-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal), Guest Blogger
The GOP hearts Ayn Rand. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and his father Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), all mention the works of Ayn Rand as being influential in their lives. Even Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas references her work as influence in his autobiography. Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, is an acolyte of Rand’s thinking and knew her personally.
I would like to focus on one aspect of Ayn Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism, and its implications for Christianity.
Rand saw the role of any philosophical system as the understanding of reality. Reality (existence) and the ability to understand reality (consciousness) are at the heart of Objectivism. Considering existence (reality) and consciousness (man’s awareness of it), Rand assigns primacy to existence, “the universe exists independent of consciousness (of any consciousness).” In other words, “wishing doesn’t make it so.”
For Rand, consciousness is the faculty of perceiving that which exists, “consciousness is consciousness of an object.” Eric Johnson, in a review of chapter one of Leonard Peikoff’s book Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, wrote:
Since the nature (identity) of consciousness is to be aware of reality, existence is prior to, necessary for, and not subject to the control of, consciousness.
Consciousness cannot be conscious only of itself because you run into the chicken-and-the-egg problem. Consciousness requires objects to be aware of in order to create consciousness. Sensory deprivation does not validate the notion of consciousness without anything to be conscious of. Consciousness of objects, and their associated memories, were already formed before any experiments with sensory deprivation.
Rand’s primary axiom of Objectivism is the Primacy of Existence. In contrast is the Primacy of Consciousness, “the notion that the universe has no independent existence, that it is the product of a consciousness (either human or divine or both).” Rand’s Primacy of Existence is the reason for Objectivism’s position of atheism with respect to religion, especially Christianity and its “creator God.”
The Christian concept of God as a disembodied consciousness that created everything, except itself, is antithetical to Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism. Objectivism provides a solid philosophical foundation for rejecting the Christian worldview.
The Primacy of Existence hasn’t received the media attention that it deserves, and I doubt that Rand’s fans in the GOP/Tea Party would understand its ramifications.
H/T: AlterNet, Anton Thorn, Dawson Bethrick, Objectivism Wiki, Ayn Rand Lexicon.
“A human being can survive on his own after he has reached a certain level of knowledge and experience.”
Okay.
Put your money where your mouth is then, greed boy.
Next time you get ill or need dental work?
Don’t go to the doctor or the dentist.
If armed intruders are breaking into your home or business?
Take care of it yourself, tough guy. No need for you to call the cops now is there. Especially since the government is paying them with money they “stole” from you.
And if you have a fire? Well it goes without saying that you should put it out yourself for the same reason you shouldn’t call the cops either.
See how well that all works out for you.
Next time you need to travel?
Don’t drive on any roads or bridges built by the government as a collective effort. No airports either since most of them are government subsidized if not outright paid for by government.
Also, immediately stop using indoor plumbing. You may have paid for the pipes in the house, but the government paid for the pipes bringing you fresh water and removing waste water.
Me?
I’ll be the one at the morgue laughing at your greedy lil’ violence mangled, burnt and diseased corpse.
dip stick:
altruism is not a survival trait, but cooperation is. Bees, ants and termites are not human beings. Bees, ants and termites needed to cooperate to survive. A human being can survive on his own after he has reached a certain level of knowledge and experience.
Cooperation for a human being is different than cooperation of a bunch of bugs with a brain the size of a pin head. It saves time and increases the amount of time that can be spent in other pursuits which helps to improve society. But that is an ancillary outcome when the individual improves his own life.
Bees, bots, termites and ants are not men, that you think the same principles apply is scary.
Mike Spindell:
if you think Tony C’s comment was nuanced, well I dont know what to say except go see a doctor, I think dementia is setting in.
Tony C:
people cooperate willingly when they are free. A gun is force so I dont even know why you are using that as an example. Forced cooperation is not cooperation.
Who rides free on the backs of others except those who do not contribute or pay their own way?
If there is a price for citizenship then the society is not a free society. Men do not give up their natural rights to enter into society.
“The idea is quite unfounded that on entering into society we give up any natural rights.” Thomas Jefferson
To wire something into our heads is to control, a controlled people are not a free people. Why do you not want a free society? Why do you not want the natural order for human beings?
