Ayn Rand - Opinion? (preferably informed?)

[JamesTheUnjust]

Ayn Rand appeals to the selfish side of all ideology.

I'd be willing to wager a significant sum that you don't even understand what the word "selfish" meant to Ayn Rand.

Also note the thread was looking for "preferably informed" opinions.

How seriously should I take someone who thought social security was evil but didn't give up her own SS checks?

She knew quite well what selfishness was, and like any political hack, she was simply out to sell books and make money.

Bingo.

Her fans want to ignore this hypocrisy and call it a red-herring. It proves the bitch was only an advocate for capitalism when she was benefiting from it, and when she was cut down by the cruelty of her own sword, she quickly started "leeching" off a liberal program.

[Jmpty]

This is from one of my favorite modern philosophers, Massimo pigliucci , who chairs the philosophy dept. at CUNY.
 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NQl ... PuUug/edit

[lumpymunk]

Bingo.

Her fans want to ignore this hypocrisy and call it a red-herring. It proves the bitch was only an advocate for capitalism when she was benefiting from it, and when she was cut down by the cruelty of her own sword, she quickly started "leeching" off a liberal program.

When she talks about how she doesn't want to pay for social programs because she thinks they are not beneficial, what she's really saying is, they are not beneficial because they had no value to her personally. She didn't like those programs not because she thought another way would be better, but because she didn't give a fuck about society, and only wanted more for herself. All she did was take her ideology and wrap it up in a nice little package with a bow on top, in order to sell her sociopathy to the public.

Provide a citation for this to backup your "interpretation?"  All you've done is show you hold a strong uninformed opinion about something you haven't even attempted to understand.

Rand commented that people who are forced to fund government programs are not immoral for taking the benefits for which they paid.

...the victims, who opposed such laws, have a clear right to any refund of their own money —and they would not advance the cause of freedom if they left their money unclaimed, for the benefit of the welfare-state administration.

See... the argument breaks down entirely under the slightest scrutiny.

The Myth: Ayn Rand violated her own philosophy by collecting social security.

The Answer: This is the same as claiming that if you are against robbery, and you were one of Bernie Madoff's victims, you violate your principles by putting in a claim for partial restitution.

She addressed a similar issue in her article "The Question of Scholarships," The Objectivist, June, 1966. From that article:

"Many students of Objectivism are troubled by a certain kind of moral dilemma confronting them in today's society. We are frequently asked the questions: "Is it morally proper to accept scholarships, private or public?" and: "Is it morally proper for an advocate of capitalism to accept a government research grant or a government job?" (more mid way down the page)

http://www.aynrandmyths.com/

I can provide citations all day long about the subject that backup this justification, can't you come up with one source?

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/gover ... ships.html
Contrast http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/indiv ... ights.html
With http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/colle ... ights.html
and http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/property_rights.html
also the role of government http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/government.html

[lumpymunk]

This is from one of my favorite modern philosophers, Massimo pigliucci , who chairs the philosophy dept. at CUNY.
 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NQl ... PuUug/edit

...and midway down on the first page.

First and foremost, obviously this isn't going to be a scholarly analysis of Objectivism.

 :rollin:

How about just googling "I disagree with Ayn Rand" and you'll find more of the same?

Still reading, pretty standard type of "analysis" if you can even call it that.

Step 1: Mistate a premise.
Step 2: Quote something from fiction
Step 3: Attack a non-premise in a fictional book and consider this a "dismantling"

She writes in Atlas Shrugged that "An axiom is a proposition that defeats its opponents by the fact that they have to accept it and use it in the process of any attempt to deny it." Wrong. An axiom is an assumption from which the discussion begins. It can (and should) be examined and/or challenged if the deductive consequences of the axiom(s) entail logical contradictions or any other rationally unacceptable conclusions.

What a joke.

In his "analysis" of Objectivist Epistomology he makes no mention of the fundamental process that gives Objectivism it's name... Concept Formation.  This pertains to how concepts are formed in the mind and what qualifies them as objective.

