering over this, I am now wondering whether to:

* not think of such people and ignore their existence

OR

* to try to rationally debate them.

Of course, with professed irrationalists, the latter course would be a futile one.

Any thoughts?

I have tried to logically debate with a Marxist/Racist uncle of mine and all I got from it was a head-ache and no mutual understanding at all.

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I had a long debate with this guy on the MySpace Ayn Rand group. As long as he was pretending to be honest and rational I kept pushing him toward essentials, until he finally came out and said that he believed that "the community" could have rights and values completely separate from individuals. Once he got that point and started saying things like "Objectivism is a violent, psychopathic, fascist philosophy", I figured that pretty much speaks for itself, there is no point in trying to refute something that ridiculous on a board where most people have already read Rand and can easily deduce where this guy is coming from.

While I consider it immoral to remain silent when someone is spewing evil, I consider even more immoral to waste precious time and energy trying to shovel their piles of BS. As a pastime, it almost always puts me in a bad mood and makes me feel like I'm giving their evil a legitimacy it doesn't deserve. Much better to spend one's time living the values of objectivism and ignoring the Ellsworth Tooheys of the world:

Toohey: Mr. Roark, we're alone here. Why don't you tell me what you think of me? In any words you wish. No one will hear us.

Roark: But I don't think of you.

I wouldn't think of him at all... :)

Oops, didn't catch that reference before I added my FH quote. Call me a second hander :huh::|

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I've met a few Tooheys; in fact, I live next door to one and regularly debate matters of economics, politics and philosophy with him. In my experience though, Toohey's character is more a metaphor than something analogous to a real person, because most people who espouse his ideas genuinely believe that Leftism/altruism would make humanity happier and materialy prosperous. Very few people, even amongst the most radical crowd, have any overt malice toward human life and happiness.

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I saw one, a famous Australian journalist by the name of John Pilger. Nasty piece of work. I didn't know who he was at the time, but I went to a free lecture at hosted by UNSW featuring him and Ramos Horta about the liberation of East Timor from Indonesian rule. Mr Horta was alive and passionate, full of hope for the future once they got rid of those Indonesian bastards. Pilger, on the other hand, was dressed in black, slovenly slack facial features, scraggly unkempt hair what was of a drained-looking grey, sounded as dead as a post, and just used the affair to pour slime over the Australian government and a few Australian businesses (especially BHP). He clearly did not give a damn about the plight of the East Timorese people, and was just using them to promote his own agenda. I was greatly impressed with Mr Horta. I was filled with revulsion for Pilger even without knowing anything about him at the time, and later discovered how right my initial sense of him actually was. Pilger is one slick sick puppy, and a darling among the left. Ptheh.

JJM

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Have you met anyone who is like the Fountainhead character?

Yes, plenty of them. Hillary, Chomsky, Oprah, Kennedy, the whole staff of the morning hen-clucking show View or whatever it's called. I'd like to punch them in the mouth and see just how forgiving and altruistic they really are.

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So by "meet", I assume that you mean "have heard of". Are you generally given to assault as a way of dealing with people?

By meet, I mean come in close contact with.

Sure, but only for Tooheys.

Are you generally given to having no sense of humor as a way of dealing with people?

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Are you generally given to having no sense of humor as a way of dealing with people?
Nah, I think you're a laugh a minute. You apparently didn't see the humor in my challenging your false statements on a reality-centric forum and advocacy of violence on a forum dedicated to a philosophy of mind, not muscle. ROTFLMAO!!! You need to work on your sense of humor.
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  • 4 months later...

My english teacher in High School.... I remember that one day in class he gave us a long winded explaination about what makes a "great work" of literature. It had to be over a certain age, a certain style, 100 or so academics had to vote on it etc. So I raised my hand and I disagreed with him.

He was totally taken aback, and smugly asked... So what do I think makes a piece of literature great? Well I view a piece of literature like any other work of art. A painting, a sculture, etc. Therefore that art work has exactly one person in all of the world to prove itself to.... and that would be me. I and I alone have the right and ability to dertermine for myself what is great, or what is poor. It is merely an opinion if Romeo and Juliet is the best play ever written, or Crime and punishment is "fit" to be reading. And I honestly do not really care if 1000 of the worlds most learned people might come to the same conclusion.... only I can say for myself what I consider to be a piece of amazing artistry.

Well that was about it for him.... this teacher just about lost it. He was so angry I could not believe it.... like I had done some horrible injustice to him. For years I could not understand why he was so angy. And only after reading about objectivism did I understand why. For him.... literature was a religion. An opinion that was absolute fact to him. So solid in his mind, that the very idea of him being wrong made him freak out. Zealotry is the one and only true enemy of reason... and I showed him that on that day. It made me proud. :)

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