49 minutes ago, The Laws of Biology said:
Darwin and Freud viewed human nature as essentially and irredeemably irrational, injust, unethical, and aggressive.
I won’t argue with you about Freud. Can you back up your claim about Darwin?
1 hour ago, The Laws of Biology said:
I will have to study it and contemplate it further
LB,
My suggestion is the opposite: self-impose a ban on all reading of this subject - no Rand, no evo psy, no Shakespeare, no statistical overviews of data organized according to the modern scientific method. For a period of time set by yourself, direct your mind out of books or articles and invest your time into doing something that you’ve always wanted to do (and monetize it if you can). Whatever is true of human nature, is in you, not in Aristotle or Freud’s minds. One century of meticulous study will not replace a single week of closely introspecting yourself as you work to bring into existence something that you actually care about.
At the end, you’ll likely find something curious: your interest in other people’s theories will diminish. Considerably. There’s also a chance that you’ll find most of what you’ve read to be absolutely useless in practice.
No thinker can be judged without a point of reference, namely a set of principles one is already using - not when arguing, but in regular life choices. This turns ideas into tools and henchmen of a living breathing reality, and refining them becomes no more than that - a means to an end.
Right now, your arguments read like more-or-less accurate overviews of western thinkers. But what you are casually doing is a monumental task - scholars spend many years struggling to accurately communicate the essence of just one thinker and his influences. There is also the danger of the truth being on the fringe, and not in the mainstream. But ‘what ifs’ are empty talk - only individual minds exist and only individual minds can recognize reality. The test of one’s philosophy (and the accuracy of its view of human nature) is ultimately the quality of the practitioner’s life, and his liberated status of being able to judge ideas without the aid of an external source.
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3 minutes ago, Economic Freedom said:
humans were originally irrational (evidence of that?)
Non-rational (lacking the faculty of reason), not irrational (having it but failing to use it). There is plenty of evidence, including but not limited to comparisons of genomes, that we share common ancestors with all other animals, none of which are rational as we are.
6 minutes ago, Economic Freedom said:
the faculty of reason (definition of that, please?)
Reason is the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by the senses. One crucial feature is the ability to form concepts, as discussed in ITOE.
23 hours ago, The Laws of Biology said:
Just today I saw a news report that a gov’t official in Russia had said that domestic opponents to Russia’s current war in Ukraine will be sent to concentration camps.
*** Thread split: Russian invasion of Ukraine/Belief of Mainstream Media Narrative ***
8 hours ago, Economic Freedom said:
In other words, if only a fantasized, factually impossible scenario had been real, things would’ve been different (and, needless to say, better).
You are the one who contaminated this discussion with an impossible counterfactual. Maybe I would have done better to ignore that post. My point is that the evils of history do not show that humans are by nature evil. They are the result of a lack of good ideas.
On 8/19/2021 at 11:12 AM, The Laws of Biology said:
Isn’t it against the self-interest of leaders to teach the whole population of the earth to pursue self-interest and to never sacrifice themselves for the Nation, the People, the State, the Party, the Leader, the Corporation, the Team, the Movement, or the God of one’s religion?
It would seem that it was indeed not in the leader’s best interests to have a population of rational self-interested individuals. They tend to be the least malleable and take the most time and attention to keep in line. Objectivists are not prone to sacrificing themselves for anything but what they determine are legitimate reasons for doing so. None of the things that you mention are credible or valid unless the individual can be persuaded that doing so would be in their own best interests. Each would have to come to their own conclusions. Like democracy, very messy.
What has your imagined Objectivist done that requires intervention to “keep in line”?
7 hours ago, dream_weaver said:
What has your imagined Objectivist done that requires intervention to “keep in line”?
I must plead ignorance as to your intention with your comment. I was attempting to respond to LB about authority that would not appreciate rational self-interest or resisting the self-sacrifice that we have come to know as ‘altruism’. I would guess any of his examples might be legitimate but I would focus on the articulation of collectivism over centuries in the promotion of self-sacrifice for the greater good, even if not in the self-interest of the individual.
If that is what you are referencing, then I would say that any authority would have difficulty in ‘keeping in line’ (not sure of your reference) those that have an ability and a propensity to self-determination and creating, developing and following their own conclusions as to appropriate behaviour at the risk of conflicting with whatever authority is in power.
I think it obvious that the critical thinker, and the independent individual would be much more difficult to control than the ‘joiner’, the ‘member’, those that embrace ‘family’ and make an attempt to not ‘rock the boat’ or act as an obstacle to the will of the ‘greater good’. If your comment was focused on some other point let me know and I can respond to that.
Objectivists, as I understand, or Objectivism, as a philosophy for living on earth, shouldn’t require keeping in line. True becoming part of the collective, and the notion of self-sacrifice are an anathema to one who values their independence and desires to live rather than simply avoid death, should hardly be but a blip to most authorities in power.
In one of Leonard Peikoff’s lectures, someone had uttered loudly from the back of the room “Revolution now!” Peikoff pointed out (heavily paraphrased) . . . “and then what? Most of citizens want the type of government that is currently in place, else it would not be the way it is. How long after ‘winning’ such a revolution would it take for things to return to the way they were?”
Some critical and independent thinkers and individuals are like Rand, seeing the consequences all too clearly, and are afraid not to be outspoken. Some follow another path where “Objectivist are subversive as hell”, discovering how to implement changes that don’t necessarily grab the attention of the authorities.
The discussion about evolution started when, as LB, you stated
On 5/6/2022 at 10:05 AM, The Laws of Biology said:
Darwin and Freud viewed human nature as essentially and irredeemably irrational, injust, unethical, and aggressive.
You did not give any reason why this statement about human nature should be taken seriously in philosophical inquiry.
I asked you to back up your claim about Darwin and, as EF, you said
On 5/6/2022 at 1:48 PM, Economic Freedom said:
n “Descent of Man”, Darwin claimed that human morality evolved in the same way that biological organisms presumably evolved: by the two-pronged mechanism of 1) random mutation, sifted by means of 2) natural selection. It’s a strictly non-rational viewpoint: random mutation = stochastic event (i.e., chance); natural selection = deterministic event. Teleology – goal-oriented approach – has no part in Darwin’s view of human morality. It should be pointed out that this view was also held and extended by later adherents of Darwin’s.
It would be more precise to say “Teleology – goal-oriented approach – has no part in Darwin’s view of how human morality came to exist.”
I then indicated the distinction between acquiring reason and acquiring morality by saying
On 5/6/2022 at 5:41 PM, Doug Morris said:
Evolution in this way is how we acquired the faculty of reason. Once we had reason, we used it to acquire morality.
You then blew this off by crudely and imprecisely restating my point and comparing it to
On 5/6/2022 at 5:48 PM, Economic Freedom said:
those “Just So” stories by Rudyard Kipling (how the giraffe “acquired” its long neck; how the leopard “acquired” its spots; etc. Highly recommended fiction reading.
I think much of the rest of the debate about evolution in this thread has been a smokescreen generated by you to cover up how weak your argument is philosophically.
Obviously, we could not have acquired the faculty of reason by means of reason. We acquired it by biological evolution. This is not relevant to a discussion of what we did once we acquired the faculty of reason, which includes arriving at morality.