For a philosophy named Objectivism, epistemology is foundational, since the possibility of objective knowledge is an inherently epistemological question. In this regard, Rand and her followers are surprisingly ambiguous. For instance, conscious of the obvious fact that human beings continually make errors of judgment, observation and reasoning, they agree that one cannot actually be certain of any proposition one utters. Oh? From when, then, comes any claim of objective knowledge? Well, as Leonard Peikoff put it in his Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, any proposition is "certain" if the available evidence supports it, i.e., it is certain within a particular context.

But this is pretty close to wanting your cake and eating it too. Any sensible epistemologist would simply say that said proposition is made more or less probableby the available evidence, and that this judgment may change if the evidence (the "context") changes. No claim of certainty is warranted. The problem, of course, is that rephrased this way the Objectivist idea becomes unsurprising while at the same time undercutting any broad claim to objective knowledge.

Look if you're going to critique something the first rule is being fair to the belief system you're critiquing by accurately representing it.  This is the same type of low-brow uninformed commentary Jmpty could offer.

The misrepresentation doesn't stop.

Another positivistic sounding notion in Rand's epistemology is the rejection of emotions as a type of cognition. Indeed, Peikoff went so far as to state that "emotionalism" is synonymous with irrationality (I wonder if he checked with Quine before claiming that something is synonymous with something else). This sort of attitude has been common in philosophy since Plato (read: nothing new in Objectivism), with the notable exception of Hume, who was one of the first philosophers to seriously play up emotions as both a source of certain kinds of knowledge (particularly moral judgment) and as actually guiding reason rather than being controlled by it. Modern philosophy of mind and cognitive science are producing a much more nuanced understanding of the necessary integration of emotional and cognitive functions in the brain, without which, human knowledge and in fact the human condition itself, would not be possible.

Objectivism, like Hume, holds that any given emotional state is the cumulative evaluation of all things held in consciousness (from sense perception to the structure of previously formed concepts) both consciously and unconsciously.  This makes it a reliable source of evaluation, (read: not action) and can be relied on as long as ones philosophy is consistent.  This is not a process of obtaining knowledge about the world (cognition) this is a process of evaluation... it is feedback that gives a person information on their relationship to reality is at any given time.

A really simple example: An ex-Christian atheist might feel a tinge of guilt for having sex "out of wed-lock" because of residual conceptions of morality left-over from being raised in Christianity.  Psychologically this indoctrination is tough to overcome, so its plausible there would be all kinds of "left over" shit when overcoming Christianity.  (...of course other factors can be at play obviously this is very simplistic).  The atheist doesn't engage in cognition or gain new knowledge from this guilt, but becomes aware of an internal contradiction that needs to be worked out by looking at why concepts pertaining to old Christian ethics haven't been revised.

This is explained across several books.
http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/emotions.html

A good summary quote, "An emotion that clashes with your reason, an emotion that you cannot explain or control, is only the carcass of that stale thinking which you forbade your mind to revise."

[lumpymunk]

Perhaps the most curious part of Rand's epistemology was her contention that sensory perception is valid in an axiomatic sense. Since perception is a physiological function, according to her it comes without error, which led Rand to bizarre statements such as that optical illusions are conceptual errors, not errors of sight — as if "sight" were somehow clearly distinct from the brain's conceptualization of what we see. The reason perception had to be perfect is that Objectivism is a kind of empiricism, relying on the notion that all our knowledge is ultimately based on the senses, just like the classical British empiricists (Hume, Locke and Berkeley) had maintained (though Objectivists actually have a problem with Locke, and presumably Hume, since they acknowledge the imperfection of the senses).

vs.

[Man's] senses do not provide him with automatic knowledge in separate snatches independent of context, but only with the material of knowledge, which his mind must learn to integrate. . . . His senses cannot deceive him, . . . physical objects cannot act without causes, . . . his organs of perception are physical and have no volition, no power to invent or to distort . . . the evidence they give him is an absolute, but his mind must learn to understand it, his mind must discover the nature, the causes, the full context of his sensory material, his mind must identify the things that he perceives.

