Yatzhee Mentions Objectivism a Lot
- Thread starter JMeganSnow
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There's a wonderful quote, that sums up my feelings on Objectivism quite nicely, even though the quote has nothing to do with Objectivism:
"grabbing what you can get isn?t any less wicked when you grab it with the power of your brains than with the power of your fists"
I say phooey on your "Voluntary" exchanges. Quite a few of those are things done out of necessity because someone did something clever and very underhanded and forced them into it.
"grabbing what you can get isn?t any less wicked when you grab it with the power of your brains than with the power of your fists"
I say phooey on your "Voluntary" exchanges. Quite a few of those are things done out of necessity because someone did something clever and very underhanded and forced them into it.
Bit of a fact for you.JMeganSnow said:
Moral Objectivism was a theory/philosophy of Ayn Rands.
Ironically her book, Atlas Shrugged, was a book that influenced Bioshock heavily.
Yahtzee may have spotted this and decided to comment on it etc.
Coincidence? You be the judge.
That's why J. says "apart from the Bioshock review" in the exact chunk of text you quoted -- you know, to imply that she's already aware of why a mention of Objectivism would be natural and unsurprising in that particular review.Zeldadudes said:
So I'd say your snark is very heavily misplaced.
-- Alex
Did she come up with a name for the style of argument whereby you fail to come up with a viable response in a debate and instead make a numbered list evidencing why your rhetorical opponent is "pathetic"? I commented that mixed economies - that is, those that combine governmental controls with pragmatic economics and accountability - are acknowledged as having the highest living standards in the world, in case you missed it.Wow, how pathetic. You know, Ayn Rand actually came up with a name for this style of argumentation because it's both prevalent and absurd: it's called "argument from intimidation". Let's see what you've done here:
1. Used the word "Ubermensch" to imply that I'm some sort of Nietzschian Superman proponent.
2. Used the word "hilarious" to imply that the only thing anyone needs to consider is your personal views of humor. Surely because YOU think it's funny it MUST be ridiculous.
3. Made reference to "facts" without providing any.
4. Used the word "daft" as in #2.
Is this *really* the best argument you can provide?
I'd ask you to explain how corporations aren't capable of exploitation, but seeing how I doubt you could, I'd like to just note that the comparing of companies and governments - which are both institutions, and both have a mandate of making profit - is not so far-flung, especially in reference to Feudal societies, which were like major companies in the sense that their central focus was making more profit for the aristocracy, who would be analagous to the share-holders within a company.
I know that the U.S. is a republic, my point was clearly that the absorption of democratic principles in the United States had in large part to do with the popular revolt of their citizens, who rebelled against the monarchistic governmental models forced upon them by the British and behaved "violently" and without regard for "private property rights" in doing so.
That's chicken or the egg: logically, the leading theorists of revolutions are not apt to hail from the lower-class (a fact which only strengthens what I was saying about the definitiveness of social conditions), but their ability to garner the support of the "commons" to overthrow the government is typically contingent on the promise - and often delivery - of a higher living standard than they had previously enjoyed (and, of course, the capacity of their arguments to resonate socially; the outlier to this whole theory would be the assistance of foreign governments). Brecht once commented that in western nations, it is typical to assign achievements to their intellectual instigators, rather than the masses who made them possible: this is what you're doing right now, by suggesting that the lower-class masses often neccessary to overthrow the government are not "revolutionaries", or that they are somehow ancillary to social change.
No, you see: the governmental antecedents of the economic ideas favoured by Rand were originally implemented via "collective action" that disregarded "private property rights" and a myriad of the other principles she espouses.
This is what's so paradoxical about her work: that she claims to be the sole champion of "reason" lost amid a swath of foaming socialists and hippie masses, when in actuality her failure to acknowledge the implications of social conditions or even relativity - affirmed by social science and modern science, respectively - make her views detached from any palatable concept of "rationality."
