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What do you disagree with Ayn Rand on?

Posted by qhrjk 4 years, 6 months ago to Ask the Gulch
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Hello,

How do I phrase this... I was curious if anyone has some criticisms about Objectivism on here. What do you disagree with? What would you change? Would you articulate something differently?

Nothing's black and white, I guess.
I'm not asking this out of spite or anything of the matter; I'm just a student who wants to hear different perspectives.

Thanks!


All Comments

  • Posted by $ Commander 4 years, 5 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Considering qhrjk and I have had private interaction regarding the above, you've not had privilege. All the terms in the preamble you've quoted are ambiguous assumptions. The assumption that all humans have had objective training, in reason, that these expressions are understood from a valid metaphysical, value based, perspective. I'll refer you to The Objectivist's Ethics again.
    We have the Right to our lives. We have the Right to our Freedom. We have the Right to pursue Happiness. When we elect, from our Freedom, to interact with mutual Rights amongst each other as humans, we agree to earned Liberties as promotions and restraints upon our behaviors. I am free to pursue equitable or inequitable participation throughout my life. At the simplest I am free to seek "comfort" and avoid "discomfort". This is something all living things experience. As complexity of an organism increases sensations are perceived through an emotional "state". Humans, being of the higher complexity on the planet, need reason to sort perceptions and emotions.
    And our Mortality is the key to a value structure for governance of our lives. I've been wrestling with these concepts for over forty years. "Why are Humans the only life form that do not conform to the Natural Order of all other life on the planet?" A good question?
    To jump ahead to The US Constitution. Despite the intentions, as ambiguous as they are, there was never an objective statement of Unalienable Rights as an interpretive overtone. The District of Columbia formed...a corporate entity. When we were enrolled into this corporation through the Social Security Administration we agree to abide by the regulations and laws of the corporation. If "The Corporation" "decides", through the mechanism of Democracy and "It's" "Representatives" to avoid or undermine equitable relations, we, as corporate Citizens, are obligated to comply. And this raises fundamental conflicts between mob rule, whim, and objective pursuit of equitable lives.

    This is not an all-inclusive iteration of what I'm working on. Boilerplate at best. The target for release of authorship is 2021. The title: Reaching UP (Unlimited Potential) An expression of what we are as humans and a value statement that is necessary to identify and resolve conflicts....from the street.
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  • Posted by 4 years, 5 months ago in reply to this comment.
    I like this rebuttal. Pascal's Wager also seems to disregard how many different faiths there are. Should I be muslim, christian, jewish, hindu, etc. all at once... just in case one of them is right? It's literally impossible.
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  • Posted by Lucky 4 years, 5 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Correct. Pascal's Wager is fallacious.

    It is the same as what Climate Alarmists call the Precautionary Principle. By this if an event is not impossible, and if it occurs would be a calamity, then any cost is justified to stop it happening.

    The alarmists tell us what to do, of course the cost is enormous, and there are the usual rake-offs. The climate alarmists solutions do not guarantee that their threats of extinction/ catastrophe will not occur (in fact their solutions only waste money). Nor will expressed belief in gods guarantee eternal life.

    Anyway, what is this belief thing we are supposed to have or not? You may say you have a belief is order to gain some advantage but you are just claiming, call it lying, perhaps rationalizing, (lying to yourself), it does not specify what is in your thoughts.
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  • Posted by Eyecu2 4 years, 5 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Recently there was a meme here about how people from opposite sides of a position that are convinced that they are correct shouldn't discuss their positions with those on the other side. As they will only disagree and never change the mind of the person on the opposite side.

    I think that you can agree that neither of us will influence the other. Therefore I will stop here and wish you the best.
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  • Posted by lrshultis 4 years, 5 months ago in reply to this comment.
    The problem with the wager is that it does not deal with ones life. To believe that the threats of some men who wrote the Bible without any proof that one does not just die, period, is the waste of a life lived. I realize that Christians believe that God, with power to create existence, had spoken to some possibly disturbed men and unable to come out of hiding to speak to those sinners who will not just believe. I am 79 and have never found any evidence of a god and thus am not a theist. No one has ever been able to do more than wave their hand around and pointing out what exists and saying that proves God.
    Just what is being wagered. It appears to be some ghost in the machine, a soul, which is eternal and was implanted by a god in a human body at conception.
    Your number 1 assumes that God is good despite the lack of goodness other than that created by human activity. It also does not indicate what infinite win means.
    Your number 2 assumes that God is a child wishing to be loved and coddled and wishing to torture the one who will not believe without reason for eternity with no more reason than my sister who wanted to hear heavenly music for eternity. Eternity never ends.
    Your number 3 disregards having lived a falsehood for a lifetime.
    Your number 4 disregards the fact that an honest live might be lived, which would be the greatest reward.
    The wager is a sham to get a childish mind to become a theist.
    In fact the wager in no way supports religion other than the religious belief that the wager proves something. You need some evidence and then have a rational belief by reason. Just saying so will not do.
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  • Posted by Eyecu2 4 years, 5 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Which is where I part with Ms. Rand, I am a Christian.