Objectivism also makes an important distinction between sensation and perception.  One of these involves involuntary biological processes (occipital lobe, temporal lobe, parietal lob), the other involves higher mental activities where concept formation occurs (hippocampus, frontal lobe).  Obviously the biology I'm listing is overly-simplistic, but Massimo passes over this distinction and makes Objectivism appear overly simplistic in doing so.

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/perception.html

That last statement, "his mind must identify the things that he perceives" is expanded on in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.  This is the essence of what "consciousness is identification" means.

[Jmpty]

Yeah, I value what you say SO much more than the chair of the Philosophy dept at CUNY.

"Look if you're going to critique something the first rule is being fair to the belief system you're critiquing by accurately representing it. This is the same type of low-brow uninformed commentary Jmpty could offer."

I guess I should take that as a compliment.

[lumpymunk]

I think you should value what primary sources actually say over what someones misinterpretation of that primary source says.

I've shown you clear misrepresentation.  It's not that Massimo is intentionally misrepresenting Objectivism, it's that he's an academic philosopher.  Academic Philosophers do not study Ayn Rand on a scholarly level.

First and foremost, obviously this isn't going to be a scholarly analysis of Objectivism.

So yea, believe someone who tells you on the first page of what he's writing that it's not a scholarly analysis or read the primary source material I've provided that contradicts his simplistic and unanalytic blog posts.

Doesn't matter to me, as long as the information is available in this thread for other readers I couldn't care less if you choose to be intellectually honest with yourself or not.

[Jmpty]

"I've shown you clear misrepresentation. It's not that Massimo is intentionally misrepresenting Objectivism, it's that he's an academic philosopher. Academic Philosophers do not study Ayn Rand on a scholarly level."

I wonder why?

I've Posted several scholarly articles critical of Rand, including one by her former partner, and the response is always That it's being misrepresented, or that I need to refer to the "Rand lexicon." I don't think that I am being intellectually dishonest at all.
You are obviously enamored with objectivism. It is my hope that you'll grow out of it.

[lumpymunk]

I've Posted several scholarly articles critical of Rand

 :rollin:

You've made three substantive posts and I've dealt with all three of them.

- Ayn Rand was a Clever Racist. (obviously not scholarly)
You posted the content of a Daily Kos article so that hopefully nobody would google it and realize its some weak pundit with nothing else better to write about.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/04/2 ... er-racist#

- Nathaniel Branden on confusiong Reason with the Reasonable (which doesn't speak to the philosophy of Objectivism, and attacks Ayn Rand as a person on a psychological level, then makes inferences about the philosophy.)

- Masimo Pugliucci, which were 4 short blog posts on Objectivism by an Academic philosopher that plainly stated that his writing was not scholarly.

I've Posted several scholarly articles critical of Rand

Posted several scholarly articles critical of

several scholarly articles

 :rollin:
 :rollin:
 :rollin:

You are the epitome of intellectual bankruptcy.

[Jmpty]

Grow up.

[lumpymunk]

Grow up.

 :Hangman:

thanks for playing.

[Jmpty]

Ayn Rand is for children  

George Saunders understands what Rand fans won't: Objectivism is more young adult fantasy than political philosophy
By David Sirota  
 
 
Ayn Rand is for children


With this week's news that Glenn Beck and others are preparing to build libertarian communes and "Going Galt," I figure now is the time to finally refine my theory about those who claim to be Ayn Rand acolytes or who brag that their favorite book is "Fountainhead Shrugged" (they are the same book written twice in order to double Rand's profit, so for brevity, let's just use one name).

Since I first met Objectivists (read: libertarians) in college, my Unified Theory of Rand Groupies posited that they all probably fit into at least one of three groups: those who 1) never grew out of the usual "the world is persecuting me and doesn't see my true genius" phase that momentarily afflicts the typical high schooler 2) think saying "Ayn Rand" in any context makes them sound intelligent, even though they've never actually read her work or 3) have read Rand's work, don't genuinely believe in her ideology as evidenced by their lifestyle/politics, but still say they love her because it serves to make them feel good about their own avarice.

