How this Philosopher is Looking out for You

There is a deep "fit" between someone's adopting the Ultimate Philosopher moniker and writing a book titled Toward Utopia, and that someone being a huge and well-informed devotee of Ayn Rand. It's really no surprise in the slightest to someone in my epistemic position - someone with tremendous amounts of intellectual curiosity combined with a deep familiarity with philosophically-sound cognitive guidelines (explicated at length by Rand and Peikoff, as it turns out). But even taking Ayn Rand out of the picture, there's Aristotle, and he was looking out for the everyday human being as skillfully as anyone.

Take some hate-filled bastard like Karl Marx. He proclaimed to be a defender of humanity, and many, many people, by the millions if not billions, bought into it. Yet the likes of Karl Marx are the biggest enemies of humanity, in virtue of lousy cognitive processes or bad character or a combination of these things. The only reason Marx seemed to have more credibility than the run-of-the-mill socialists of his day, was his ability to dress up his "findings" in respectable-sounding philosophical-level jargon. He got that pretense to respectability by adopting a Hegelian context. Marx's co-opting of Hegel was his way of coming up with intellectual cover for his monstrously bad social-economic ideas. His writings reflect a deep-seated hatred of capitalism for which he was seeking a rationalization.

The result of Marx's influence: tens of millions of people dead. Needlessly dead, of course, as the Socialist Revolution promised by Marx, and the Paradise promised by his devotees, never happened. Capitalism has triumphed for the simple and obvious that capitalism is the proper social system for human beings. (This left-wing meme that capitalism is the source of oppression, wars, plutocracy, the military-industrial complex, poverty, and such is so much biased, ignorant, cognitively-fucked, and sometimes-dishonest BS.)

So, if Marx was clearly not on the side of the people, just what other intellectual figures, in their own insidiously damaging ways, were also against the interests of the people? Turns out there are shit-ton of them. Something about the very philosophical profession as such seems to provide a bias against everyday practicality - from economics all the way up to the fundamental-level cognition philosophers specialize in. We could start, for instance, with Plato's arbitrary doctrine of the Forms - Form being an otherworldly and unseen, but perfect and pure, X that "explains" the lowly, dirty every day appearances which we need to get beyond in order to attain true wisdom. Does it really take that much imagination to see what insidious anti-man effects this notion has in practice?

Strangely enough, the philosophers - the ones who are supposed to detect and identify the insidious effects of fundamental-level ideas - have dropped the ball. This would follow naturally from their theory/practice disintegration. What sort of real-life destruction could flow from Plato's doctrine of the Forms? It's not even a question that the philosophical mainstream seems to even want to consider. There are ideas over here, and then reality over there, and philosophers like Plato are merely doing their best to understand life in fundamental terms; so how could we vilify Plato or his system? This is the instinctive reaction from non-Randians to Rand declaring Kant "the most evil man in mankind's history." I think Rand is mistaken about this, but - unlike the mainstream philosophers gleefully ready to dismiss her as a crank - I understand what Rand was getting at: Kant's ideas are extreme in their insidiously destructive effects.

It was the utter fucking mess made of philosophy by Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger that has turned Europe into what it is today: a people looking to America to show the way, since their leading lights don't have the answers. This is without even getting into the indirect and insidious influence these thinkers' ideas had on the course of European politics in the very bloody first half of the 20th century. Socialism was all the rage amongst the intelligentsia in the early 20th century, including by the head intellectual honcho of the time, Heidegger. The effects of socialism have been widespread death, stagnation, etc. Heidegger liked National Socialism. Is this someone the man-on-the-street can trust to be on his side?

Kant said that morality is about following abstract universal principles with very murky substantive guidance, rather than about achieving happiness and self-actualization. Is Kant on your side?

Kant said that he had found it necessary to deny human knowledge of the "thing in itself" to make room for faith. Whether or not his intention was to keep religion and reason separate, this could only have the effect of emboldening the pro-faith crowd; the cashing-in is Dinesh D'Souza and his fellow illiberal theocrats. So, is Kant on your side?

Kant said that human perfection isn't possible in this world, and that morality demands that we act as if there were an infinite afterlife in which only then perfection might be achieved. So, is Kant still on your side?

Hegel's reaction to Kant's dualistic approach to philosophy (one emulated to an appalling extent in the mainstream academy) is to dissolve all distinctions into identity; the World, in other words, is a manifestation or emanation of Idea; Object is identical with Subject. Is Hegel on your side?

Schopenhauer intuited that the "thing-in-itself" is Will and that if we can detach in the way prescribed by Eastern mysticism, we'll not suffer so much. Is Schopenhauer on your side?

Bertrand Russell played a bunch of linguistic parlor-games that had no positive practical effects for life, for morality, for common sense, or for political freedom, i.e., capitalism. Is Russell on your side?

John Rawls said that whether you have a right to keep the product of your mind and efforts depends on whether your doing so satisfies his Difference Principle. Is Rawls on your side?

I could go on, but the concretes mentioned already should establish the essential point. We should judge a philosopher on the basis of how well he or she fulfills the job a philosopher is supposed to fulfill, and that job necessarily involves working on behalf of - not against - human beings.

It is no wonder that philosophy has gotten such a bad reputation in the mainstream. It has the reputation for head-in-the-clouds impracticality. At the hands of Plato, Kant, Hegel and others, that reputation is deserved. What the mainstream - not just the ordinary folk but also the mainstream of intellectuals - doesn't yet know is that these thinkers' abstract ideas do have massive practical effects. No philosopher sets out to create an impractical or destructive system of philosophy; the philosopher has a basic worldview and seeks the greatest intellectual fortification for it. It's that process of fortification that has the greatest potential real-world effects. If the fortification runs contrary to the actual requirements of reason, happiness and freedom, then it can have tremendously damaging effects on these values. It is precisely in virtue of the impracticality of a well-fortified worldview like Plato's that it can have the most damaging practical effects when people - whether knowingly or not - adopt such ideas and attempt to implement them.

The solution isn't to toss the philosophy baby out with the anti-practicality bathwater, but to fundamentally transform what philosophers do so that they are finally working in unison on behalf of ordinary people. We might start with repudiating those philosophers who are most clearly against the interests of ordinary people, which are the philosophers opposed to capitalism. The likes of Marx are the most obvious charlatans. But remember what made Marx's prominence possible: Hegel. That means doing higher-level, more abstract work at the greatest level of fundamentality: metaphysics and epistemology. (Again, this is why David Kelley's working-with-libertarians strategy is such a futile waste.) And at that level, we need philosophers who are on our side: Aristotle and Ayn Rand.

This is the goal of my blog and my work. I aim to be the philosopher who writes and works on your behalf. I affirm the classical realism first defended expertly by Aristotle. I affirm that cognitive clarity and sound thinking methods on fundamental questions can be achieved. I affirm the pursuit of happiness in ethics. I affirm the right to the pursuit of happiness in politics. I affirm that human beings, given the right conditions, are capable of mind-blowing greatness. I affirm that capitalism is the only social system proper to human beings where they can seek and achieve greatness and enjoy the product of their efforts.

I affirm that free will means the possibility of greatness and moral perfection, not an excuse for moral failings and for projecting perfection onto an unknowable infinite afterlife. I affirm that the popular practice of wondering about whether we're all brains in a vat (or, better/worse yet, "why there is being rather than nothing") is so much sophomoric, context-dropping BS. I affirm that "the problem of induction" can be solved by actually looking at how sound real-world thinking processes are inductive in their essence. I affirm that you can't attack these principles without implicitly affirming them.

Anyone notice, by the way, how no BS ever got past Roark or Galt? Isn't it time for the anti-Rand types to take a hint?

Why Ayn Rand = The Future

The spread of Randianism/Objectivism will definitely provide some parallels to the spread of Christianity in the centuries following Jesus's death. There's something these two quite-different worldviews have in common: the ability to inspire. There's that obscure part of The Fountainhead where Roark agrees that he is a "profoundly religious man, in [his] own way." There's this theme in there about the projection of a human ideal. Rand described the consequent emotion and practice as man-worship." The vision and sense-of-life associated with this is a heroic one. "My philosophy, in essence, is man as a heroic being..." Here's the last paragraph in the first AR Lexicon entry under "man-worship":

The man-worshipers, in my sense of the term, are those who see man’s highest potential and strive to actualize it. . . . [Man-worshipers are] those dedicated to the exaltation of man’s self-esteem and the sacredness of his happiness on earth.

This represents a radical transformation from the other-worldly religion of Christianity, placing the object of reverence and worship back in the realm of observable reality grasped through reason alone: man as he might be and ought to be.

Unlike the many philosophers in history - the likes of Plato excepted in part - Rand presents a comprehensive vision of life that hits home on not just the intellectual level, but the spiritual level as well. From the standpoint of ability to inspire and appeal to people's spiritual sense, Rand's philosophy offers what Christianity does, without all the vicious (anti-)intellectual baggage.

Rand's philosophy is a philosophy for America - America as it might be and ought to be. It offers a vision of freedom from all forms of tyranny over the mind of man. It offers a vision of greatness and genius actualized once all the shackles of unreason and oppression are lifted. Salvation lies within. Moral perfection is possible to human beings. All this is grounded in one's own observation of reality and not in some book of myths or epistemologically-unsound wishful-thinking.

