"[Rodney] Stark, [author of The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success,] a professor of social sciences at Baylor University, is
absolutely correct in his rare identification that a commitment to
reason was the fundamental cause of the spectacular progress achieved in
the West and nowhere else. But he is profoundly mistaken in ascribing
the basis of that commitment to Christianity." The Objective Standard
Ayn Rand, when asked by Playboy Magazine, "Has no religion, in your estimation, ever offered anything of constructive value to human life?", answered
"Qua religion, no -- in the sense of blind belief, belief
unsupported by, or contrary to, the facts of reality and the conclusions
of reason. Faith, as such, is extremely detrimental to human life: it
is the negation of reason."
In ascribing the victory of reason to that which is inimical to reason is ludicrous. Even Thomas Aquinas, the most rational of Christian theologians, was led to some irrational conclusions as a result of his faith.
Some heroic thinkers have tried to reconcile them. "[John] Locke emphasizes the
reasonableness of faith to such an extent that a religious doctrine’s
irrationality—conflict with itself or with known facts—is a sign that
it is unsound." Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
This alone would seem to indicate that reason wins out where faith is irrational; and where faith is rational, it must be reason, not faith, even when it involves matters traditionally ascribed to religion.
For the sake of "diversity" we allowed the concept of "ethnicity" to enter our cultures. While we have always valued differences here in the US--for example in Holland, Michigan the Dutch are so old fashioned that people from The Netherlands often travel here during the Tulip Festival to see the old traditions long forgotten in Holland--there is a difference between celebrating such things, and trading it up for racism, which we have done.
30 years ago, the author Ayn Rand saw this form of racism coming and described it:
"'Ethnicity' is an anti-concept, used as a disguise for the word “racism”—and it has no clearly definable meaning. . . . The term “ethnicity” stresses the traditional, rather than the physiological characteristics of a group, such as language—but physiology, i.e., race, is involved . . . . So the advocacy of “ethnicity,” means racism plus tradition—i.e., racism plus conformity—i.e., racism plus staleness." http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/ethnic…
For the sake of ethnicity, the left "celebrates" the dialect called Ebonics, and once advocated teaching it in schools! But by institutionalizing it as they did, they made it a target for educators who saw it, not as a valid dialect, but as as horrible lack of education, a failure by the educational system. Those educators didn't despise the uneducated, but despised the left for institutionalizing a failed system. However, those less educated than the educators looked at what the left advocated, and began hating the messenger--those who used Ebonics. Those who use Ebonics are now the targets of racists who say that the blacks and other poor who use Ebonics are inferior. This began when the left "celebrated" the diversity of the ethnic classes too poor to learn proper ( or at least good) English.
Because of our "celebration" of ethnicity, it has become taboo to question the many large and small Muslim communities in the US who refuse to learn English, communities we now find are organizing to send their youth to the Middle East for training in terrorist camps. This doesn't mean that even the majority of people living in those communities agree with terrorism--they do live in the US for other reasons, after all--but politically correct celebrations of ethnicity have not allowed us to properly question the motives of people who appear to be questionable citizens in those communities.
The same can be said for "ethnics" all over the globe. One reason for the Balkan War of the 1990s was "ethnic cleansing". That is what Hitler was doing, also.
"The Rwandan Genocide was the 1994 mass murder of an estimated 800,000 people....It was the culmination, largely influenced by the Belgian colonization which favored the Tutsi minority group because of their more 'European' appearance, of longstanding ethnic competition and tensions between the minority Tutsi, and the majority Hutu peoples." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_Gen…
It is not what the Israelis want to do to the Muslims; after all half of Jerusalem is controlled by Muslims, and Yassar Arafat had the chance to create a Palestinian nation during his life time, but at the last minute, after all the years of wars and negotiations, "the Old Warrior" changed his mind and said no, because the ethnic cleansing of the Jews from Palestine was more important to him.
So long as we celebrate "ethnicity" and not simply the cultural differences and traditions, racism will continue to escalate.
It has been asked often why man considers himself, over other animals, to be "the rational" animal, when he often doesn't act rational, and even commits acts of irrationality.
What we do with our intelligence is not the question. The answer is: Brutes abstract not. (Locke)
Because they cannot abstract, at least with any degree of mnemonics, the naturalist Loren Eiseley said that animals live in an "eternal present" from which they can never escape.
Ayn Rand described it as "range-of-the-moment consciousness", which explains the lack of mnemonic cognition. They can't teach their young what they've learned in a manner which gives the young something to build on. Whatever they learn, it stops rights there, even it is passed on to the entire tribe, like those macaques who learned to wash their food. This action was caught on camera by scientists who had been studying these particular groups of monkees and had never seen them do it until one accidentally dropped his food in the water-------and liked the result. So he continued to do it, and the other monkees mimmicked him and discovered they liked it too.
But that didn't lead to an abstraction. Nothing more was learned than that washing food tasted good. Perhaps in an act of evolution, only the monkees who wash their food will survive someday during a storm of biological pestilence upon their food. But it wasn't because they learned to make anti-biotics.
