James Randi and Objectivism

[Leumas]

There's a quip I remember from Asimov, he was at a meal or function and someone was complaining bout how hard it was to find staff these days and things were better "back then", he pointed out that back then she would have been staff.

It does seem many people imagine that they would be "at the top" of the pile if only there weren't these terrible restrictions that prevent them from reaching their rightful place. It's a sobering fact but for most of us these "terrible restrictions" are all that are propping us up! We know what happens when they aren't in place and for the vast majority of people it is a life of abject poverty, short lifespans and great misery.

That is exactly why a barista at a coffee shop who has no health care and cannot get a decent education because she cannot pay for it defends tooth and nail her decision to vote for people like Romney or Gingrich whose sole aim in life is to lower taxes on businesses so that someone like Romney who makes $45M a year can remain in the less than 15% tax bracket or even lower it.

She is fully convinced that she is going to be like Romney one day instead of being a 70 years old who cannot afford health care and dies because she cannot get treatment for something that is easily treated if only she had the money to pay for it but cannot since she had to remortgage her house already to pay for treatment for the last ailment she had before that.

Or consider the motivation of the ex-marine guy who argued with me that there should not be government run health care along the same lines as the one he is using as a Vet (and admits it is great) because he begrudges that everyone should get the same treatment as him.

See this video about the scam called Romney and this video about the shame called Gingrich.

 

[Leumas]

I think Ayn Rand's view of capitalism is unrealistic and unworkable for one simple reason: we tried it before and it resulted in disaster.

Ayn Rand would apparently have loved modern-day Somalia

I'm not particularly an Ayn Rand fan, but what evidence do you have that the Great Depression was caused by her version of capitalism? Or that her version of capitalism has ever existed within the past few hundred years?

History.

What about the French, English, Spanish and other European Empires, and petty Monarchies, Feudal systems and serfdoms and slavery.

What about the Medicis family in Italy who BOUGHT the Papacy and pretty much controlled or extorted everything else they could lay their hands on.

What about the petty regimes all over South America.

What about the Rajas in India and the Khans in Persia.



What about the Roman Empire?


All of those are what Pup has described....but instead of people clumping together to defend themselves against the abuses of monopolies.... rather…. it was the monopolies clumping together to create armies and systems to defend themselves against the people and to rapine more people in their un-bridled rampaging greed called Unregulated Capitalism.



It is pretty much what Tsig said

For one person to have absolute freedom everyone else must be his slave.

 

[marplots]

Rand's philosophy (her quote):

My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

My objective analysis:
1) I am not an heroic being. I'm a schlump.
2) I am at my most moral when I am putting someone else's happiness above my own.
3) My noblest activity (so far as I can tell) is spinning fantasy while dreaming.
4) If reason were an absolute, we'd agree more. And, if I were entirely rational, I'd never get out of bed.

I'd actually frame man as an emotional bundle of biological drives only supported afterwards by rational constructs based on knowing what the answer should come out to be. This is why skepticism is so attractive -- it ain't at all natural.

 

[catsmate]

I don't know if James Randi has given a personal opinion on Rand and/or objectivism; for me objectivism is a silly, childish philosophy developed by a third rate mind to justify her existing opinions.

 

[Cayvmann]

There's a quip I remember from Asimov, he was at a meal or function and someone was complaining bout how hard it was to find staff these days and things were better "back then", he pointed out that back then she would have been staff.

It does seem many people imagine that they would be "at the top" of the pile if only there weren't these terrible restrictions that prevent them from reaching their rightful place. It's a sobering fact but for most of us these "terrible restrictions" are all that are propping us up! We know what happens when they aren't in place and for the vast majority of people it is a life of abject poverty, short lifespans and great misery.

Dunning-Kruger works to explain this, I think. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect

 

[tsig]

I hope you don't mind if I borrow this. I promise to put it in quote marks.

No problem.

 

[Jorghnassen]

Don't know about Randi, but in terms of famous skeptics, Michael Shermer's opinion on Objectivism is pretty clear

 

[Foster Zygote]

... subject to the requirement that your reason and rational thinking must always lead you to the same conclusions as Ayn Rand: that capitalism is natural and undeniably good, that the world is divided into supermen and mediocrities, that the latter should kiss the former's boot for being allowed to live. Disagreement with Rand's program marks you as anti-man, anti-reason and anti-life, and proves that you desire the extinction of mankind. I've been there. It's trash.

That pretty well sums up my views as well.

 

[MichaelM]

Throwing Rocks at Rand

Since the first listed priority of this foundation is to "expose ... pseudoscientific frauds" it was quite amusing to land on this particular thread overflowing with exactly that. With barely an exception, the posts to this thread are based not on any study or even superficial understanding of the body of ideas that is Objectivism—a more accurate description would be "internet hearsay."

