Reddit's /r/philosophy: a fucking joke (and a silver lining)

Exhibit A

It's all too obvious from this example (and it's only one among many) that the malicious, cowardly Rand-hating thugs who infest this otherwise-important social-media outlet for widely-viewed intellectual discourse don't care to have an argument on a level field of play.  (Cowards! Weaklings! BUMS!)  The downvoting patterns are specifically directed at burying Yours Truly's eminently sensible, factually-supported responses to the well-upvoted anti-Rand idiocy that is rampant there.  That's not philosophy, that's a playground mentality intended to deceive the readership about the true nature of the discussion taking place there.  This is the kind of crowd grown and bred by the university philosophy departments these days?  That shouldn't come as too much of a surprise, given the disgusting, pathological, politically-motivated pattern of behavior by a number of "eminent figures" in that profession.

I really don't know how this problem could be solved; it's a failing of the format that would not happen on a genuine Usenet-style format of old.  It's a problem that reddit itself is going to have to fix by some useful and workable change of the format.

(There's also some other software problem that has been resulting in a whole lot of my posted comments being filtered by a spambot for reasons not yet ascertained by the mods there.  Oh, well.  It's discouraging enough to see what I spend much time posting there get buried by anonymous cowards when my comments do show up.  (This is aside from the general feel someone such as myself gets from discussing Rand on /r/"philosophy": that I'm wading through a crowd of irrational bigots, probably much like trying to defend theism on /r/atheism.  [Oh, if you think religious people can be irrational bigots, just watch the way so many of those in the "new atheist" movement react like poo-flinging monkeys toward anyone religious.  "Liberals" can be much lower than the "conservatives" they so often stereotype.])   Discouragement is the malicious cowards' motivation, of course.  I shall have to adjust my own course of action accordingly.  One thing I'm sure of, however, is this: this epistemic aggression will not stand, man.  Not in the long run.  BUP.)

Perhaps the most discouraging thing of all - as a general proposition, not just in terms of concrete instances of injustice or against whom such malicious behavior is directed - is how the stifling of pro-Rand voices has implications beyond merely that for the nature and quality of philosophic discourse.  As Peikoff explained at great length in Chapter 8 of OPAR, on the virtues, the effects of a little dishonesty, by the nature of reality and how all rational cognition is integrated, cannot but spread like a cancer to more and more facets of the dishonest person's existence.  (The case of Nathaniel Branden's progressively worse and increasingly all-encompassing deceptions of Ayn Rand until it blew all up in the end - as it had to - serves as a striking illustration of the principle.)  As anyone who reads this blogs regularly knows, this culture desperately needs an infusion of Aristotelianism in order to address its problems and challenges (much less move above and beyond toward a positive: big-time cultural flourishing).  I don't know how many times it has to happen, for people to get the point that where Aristotelianism (or something like it - e.g., Jeffersonianism) is alive and well, cultures and societies have flourished in ways they didn't before.

As it happens, the single most influential intellectual figure on the American public scene for the last half century up until the present (who else would it be besides Rand?) is - as some of the nation's leading scholars of Aristotle will tell you - also a neo-Aristotelian.  This makes it quite inescapable that in any serious discussion about how to move America forward into a period of enlightenment and flourishing - about what ideas to preach, what behaviors to encourage, what strategies to pursue - the name "Ayn Rand" cannot just somehow be pushed off to the side as irrelevant.  This is simply the nature of things, an unalterable reality, an undeniable absolute.  I think that if there were some way around that, I would have thought of it by now.  But the (perfectivist) principle involved precludes it.  It has to.  Rand shares too fundamental a similarity to Aristotle and Jefferson for it not to be so.  One doesn't have to like this reality to acknowledge it.  Me, I've simply become accustomed to it; it matters not what my feelings about Rand are.  I'm a perfectivist, and she's a forerunner of the idea, and that's all there is to it.

So, given all this, assuming that it's an infusion of Aristotelianism that we need, why couldn't we just say "let's go with Aristotle and/or Jefferson, they provide the best examples to follow."  Okay, but how then do you manage to evade the logical consequence that Rand must enter the discussion?  I can't think of a single fucking way it can happen.  It's either-or.  Either you accept Aristotelianism and Jeffersonianism - and therefore accept Rand in some fundamentally important sense - or you reject Rand and thereby in effect reject Aristotelianism and Jeffersonianism.  The reddit /r/"philosophy" thugs, and all too many people in the academy, have chosen the latter course.  What are the American People going to think about that when they come to find all this out?  "mouse, meet Cat."