Man can learn to understand that because he washed his hands and his food, he prevented himself and others from getting sick. That knowledge was an abstraction, and it can be taught to others.
THAT is what makes man intelligent. That he foolishly or criminally uses his intelligence is a different question.
"Dictatorship and determinism," wrote Ayn Rand, "are reciprocally reinforcing corollaries: if one seeks to enslave men, one has to destroy their reliance on the validity of their own judgments and choices—if one believes that reason and volition are impotent, one has to accept the rule of force. “Representation Without Authorization,” The Ayn Rand Letter, I, 21, 1
Today, we see the spectacle of a federal government nearing totalitarian power over society. It seeks to re-create the nation in its own image--green, "socially just", ignoring the power of the individual and his right, both Constitutional and natural, to empower his own will; and it is doing so by giving us cause to relinquish our reliance on the validity of our own judgments and choices.
It is telling us that General Motors and Chrysler no longer know how to manage their own companies, because in a world where they naturally lost their share of the market to competition, they also lost money when a disaster struck the economy after government interference in that economy.
Of course, the government has interfered in the capitalist economy almost from the beginning of our nation's founding. But once it became large enough to be a real force, then the concept of capitalism was replaced by the concept of the "mixed" economy. But no one calls it that.
They still call it capitalism, and so when this mixed economy fails because the capitalists have lost control over their own capital, lost it to bureaucrats who were not seeking to protect capital but rather to protect special interests from the capitalists, then the bureaucrats could claim the capitalists were incompetent of maintaining a healthy economy. It isn't "socially just" to allow a few incompetent money mongers to destroy everything for everyone.
The real capitalists knew better, but the majority of people alive today believe that the government has proved "capitalism" is the special interest who must be shackled and told how to manage its own affairs; when the fact is, it has been shackled for so long it no longer knows how to do what it is supposed to do.
It is supposed to say no to government interference, relying on the validity of its own choices based on objective market values. No such values can exist when a mixed economy by definition is subjective.
And since the government can now make the claim that "health care" is inefficient and have that backed up by the health care industry climbing naked into bed with it, "the people" are beginning to believe that reason is impotent---when it is not governed.
When a new piece of electronics hits the market, it is always expensive at first. Look at the price of the IPhone, which now has dropped by more than 60%. The first real laptop computer for under $200 is being advertised heavily on TV by a major wireless internet carrier who sells that laptop.
So when a new piece of medical equipment, or new medicines, hit the market, they are always expensive. The difference is, there are not hundreds of thousands of hospitals rushing out to buy the new equipment, and the meds are not immediately prescribed to millions of people, so there is no reason for the price to come down.
Yet, everyone who gets sick and can be helped by the new equipment want it used on them, and they then complain about the cost of health care, and they equate it with health care itself. There is nothing wrong with health care. There is something wrong with everyone wanting the best and the most expensive procedures used on them, while complaining about the costs.
"Social justice" is a form of alleviating the effects of determinism, but it's all smoke and mirrors. Determinism doesn't exist, but if the philosophers can get you to believe it does, then they have power over everything and everyone, including government policy, because it is they who taught the policy wonks everything they know.
I answered a question for someone who asked about Ayn Rand's use of the word "altruism" and her vehement objection to it.
"I've heard people ranting and raving about Rand's ethics, and I must admit that I find it disappointing. She goes on about how "most philosophers" and the "history of philosophy" have favored altruism, but she provides no examples of who might fit these descriptions. I honestly can't think of a single philosopher who fits her idea of altruism, and it appears to me that her whole argument is rooted in a strawman argument: she is attacking an opponent who doesn't exist. How can a Rand fan defend her?"
ANSWER:
RAND: It is ideas that determine social trends, that create or destroy social systems. Therefore, the right ideas, the right philosophy, should be advocated and spread. The disasters of the modern world, including the destruction of capitalism, were caused by the altruist-collectivist philosophy. It is altruism that men should reject.
PLAYBOY: And how would you define altruism?
RAND: It is a moral system which holds that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the sole justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, value and virtue. This is the moral base of collectivism, of all dictatorships. In order to seek freedom and capitalism, men need a nonmystical, nonaltruistic, rational code of ethics -- a morality which holds that man is not a sacrificial animal, that he has the right to exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others, nor others to himself. In other words, what is desperately needed today is the ethics of Objectivism." http://www.ellensplace.net/ar_pboy.html
"Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others. These are not primaries, but consequences, which, in fact, altruism makes impossible. The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice—which means; self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction—which means: the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as a standard of the good.
"Do not hide behind such superficialities as whether you should or should not give a dime to a beggar. That is not the issue. The issue is whether you do or do not have the right to exist without giving him that dime.There are two moral questions which altruism lumps together into one “package-deal”: (1) What are values? (2) Who should be the beneficiary of values? Altruism substitutes the second for the first; it evades the task of defining a code of moral values, thus leaving man, in fact, without moral guidance.
"Altruism declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and any action taken for one’s own benefit is evil. Thus the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral value—and so long as that beneficiary is anybody other than oneself, anything goes." http://www.aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/al...