Rand offers a vision of man not as a corrupt and ugly being wallowing in the muck; rather, when she looks at man she sees the possibility of a Howard Roark or a John Galt. She sees a being capable of being shiny, happy, radiant, clean, and benevolent. It's the total opposite of the cynicism ruling the mainstream-swamp. "What fuel can support one’s fire? Love for man at his highest potential."

If we as a country and as a world are to move ahead - full speed, not in the usual stale, worn-out way - then it is Ayn Rand's philosophy we need to understand and embrace. (On the intellectual side there's also Aristotle; the big A did not, however, inspire spiritually - at least not in the extant writings/lecture notes.) The 2,000 years following Randian reason will absolutely blow away the 2,000 years following Christian mysticism. The essential precondition - freedom of thought - was secured by the American Revolution. Now is the time to fulfill that Revolution's promise.

The Lesson of the Peikoff-Kelley Split, Cont'd

Following up yesterday's posting, I want to take up the issue of David Kelley's strategy of "working with" libertarians to achieve libertarian and/or Objectivist goals. This strategy reveals a fundamental failure to grasp the Objectivist view on philosophical hierarchy, and in ways Peter Schwartz's incompetent attack on the "libertarian movement" failed to capture.

I made reference in yesterday's posting to one-time Atlas Society Executive Director Ed Hudgins' totally lame op-eds. Hudgins came over to the Atlas Society from the CATO Institute, and those two organizations have intertwined over the years. Now, here's the issue: what does Objectivism-advocacy have to gain from Objectivists hobnobbing with libertarian groups? What, exactly, has Kelley's alliance with CATO produced to help advance the spread of Objectivism? More fundamentally, what could he gain on the Objectivism-advocacy front with this strategy? What crucially important ideas do organizations like CATO offer for Objectivists? What's the goal, and what has been accomplished?

An alliance between a primarily Objectivist organization and a primarily libertarian organization offers nothing of use to the Objectivist one. I mean, isn't it obviously so? The American discourse is up to its neck in pragmatic policy analysis, which is what CATO in all its glory specializes in. This isn't to downplay the useful aspects of such policy analysis in the discourse. But we've been awash in policy analysis with libertarian or capitalist implications for decades on end. What good has it all done? The mainstream is still way suspicious of capitalism and laissez-faire and individualism. Doesn't this suggest that this isn't a question of there being enough economics education, but rather not enough philosophical education?

This begs the question: just what were Kelley & Co. doing, devoting their precious intellectual resources to aligning with libertarian organizations in their advocacy-strategy? Not only has that strategy not accomplished much of anything given the empirical record, it couldn't accomplish anything. You don't even need Kelleyite pragmatic experimentation along such lines to test this true hypothesis. Why? Because of the philosophical hierarchy. (Duh.)

I'll quote Objectivism's founder on this point:

I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows.

This—the supremacy of reason—was, is and will be the primary concern of my work, and the essence of Objectivism. (For a definition of reason, see Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.) Reason in epistemology leads to egoism in ethics, which leads to capitalism in politics.

(For further amplification of reason in its full meaning, see Peikoff's Understanding Objectivism and other courses.)

Now, it's self-evidently obvious that had Kelley understood this point, he wouldn't be substituting a fight for reason with a fight for the same thing libertarian groups are already fighting for. Rand recognized the primacy of ethics over politics and of epistemology over ethics. In terms of epistemology - i.e., cognitive methodology - Peikoff has done a shit-ton more of value in the time since Rand's death than Kelley has. Peikoff did work of greater philosophical fundamentality with his work on induction alone. Perhaps it's no coincidence that as Kelley spent more and more time courting libertarians, on a level of lesser philosophical fundamentality, his grasp of the principles of greater fundamentality atrophied, culminating in his evasion on the Branden matter?

Well-versed students of Objectivism are well aware of how abstract principles of greater fundamentality are broader reaching in their practical effects. When Rand looked at the American political scene, she recognized that a moral revolution was needed to restore America to its founding roots, as policy analysis provides only facts, not values. And she asked, further, what preconditions were necessary to bring about the moral revolution. To do that, she looked at things the way a true philosopher is supposed to: at the greatest level of fundamentality applicable. The fundamental is reason, which is adherence to reality by means of logical integration; the pursuit of happiness and the freedom to exercise one's mind are derivative of that fundamental.

Rand gave up on aligning with the many conservatives and libertarians of her day, given the fundamental differences between what they were fighting for and what she fought for. The absolutism, primacy and supremacy of reason was her chief concern. What is Kelley's?

[Hint: at the core of a sound understanding of Objectivism is knowing how to apply the Rule of Fundamentality on any given issue. Rand was a fucking master at it (leaving aside her polemics). A much more fundamental goal than educating people about libertarian policy analysis is educating people on how to master the Rule of Fundamentality as well as Rand did. Since this is an issue concerning the essence (i.e, the fundamentals) of sound cognition as such - an illustration of the very Rule in question - the implications in practice are going to be the most far- and wide-reaching. The basic reason there isn't laissez-faire in this country isn't primarily because people fail to grasp what's so great about freedom; that is merely a consequence. The underlying cause is people's inability to think properly. As we've seen, this malady of improper thinking strikes even (or is it especially?) intellectuals, with the greatest tragic effects in practice (again, given the Rule).]

The Lesson of the Peikoff-Kelley Split Today

If the last 20 years of the Objectivist movement tell us anything, it's the triumph of the Peikoff model over the Kelley model. This is not to say that the Peikoff model is correct in every way, but its superiority over the Kelley model is now no longer in any serious question - much like how even advocates of socialism like Robert Heilbroner eventually and graciously conceded to Ludwig von Mises.

Let's start with the endorsement Ayn Rand herself lent to Leonard Peikoff. His 1976 Philosophy of Objectivism course is - superseding any and all presentations by the discredited Nathaniel Branden in particular - the only course on Rand's philosophy she herself authorized. In a general recommendation included in Letters of Ayn Rand, she described Dr. Peikoff as having a "superlative" understanding of her philosophy and ability to communicate it. This observation is borne out for normal listeners of such Peikoff audio courses as Understanding Objectivism and the advanced seminars on Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand.

Let me cut to the chase of the thought that led me to post this rumination: David Kelley's version represents a mushy, pragmatist approach to Objectivism. It all seemed quite innocuous back then, in 1990, when he penned Truth and Toleration and spoke to some commonsense issues such as how not to judge people illicitly based only on ideas they espouse. The concern and issue that I think Peikoff and Kelley each in their own way addressed was the role of context in moral judgment. But Kelley would make these awkward formulations of Objectivist principles that you'd never in a million years see Ayn Rand making. The formulations sounded a little mushier, a little more accommodating to Objectivism's critics and opponents. We got these Rawls-sounding digressions about dialoguing and reconciling, a "forge an overlapping consensus" type of approach (hence the "libertarian outreach"), doing more of the give-and-take of discourse, and strange pragmatist language about "balancing acts."

If Ayn Rand taught us anything about philosophical integration, it's that small and subtle disintegrations are insidious to the integrity of the whole. This is the basic problem with pragmatism: once you start going into "compromise" mode, there's no end to it. This is the basic issue behind the "quality control" that Rand and Peikoff were always concerned about maintaining. It wasn't about enforcing agreement, but about keeping out mushiness. And that's what David Kelley symbolizes: mushiness.

As personages go, the Brandens are central to the difference in the respective courses charted by Peikoff and Kelley. It starts with the Brandens' bios/memoirs, Nathaniel's being the especially vicious, pathological, and dishonest one. The issue of Barbara Branden is a minor distraction relative to the issue of Nathaniel Branden. If you don't get it about Nathaniel Branden by now, there's something gone wrong. If there's anything that all the now-available evidence about his grossly immoral treatment of Ayn Rand (among others) shows, it's that he can't be trusted any further than he can be thrown. Anyone paying at least half attention could discern that the Rand-Branden schism wasn't about "a jealous woman scorned" but about gross immorality by someone posing as a spokesman for Objectivism. That's all it was about. Allen Blumenthal had figured that out, which is why he stuck by his 1968 pledge and left Kelley's Institute for Objectivist Studies when Branden was brought on there.

But let's just say - and there are reasonable bases for saying this - that the full scope and extent of Branden's immorality was not made publicly manifest until excerpts from Rand's journal were published in Jim Valliant's The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics in 2005. The gist was Nathaniel Branden's dishonesty and betrayal of Objectivist principles, and Barbara Branden's complicity in that. Anyway, they lied convincingly to Rand for years, taking advantage of her goodwill, and then Branden continued to conceal the full scope and extent of his "psychology/sex problem sessions" with Rand in his Judgment Day/My Years With Ayn Rand, while laying out an open challenge for Rand's journals regarding the whole train wreck to be released. Well, they were released - and Branden was proven to be a way bigger liar than he had let on. (And not merely a liar. Brad Aisa once summed it up aptly: "Branden's a creep." He was revealed not to be a semi-helpless guy caught between a rock and a hard place, but a manipulative, narcissistic creep. In addition to being a liar.) The only rationally justifiable thing to do at that point was to be entirely disgusted at Nathaniel Branden and his monstrously unjust treatment of Rand.

