Life doesn't exist in a vacuum. You cannot treat life as some science experiment, whereby you reject some experiences in favour of others. Life without regard for the emotions or intuitions is inauthentic life. It is a life that is missing something. You, whether you like it or not, are an emotional being. You are driven by your emotions, desires, fears. Most of which is unconscious. These things are not something you can simply choose to switch off in the name of objectivism. Ask yourself why you are so inclined towards this position.

Life includes the irrational, the absurd the mysterious..

You cannot have only one side of a coin. Objectivism is an exercise in ignorance. — emancipate

What you're saying isn't making any sense. What you're saying is that because we have emotions we must obey our emotions. I think that's nonsense. Just because we feel something doesn't make it right. And just because we can't just "switch off" our emotions doesn't mean we shouldn't try to get them under control. We must use reason and evidence to determine the best course of action for our lives. Objectivism isn't ignorant. It's providing guidance for your life if you value it at all.

What you're saying isn't making any sense. What you're saying is that because we have emotions we must obey our emotions — AppLeo

I didn't say that you must obey emotions. However, I did say: "That's no life. That's an attempt to reduce from life the elements and qualities you dislike."

To put it extremely plainly, you are attempting to reduce elements from life that you dislike: emotions. Do you understand now? Yet you acknowledged the existence of emotions. So you must also acknowledge that a life whereby rationality attempts to shun emotions, is less than a full experience.

Which is indeed, to hammer the point home, an attempt to reject aspects of life that you dislike. Interestingly, this simply shows that emotions are the driving force behind your decisions. It is what causes you discomfort that you forbid.

Those who are self-centred tend to be ostracised.

That's what is happening in this very thread. Bit of a microcosm, really.


You can't see it. That's not surprising.

Rand simplifies things by pretending that everyone is a trader. That makes her appealing to those who have difficulty with change or variety, or who have a greater fear response than others and need a simple explanation to calm their anxiety. If everyone is a trader then I don't have to think about what it might be like to be a wheelchair user, or to be part of an ethnic minority, or to care about others rather than oneself.

But maybe I don't have the full truth, so I'm interested in why people would disagree with me. — AppLeo

You've been here a week, and haven't commented in any other thread. You are not here to be challenged. You just want to rave on about your own thinking.

I suspect this is not the first forum in which you have participated. How's it working out?

We mock what we don't understand. — AppLeo

Great clip!

Every man can decide for himself what the best of action is for happiness. He just needs to have logical reasons for it. — AppLeo

This is essentially how our minds work, we make decisions and then rationalize those decisions. Although we may have the ability to prime or condition ourselves towards particular choices/goals.

We mock what we don't understand. — AppLeo

Love who you will, but really, what do you see in that old hag?

Just because someone is disabled does not mean that they are entitled to a wheelchair system. — AppLeo

You are presently walking around on your own two feet, at this point; that could change abruptly. Unpredictable chance might intervene in your life at any moment, rendering you unable to walk. How? A car accident, a bullet aimed at somebody else, a fall, an accident playing sports, disease... It happens.

Why would we, why should we, employ government power to assist you in any way? We would use government power to assist you in your recovery because you are part of our community -- however much you may disapprove of your membership. You will be a more productive member of the community if you can move around freely than if you can not.

Besides, to whom would you go for charity? Certainly not your fellow objectivists! They are busy taking care of #1, and you, unable to trade with them, count for nothing.

OK, supposing that you don't get run over by a truck. Most of us don't. But if we are lucky, we get old. 40 years ago, progressive governments passed codes that resulted in urban and private spaces being more accommodating to people. Like curb cuts, for example. Ramps, automatic doors, elevators, bathrooms with sinks and toilets at the right height for children, adults, and people in wheelchairs, etc.

I'm lucky: I'm getting old. I still bicycle, but I regularly use public transit. I appreciate "kneeling buses" that drop the front corner of the bus 6 inches lower. It makes it much easier on aging knees to get on and off the bus, especially when carrying groceries. I appreciate that elevated and underground transit stations offer escalators and elevators to reach street level. So do tens of thousands of other people in this city who use the same busses and trains.

The city I live in (Minneapolis) requires everyone to shovel snow off their sidewalks. In a sense its just a trade: Everyone shoveling their own walk is traded for everybody being able to walk around easily. I don't know where you live, but unshoveled snow makes life difficult for everyone. True, it's a forced trade. If you don't shovel your walk, the city might come and do it for you at your much greater expense. Besides, shoveling snow is good for people. It's free exercise.

Fortunately for you, you do not live in society operated according to your own objectivist scheme.

What an embarrassing thread.

After his second post you can conclude it's not worth anyone's time.

It seems like a moral obligation to oppose ideas like Rand's and AppLeo's.

Survival without cooperation, ethics without normativity, morality without obligation, politics without groups, people without identities, freedom without the expansion of autonomy, justice without law or fairness, order without appeal. A recipe for a world bereft of anything resembling human life; yet still apparently a philosophy for living.