Subjective pluralism believes, essentially, that western society is not an especially rational, anomalous society that exists in a vacuum, but rather that it is in continuity with history, and that something like "modern science" is potentially as fallible as the creation myths of yesteryear (naturally this leads to skepticism about the existence of an "objective truth": a notion that, to a large extent, was manipulated by western Europe to promote the inscrutability of their views). It's a difficult thing to refute in a world where the preeminence of liberal views among the intelligentsia is a direct result of it being untenable philosophically at this point to assert, for example, that the assigning of significance to individual rights is the only "correct" way to govern the populace when successful societies have organized themselves in various ways throughout history. In this sense, arguing that alternatives exist to holistically western morals or governmental models (or the extenuated individualism proposed by Rand) is not that different then arguing that the Bible is not monolithically "correct": all subjectivists are arguing for is the validity of differing approaches, whereas objectivists believe in the existence of one, inarguable truth - and a Eurocentric one, at that.
Remember Mark Twain? "The radical of one century is the conservative of the next." All Ayn Rand is trying to do is assert the supremacy of a western objectivism that's been long-since exhausted by the developments of its era, and the straining of reason in her philosophy shows.
Look, I really have to tell you: you're not this über-intelligent individual who dropped out of school because you were sick of all the leftist sheep that surrounded you, and who now champions self-dependence because you possess so many hallowed attributes that the lazy masses want to usurp. In actuality, you're just a fairly juvenile intellectual whose egocentric enough to think that everyone - including myself, and I've had a fair number of run-ins with ass-backward uses of post-modernism, and the college curricula - who disagrees with you and your hack philosophy is some kind liberal stooge.
Anyway, drop it; read a credible book; develop a new right-wing philosophy that makes sense. Just please don't try to tell me that I'm solely the byproduct of social indoctrination, or that I've never went through my own knee-jerk conservative phase.
in the end it wouldn't matter, since the inventor would reach that height either how; it would just be a question of time. that's been the case with society so far as i know. the steam engine was first invented around 150 AD; but people didn't know what to do with it back then. it was forgotten, only to be reinvented 1700 years later, when society could appreciate it.Cheeze_Pavilion said:
our advancement could go much further than we have right now, but if someone blocks a development, it might be another 500 or 1000 years before that invention finds its place in society. why? because of the judgments and fears that people have, and that they exercise them on anything new or different. once you understand this, you will understand why ayn rand had objectivism, why plato had the republic and why buddha had his teachings.
maybe they don't make sense in your mind, but i don't see how that is the problem of everyone else. maybe you should actually understand where all three of them are coming from before you start bullshitting your way through this. i accidentally stumbled upon some of buddha's quotes from another site and tried to compare them to what i read of rand's philosophy. you'd be surprised on how much they match.EzraPound said:
great minds do think alike, because underneath the different syntax of these three philosophies, the semantic remains the same. i'm not going to bother explaining it to you further as you're judging on your personal bias and not on facts; which makes this discussion entirely useless.
A philosophy you can't (or won't) explain is a philosophy you don't truly understand.theklng said:
The problem is the recursive nature of the "proofs" in Objectivism... the law of identity is important, yes, but if you reduce too much to the tautologocial "A = A" then you end up proving nothing but trivialities... and then, from those trivialities, you can extrapolate whatever principles you want just so long as you stick with identities.
Myself, I guess my main argument against Objectivist thought is how often it's used as an excuse for dismissing the concept of empathy. It's highly conducive to "I got mine" reasoning, and highly prone to encouraging a particularly heinous sense of entitlement in some simply because of the contents of their wallets.
It's a "by their fruits shall ye know them" sort of thing.
-- Steve
Denial, not proof.theklng said:
-- Steve
PS: "Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?... If they are going to die, it's best they get on with it and reduce the surplus population." Dickens had plenty of experience with proto-Objectivists and their social Darwinism.
Um yes, yes it does.JMeganSnow said:
In atlas shrugged she called people who gave to charity evil, solely on the basis of giving to charity.
In addition she stated in an interview that carrying about your friends and family over pure productivity to be immoral. Which is completely batshit, seeing as humans are social animals and the best way for us to be happy is.....to help other people.
What your esposuing is more libertarianism not objectivism. Ayn rand claimed altruism was evil, and she really did apparently believe that.
It equates moral worth with monetary worth in effect.
There is nothing wrong with seeking to be the best you can be.