If these entities paid attention to Rand like they're supposed to - as Aristotle and Jefferson themselves would if they were around today, since their policy is not one of evasion but integration, particularly with respect to culturally-significant author-figures (this is no-brainer shit, is it not?) - then of course Aristotle would become their center of attention as well.  One need only look at how the really smart people very much influenced by Rand end up being big-time Aristotle fans as well.

As things stand at the moment, most of the non-Randian crowd are completely oblivious to what Leonard Peikoff's lecture courses are all about.  These courses used to be in the hundreds of dollars each, making them prohibitively expensive to the very people - college undergrads - for whom they would make the most difference.  Now, they're marked down to around 10 bucks apiece.  The completely-oblivious crowd does not know what this portends, but I do, and so do those who've listened to and absorbed the material contained therein.  It spells doom for the oblivious ones (if they don't clean up their act).  There's just no getting around the fact that when college undergrads by the thousands upon thousands get their digital hands on these courses, coupled with a growing academic literature on Rand, the older generation of intellectuals is going to be replaced over time by a bunch of Randian-Aristotelians - all for the better, of course.  If I knew of a way around this eventuality, short of Apocalypse stepping the way, I think I would have figured it out by now.  But, well, you know, A is A. ;-)  And /r/"philosophy" is a fucking joke.

But seriously, what do the Rand-haters do in the event that a shit-ton of undergrads have Understanding Objectivism coursing through their veins?  Now that's an ultimate hypothetical right there, a cultural-singularity type of event beyond which we can hardly predict.  Perhaps the question to be asked first, is: will a shit-ton of undergrads have Understanding Objectivism coursing through their veins in the reasonably near future?  If so, why?  If not, why not?  To listen to the Rand-haters, one might think they don't take such an eventuality seriously because, well, of course (for them) Objectivism is obviously shit and always will be.  But they haven't listened to Understanding Objectivism, though, now have they.  So what you then have to ask is whether someone could listen to Understanding Objectivism and come out of it not taking Objectivism seriously.  But all the evidence I've inductively observed tells me that the chances of that happening are slim to none, but then again what if the available sample size is already biased and too small?  (Huh.  What a question to ask.  I wonder what cognitive methodology would boldly facilitate one's asking such questions aimed at establishing the full context.  Gee, lemme think....)  But what if it isn't?  Then what?

Well, then it comes down to an issue of how many of those intellectually-eager undergrads are going to buy up these $10 courses and proceed to go hog wild with their classmates and professors, a scenario where understanding Objectivism becomes the cool new hip fad in a way it just wasn't before.  That might depend in good part on the use of existing media for advertising this material to the right demographic.  That's a fairly capitalistic concept, ones that the people at the Ayn Rand Institute might be more well-attuned to more than just about any of the ideas-merchants out there.  First off, they have Rand books selling like hotcakes, year in and year out.  In the middle of those books are those postcards telling you where you can get more information on things like newsletters, campus clubs, recorded lecture courses, and so forth.  You have a large number of existing Objectivists who've taken these courses telling the newer students of Objectivism on Facebook or wherever that "you've got to hear this course, it will really amplify your comprehension of the philosophy."  It'll be all in (near-)unison directed toward the "newbies."  And guess what, they won't cost an arm and a leg, either!  You could get a couple dozen courses for what used to be the price for only one!  And it's all Leonard Peikoff in his brilliantly engaging and entertaining lecturing style, too!  Wow!  What a fucking bargain, huh?  A steal.  Like, could this be for real?  Did the ARI really do that?  Why listen to music online for free when you could listen to Peikoff for 25 hours for $10?  And maybe instead of getting drunk at the frat party the undies will spend that time doing the more cool thing by listening to a Peikoff lecture.  Just maybe.

What was that about BUP again?  You know, I'm feeling so much better now than when I began this posting.  Took a negative and turned it into a positive.  Lesson: don't let the filthy, scummy, slimy fucks get you down.  Thanks for guiding me in this direction, /r/"philosophy," keep up the bad work! :-D

You can't refute perfectivism. :-)

"Checkmate, asshole."

(Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to go tend to my splitting sides.)

Ayn Rand vs. ignorant "liberal" idiots

When it comes to Ayn Rand, the self-styled open-minded more-enlightened-than-thou "liberals" in the country today show their true colors, and they aren't pretty.

The latest case in point:
"Ayn Rand is for Children" at Salon.com, dated today.