Henry Hazlitt, the journalist, was one of the few persons (perhaps the only one, I'm not sure) who could tolerate Ayn for any extended period of time. As far as I'm aware, she never broke with him and banished him from her Inner Circle as she did others. As to why he was able to abide by her sometimes vicious, sometimes puerile peculiarities over time, we may find an answer in his book The Wisdom of the Stoics (actually a pretty good read, I will note).

We may also find, in Stoicism, as I think Hazlitt did, a way of life which emphasizes reason and the intelligent regulation of the emotions (and especially the passions) and yet recognizes that following reason and understanding our nature as social beings, leads us to took upon Objectivism as a code of living little more than an oddly peevish and hectoring encouragement and justification of our desire to pleasure ourselves.

Why would we, why should we, employ government power to assist you in any way? We would use government power to assist you in your recovery because you are part of our community -- however much you may disapprove of your membership. You will be a more productive member of the community if you can move around freely than if you can not. — Bitter Crank

Because you can't get what you want through voluntary consent and hold the whole of the group more important than the individual.

Well I just don't understand why you're so upset about the world changing climate. So what the world rises a few degrees. — AppLeo

This is exactly what I was talking about. You're not an honest actor. You prove repeatedly that you haven't read up on these topics at all and yet you seem fine making such blaise and unjustified (and false) statements. A few degrees rising here equates to substantial jumps in artic and Antarctic temperatures, causing ice caps melting. That's an absurd amount of ice to melt, and not surprisingly leads to substantial sea level rise globally. Something you cannot stop at all. As I said before, even putting pointless fencing across the southern U.S. border is stupidly expensive and ineffective. Now scale trying to put up sea barriers around the entire landmass of all the continents of the world. Many island Nations are already pleading with the U.N. to help them right now because they're losing land.

And you know what happens as coastlines start disappearing? People move inland, flee really. There comes space shortages, resource shortages and a dramatic increase in violence because of general xenophobia, fights over what remains once the global population heada inland, and so on. And that's just from sea level rise, it doesn't even factor in the increase in natural disasters in both intensity and occurrence, mass species die offs and how parts of the world will become uninhabitable. I mean really, this is the kind of callousness and stupidity and reality divorcement that extreme right wingers like yourself breathe like the air. No one can debate with you because reality doesn't matter, only idealized scenarios divorced from the unfortunate restraint of externalities and actually engaging with other ideologies.

It seems like a moral obligation to oppose ideas like Rand's and AppLeo's. — Bitter Crank

I think the occasional Randians that turn up here do us all a great service. It provides a rare topic on which people that have been having blazing rows about other issues like abortion, materialism or proper nouns, can all agree and recover some of the mutual warmth that may have been lost in those other theatres.

Blessed be the peacemakers!

Why can no one on here see where I'm coming from or see the value of Ayn Rand's ideas?

The problem is we do see where you're coming from. You just don't see where we are coming from. Imagine yourself back in time before you attained your current political ideology. Someone comes up to you in the street and says "Disabled access ramps are a slippery slope to Naziism", no matter what you say to them they keep defending the position. What would you think of them, honestly?

Why can no one on here see where I'm coming from or see the value of Ayn Rand's ideas? — AppLeo

I read Rand when I was a kid--I was (and still am) a big Rush fan. 2112 came out when I was 13 years old. I was a pretty straightforward U.S. party-styled Libertarian (although on the minarchist side).

I read more of Rand's nonfiction--I was never a fan of realist/drama-only fiction (as opposed to "genre fiction"--fantasy, SciFi, horror, etc.), but I liked Anthem a lot (which of course is her SciFi/fantasy book). I haven't read Anthem in decades, but I wouldn't be surprised if I still liked it.

However, I wasn't only reading Rand--I had actually started reading other philosophy when I was 11, prior to reading any Rand. And from the start, I disagreed with Rand on quite a lot, especially her attempt to ground value judgments (ethics, aesthetics, etc.) in objectivity.

And then in the past 20 years, I've also moved away from being a U.S. party-styled Libertarian. I still have a lot of libertarian views/tendencies, but I don't agree with libertarianism on the economic/social services side of things any longer. I now consider myself a "libertarian socialist," although I'm a very idiosyncratic sort of libertarian socialist (idiosyncratic enough that I appear to be the only person in the world with my particular views re governmental ideals).

So I can understand Rand and her appeal, but she got a lot of stuff wrong (as has every other philosopher in my opinion).

From where I sit, three of four of the fundamental tenets of Objectivist philosophy don’t correlate to basic human nature. Simple as that.

Why can no one on here see where I'm coming from or see the value of Ayn Rand's ideas? — AppLeo

That fact is suggestive, isn't it?

I'm not going ever abandon Rand... If I ever disagree with her, it will be on very minor details. I agree with her fundamentally though and that will never change. — AppLeo

In other words, as an individual thinker, you are surplus to requirements, now and forever. Rand has done your thinking for you. All that's left is to spread the gospel and congregate with your fellow Randian "individuals" whose sole ideological purpose is to sing from the same hymnsheet.

Well, as you've reached the limits of your ability to say anything worthwhile here, we're done I guess.