So the answer is yes-- it is completely rational to minimize production while maximizing profits by leveraging the irrationality that exists all around you.
Making your money by catering to the vices of other irrational individuals is not exactly what Ayn Rand meant by “productive achievement.” It seems as if you’re looking at how much money one makes as being the metric that should be used to define an individual’s morality, but instead, it’s much more about the path taken to those riches. If somebody makes a fortune by selling addictive drugs to drug addicts, or prostitutes to men who are too pathetic to get a partner based on their positive qualities, they certainly have not achieved as much as any of the people who pioneered any of the industries on the list that Jake Ellison provided.
Could you quantify that a bit? If a person has been rational once, would you say he was rational? Or if he has been irrational once, would you say he was irrational? Or if he was rational more than half the time, would you say he was rational?
Could you quantify that a bit? If a person has been rational once, would you say he was rational? Or if he has been irrational once, would you say he was irrational? Or if he was rational more than half the time, would you say he was rational?
TIA for clarification of your question?
Bob Kolker
Excellent question. I don’t think it can be quantified. My approach to the original question was to try and break it down to the fundamental determining factor of a rational life. It seems to me that living a rational life would require a rational philosophy, since a man’s philosophy is his “comprehensive view of life;” the “base, a frame of reference, for all his actions, mental or physical, psychological or existential.” (Ayn Rand - “The Chickens’ Homecoming,”
Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, 45). If his philosophy is irrational, then how can he ever be rational?
Most answer that a man’s rationality is contextual. Well, it is - as is everything. However, if the man’s philosophy is irrational then it pervades all contexts. Perhaps an example will help me explain my thinking:
Suppose Jack has a mystical philosophy. He believes a supreme being exists which will answer his prayers for all his wants and needs. There are two possible ways Jack can act:
He can wait until this supreme being provides him with his wants and needs. He makes no plans for getting what he wants and needs aside from praying every night. He makes no effort toward achieving these things since his philosophy tells him his supreme being will provide it. In all contexts, Jack is clearly irrational. I would be willing to bet very few people act this way.
He can make plans, and put forth effort in order to get what he wants and needs. He still prays, and still believes in a supreme being which will provide him with everything he needs. So, he’s lying to himself - he’s denying reality. Either he’s denying his belief (a belief rooted in his understanding of reality) that his supreme being will provide him with everything he wants and needs, and so he provides for himself. Or, he’s denying the reality that there is no supreme being to provide him with everything he wants and needs, therefore he must provide for himself. Even if Jack takes the necessary actions to provide for himself, he’s still holding a contradiction - he’s still behaving irrationally.
I agree with Grames (and others) - “common sense is fairly common,” and the focus should be on people’s ability to deal with abstractions. But what does this tell us about people’s rationality when we know the vast majority of them hold a mystical, irrational philosophy? No matter how you slice it, they’re holding contradictions in every aspect of their lives because their fundamental view of the world is flawed. Even the man who acts in a rational way is still behaving irrationally if he holds an irrational philosophy. His philosophy tells him reality is one way, but he acts as if reality is another; he believes reality behaves one way, yet his “common sense” actions belie that belief.
Could you quantify that a bit? If a person has been rational once, would you say he was rational? Or if he has been irrational once, would you say he was irrational? Or if he was rational more than half the time, would you say he was rational?
TIA for clarification of your question?
Bob Kolker
More simply, I would say that a rational person is one who holds and applies rational principles, thus acts consistently rationally (except for errors of judgment or occasional misunderstanding of the principles).
It is quantifiable in that sense: “1 time” or “half the time” suggests non-rational.
If they are not, then wouldn’t the rational course of action be to “get mine while the gettin’s to be got?” If the mob is a bunch of mystics, trying to take the unearned, and my rational highest value is my own life and my own happiness, wouldn’t the rational course of action be to not stand apart from those mystics, lest they see me as a heretic and kill me. Woudn’t it be rational to take as much as I can, regardless of who earned it? Wouldn’t it be rational to create nothing - to not work myself so hard just to have it taken?
No. Even mystics have a sort of primitive, inarticulate respect for someone they see as rational and productive. It makes them easy to manipulate if they see you as someone who’s in the right (successful) relationship to reality.
Making your money by catering to the vices of other irrational individuals is not exactly what Ayn Rand meant by “productive achievement.” It seems as if you’re looking at how much money one makes as being the metric that should be used to define an individual’s morality, but instead, it’s much more about the path taken to those riches. If somebody makes a fortune by selling addictive drugs to drug addicts, or prostitutes to men who are too pathetic to get a partner based on their positive qualities, they certainly have not achieved as much as any of the people who pioneered any of the industries on the list that Jake Ellison provided.
Would you like to provide some examples of people who have made and kept fortunes pursuing these avenues? These are common economic myths that have been overturned many times (see “Why Drug Dealers live in their Mother’s Basements” from Freakonomics, IIRC). This kind of assertion belongs in the same category as “Bernie Madoff made a fortune by defrauding people”. Did he? No, he did not. He went to JAIL. The fact that, briefly, he was sitting on a big pile of money makes no difference–otherwise we’d be calling people who endure years of poverty in order to plow their money back into their startup “stupid”.
In fact, if you know a little bit MORE about economics, you find that it is the very laws that make traffic in so-called “recreational” drugs and sex *illegal* that enable the occasional cartel willing to break those laws to briefly amass a pile of loot–being outside the law already, they go to extreme (read: violent) measures in order to squash the “competition” and try to “corner the market”.
Anyway, enough about that. Ultimately there’s no point in playing a guessing game to try and figure out how rational other people are. You can’t really KNOW the operations of someone else’s consciousness, after all. All you can do is observe their actions/words and decide the extent to which you wish to deal with them based on their choices.
The only thing you should be worried about, and the only thing you have to fear from irrational people is them choosing to use some method to *force* you to deal with them, and in this regard you should do the same thing that you do to protect yourself against any physical disaster. You take precautions. Some of those precautions are personal (learn to defend yourself against immediate physical attack, perhaps, or avoid situations where it may be an issue). Some are political (speak out for rational political principles). Focus on what you can do, not on what other people may do, and in your mind treat it like any other accidental occurrence outside your control. Do you shake in fear and horror at the prospect of a previously unimagined space rock landing right on your head and squashing you like a bug on a windshield? You do not. You take a reasonable amount of space-rock precautions given the likelihood of this happening and then forget about it. Do that with people, too.