Out of these three groups, the third is probably the most prominent in this, the era defined by the politics of "makers versus takers." After all, these folks purport to adore the free-market triumphalism of "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged," haughtily imagine themselves as rugged up-from-the-bootstraps individualists like Howard Roark and John Galt, tell themselves that their greed is patriotic, and thus demonize government and taxation. Yet, most of these same people tend to live their lives in ways that belie their personal mythology.

Typically, they are more than happy to (among other things) drive on taxpayer funded roads; to have their assets defended by government agents (aka police and firefighters); to have their property rights protected by a law enforcement collective known as the judiciary; and to pocket their share of handouts. Some alleged Randian individualists are even willing to decry the social safety net for others but not for themselves, and still others are happy to to vote in Congress for the epitome of what Randianism stands against.


That said, after reading the following nugget from this terrific New York Times writeup of literary giant George Saunders, I discovered a critical hole in my theory (emphasis added):


After he graduated from the School of Mines, Saunders went to work for an oil-exploration company in the jungles of Sumatra...They worked four weeks on and two weeks off and in the down time would be shuttled in helicopters to the nearest city, 40 minutes away, and then from there fly to Singapore.

"I'd been kind of an Ayn Rand guy before that," he said. "And then you go to Asia and you see people who are genuinely poor and genuinely suffering and hadn't gotten there by whining." While on a break in Singapore, walking back to his hotel in the middle of the night, he stopped by an excavation site and "saw these shadows scuttling around in the hole. And then I realized the shadows were old women, working the night shift. Oh, I thought, Ayn Rand doesn't quite account for this."

As Saunders' personal story suggests, my theory about Randists fails in not accounting for the fourth and arguably biggest subgroup of all: those who have never visited the developing world. And when I say "developing world" I'm not talking Tom Friedman-ese by referring to walled off resorts in banana republics or big, wealthy cosmopolitan cities isolated from their otherwise dirt poor nations. I'm referring to the actual dirt poor places outside those resorts and cities where the Tom Friedmans and Rand groupies probably never visit.

Now its true: I've never been much of a Rand fan myself (beyond, of course, the normal momentary dalliance with "Fountainhead Shrugged" during my obligatory 11th grade descent into immature self-pity). Nonetheless, after my three-week voyage to the poorest province in China in 2009 (which you can read about here), I can say with confidence that if you have been to the non-Tom-Friedman developing world – aka the actual developing world – you don't need Saunders' MacArthur Genius-worthy intellect to arrive at his very same conclusion.

My particular trip felt like a journey to a place much like what I imagine 19th century America had been – a place that at once confirmed the worst consequences of a real-world Galt's Gulch (no obvious environmental, public health or workplace safety laws) and proved the idiocy of Rand's overarching ideology (the preternaturally industrious poor in China hardly seemed like blameworthy "takers").

I'm guessing it was the same for Saunders in Singapore, just as I'm guessing it is for Americans who deign to visit the developing world. Simply put, once you actually see laissez faire capitalism and greed-is-good extremism at work, it doesn't look as nice as it sounds in Rand's works. On the contrary, as Saunders implies, it makes "Fountainhead Shrugged" look less like serious treatise than bad young adult fiction, with all the corresponding misguided parables and oversimplified conclusions.

The problem is, for various reasons – some having to do with economics, some having to do with cultural arrogance – relatively few Americans make the kind of trip Saunders made. According to government data, only 30 percent of Americans even possess a passport (which is a very low rate compared to citizens in other industrialized English-speaking countries). Additionally, of those who do, only a fraction use their travel papers to visit parts of the developing world that perfectly spotlight the failures of the Rand vision.