We are meant to be free because we have a brain, we cannot use that brain properly if we are not free. Look at the human misery caused in the Soviet Union by centralized control, do you think centralized control allows human beings to properly function?
If I am an ideologue I am in good company; Jefferson, Locke, Say, Bastiat and many others. Rand is not the only believer in the rights of man and liberty as his natural state.
If you truly believe what you write, you are far more deleterious to human existence than a 1,000,000 of my kind. We only want to be left alone, you want to put a yoke on us and treat us as oxen.
“If we want people to cooperate, the most effective way is to make cooperation and public contribution a price of citizenship.”
Tony C.,
Your whole comment was elegantly stated, but unfortunately far to nuanced and subtle for someone who Buddha has coreectly categorized as having a sociopathic bent.
@Roco: The best way to get people to cooperate is in a free society.
Can you justify that with anything other than ideology? The second best way to get people to “cooperate” is to threaten them with bodily harm or imprisonment or banishment if they do not. You claim to an objectivist, well look at the damn facts; if I want the trains to run on time all I have to do is publicly shoot a few people that fail at that job and the next person I put in charge of making the trains run on time will “cooperate.”
The best way to get people to cooperate is to wire it into their psyche so they like to cooperate and feel good about cooperating.
There is no plausible reason why the freedom to ride free on the backs of others would encourage people to cooperate, in fact the opposite is true. If we want people to cooperate, the most effective way is to make cooperation and public contribution a price of citizenship.
I’m not wrong. You’re once again missing the obvious. Don’t you get tired of missing the obvious?
For example that humans are all essentially alike. A family sharing 99.9% of our genetic material all traceable to a common mother via mitochondrial DNA. Complexity isn’t the issue. Commonality as a species is. But I know . . . you’re “special”, aren’t you Randie?
You also missed the obvious finding of the experiment: that altruism evolves as a species survival trait. This means conversely that a lack of altruism is a trait that is not a survival trait, but ultimately destructive to a species lineage.
You also perpetually miss the obvious that civilization is a group effort whether you like it or not and that as a species – be it humanity, ants or little robots – the survival of the whole always outweighs the imperative of the survival of the one.
Normal, non-sociopathic humans help each other and if we didn’t our species would still be living on the savannah hiding from lions and living caves without the use of fire.
Anything to rationalize away your greed and narcissism, eh troll boy?
Right up to the point of proving your views are inhuman and inhumane. A point that is manifest to all based upon your gyrating rationalizations and denials while clinging desperately to your goddess, Ayn. Manifestly obvious to all except to you and other sociopaths, of course.
You lot seem to have a problem with missing the obvious.
(To clarify that 95%-99.9%: The DNA is not the only thing that matters to who we are and how we develop, there are at least three other significant factors to consider. One which is not captured by sequencing is methylation; a kind of chemical decoration on the DNA, lost during sequencing, that controls its expression. Methylation can be be difference between not-expressed-at-all and expressed-in-spades.
The second factor is the repetition of genetic sequences; often what makes one person different looking than another is the repetition of a sequence that controls how much of a protein is produced. In other words, we may share an identical control protein, but if I have seven reps and you have one, I may have seven times as much of it as you do, with signficant consequences to morphology. For example, if the protein is a growth suppressant, you may grow larger and more muscular than I, no matter how much exercise I get.
The third is the “no-longer-junk” DNA between genes that encode for proteins, which we are learning at least some is critical for control and morphological expression. In other words, it may not express proteins but it is still important to determine how OTHER stuff works, folds, and gets expressed, and in what order that happens. It is as if we watched a computer and defined what it did in terms of moving disk heads or printer carriages or controlling pixels on the screen, without realizing there was code behind all that controlling the behavior. Most measures of similarity I have read are all about the genes that encode proteins, not the “not junk” DNA in between them.
If we measure based strictly on the functionality of the proteins two random people can both produce (and not minor changes in form or the alternative base-pair codings for identical amino acids and not how many reps of that protein are produced and not the methylation controls) then at that level of abstraction humans will be 99.9% similar.