Altruism: (Alter: other) In general, the cult of benevolence; the opposite of Egoism (q.v.). Term coined by Comte and adopted in Britain by H. Spencer. 1. For Comte Altruism meant the discipline and eradication of self-centered desire, and a life devoted to the good of others; more particularly, selfless love and devotion to Society. In brief, it involved self-abnegating love...As thus understood, altruism involves a conscious opposition not only to egoism but also to the formal or theological pursuit of charity and to the atomic or individualistic social philosophy of 17th-18th century liberalism, of utilitarianism, and of French Ideology. Dictionary of Philosophy: Runes http://www.ditext.com/runes/a.html
Altruism is the opposite of egoism. The term “egoism” derives from “ego,” the Latin term for the English word “I”. “Egoism” should be distinguished from “egotism,” which means a psychological overvaluation of one’s own importance, or of one’s own activities. Rational egoism claims that the promotion of one’s own interests is always in accordance with reason. http://www.iep.utm.edu/e/egoism.htm#SH2a
THEN THERE WAS kant: By contrast, philosophers in the Kantian tradition conceive of altruism as a rational requirement on action. They claim there is no need to postulate a benevolent desire to explain altruism. Kant's initial argument appeals to his requirement that we may only act on principles that we can will as universal laws. Willing a world in which everyone has a policy of not helping others, while knowing that you will need help, would be inconsistent, so we must will to help those who are in need. Kant also argues for a duty of beneficence on the basis of the requirement of treating humanity as an end in itself. He argues that you must treat the ends of others as you treat your own ends. You take your own ends to be good and worth pursuing, so consistency requires that you treat the ends of others as good and worth pursuing. This suggests that we have reason to help not only those in need, but anyone we are in a position to help.http://www.bookrags.com/research/altruis...
The fallacy of altruism, or altruistic moralism (or moralistic altruism), is the sense that there is a general duty, or that morality as such requires us always, to act in the interest of others.http://www.friesian.com/moral-1.htm
OK, SO..............Because Rand was a rational egoist, and because altruism is defined as the opposite of egoism, anything not egoism is altruism. Collectivism of any sort, whether Marxism, Obama-ism (redistribution of wealth), communism, socialism, etc is thus altruistic, especially since Comte DEFINED it as being anti-egoistic, by making it "self abnegating love," whatever that is. An egoist would say you cannot love if you abnegate your personality.
BUT DO NOT SAY IT DOES NOT EXIST, as many people claim. The questioner says it is a "strawman" argument. Others say no such thing as altruism can actually exist because no one can live by its requirements.
There are plenty of people out there who are trying to make it work. This web site http://www.altruists.org/about/altruism/ even calls itself "Re-Establishing Altruism As A Viable Social Norm", as if it ever was the norm.
In the sense that anything which is NOT rational egoism is collectivism is altruism, that is how Rand meant it. You can listen to a half hour debate about it that Rand had on a radio show here http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?p...
It is in the DEFINITION of altruism as "a theory of conduct by which only actions having for their object the happiness of others possess a moral value", that Rand objected.
Yet, there are those who believe that in order to produce happiness in one's own being, one MUST take actions which have as their object the happiness of others.
"Consider that it takes about 1,000 wind turbines, occupying tens of thousands of acres, to produce as much electricity as just one medium-sized, coal-fired power plant. And that's if the wind is blowing: the intermittency of wind wreaks havoc on electricity grids, which need a stable flow of power, thus requiring expensive, redundant backup capacity or an unbuilt, unproven "smart grid."
"Or consider the "promise" of solar. Two projects in development will cover 12.5 square miles of central California withsolar cells in the hope of generating about 800 megawatts of power (as much as one large coal-fired plant). But that power output will only be achieved when the sun is shining brightly--around noon on sunny days; the actual output will be less than a third that amount. And the electricity will cost more than market price, even with thel ife-support of federal subsidies that keeps the solar industry going. The major factor driving the project is not the promise of abundant power but California's state quota requiring 20 percent "renewable" electricity by 2010.
"There is a reason why less than 2 percent of the world's energy currently comes from "renewable" sources such as wind and solar--the very sources that are supposedly going to power the new green economy: despite billions of dollars in government subsidies, funding decades of research, they have not proven themselves to be practical sources of energy. Indeed, without government mandates forcing their adoption in most Western countries, their high cost would make them even less prevalent.
"Will a green energy industry be an engine of economic growth? Many want us to think so, including our new President. Apparently a booming green economy with millions of new jobs is just around the corner. All we need is the right mix of government "incentives."
"These include a huge (de facto) tax on carbon emissions imposed through a cap-and-trade regulatory scheme, as well as huge government subsidies for "renewable," carbon-free sources. The hope is that these government sticks and carrots will turn today's pitiful "green energy" industry, which produces an insignificant fraction of American energy, into a source of abundant, affordable energy that can replace today's fossil-fuel-dominated industry. This view is a fantasy--one that could devastate America's economy. The reality is that "green energy" is at best a sophisticated make-work program. [condensed from the Ayn Rand Institute]
President Obama guarantees "to inflict untold damage on his own country and many others, on the basis of claims so demonstrably fallacious that they amount to a string of self-deluding lies...
