Ayn Rand Mike Wallace Interview 1959
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I always like to think Ayn Rand's selfish desires and socialism could work together. Just think of taxes going to reasonable causes (such as infrastructure or health care) as forced self-interest :)
What do you think America was built by? A bunch of man-babies who took their toys and went home when someone else wanted help?
Rand's characters are cartoon heroes and villains whose distinguishing characteristic is a leaden humorlessness.
Her moral philosophy is as cartoon-like as that of the communists she hated so much. The world consists of a few beleaguered (and attractive!) supermen, and the great mass of sponging inferiors who bleed them dry.
This is heady stuff when you're fourteen, but it bears about as much relationship to reality as the Left Behind novels, which offer the same kind of subtle characterization and philosophical depth.
Here are two questions that serve to show the level of depth that you're not seeing in the book (but very much exists):
"What is Lillian's view of sex? Why does it torture Hank? Is he right or wrong to accept that torture?"
"How has Hank Rearden's attitude toward and treatment of his family changed? How -- and why -- has it remained the same?"
If you can't see it in a fiction book, perhaps Tara Smith's "Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics" might help you to understand the nuance of Rand's moral philosophy. (Tara Smith is a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin.)
And even if you hate her characters and her philosophies, with exchanges like the below, she is a least interesting to dissect and deserves more than dismissing her writings to fourteen year olds.
"Do you believe in God, Andrei?"
"No."
"Neither do I. But that's a favorite question of mine. An upside-down question, you know."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, if I asked people whether they believed in life, they'd never understand what I meant. It's a bad question. It means nothing. It can mean so much that it really means nothing. So I ask them if they believe in God. And if they say they do--then, I know they don't believe in life."
"Why?"
"Because, you see, God--whatever anyone chooses to call God--is his highest conception of the highest possible. And whoever places his highest conception over his own possibility thinks very little of himself and his life. It's a rare gift, you know, to feel reverence for your life and to want the best, the very greatest, the highest possible, here, now, for your very own. To imagine a heaven and then not to dream of it, but to demand it."
Nietzsche is not only a much more eloquent writer, but his ideas are far more profound.
It's also what we see today in the healthcare mess: private insurers buying off politicians and blocking any real progress.
1. Tax structure that makes a market place for insurance impossible. 2. Medicare reimbursement system, it's method of calculating costs is seriously flawed. 3. The inability to buy insurance across state lines. 4. The inability to sign a contract with your doctor, i.e. waive/limit liability. 5. Massive amounts of regulation and red tape that must be complied with. 6. The strangle hold the AMA has on the production of doctors, granted by the government.
and those are just a few of the major problems.
What we have today and these future proposals are all forms of regulatory capture -- i.e. influencing and controlling those who make the rules. Every time you see a new standard or regulation it can probably be assumed that it's being proposed to cement the position of vested interests.
Also, she anchors her book in America. Imagining how America could go wrong, but uses the socialism in Argentina and Mexico as a backdrop. She spends quite a lot of time giving examples of good selfish capitalism and bad selfish "capitalism"
http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/collections/film/holdings/wallace/
Wallace has had an amazingly long career.
First off, if my boss left to go do that I'd say "Thanks for the promotion" and take the payraise.
Second off -- and much more importantly -- you should live your life for something more than your own crappy temporary luxuries.
1. John Galt convinces the "rich", though quite a few weren't, that continuing their work would lead to their destruction so in order to survive they would need to go on strike. Perhaps the better analogy is the man who invents a new weapon and then is killed by someone else using it.
2. The problem was that as the bosses left others with corrupt ideologies were taking their place.
3. Nothing in the book has to do with the rich needing luxuries, in fact they all move out to Galt's gulch and do manual labor and leave the life of luxury behind. In fact her stories are all about being true to yourself and living your life the way that you want to.
I'm not a fan of everything she's written, but I think you really missed the point of the book.
Gimme a break. If anything, the way things work in the corporate world the bosses are some of the least likely people to have consistent morals in the face of expedient solutions.
There's a million people waiting to replace them and, with a little time to get used to a job, there's no fateful reason why the previous person doing it is the only person who possibly could.
The thing about that story is that the adherents claim to be all wise and worldly, oh, you'll get it once you're making money -- I'm making money, I think it's BS and nobody actually succeeds with such a childish, self-gratifying attitude.
Have you read the book?
"Gimme a break. If anything, the way things work in the corporate world the bosses are some of the least likely people to have consistent morals in the face of expedient solutions." This behavior occurs throughout the novel.
What is the childish self-gratifying attitude? That those who work hard and persevere are successful? That it's wrong to steal from others? That at the end of the day you exist for yourself and what you find important (friends, family, etc) and that no one else has a claim on you?
It seems like you setup straw men and then knock them down.
Seems like a philosophy built to justify being a jerk.
Wow...I wish there were still people like this on television.
My problem with objectivism is that it fails to account for the complexity that exists in our world. It might work better if we were truly rational beings, or if people were only constrained by their own decisions or a set of fair, logical rules. We don't live in a computer. I wonder if this similarity has anything to do with the reason why so many objectivists I know have a technical background?
(I hope I didn't just open up a bad can of worms here... I do appreciate your contribution.)
America isn't ready for a political system that's acceptable to Objectivists (Americans would reject it.) What it really needs is to discover Objectivism's deep, practical and consistent moral message.
Interesting that you know 'so many' Objectivists... I've never actually met any myself (I live in the UK).
And objective reality is not so unintelligent or undebatable to be dismissed at the whim of one sentance.
I wonder if greenlblue stopped watching because she was talking about something so darned obvious.
What do you say is what to hold on to after you "throw out objective reality"?