If we take all of that stuff into account, it becomes very difficult to put numbers on the comparison.)
Aw, isnt that just too precious. Little altbots. Only problem is that they are talking about cooperation. The best way to get people to cooperate is in a free society. Which means both political and economic freedom.
But they are right, I would rather help my brother or sister or other family member than society at large. So maybe they are objectbots rather than altbots.
Shit, even a wacky experiment meant to prove altruism is superior has the opposite conclusion. God damn, don’t you ever get tired of being proven wrong?
Oh by the way, people are much more complex than a simple robot, in case you hadn’t noticed. And so is the evolutionary mechanism. But I do find it interesting that you think bees and ants have a superior societal model. But your views are consistent since the society is all and all must sacrifice for the queen (sovereign). Very interesting indeed.
@Buddha: Thanks for the article. I am familiar (from my work) with some of these arguments, although I had not read that particular one.
I would point out that (depending on how one measures similarity) humans share between 95% and 99.9% of their DNA. There is a lot of genetic evidence that we have both a common mother and a common father (that lived thousands of years apart) from about the 100,000 to 200,000 year range.
That is suggestive of a few bottlenecks in our evolutionary history, when humans approached extinction. Presumably after one of these, the males left all had a common male ancestor (one explanation might be both geographic isolation and a social structure in which alpha males monopolized mating rights), followed many thousands of years later by a second bottleneck or complementary competitive mutational advantage conferred through the female to other females; accounting for the common female ancestor. For example, such a mutation may have been a tweak in brain structure that allowed recursive thought or more extensive language usage or some other behavioral change that allowed the descendants of one women to eventually out-compete all the female descendants of her female peers.
That was probably a higher-impact mutation than whatever happened with our common male ancestor; just because of the mechanics of reproduction: An alpha male can father thousands of children in his reproductive career and pass on his mutation to half of them; a female can mother about a dozen and pass on her female-only mutation to about 1/4 of them (half the females). So whatever that mutation was, I think it must have kicked ass to become universal.
The point of course is that altruism among strangers, by the article you pointed out, is a sensible genetic strategy. The vast majority of my genetic structure is identical to my fellow humans. That is, if one needs a scientific basis for feelings of altruism.
However, what I find valuable in humans is their personhood. Some aspects of that may be encoded in genes, separated twin studies suggest some pyschological or attitudinal correlations above that of unrelated strangers.
But for the most part, what makes a person unique is encoded in the patterns of the neuronal growth and connections made by experiences; and (in keeping with the disposable soma hypothesis) that part of us is mortal. The parts of us that can theoretically be conserved indefinitely (genes) are all just mechanical; it is like passing on the blueprint for a computer but without the operating system or software that will determine what the computer will accomplish while it exists.
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/05/even-robots-can-be-heroes.html?ref=hp
Mike Spindell:
ooh such biting repartee. I think I shall slice a piece of cheese and listen to some violin music while I read your posts.
@Roco: The point of education, in my view, beyond just learning some rote skills like calculus or chemistry or physics, is to learn what consititutes a plausible argument, what is implausible in arguments, and ultimately how to formulate your own plausible arguments. An architect isn’t much good to us if cannot tell if a new building design will stand up to a gust of wind.
Unless your degrees are in history or mythology or art or something, then presumably you have some sort of professional skill or training. If you have the training, use it to make a better argument or defend your position with something other than “you guys are crazy.”
“So what, I have 2 degrees and well on the way to a third one.”
Unlike me Roco, you use an unidentifiable pseudonym. You could claim to be Superman and who could tell? We don’t know if you’re male, female or even if you are American. Just a blowhard full of gas and false claims is all you are until you can prove differently. You could claim to be an Academy Award winner, or the head of the CIA, but that doesn’t make it so. If you remember, although you are definitely memory challenged, I cited my education in response to your childish screed. You may well be who you claim to be, but I doubt it given that I know 12 year olds more intelligent and emotionally balanced than you seem to be.
“You arent smart enough to understand Rand at anything more than a superficial level. Your posts prove that.”