"Mr Obama begins by saying that "the science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear". "Sea levels," he claims, "are rising, coastlines are shrinking, we've seen record drought, spreading famine and storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane season."
"Delegates from 190 countries met in Poznan, Poland to pave the way for this year's UN conference in Copenhagen at which the world will agree on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol on climate change," heard Mr. Obama speak these words.
"Mr Obama has again been taken in over hurricanes. Despite a recent press release from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration claiming that 2008's North Atlantic hurricane season "set records", even its own release later admits that it only tied as "the fifth most active" since 1944. NOAA's own graphs show hurricane activity higher in the 1950s than recently. A recent Florida State University study of tropical cyclone activity across the world (see the Watts Up With That? website) shows a steady reduction over the past four years.
"Alarming though it may be that the next US President should have fallen for all this claptrap, much more worrying is what he proposes to do on the basis of such grotesque misinformation. For a start he plans to introduce a "federal cap and trade system", a massive "carbon tax", designed to reduce America's CO2 emissions "to their 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce them an additional 80 per cent by 2050". Such a target, which would put America ahead of any other country in the world, could only be achieved by closing down a large part of the US economy.
"Mr Obama floats off still further from reality when he proposes spending $15 billion a year to encourage "clean energy" sources, such as thousands more wind turbines. He is clearly unaware that wind energy is so hopelessly ineffective that the 10,000 turbines America already has, representing "18 gigawatts of installed capacity", only generate 4.5GW of power, less than that supplied by a single giant coal-fired power station.
"He talks blithely of allowing only "clean" coal-fired power plants, using "carbon capture" - burying the CO2 in holes in the ground - which would double the price of electricity, but the technology for which hasn't even yet been developed. He then babbles on about "generating five million new green jobs". This will presumably consist of hiring millions of Americans to generate power by running around on treadmills, to replace all those "dirty" coal-fired power stations which currently supply the US with half its electricity." [condensed from Telegraph.co.uk]
McCain-Feingold Act tells you when when no one is allowed to speak or some groups aren't allowed to speak
Finally, someone on TV understands the nature of Objectivism, and has been bringing speakers to his program from the Ayn Rand Institute. Its director has been on the show. Last week Glen Beck had Onkar Ghate, a senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute.
Condensed transcript from the program, Feb. 20, 2009
Tonight, we have a very special edition of "The Glenn Beck" program.
We're going to play out some of the worst-case scenarios with some of the greatest minds around, asking ourselves one simple question: What if?
And tonight, we're going to think it out with the help of former CIA agents, some of the best money people around, military analysts, survival experts. We're going to try to show you how to prepare for the worst while everybody else is sitting back and hoping for the best. And I want you to know — everybody involved in this show is also hoping for the best.
In mid-January, the government "war-gamed" a scenario where American cities were subjected to a coordinated two-day attack. Why? Are they saying that an attack is imminent like that? No. They just understand that planning for the unthinkable will allow them to act rationally while everybody else is panicking.
The truth is — that you are the defender of liberty. It's not the government. It's not an army or anybody else. It's you. This is your country.
So, ask yourself: What kind of sentry do you want to be as you stand there at the gate?
We're making decisions right now, and I don't think we're really thinking them through. Let that not happen to us. Let's make the unthinkable thinkable for 60 minutes.
Onkar, tell me a little bit about what you see happening with freedom of speech in a scenario like this. Does the government need to keep people muted in a situation where things have really fallen apart?
GHATE Yes, I think so. In this kind of night player scenario that you're envisioning, what would happen is that the government wouldn't tolerate any kind of objections and dissent. And what would happen is, that there would be a clampdown on free speech, particularly, I think, political speech.
And we've seen precursors of that with, say, McCain-Feingold Act which is an assault on the First Amendment rights which tells people, you can't spend your money to advocate for views you want. It tells you when you can do it. It puts periods when no one is allowed to speak or some groups aren't allowed to speak and we would see a real extension of that so that the people in political power can hold on to their power, to get a real collapse in a dictatorship, it's a one-party rule.
But to get that, you really have to silence other people, and that — and you can only do that by infringing on their free speech rights and making a mockery of the First Amendment.
BECK: All right. I'm not sure if you — and I don't mean to insult you by any stretch of imagination, we just haven't had a chance to talk beforehand. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the history of Woodrow Wilson or Franklin, but — or even Truman. We've done this before, and it was always wrapped in Uncle Sam and the flag. We have clamped down on people. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, back in the early 1900s, we had 150,000 people that were political prisoners that were in jail for speaking out against World War I.
So, this isn't a crazy scenario.
GHATE: No, I don't think it is.
BECK: This has happened before. What would be the signs, the road signs along the road to 2014 that we should be aware of?
GHATE: I think extensions of McCain-Feingold, extensions of — if there are some political speeches that is OK and other speeches isn't, and it's the government that gets to decide which is which. So, if we start seeing as we've seen stimulus czars, regulatory czars, if we start seeing speech czars, we're down the road to a real dictatorship.
