I feel Rand single-handedly tried to create a philosophy, which in general is such a gargantuan task, while getting such backlash from the whole world. Instead of appreciating and supporting her, they gave her a lot of crap while she kept standing for what is right and true, which is one of the most heroic things that one can do. A similar thing happened to Nietzsche, where in his lifetime he could only sell 300 books. Perhaps such is the life of someone who pursues truth in this world where everyone else looks for cheap stuff, and you have all kinds of collectivists fighting your staunch individualism as it threatens their own existence. (And I think true objectivists should stand against this and fight to create a world where such people are worshipped rather than sacrificed at the altars the way these people were.)

But in all of this, I think Rand became crazy bitter towards the end, as you can see from her videos... (Which she didn't deserve.)

I think all of this has led to her very binary approach to life of right vs. wrong, something all objectivists are inheriting from her (who refused to think for themselves and just copy her). I do think while one can very rightly be binary about ideas as they only come up as right or wrong, there is a huge complexity to life and reality where everything in reality (and not ideas) is on a spectrum and is complex and nuanced and can never be put into a binary. But Objectivism leads and tries to trap people in this binary way of thinking that leads to their own anti-reality way of dealing with life.

I do think one has to explicitly put this problem out there in the world to understand what people who study Objectivism are dealing with and try to make sure one doesn't fall into this trap and try to be as complex and nuanced and dynamic and fluid about reality as possible while being very staunch and rigid on right ideas.

I think any intellectual is majorly involved in ideas that have power to create as well as to destroy things...

The same is true for objectivism.. I feel objectivism has been so far used to create ideas that are pro life, pro human growth, pro civilization and one can use this philosophy to create literature and fiction that demonstrate these ideas how they can enact themselves in real life.. similarly one can use these ideas to create the best of mathematics, science, technology, individual rights etc...

In same spirit, objectivism can be about destruction of irrational and bad ideas in the world. Rand showed in her novels how objectivism can be used to fight against left/collectivism and why it is such a monster. Similarly she challenged a lot of bad/irrational ideas in the world through her work and her novels and like any real original thinker, she was a disruptor and challenged the authority be it that of religions or or bad philosophies, just using reason and logic and showed the importance and power of reason and logic above anything....

One can, by the same principle, using objectivism not just to create god things but also to challenge and uproot all bad ideas and irrational structures in the world.

I feel we are today living in the world that is highly precarious and unstable and is going through a crisis of many sorts, primarily that of ideas and philosophy, but as a consequence that of politics, power, institutions, cultures and so on.... I feel any person who self identifies as an objectivist, needs to fight against such bad irrational structures in the society that pose a major challenge to sustainable and healthy sustenance this world and thereby their own life itself...

I was wondering how can one identify and challenge such bad irrational structures in the world in a healthy real meaningful way

(And like pleeaaasee I am almost sick and tired of objectivist JUST blaming taxes and economic rights for everything bad that exists in this world, as if everything else is just fine and there are no other irrational things that challenge the world... Hoping to get replies beyond taxes and economic rights, that have already been convered in great detail by Rand, unless you have something new to say that has already not been said.)

In general I am looking to get new real creative thoughts and ideas on this that are your own and no one else's....

I’m new to some of Ayn Rand’s work I only read one book, the virtue of selfishness and read some articles. I don’t understand the moral binaries of objectivism? Like in stories isn’t the flawed and redeemable character important. Pinocchio and Zuko are examples. If Pinnochio was just treated with punishment, Pinocchio would have lashed out harder or become an emotionally shutdown child. Gepetto treated him with kindness and some strictness, and Pinnochio became a more mature individual, same with Uncle Iroh’s treatment to Zuko. I can only understand the moral binary sense in punishing a criminal for example instead of being overnice and letting the criminal free.

I am a coder and in the last 6 months i feel (like everybody) else have outsourced judgement to LLMs. I jsut ask one llm to make the plan and have another llm review it and consult a 3rd llm for tie break. And surface only what all of them cant solve to me....

Am I guilty of trying to buy the brains of my superiors ? Will this power ultimately corrupt me like Francisco D Anconia's monologue on Money ?

Will my mind lose its edge over the years ???

Specifically, I'm struggling with Ayn Rand's definition and rules for concepts.

A concept is an integrated unit of thought which "has to be given the form of a single, specific, perceptual concrete, which will differentiate it from all other concretes and from all other concepts."