To be sure, a strict Objectivist would probably argue that many developing-world nations don't represent Rand's vision because they are ruled by corrupt governments. But that's not really relevant because many of those places are now defined by Authoritarian Capitalism whereby political freedoms are limited, but Randian free-market extremism most certainly is not. Indeed, as some American CEOs will openly admit, if you want to see a more purely Randian version of a socially darwinist free market than exists in America, head straight across the Pacific Ocean to China.

Put all this together, and I'm officially amending my theory. To be a Rand groupie is to flaunt your immaturity, your ignorance, your desperation to justify greed or your lack of international travel. It is, in other words, to admit your blindness to how so much of the world already lives, and to ignore what America would look like if "Fountainhead Shrugged" was seen as a public policy manual rather than what it really is: a dangerous farce.

[Jmpty]

Foutainhead shrugged. :rollin:

[Jmpty]

From Rational Wiki:
Quantum physics and relativity

Some Objectivists like David Harriman and Leonard Peikoff actually seem to have a problem with modern physics, especially quantum mechanics due to its probabilistic nature. The breakdown of classical mechanics-style causality at the quantum level doesn't square with Rand's vision of causality. This has led to declarations by Objectivists that modern physics is "corrupted" or "tainted" by a "Kantian influence" and "bad philosophy" in general, in addition to various crank "refutations" of quantum physics and denial of some theories like Relativity (which was Petr Beckmann's specialty).[8]

[edit] Realism in psychology

Rand's notion that we can observe reality directly (known in philosophy as direct or naïve realism) is refuted by the current consensus in neuroscience, psychology, and the cognitive sciences (which accepts various forms of indirect or representative realism). In the cognitive sciences, raw input is called "bottom-up perception" and the way the brain interprets this input is called "top-down perception." The visual, auditory, etc. cortices essentially "reconstruct" the input from their respective sense organs, meaning there is always some element of top-down interpretation of raw stimuli. Thus, we do not experience reality directly but in some sense a perceptual facsimile of reality constructed by the brain. A simple example of this is the fact that the image formed on your eye's retina is upside-down, but the visual cortex flips it right-side up. There are numerous other examples as well, including hallucinations and cognitive illusions.[9]

[edit] Evolution

Ayn Rand also expressed doubts about the validity of the theory of evolution. Indeed, while Objectivism itself shares much in common with Social Darwinism, what she didn't like (that is, that according to the evolutionary theory, there is no real difference between human beings and animals, or that it might dilute or downplay personal responsibility) reminds of other right-wing criticisms of evolution.[10]

While Rand herself was ambivalent about evolution, Objectivists at the Ayn Rand Institute have produced material critical of creationism and supportive of evolution.[11]

[edit] Environmental science

Because the magic of the free market can solve any problem, capitalism cannot cause environmental damage. And even if it did, nobody owns the environment, so caring about it would be immoral! Thus, anti-environmentalism is a common position among Randroids and they promote the usual associated pseudoscience and denialism on issues such as DDT, acid rain, and global warming.[12][13] Rand herself was also known for denying the link between smoking and cancer, then got a good taste of karma after being treated for lung cancer in 1974.

[edit] Strange definitions


""'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.'
 

Objectivists commonly take a word, change its meaning to fit their needs, and then complain that no one else is using their definitions. This has often led to confusion in debates, as neither side knew that they were both speaking two different languages.