Right back at ya, greed boy.
Mike Spindell:
blah, blah, blah. So what, I have 2 degrees and well on the way to a third one.
I havent been 19 for a very long time and I never lived in my mothers basement past the age of 18, too busy.
You still bore me with your Oliver Twist story. I hated Dickens when I had to read him in 9th grade, he still sucks.
Tell me, did you pick pockets to make ends meet?
You arent smart enough to understand Rand at anything more than a superficial level. Your posts prove that.
@Roco: Oil accounts for only 20% of GDP, or do you not like that fact?
Besides, take any country, including the USA, and strip it of whatever natural resources it has, and let us see how they do. Pull the plug on our farming, or fishing, or whatever and see how WE do.
Your argument is pointless: Norway was around literally 1000 years before the oil reserves were discovered in 1960; to claim they cannot survive without them is ridiculous. The fact that they found them, and are exploiting them in a way that will permanently benefit their people (the 4% law is designed to spend only the interest on the sovereign wealth fund and leave the principal intact) is practically the definition of responsible government, and what any responsible country should do with whatever natural resources it has, be it arable land, oil, fishing, coal, whatever.
It is not what we do, and I find it at times both hilarious and depressing that the “drill baby drill” crowd still thinks that letting BP or Exxon drill in our national waters, extract oil, sell it on the world market for whatever the market will bear and then pocket the money and pay zero taxes on that income will somehow, magically, help our energy problem. They don’t even pay the damn royalties.
“I pay others about $100 per day to do those things for me,”
Roco,
Quit the crap. you’re a 19 year old loser who flunked out of Jr. College, live in mom’s basement, eat her food and take her money. you probably don’t even clean up after yourself.
“I find it funny you think I am foaming at the mouth putz, I could give a shit about what you think.
I just throw shit out there so you waste your time responding to it. No way you are employed if you can spend that kind of time answering my posts.”
Roco,
A tacit admission that you are a troll and nothing else. You may take pride in that, but the truth is you’re nothing but a disreputable little putz, with little intellect and perverted amusements. I didn’t need your admission to confirm that, I sensed it from the first, which is why I didn’t bother answering you in depth. Tony C. and Buddha were being kind to you by offering cogent responses, but to those such as you kindness is to be abused. In exposing your true self you also expose why followers of Rand are little more than self-involved, sociopathic
clowns, who like her because she justifies their vile behavior.
“Mike Spindell:
you keep spouting the same old same old without criticizing her ideas. Just blah, blah wooden, blah, blah stupid.
Are you even educated at all? You probably flunked out of school. Your ideas are a little less advanced than Jethro Bodines.
You made it to, what, the 5th grade?
You bore me.”
Roco,
Truth is when it comes to Rand I could kick your ass logically and rhetorically. Why should I bother though, because Tony C. and Buddha have already done it with panache and in depth. You’ve got nothing except for weak “talking points” and incorrect ideas of the meanings of economic philosophies. You haven’t once cogently answered any of the points they’ve made and have responded to them with little more than a child yelling
“Nyanhh, Nyanhh, Nyanhh! You are a poor one to talk about being boring, since there is little of interest you produce.
Re: My education. I have a BBA, an Ivy League MS and five years of postgraduate training. Orphaned at 18 I worked my way through all my education full time, often at night. Now it is true that in both college and grad school I had full tuition scholarships, both earned on merit not need.
As for the intricacies of Ayn Rands philosophy I will sum up its’ flaws quite briefly so that you might understand your own fallibility in following them. I do this because while tony C. and Buddha have amply and thoroughly done so, their discourse seems to be too far above your head for you to understand.
Ayn Rand is a joke because the inevitable outcome of her “economic system and philosophy” would be that the people with the most guns and/or wealth would take power and screw everyone else. There would be no entity to stop them and in this current world with the weapons available the only inevitable revolution would be by others with guns and power. The “Objectivist Belief” holds no sympathy except for the “ubermenschen” like Galt, Reardon, Taggart and Daneskjold. You would therefore have set up a model system of feudalism and we already know from history how that worked out.