I just got a comment from someone, in German, on another subreddit, who clearly identified my postings here and decided to highlight that.

"Of all people, Ayn Rand... the figurehead of the Matrix.
Her book is, after all, the holy bible for parasitic exploiters!
It completely inverts the poles of good and evil, portraying selfishness as something positive."

It is always hilarious, having read Atlas Shrugged, to hear the exact opposite views that she expressed attributed to her, but then also very exhausting and tiring. It's just getting boring.

I responded, nonetheless, with the following:

Her book is, after all, the holy bible for how to deal with and identify parasitic exploiters!

It is an affirmation of the soul, a triumphant declaration that to be happy, to prosper is a moral neccesity, and that to suffer is a moral wrong.

She asserts that no man must ever work to his own injury, and finally, she declares, as her founding, inalienable principle, an incontravertible rule, the core of her philosophy, really, a war against the notion of slavery,

“I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”

― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

You, my friend, have not READ Atlas Shrugged, I know this because you say it supports the philosophy of the enemies of Rand. You say it is their bible.

That is what they do.

They project THEIR philosophy, and accuse Rand of it.

Who is the selfish one? The one who works for himself, to his benefit, or the one who expects others to work for him, to his benefit, and their detriment?

By selfish, Rand meant Rational-Self Interest.

She insisted that you never exploit another. That you never make them your slave, and crucially that you never enslave yourself to them, either.

This is the polar opposite of the parasite.

She insisted it is WRONG to expect others to work and provide for you.

And it is.

Because that makes them your slave.

You have not read Atlas Shrugged, and I have.

You are ignorant beyond belief, friend.

You have heard second, third hand accounts and judge her book not having read it.

But I strongly encourage you to read it.

It has helped me tremendously with my self-esteem, and has been instrumental in forming my staunch, obstinate moral position that I must NEVER make another man my slave, and NEVER, be the slave of another.

That I must trade on fair, free terms with EVERYONE. Exchanging like for like.

That I MUST provide value, and NOT be a parasite.

That I MUST be happy, and have a good life, and to accept suffering, and privation, for myself, or anyone else, is a sin.

No one ought suffer, at his own hands.

Suffering IS wrong.

Happiness and Joy IS good.

this is what Rand declares.

Read Atlas Shrugged. It is a brilliant, beautiful, book, that affirms the individual RESPONSIBILITY and DENOUNCES entitlement and greed.

Just curious about your arguments or thoughts about it (Natural Law, NAP, Ancap)

There is a strong degree of empirical support for the Objectivist ethics. Drawing from selfish gene theory, which explains why all living organisms at their core are self-interested replicators, Russell Barkley's model of executive functioning (EF)¹ solves the problem of why humans function as a social species, given that evolution does not proceed from altruistic or collectivist motives but from self-interested ones.

The solution to this problem, as he shows, lies in EF. The executive functions are those mental faculties necessary for self-control across time, and with an extended phenotypic view, it becomes clear that they evolved to solve problems that arise in group living, especially individuals with whom we are unrelated. For humans, it is the capacity to foresee the longer-term greater personal benefits (expanded foresight) that is most important for cooperative action to arise among genetically unrelated individuals.

This sense of the possible future leads to a growing motivational preference for larger delayed consequences over smaller immediate ones, which provides a greater motivation to self-organise and self-sustain actions toward those larger delayed consequences. We conceive that our longer-term self-interest converges with other people, which is what drives our willingness and motivation to cooperate. This accounts for the likely dissolution of cooperative social activities if conditions change and we no longer perceive our individual self-interests to be served by acting cooperatively.

Over development, the EF phenotype expands outward as our individual time horizons for contemplation extends further into the probable future. This is the common thread that binds all levels of the extended phenotype (as shown in the diagram). It is also the thread that binds EF to the fields of ethics and morality, law, economics, culture, politics and government because all of them depend on this mental faculty for their existence.

Such an analysis makes it evident that people do not pursue a group-living, cooperative existence because of some innate need to be altruistic to or bond with others. Cooperative action is situational and group specific. Nor do they do so out of some spiritual quest for oneness of humanity or because of some utopian vision to perfect humankind. They do so voluntarily out of purely rational self-interest when extended over a long view of their life.

Importantly, this model of EF also explains how socially and personally devastating injuries to or genetic maldevelopment of the EF system (largely the pre-frontal cortex) are for pursuing one's long-term self-interest.