It's the usual (childish!) silliness passing for hard-hitting analysis, nothing that us veterans of internet culture-wars haven't seen recycled ignorantly thousands of times already and upvoted by the reddiotic circlejerk to the point of self-parody.  That link points to the /r/politics subreddit, which is filled to the brim with intellectually-lazy partisans who give not the slightest shit about truth or justice but about what's popular, and reddiot's social-metaphysical upvote/downvote format only encourages it.  But wait until you see the /r/"philosophy" subreddit, where there's no excuse whatsoever for this kind of ignoble/vicious behavior.  But it gets worse: Even the leading "philosophy" blogger in the academic profession, Brian Leiter of the University of Chicago, and scores of vile little like-minded leftist cronies in that very profession, get in on the disgraceful, shameful act.  I think of these particular academic-world assholes as the Lance Armstrongs of the philosophical profession: they have managed successfully to keep up the illusion of objectivity and integrity, but it won't last; it can't last, not as long as the truth can get out and justice prevails in this world.  (If they are forward-looking enough, as they're supposed to be as philosophers, they cannot fail to recognize that in the extra-advanced information age that is the coming generation, all their public evasions can and will be fully exposed and assessed, as is happening right here, a good deal ahead of the curve.  I can't think of any way around that eventuality short of species-wide technological collapse and/or extinction - and I've been giving this subject a reasonably good deal of thought.)

It's not even like these "liberal" intellectual thugs care about a fair fight.  Cowards!  Weaklings!  BUMS!  What psychological syndrome might explain this pathological pattern of behavior?  One libertarian philosophy professor with a great deal of affinity toward Rand once explained to me that it pretty much boils down to politics: if Rand had (incomprehensibly) somehow been on the left politically while everything else about her remained the same, the academy and the rest of the Left would have welcomed her with open arms, especially given her demonstrable intellectual prowess (to anyone who'll look with an open mind - the "workshop" appendix to Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology being a nice readily-accessible example if it in action).  I'm about 98% sure this professor has it right.  (Yet another instance highlighting the sorry state of affairs here appears in a 2012 piece at the Chronicle of Higher Education.  Being the kind-hearted, take-no-prisoners, suffers-no-fools-gladly gentleman that I am, I contacted the author of this piece a few days back (under a real-nym) to correct him on his errors by providing abundant contrary evidence; the response so far has been, shall we say, unsatisfactory, yes? - to put it mildly.  Maybe he's too busy; I don't know.  But that published piece sucks swamp ass regardless.)

I mean, c'mon: Jimmy Wales is a child, as today's Salon article unequivocally implies?

That these kinds of articles continue to flow even to this day from supposedly enlightened liberal news-and-opinion websites, in light of the growing academic/professional literature on Rand (see the Ayn Rand Society for example - lots of adults there, some of them leading Aristotle scholars, several of them on the faculty of highly-ranked philosophy programs), says a lot more about these so-called liberals than they do about Rand.

About this author:

"David Sirota is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist, magazine journalist and the best-selling author of the books "Hostile Takeover," "The Uprising" and "Back to Our Future.""

Oh, he sounds like he's really got some philosophical chops.  Chances are 0% that he so much as emailed or called someone up at the Ayn Rand Institute for comment.  These "liberal" pieces of shit never do.

Such so-called liberals' constant hysterical strawman reactions to Rand have gotten to the point of being comical (among those with a clue, or among those who don't evade stone-cold facts). Do they really have nothing better to offer than what the university professors seriously studying Rand have been offering, which has been overwhelmingly positive?

It's too bad Ayn Rand isn't still around, because there's no way these people would would be getting away with this blatant idiocy.  How does it happen as it is?  It's because of the intellectuals.  As they go, so goes the nation.  No wonder the public discourse in this country is so fucked up.  I'll supplement this supremely judicious rant by quoting Rand from that link about the intellectuals, as it is way too good not to:

[The intellectuals] are a group that holds a unique prerogative: the potential of being either the most productive or the most parasitical of all social groups.

The intellectuals serve as guides, as trend-setters, as the transmission belts or middlemen between philosophy and the culture. If they adopt a philosophy of reason—if their goal is the development of man’s rational faculty and the pursuit of knowledge—they are a society’s most productive and most powerful group, because their work provides the base and the integration of all other human activities. If the intellectuals are dominated by a philosophy of irrationalism, they become a society’s unemployed and unemployable.

From the early nineteenth century on, American intellectuals—with very rare exceptions—were the humbly obedient followers of European philosophy, which had entered its age of decadence. Accepting its fundamentals, they were unable to deal with or even to grasp the nature of this country.