Some commonly warped words include:
Altruism: The Objectivist definition is "...that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value."[14] It's based mainly upon Auguste Comte's (who coined the term "altruisms") definition of altruism: "Self-sacrifice for the benefit of others."[15] Translated from the jargon, Rand is trying to say that "altruism" is acting like a doormat and only working for others without consideration of one's own needs. Naturally, few people have such a view on life; even fewer do who actually practice it, and at that point only do to get something in return. In normal-speak, altruism is simply acting to benefit humanity. Like most straw men, the "Altruist" movement feared by Randroids cannot defend itself because it doesn't exist. While Comte did advocate something like this ("live for others"), people declined to obey his dictum.
Mercy: Leonard Peikoff defined mercy as "unearned forgiveness." This basically means that if your enemy is on the battlefield, unarmed, and begging for mercy, it would be immoral to let him live. In this sense Objectivism is diametrically opposed to the Christian concept of salvation by unmerited grace.
Reason: This one has actually at least two different meanings in Objectivist writings. One is pretty close to the usual meaning of the term. But Objectivism also argues that you must use your reason in order to be happy, which is kinda like trying to open your garage door with your driver's license. In this second, shifted ethical/political sense, it then roughly means "absence of ethical concerns regarding one's decisions." Outside the Objectivist funhouse, people who have no concern for the ethics of their decisions are called "sociopaths."
Mind: The mind is an essential part of Rand's justification of property rights. Alas, her argumentation is weird (it's basically bad Locke) and ends up bearing almost no relationship with the usual concept of mind. Also, taxation and redistribution are "mind enslavement," apparently. To avoid such peculiar, loaded rhetoric, many other libertarians such as Nozick rather argue in terms of "self-property" than "mind," the idea being the same but less hypocritical.
Evil: Because of the Objectivist ethical system, this word is given a meaning that is at least slightly different from everyday use. But Rand also used it to disparage thinkers she disagreed with, solely on the basis of their philosophical ideas. And then Randians complain that she isn't taken seriously by academia.

[edit] Wacky positions

Many Objectivists, at least during Ayn Rand's lifetime, more than three decades ago, held that cigarette smoking is a moral obligation.[16]

Objectivism's views on art and music tend to reflect Rand's own personal tastes, seriously constructing a philosophical basis in which the art and music Rand liked is moral, while anything else is not. One wonders what some of them think of Rush (the band),[17] whose drummer Neil Peart wrote lyrics inspired by Rand but whose music was clearly not of the type approved by the ever-so-rational Miss Rand, even though she was alive when Rush were making their best, most heroic, and most individualism-celebrating music.[18]

Just for lulz and to confuse people (including her dim-witted intellectual heir), Ayn Rand decided she didn't like libertarians and declared that they plagiarized her ideas when it suited them and besmirched her name when it didn't.

[edit] Criticism

A criticism of Ayn Rand so obvious it's really kind of impressive that anyone follows her is based around a quote we already mentioned above:


""There is one word that is forbidden in this valley: the word 'give.'
 
—Atlas Shrugged  

Again, Ayn Rand holds the position that it is immoral to give, or to receive aid to another of any kind. She explains this in an interview in 1959,[19] where she specifically says that man must not live for others, and that altrusim is immoral.

This can be criticized on several grounds. Firstly, this means that it is immoral to be a child, or to raise a child, since a child requires constant attention and aid from the parents. This probably explains why Rand never had children, and also means that if the human species adopted this, we would be gone after one generation. Another criticism is that we are more-or-less not evolved to think this way. Aside from her strange definition of altruism, Rand would take a low position on evolutionary ethics, which is essentially the idea that we are evolved to act in the interest of the group as much as ourselves. This is why most people, cultures, and ethical systems don't consider self-sacrifice to be immoral, although Randian philosophy says that it is.

A stunning example of this problem, especially if you're Finnish, is the case of Simo Hayha. Hayha was a sniper in the Finnish White Army during the Winter War against the Soviet Red Army who killed 505 enemies, survived temperatures as low as -40C and numerous attempts to kill him both by carpet bombing and by assaults of infantry and mechanized units. The actions of Hayha were instrumental in preventing the Finnish from losing the Winter War, which prevented them from being taken over by the Soviets. When asked to explain actions like these (partly since actions like these happened in Atlas Shrugged) Randroids respond with a rather dehumanizing, and frankly insulting, response that the person is not acting out of group interest, but is instead expecting to survive and is trying to gain self-respect or popularity.[20]

But alas, if he didn't care enough to do such a thing Finland would have gone Red. And ol' Ayn wouldn't have liked that, would she.

[edit] See also
Asshole

[Jmpty]

I can keep going, if you like.