A Manifesto for Psychopaths | Hacker News Reader

A Manifesto for Psychopaths

monbiot.com

14 pointscycojesus13 comments

"1. In the spirit of Rand, I suggest you don’t pay for it, but download it here.."

That's pretty much all you need to know about how much this fellow understands about "the spirit of Rand".

"Like all philosophies, Objectivism is absorbed second-hand by people who have never read it."

And it's rejected by lefties in precisely the same way. Usually under the helpful guidance of an undergrad prof. :-)

Your comment is not in the spirit of HN. Maybe you could fill readers in on how he misunderstands things, or how "lefties" reject it, rather than smugly dismissing people who you view as flawed for being dismissive. 8oD

I'm not sure he is misunderstanding anything so much as out and out misrepresenting the entire premise of the position;

Selfishness, it contends, is good, altruism evil, empathy and compassion are irrational and destructive. The poor deserve to die; the rich deserve unmediated power.

This is nonsense, it would be like me claiming that bastiat and hobbes were just spinning the same tired old bullshit that statists had always spun before, attempting to push forward with the divine right of kings idea as justification for totalitarian states, and if we don't accept their logic we'll all just devolve into a state of eternal war amongst all humans.

You could make that argument about those positions, but in doing so, you make it clear that you're not attempting to accurately portray anything bordering on nuance, you're just trying to join a chorus portraying them in the worst possible light.

Politely responding with "Well don't you think you might actually have missed this little point here on the side" is to validate the position being offered as if it had any kind of bearing on reality. It's simply not an appropriate response to this kind of reality warping polemic.

Also, there is nothing 'psychopathic' about wanting to keep the fruit of your labor. Imagine there's no government (it's easy if you try). You are responsible for yourself, starve or prosper. Your choice whether to feed the moochers and looters, or to fight them. Pirates are glorified in Atlas Shrugged...

Rand opposed the domination of the individual by the State, and dramatically illustrated the snivelling scum who infest and control the Omnipotent State as a way to dominate those with whom they can't compete. If you enjoy having bureaucratic control over all your decisions, instead of the freedom to try your ideas, possibly failing or possibly hitting big then join the criticism of Rand. There's nothing wrong with being charitable and generous to others, unless it is enforced by the State. As a choice it is a virtue, as an edict enforced with deadly force it is slavery.

If she was not already disproven before, then she was in 2008, when even Greenspan was speachless confronting the magnitude of the disaster that the ultra-market-liberal ideology had caused.

Being forced to lend to borrowers who could never repay is not a symptom of a free market. The debt-crash would be a prime example of the problem Rand argued against. Corporatism (corporate-crony payoffs) are a disease which requires a powerful State. End the Fed, decentralize and shrink the federal gov't and encourage competition, small enterprise and see prosperity. Gov't handouts are addictive and destructive.

Way to strawman a complex philosophy with a simplistic summary.

Anybody who reads Rand as anything other than sub-standard Science Fiction is an idiot. Why waste energy debunking her imbecilic assertions (most of which have been obliterated by studies) that she presents as fact?

Actually, reading it as any form of fiction is retarded. It is rightly criticized as bad fiction, because it's too focused on delivering lengthy speeches as the main argument, and little spent on character development or realistic dialog. There are some spot-on character illustrations of the snivelling slimebags and some of the side characters are entertaining, but all of these are 1D or 2D at best.

Anybody who reads /(Marx|Lenin|Mao)/ as anything other than sub-standard Science Fiction is an idiot. Why waste energy debunking his imbecilic assertions (most of which have been obliterated by studies) that he presents as fact?

You are aware Das Capital doesn't actually present a vision of any future society & is simply a historical analysis of the formation of capitalism? Most economists accept the materialist dialectic.

Because if you want to actually oppose an idea, the least you can do is accurately represent it. There are far worse books than Rands; for example the majority of the holy books in existence currently venerated by the vast majority of the world's population in some way shape or form.

And yet to criticise these works is not to misrepresent the original statements into some largely inaccurate comic book characterisation and then proceed to dismantle it. If one is to attack the bible they don't first need to inaccurately summarise it as a survival horror work with a zombie protagonist agitating for the violent overthrow of the totalitarian Roman government at the time. Doing so just marks them as someone not to be taken seriously.

There are plenty of problems with objectivism, or if you want to delve into messy character assassinations, Ayn Rand herself. It is not necessary to construct these ridiculous parodies of strawmen and then proceed to whip them in as self righteous a fashion as is humanly possible.

There are kernels of good ideas in both Rand's work (people own themselves, and ought to behave in a fashion cogniscent with providing for their own lives and providing value of their own in exchange for value received from others. Beware people who claim to represent "the public" and want your value for no payment, because "the public" is a dangerously nebulous concept which can be and is warped in modern times in much the same way as "god" was in ancient times) and the bible (Do to others as you would have them do to you). If one needs to take anything from these works, perhaps they ought to focus on the right, rather than the wrong?

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