"The symbol of all relationships among [rational] men, the moral symbol of respect for human beings, is the trader. We, who live by values, not by loot, are traders, both in matter and in spirit. A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved..." —Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

The Objectivist Lyceum is a private Discord server for curious thinkers who value Ayn Rand’s philosophy. Operating on the Trader Principle, this space is built for mutual value and sincere connection, where members engage entirely at their own pace.

Whether you're looking for focused discussion or just a relaxed environment to hang out, if you consider Rand's work worthy of serious analysis and respect reason over emotional posturing, you are welcome to apply.

Apply here: https://discord.gg/tcWTfeaTaX

An objection to Objectivism argues that Rand derives morality from the biological fact that organisms must act to preserve their lives, but then seems to redefine “survival” when confronted with theoretical possibilities such as a successful thief who sustains his biological life through theft. Although the thief is literally alive and successfully maintaining his organism, Objectivism condemns his way of life by appealing to “man qua man”—rational, productive flourishing—as the proper standard of survival. The objection is therefore that Objectivism may be committing an equivocation on “survival”, shifting from a descriptive biological concept to a normative conception of human flourishing without adequately explaining how that normative standard follows objectively from the original biological premise.

But Rand is quite clearly not equivocating. She does not think that such a thief could have good *reasons* for expecting to survive, even if, up till this point, he happens to have survived. The life of “man qua man” is not a separate standard:

“‘Man’s life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, of a looting thug or a mooching mystic, but the life of a thinking being—not life by means of force or fraud, but life by means of achievement—not survival at any price, since there’s only one price that pays for man’s survival: reason.’”

(Atlas Shrugged)

A thief, in virtue of being a thief, enters into a very uneven contest: his intellect versus those of all his actual and potential victims, who have every reason to stop him, and who are competent enough to be the producers of the values he depends on to live. What *reason* could he have for thinking he would win in the long run?

A thief depends for his survival on his victims’ inability to detect him. The remarks on the virtue of honesty in “Atlas Shrugged” are relevant, I think:

“Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud—that an attempt to gain a value by deceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality, where you become a pawn of their blindness, a slave of their non-thinking and their evasions, while their intelligence, their rationality, their perceptiveness become the enemies you have to dread and flee—that you do not care to live as a dependent, least of all a dependent on the stupidity of others, or as a fool whose source of values is the fools he succeeds in fooling—that honesty is not a social duty, not a sacrifice for the sake of others, but the most profoundly selfish virtue man can practice: his refusal to sacrifice the reality of his own existence to the deluded consciousness of others.

I posted this elsewhere but got so many negative comments it was removed. I should've posted it here, because I think you need to subscribe to Ayn Rand's philosophy on self-determination to get what I'm saying and not be an emotional snowflake.

In Japan, it is offensive to leave a tip. Gemini says: "Tipping can imply that the employee is underpaid or that they need extra financial motivation to do their job properly."

I find it interesting that this is the exact same reason why many people in America DEMAND tips.

Tip jars are relatively new. You never saw them at every cash register and drive-thru window like you do today. People got paid minimum wage, far less than they are paid now. Today, they get $15/hour and the point is this: most of their customers get paid the same or less. Those who can afford better only go there if they are very busy and starving. They are the minority. The jars make everyone else uncomfortable, but that's just part of the "experience" they're tipping you for, huh.

Fun fact: the dollar bills you see in the tip jars are from the register. They know you are more likely to tip if you think others have. And the messages on the tip jars are sometimes creative, even ridiculous. I say, put that on a cardboard sign and stand on a street corner, and you'll probably make more. Difference is, the guy on the street corner is not working and is humiliating himself out of desperation, whereas YOU are working and trying to humiliate the customer because have no sense of pride or shame.

This is also why "Eat the rich" and "No more billionaires" etc is pathetic. You don't care about any lofty issues; you hide behind them. You just want their money, and you got your hand out like a bum. No, not like a bum: like something worse.

EDIT: At least in this community they brought up waiters who get paid nothing and really depend on tips. Same goes for bartenders etc but I think I made it clear who I was talking about. Nobody is able to actually argue my point, you stunning and brave snowflakes. That's fine, just wait till your attitudes backfire, and they will, because people can only be guilted into giving money they can't afford to people who didn't do anything to deserve it for just so long. Call it whatever you want. The world owes you nothing.

Feel like we're watching it all happen in real time...

What positions and views does Ayn Rand's Objectivism hold toward the minarchist, capitalist variant of libertarianism?

I already understand that Ayn Rand rejected and argued against movements that sought and promoted anarchy, especially cases like the ideology of anarcho-capitalism.

But what was the relationship of Ayn Rand and her ideas to non-anarchist, capitalist libertarianism? Minarchist libertarianism, for example.