Ayn rand however claimed that the poor were poor because they deserved to be, and therefore where worthless people. It is the blame the victim mentality, the idea someone is a worse person than you merely because of circumstances of birth and not there own actions is inherently elitist.
This woman opposed public education remember, the single greatest leg up we have ever given the poor to succeed or fail on there own merits instead of circumstance of birth and one of the greatest boons to the free market ever.
It's just not comparable. There's a reason academia has pervasively rejected Rand's philosophy: because it doesn't make sense, whether judged by the gauge of modern or social science. Moreover, it's bereft of any real, concretized analysis: in a recent post, I quoted a section of her article, "Apollo and Dionysus", to illustrate the way she contructs arguments out of fallacies, but I'll restate - where a philosopher such as Plato or Kant dissects every level of the logic they use (and, in the latter case, understands scholarship) Ayn Rand applies sweeping value judgements to various ideas without justifying them. In the "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology", for example, she roundly dismisses nominalism, pragmatism, linguistic analysis, etc. - all without properly explaing why these ideas are inadequate, or even demonstrating an understanding of their origins!
Of course, Rand's philosophy has merits, and it's not unreasonable that you may find some correlation between her ideas and Buddhist ones - but that's only because she's paraphrasing earlier writers, many of whom made claims similar to her in a time when those ideas were more broadly defensible - like in the nineteenth century. Infact, what I've noticed is that Rand's philosophy is "popular" because, without a strong understanding of philosophic scholarship, it's possible to get hoodwinked into reading it and not understanding how poorly argued it is on a number of levels - especially if you're arrogant enough to adopt the disposition that all academics are Marxist dimwits and you know more because you read some piss-poor piece of fiction that makes intermittent allusions to Kant.
Oh well everything said about Rand I was going to say to some extent so I won't bother. Though I will mention that Ayn Rand is espoused by the American Republican Party as a must read thus this explains why the Republicans fail at life. Oh well all we need now is a party based on Nietzsche, Hitler, Mussolini or Plato then we could have a particle of common sense.
It's kinda useless to get into the discussion at this late stage.
To me, objectivism has its merits AND its pitfalls. The believers will try to go around the pitfalls and the naysayers will drive case scenarios to their extreme in order to punch holes in the logic of the philosophy. Neither method is particulary helpful or enlightening.
Personally I like many ideas Rand had, but I'm not kidding myself that her philosophy has n answer for every human scenario. Thus as an idelogy to fundamentally follow, objectivism fails. Just like ALL ideologies that are stuck to fundamentally. Soem fail beacue they are not flexible enough, others fail because the intentions doesn't work outside the laboratory.
I'm pragmatic, we live in interesting times were human progress runs faster than can be consciously absorbed and we have to continually reevaluate our thinking. So read Rand for her ideas, her philosophy isn't flawless but you could definitely do worse.
Oh, and Yahtzee apparently got it wrong or took liberties in his "interpretations" of objectivism. Then again, I got to ZP for the laughs not the social criticsicm.
To me, objectivism has its merits AND its pitfalls. The believers will try to go around the pitfalls and the naysayers will drive case scenarios to their extreme in order to punch holes in the logic of the philosophy. Neither method is particulary helpful or enlightening.
Personally I like many ideas Rand had, but I'm not kidding myself that her philosophy has n answer for every human scenario. Thus as an idelogy to fundamentally follow, objectivism fails. Just like ALL ideologies that are stuck to fundamentally. Soem fail beacue they are not flexible enough, others fail because the intentions doesn't work outside the laboratory.
I'm pragmatic, we live in interesting times were human progress runs faster than can be consciously absorbed and we have to continually reevaluate our thinking. So read Rand for her ideas, her philosophy isn't flawless but you could definitely do worse.
Oh, and Yahtzee apparently got it wrong or took liberties in his "interpretations" of objectivism. Then again, I got to ZP for the laughs not the social criticsicm.
i never saw anything bad in being eclectic...Hithel said:
that being said, i agree with you. this is the essence of what i was trying to convey. i realize however that giving people here an opinion of understanding is throwing pearls for swine. it's a rare incident if i happen upon someone who can understand the complexities of life in the spectrum that i do.