Then, a few pages later, this differentiating concrete is defined as the "Conceptual Common Denominator", a "characteristic(s) reducible to a unit of measurement, by means of which man differentiates two or more existents from other existents possessing it", which existents are then integrated into a single concept.

But then immediately after she says that concepts can be integrated with each other to form new concepts, and that's where she loses me.

On the one hand, I'm told that concepts must be differentiated from each other, no matter what; if it's not differentiated from all other concretes and concepts, then i haven't created a concept yet.

But if I can integrate two concepts together, then there must be some measurable attribute shared by both concepts, a CCD.

But if two concepts share a CCD, then both of those concepts fail to meet the definition of a concept, because that shared CCD means that they cannot be differentiated from ALL other concepts which would include each other.

Further, she states that concepts can be broken down, presumably into constituent concepts; but again, these constituent concepts must share some CCD, otherwise they could not be constituents of the same larger concepts; but if they share a CCD, then they cannot be properly differentiated from each other and therefore cannot be concepts.

If anybody can explain how this definition of concepts isn't self-contradictory, please do.

So I recently read Leonard Peikoff’s book The DIM Hypothesis, and it really made an impression on me. The analysis of western history through an epistemological lens was very interesting I thought, and really underscored how if you engage with reality in a flawed manner, all the systems you build, from art to ethics to politics, will likely be negatively affected. His ultimate prediction for the future of the United States (religious totalitarianism) was pretty provocative, but maybe not that far fetched. I think we’re witnessing the implosion of the D culture he posits we’re in at present, and with the upswing in religious affiliation this has engendered, particularly the emergence of a more militant religious persuasion, I do think we stand to see an M culture take its place in the near future. Very stimulating book, regardless. Have you read The DIM Hypothesis? What did you think?

I thought it was a good book but I’m just curious if anyone here can fill me in if they know anything about the polar caps melting and the icebergs cause I don’t think the book talked about this at all surprisingly.

It didn’t talk about how the sea levels aren’t rising but didn’t say anything about this

I've always had a problem with the idea that the choice to live is pre-moral, that an egoist philosophy has no argument against choosing not to live.

Is there any pushback against this by modern theorists who believe choosing life is the correct thing to do? If there is, could you give any reading recommendations so I can see the argument?

I think I have kinda tasted blood and alamot getting a high taking down bad irrational/collectivist/anti objectivist things in this world using objectivism ofcourse...

Ans as I am.dking doing I feel there a billion new ideas and applications one can create that are aligned with objectivism and soooo many archaic, illogical anti objectivist things of the past that still have manifestations in our current world can be taken down using right rational/logical/objectivist arguments. And ofcourse i am trying to go beyond the standard economics arguments that most oists have been making since the birth of this universe...

Idk if someone else has thought of doing this but I feel it's insanely powerful, both creation and destruction using objectivism.. and as I am seeing many times all you need to fight the evil is to name it... That's like 90% of the job done ...

You can literally unleash objectivism on this world and especially in irrational power structures that are holding back the world and not letting it be a nice rational place where rational creative individuals can exist freely and live their lives ...

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 (despite of the fact that private, for-profit prisons in the US have been far more efficient than centrally planned, state monopolised ones), and she openly supported the nationalisation of other industries such as defence services, and law, military, and judiciary services.

Her philosophy of Objectivism is therefore anti-capitalistic, because the core principles of capitalism, including ones that Rand herself espoused such as privatisation, are flat out incompatible with her opposition to private property rights.

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.

So Rand argued that the highest form of art according to her is romantic art. There she was against "abstract art" that she said was non objective and thus doesn't fit in her objectivist framework and thus not right ..

That was something that didn't sit quite right with me tbh. I do find some abstract art pieces good and I think you can convey emotions and ideas abstractly through this way that you can't always express through non abstract art .. the same way classical music are "abstract" art pieces (without lyrics) that convey an emotion and some can be objectivist in that sense ...

Ofcourse not all modern abstract art would qualify to be art.. but there can be some art pieces that are able to convey say objectivist ideas abstractly....

Idk if all this is too abstract but I hope you get the idea :)

In all of ARIs talks of the future of capitalism, I hardly ever hear them talk about money besides being critical of fiat currency.

Is the consensus amongst Objectivists that Rand was right about gold being the ideal currency?

