What it feels like to me is the leaders of the Objectivism movement are all narcissists and the followers are paradoxically not Objectivists because they’re following a philosophy instead of being guided by the self.
Being a peak Objectivist would be to not care about being an Objectivist or not, basically making it impossible to be an Objectivist if you follow the philosophy, even at the top of it because you are dependent on your followers for influence, status and power.
The irony of it all, turns out a philosophy based on self sufficiency is as big of a grift as a political movement trying to convince everyone that in this day and age self sufficiency is the best move, mostly cause they can’t fathom sharing.
One of the _most_ ironic bits being that if everyone were truly self sufficient there would be no social hierarchy and no money anymore.
> Being a peak Objectivist would be to not care about being an Objectivist or not, basically making it impossible to be an Objectivist if you follow the philosophy, even at the top of it because you are dependent on your followers for influence, status and power.
So basically objectivism is the punk of the philosophical world?
It should be noted: Rand's definition of objectivism doesn't exactly match what you expect from the common sense usage of the word.
I think Objectivism fails because at least in part it doesn't establish solid enough foundations, and takes as fact unproven things that rely on mountains of suppositions and not always reliable evidence.
For example, whatever you think of "laissez-faire capitalism" (as supported by Rand), it's very weird to make its defense part of a philosophy, more so as a kind of axiomatic statement. Imagine someone were deep into some math book, say a dense Algebraic Geometry textbook, and it was just declared out of the blue that "laissez-faire capitalism is an ideal system" or something like that. That could even be true within some context, but I think it's out of place. It also relies on so many assumptions and is far from conclusively proven (the way capitalism is implemented also varies considerably today, and I don't agree that being maximally "laissez-faire" turned out to be better, at least not obviously)[1]. I would even understand she divulged her political ideas, but kept separate from the basis of a philosophy.
Also, like many philosophies, I don't think objectivism survives a closer scientific scrutiny. I suppose there was no firm grasp on what the mind was, or the nature of conscious (there is still some uncertainty, but much more clarity). I like how Dr Rachel Barr (a neuroscientist I follow on social networks) put it: old philosophies, specially about the human mind and soul, made great observations some of which unfortunately (such as that the 'Pineal gland is the principal seat of the soul' as regarded by René Descartes) can be "swept away" and basically definitely disproved by science from a better understanding of the nature of our brains and minds. Some assertions about perception and consciousness seem to be outdated.
I particularly object (no pun intended) to the basis of ethics as individuals. As I've argued previously[2], we now understand the nature of consciousness to, in my view, not justify an ethics that is based solely on the primacy of self-interest. We are part of a giant network of interactions, and although the self seems like a very important concept for our society, metaphysically it doesn't make much sense to prioritize the self at all costs (even when this prioritization includes some strategic concessions for altruism), though I think it's important that we take care of ourselves for pragmatic reasons, because we basically are the ones that understand ourselves the most and live with ourselves 24/7.
I think Objectivism (although again I am no specialist, I haven't studied it profoundly) has merits around notions of reality being singular and shared by everyone in one way or another, and (hypothesis mine) if everything derives from a singular reality, by understanding this singular reality we should be able to in a certain sense understand everything (including ethics, art and morality, which I think is highly counterintuitive) -- because our brains and minds which form the basis of such questions are part of reality, as well as any internal processes within those that enable subjective perception and subjective reality.
I wrote more about this here[3]. Please take a look if you're interested.
[1] Not to mention, we hardly got to try out 2 (or maybe 3) political systems in any serious way: capitalism and socialism (also perhaps social democracy), although there are a myriad of variations to experiment with as well (forms of voting, systems of regulation, the design of various institutions) that aren't considered when talking about "political systems". Who knows if something else could be better? I think a more general view of society as a whole as a kind of giant system is necessary to understand how to design better societies in general.
Caveat that I used to be into Objectivism but now would say I'm extremely unsympathetic to it as a project. I don't think it's so odd that a philosophy would venture into economic systems as part of the course to staking out moral axioms and preferred conditions of relations between people. I'm not laissez-faire by any stretch, but there are such things as economic philosophies that wrestle with questions of liberty. Economics is a very philosophical subject, and moral, political, and economic philosophy can become quite entangled, for good reasons.
While I think your math example is basically right, it would be surprising there, I don't think economic order emerging out of moral and philosophical reflections is particularly surprising.