Kelley's response to The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics was - let's cut the shit - an evasion. A downright cowardly refusal to face facts and accordingly. It was the "cashing in" of the initial mushiness taking hold and building. So, even after Branden was exposed as a total fraud and creep, up through his memoirs and beyond, he was still invited to present at the Objectivist Center's (the new name for the Institute for Objectivist Studies)
events. That's when the falling-out began. Lindsay Perigo couldn't stand the ever-insidious-and-expanding mushiness (a lack of what he called KASS, or a Kick-ASS sense of life), much less the outright cowardice on the Branden issue. Once Perigo left in disgust, the dominoes fell. Along the way, the Objectivist Center changed its name again, to the Atlas Society (Perigo affectionately dubbed it the "KASSless Society"), and quickly became irrelevant.

Today, the only Objectivism-advocacy organization doing serious work training the next generation of intellectuals is the Ayn Rand Institute. Kelley's brand of doing things is all but defunct.

There was a time that I found Kelley's sensibility more attractive. It hit home more for me as an aspiring academic philosopher. Kelley's idea of advancing Objectivism was to make advocacy more like the academic model of doing philosophy - with the inevitable consequence of repudiating Rand's "intolerant," non-scholarly approach to thinkers like Kant. (Pathological fixation on "scholarship" may well explain various problems within "the academic model." Rand's not being "a scholar" or "consensus-forger" in her mode of popular exposition is a question-begging excuse for the insular snobs to downplay or ignore her.) Indeed, for a period of time there in the 1990s, many of the best minds within the Objectivist movement were attracted to Kelley's organization. The case for ARI around this time was hurt severely by the presence and position of Peter Schwartz there. In addition to writing a disreputable and silly hatchet job on some non-existent he called "Libertarianism," he also cited Rand's authorship of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged as good-enough proof of her character vis-a-vis the Brandens. (According to Atlas Shrugged, a morally-ideal person, Dagny, apparently-needlessly shoots a guard toward the end of the story. Is this to say Ayn Rand herself would do such a thing, or is this to say that Atlas Shrugged is subtly and insidiously flawed in mis-integrated kinds of ways?) Never mind that this settles no issue, epistemologically, when the disputants are Atlas Shrugged's author and dedicatee, respectively, a decade after the novel was written. One of them went corrupt, but which one? Long story short, the credibility of Peikoff and ARI suffer around this time due to the Schwartz MO.

I happen to be a rather unique case in that, even while drawn to the "academic model" around the mid- to late-1990s, I also listened to a good number of Peikoff audio courses. These courses provided little in the way of help for my graduate-school years in Philosophy - the paradigms are so at odds - but have proven to be saving graces and game-changers long-term. The essence of courses like Understanding Objectivism is that Objectivism doesn't need "updating" and "improving" or bridge-building with academia; rather, understood and used properly, it is its own best defender. Kelley seemed to pay lip service to Objectivism's special imperviousness to refutation, but what he says and the way he says it is unconvincing; the way he talks about Objectivism, it ends up sounding like merely a reasonable-sounding entry into the discourse with no special sales points. I think if he were truly aware of its special sales points, he'd not have drifted the way he did.

This gets back to his drift in regard to Nathaniel Branden. Branden is so discredited by now that his influence can only be poisonous. But there's something of a "sense of life" nature here, and that has to do with Ayn Rand's sense of life as opposed to David Kelley's. Rand was an uncompromising idealist and this comes out in her art. Kelley's basic operative MO is pragmatism. Much like in Rand's art, the cashing-in of Kelley's pragmatism is the irrelevancy of his organization and MO after 20 years. (You ever have the patience to sit through an Ed Hudgins op-ed when he was Ex-Dir of the Objectivist Center and/or Atlas Society? Total undistinguished mush, every time.)

Another insidious effect of pragmatism is how easily it devolves into cynicism. And it is ugly, naked cynicism that explains so many folks' seemingly instinctive attraction to the Branden message: that Rand was a "great, but ultimately flawed" human being. A cynical sense of life is shut off to ideations of greatness and grandeur and moral innocence and purity. "These ideals only pop up in juvenile novels and appeal to naive youth." That's the kind of amateurish bullshit that the Kelleys and Brandens feed right into. "Great, but ultimately flawed" is typical cynical double-speak and the effects of this portrayal of "flawed greatness" was - of course - entirely insidious; naturally, it devolved into "Rand was an unhappy/tyrannical/delusional/etc. human being," with the acknowledgment of her greatness - if it even remains after all the evisceration - reduced to a mere concession.

I still take issue with certain aspects of the Rand/Peikoff MO, and it concerns mainly their (non-essential) polemical criticisms of other thinkers or ideas. Nonetheless, if you disregard their polemics entirely - hell, I'm fine with that; Rand and Peikoff never advised anyone to take their word for it, after all - the substantive core, particularly the methodology (which is the fundamental ground of the rest, including the theory of concepts), stands pure and strong. Rand and Peikoff mastered that methodology at a much higher level than Kelley did. Branden was as clear a litmus test as any.

To illustrate Peikoff's continuing contribution to the discourse about Objectivism in ways Kelley doesn't measure up to, I'd like to mention Peikoff's own DIM Hypothesis and apply it to the difference between Peikoff and Kelley. Kelley, through his basic pragmatist orientation, falls into the "D" or "disintegration" category. Rand goes into the "I" or "integration" category. (I'll leave aside here the issue of subtle/insidious mis-integration or "M" as it's popped up in Objectivist circles.) Peikoff has a deeper grasp of Rand's "I" method. Part of Peikoff's DIM Hypothesis is that integrated worldviews have a kind of influence and appeal that disintegrated worldviews do not. This was illustrated in the 2004 presidential election campaign: Kelley, er, uh, John Kerry was the mushy disintegrated guy who didn't stand for anything and came off as weak. Counter to that, there was a widespread attraction to Bush's being bold and standing for something even if it was wrong; at least with fundamentalist cowboys like Bush there's no question about his sticking to a course or position whatever the practicality or political winds.

To sum up: Kelley = mushy pragmatic "D"; Rand and Peikoff = uncompromising and intransigent "I". It's like Keating vs. Roark all over again. At stake this time: the future of philosophy. Rand FTW!

A $6 Billion Fix-America Plan

You read that right, $6 Billion, with a B. In this day and age, that's a drop in the bucket. Hell, with this plan, it virtually pays for itself overnight. On the heels of the addendum to my last entry, here's the plan:

Buy and distribute $20 worth of Ayn Rand books for every man, woman, and child in America. It means buying up about 30 million copies each of the following mass-market paperbacks:

We the Living
Anthem
The Fountainhead
Atlas Shrugged
For the New Intellectual
The Virtue of Selfishness
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
The Romantic Manifesto
Philosophy: Who Needs It (we might need double or triple orders of this one)

plus about 15 to 20 million copies each of the following trade paperbacks:

Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology
Return of the Primitive
The Ayn Rand Lexicon
Letters of Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Answers
Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (by Leonard Peikoff)

Just buy 'em up and distribute 'em however they'll make the most impact. Put 'em in libraries, put 'em in schools, just put big stacks of whole boxes of books in spaces where large numbers of people usually gather, wherever. Just get 'em out there. For a mere $6 billion, the results would be fucking mind-blowing.

How could you possibly not get your money's worth with this plan?

(The story behind the "Read Ayn Rand" image here.)


Plan updated here.

More From the Anti-Capitalist Mindset

The Distinguished Professor, Brian Leiter, is such an ass. In his own way, he's analogous to or a counterpart to Sarah Palin, who is Too Fucking Stupid to Take Seriously (TFSTTS, or TFS for short). He's close to the archetype of the out-of-touch, arrogant, elitist academic professor of the Humanities. (He's actually a professor of Law first and foremost; as a philosopher it's clear he's an incompetent piece of shit in virtue of his blind and ignorant hatred of any and all things capitalistic. That's right, a piece of shit. A big, fat, ugly, walrus-looking, fucking piece of shit. I'm thinking maybe a hybrid of Balph Eubank and Wesley Mouch. Come the Revolution, he's completely discredited and out of a job qua philosopher-pretender. Thus spake the Ultimate Philosopher.) His latest piece of hatred of the good for being the good mostly quotes from another article. The question: Does Wall Street Produce Anything of Value? (Like I said, a piece of shit who hates the good for being the good.) The Distinguished Professor says, "yes, but not much," according to an assessment he regards as "sensible."

It really makes no difference to this that he's quoting from an "economics reporter" (anyone with common sense should know that this is codeword for "pundit with an econ degree," and pundits are almost uniformly idiots - near-sighted idiots - fucking idiots). Economics reporters get things wrong all the time - which is why there are people out there, smarter than they are, who beat the market and the CW/punditry. Who are those smarter people, exactly? Youuuuu guessed it - the ones hated most by the Leiters of the world. The ones who "owe" the rest of society for their superior mind and vision. And Leiter is fundamentally a dishonest evader at root, picking and choosing which "economics reporter" he decides to find "sensible commentary" from. I mean, isn't it obvious how dishonest and cowardly his whole M.O. is?