I always find it interesting that she says many of the same things that an anarchist of the left would say yet they would both hate to be identified with the other. It also seems to be impossible to bring about and maintain the systems objectivists, libertarians or anarchists advocate without a widespread shift in morality if not human nature itself.
I suppose that whether reality is objective or subjective is both one of the greatest questions in philosophy, and one of the most useless. But, what you're talking about is the difference between reality, and perception of reality.
I happen to think that reality is pretty objective, various nuances of quantum mechanics aside. I certainly think that reality existed long before we as individuals or as species appeared on the scene, and I think it extends far beyond our relatively meager sphere of perception.
Did you mean, objective perception?
This kind of thinking is too easy.
This is basic stuff, and you call it "obviously wrong." That's an indication that you haven't thought about it enough; there is very little which is "obviously" this or that. You must examine an idea and it's surrounding evidences, or established ideas.
If you're going to state something as "obvious" in the sense that it's axiomatic, that's fine if you are treating it as a temporary variable and examining its implications and drawing it out to conclusions.
The mistake at this point is noticing that, after treating objective reality as axiomatic, the world you see is congruent with your internalized map and therefore that is "how it is." This is a functional facade. An illusion, and you've been tricked.
The world is not very colorful in an objective reality.
\/@greenlblue: Sorry, I have a bad habit of submitting comments then editing the rest into it, so I don't know where into my editing you read. Anyway, from my experience, there's no use in carrying a conversation about "objective reality." I just had to say a little bit since I wouldn't feel right not giving some direction.
The world is not very colorful in an objective reality.
The world is very colorful in an objective reality, is what I meant.
The processing your brain does to fill in details is irrelevant when there are multiple methods of observation and multiple observers, and all agree with reasonable precision. When multiple observers can measure an object and find that it has volume and mass, we can all agree that the thing exists. We might disagree on what to name it, or what it "means", but it'd be pointless to argue that it might really not be there.
While one could argue that everything, including all the other observers, are a product of my imagination, it isn't productive to do so. Whether it is all in my head (or in a supercomputer and I'm really just a simulation) isn't a useful theory. I can't do anything with that theory. It is untestable, and thus is mere superstition.
In short, objective reality is a good model for...reality. And, so, it makes sense to behave as though jumping off of a cliff will probably end ones existence.
I believe the notion that someone on HN would be "pro objective reality" (whatever that means...I'm not sure there is any way to win against what is, so why fight against it?) comes from the fact that we are all mostly nerdy, science-oriented, and we tend to be more likely to know how things (where "things" can be mechanical, biological, electrical, etc.) work. We know that when you feed voltage into a particular semi-conductor, the same thing happens every time...so, we tend to be less likely to fall into the trap of thinking things happen because of magic or because we imagined they happened or whatever.
In short, I reckon accepting objective reality has a net positive value in my life. I'm not sure how denying reality would do me any good. I'm pretty pragmatic, and I like having some level of control over stuff in my life, so I reckon I'm a believer.
If there is no objective reality, one person can say, "There is a car in my garage." and someone else can say, "There is a dragon in your garage." and both will be equally correct (because there is no objective way to determine otherwise). But, because objective reality does seem to be an accurate model for our universe, other observers can look in the garage, and see that, yes, there is a car (or dragon, as the case may be) in the garage. You can take a picture of the car (or dragon) in the garage, you can measure it, you can hop in (on) and take it for a drive (flight), you can touch it, etc. While your perception and your recollection may have gaps, we have scientific tools to remove the ambiguity of faulty perception and memory. With enough measurements, recordings, and photographic evidence of something, we can know it pretty darned objectively.
My point is that it's simply unproductive to deny that there is an objective reality. The world behaves as though there is objective reality. My house has never turned into a turtle, and my dog seems to be a dog every day no matter how much she might want to be a cat. I may not remember all the details of each of these things, but that doesn't mean they aren't what they are. The "patchwork of things" that my brain puts together about the world can be made to match the patchwork of things that other brains put together by using tools to measure and record those things, even while understanding that no one will ever have a complete grasp of the entirety of reality (it's pretty big, and even one single pebble, is too much for a single human to grasp in its entirety, when you start thinking in terms of atoms and particles and such).
Basically, I think you've decided that "objective reality" means humans can be all-knowing and perfectly observant...but that's not what anyone else means when they use the term.
I still don't have a clear idea on how one can reject objective reality, or reject what is real.
There have been some simularities between all my confrontations over the years: the people don't make very much sense; they demand respect for their "opinion;" and, they attribute arrogance to believing in an objective reality.
Somewhere, they learned the wrong thing. And I think I've deduced part of the problem: they take the subjectivity of some definitions as a sort of proof that an objective reality doesn't exist, and at an intuitive level, they don't accept reductionism.
Definitions being a form of reductionism. That is to say, at a very fundamental level, they take issue with you saying "this orange weighs .3kg ." They won't confront you for saying that, but if they happen to like the movie Joe Dirt, and you say "Joe Dirt is a bad movie," watch out. You are now offending their reality and it is now very personal.
And just to further clarify, when I say "the subjectivity of some definitions," I mean the various degrees of allowed interpretation of ideas. There are different degrees of subjectivity to different ideas: people have an amount of leeway to define some things for themselves, such as love, as it is not very well understood anyway. However, some ideas are very close to a real, concrete, one-to-one, definition of reality.
Yet these people have it in their head that they can make up whatever they want with anything, even though they don't normally execute this power to make up whatever they want. But they do get caught up on their right to make up whatever they want, which boils down to rejecting objective reality. I think there's some kind of empowerment high and self-consolation that "opinions" hold merit by merely existing, even for concepts that aren't lenient with subjectivity.
This submission is pretty much dead but I hope you read this comment since I had this Aha! while reading your comment. This is a rough sketch of something I'm going to expand upon, but hopefully I explained it well enough for now.