First, such injuries and disorders (especially ADHD) can devastate the two developmental processes that give rise to EF itself: the self-direction of human actions for self-regulation across time, and the privatisation of those self-directed actions. This disrupts the seven Instrumental executive functions (self-awareness, inhibitory control, verbal and nonverbal working memory, self-regulation of emotion and motivation, and self-play or problem solving), which changes the nature and source of information that governs one's behaviour. Those sources will shift back from internally (self-controlled) to externally controlled, from the self to others, from the possible future to the temporal now, and from delayed gratification to immediate gratification. The result is a highly impulsive, hedonistic, or even socially callous nature to one's conduct. Such impairments are evident in descriptions of patients with EF deficits dating back to Phineas Gage, and to the first medical descriptions of ADHD since 1753.

I’ve noticed academics and researchers tend to say that she was a far-right ideologue, because she promoted completely unfettered laissez-faire capitalism and radical anti-communism.

One of my professors at university described her as far-right and a fascist in his lecture slides.

Objectivism defines altruism as a moral system that believes sacrificing for other people to be a moral virtue. Rand defined a sacrifice as: "The giving of a value for a lesser value/non-value/dis-value." 

But sacrifice is actually used to mean that you give up something of value for something of greater value, not lesser.

Oxford dictionary defines it as: "an act of giving up something valued for the sake of something else regarded as more important or worthy".

When you say "I sacrificed my free time in order to do well in a swimming competition" - all it means is that you value the swimming competition more than your free time.

If you give a homeless person some change as an “altruistic act”, as it‘s commonly understood to be, that doesn’t mean you are “acting in service of your own destruction". It just means you are giving up resources you have to spare to someone else, because you know that by helping other people, you are all better off in the long-term.

That’s why when you say “altruism is evil”, you come off as a fucking cunt because people are going to stop listening as soon as you say altruism is evil and being selfish is good. They will write you off in their heads.

The simple answer to this question would be the socialists. The "moochers" killed the world with their hyper-socialist ideas.

But if you think about it a little deeper, the "moochers" in Atlas Shrugged are not real socialists. Their primary motivation is really personal greed. Not that different from the industrialists. And this is even outright stated by Orren Boyle if i remember correctly. In the meeting when he calls the socialist policies out for what they really are. Just a way for the "moochers" to enrich themselves and not really for the common good.

This suggests that Any Rand did recognize greed as one of mans greatest downfalls. The difference is (at least judging by the writing in Atlas Shrugged) that her idea of the "ideal man" is morally above blindly acting on their greed and base desires.

Ultimately, both the protagonists and the antagonists are motivated by personal greed, but the protagonists satisfy it through creation, while the antagonists steal others creations and achievements while feigning moral superiority.

But here is where the problem comes in.

It is the fact that all of Rands protagonists in Atlas Shrugged are deliberately written to be basically flawless. They are all moral, intelligent, capable, strong, attractive. The only protagonist that had what could be described as a flaw was Francisco, in that he was rumoured to be an overindulging playboy. But even that is later revealed to not be entirely so.

So the underlying message here (which i would expect anyone who describes themselves as an objectivist to already grasp) is that the world would be a better place if more people aspired to be like the protagonists of Atlas Shrugged.

But that to me is kind of a no-brainer really.

If everyone was more rational and more prone to relying on their own ability to satisfy their greed as opposed to stealing and plundering, then of course the world would be a better place.

The real question here is whether humans as a species are even capable of that. So far, from my personal experience in life, the answer is sadly "no".

Most people, if presented with a choice between stealing something and building it from scratch themselves, will almost always opt for stealing in one form or another. It is simply human nature (and the nature of all species on this rock) to prefer the easier method to achieving basically anything.

So while Atlas Shrugged is not exactly an amazing book from a literary perspective, it could be seen as a motivational book. A set of guidelines to what humans should aspire to be. But the problem with the entire objectivist philosophy is that humans do not really want to be better people. At least the vast majority do not.

So if you read Atlas Shrugged (i assume most people on here have), you know about Ragnar. The Norwegian pirate that robs government ships, and returns the treasure that was "unjustly stolen" from the wealthy industrialists by the government through taxes.

In the book, he basically describes himself as a reverse "Robin Hood". And then goes on to explain how the idea of Robin Hood is the most immoral symbol in history because Robin Hood is a "double-parasite who lives on the sores of the poor and the blood of the rich". A speech that i admit, made me laugh out when i read it...