BECK: OK.
GHATE: And that would be really scary.
Onkar Ghate's comments Copyright (c) 2009 Ayn Rand(R) Institute. All rights reserved.
If love is just chemical then if i reproduce the same chemical in someones brain can I literally make them fall in love with anybody?
A: That is the "deterministic" (or worse, the "fatalistic") explanation of emotions. Emotions, consciousness, soul, free will, conscience, etc are not "just" chemicals or snynapses or whatever science declares it to be.
Science is not wrong, except in its metaphysical classification of these events as being "just" chemical, or "merely" bio-physiology at work.
Metaphysics is the art of constructing explanations for everything that exists. For example, the description of a "table" is metaphysical, while the table itself is physical. Every word except personal pro-nouns, in every language, represents a metaphysical concept. Deterministic science dismisses the metaphysical description of conscious and bio-physiological events as anything more than the stark scientific (physics) description.
However, "love" and all the rest of that is obviously much more than the sum of its total bio-physiological activity. It has metaphysical meaning for all of us that encompasses not only the recognition that love is a reaction to something, but that since we don't all love the same things, there must be a relation between the bio-physiology and the metaphysics we each, individually, hold.
Your metaphysics may be somewhat or extremely different than mine, and different from someone else. Sometimes we do not even recognize the metaphysics of another person; in other words, he and we seem to be talking about two different things when in fact we are talking about two different things--his metaphysical evaluation describes "love" as bio-physiology, while yours and mine describes it as "a pleasurable emotion that gives us confirmation that something is important enough to value beyond "like."
Since love is an individual response by one person to the value system he/she subscribes to, it would be impossible to make someone love what you want them to love through the introduction of a "love chemical"--at least not without inciting within them a neurosis having to do with the conflict between what you have forced them to love, and what they actually value enough to love
What is this moment call "now?"?
Epistemologically, it is the only moment in existence. The old play on words is correct: "Yesterday is gone, and tomorrow will never come."
Time is a construct of the mind that allows it to string together all the moments of "now" into something cohesive and having the charcteristic of endlessness, yet because of the construct we can remember prior moments of now.
"Time is a measurement of motion; as such, it is a type of relationship. Time applies only within the universe, when you define a standard—such as the motion of the earth around the sun. If you take that as a unit, you can say: 'This person has a certain relationship to that motion; he has existed for three revolutions; he is three years old.' But when you get to the universe as a whole, obviously no standard is applicable. You cannot get outside the universe. The universe is eternal in the literal sense: non-temporal, out of time." Leonard Peikoff, “The Philosophy of Objectivism” lecture series (1976), question period, Lecture 2
"The idea of an infinitely small amount of length or temporal duration has validity only as a mathematical device useful for making certain calculations, not as a description of components of reality. Reality does not contain either points or instants (in the mathematical sense)." Harry Binswanger “Q & A Department: Identity and Motion,” The Objectivist Forum, Dec. 1981, 13.
The brain has a "clock speed", which works virtually the same way as a computer. It has been estimated that our minds can absorb approximately 10 "moments" each second, and it is these moments we string together for the illusion that time is continuous (whereas it is actually motion that is continuous.) Time, as stated above, is a relationship to motion. But we do not comprehend each of those 10 moments each second; sometimes we don't even comprehend "seconds" because when something extraordinary or at least eventful and consciousness-filling happens, we say "time flies." An hour can go by in what feels like minutes.So the moment we call now is only the moment you are in and only when you realize you are in it. It can be as short as your mind can comprehend, or as long as your mind is consumed in an interest.
What constitutes beauty in your eyes?
When we say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, we are talking about metaphysical values. Generally, our species appreciates that beautiful sunset, a great play or movie, a job well done, heros, birth, and the "eternal" over the "transient" because of metaphysical value judgments we make.
Metaphysics, "in the formation of a sense of life, [which has since come to be called a "world view"] is the term important. It is a concept that belongs to the realm of values, since it implies an answer to the question: Important—to whom? Yet its meaning is different from that of moral values. Important does not necessarily mean 'good.' It means 'a quality, character or standing such as to entitle to attention or consideration' (The American College Dictionary).
“Important—in its essential meaning, as distinguished from its more limited and superficial uses—is a metaphysical term. It pertains to that aspect of metaphysics which serves as a bridge between metaphysics and ethics: to a fundamental view of man’s nature."
Is the universe intelligible to man, or unintelligible and unknowable? Can man find happiness on earth, or is he doomed to frustration and despair? Does man have the power of choice, the power to choose his goals and to achieve them, the power to direct the course of his life—or is he the helpless plaything of forces beyond his control, which determine his fate? Is man, by nature, to be valued as good, or to be despised as evil?" Ayn Rand, various sources http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/metaph...
The strikers will be only those with ethics because they are the ones with the most to lose. They are at the top of the economic food chain.