> Objectivism has merits around notions of reality being singular and shared by everyone in one way or another, and (hypothesis mine) if everything derives from a singular reality, by understanding this singular reality we should be able to in a certain sense understand everything (including ethics, art and morality, which I think is highly counterintuitive)
But this is a violation of Hume's Guillotine. You cannot derive "ought" statements from "is" statements. There is only one reality, and science can tell us how it is, but science cannot tell us how it ought to be, how much we should like it, or in what ways we should want to alter it.
Rand and her followers fail in their attempted logical chain by leaping from "humans evolved rationality as a tool to survive and enhance their lives" to "enhancement of each individual's life via self-interest is the standard of moral value", which is non-sequitur. Rationality is the ability to make plans and accomplish goals, the fact that it exists does not tell us which goals we should use it in the service of.
She smuggles in her own pre-existing moral preference when she defines individual flourishing as the ultimate moral good. You can see this very easily if you take the exact same syllogism and substitute "community interest" for "personal interest". In fact this modified version of the argument may be even more valid, since a defining feature of humanity even more than our rationality is our unique community organizing power, which is also evolved, and thus community service also serves perfectly well as an evolution-informed yardstick of moral value.
You can derive morality from observation if you aren't looking for ontological "ought statements". Hume's position assumes that the religious approach to morality is the only one possible - that morality consists of these detached and universal "ought statements" that must be observable in the Universe somehow and take on the same form as Commandments from a God.
That's not how the Objectivist ethics works, at all. There are no "ought statements" because ethics, in Objectivism, is a system of judgement and reasoning. It's applied epistemology.
So, no, you won't find a mythological ethics in reality. But you can learn how to identify the nature of things and judge how they relate, positively or negatively, to human life. And that's the essence of Objectivist morality.
But a system of morality requires the ability to make "ought" statements. Merely saying what exists is not enough information to inform correct decisions, because whether or not something exists is unrelated to whether or not it is good.
When the objectivists try to define "human life" as their yardstick for moral good, again, they smuggle in those preexisting preferences. There is no real principle that means "human life" should be condensed down to individual hedonistic comfort. It is very easy to argue that human life is better served by collective comfort, and thus the best actions are the ones that are self-sacrificing in service of the community, because these are the ones that do the most service to human life.
> But this is a violation of Hume's Guillotine. You cannot derive "ought" statements from "is" statements. There is only one reality, and science can tell us how it is, but science cannot tell us how it ought to be, how much we should like it, or in what ways we should want to alter it.
Thank you for your comment. To be clear, I am not an objectivist as stated above. Also, I did not know Hume's Guillotine, thanks.
I believe in fact Hume's Guillotine (henceforth HG) can be definitely disproven with what we know today. The root at what's wrong with HG is that feelings are actually real.
To understand why, I like to open with Alan Watts quote: "If nothing is felt, nothing matters.", and also "The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. (...)".
Suffering is a real phenomenon, even though it is manifested in our brains and minds. All sorts of joys and good feelings are also likewise real. If something really is bad to experience (deep suffering), than that's essentially a fact about reality, and subjective experience is part of reality. If something feels bad, it feels bad, and if something feels good, it feels good (even though our desires and judgements about what feels good and what feels bad have serious issues and limitations we should be keenly aware of). This implies we can (at least in theory) understand the nature of those feelings, and understand what feels good and bad. This constitutes the "ought" -- I would say Hume is right in the sense that oughts derive from feelings (defined in the most general way possible), but wrong in the sense that oughts are inaccessible from "is" or science in general. Feelings, emotions, the character of our inner world all forms various "is"es -- essentially "What you felt, you felt".
The meaning of life is to curate and promote good feelings on everyone's minds, and logically we should be able to defend it couldn't be otherwise. If nothing is felt, nothing matters. Consciousness is an experimental fact, and given we observe it and conclude it's real, it provides a unique sole basis of morality and theory of action. A theory of morality that defends fundamentally something that is besides or disregards consciousness (say claim 1: "The meaning of life is arranging rocks in geometric patterns; humans and sentient life don't matter") is inconsistent with the reality of subjective experience -- bad feelings are bad as an experimental fact and good feelings are good as an experimental fact. A being that asserts Claim 1 is disregarding facts of nature.