Now, what does the pro-capitalist mentality say, in reaction to the higher-than-before salaries commanded by "not very productive" Wall Street people? One thing the capitalism-hating mentality can't seem to get its head anywhere near around, is globalization and its effects. Globalization is like the exact opposite of what the Academy is all about. With globalization, there's no tenure. There's no taxpayer-subsidized intellectual fraud. There's no incentive and reward for stagnation and conformity and ass-kissing. There's only the thing the leftists pathologically fear and hate: the capitalistic process of supply and demand. It is supply and demand that determines prices, including salaries. In an anti-capitalist, globalization-ignorant, economics-ignorant, market-ignorant mindset, it's incomprehensible how the greater Wall Street salaries can be tied to greater economic value.

(Remember that Piece-of-Shit Leiter's intellectual hero is another piece of shit, Karl Marx, who dishonestly promoted the idea that workers are the source of all value and that capitalists are exploiters. One thing about Marx is that he was a loser who mooched off of Engels, and played the victim of capitalists his whole life. Marx also fantasized that capitalism and individualism would be transcended and superseded by communism. What an idiot! One could discern that he was an idiot, well before historical experience discredited him entirely. In the facepalm department, this dishonest idiot still makes the top ten amongst philosophers most cited in the mainstream academic journals.)

If we are forward-looking and visionary - much like capitalists but much unlike tenured academic leftists - we can use the Wall Street People's superior earning-power as an example to emulate rather than one to denounce, denigrate, undercut and hate. We could use their example to learn important lessons. We might do things like discover what underlies this shift in market values from the way they were before, prior to advancing globalization. What this shift tells us is that America and Americans could - given the right leadership and direction - very well play a certain kind of role as globalization inevitably advances further and the developing world becomes industrialized. The role I have in mind is one of extreme profitability: Americans increasingly become like the Wall Street People (though hopefully with a more philosophical and less philistinic mindset than the current crop). In other words, Americans increasingly would fill the job of deciding how investment resources get directed worldwide. America would become more and more like Wall Street itself.

In other words, the average American would become a big-time capitalist, and profit immensely.

Now, whose philosophy do you think would best equip and encourage Americans to take on this role as financiers to the world? Karl Marx's? John Rawls's? Immanuel Kant's? G.W.F. Hegel's? Plato's? (Plato, the proto-communist, the intellectual and spiritual father of all the terrible shit that happens under the banner of philosophy, starting with the wholly arbitrary Forms?) Martin Heidegger's? (Heidegger, the guy who signed onto National Socialism?) Jesus's? Some other major thinker with insidiously anti-individualist, anti-capitalist ideas? Some other mainstream/left academic? Some other intellectual figure out to stifle people by making them feel guilty for making money while others are in need?

Are you fucking kidding me?

This stuff is so slam-dunk, innit?

[ADDENDUM: On tonight's new episode of The Simpsons, Moe remarks that the people of Detroit are "living in Mad Max times." I'd like to propose an experiment: carpet-bomb Detroit . . . with books like Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. I think it could be absolutely mind-blowing just how much difference a good idea can make, even amongst the nation's supposed throwaway-people. Besides, they've been carpet-bombed enough, so to speak, by The Communist Manifesto and A Theory of Justice; why not give the truth a chance for a change? Prediction: Detroit would be a mecca of greatness within a generation. No shittin'! Just gotta think big . . . like a capitalist.]

Kudos Again to Greenwald

Greenwald picks apart a Nation article which cast doubts on the authenticity of the "don't touch my junk" guy.

It's almost like reading Ayn Rand dissecting all the conceptual evasions in a run-of-the-mill article of her day (most likely one attacking, undercutting, or impugning good things like capitalism). Outlets like The Nation are left-partisan to begin with, so already there's reason for suspicion, prima facie. Then come all the conceptually sloppy associations, "wonderment" passing as legitimate fact-based observation, etc. Hell, the Nation's smear-piece reads much like your typical hit-piece on Ayn Rand herself. I wouldn't be surprised if the history of the Nation is peppered with all kinds of sloppy, shoddy, awesomely-committed-to-misconception (h/t Michael Herr) references to Rand.

In fact, googling up "the nation ayn rand" brings up this incompetent pile of shit as the first result. See?

Big, Long Sigh

First, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Ayn Rand. The authors of that entry are Neera Badhwar and Roderick Long, who are sympathetic to Ayn Rand, are partly involved with "non-orthodox" segments of the Objectivist movement, and are philosophy professors. This last part should have a Rand fan concerned already. Combined with the middle part, there is even more cause for concern. Why? Because the probability that an academic philosopher - much less one not intimately familiar with Peikoff's lecture courses - would understand Objectivism properly, is exceedingly small. The only ones (who come to mind right off) who do a really good job of coming quite close, are the "Dougs," Rasmussen and Den Uyl. But to do things like write Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand or to understand and integrate the inductive methodology behind that book and courses like Understanding Objectivism, requires many years of immersion and habituation in the philosophy. Outside of this process, it's a crap shoot whether you end up "getting" Objectivism or not.

One thing that the academy of present day simply does not and cannot do is habituate philosophers to think in such a way as to "get" Ayn Rand and the way she thinks. There is simply a fundamental disconnect between the two models. It's like apples and oranges how the two modes of "doing philosophy" happens. If we are intellectual cowards and go by strength in numbers, we'd conclude the academy is where it's at and that Objectivism is some kind of cult-like and sheltered fringe. The academy, meanwhile, emphasizes "rigor" (this carries an inherent danger of "paralysis by analysis" if you don't come at it from a proper methodological context) and peer review, and those are ostensibly good things, but - and I'd have to spend much more time on a longer posting or book chapter to explain all this - these things are applied in such a way as to stifle the development of good things like Rand's ideas. The closest the academy has to exposure to Rand at this point - aside from one prominent book published four years ago (Tara Smith's Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics published by Cambridge Press) - is the work of Aristotle. (Speaking of Aristotle, I'm reading Henry B. Veatch's Aristotle: A Contemporary Appreciation. At the time he wrote it - 1974 - the most dominant figures in professional philosophy were Heidegger and Wittgenstein, while Aristotle was just beginning to be looked at by the English-speaking world. Fucking ridiculous!) The current generation of ARI-trained folks going into academia simply could not come out of the academy with their methodological faculties intact, which is why they require the dual-training.

So, getting back to the authors of the Stanford Encyclopedia entry. I encountered this collection of links to a discussion between Profs. Long, Badhwar, Rasmussen and Michael Huemer, a libertarian intuitionist. (Incidentally, intuitionism is a total dead-end. But never mind that, it's a prominent position and it comes from the academy! Yay!) Now, I hardly know Prof. Badhwar; about the most I know is that she contributed articles to the libertarian-friendly Social Philosophy & Policy journal, a leading journal in that area of specialty. (Don't get me started on "area of specialty" or AOS; hell, that alone could explain why the academy as a way of "doing philosophy" is so damaging, by encouraging compartmentalization and paralysis through analysis. For evidence, see the contrast between Rand and Rawls.) I trust she has only the best of intentions and is going on the best of her understanding. But this is simply unacceptable:

Doug is right that the omission of the virtue of practical wisdom from Rand’s discussion is an important one. But I don’t find it surprising: she was not a systematic philosopher, and she omitted to discuss a whole lot of important things, such as generosity, kindness, forgiveness, and charity.

(This is where you're supposed to let out that big, long sigh like I did.)

I just don't know how this shit gets into the mindset of those "analyzing" Rand. I'm sorry, but if - whatever the reasons, whatever the causes - you end up saying things like "Ayn Rand is not a systematic philosopher," you really haven't a clue what you're talking about. You simply are not coming from a proper context of understanding.

One thing about thinking systematically is - seemingly obsessively, but more just a matter of habit and mental organization (see Kubrick for another example) - keeping mental notes about all kinds of concretes and relating them in logical fashion to other instances based on relevant similarities. In this case, I note that we have a "Rand-sympathetic" professional philosopher who doesn't really "get" Rand, who also happens to be the same person to co-author the entry on Ayn Rand at the internet's leading philosophy encyclopedia. To a systematic-integrated mind, this otherwise-unnoticed connection raises red flags. One thing it says is that there is no real effort within the academy as it's currently set up to approach Ayn Rand's writings and ideas on the demanding terms Miss Rand set for her readers. Only a truly corrupt mentality would equate her plainspoken style of writing with such vices as being "simplistic" (I believe Rand identified this as an anti-concept, BTW, but what does she know - she's "simplistic") or unsophisticated. I guess the idea of condensation and essentialization (more Randian buzzwords used in connection with concept-formation, integration, and unit-economy), a process which captures all the original content and applies it to an appropriate (popular) format, means a thinker who isn't "serious" or "rigorous."

(Never mind the eye-opening, free-flowing rigor on display in the ITOE workshops. Never mind that her ideas emerge virtually intact under the rigorous Rasmussen-and-Den-Uyl treatment. One thing you mustn't forget about the ethos of academia: Rasmussen and Den Uyl aren't "prominent" enough for the message to reach the mainstream there. So, in addition to rigor and peer review, you also need prominence and specialization. But those latter can't be all that insidious and corrupting, can they? And if Leiter's views about former UT colleague Tara Smith and her book are any indication, not even prominence helps. Hell, Nozick was prominent. Nozick even gave a biting explanation for why so many academics embrace socialism and oppose capitalism. And even that gets ignored. Rocks the boat too much or something. Boat-rocking is frowned upon as well, and "rightward" political leanings can cost you career-wise. Now there's nothing insidious and corrupting about that, could there be?)