In an op-ed in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Robert P. Murphy, Ph.D., PRI senior fellow in Business and Economic Studies, argues [in a report] that vast government spending is not a cure for the U.S. recession. Dr. Murphy explains that the true purpose of an economic system isn’t to “create jobs” or channel a particular number of green pieces of paper into everyone’s wallet on payday, but that workers are employed productively, so that they take scarce resources and transform them into goods and services that consumers value.
“The price of limiting economic freedom is real, but not always apparent or easily understood by [ ] by lawmakers,” said Lawrence J. McQuillan, Ph.D., co-author of the report and director of Business and Economic Studies at PRI." PRI
It is not easily understood by business itself, apparently. After taking government money that essentially made government an invested stockholder, the bonus-paying, romper-room, jet-buying antics of those businesses have forced government to cap the pay of future recipients.
"Many of us who know [Ayn] Rand's work," wrote Stephen Moore in an op-ed, "have noticed that with each passing week, and with each successive bailout plan and economic-stimulus scheme out of Washington, our current politicians are committing the very acts of economic lunacy that Atlas Shrugged parodied in 1957, when this 1,000+ page novel was first published and became an instant hit." [emphasis added]
"For the uninitiated," Moore continues, "the moral of the story is simply this: Politicians invariably respond to crises -- that in most cases they themselves created -- by spawning new government programs, laws and regulations. These, in turn, generate more havoc and poverty, which inspires the politicians to create more programs . . . and the downward spiral repeats itself until the productive sectors of the economy collapse under the collective weight of taxes and other burdens imposed in the name of fairness, equality and do-goodism."
Not only did the politicians, using the code phrases "for the public good," "the redistribution of wealth," and others, create a downward spiral, the very spiral we are on now, but they created two new classes of Americans: the looters and the strikers.
The looters were those who, like the corporations who are now taking government money, took government money. Looters were also people as individuals who fed off this constant stream of government handouts to the needy. The government itself was the prime looter, because it took from those who produced the wealth in order to give to those who sucked the life out the productive workers.
The strikers were those who refused to play the game any longer. At first they were only the top executives of major companies, and only those who had ethics. Those who had no ethics, like the bank execs we have now who take multi-million dollar bonuses after wrecking their companys, had no reason to go on strike. If they played the game right, they would still eventually get their money.
In Atlas Shrugged, the main visable protaganist is a woman who runs the nation's major railroad, at a time in our history when railroads played a much larger role in the economy. The train could be said to be a metaphor for what happens in the plot, because the looters' train is out of control running downhill with no breaks.
The strikers are only those with ethics because they are the ones with the most to lose. The are at the top of the economic food chain. Everyone below them feeds off them. When they begin to strike, disappearing apparently from the face of the earth, untraceable, unreachable, then the execs without ethics are stuck at the top of the economic food chain.
No one has yet become a striker that I know of. But its going to happen. It happened in the great "Brain Drain"* from England in the 1960's, when the brains moved to freer nations. "The term was coined by the Royal Society to describe the emigration of "scientists and technologists" to North America from post-war Europe." [* see [1] [2] [3]]
But in Atlas Shrugged, some of the "brains" the keep the economy afloat are literally invited to strike, and are given a safe haven. Some, who don't know of this safe haven, strike on their own by retiring without explanation.
The moral of this blog is to point out that what is about to happen to this country and to the world, as long and as far as this bail-out is continued, will cause everything in the novel to come to fruition.
The only means of rescuing the world from the abomination of spending-stimulus packages, especially those filled with "social" programs, is to take the advice of the 200+ economists who disagree with President Obama and with the force behind the strike in the novel: "Get Out Of Our Way!"
The inescapable necessity of choice is the hand that nature dealt to mankind.
"Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice." *
That sounds like determinism. Is it?
Determinism is a form of reductionism, "a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents.[1] This can be said of objects, phenomena, explanations, theories, and meanings." [see [1]]
"Reductionists are those who take one theory or phenomenon to be reducible to some other theory or phenomenon. [ ] The type of reductionism that is currently of most interest in metaphysics and philosophy of mind involves the claim that all sciences are reducible to physics. This is usually taken to entail that all phenomena (including mental phenomena like consciousness) are identical to physical phenomena." Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
"Our bodies and minds are shaped in their entirety by conditions that precede us and surround us," writes Tom Clark, using those reductionist metaphysics.
While I would say that "conditions that preced us and surround us" do indeed eliminate our "power to escape the necessity of choice," I would disagree with Clark's following conclusion that because of that necessity of having to choose, "we can no longer take or assign ultimate credit or blame for what we do."
Men and women used to take that credit or blame, in other times, when the morals of humans seemed to be greater in personal importance. People were never heard to whine, "It wasn't my fault," except for those who were subsequently sneered at or even ostracized by society for such remarks.
The idea that man has no power to escape the necessity of choice creates the responsibility for any decisions he then chooses to make, and there is nowhere for them to be placed except squarely on the moral shoulders of the decision-maker. Certainly the blame cannot be placed on the inescapable necessity of choice.
