"She liked smoke filled rooms where ideas fought one another and where sometimes ideas died"
Ah, that explains everything; her ideas are all zombies.
Zen's Rant on Ayn Rand - intelligent responses appreciated
by Dogpatch 70 Replies latest forum announcements
-
SixofNine
-
DaCheech
just keep on snickering with your useless brains.
hypocrites!
-
DaCheech
Union mentality = no brains
look at all the cops out there!
x-Law Enforcement officer who now teaches Team Leader
-
Terry
The village collective in Early America would fine you for not going to church on Sunday.
The village collective used peer pressure to make sure you remained within your "role" and strayed no farther.
Your value was what you did for them. As an individual you were merely a pain in the ass.
Part of this was pure survival, of course. If you had a better idea or an innovation nobody was willing to risk the failure of an experiment.
Often the most far-thinking and innovative minds were driven out. But, it is the outsider who has always contributed the most ultimately
to advancement for all mankind.
Galileo is a good example. He dared experiment and test things. He was not content with "received wisdom". When he wrote down his observations and publicly published contrary ideas he was summoned before the Inquisition and sentenced to house arrest. Obviously, the sun went round the earth and not vice-verse.
His "personal" views were seen to mock the Pope and threaten respect for authority. What if everybody took it upon themselves to THINK? Where would that leave the church?
-
designs
The pendulum swings between extremes in what civilization has produced. To much in either direction produces and fosters invention as well as the need for team work on the basics like irrigation farming technigues to large scale construction projects.
The Flying Buttress drew on knowledge that came from early Byzantine architecture and they needed skilled teams of carpenters and masons.
-
SixofNine
What if everybody took it upon themselves to THINK? Where would that leave the church?
Nice thought. But again, completely irrelevant to a discussion about Ayn Rand. After all, many people say she started a cult. In the strictest sense they may be wrong about that (though many would argue the same about our claims that the WT is a cult), but they say it for a reason. That reason is not that her followers, yourself included, are particularly good at thinking for themselves.
-
DaCheech
Terry is purely relevant, for you brought in stupid side-tracking arguments!
Go terry, good thinking!
-
botchtowersociety
Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
-
mindseye
Glander wrote: I would point out that it is "contemporary philosophers and academic departments" who are the core cheerleaders for Collectivism. Even the word "departments" in this context gives away the group think that these mental midgets cling to.
Glander: Any institution has a certain structure and amount of cultural conformity, and academia is no exception. But rigorous critique is the primary factor in academia. Both Rand's literary merit and philosophical arguments suffer greatly in any rigorous analysis.
Terry: I enjoy your posts, and I can tell from your writing you are a very rational person. Rand's arguments are mainly geared towards the highly rational, she is a champion of the left-brained. She eschews humanity's storehouse of metaphor, myth and poetry for a philosophy of strict, linear "reason". Yet even her "reason" is flawed because she indulges in the simple logical fallacy of the false dichotomy - that is when she proposes a false choice between the individual and the collective. It's a false notion that we have to exalt the Galileos, Einsteins and Steve Jobs at the expense of the everyman, and that we have to dispense with excellence when we choose measured altruism.
Rand's biggest mistep is the idea inherent in her idea of a "Utopia of Greed." It's a terribly misguided notion that if individuals follow their own egoistic 'ethic', and form some 'ideal' capitalist institutions, then some perfect state can be acheived on earth. Besides sounding scarily like an organization we are all familiar with, these ideas are tied up in utopian certainty and teleological thinking. Basically, teologogy stems from Aristotle's notion that everything, including humans, have a final cause or purpose (a comparison that Rand would not object to, to paraphrase her "in philosophy there are the three A's - Aristotle, Aquinas, and Ayn Rand"). The problem with teological thinking is that there is nothing besides our own ideas that show that we have some final cause and purpose, and such notions lead to all kinds of misguided ideas about the direction of history, from Marxism to Fundamentalism.
-
SixofNine
Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
Well, that's certainly part of it. But no, it's not "the" process.