I guess that what I'm trying to say here, is that if Ayn Rand's ideas go under the "rigorous, analytical" microscope according to the present-day academic ethos, prepare for a train wreck. You can start with encyclopedia entries on her by those who seem to understand her by demonstrating a superficial understanding that a legitimate insider can only find inadequate.

Rand and the Academy (as we know it) are fundamentally at odds, and something has to give. I'd even go so far as to question the "infiltrate academia" strategy the ARI has been going with. How do you un-corrupt a corrupt institution? I'm thinking it could only be done from "the outside" - busting the whole system at its root. You can start with how academia these days is funded in large part by taxpayers rather than by a straightforward market process. Alternatively, you could start by noting that "best minds" doesn't mean "best minds in academia," and that a lot of our best minds become rich capitalists whose ethos is way at odds with the academic one (for the reasons Nozick explained). There's no mystery how many of the best minds look at the present state of the academy - the humanities in particular - and throw their hands up in disgust or incomprehension, and move on. This doesn't seem to be a reality that many within that institution have woken up to - hence the intellectual elitism, the insularity, and such. Facepalm.

Anyway, the success of Rand's system of ethics - her individualistic eudaemonism with rationality as the central virtue - in contrast to the trainwreck-theories mulled over for decades on end by the "trained academics," is enough prime facie evidence right there that she's got her act together more than the academy has. That's before you even get to her theory of concepts and - most fundamentally - her (system-oriented) methodology, which will prove the most revolutionary in the end.

Essential Writings of Ayn Rand

As I am (constantly in a process of) organizing mental content, the idea occurred to me that, some day, there will be a "Basic Works" compilation for Ayn Rand like we see with Plato, Aristotle, Kant and other big hitters. So what might a Basic Works of Ayn Rand look like? What constitutes the essentials? The essays Rand wrote that might be considered foundational. Such essays as "The Objectivist Ethics" are prime examples of this. What else might be considered foundational in some important way? I think an essay such as "'Extremism,' or the Art of Smearing" covers certain epistemological essentials even while covering a political topic, so I think it qualifies. But we don't want to start doing the borderline-case, slippery-slope kind of thing, so we need a process of elimination. After such a process, I come down to the following writings:

Part 1: Speeches from the Novels (those excerpted in For the New Intellectual)

Part 2: General Essays on Philosophy
"Philosophy: Who Needs It" (1973) (PWNI)
"Philosophical Detection" (1974) (PWNI)
"For the New Intellectual" (1961) (FTNI)
"Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World" (1960) (PWNI)

Part 3: Metaphysics and Epistemology
"The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made" (1973) (PWNI)
Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (1966-67)

Part 4: Ethics
"The Objectivist Ethics" (1961) (TVOS)
"The 'Conflicts' of Men's Interests" (1962) (TVOS)
"Doesn't Life Require Compromise?" (1962) (TVOS)
"Causality Versus Duty" (1970) (PWNI)

Part 5: Politics
"Man's Rights" (1963) (TVOS)
"The Nature of Government" (1963) (TVOS)
"What is Capitalism?" (1965) (CTUI)
"Patents and Copyrights" (1964) (CTUI)
"Conservatism: An Obituary" (1960) (CTUI)
"'Extremism,' or The Art of Smearing" (1964) (CTUI)
"Racism" (1963) (TVOS)
"The Roots of War" (1966) (CTUI)
"The 'Inexplicable Personal Alchemy'" (1969) (TNL/ROTP)
"Censorship: Local and Express (1973) (PWNI)

Part 6: Aesthetics
First six articles in The Romantic Manifesto plus "The Goal of My Writing" (TRM)
Introduction to the 25th anniversary edition of The Fountainhead

Part 7: Essays on American Culture
"Apollo 11" (1969) (TVOR)
"Apollo and Dionysus" (1969-1970) (TNL/ROTP)
"The Comprachicos" (1970) (TNL/ROTP)
"The Age of Envy" (1971) (TNL/ROTP)
"Don't Let It Go" (1971) (PWNI)

I figure such a book would run to about 800 pages total with an index. (Part 1 would be about 140 pages, Part 2 about 90 pages, part 3 about 90 pages, part 4 about 60 pages, part 5 about 130 pages, part 6 about 130 pages, part 7 about 130 pages. That total comes to 770 pages.)

Abbreviation code: CTUI = Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal; FTNI = For the New Intellectual; PWNI = Philosophy: Who Needs It; TNL/ROTP = The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution / Return of the Primitive (rev/updated ed. of The New Left); TRM = The Romantic Manifesto; TVOR = The Voice of Reason; TVOS = The Virtue of Selfishness.

The Genius of Glenn Beck

I want to start out by saying that to really "get" Glenn Beck, you have have have to watch his show for yourself over a period of at least a few weeks. (Perhaps this is a rule for immersing yourself in just about anything or anybody.) It simply will not do to rely on the hit-piece style of "quoting" from his show by (probably Soros-supported?) sources. Otherwise, what I say in praise of Beck's show would seem incomprehensible and/or crazy. But his show is some of the most riveting stuff in television; an hour of Beck just flies right on by. You just have to go into it with no preconceptions and get drawn in over time by the core message.

Anyway, to capture this man's genius in a nutshell: on today's show he quotes from a document called the United States Declaration of Independence, thusly:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Then he proceeds to ask: How do you "progress" beyond this principle? "There is no higher principle than this!"

Take that, "progressives" (a.k.a. cowards afraid to identify themselves openly with socialism and/or substance).

Today's tidbit concerning Rand and Peikoff

In his Art of Thinking course, Peikoff made a crack concerning collaborating with Ayn Rand, "which means taking notes."

The testimony of those on Ayn Rand's intellectual wavelength ("unparalleled genius"; "Mrs. Logic") reminds me very much of people's testimony concerning Stanley Kubrick's thought processes. These two people's minds - Rand's and Kubrick's - were like the smoothest-running engines of cognitive integration, making the seemingly toughest tasks all quite habitual and natural and commonsensical, while everyone else could only try to keep up. It takes years of reality-oriented, focused-on-essentials mental processing to automatize one's cognitive activities at such a true-genius level.

That is all.

:-)

Palin: Unqualified. End of Story.

I have posts on the metaphysics of perfection, on where is-ought unity obtains, and on sense-of-life defects in Atlas Shrugged in the queue, and yet I've gotta spend my valuable fucking time addressing something else here.

Sarah Palin is a dingbat. She exercises poor judgment on matters political. She couldn't hack it for more than half a term as governor of Alaska. She's proudly ignorant. She's proudly anti-intellectual. She's incompetent at basic grammar and spelling ("refudiate"). She's unqualified to be president of the United States. She was unqualified two years ago when she ran, and she's unqualified now. Nothing has changed in this regard. It's the same old Sarah Palin. She's demonstrated amply that she refuses or is simply unable to do the work necessary to get or be ready for such a job. She's nothing more than a celebrity these days, riding her name-recognition for all it's worth. She's a phony and a fraud, which alone is enough to disqualify her from the office. She refuses outright to answer any hardball questions from the media. Whenever she is caught off guard with a question from someone and stoops to answer, she makes an ass of herself all over again.

So why in the fuck is Sarah Palin still even a prominent figure in American politics? And why does the GOP establishment run around like panicked pragmatistic cowards trying to contain the Palin Phenomenon? Since political operatives tend to be so anti-ideas (it's essentially not about ideas but about strategy - basically, Machiavellianism and narcissism), they have no clue at all how to contain it. To those embroiled in the political cesspool, the Palin Phenomenon is a given, something that simply cannot be beaten down because her following is so rabid and willing to believe pretty much anything.

Given that context, the political establishment cannot even wrap its puny intellectual capacities around the glaringly obvious fact that she is unqualified to be president. What's the upshot of the intellectual mess here? A concern that she is unelectable. They are apparently incapable or unwilling to address the core fundamental problem, which is her lack of qualifications. Almost no one in the lamestream media seems able or willing to address this very point in the necessary bold and clear terms. The only name that comes to mind is Keith Olbermann, and he has a "boy who cries wolf" problem anyway, while his ratings and audience are disgruntled-left-focused. The only other place you get a rational Palin-is-unqualified analysis is Sullivan's Daily Dish.

Sullivan specializes in shooting GOP fish in a barrel, see. He's really good at that, seeing as he's a political wonk and in a similar trap of confronting Palin as a seemingly unstoppable juggernaut of sorts. Sullivan, being ignorant of Ayn Rand, hasn't the faintest how to deal with this phenomenon at a deeper, wider and long-term level. But at least he identifies Palin as thoroughly unqualified and thoroughly lacking in any credibility whatsoever. That part he's obsessively gotten right for two years and counting.

So why won't anyone but a couple lone voices in the media-political establishment call out this fucking farce for what it is? I mean, it's a plainly obvious fact to anyone capable of even semi-principled integration that she's way out of her depth qualifications-wise. Then again, it should be plainly obvious to anyone capable of even semi-principled integration that the whole political scene today is a circus of insanity, or that Ayn Rand offers the appropriate long-term intellectual solutions to what ails Americans individually and collectively. Only a small minority of people - mostly those deeply familiar with Ayn Rand's ideas - seem able to recognize the problem and the solution.