Capitalism per the definition of Ayn Rand is the political system that seeks to protect the individual human being's absolute right to autonomy, requiring only that each such person consistently grant that same right to all other human beings. There has never been a government in all of history that sought to do that without compromising the effort with some form of coercion for expedient purposes.

Autonomy means freedom from coercion by physical force or the threat thereof. It means that in a capitalist society, all human interrelationships shall be voluntary, and the government may, as the enforcer, only use force to stop force and nothing else. It is a sign of the colloquial, shallow, and wildly inaccurate understanding of capitalism in these comments that they would accuse capitalism of being the cause of the present economic dilemma. The society George Bush ruled was not a society of voluntary interrelationships—nor is or was any other one.

As for the comments on Ayn Rand in general, if you will review them, you will find that none of her ideas are referenced and accompanied by evidence to the contrary. They are mostly just characterizations that are uttered with the apparent expectation that the author's words should be taken to be infallible.

If, instead of just throwing rocks at Ayn Rand, the authors of these comments had spent a little time scanning her work, they would have learned that "only ideas matter." And where she formulates an identification about the nature of man and the universe and accompanies it with supporting evidence, a simple characterization of the idea will not constitute a rebuttal.

In short, it looks like some educators here did not do their homework.

 

[joesixpack]

...individual human being's absolute right to autonomy,

Human beings are not autonomous by nature. Voluntarily autonomous individuals are very rare, and they are generally neither completely autonomous nor sane.

 

[stilicho]

There's a quip I remember from Asimov, he was at a meal or function and someone was complaining bout how hard it was to find staff these days and things were better "back then", he pointed out that back then she would have been staff.

It does seem many people imagine that they would be "at the top" of the pile if only there weren't these terrible restrictions that prevent them from reaching their rightful place. It's a sobering fact but for most of us these "terrible restrictions" are all that are propping us up! We know what happens when they aren't in place and for the vast majority of people it is a life of abject poverty, short lifespans and great misery.

It applies to businesses and corporations as well as to individuals. I don't actually prepare the taxes but I do some of the preliminary calculations (just doing the development work and pressing buttons, these days) for our tax manager. There are some regulations and some benefits our corporate taxes are paying for, without which the industry wouldn't work. Or it wouldn't work as well.

My impression of Ayn Rand has always been that there's a certain amount of nihilism in her work and this is prominently evoked by her adherents. I also don't understand how she herself managed to fit into her social environment. I've read Greenspan's memoirs and it sounds as though everyone in her inner circle simply nodded and agreed with everything she said regardless of implications. He'd said something (I can't remember what it was off the top of my head) and got some kind of reaction from her but it sounds as though he backed down immediately so as to gain some sort of nebulous status within that clique.

I don't have enough hours in the day to waste on cultish dogma.

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

Since the first listed priority of this foundation is to "expose ... pseudoscientific frauds" it was quite amusing to land on this particular thread overflowing with exactly that. With barely an exception, the posts to this thread are based not on any study or even superficial understanding of the body of ideas that is Objectivism—a more accurate description would be "internet hearsay."

Capitalism per the definition of Ayn Rand is the political system that seeks to protect the individual human being's absolute right to autonomy, requiring only that each such person consistently grant that same right to all other human beings. There has never been a government in all of history that sought to do that without compromising the effort with some form of coercion for expedient purposes.

Autonomy means freedom from coercion by physical force or the threat thereof. It means that in a capitalist society, all human interrelationships shall be voluntary, and the government may, as the enforcer, only use force to stop force and nothing else. It is a sign of the colloquial, shallow, and wildly inaccurate understanding of capitalism in these comments that they would accuse capitalism of being the cause of the present economic dilemma. The society George Bush ruled was not a society of voluntary interrelationships—nor is or was any other one.

As for the comments on Ayn Rand in general, if you will review them, you will find that none of her ideas are referenced and accompanied by evidence to the contrary. They are mostly just characterizations that are uttered with the apparent expectation that the author's words should be taken to be infallible.

If, instead of just throwing rocks at Ayn Rand, the authors of these comments had spent a little time scanning her work, they would have learned that "only ideas matter." And where she formulates an identification about the nature of man and the universe and accompanies it with supporting evidence, a simple characterization of the idea will not constitute a rebuttal.

In short, it looks like some educators here did not do their homework.

Woa! Exactly how does the part I highlighted work?