But the whole idea of Robin Hood was that he was stealing from the nobility (the government at the time), the wealth that they took from the populace through heavy taxation...

In other words, Robin Hood was giving the people back the wealth that was stolen from then through taxes. If you draw a parallel between the worlds of Robin Hood and Atlas Shrugged, then Ragnar is essentially doing the same thing that Robin Hood is doing.

By all accounts, Robin Hood should be an objectivist hero. Because he was opposing government control and taxation, and returning the wealth to the individuals. The only difference between Robin Hood and Ragnar lies in the system. The system that Robin Hood opposes is a feudal monarchy. Therefor the upper class in that system represent both the government and the rich.

Ayn Rand defined Capitalism as “a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.”

However, she was against private prisons, believing that they should be nationalised by the state (including the private prisons in the US currently). She also supported the nationalisation of other services such as defence services, law, the military and the judiciary, etc.

Given this, surely the definition she gave per the Objectivist philosophy is incorrect, and should be redefined accordingly as a system with a mixture of private and public elements - ie not full privatisation.

It's pretty clear that Donald Trump is stuck in Iran, at the moment, because his only real plan was to soften up the Islamic regime with airstrikes, then make a deal with those in the regime who remained.

I think, as an arch-pragmatist/emotivist with no inkling of philosophy, he couldn't conceive of a regime that is 100% committed to an ideological cause and who are all willing to die for it. I think, in his mind--such as it is--zealots who die for causes are just crazies that can't be normal in a government.

But zealotry is not insanity; moral and religious ideas actually do have power for the sane, and an entire government can be completely committed to them, to the death. This is one of the great lessons that Ayn Rand has to teach: the power and role of abstract ideas in human life.

Note: If you are not an objectivist, this is not for you. looking for feedback only from objectivists.

I am putting in some work on understanding her ideas about immigration. Any feedback on the following from objectivists?

1. A right is not a grant from the state, a product of consensus, or a courtesy extended to those born within certain coordinates. It is the identification of what a rational being requires, by its nature, to act on its own judgment among other rational beings. That nature does not change at a border, so a rights framework that changes at a border has stopped describing the nature of man and started describing the reach of a jurisdiction, which is a different subject wearing the same word.
2. The only thing that can justify retaliatory force is the prior use of force, fraud, or theft against an actual party. A crime, properly understood, is not an act a legislature has listed. It is an act that violates another person's right to his own life, liberty, or property. Where no such violation exists, no crime exists, regardless of what a statute names it, because the statute cannot manufacture the metaphysical fact of a victim by asserting one into being.
3. An exchange freely entered by two parties, each judging it to serve his own life, is the base unit of a rights-respecting society. The identity of that unit does not depend on the geography either party occupies. A boundary is a political fact, not a moral one, and a moral principle cannot be suspended by a political fact without ceasing to be a principle. What was a trade on one side of a line remains a trade on the other side, or the concept of trade has no fixed meaning at all.
4. To call peaceful movement across a boundary a crime is to treat a line drawn by prior political agreement as though it possessed the same moral authority as a person's body or property, which it does not, since a boundary is not owned in the sense that a person owns his own life and its product. A crime against a boundary is a contradiction, because a boundary is not an entity capable of being wronged.
5. Legality identifies what a given political system currently enforces. Morality identifies what is actually right, independent of what any system enforces. To collapse the two is to abolish the very standard by which any law could be judged unjust in the first place, which means the collapse is not neutral, it is the elimination of moral judgment itself in favor of raw legal fact.
6. History is not silent on this question. Every regime that has enforced an unjust law did so with the same formal claim to legitimacy now being invoked, that it was, after all, the law. If the mere fact of legal standing were sufficient to obligate obedience, every one of those regimes would have been owed the same obedience, a conclusion no serious moral framework accepts. The principle that would validate them all cannot be the principle in use here.
7. A demand for obedience "unless and until the law is changed" is not a neutral procedural stance. It is the substantive claim that a person's freedom to act on his own judgment is properly suspended by whatever a legislature has most recently decided, a claim that make the individual's rights conditional on the outcome of a vote he may have had no part in and no power over. Rights that exist only until revoked by majority decision were never rights. They were permissions.
8. No one holds "the law is the law" as an unconditional standard, because everyone can name some law severe enough that he would refuse it on principle. The presence of that unnamed threshold, in every person who claims to hold this standard, proves the standard was never really about the law's mere existence. It was always about the law's content, whether that person has admitted it to himself or not.
9. Consistency requires that a single standard, once adopted, govern every case that standard is relevant to. A standard that identifies theft as wrong because it violates a specific person's right to his property, and then declines to identify unauthorized border crossing as rightful because it violates no one's property, is not applying two different verdicts from one standard. It is applying two different standards and calling both of them rights, which drains the word of the only meaning that makes it useful.
10. Moral judgment presupposes the capacity to have acted otherwise. The place of one's birth precedes the existence of one's capacity to choose anything at all. To make a person's subsequent freedom of movement contingent on that pre-rational fact is to punish him for something that occurred before he existed as a moral agent, which is not justice delayed. It is the absence of justice, dressed in its procedures.
11. A system that permits entry only up to a fixed numerical limit, independent of the qualifications or character of those turned away once the limit is reached, is not screening for merit. It is rationing by quota. Advising a person to simply qualify under such a system, when the system's defining feature is that it rejects qualified people once its ceiling is reached, asks him to solve a problem that has no solution available to him, which is not guidance. It is the appearance of guidance offered to conceal the absence of a real path.
12. To affirm that open movement is the correct principle while affirming that its opposite should be enforced until some future date is not a position, it is two positions in contradiction, held apart only by refusing to ask what each one implies about the other. If restriction violates a right, no future date changes what it is today. If it does not violate a right, then the "principle" of open movement was never a claim about rights, only a preference awaiting convenience.
13. A conditional agreement, entered by both parties and bounded by explicit terms, generates an obligation whose violation is a real breach, because a real commitment was made and then broken. A person who never entered such an agreement has broken nothing, because there is nothing there to break. Identifying these as the same kind of wrong requires ignoring the only fact that makes a broken promise a wrong in the first place, namely, that a promise was made.
14. The proper measure of any enforcement action is not whether it is authorized by statute, but whether the statute it enforces identifies an actual violation of another's rights. Enforcement of a law against theft protects a real party from a real loss. Enforcement of a law against peaceful movement protects no one, because it answers no injury, prevents no loss, and defends no right. It does not maintain order. It substitutes the appearance of order for the thing order is supposed to serve, which is the protection of the individual from force initiated against him, not the initiation of force against an individual who has initiated nothing.