Absent such an engine of cognitive integration, you're at the mercy of the outside forces that are a seeming given. Just the very idea of Palin having a roughly 20% shot at the 2012 nomination is a kind of uncertainty that a rational polity shouldn't and wouldn't be subject to. So the conclusion to draw here is that we simply don't have a rational polity right now. Not rational in any deep and fundamental sense. Maybe at some superficial social-scientific pragmatistic "rational irrationality" level, what we do have is a rational polity. What democratic polity isn't rational by such a standard?

Back to the fucking Republicans. Their chief concern seems to be her electability, as no prominent Republican has the guts to call it like it is concerning her being unqualified. Everyone with a lick of common sense knows that the GOP would be all over a Democrat candidate so lacking in qualifications. Say it's not even a matter of guts, but plain old intellectual recognition. Are they so lacking in that? They may very well be. Politics today is so extremely cynical and anti-intellectual as it is (this comes from a pragmatistic orientation towards life), so such a lack of recognition would not be surprising in the least. Whatever the causes, we're left with a totally pathetic GOP reduced to the complaint that she is unelectable, and what's more - anti-concept alert! - she's "polarizing" and "extreme." Ayn Rand is so prescient on these things. This is also to say that the reason for, scratch that, the cause of Palin's popularity is intellectual disintegration. A polity incapable of recognizing the more fundamental underlying problem - not just that she is patently unqualified, but how someone patently unqualified has any place of prominence in the world's most significant polity - has much bigger problems than whether some dingbat is electable or too "polarizing" or "extreme."

At this point, there's really nothing further to be said. An unqualified dingbat has prominence of place in our insane politics because our insane politics is the product of intellectual disintegration. Perhaps the intellectual elements in our society had better get past their issues/phobias and consider a paradigm shift by seriously considering Ayn Rand's consistently-reason-based, pro-integration alternative. Just maybe?

Peikoff vs. McCaskey

Well, I'm prepared to admit a bit of an egg-on-face problem in light of Peikoff's explanation for the "split" with McCaskey.

One thing to mention as a matter of my context, was the impression that his released email criticizing McCaskey was a "last word" type of thing on the subject - a policy he adopted with respect to David Kelley upon publishing "Fact and Value." (I'm still disappointed with how the Kelley-split thing was handled, probably by a good number of those involved.) I'd also like to mention how Peikoff's statements of this sort come off in sense-of-life terms: a sense of needlessly contemptuous tone. The same tone drags down the ability of his magnum opus, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, to engage most effectively with a normal reader. It comes across in Rand's writings at times as well. (I'm not yet through with my multi-part explanation of my sense-of-life differences with Atlas Shrugged.) But one thing I simply don't have is a personal acquaintance with Leonard Peikoff, and such a personal-level acquaintance tends to help in situations such as this.

Further, a general epistemic lesson to take away from this is to consider that a wider context may well exist where we haven't heard "definitively" from both sides of a dispute. Just imagine watching a court case and forming a judgment based only on what the prosecution said. This lesson is particularly crucial when applied to the Rand/Branden break, where all kinds of people (myself included) drew conclusions about Ayn Rand based on distorted and one-sided accounts from the Brandens themselves without having seen/read/heard Rand's side of things (again, having been under the impression that "To Whom it May Concern" was Rand's "final" statement on the matter . . . which actually meant Branden getting off easy considering that the truly reprehensible nature of his misdeeds remained hidden from the public until James Valliant's The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics).

Anyway, for what it's worth, before I (just now) became aware of Peikoff's statement on the McCaskey matter, I had already purchased David Harriman's The Logical Leap, and Peikoff's The Art of Thinking course (one of the lecture courses from Peikoff's age 50-60 prime-period I hadn't heard yet) is already on its way. The more I study these two individuals - Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff - the more it keeps coming together and making total sense. Still not sold on all the (ultra-contemptuous) "Kant is evil" polemics, but I'm almost grasping the full context in which some of these polemics were formed. And her theory of concepts as inductive generalizations - the center of it all, the thing that really matters most in the end, long-term - is effing brilliant and cements Rand's place alongside Aristotle as the greatest philosopher to date. When Rand commends Peikoff for his ability to communicate Objectivist ideas "superlatively" (her word), there's no shittin' about it: he knows his Objectivism pretty much as well as anyone alive. (For whatever reason, Branden pretty fell off the map in this area; his theory-practice integration dropped through the floor, he indicates a failure to understand Objectivism by projecting his own psychological issues onto Objectivism's theoretical structure, and he hasn't produced anything like Peikoff's lecture courses since the Break. Just as with his relation to Rand, the Philosopher outlasts the Psychotherapist.) (Meanwhile, I'm the leading authority on the next level/integration beyond Objectivism: Perfectionism.) As his Understanding Objectivism course essentially established, the Objectivist methodology - the center of it all - is pretty much invincible, having to be invoked in order to be attacked. Once you account for how concepts (our means of grasping reality) are formed objectively, the rest falls into place.

(Damn, if only an in-fashion socialist had come up with the measurement-omission account, the academy would have lapped it all up already. But then again, the kind of integration it took to arrive at the theory of concepts is the same kind of integration involved in recognizing the truth of the moral rightness of capitalism. Hell, just to recognize this point requires an appreciation of and good job integrating the method. I ask again, as I did the other day, do present-day mainstream academic philosophers even know what "integration" means? By the way, there is ample justification for Rand's contempt towards the "academic model," a model drenched in social metaphysics. The contempt here seems quite mutual; they don't like her and she didn't like them. Of course, by a number of indicators, the academy isn't stuck in quite as big a pile of shit as it was mid-20th-century; the ascendancy of Aristotle - kinda hard to stop that juggernaut, innit? - and the relative decline of assholes like Marx and other socialists has surely added to the conceptual clarity going on there. And Rand is getting some traction in the area of ethics without any meaningful criticism in opposition, as well. Let's not forget about that.)

Speaking of integration, I'm still trying to integrate what Peikoff is doing bringing up his "stature" in the Objectivist movement in these kinds of disputes. Again, Peikoff does note that his comments in the email presupposed a context shared amongst all the recipients. Still, there's something "off" about it, perhaps part of the same tone that comes off (sense-of-life-wise) as so contemptuous. Anyway, I've got bigger fish to fry than spending a lot of time focusing on this stuff. I look forward to listening to his course, reading the Harriman book, and integrating it all as need be into my forthcoming treatise. This thing needs to come out of the starting gate full-speed with bases amply covered, see.

Obama vs. American exceptionalism?

Sullivan tears the GOP media establishment another asshole. Nice to see Sullivan in top form; if he kept that up consistently he'd be a Perfectionist!

Nonetheless, what's the Machiavellian Obama doing, setting himself up for such easy political smearing like that? Could it be his please-everyone pragmatism? What's the point of the first sentence in his response about exceptionalism, the one easily and readily exploited by an unscrupulous partisan media-political machine? Also, why doesn't Obama praise individualism and capitalism as central to America's greatness? He cites nebulous "core values" to America such as democracy (yay!) and the rule of law (yay!) and free speech (yay!) and equality (yay?), but nowhere do I see the words "capitalism" or "individualism". Why not? Is he afraid to declare these as the core principles? Is he ignorant of their being core principles? Would the boundlessly-intellectually-curious Jefferson, were he President today, aware of the obvious similarities between his worldview and Ayn Rand's, be so goddamn ignorant and/or fearful?

This does raise a core and fundamental question of the matter: with the likes of Obama as president, why should America be considered exceptional? How do we stand out, and in virtue of what? Is it in virtue of pragmatism and lack of intellectual curiosity and ignorance of moral individualism and capitalism? Obama only touches upon the principle when he says that only in America could a story like his happen. Why does he fail to explicitly and clearly identify the principle? He says America is exceptional, but doesn't really explain why in fundamentally convincing terms. Had he known a thing or two about Ayn Rand, he would know that by making watered-down and vague explanations for American exceptionalism, he fails to be convincing. People don't respond in fundamental sense-of-life terms to vagueness and pragmatism; they respond to clarity, principle and boldness. Upholding "free speech" as a principle without tying such a value to a more fundamental explanation of its rightness, is just to mouth an empty platitude. This is pretty typical for pragmatistic politicians, but not typical for great leaders (such as Jefferson). (As a pragmatistic politician with no fundamental understanding of what makes America great - and this lack of fundamental understanding is conveyed in conscious and subconscious ways to his audience - Obama actually represents something that should be repellent to his intellectually liberal supporters: a variant of anti-intellectualism. So much for the myth - initially a hope - that he could transcend the anti-intellectualism so pervasive in our politics.)

So, why does Sullivan fail to notice all this, in his smaller-fry campaign of taking shots at a right-wing media machine, as delicious as those shots might be? I mean, c'mon, if you're gonna shoot fish in a barrel, why not do so in regard to Karl Marx and John Rawls rather than nonentities like Charles Krauthammer or Rich "Little Starbursts" Lowry? Lowry? Really?

Justice vs. Force

From poll answers provided by Allen Wood, a Stanford philosophy professor and leading Kant scholar:

My real position could be accurately described as 'anti-hyperinegalitarianism'. But given the obscene inequalities we have in the actual world, this is close to egalitarianism,

Um . . . well, the Ultimate Philosophical Retort to this more or less academic-mainstream view is, "How are the inequalities obscene?"

