Conspiracy Theories and Personal Attacks

Metaphysics and Epistemology
1

In the first two paragraphs Ayn Rand identifies why politics is so viciously personal, and why there are conspiracy theories. Of course it is still true today, and on the left and the right. It is all in how people think, whether they are attacking Sarah Palin’s uterus or Barack Obama’s citizenship, when they participate in bad science by forming a circle of biased peer review and when they perceive attacks on bad science as only a personal attack.

From The Ayn Rand Letter

Vol. II, No. 15 April 23, 1973

Brothers, You Asked For It!–Part II

The concrete-bound pragmatist mentality cannot fight for an abstract goal. It cannot fight

for

anything in the realm of ideas, only

against

something. To fight

for

, means to struggle to bring something into existence, which requires the power of abstraction; to fight

against

, means to oppose something which is there already. But even to fight against an existing idea requires the promulgation of ideas. What can one find as a substitute, which is there already and which—one has been taught—is unaffected by ideas?

Men

.

For many years past, the ideological policy and argumentation of most of the political Right has been one solid

ad hominem

. Republican candidates me-too’d the Democrats, adding only the claim that they, the Republicans, would do the job better, because they were better, kindlier, more experienced, or more folksy

men

(thus losing election after election). The crusade of Senator Joseph McCarthy was not fighting communism, but

communists

; it consisted merely in a campaign of party-card hunting. General Motors did not fight Ralph Nader on the issues, but hired investigators to spy on him, hoping to find material for a

personal

exposé (and failed). The John Birch Society ascribes all the disasters of the modern world to a conspiracy of evil men.

2

Barack Obama’s citizenship,

there are some nuts out there, but I don’t think you can say that everyone with questions about this is a conspiracy theorist, it is simple matter of Constitutional eligibility. There were doubts about McCain, these were easily settled upon production of his birth certificate. Obama could settle the issue once and for all by releasing his original birth certificate, one must question why he refuses to do this and spends millions on lawyers to prevent its release.

3

one must question why he refuses to do this and spends millions on lawyers to prevent its release.

One ends up asking that question only after managing to be dupable enough to buy into this “millions spent on lawyers to prevent the release of a birth certificate” nonsense, without a shred of evidence.