The intellectual Establishment of today isn't dominated by a philosophy of irrationalism, although it is dominated by a number of bad trends that undercut its usefulness to the society-at-large and its progress toward better conditions.  Aside from the ugly political aspect of things, there's that thing about the American intellectuals having been unduly influenced by European philosophy when Aristotelian philosophy has always been the best intellectual paradigm in terms of the health of societies (and home-grown pragmatism hasn't been cutting it - not when it fails to identify eudaimonic self-actualization as the primary aim of ethical conduct and intellectual excellence as the key to all of human virtues).  Added to that is the trend among intellectuals to oppose capitalism as if out psychological and sociological instinct.  That ties in with Rand's observation that this nation's so-called intellectuals were unable to deal with or grasp the nature of this country.  Hell, take a look at prevailing contemporary constitutional jurisprudence in contrast to a commonsense Jeffersonian-Paineist-Spoonerite-Barnettian natural-rights jurisprudence for a sign of the intellectual corruption involved.

(I mean, shit! - Congress could prohibit alcohol if it wanted to, on the very same grounds that the Supreme Court upheld cannabis prohibition in Gonzalez v. Raich (which built upon the bullshitty Wickard decision covering what's-not-interstate-commerce) - even though Prohibition was repealed once already (prior to Wickard, that is)!  That's ass-u-ming that SCOTUS wouldn't bullshit its way into some squaring of this screwy circle in order to keep Congress from doing that.  This absurd state of affairs could be cleared up quickly and easily on Jeffersonian grounds.  But wtf do I know, I'm not a lawyer, just a measly philosopher whose chief credential is a non-peer-reviewed blog.  Speaking of "peers," is Scumbag Leiter one of them?  Derek Parfit, perhaps?  Who "peer-reviewed" Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Spinoza, Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche, anyway?  I'm just asking questions here.)

Signs of health in the intellectual community would include the re-emergence of neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics in the academy (some decades after Rand had been on the cutting edge in this area, mind you) and the decline of Marxism into near-irrelevance.  These are no-brainers, however.  A chief indicator of dysfunction, on the other hand, I pointed to in a very recent posting: the most-unfortunate failure by the academy to connect with and make itself relevant to the People.  The People desperately need education in philosophy - in critical thinking, in intellectual curiosity, and not only Aristotelianism or Randism in particular (although Aristotle and Rand would be the first to do all in their power to mobilize the intellectuals into relevance) - else the populace becomes anti-intellectual and public discourse suffers accordingly.

And that is how widely-viewed websites like Salon.com end up publishing idiotic commentaries on one of the nation's most influential and controversial thinkers of the day, and who knows what else.  It is also how our current Head of State comes not understand jack shit about Ayn Rand (although I'm sure he could recite Rawls chapter and verse based on what he absorbed there at Hahhhvuhd).   The people all across the fruited plain deserve a decent, fair, well-informed discussion among its leading ideas-merchants - especially those in academe - about societally-influential and controversial ideas that inform their lives and political trends.  When the academy fails miserably - and I mean miserably - to deliver on their implicit and explicit promises to fulfill their professional and human obligations in this regard, righteous anger on the People's behalf is a perfectly normal and completely justified response.

This stuff should be a no-brainer.  Scholars at the Ayn Rand Society have figured this stuff out.  (Rand had it figured out more than 50 years ago, for crying out loud!)  Why can't the rest of the intelligentsia?  The sooner they get their act together, the sooner we all reach the cultural, technological and whatever other Singularities.  Foot-dragging is not an acceptable option.  It's not some goddamn mistake that ultimatephilosopher.com points right to this here expletive-filled blog, which has "ayn rand" and "integration" as the largest-lettered labels in the sidebar and a link to incestuous lesbians in the "about me" section, not to mention a treasure-trove of wisdom spread out over some 250ish blog entries now.  Now how about getting fucking clue, any of you professional intellectuals reading this - and that goes especially for you so-called high-minded liberals among you - and get your asses in gear for the sake of the future well-being of humanity.  At the very least, think of the children! ;-)

What would Aristotle do (aside from wiping the floor with Rand-bashing idiots and himself-point-missers)?  (Remember, kids: boundless intellectual curiosity as the root source of great-souledness.)

Now go, go, for the good of the city!