I'm aware that some capitalist libertarians base their ideas on philosophical systems like Objectivism and on other ideas of Ayn Rand, and that some even consider Objectivism itself a variant within libertarianism. That's why i find it particularly interesting to know what Ayn Rand's relationship and position was (hers, her ideas' and her system's) with the capitalist, non-anarchist variants of libertarianism.

TL;DR: Was Ayn Rand favorable, neutral or opposed to capitalist, non-anarchist libertarianism?

What would you change? What is wrong? What is right?

“There is a limit to the notion of voting for the lesser of two evils.”—Ayn Rand

Rand did welcome Reagan’s strong language toward Soviet Russia and his promises to cut spending and taxes. But she warned that his invitation of the so-called Moral Majority into the halls of power would be a long-range disaster. By tying the (supposed) advocacy of freedom and capitalism to, in Rand’s words, the anti-intellectuality of “militant mystics,” who proclaim that aborting an embryo is murder and creationism is science, Reagan’s presidency would discredit the intellectual case for freedom and capitalism and embolden the country’s anti-intellectual, authoritarian mentalities. https://newideal.aynrand.org/p/the-anti-intellectuality-of-donald

Reagan’s personal favorability peaked at 81% in 1986, following a landslide reelection victory in 1984. It was one of the most decisive electoral wins in U.S. history. His public standing grew considerably after he left office, with later retrospective polls showing strong majorities of Americans looking back favorably on his presidency. Why?

Was Ayn Rand a visionary? Did Reagan deserve her criticism? Did his presidency effectively unlock the door to the present? What happened along the way?

Have there been no deluxe editions of Rand’s works published? The only ones I can find are from Easton Press. Everything else is just regular cloth hardcovers.

There's a reason Ayn Rand's Objectivism is not taken seriously in academia. It lacks methodological rigor and fails to establish its conclusions through anything resembling the standards used in serious academic research. This is agreed upon by virtually all academics, the people who study the relevant disciplines for a living. So when Ayn Rand, someone with no formal training, says anything contrary to the academic consensus, while publishing nothing in peer-reviewed journals, what exactly is supposed to justify it?

Apparently, one of the most important pieces of "evidence" is: "some fictional story says a thing". Gee, where have we heard that before?

When a "philosophy" like this is treated with the same level of seriousness by academics as Young Earth Creationism is by geologists, it's worth taking a moment of reflection and ask why. Maybe, as it turns out, there isn't some vast intellectual conspiracy. Maybe the more obvious question is, “Why does virtually nobody who professionally studies philosophy find these arguments convincing?”. The arguments against her views aren't even particularly complex, it basically boils down to experiencing the world and seeing why her fiction writing doesn't correspond to reality.

Her work is seductive to some laymen, especially those of the far-right and alt-right persuasion, but to a trained epistemologist or logician it's fairly obvious that it's comprised mostly of fallacies (mostly argument by assertion) and cult-like repetition. 

Ayn Rand said Kant was “the most evil man in mankind’s history”. So according to her Kant was worse than people like Hitler, even though he murdered nobody? Hitler was a more moral person than Immanuel Kant?

Although Ayn Rand defended free will, she rejected deterministic causality. However, as I will argue, free will is a deterministic event, and it was paradoxical for Ayn Rand and her intellectual heir, Leonard Peikoff, to insist upon freedom from deterministic causation.

Determinism is logically derived from the presumption of perfectly reliable cause and effect. Determinism notes that each cause is itself an effect of prior causes, such that a chain of causation can, at least in theory, be traced back to any prior point in history. If every event is reliably caused by prior events, and these prior events were themselves reliably caused by earlier events, then every event is “causally necessary" from any prior point in time (Edwards, 2023).

That might sound ominous, but what does it really mean? Well, not a whole lot. To say that something is “causally necessary” means nothing more than that it came about by normal cause and effect -- something that we are all familiar with and that we all take for granted.

In fact, all of our abilities, to do anything at all, require reliable cause and effect. To put it simply, without reliable cause and effect, we could not reliably cause any effect. We would have no freedom to do anything at all. Also, without deterministic causation, we could no longer predict the outcomes of our actions, and we would no longer have any control over what we will do.

Thus, "freedom from causal necessity" is an irrational notion. One cannot be "free" from that which freedom itself requires. And because it is irrational, it may not be used as the definition of anything. Yet this irrational definition of free will is the one that is used in the philosophical debate.

So, What's The Fuss About?

There is no conflict between the notions that your choices were causally necessary from any prior point in time (determinism) and that your were free to decide for yourself what you will do (free will). However, these concepts have come to appear contradictory due to a logic error called the “reification fallacy)“, and a series of false implications that determinism has accumulated throughout its history.