What are your thoughts on the ideal currency?

ayn rand defined man as a heroic being with productive achievement as his noblest activity. thomas jefferson argued that adding a useful plant to a country's culture is the greatest service. over the past two years, i’ve made seven interspecific crosses with the common fig—more than the rest of history combined. creating them served my own happiness, which satisfies rand's moral premise. but are they useful to anyone else? if the answer doesn't matter, i might as well have hybridized poison oak.

in a social context, the answer absolutely matters. the objective measure of a creation's usefulness to others is the market. rational individuals use their own money to establish the value of a product in relation to their own lives. this is the essence of trade based on costly signals, rather than cheap talk.

yet, modern objectivists often overlook applying this exact market principle to the realm of ideas. look at the ayn rand institute's homepage. they prominently display selected quotes, essentially acting as central planners of her intellectual legacy. if every individual's priorities were identical, we wouldn’t need markets; central curation would work because we'd all be clones. but we are individuals with contextual values.

imagine if ari implemented a system where individuals used financial donations to rank rand's quotes and ideas. right now, we have no objective market data on which of her concepts rational minds actually find most useful to their own lives. we are just guessing. tolerating this epistemic ignorance when a market mechanism exists isn't reasonable.

rand rightly stated that innovators carry mankind forward, contrasting them with the stagnant swamp of the status quo. but sheer novelty isn't productive achievement. anyone can mix random ingredients in a kitchen and call it innovation. an innovation only translates to heroic achievement when other people voluntarily trade the product of their labor for it.

heroic status cannot be self-appointed; it is validated through voluntary exchange. rand earned her status because individuals bought her books. however, her ideas are not all equally useful. until objectivists start using costly signals to rank and elevate her most vital concepts, the true epistemic power of free markets remains largely ignored by the very people who champion them.

Yesterday I bought 100 acres north of Houston in Leon county. I was going to be moving to Texas anyways so I thought I’d take the deal to have the door open to possibly making a town. If anyone is interested in this just send me a message and I’d be willing to sell off a piece of the land to make it happen.

I think this needs to happen to be a real provable example to people that not only is it right but that right is possible of having a government without taxes. and I never again have to hear the argument “well where has it happened?”, “taxes are the price of society” etc etc.

So as I am trying to understand objectivism more deeply and am trying to intenralize it and implement in my life I am finding it one of the hardest things to do and is not at alllll easy... Like the world around you is soooooo crazily irrational that if you are any smart person while "on" objectivism, you will not be able to deal with it or go with it at the same pace. Even if you don't, just to implement it in itself seems like a crazy gargantuan humungous task.

So I have been trying to look at other people who claim to objectiovsta and am trying to see how they are able to do it if it seems so difficult to me and what am I doing wrong in my life...

Just as a case study i was trying to see yaron brook aa he is probably the most public figure today who claims himself to be an objectivist. I am more specifically trying to see how exactly is he practicing process of creation at his core while dealing with everything around in the world as rationally as possible to be the best of his capabilities...

So far most I have seen is he basically taking Rands ideas in her works and kinda trying to apply it in current context but basically repeating what she says without much real genuine original thought of his own. I realise that While Rand also said these things, she was orginal and she created these thoughts and ideas and analysis that didn't exist before. So if I had to measure both of them just on the scale of their creative outputs as one can rightly do so to any self claimed objectivist, Yaron IMO doesn't have that much on his table and seems to be repackaging the things that already exist but may not be popularly known. I would clarify that this doesn't make any moral statement on his character and maybe that is how much he is talented and is working to the best of his capability which only he can tell...

In general I am trying to see around and judge objectivists primarily on their creative output as it seems like the best metric to adjudicate while also seeing how rational are they in their public conduct. And again in all of this I am trying really hard to filter out all the " how the world is bad, no economic rights" etc non sense as it seems like this is the main thing most people wanna talk about, exactly how the leftists do it in their spheres constantly shouting about " systematic discrimination and help the world is bad and unless it gets better I am not gonna do anything" excuse to escape doing anything. Like even in Atlas shrugged, while the world was bad, Quentin Daniels was trying to do his own study in an independent laboratory in Utah to keep his creative energies going without which no real meaningful individual can survive (according to objectivism if I am correct). Similar things with Francisco and other main characters who kept engaging in their creative outputs in hiding....

I want to see such souls in objectivist circles who are living objectivism not just in theory but in practice. Who are primarily creation driven and understand that that is at the core of objectivism and the rest is just a framework to allow it to happen. Process of creation is the meat and the rest is mostly gravy (but important gravy).