("Yes, UP, for the thousandth time, integration is fun. :-|")

P.S. For an example of an honorable leftish-liberal media figure, try Glenn Greenwald.  He's had the very good sense (as is standard for him) not to enter the Rand-criticism fray or to so much as mention Rand beyond his demolition of Paul Ryan, a politician (ew!) and Romney-sidekick (yuck!) who, as Greenwald correctly mentions, bears little resemblance to a Randian hero.  Greenwald was the primary draw, for me, to Salon's website on a regular basis, before he moved over to the UK Guardian.  For anyone who has observed Good Guy Glenn in action, he never loses an argument.  Why?  Because when he speaks on a subject, he knows what the fuck he's talking about.  There's a key rule for how to win arguments: know more about the issue than your opponent does.  It's worked for me: I've never lost an argument about Rand, for instance.  Something something impossible to refute perfectivism....

The internet, philosophy, and the future

What follows is a series of interconnected facts, observations, and extemporaneous thoughts about the long-term future and the internet's place in it all.  Heroes will be touted, villains exposed, internet culture analyzed, large-scaled trends identified, and what have you.  It's gonna be fun, because integration is fun. :-)

Where to begin . . . I'll start out with Noam Chomsky, who co-authored (with Edward S. Herman - I've never heard of him, either) his most well-known work, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988).  Since that time - particularly since the early-to-mid-1990s - Chomsky's analysis has become less and less applicable to the mass media as they have evolved since that time.  The principal and most revolutionary mass medium to emerge in that time is, of course, the internet (a series of tubes; A.K.A. the internets).  I needn't go into the transformational effects of this medium on our culture just so far, even without the culture-wide recognition of philosophy as the prime mover of cultural and historical evolution; suffice to say it has been a game-changer in the mass-media dynamic.

The primary benefits of the internet have included: a decentralizing of information command-and-control; vastly increased user-control over the content they are exposed to (there are downsides to this in the epistemic-closure department...); vastly enhanced interconnection of people and integration of information and knowledge; vastly enhanced information search along with vastly enhanced ease and speed of access.  Those are at least some benefits that come to mind off the top of my head.  The convergence of forces to which all this will lead is inevitable and will be the primary driver of what I and some others term the approaching Cultural Singularity.  This Singularity is driven by advances in technological infrastructure (which ties into the Technological Singularity on the horizon that Ray Kurzweil, Stanley Kubrick (way back in the '60s!), and others have been talking about) and the social-media-generated power of memes (ideas) to alter the intellectual and cultural discourse in major and often unpredictable ways.  Chomsky himself recognized the new power of social media in the wake of the Occupy movement.

What has yet to be figured out by the vast majority of people - if they had figured it out already I wouldn't be needing to type any of this stuff - is that in terms of ideas and memes, philosophy is the prime mover.

(If you're too lazy or proudly ignorant to click on and read the links I provide for your edification, this is probably not the blog for you.  Go fucking read what Rand said about philosophy, which serves as part of the background for what I say here.  That's what internet links are for, goddammit: to integrate seemingly disparate collections of information and knowledge that much more quickly and efficiently.  Hell, you could read through the entirety of this blog and pretty much have all this shit figured out as much as I do; I'm not that special.  Now Aristotle and Rand: they were truly special, way ahead of their times.  The whole point is for everyone to become that special as a social norm, beginning with a program of education formulated in great part already by ancient visionaries like Plato and Aristotle.)

Now, what is some prima facie evidence readily available to today's internet user of philosophy's fundamental importance?  I'll mark as Exhibit A the Getting to Philosophy phenomenon on wikipedia.  A number of people who have learned about this phenomenon have gone, "whoa," like it was something out of left field or what have you.

I have to digress at this point and talk a little bit about wikipedia's main founder, Jimmy Wales ("Jimbo" to a number of long-time internet acquaintances and students of Objectivism).  For those of us old enough to remember these things, there was some webpage way back when, probably 15 years ago now, where prominent students of Objectivism described how they got into Rand.  Jimbo describes how he encountered a copy (non-digital, of course) of The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z (1986, compiled and edited by Harry Binswanger), and never turned back.  Would that it were so for everyone....

