Does the evil man try to program society with his own philosophy? So a Priest may practice his philosophy and also spread it.
Or does the evil man have his own philosophy and distribute another? A Priest may advocate certain ideals and claim they give you happiness but not act by them himself.
I know this is really vague, but I’m just feeling around here blindly trying to figure it out. I remember Toohey in FountainHead advocated selflessness but he was actually acting selfishly to gain power(sacrifice others to yourself - while preaching sacrifice yourself to others).
This was debated on HBL recently. Did Mao truly believe the Marxist ideology, or was he only it for power? Do catholic priests who advocate celibacy and then molest boys live by their philosophy or cheat on it? Yes. The only way to live with a contradiction is to be a contradiction.
Lusting for power is very much a second-handed mindset, and therefore not really selfish. If “selfishness” were to mean pursuing your own goals, then anyone who pursued any goal–including self-destructive goals–would count as selfish. The difference between a lemming and a power-luster is only in the specific way of their self-destruction and its speed.
But you do raise an interesting question, one that I have been thinking about myself. The ultimate form of this question is: Did Kant believe his own philosophy? My answer would be that the verb “believe,” in the sense that we Objectivists believe facts of reality we have identified, is simply not applicable to an irrational mind like Kant’s. He never had the purpose of identifying facts of reality in the first place, so he wouldn’t consider propositions from the point of view of whether they correspond to reality. He would not ask himself, “X says this and that; now do I accept that as the truth–i.e. believe it–or not?” He would just ask, “X says this and that; now do I like that or don’t I?” If he liked it, he would seek to construct an “argument” (= page-long incomprehensible sentences) to support it; if he disliked it, he would construct the same to oppose it.–So, in the end, he was indeed a Kantian!
In Israel there was a very famous Objectivist philosopher called Moshe Kroy.. he was teaching at university at a very young. Many years later however he began writing about mystics and all sorts of weird things that have nothing to do with Objectivism. At this point you either assume the guy didn’t understand Objectivism - which would seem silly, or he was just evil.
His story is a weird one, apparently he was invited to a Atlantis, like Galt’s Gulch, in South America. He just disappeared, many think he was murdered.
In the 1970s, a capricious philosopher named Moshe Kroy taught Rand’s philosophy at Tel Aviv University, but he eventually abandoned rational egoism for Scientology, and later, Indian mysticism, which may have contributed to the perception that her philosophy is a fad. Rand’s philosophy is no longer taught at Tel Aviv University.
This was debated on HBL recently. Did Mao truly believe the Marxist ideology, or was he only it for power? Do catholic priests who advocate celibacy and then molest boys live by their philosophy or cheat on it? Yes. The only way to live with a contradiction is to be a contradiction.
I guess that’s like saying “bad philosophical premises cause bad behavior”? I think your philosophy relfects outward in your actions.
Does the evil man try to program society with his own philosophy?
Or does the evil man have his own philosophy and distribute another?
Ayn Rand said that evil philosophies are little more than elaborate systems of rationalization. A person who is following a gradual path toward becoming evil is someone who evades the facts of his life and chooses instead to act only on whims and emotions. Instead of constructing a comprehensive view of the world from which he can make responsible and moral decisions, this person will instead collect slogans and catch phrases that can be readily used to avoid making hard decisions and hence not take any responsibility for his actions.
Once you understand that an evil philosophy is really not a comprehensive view of reality but is little more than a complicated attempt at self-deception, then you will realize that an evil man will not use whatever power he has to educate and “program” others with his view of the world. He has no philosophy to offer. The only thing that an evil man has to offer are lies and half-truths, and he will use whatever power he has to make sure that the people around him are weak, corrupt, and docile enough that they will not pose any challenge to his own view of reality.
On the subject of evil and of philosophy, I had made a thread earlier titled “Evil’s Metaphysics and Ethics” based off of an essay by Andrew Bernstein, you and others may find of interest. I know I did:
These errors, moreover, are not so much a reflection on the ability of the good men as on the difficulty of their task. To discover and validate the foundations of reason requires an extraordinary genius. Once the proper foundations of reason and egoism have been discovered, the errors and confusions on which evil feeds evaporate.
(Villainy: An Analysis of the Nature of Evil , Andrew Bernstein).
This is exactly what I was thinking about… Take me as an example. I hated philosophy, because from all those countless texts I was taught at school all I concluded was that reality isn’t knowable through reason and everything can be argued. I wanted to find answers but I was confronted with impossible texts in the masses(most of which didn’t make any sense whatsoever and weren’t consistent either). Why should I spend a lifetime traveling the world and studying to figure out how I can understand life, and maybe not even get anywhere? … I just kind of(I say “kind of” because I was still passively looking out for something) accepted that I had to live with contradictions and that I was maybe intellectually incapable of ever “knowing”. This also meant that at many times I would sanction an evil philosophy, be it political or metaphysical - whatever was “practical”, more accurately, pragmatic.
That is… until I discovered Rand(one of my philosophy teachers on a army academy on a kibbutz in Israel introduced me to it). I read “Philosophy: How you need it” all night. I could tell I made a massive discovery. This was clear, concise, logical and inspirational. I am now continuing the study and facing the problems that I have never been able to face before with my mind.
If I had not read Rand, I don’t know what path I would be taking today. What kind of things I could possibly be convinced to advocate later down the road in my life. Maybe there are many like that, who could’ve been something alot better had their minds not been beaten into a pulp.
Great! I think Bernstein’s article is excellent; I broadened my understanding of evil manyfold by reading/understanding it!
Take me as an example. I hated philosophy, because from all those countless texts I was taught at school all I concluded was that reality isn’t knowable through reason and everything can be argued.
In high school, I was never taught philosophy, nor do I even remember knowing of it then. But I soon discovered it in my first college (on my own, not in the classrooms) and thought that this was exactly what I was looking for in the sciences and found it specifically in philosophy. It dealt with all the question I had. I totally started living my life accordingly, too bad I didn’t discover or find out about Rand for another 2 years or so. What I was primarily reading was Anton LaVey and Nietzsche then.
That is… until I discovered Rand(one of my philosophy teachers on a army academy on a kibbutz in Israel introduced me to it). I read “Philosophy: How you need it” all night. I could tell I made a massive discovery. This was clear, concise, logical and inspirational.
Until I read The Fountainhead, I was a Satanist. Afterwards, as I made my way through the rest of her fiction and non-fiction and applied it to my own life, I’ve been an Objectivist for many years since.