In Buddhism one of the Noble Truths recognized by Siddhartha is that suffering exists. In other words, suffering is real. So if an action of mine provokes suffering (conversely if it provokes joy/good feelings) then that provides a solid and definite basis for morality: not all your actions are arbitrary, at least they should avoid causing suffering (and more generally, promote good inner lives).
(Note: Again, finding out what really is good with high certainty is actually difficult and our judgement caries risks and imprecision. I discuss about how to find what is good in the link below)
As a final concession, I suppose you could deny that, although feelings are real, and bad and good feelings exist, that we "ought" to promote good feelings is a "fact" about existence, even though I think that is really inconsistent:
How could a bad feeling factually exist and promoting this bad feeling be good or neutral? If a feeling is said to be bad, that is fundamentally associated with a negative valence of its existence. Negative valence of its existence logically implies it should be avoided in any theory of action or value.
But even if you reject that argument (which I believe in a sense definitely wrong!), once you accept the primacy of consciousness instead of a fact as an axiom/"passion", then I believe you need no more "passionate oughts" in your theory, given you accept subjective experiences to be real, as well as accepting the rest of science and logic of course. Basically all oughts would follow essentially from this single axiom which really makes utmost sense to accept (and as I argued I really think is a fact, or an "is") -- otherwise you might be defending the geometric arrangement of rocks in a dead/unconscious universe, which I really think is absurd and indefensible (both in the sense of our "passions" and to me in the sense of factually false). But it should be fine to take the primacy of consciousness as an axiom or Near-Universal Passion of the Reflective Mind, because we then should agree with everything that follows in any case :)
Objectivism has many of these sorts of contradictions. Most famously, Ayn Rand herself collected medicare and social security as her health deteriorated towards the end of her life.
Socrates allowed himself to be put to death even though his supporters had bribed the jailer to allow him to escape. Given his philosophy of ethics, even though his trial had been unjust, he felt it was incompatible with his teachings for him to avoid the sentence that had been handed down to him.
Some people believe that their ideals are important enough to live up to even though life can be brutal.
To be fair, Rand herself said (to paraphrase) that because the state took it from her against her will it was fair play to take it back and I think that was self-consistent.
That said, she wanted to let the disabled starve to death so I don't think anyone really has to be fair to her at all. Empathy is only for the empathetic.
It is not a lie. She felt that the government had no right to assist, and that they should be left to depend on "charity" (IE - Begging).
There are also tapes of her saying that the retarded should not "be allowed to come near children," and that children cannot deal with the "spectacle of a handicapped human being."
Question from audience:
[muffled audio which sounds like:] "...why is this culture..."
[loud noise which sounds as if it represents a point where the tape has been edited]
Rand: [mid-sentence] "...for healthy children to use handicapped materials. I quite agree with the speaker's indignation. I think it's a monstrous thing — the whole progression of everything they're doing — to feature, or answer, or favor the incompetent, the retarded, the handicapped, including, you know, the kneeling buses and all kinds of impossible expenses. I do not think that the retarded should be ~allowed~ to come ~near~ children. Children cannot deal, and should not have to deal, with the very tragic spectacle of a handicapped human being. When they grow up, they may give it some attention, if they're interested, but it should never be presented to them in childhood, and certainly not as an example of something ~they~ have to live down to."
- Ayn Rand, The Age of Mediocrity, Q & A Ford Hall Forum, April, 1981
> Children cannot deal, and should not have to deal, with the very tragic spectacle of a handicapped human being. When they grow up, they may give it some attention, if they're interested, but it should never be presented to them in childhood, and certainly not as an example of something ~they~ have to live down to."
There's an irony in here, since this is more of less a summary of the ideology that wants "safe spaces" in schools.
Just, you know, with an entirely different set of things that proponents want to shield children/young adults from.
What it feels like to me is the leaders of the Objectivism movement are all narcissists and the followers are paradoxically not Objectivists because they’re following a philosophy instead of being guided by the self.
Being a peak Objectivist would be to not care about being an Objectivist or not, basically making it impossible to be an Objectivist if you follow the philosophy, even at the top of it because you are dependent on your followers for influence, status and power.
The irony of it all, turns out a philosophy based on self sufficiency is as big of a grift as a political movement trying to convince everyone that in this day and age self sufficiency is the best move, mostly cause they can’t fathom sharing.
One of the _most_ ironic bits being that if everyone were truly self sufficient there would be no social hierarchy and no money anymore.