A little digression-within-a-digression: Students of Peikoff's lecture courses, especially Understanding Objectivism, but also such courses as the Advanced OPAR Seminars and The Art of Thinking, have "never come back" from Objectivism as a way of thinking and living.  A curious mind - and any aspiring author who wants to conduct a serious study of Objectivism - will want to know why that is so.  Well, click on that link there a few lines above and find out for yourselves for only a few bucks.  Serious students of Objectivism used to have to shell out hundreds of bucks for this stuff and, again, never looked back.  (Digression-within-digression-within-digression: The reason that you will not see any serious and credible book criticizing Objectivism in the future - ever - is that material such as Peikoff's lecture courses, not to mention the growing academic secondary literature on Objectivism, will have to serve as research material for any serious, honest, credible, and competent commentary on Rand and Objectivism.  Given how inexpensively all this material is available for now, there are no excuses for students, researchers and authors not to listen to and absorb this material - to actually understand Objectivism as Objectivism's founder herself did.  And they all will find that - as a variety of cognitive and ethical perfectivism - Objectivism is, like an axiom, as irrefutable as any (dynamic) Aristotelianism on the world-historical scene.  This is why selectively-reality-oriented scumbags like Leiter and his vile little cronies are fucked right in the reputational poopchute unless they mend their ways.  That's just the way it is; don't shoot the quasi-anonymous cuss-word-slinging messenger, now [you FUCKS].  (Digression-thrice-removed: My word search counts 94 instances of the f-word on the front page of this blog going back to Nov. 24.  Only 94???  I shall redouble my efforts!  Walter didn't watch his buddies die face down in the muck so that these fucks could waltz around the internet spreading their anti-Aristotelian hate.  95 "fucks" now.  96.))

Back to Jimbo: The method to the madness that went into creating the Lexicon is nothing new to serious long-time students of Objectivism: integration.  With that, there is a recognized hierarchy of knowledge   (a topic covered indepth in Understanding Objectivism and discussed in a segment of Chapter 4 of OPAR).  On top of this I'll make the observation that key concepts of methodology in Objectivism - integration, hierarchy, context, induction - are elements of a phenomenon known in more traditional terms as encyclopedic learning.  (I call it perfective learning.)  If you haven't drawn the connections already: Jimbo, an encyclopedic learner, found quite a home in the Lexicon, and later went on to found the leading encyclopedia on the internet, in which a "Getting to Philosophy" phenomenon is observed to be the norm, which is due unavoidably to the hierarchy of human knowledge.  Do you think this is all some kind of accident?  For some of us - especially those of us well-versed in the Randian Arts - this is all a no-brainer to figure out and comes as no surprise at all.  Philosophy is the most fundamental discipline with respect to the hierarchy of knowledge, the term-setter for all other fields of study, the integrator and uniter of all the disciplines, the primary, the fountainhead.  As Miss Rand puts it on p. 74 of ITOE:

If it should be asked, at this point: Who, then, is to keep order in the organization of man's conceptual vocabulary, suggest the changes or expansions of definitions, formulate the principles of cognition and the criteria of science, protect the objectivity of methods and of communications within and among the special sciences, and provide the guidelines for the integration of man's knowledge? -- the answer is: philosophy.  These, precisely, are the tasks of epistemology.  The highest responsibility of philosophers is to serve as the guardians and integrators of human knowledge.

(Question: why doesn't this appear in the Lexicon under the Philosophy entry?  Evidently the Lexicon needs further perfecting!)

To this I'll add the observation that Jimbo has advanced the cause of objective integration of human knowledge quite admirably; it helps to have a good philosophy informing one's habits and decisions, dunnit?  It's also an incontrovertible fact that Jimbo is perfectly normal - not some brain-numbed cultist the Leiters of the world wished would define Rand's avid readership - and a highly successful leader in business and culture.  He's the kind of person that the New Society of Reason can and ought to be modeled upon; all it takes is a sensible, not-excruciatingly-difficult-to-implement program of citizen education.

/digression

[As I'm a little tired now, I'll finish this posting later; I've given the curious and observant reader enough to chew on as it is, and all beyond any shadow of dispute at that.  And, yes, /r/philosophy (and, by implication, the contemporary Philosophy Profession) will be getting the Wednesday ass-fucking it's been begging for. :-D ]

To continue:

In The Psychology of Self-Esteem (1969), Nathaniel Branden wrote:

A man of self-esteem and sovereign consciousness deals with reality, with nature, with an objective universe of facts; he holds his mind as his tool of survival and develops his ability to think.  But the pscyho-epistemological dependent lives not in a universe of facts, but in a universe of people; people, not facts, are his reality; people, not reason, are his tool of survival.  It is on them that his consciousness must focus; reality is reality-as-perceived-by-them; it is they who he must understand or please or placate or deceive or maneuver or manipulate or obey.  It is his success at this task that becomes the gauge of his efficacy - of his competence at living. ... The temporary dimunition of his anxiety, which the approval of others offers him, is his substitute for self-esteem.  This is the phenomenon that I designate as "Social Metaphysics." ... Social metaphysics is the psychological syndrome that characterizes a person who holds the minds of other men, not objective reality, as his ultimate psycho-epistemological frame of reference.  (Mass-market paperpack, p. 179-80; original Branden article, "Social Metaphysics," appeared in the Nov. 1962 *Objectivist Newsletter*.)

