Hi Michael:)
What part of Rand's thinking, specifically, was deleterious, in your opinion?
Personally, I think that ecstacy is something that approaches in degrees,
step by step. I'm much further than I was a year ago. I expect that the next
year will find me still further along that path. Step by step.
best wishes,
Mike Rael, MS

"michael r. brown" <foosi@...> wrote:
At 05:47 PM 4/27/2007, Christopher wrote:

> I observe from those schooled in Objectivism that they sometimes
discard human value from individuals who live in the realm of social
metaphysical (SM) thinking.

many objectivists, unfortunately, are completely oblivious of the
enormous extent to which humans are zoon politikon, as aristotle
wisely said. i have seen more objectivists crucify themselves and
their honest feelings out of fidelity to a terribly mistaken and
ignorant conception of independence than i can tell you, and it's
heartbreaking.

i remember an experiment of a few years back, and dearly wish i
remembered the source/citation. an algebraic problem was presented to
one group of people in one form, and the same problem was presented
to a second group in a very different form. to the first group it was
presented as a straightforward dependent-variables type problem; to
the second group it was presented in the form of a group of friends
trying to get into a club and the problem was expressed in the
relations of their ages.

need i tell you that the first group - both groups were quite average
folk - had difficulties with the problem, while in the second just
about everyone could solve the problem with ease?

now, what's especially interesting was the interpretation the
researchers gave to this: they hypothesized that it's proved of
evolutionary benefit for we tribal primates (yes, we are) to be
highly astute in things touching on tribal relations, and so issues
touching on people get preferred processing time.

now, my point isn't to argue the correctness of this one
long-ago-read interpretation - i wanted to set it down because it
rang deeply true to me, particularly to my inner experience, and set
me a little further apart from this aspect of objectivism.

i feel about rand as nietzsche did about socrates: i contend with
her. she had a great flame in her, but it was a troubled one and, for
all her astonishing insights (especially face to face), when it came
to other people she was often wrong, very wrong, dangerously wrong.
her ideas of what other people were feeling and what motivates other
people were in the realm of fantasy-land. she appeared to think that
if in her system emotion X had to be caused by Y, then all instances
of X were caused by Y! this, quite obviously, was her own brand of
rationalistic fallacy.

this unfortunate distortion affected even what she was most proud of
- her conception of the self. to begin with, the mechanics of the
ecstatically individual self don't add up. where does all this
ecstacy come from? she seems to have inferred it in male
archetype-figures - her very early private journal notes on the
hickman murder case make for surreal reading - this sociopath (who
appears to have been influenced by popular images of stirner and
nietzsche, probably c/o the popular h.l. mencken) aroused her
~23-year old to all kinds of projections - he had a wonderful, free
consciousness (!), the crowd in the courtroom hated him not because
he'd kidnapped and murdered a little girl but because he'd defied the
mob, etc. - this is just nonsense!

i regret to say it, but this part of rand's concept of independence
was purely reactive: she reacted against the forced christian
mysticism of Mother Russia and against the forced mystic collectivism
of Soviet Russia - but this self that she postulated was purely
fictional. it was a construct. and so many people, to this day, are
flagellating themselves because they cannot live up to a fiction.

it isn't my intent to insult her. quite the opposite. she has a very
deep place in my heart and mind and always will. i think some of her
best insights are incomparable, and often are completely unremarked,
scattered like gems in her interviews and asides. from what we
understand from n.b. she had a pile more, and it's tragic she never
better-developed them.

but her concept of the relation of the realized self and society? i'm
sorry to say, it's the bunk. no, we shouldn't derive our sense of
value from others. but having said that, we've not exhausted the
subject. we've not even begun. and "independence" of the randian
stripe often involves elaborate structures of rationalization and repressions.

ask yourself this: do the loyalest avatars of her philosophy seem
ecstatic and joyful to you?

as nietzsche said of his antagonist socrates: "i admire and revere
the great wisdom of socrates in everything he said - and did not
say." and of his even deeper antogonist plato: "we who have followed
him still light our lamps at the same source." (both quoted from memory.)






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