It is the inescapable necessity of choice that gives meaning to life. Without choice, life--if it could exist--would exist as a stagnant, unthinking, unknowing blob of protoplasm that could not even act with biological necessity; after all, even biological necessity is created by inescapable evolutionary ends. Evolutionary ends are the "choices" nature makes in the life-and-death attempt to keep a species adaptably alive.
The inescapable necessity of choice is the hand that nature dealt to mankind. That makes the inescapability of moral choice metaphysically natural. It also draws the line between being human animals and a non-human animals. The inescapablility of moral choice is a metaphorical shining crown on man's head when he chooses to take "ultimate responsibility and blame" for his actions.
It defines the desire to mitigate blame and to diminish credit for proper choices as the epistemology of whining.
* from John Galt's Speech; Atlas Shrugged; Ayn Rand
Natural economics do not require the coercion and the gun-in-hand tactics of collectivism, nor is it up to the government to "allow" naturalism, but only to prevent unnatural economic acts.
Many times over the course of the lifespan of this blog, I have written about capitalism as the rational economics of metaphysical naturalism.
Ben Bernanke, former Chairman of the Fed, co-authored a syllabus called Principles of Economics, while teaching at Princeton. The authors do not describe "economic naturalism" as that which would apply to the nature of man if man was uncoerced by any policy other than the free, natural market.
They describe it, instead as "the ability to see economic principles in the everyday details of life as well as national and international events." Why does the small business woman in Minnesota who operates as though she were in a truly free marketplace need to see international "events" as part of her naturalistic view of business?
It was my understanding that all economists who are not concerned merely with the "big macro-economic picture" will understand that that "big picture" is made up of "principles in the everyday details of life." Any economist who only looks at the macro-economics of "international events" is a fool.
But what details of what life? As it has been said that we are already a socialist nation, the "details of life" are going to be those of a civilization living under the rules of socialism.
That, in short, has nothing to do with "naturalism" in economics. Natural economics do not require the coercion and the gun-in-hand tactics of collectivism. This may be the reason that former Treasury Secretarys Henry Paulson and Bernanke, and President Bush, put forward on September 18, 2008, a brief, three-page proposal without details about how the program would be overseen.
Bernanke, and obviously Paulson, are of that school of economics that does not recognize a natural market, not even after Bernanke defined what it means to him; in that three page proposal there were no "details of life." There were no details at all.
He and Paulson spent days in front of Congress conceding problems with the plan while at the same championing it as the solution to the nation's current financial problems. It has not been the solution. We are now looking at a boondogle spending bill of well over $800 billion.
"Try acting as a laissez-faire capitalist," I wrote here. "It will get you a prison sentence for ignoring all the laws that prevent it."
Acting as though the laws did not exist is not coercive. It twists no one's arm to keep your prices low.
It is, however, proper to make laws about capitalism that prevent such things as lowering prices below costs to put competitors out of business, or about the taking of public bail-out money then spending it on bonuses for the very people who took the bail-out. Legislating what are improper ethics is not the reverse position of allowing sound business practices that some people with certaain ideologies don't like. The government has no business and no right to allow that which is non-coercive because it is, instead, the right of the people to do anything they please that is not coercive, i.e., that does not require a gun, whether it be a literal or a virtual gun.
It is not up to the the government to allow anything. It is up to the government only to prevent that which is unlawful, and it is not up to the government to make unlawful those things which are not coercive. Naturalistic economics as would exist without any government interference is naturalistic economics and is therefore non-coercive.
Economic naturalism is the state of any economy that is not controlled by the governement, nor by any means of coercion--or worse--used by businesses or individuals in that economy.
Today, Americans are walking with eyes wide open into the kinds of scenarios that could have come right out of "Atlas Shrugged". As I speak, a pay cap is being legislated for businesses who take government bail-outs that never should have been paid in the first place but which will continue to be standard practice for many years to come. This will cause the best of our business leaders to get out.
The Governor of my state, Michigan, has vowed to cap the prices of health care costs. This will only drive doctors out of the state. Then the only way to prevent that is to make it illegal for doctors to leave the state because they have taken government money in the form of Medicaid or Medicare or some other plan.
Take WalMart as the biggest literal example of a business that every local government tries to control in some way, in the belief that WalMart is the big bad economic wolf who sets out to destroy local small businesses, that will cause traffic problems, and look like an eyesore. Sam Walton could have written these words, and if he had, and if he was alive today, he might become one of the "deserters" of the world of "Atlas Shrugged":
"I do not want my attitude to be misunderstood. I shall be glad to state it for the record...I work for nothing but my own profit--which I make by selling a product they need to men who are willing and able to buy it. It do not produce it for their benefit at the expense of mine, and they do not buy it for my benefit at the expense of theirs; --and I am proud of every penny that I have earned in this manner. Do I wish to pay my workers more than their services are worth to me? I do not. Do I wish to sell my product for less than my customers are willing to pay me? I do not. Do I wish to sellit at a loss or give it away? I do not. If this is evil, do whatever you please about me, according to whatever stnadards you hold. These are mine." Hank Reardon, industrialist in Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand, at his trial for ignoring laws that prevented doing business as his standard told him he ought to. [condensed]
Mr. Dennett is an interesting figure because he does not argue that man is not by nature deterministic, but he certainly gives it new meaning, and his ideas appear alongside the names of others who may--or may not, there are so many of them--see the nature of man as more fatalistic (see below.) Some may even see us as less deterministic than Dennett; I couldn't begin to list the view of all the other people he appears beside if I had a year to do it. Which books, which lectures, which interviews did those others write or give in which their idea of man's determinism is defined?
