When people say that Ayn Rand has become a cornerstone of the “conservative” political philosophy…and then you read quotes like this:
Today’s “conservatives” are futile, impotent and, culturally, dead. They have nothing to offer and can achieve nothing. They can only help to destroy intellectual standards, to disintegrate thought, to discredit capitalism, and to accelerate this country’s uncontested collapse into despair and dictatorship.- Ayn Rand
Or:
Today’s culture is dominated by the philosophy of mysticism (irrationalism)—altruism—collectivism, the base from which only statism can be derived; the statists (of any brand: communist, fascist or welfare) are merely cashing in on it—while the “conservatives” are scurrying to ride on the enemy’s premises and, somehow, to achieve political freedom by stealth. It can’t be done. - Ayn Rand
Considering she detested the conservatives, did not support them, and attack their philosophical premises, it leads me to realize that most people who speak of Ayn Rand at all are those who actually have not read any of her work, or maybe picked up a copy of Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, or Anthem and then somehow believed this is what it’s all about and that they hate it for some reason and then regurgitate anything said against her as truth and fact.
As I’ve said before, I am not particularly against people being against her or not liking her, but it’s one thing to disagree with her philosophy (and other Objectivists) and to do it in a intellectual fashion as good people are prone to do…it is another when you have non-intellectuals who have not read anything, who do not bother thinking, and throw out bromides other people write so they can second-hand some feigning of “wit” they think they might have.
“The man who despises himself tries to gain self-esteem from sexual adventures—which can’t be done, because sex is not the cause, but an effect and an expression of a man’s sense of his own value …
The men who think that wealth comes from material resources and has no intellectual root or meaning, are the men who think—for the same reason—that sex is a physical capacity which functions independently of one’s mind, choice or code of values. They think that your body creates a desire and makes a choice for you just about in some such way as if iron ore transformed itself into railroad rails of its own volition. Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a man’s sexual choice is the result and the sum of his fundamental convictions. Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself. No matter what corruption he’s taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which he cannot perform for any motive but his own enjoyment—just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity!—an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exaltation, only in the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire. It is an act that forces him to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body, and to accept his real ego as his standard of value. He will always be attracted to the woman who reflects his deepest vision of himself, the woman whose surrender permits him to experience—or to fake—a sense of self-esteem … . Love is our response to our highest values—and can be nothing else.
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Ayn Rand
The belief in God usually indicates a couple characteristics about the type of person you are dealing with. One is the the individual who does place something above their self, above their own ability of thinking, and of above their own perception of reality. It means that, even if they advocate for reason ninety percent of the time, this belief indicates that they do not fully trust reason as a means of identifying and integrating their perceptions, their conceptions, and their knowledge. The other is the individual who believes that duty is the only moral code one can have and that any action taken not of duty to others, family, friends, or God is either meaningless or immoral, which means that they believe in the subjugation of the individual to the collective, to others, to God.
It is often times that both of these types are in the same person. It is a fluid contradiction that can change perceptions on what they believe at any given moment, but that they will hold convictions that their knowledge can come from both reason and faith, that their moral code can both be self-chosen and pre-chosen, and that their self is important but only to meet the ends that God has chosen for them.
The belief in God is a philosophical destroyer, whether it is Christianity, Judaism, Islamism, Hinduism, Paganism, or Deism. The notion that a supernatural being beyond perception, conception, and life itself has the monopoly on your life and demands endless faith to negate your reason is not only far-fetched, but destructive to life itself. Note the countless wars fought in the name of some God and it’s will, the countless infringements on rights on the moral premise of God’s code, and the slaughtering that happens to “save” society. They can clamor all they want that it is “man’s evil nature” that uses “God” as a scapegoat for their evils, but when one’s philosophical premise is flawed, contradictory, and built on duty to the supernatural, what use does man have for the life he willfully gives to reach a supernatural world beyond his own life? If man’s nature is inherently evil, then how can any form of government, society, philosophy, or teaching alter the course that is being set for mankind as it now stands?
From the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights comes the webpage about the Principles of Free Society.