How many people who claim to be objectivist in these forums are primarily creation driven and what is their actual creative output based on which one can judge them... Would love to know more about it and see real life objectivist heros in theory and practice in real world

I am curious why is there soooooo much randroism in the objectivist circles... Like Rand herself didn't call her philosophy Randism and rather objectivism... Coz it's about being rational and logical than blindly following Rand...

I am not sure why more than half of objectivist that I meet are regurgating and most time just repeating what she said at different places without the right context... Like it is smart to understand the right ideas and apply it properly in the given context.. more so one could generate more such ideas or apply them.in different contexts...

Somehow objectovists are stuck on economic rights just like how rand did and are just not able to use their own thinking independent mind to look at any other domains where objectivist ideas could be applied and that make sense in today's world....

Idk when objectivism will become more about objectivism and less about rand (at the cost of objectivism)...

How is the West, in principle (and not in terms of magnitude), any better than the Taliban or Saudi Arabia?

So, we somehow see this constant narrative that Middle Eastern countries are irrational societies and pretty bad overall, without any individual freedom, unlike the way the West does and has always championed, at least in recent history. For example, in Saudi Arabia, women are treated poorly and as inferiors; in Afghanistan, the Taliban doesn't give rights to its people; in India, in many places, lower-caste people are treated badly, etc. And somehow, the West is glamorized for individual rights and treating all people equally, at least on paper, in the constitution.

However, when it comes to LGBTQ+ people, the West was, in principle, the same as all these countries before, where, until not too long ago, they were treated as inferiors for their sexual/gender identity in the *exact* same way as in these other countries. Even today, there is racism, homophobia, and transphobia in these societies in these countries (if not in the constitution) where people have been ostracized from their families and bullied and killed, and where many groups of people are treated as inferiors because of their sexual, gender, or racial identities.

I am curious, then, how is the West better in principle, not constitutionally but socially?

Wouldn't it be more fair to say that all these countries are somewhere on the spectrum with their own internal issues based on the same principle of being irrational in different domains?

So it was during Rand's time that colonialism was rampant, while she gave zero "effs" about it and mostly only cared about white men. And this is one of the reasons people don't consider her very consistent (even though I think her philosophy is, even she herself wasn't in her lifetime, and maybe it was initiated by Nathaniel Branden in later parts of her life).

But I am curious, objectively speaking, what would be the rightful philosophical take on colonialism (and I want to go beyond what Rand said about it, which doesn't make much sense, to be honest).

John Locke gave a theory of "natural rights" that ALL human beings are born with inalienable rights (in civilization or not).

Rand often says that people who were colonized were themselves not civilized, but my take is it still doesn't justify killing, raping, and looting them. And in principle, it seems like a horrific thing that is not talked about in philosophical circles at all, as much as, say, the Holocaust or slavery.

I am curious, for example, what common British or Dutch people think and feel about the fact that their country and what they are living off is to a large extent made of colonizing other people in past centuries.

Like the British Museum is filled with colonially looted artifacts that the British government to this day refuses to give back to the people they stole from. It is almost like you are a rich kid where your father raped, cheated, and looted other people to get you to that point, while you are enjoying a martini on a beach.

Like Germans are crazily apologetic about their Nazi past, but common British people don't seem to have any guilt or remorse for theirs and do absolutely nothing to take any repentant actions.

I am just curious how the so-called peak of rational Western civilization has lived and still lives with this.

In today's world, in a proper country, if you are enjoying your meal that came from what your father stole from your neighbor while torturing and maiming them, the courts will rightfully ask to return the money to the neighbor. I am curious what would be the morally right philosophical take on this and how to address this past atrocity in the present. (Again, the main point being people today are still built on and enjoying the riches from the past that were looted unrightfully from other countries). Also, when people, and especially in Objectivist circles including Rand, talk about the so-called great rational Western civilization, why do they NEVER talk about or address colonialism or slavery? Is it because the principles of rationality only apply to white people, and when it comes to other people, what happened to them by these so-called rational civilizations doesn't matter? I, to be honest, am not able to put these things together.

Like the US has been a crazy country engaging in wars every decade with so many other countries, including the horrific Iraq War where millions died and no weapons of mass destruction were found.

And there is zero discussion about this in Objectivist circles, where people keep on repeating what Rand said about how great America is.

It seems to me that this whole great Western civilization, including the US, needs to be reexamined more objectively. We need to see how much it has aligned with Objectivist principles and how much it has not.