The field of scientific naturalism leaves the door open to so many who "do not think alike on many action issues, and beyond the other principles [listed] below, it is not the movement’s desire to press for conformity." [emphasis added] The Brights
This lack of conformity is the reason that this Academy Blogger holds as a principle that free will and the soul exist, not as supernatural entities, but as a collection of Man's physiological actions which he then identifies as having a common "thread." This thread is a "unit" which is a "bridge between metaphysics and epistemology [and are] viewed by a consciousness in certain existing relationships." [emphasis in the original] Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology; Ayn Rand
Thus, man is able to naturalistically use his conscious powers to identify common elements between certain relationships of emotion and intellect, relationships which theists attribute to the supernatural, but which a metaphysical naturalist identifies as merely part of the process of the life of a man. He groups together these things into a relationship which he gives the name "soul."
Scientific naturalists refuse to identify these relationships as having the name "soul" because it is so tied through history with the theist notion of supernaturalism. But that is the theist's mistake; the scientific naturalist's mistake is in not recognizing the correct title of the relationship while denying the origins given to it by theists.
Properly identifying those relationships as "internal experience," someone mockingly wrote: "Pity us poor rational dualists. We have internal experience and yet no beliefs about God or Afterlife. We have more to lose. What I wonder: Are you absolutist non-dualists pretending not to have experience in order to soften the terror of your own deaths?"
I wonder if it is precisely this "internal experience," this "consciousness [of] certain existing relationships," that most naturalists fear?
Perhaps the "absolutist non-dualist" ideas he was considering were these:
"More and more, biology and neuroscience show that the brain and body do everything that the soul was supposed to do."[1]
"If you don’t believe in anything supernatural – gods, ghosts, immaterial souls and spirits – then you subscribe to naturalism, the idea that nature is all there is."[2]
"...there’s no evidence for immaterial souls..."[3]
"This means to see ourselves as completely physical, embodied, caused creatures, linked to the world in each and every respect, without souls..."
And: " The death of God up there is now followed by death of the “little god” in here: the soul..."
And: "...in dropping the soul and free will we get rid of the fictional supernatural agency that blocks true explanations of phenomena. This gives us power."[4]
The last bullet quote in [4] demonstrates how getting rid of the word "soul" itself somehow gives scientific naturalists their "power" to explain everything by physiology. But notice that while the author of all those quotations refuses to admit to a "non-material" soul, he is referring to something about "internal experience," identified as metaphysical. Metaphysics by definition is not material, so the author is denying the soul as "internal experiences" to which we give the metaphysical name "soul," even while metaphysical naturalism keeps supernaturalism out of it. To say something is "metaphysical" is not to say it is supernatural.
The author of those quotes, Tom Clark, runs a pair of websites devoted to debunking the metaphysics of the soul and of free will. Daniel Dennett's name appears on Clark's sites, alongside those many other names who may or may not agree with either Clark or Dennett, who here appear to be disagreeing each with the other.
Last week, I wrote, "...because the brain is specifically an animal organ, a determinist would think that his thoughts are actions caused by specific psychical or physical conditions." This is what Clark would have us believe.
And, in fact, this view is true, if you do not figure fatalism into the mix. "Fatalism is the view that we are powerless to do anything other than what we actually do." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Clark would have us believe in this powerlessness. The argument runs that if you could go back in time and all other things remained the same, would a man have the free (libertarian) will to do differently than he did the first time? To answer no is fatalism, because it denies the ability to do something other than what one did do. To say "given that all other things remain the same," is to say "of course he could do nothing differently; nothing has changed." That is a not a fair test of free will, to change nothing, yet expect that free will would do something different anyway. Change one thing, then ask if free will would act differently, or if it would choose the same.
The difference between the determinism of scientific naturalism and the non-determinism of metaphysical naturalism is in this case metaphysics. The determinist has us believing that the brain is nothing but "conditioning," nothing but physiological actions of the "sensory cortex [ ] activated [ ] using corticocortical and corticothalamic fibers." Bernard J. Baars and Katherine McGovern
Such determinists do not deny that we have choices. In an interview in Reason magazine online, Daniel Dennett, appearing to contradict much of what his fellow authors say, said this:
"Determinism is the idea that what you do depends. What happens depends on what you do, what you do depends on what you know, what you know depends on what you're caused to know, and so forth -- but still, what you do matters. There's a big difference between that and fatalism. Fatalism is determinism with you left out."
Thank goodness someone sees the metaphysical relationships that determine the existence of "me, myself, and I." The way scientific naturalism is headed, someone, someday, is going to declare that those entities are also supernatural, and therefore do not exist.
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