One simple but fundamental error in current-day mainstream moral and political philosophy (that is, unless A. John Simmons represents some kind of silent libertarian mainstream, but I kind of doubt it) is the confusion of matters of justice with matters of what rights people have. Rawls's Theory of Justice is focused almost exclusively with how coercive institutions ought to deal with questions of both liberty and equality. The stolen assumption here is that institutions ought to be coercive at all.

Okay, let's imagine a eudaemonistic culture. Eudaemonism is concerned with self-actualization and the conditions required for such. Those conditions are, first and foremost, the agent's own moral dispositions, and then things like good upbringing and education, a minimally supportive culture, having basic needs fulfilled and . . . freedom (to exercise one's capacities, as a necessary constitutive element of eudaemonia). Equality hardly enters into the picture at all except in minimal legal terms (i.e., equality under the law). But take the core concern here that a left-liberal might share: the importance of fulfilling the conditions under which people can flourish. Ensuring that basic needs are met is part of that moral vision. So let's just posit this plausible assumption: a eudaemonistic culture is one in which people are concerned that the basic needs of people are met.

Now, where is force supposed to enter this picture? If a theory of "social" justice is about "what human beings owe to one another" as a matter of basic human decency, that's all fine and good. How does that translate into a prescription that people or a polity engage in force to see to it that these obligations are fulfilled? It's a complete non sequitur.

The basic rational principle of political governance is that it secures logically prior rights, i.e., that it secures the conditions of freedom under which people can flourish. Protecting freedom is the only proper concern of government. Matters of "obscene" inequalities are a moral concern that people in non-coercive organizations have every right (and duty, if we're really dealing with moral obscenity) to address. The paradigm that absolutely has to be tossed out here, however, is the force-is-acceptable paradigm. It's an age-old paradigm used and applied across the ages where human beings as a species hadn't reached a high-enough stage of enlightenment to recognize the evil of using force against rational beings.

(As far as moral obscenity goes, let's not buy into the floating, irrational egalitarian notion that the social problem to be concerned with is inequality per se. There is no rational moral principle underlying any such concern. As some version of eudaemonistic ethics is the only rational underpinning for any social-political ethics, the proper focus of concern here is not inequality but rather whether the requisite conditions for self-actualization have been fulfilled. Equality or inequality plays no significant role in this analysis. To decry, say, starvation in the Third World as a moral obscenity is not to decry it on grounds of inequality. I do keep in mind Prof. Wood's hedge here; maybe he's not advancing his concern for moral obscenity on such irrational grounds as egalitarianism, but rather on grounds having to do with meeting basic conditions for self-actualization in light of current disparities that supposedly can [only?] be addressed through political means.)

What we should seriously consider as philosophers is whether the coercive state is anathema to (eudaemonistic) moral values, even and perhaps especially including the socially-oriented concern that the basic conditions for self-actualization are met. To say that good people ought to do certain things or provide such-and-such conditions for one another as a matter of justice, is not to say that the coercive state is the means by which people get (i.e., make, through force) one another to respect the demands of justice.

My "force is evil" view might be labeled or lumped into the cluster of views known as "philosophical anarchism." If that means, simply, that people ought not to use force against one another, then "philosophical anarchism" is the only acceptable social-political position and, frankly, the only one that common-sense analysis leads to. The basic social principle I endorse is that no one has the right to initiate physical force against anyone else, and that any social institution must respect individual rights; a social institution calling itself government isn't exempt from such a requirement. Government, like any other social institution, should be based only on the consent of the participants involved.

The scheme of voluntary communities envisioned by Nozick in "A Framework for Utopia" (the last chapter of Anarchy, State, and Utopia) is much like what I have in mind. Unlike Nozick, however, I have a broader moral vision to offer which makes a plausible road to "utopia" so much as realistically possible: a society in which eudaemonistic values are widespread is a society in which (a) people tend to be a lot more appreciative of the requirements of self-actualization and are therefore more empathetic and peaceful and (b) a society where the institution of government becomes (perhaps radically) transformed from government as we know it today.

Suppose, for instance, that the mindset that made "Galt's Gulch" possible is so widespread, and the success of such a model so compelling, that government functions amount to the functions performed by Judge Narragansett in the valley. Ayn Rand firmly denied that she was an anarchist, but the model of governance entailed by widespread acceptance and application of her moral ideals meets the social conditions demanded by the self-styled anarchists (excepting perhaps the left-anarchists, unless they really wouldn't mind the productive geniuses going off to form their own capitalistic societies, in which case the left-anarchists' desire for peace exceeds their desire to interfere with capitalist acts amongst consenting adults). The essential aspect of government in Rand's definition is the exclusive power to enforce laws in a defined geographical area, as a necessary prerequisite to the Rule of Law. That sounds consistent with the requirement that all governments must be based entirely on the consent of the governed and where the model of governance is not unlike the minimalistic dispute-resolution functions provided by an effective legal apparatus as was the case in the Gulch.

Doesn't this vision of a good society offer a lot more to inspire people than a force-based quasi-egalitarian vision does?

One thing entailed in this vision is that politics as we know it (and politicians as we know them) can be a thing of the past. No longer would we entrust our concerns about justice (or other things) to the fucking sociopathic narcissists running governments these days. No longer would we entrust these narcissists with coercive powers over our activities. How we interact with one another would no longer be a matter of how to employ force but how to get on with the task of flourishing (which includes taking an interest in the flourishing of others). Provisions of welfare goods thereby would become, properly, a matter of ethics rather than politics. Sounds to me that Ayn Rand identified the issues here at a greater level of fundamentality than Rawls did, ergo Rand > Rawls. Duh.

The Trolley Problem

(Thoughts that occur as I look through some of the answers and analyses of the answers in a philosophers' poll.)

How would Ayn Rand answer "the Trolley Problem"? My inclination is to think she would ask for any real-world scenario in history that comes remotely close to resembling such a scenario. She was concrete-oriented that way. In terms of general principles - not to be confused with a rationalistic "top-down" approach which takes such a scenario as a "good test" of some abstract principle that may or may not have been derived rationally and properly - her approach is indicated in "The Ethics of Emergencies." The Trolley Problem would fit the definition of an emergency situation as well as any. So what's the right answer? Is there a right answer?

Philosophers of the "mainstream" variety like to use such hypotheticals to challenge either moral theories or moral intuitions or both. What do our intuitions on this say? "Intuition" seems like a euphemism for "common sense," and common sense tends to be a highly reliable indicator of at least being on the right track. (I like to think of Aristotelian and Randian philosophy as common sense carried through consistently and to the extreme.) Common sense would say that faced with such a scenario - and the scenario stipulates that one's actions affect strangers of an indistinct age, gender, intelligence, etc. - you "do the numbers" and flip the switch (resulting in one death as opposed to five).

Now, the question of interest to philosophers is whether doing the numbers validates utilitarianism as the ruling paradigm of moral reasoning.

Isn't that a bit insane? Isn't that more than a bit insane? What kind of philosophic/epistemic methodology leads one to such a conclusion? What if utilitarianism gets its appeal mainly from applying the ethics of emergencies to normal real-world scenarios? And that gets us back to the original question: what real-world historical scenario resembles the Trolley Problem? We need a theory we can apply to the real world and not just to a hypothetical scenario that may or may not resemble the real world.

My (and Rand's, and Aristotle's) moral theory is an individualistic eudaemonism, which would fall quite squarely into the "virtue ethics" category. Eudaemonism tends not to concern itself with such questions as what to do in a Trolley Scenario, but rather with what it takes to live a good human life. So ultimately what it comes down to is what decision is constitutive of the agent's living well as a rational animal. The broad principle is covered quite well in "The Ethics of Emergencies," and the broad principle aligns very closely with a common-sense orientation toward the world. Common sense dictates, without knowing anything about the people involved, without being provided any alternative to either one or five people dying, etc., that you flip the switch and save four lives. That seems to be the reasoning a eudaemonic agent goes through in such a situation. It looks like the decision a person trying to live the best life they can would reluctantly make.

But what bearing does that have on the way a eudaemonic individual lives his life generally? We get back to the real world and ask what scenarios look like that. I'll just throw this one out there as it seems like as good a concrete as any: the decision to drop nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Here we have political leaders faced with two basic alternatives, under the assumption that the Japanese army and its leadership are all brainwashed (much like the Nazis) and won't surrender peacefully: Drop the big bad radiation-spewing bombs, or go through a protracted invasion with much greater loss of life, especially of American life. Faced with such an alternative, what do you do? The American leaders "ran the numbers" and decided it definitely wasn't worth the cost in lives, especially in American lives. The real, main issue is what got these countries into such a fucking crazy scenario to begin with. But given the craziness of the scenario, the nukes - with all their own associated horrific effects - looked like the least-worst option. It so happens that no nukes have been used in wartime since. Coincidence? It also so happens that the leading nations of the world haven't gotten themselves into such a crazy fucking situation to begin with since then. Coincidence?

(Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film Dr. Strangelove highlighted the fucking craziness of it all, and there hasn't been a nuclear showdown anything like the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis since that time. Coincidence?)