So what does this have to do with anything I've been talking about?  Well, since every cognitive unit is interconnected with every other one: everything, of course.  Social metaphysics pervades - sometimes subtly, sometimes quite openly - so many aspects of human societies today that it would make Socrates and Aristotle fucking puke given the millennia humans have had to get their act together since their time.  What is even worse, even more disgusting, even more disgraceful, is when social metaphysics infiltrates and corrupts the world of philosophy.  Reddit's /r/philosophy subreddit is a microcosm of this deplorable phenomenon.

In the emerging age of social media, there are tools that people need in order to hone in on their likes and filter out their dislikes.  The Facebook "like" button is one such thing.  It aids people in organizing their mental and online content.  This sounds really nice in theory, but in practice - and when it comes to philosophy above all - no panacea has been achieved and none will be achieved given prevailing social-media formats.

The feature on reddit whereby users anonymously and unaccountably vote up or vote down content is the Achilles Heel of /r/philosophy.  It utterly destroys any defensible pretense to fairness, honesty, objectivity and related values.  The very notion that philosophical discourse should be subject to the mob-rule of such an upvote/downvote format is obscene.  It doesn't even matter what the popular prevailing views are, be it capitalism or be it socialism, eudaimonism or utilitarianism, Aristotelianism or Zizekism.  The inescable fact is that when philosophical discourse (i.e., the appearance of such) operates in effect under mob-rule (also known as "the hivemind" [cringe]), the very integrity of the discourse is shat all upon.  This is social metaphysics in a most ugly manifestation; what receives readership and attention is what is popular, not necessarily (and usually not) what is right.  There is one word eminently applicable to this phenomenon: evil, i.e., opposed to the requirements of successful human living.

Social media sites are crucial to the future flowering of culture and society, via the propagation of memes that survive or perish in the marketplace of ideas.  Reddit is today's leading example of such a social medium, in terms of subscribership and exposure.  Given the cultural primacy of philosophy, /r/philosophy becomes a particularly crucial focal point (at least for the moment...) in this context.  Its number of subscribers recently surpassed the 100,000 mark - almost surely far exceeding any other philosophy forums on the internet.  Users who go to /r/philosophy seeking wisdom have a reasonable presumption that what they are exposed to reflects the integrity of philosophical discourse.  If it fails to reflect this, then this constitutes an unnecessary, tragic and unconscionable stunting and delaying of intellectual - and therefore cultural - progress.

As it happens - and probably not all that coincidentally - Ayn Rand and Objectivism are unpopular on reddit.  The usership there is well-known to be left-leaning.  Left-leaningness isn't a particularly troubling thing in itself; as long as people have a means of expressing their ideas on a level field of play, the better ideas have at least a chance to win out.  What destroys reddit as a propagator of true and rational intellectual memes is a leftward bias - a widely-enacted cognitive vice that has the effect of creating an atmosphere of epistemic closure.  For those of you who make fun of today's Right for its epistemic-closure tendencies, I submit that you haven't seen nothin' yet until you see the left-biased vileness that prevails on reddit's social-metaphysical/mob-rule discussion platform.  For those of you who think that closed-mindedness, willful ignorance and similar cognitive vices are exclusive or near-exclusive provinces of the Right, the Left is at least as capable of such.  What's so galling about this is the hypocrisy of it, seeing as how those on the Left tend to pride themselves so much on being fair and open-minded.  And it even goes all the way to the highest levels - university philosophy departments, academic "philosophy" blogs, etc. - and it is, at root, why so many people out in the real world don't take the academy seriously.

(I'll make this observation: left-liberals seem to be quite a bit better at being intellectually conscientious.  It is leftists - the kind of people who are attracted first and foremost to Marxism, and who in scary unison hysterically and ignorantly hate capitalism - that seem to behave in the scummiest ways and encourage similar behavior among their fellow leftists.  Not truth-seeking but politics seems to be a primary motivator of their M.O.  A further observation: these leftist scum seem to find a particular affinity with post-modernism and its countless post- offshoots.  Not even this stuff is taken seriously in the vast majority of university philosophy departments, and yet it does find its way into other departments of the Humanities, where leftist scum run rampant and ignorantly hate capitalism as if out of instinct.  Fuck 'em!  They richly deserve to be the first departments to have their funding cut in university-downsizing processes.)