 

[Darat]

Since the first listed priority of this foundation is to "expose ... pseudoscientific frauds" it was quite amusing to land on this particular thread overflowing with exactly that. With barely an exception, the posts to this thread are based not on any study or even superficial understanding of the body of ideas that is Objectivism—a more accurate description would be "internet hearsay."

...snip...

You do realise that you can't have come to that conclusion based on the evidence and using reason?

 

[stilicho]

.....

Capitalism per the definition of Ayn Rand is the political system that seeks to protect the individual human being's absolute right to autonomy, requiring only that each such person consistently grant that same right to all other human beings. There has never been a government in all of history that sought to do that without compromising the effort with some form of coercion for expedient purposes.

.....

The problem is that there's never been an institution of any kind that's been able to do so either. The idea itself is honourable but not practical.

Debating the idea itself is a form of coercion.

 

[stilicho]

Woa! Exactly how does the part I highlighted work?

I'd like to see a national constitution written based on that concept and see exactly how it reads. AFAIK, Rand never did the grunt work on that basic requirement for a political and social plan. How would the RandLand constitution read?

 

[Fordama]

"A person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself. I quote John Lennon, "I don't believe in Beatles, I just believe in me." Good point there. After all, he was the walrus."

--Ferris Bueller

 

[Darat]

I'd like to see a national constitution written based on that concept and see exactly how it reads. AFAIK, Rand never did the grunt work on that basic requirement for a political and social plan. How would the RandLand constitution read?

I'd like them address the problem of children which she never really tackled and always hummed and ahhed when it was raised. I've always assumed because she realised that it would clearly expose the fact that her ideology could not be universally applied.

The writer Nancy Kress (who used ideas from Objectivism in her excellent novel Beggars in Spain) sums up my views very well: http://www.lysator.liu.se/lsff/mb-nr28/Interview_with_Nancy_Kress.html

...snip....

Nancy Kress: The thing about Ayn Rand, with whom I was enraptured when I was in my early twenties as so many people are, and who I eventually outgrew, as many people do, is that although there's something very appealing about her emphasis on individual responsibility, that you should not evade reality, you should not evade responsibility, you should not assume that it's up to the next person to provide you with your life, with what it is that you need, whether that's emotional, or physical, and that that can be very appealing. But at the same time, pushed to it's really logical conclusion, objectivism, Ayn Rand's philosophy, lacks all compassion, and even more fundamental, it lacks recognition of the fact that we are a social species and that our society does not exist of a group of people only striving for their own ends, which is what she shows, but groups of people co-operating for mutual ends, and this means that you don't always get what you want and your work does not always benefit you directly. We had a panel earlier today on the importance of children in literatureChildren in Science Fiction, published in Månblad Alfa number 19. and how portraying children makes literature more real. One of my profound disagreements with Ayn Rand is that not only are there no children in Atlas Shrugged, there is no provision for them, because if she put them in, she would have to contradict her own views, which is that everybody's life essentially belongs to you and your only obligation is to strive for yourself. Those of us who are parents very often sacrifice our own well-being, short term or long term, for those of somebody else, in order that the race can continue, and if you really take objectivism and push it to it's ultimate question, you have to conclude, from her philosophy, that society as a whole does not have a responsibility for all of its children. What that means is that if you have an abused child, a child that is being beaten or tortured next door you have no obligation and no right to interfere under objectivism. It's not your problem. It's not your business. And there's something ultimately wrong with a philosophy that would postulate that. It doesn't treat us as a social species, which we are. It treats us as nothing but a collection of individuals, and the truth is that what makes human society entensioned is the pull between our obligation to the group, to the state, however you want to define it, and to the individual.


...snip...

 

[The Norseman]

Ayn Rand fans have a fondness for the nineteenth century. Many of them figure they would be wealthier and more important than they are now if they lived in a Rand-inspired society.

I doubt Rand's version of capitalism would even work and I'm certain it has never existed anywhere at any time.

Yes, that's my point. A statement was made that Rand's version of capitalism caused the Great Depression and I called BS on it.

 

[Humes fork]

I can't imagine a stock exchange working without any sort of regulatory framework. Or the legal processes handling bankruptcies.

Ayn Rand also had a problem with quantum physics due to its probabilistic nature.

It's also funny that Rand claims her philosophy to be based on reason (i.e rationalism) when it contains a fair shunk of empiricism as well.

"A person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself. I quote John Lennon, "I don't believe in Beatles, I just believe in me." Good point there. After all, he was the walrus."

--Ferris Bueller

Meism?

 

[MichaelM]

Joesixpack,

It is not the nature of men to be autonomous it is autonomy from coercion by others that the nature of man demands, because all men are fallible and the success of each individual life depends on the choices each individual makes. Freedom means freedom from the fallibility of others.