Okay, so we have a real-world scenario that kind-of resembles the Trolley one, and best as I can tell, eudaemonistic ethics emerges essentially intact, so what do we learn from the Trolley Problem? Why do "mainstream" philosophers obsess over such things? (It so happens that those philosophers most associated with the problem, Philippa Foot and Judith Thomson, are among the best of "the mainstream," so perhaps the main upshot was to highlight the inadequacy of deontology and consequentialism as ethical theories, or maybe better yet, how incompetent but influential philosophers have used these theories in all kinds of counter-intuitive ways. Long story short, the answers these theories or their proponents are likely to give in such a situation are counter-intuitive. I don't find that to be surprising at all. These moral theories are rationalistic constructions that don't gel with common sense. Foot, however, was a virtue ethicist. Coincidence? I don't think so, seeing as how eudaemonism does everything an ethical theory is supposed to do.) Perhaps the "mainstream" obsesses on such matters because of bad philosophical methodology, i.e., bad epistemology. This would not be any surprise, seeing as how "mainstream (academic) philosophy" has become so specialized and so compartmentalized that epistemological issues hardly enter into the picture amongst the mainstream moral theorists.

We already know that to be the case when it came to the most influential mainstream moral philosopher of our times, John Rawls.

But seeing as how the Trolley Problem is, at the most fundamental root, about philosophical methodology (i.e., epistemology), how do you really answer it without doing all the appropriate background integrations to begin with. How on fucking earth do you approach any such problem (much less any other problem) without having done the appropriate background integrations (which include a high regard for common sense)? In other words, how does the mainstream of contemporary moral philosophy deliver anything but epistemic paralysis, short of becoming thoroughly familiar with proper principles of epistemology? Do these mainstream academic philosophers even really know what the word "integration" means?

Seriously, do they?

(Hint: During the course of 2 years of graduate study at what was, at the time, a leading program in moral and political philosophy, I don't think I ever heard the word "integration" once. Maybe in effect during my course in ancient philosophy given by a prominent Aristotelian-Randian, I did. Aristotle's hylomorphic theory of the soul was a big focus there, and that's basically all about integration without using the word. But it's doubtful all that many contemporary academic moral philosophers understand the epistemic implications of Aristotle's approach to the soul much less anything else. If they did, the world of academic philosophy wouldn't be mired in such a bog of shit, for one thing, and it would be all familiar with Ayn Rand's theory of concepts for another. So, no, the academic mainstream really hasn't the faintest what "integration" really means. Note: it's not the same thing as Rawslian "integration" - read: laughable attempt at reconciliation - of rational and irrational moral positions.)

Dallas Cowboys Fire Head Coach

FOX News's Shep Smith reports that after the 45-7 trouncing at the hands of the Green Bay Packers (not too unlike the 41-7 dismantling of the Seahawks at the hands of the Giants to which I was a dark-humored observer yesterday), the Cowboys have fired their head coach.

A few facts here:

(1) This was FOX News
(2) I'm the self-styled Ultimate Philosopher
(3) I'm watching a lot of FOX News lately
(4) Earlier in the show Shep was interviewing Judge Napolitano on Bush and Cheney's, scratch that, Obama's, unconstitutional abuse of presidential authority (see Glenn Greenwald's blog for details).
(5) The Ultimate Philosopher is especially observant
(6) The typical cable-news viewer is not especially observant
(7) The Ultimate Philosopher is not your typical cable news viewer

Now, the Ultimate Philosopher poses a question: Is FOX News's Shep Smith reporting on the firing of the Dallas Cowboys head coach as a significant news item a sign of the Apocalype, or a sign that if that's the most significant thing to report, then things must be pretty darn good these days? Also, how does that integrate with FOX's apparent duplicity with respect to presidential abuses of power depending on whether the schmuck in question has a (R) or (D) after his name? Finally, what does the Ultimate Philosopher's watching a lot of FOX News portend?

More from the Facepalm Dept.

By way of Chicago Law Professor Brian Leiter's highly bigoted America-hating blog, a link to this more or less typical anti-capitalist, anti-rights whining. A perceptive reader notices the following failures of cognition:

(1) The zero-sum, fixed-pie mentality.

(2) No attempt to identify the underlying cause of increased inequality in the United States. Part of this has to do with how to measure income (more income is being taken in the form of benefits, particularly health insurance). Ask an economist, and the answer is more likely to be that globalization has caused a shifting in incomes. From the global vantage point, speaking of increasing inequality in one country is a massive context-drop. So, we have here a failure to identify cause and context.

(3) No recognition of any principle whatsoever, such as the absolute right of private property; perhaps the only principle involved is, "More equality good, greater inequality bad." Good luck in trying to ground any such principle. The highest court of appeal in this screwed-up mindset is Rawls's Theory of Justice, which is ultimately against groundings (since Rawls's theory is consensus-obsessed, and it's a given in such an approach that people cannot agree on groundings, such as the absolute human requirement to be free to create, earn and keep the product of one's own efforts).

(4) Focused on solutions that don't promote growth and initiative and expanding the pie, but rather on how to redistribute the pie. This follows more or less naturally from point (1). The fucking "liberal" socialists don't have any idea how to expand the pie, which has approximately 100 percent to do with individual initiative. Any policy should therefore be oriented towards actualizing individual initiative, and punishing success through force doesn't seem like a good way of doing that. Then again, I'm not a pragmatism-eaten economist, so I don't usually analyze policies in terms of "desirable" (read: consensus-wanted) results.

(5) A (quasi-?) Keynesian tenet whereby tax cuts going to the wealthy don't stimulate growth because "they don't go out and spend the money" the way the poor do. So whether or not you deserve to keep the products of your own talents, efforts and initiative depends on whether some fucking coercive policymaker in Washington determines whether you're going to "spend" the money rightly. Do keep in mind Keynes's axiomatic dictum for the pragmatism-eaten mindset: "In the long run we are all dead." Apparently, tax reductions for the wealthy just go into some unproductive bank account. Of course, then again, maybe those extra funds go into productive investments where the highest return is going to be had. Apparently those higher returns come from various developing countries with higher rates of economic growth. That would "exacerbate" the inequality right here at home, since these investments benefit the businesses and workers abroad, less so here at home. But this concerns underlying causes that the fucking liberals with their pragmatistic refusal to deal with underlying causes (that's "metaphysics" and nonsense) rarely if ever get into. That would require consulting the economists, and the economists have had this tendency to be a lot more pro-capitalist than the fucking liberals and socialists have been. I wonder why?

(6) Apparently, it's better to let fucking politicians, bureaucrats, public employees unions, and all their ilk decide how economic resources are to be directed, than to leave those decisions to the Evil Rich who got that way by . . . you guessed it, doing a better job deciding how economic resources are to be directed than everyone else did. But as we all realize by now, success in directing economic resources to their most profitable and productive lines is something that should be punished so that the fucking politicians can redistribute things more evenly and the American economy can stagnate more relative to the rest of the world.

(7) Stagnationism, not growth, as the basis for policy. This more or less sums up all the previous points. See also Nathaniel Branden's article, "The Divine Right of Stagnation," in The Virtue of Selfishness.

(8) America is a rotten place according to the fucking "liberal" socialists, so much so that people must be miserable living here. That's why so many immigrants come here to work, save, and invest. By the way, poor immigrants coming here just adds to the percentage of poor here in the country, which is Bad. Also, see point (7), where the basic mindset is that of stasis and stagnation. The poor immigrants coming here must be the same poor that come here five years from now.

Fact is, America is amazingly rich on average (or median); the only real issue here is how we Americans capitalize upon this great advantage. Sitting around like a bunch of whiny defeatists complaining about people making a lot of wealth is just not going to cut it here. What we absolutely need to do here, is to adopt the mentality of growth, i.e., of capitalism. What this entails is a rather new, scary, and initially-disorienting perspective: that Americans could become a huge rich capitalistic "class" (do please keep in mind how the term "class" is totally abused, applied totally out of context, basically undefined, etc. by the fucking Marxism-eaten "liberal" socialists) for the whole world. That would require a lot of Americans taking on the mentality of ownership rather than of stagnation in its various manifestations. Now, if we're defeatists, and pragmatists, and traditionalists, the argument is that "this can't be done." Why? Because it would be hard? Would it be too hard? Perhaps it would be too hard for people deeply embedded and devoted to a mentality of stagnation and weakness, e.g., many in the Democrat voting base.

But (a) we shouldn't tailor policy or rights-theory to that mentality and (b) it really isn't that hopeless a situation. Growth can happen in many amazing and unexpected ways if you just foster the right conditions for it. Fostering a zero-sum, fixed-pie, envy-eaten, whiner mentality is not the way to do it. Fostering a radically capitalistic, individualistic, pro-strength, pro-independent-thought mindset is the key. Likening the United States of America to a banana republic is such a failure of cognition that it's, sadly, telling how it receives prominence of place in our leading news outlets.

Sunday worship, 11/7/2010

In the Facepalm Dept....

(Surprisingly enough, not from the Leiter Hate Factory this time.)

National Review is still in the intellectual shitter 50 years later with respect to all the hate/fear/ignorance directed towards Ayn Rand. This hit-piece isn't as world-historically bad as the Chambers review, of course, but has "conservatism" really been this stagnant, for 50 whole years? Well, of course it has been! "Conservatism" is essentially defined by stagnation. It's a fitting counterpart to the "liberals'" do-everything-half-assed pragmatism, innit?