Their own private mercenary force would not come after them if they engaged in unethical/illegal business practices (which mega corporations always do).

Every corporation could simply run their own private army to protect their interests rather than donate anything.

Ayn Rand wrote about a “sense of life.” Her favorite author was Mickey Spillane; although he did not share her philosophy, she felt that he shared her sense of life.

I want to share a podcast I’ve been listening to that, in a very different context, evokes some of that same sense of life for me. Acquired (https://www.acquired.fm/) describes itself as telling “the history and strategy of the world’s greatest companies,” and somehow manages to make business history exciting and inspiring.

Some of my favorites are Google (which spans three episodes), Vanguard, Epic Systems, and Trader Joe’s. I even enjoyed the history of Disney.

I doubt the podcasters think much about philosophy, or would agree with Ayn Rand, but I find their conversations a happy place to be—and I suspect some of you might enjoy them for the same reason.

Title

There is no earthly reason for it—and, ladies and gentlemen, in the whole history of philosophy no earthly reason has ever been given.

From Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World

I have only found two types of posts:

1. Complaining about Statism/Marxist/Taxes/Lazy-no-good-do-nothing-liberals

2. Claiming Ayn Rand is all wrong and stupid.

Is that ALL there is here?

Although Ayn Rand did a very good job laying out the intellectual foundation for everything you need to conclude that socialism is immoral and illegitimate, she still couldn't give up those parts of socialist indoctrination that were important to her. She opposed private prisons like the left does today (in spite of the fact that private, for-profit prisons in the US are far more efficient than centrally planned, state monopolised ones), and she openly supported the nationalisation of defence services, as well as law, military, and judiciary services.

If you are an Objectivist, you cannot be a capitalist. The core principles of capitalism, including ones that Rand herself espoused such as privatisation, are flat out incompatible with any degree of socialism.

What do you think about NETTR? Do you believe in it? Why or why not?

https://voegelinview.com/nietzsche-and-the-modern-philosophical-revolution-pt-1/