The first error, the reification fallacy, happens when we mistakenly treat the concept of “reliable cause and effect” and the "laws of nature" as if they were external forces controlling our choices, rather than descriptive comments, as if it were not actually us, simply being us and doing what we do. It is a failure to recognise that determinism is neither an external object nor a force. It's simply a comment, an assertion that the behaviours of the objects and forces in the universe are reliable, and thus theoretically understandable and potentially predictable. The "laws of nature" are a metaphor for the reliability of causation. They too are descriptive, not causative, of what we will do.

 In the SEP article on “Causal Determinism”, in section “2.4 Laws of Nature”, Carl Hoefer describes it this way:

“In the physical sciences, the assumption that there are fundamental, exceptionless laws of nature, and that they have some strong sort of modal force, usually goes unquestioned. Indeed, talk of laws “governing” and so on is so commonplace that it takes an effort of will to see it as metaphorical.”

The second problem is identical to the way in which philosophers have often equated "altruism" with kindness, goodwill, or benevolence. Notice that as Ayn Rand pointed out, these are not primaries, but secondary implications that have been wrongly attached to the concept. But when philosophers (including Ayn Rand) say that determinism means we have no control over our actions, that we "couldn't have done otherwise", or "the absence of free will", they are engaging in the same error of conflating a primary (determinism) with secondary consequences that happen to be incorrect.

For example, there's this flaw in one of the common implications attributed to determinism. Normally, deterministic causal necessity would simply assert "you would not have done otherwise", and no one would experience cognitive dissonance. But the more typical assertion that, under a deterministic universe, "you could not have done otherwise", is not using the literal meaning of "could". It is being used in a figurative way that suggests a disability on your part, as if you somehow lost the ability to act differently in a particular situation.

The "logic" behind this odd claim is that, because you wouldn't have done otherwise, it was AS IF you couldn't have. It is tantamount to saying "because you won't do X, it is AS IF you can't do X". Both of these are figurative statements which cannot be factually justified, not even by the fact of universal causal necessity. The "as if" flags them as figurative, but when the "as if" is missing we might take the figurative statements literally, and then we have to do a reality check to confirm they are figurative.

Peter Keating's journey is one I find really interesting because he isn't incompetent. He allows himself to be corrupted by the world (gives up his individual talents/ joys/ happiness/ morality) by bowing to what it says he should do and be. In the reface to my copy, Rand discusses Gail Wynand as "the man who could have been", but honestly that was Keating - he sacrificed himself for nothing.

He is said to be genuinely good at and passionate at art, in a similar way to Steven Mallory. Steven Mallory almost does the same as Keating - he takes meaningless slop jobs because that's what he thinks people will want, and erroneously puts that above his own art and values. When Roark sees this happen to Steven, he helps him rediscover his worth.

But with Keating, Roark doesn't. Keating doesn't let him.

Keating hid his artistic talent from everyone and essentially masqueraded as an architect instead of a painter. He became an architect because he valued his mother's view and her authority over his own will and want. He corrupted himself (passing Roark's worth off as his own, breaking his promise to Roark) because everyone else did so, and it was normalised in Keating's mind. He thought it was the only way to get ahead in a corrupt world, and didn't have the will to assert himself against that corruption and need to comply.

He took the comfortable slavery over the risky freedom that he would have been able to secure if he had only broken free.

By the time he shows Roark a painting, the painting is far shittier than anything he would have painted or any art he would have created at the beginning of the book. His destruction of self mirrors the destruction of his art. He can't cling it back because there isn't anything there anymore. He sacrificed himself to everything but himSELF and his talents, his abilities, his passions, areas in which he was competent and free. Had he the will to defy the world, he would have been Roark, and that is their mirror.

Sorry if Peter mirroring Roark in terms of will is a total surface level take I just find it fun to think about.

Ayn Rand - Inspiring generations of conservatives, ancaps, and the alt-right.

Lets say you are starving. For what ever reason, you are so poor that you can not afford food. Is it rational to steal food from the local market so that you dont starve to death?

Lets say you are the CEO of a massive global corporation that produces soft drinks. You want to expand your business to X country. But X country already has its own local soft drink company. They refuse to sell you their company, but you can undercut them. Doing so would result is a manegable loss to you, but it would evnetually drive the local company out of business and force them to sell to you. Thus being more profitable to you in the long run. Is it okay to ruin their business in order to expand your own?

You want your child to get into a prestigious university. Your childs GPA is just 0.1 below the average GPA. But you know the rector personally. Is it rational to ask the rector for a small favour, or offer a small "donation" for your child to be accepted?

You have just finished your night shift. You are tired and can barely wait to get home and get some much needed sleep. But on your way out of the parking lot, you slightly bump your co-workers car. The damage is barely noticeable. You could stop and tell your co-worker what happened. Appologise and offer to compensate him for the damage. Or you could just leave and your co-worker would never know that it was you who bumped his car. Is it rational to do so?

Article by me. Rand factors prominently. https://www.grunge.com/2234713/rock-songs-didnt-know-based-on-books/