Back to Rand and Objectivism, and their unpopularity on reddit.  The arbitrary, anonymous-cowardly downvoting of pro-Rand comments and threads on /r/philosophy is bad enough, before we even get to the issue of their not even understanding Objectivism.  People who understand Objectivism tend to overlap quite well with those who are familiar with Peikoff's lecture courses.  This doesn't register with the anonymous cowardly downvoters; what seems of central importance for these entities is that Rand advocated capitalism - and, as such, all manner of scummy behavior and injustice is permissible in their minds in order to stifle serious and honest debate about her ideas.  This phenomenon is quite wholly independent of who it is that advances pro-Rand arguments there, how nicely they advance them, how popular or unpopular they are, or how well-reasoned their arguments are.  No; this pathology goes deeper than that, and it's all-pervasive on reddit: the behavior is just as bad if not worse on /r/politics.  But any of this shit in /r/philosophy is already well beyond the pale by definition for reasons I gave above, which makes it oodles more pathological in a philosophy forum than anywhere else.  These people are in the wrong or in a state of ignorance and yet no effective mechanism exists for those who actually understand Objectivism to correct them with as much exposure to readers/subscribers as the Rand-hating comments have.  I mean, this situation - just like the unconscionable and indefensible Drug War - is fucking ridiculous.

A great part of reddit's usership is young people, many of them college-age.  Many of them come onto reddit thinking that social-metaphysical mob-rule is acceptable if not the norm.  How do so many young people come to absorb and adopt such a mentality?  Moreover, how do college-age people come to accept it?  Shouldn't higher standards of behavior be inculcated in them, if not from an early age, then at least by the time they are in college?  Are their professors - most importantly, the philosophy professors - doing much if anything to encourage cognitive virtue and discourage cognitive vice, so that they can understand this social-metaphysical epistemic chaos and insanity for what it is?  And why does Ayn Rand, in particular, elicit the worst of such pathologies?

I think these questions pretty much answer themselves at this point, no?  Individualism - i.e., intellectual, moral, and political independence - is all but ignored in the academic mainstream, after all.

What the various parties involved here need to do, as expeditiously as possible, is to get their fucking act together.  If they so much as neglect to dialogue with leading adherents of unpopular viewpoints, their long-term credibility is shot.  They will be seen as obstacles to, and not advocates of, a cultural renaissance in which all ideas are debated out in the open on a level field of play.  Aristotle wouldn't accept anything less.

I'd like to make a constructive recommendation here, one that would alleviate some of this pathology, and that is for reddit to adopt a format, for its intellectually-most-important subreddits, similar to that of Usenet.  Back in the days of Usenet, evasion and cowardice just did not and could not thrive, given the ways in which the format encouraged openness and accountability.  This is not to say that Usenet did not have its downsides, but they were quite manageable and tolerable in comparison to anonymous social-metaphysical cowards destroying the integrity of discourse by burying comments and threads they didn't like.  In my experience, the Usenet group humanities.philosophy.objectivism embodied pretty much what internet discourse could and should be (at least given certain unfortunate imperfections at the time in the way people conducted themselves).  Since that time (the 1990s), the format of internet discourse has arguably devolved, fracturing into scattered web-based forums and eventuating in such realms of social "discourse" as Twitter and the dead-end format (for integral intellectual discourse, that is) that is currently reddit's.  On h.p.o., a moderator had the job of doing very light patrolling, primarily for spam; otherwise, people could say whatever the hell they wanted with the only repercussion being that they might end up in someone else's killfile-filter.  (Is there any fucking reason such a filter-mechanism couldn't be made available to reddit users, in place of an unaccountable, social-metaphysical upvote/downvote feature?)  I would not be surprised if, in its heyday - the late '90s, roughly - h.p.o. was home to the highest-caliber discussion on Usenet.  That shit just kinda naturally happens when perfectivist philosophy is the subject of the forum, and especially when the forum participants understand said philosophy (as opposed to parroting what malicious third-rate hit-piece writers on scummy leftist websites assert about Rand and her ideas, and getting upvoted into greater reader-visibility for doing so).

Whatever it is, /r/philosophy is not philosophy in a truly integral sense of that term, just as being selectively reality-oriented does not make a person integrally virtuous in character.  It is a bastardization of philosophy, a form of false advertising.  It is manifestly and (because readily avoidable) unconscionably pathological.  Evasion of this problem by the relevant actors can and will (of course!) only exacerbate the problem.

As I'm not here to do your thinking for you, I'll leave it to you, reader, to tie all these points together and act accordingly.  I've got other shit to do, after all.  (103 days and counting down till the shit hits the fan, or intellectual and cultural renaissance is underway....)