I registered here a few months ago, but I never got around to posting because I felt like a lot of the discussions on this forum are somewhat above my intellectual ability at that point. I still am not sure exactly how competent I am in philosophy, and I have a lot of reading to do, but I saw a post I felt I could respond to today, and now that I’ve made a post, I thought I should come back here and make a more formal introduction.
I am currently 16 years old and am a high school junior, unfortunately in the International Baccalaureate program (an organization hopelessly devoted to moral and cultural relativism, I learned the other day in “Theory of Knowledge and Mathematics” that if people using a “different math” said that 2 + 2 = 5, they aren’t necessarily wrong).
I can’t really remember a time when I wasn’t thinking about philosophy, at least in a very rudimentary sense. Though I never really believed in a god, in middle school I became essentially Buddhist, but in a very altruist-collectivist way (i.e., metaphysics involving a “universal force”, ethics of altruism as consistently as possible, far left-wing politics). Fortunately, as a person who somehow held into a fairly rational epistemology (maybe due to having been educated in a Montessori school through 8th grade), I eventually saw the insanity of this (interestingly, one factor might have been becoming interested in girls and seeing romantic relationships as being incompatible with altruism. I was an oddly consistent altruist, which is why, of course, I stopped being one).
Recalling a book I had enjoyed reading in 8th grade called Anthem, I picked up Atlas Shrugged halfway through 9th grade and have been studying Objectivism ever since. I have read Virtue of Selfishness, The Anti-Industrial Revolution and parts of The Romantic Manifesto. I am currently working on Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal and Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Though this may not seem like a lot for 2 years’ time, school is very time consuming and I have been learning a lot through reading objectivist forums, mostly this one. I feel like I have a fairly good grasp on the philosophy, though perhaps not some of the more technical aspects of epistemology. I’ve also recently been improving my social skills, which could formerly be described only as atrocious.