What makes a society free? What does it mean for an individual to be free—free to pursue his rights to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness? Just how free are we in the “land of the free and the home of the brave”? And most importantly, what must we now do to achieve the type of free society that our Founding Fathers envisioned? What did they miss that we must now fight for?
I decided to create an entirely new blog (that can be followed and follow back). This page is going to be purely about politics and philosophy. I invite everyone to follow. While this one has definitely been my popular blog, I hope I can gain a good following for An Objectivist Blog as well.
I hope to see you all over there. It will be all business, however. This one will remain a heavy mixture of everything.
“ [The Pragmatists] declared that philosophy must be practical and that practicality consists of dispensing with all absolute principles and standards—that there is no such thing as objective reality or permanent truth—that truth is that which works, and its validity can be judged only by its consequences—that no facts can be known with certainty in advance, and anything may be tried by rule-of-thumb—that reality is not firm, but fluid and “indeterminate,” that there is no such thing as a distinction between an external world and a consciousness (between the perceived and the perceiver), there is only an undifferentiated package-deal labeled “experience,” and whatever one wishes to be true, is true, whatever one wishes to exist, does exist, provided it works or makes one feel better. ”
Ayn Rand
“ If one accepts that nightmare in the name of morality, the infernal irony is that “duty” destroys morality. A deontological (duty-centered) theory of ethics confines moral principles to a list of prescribed “duties” and leaves the rest of man’s life without any moral guidance, cutting morality off from any application to the actual problems and concerns of man’s existence. Such matters as work, career, ambition, love, friendship, pleasure, happiness, values (insofar as they are not pursued as duties) are regarded by these theories as amoral, i.e., outside the province of morality. If so, then by what standard is a man to make his daily choices, or direct the course of his life? ”
Ayn Rand
“ God” as traditionally defined is a systematic contradiction of every valid metaphysical principle. The point is wider than just the Judeo-Christian concept of God. No argument will get you from this world to a supernatural world. No reason will lead you to a world contradicting this one. No method of inference will enable you to leap from existence to a “super-existence. ”
Leonard Peikoff
“It is obvious why the morality of altruism is a tribal phenomenon. Prehistorical men were physically unable to survive without clinging to a tribe for leadership and protection against other tribes. The cause of altruism’s perpetuation into civilized eras is not physical, but psycho-epistemological: the men of self-arrested, perceptual mentality are unable to survive without tribal leadership and “protection” against reality. The doctrine of self-sacrifice does not offend them: they have no sense of self or of personal value—they do not know what it is that they are asked to sacrifice—they have no firsthand inkling of such things as intellectual integrity, love of truth, personally chosen values, or a passionate dedication to an idea. When they hear injunctions against “selfishness,” they believe that what they must renounce is the brute, mindless whim-worship of a tribal lone wolf. But their leaders—the theoreticians of altruism—know better. Immanuel Kant knew it; John Dewey knew it; B. F. Skinner knows it; John Rawls knows it. Observe that it is not the mindless brute, but reason, intelligence, ability, merit, self-confidence, self-esteem that they are out to destroy.
Today, we are seeing a ghastly spectacle: a magnificent scientific civilization dominated by the morality of prehistorical savagery.
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Ayn Rand
“Do not make the mistake of the ignorant who think that an individualist is a man who says: “I’ll do as I please at everybody else’s expense.” An individualist is a man who recognizes the inalienable individual rights of man—his own and those of others.
An individualist is a man who says: “I will not run anyone’s life—nor let anyone run mine. I will not rule nor be ruled. I will not be a master nor a slave. I will not sacrifice myself to anyone—nor sacrifice anyone to myself.”
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Ayn Rand
“[Man] survives by means of man-made products, and … the source of man-made products is man’s intelligence. Intelligence is the ability to grasp the facts of reality and to deal with them long-range (i.e., conceptually). On the axiom of the primacy of existence, intelligence is man’s most precious attribute. But it has no place in a society ruled by the primacy of consciousness: it is such a society’s deadliest enemy.
Today, intelligence is neither recognized nor rewarded, but is being systematically extinguished in a growing flood of brazenly flaunted irrationality.
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Ayn Rand