    If you explore Pascal's Wager there are 4 possibilities.
    1 there is a God and you believe = Infinite win
    2 there is a God and you don't believe = Infinite loss
    3 there is no God and you believe = Small comfort in your mistaken belief
    4 there is no God and you don't believe = zero sum no win no loss

    Personally I think that Pascal was correct and that it is foolish not to believe. Then again I believed before I became aware of Pascal's Wager and had voiced the same concept independently before I became aware of it. Heck back then I thought that my position was orginal.
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  • Posted by lrshultis 4 years, 5 months ago in reply to this comment.
    "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence (sic), promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of ..."

    I am not sure what you need for a preamble for a constitution establishing a republic?
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  • Posted by lrshultis 4 years, 5 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Pascal's Wager is "the argument that it is in one's own best interest to behave as if God exists, since the possibility of eternal punishment in hell outweighs any advantage in believing otherwise."

    It is similar to the law of economics that one should consider what is seen and also what is not seen, i.e., what is the cost to a life if one spends ones life as a theist spending a lifetime in fear of a nasty threatening deity and discards the cost of being an atheist in terms of the value of ones life?
    What is tossed out of that wager is what happens if the atheist is right and the theist is wrong. Since ones life is what is important, spending a life believing in a non-existent god would have been a wasted lifetime. All that the theist has to offer is a made up threat by those who would try to control humans promising pain and suffering for eternity if one does not bow to them.
    Rand's position on religion was that belief by faith in the absence of evidence for something is wrong. If there is evidence from which to infer the existence of a god, then believe by reason, The fact that others believe in a god is not sufficient to infer the existence of God.
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  • Posted by $ 25n56il4 4 years, 5 months ago in reply to this comment.
    I have a comment on this. If slavery was so bad, try being an American Indian. Our government hasn't kept one Treaty they ever made with the Indians. They are criticized for being alcoholics! Think about that! You don't want to walk in their moccasins!
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  • Posted by lrshultis 4 years, 5 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Do you wish to not have been born? Your life depends upon the conditions of the past. If slavery had not been a widespread condition in the past, very few of us would exist. The timing for the genome mixing in conceptions would be changed, assuming that your parents would have been born and have even met. There are no ready made souls which a deity inserts in some random body to give one a self such as in you and me. We are self made selves of bodies that grow due to the random mixing of the genome of a particular sperm and ovum at an exact moment in history. It was just a matter of one particular sperm out of millions penetrating the ovum and the production of the DNA of the future person. That is how no person is exactly like any other person. It has a large amount of randomness to the process of conception and growth of a future human person.

    Had there been a different outcome with the land of the Earth, most of us would most likely not exist. It is somewhat like the exaggeration in time traveler stories where someone changes some small thing in the past and with the affecting of the future to a large extent. Large past affects will cause large effects such as whether one is born or not.

    I know what you are saying about those pilots that you instructed. In my case back in the mid 60's at about the time that Rand gave her Objectivist Ethics lecture at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, I graded math papers for the United States Armed Forces Institute. There were students who were learning arithmetic who would, for some reason that I could not understand, just resubmit the same paper over and over without even trying to correct mistakes. They could not concentrate long enough to care whether they had learned something new.
    It seems like you had more success in the pilots and not too many were able to remove themselves from the gene pool.
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  • Posted by Owlsrayne 4 years, 6 months ago
    I believe in the concepts that Ayn Rand writes in Atlas Shrugged. But, I don't think that she foresaw the political rift that is happening in the US and the sham impeachment inquiry that is crippling the Congress. Also, the uptick of Civil War talk on the internet Social Media, etc.
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  • Posted by $ Stormi 4 years, 6 months ago
    As a female, raised on objectivism before I knew its name, I find it pretty sound. It works, it is logical, it is what should be. I also have an issue with late term abortions, which did not exist in her her day. At some point, that baby is a person with Constitutional rights to think and b, the mother was responsible for not being careful with birth control, live with the consequences or give the child up. I admit to an amount of spiritualisty, but somehow, I feel whatever God led us to objectivism and hopes we live by it and stop calling him for help for every little thing. Extreme religion and psychology lead to dependence on others, when we all should try to be strong individuals. Rand was hard on FLW, felt he did not live up to the lead in "Fountainhead", maybe that was her putting more expectation on en than women, as she seemed harder on them, while not so much on women.
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  • Posted by LibertyBelle 4 years, 6 months ago
    I understand she didn't like Gilbert & Sullivan, but I am a big G&S fan, I don't intend ever to change that.
    I think that it would be wrong to abort a fetus after it gets brain waves (which I guess would be within about the first 3 months). They go by brain activity to know when life ends, don't they? So shouldn't that be the standard about when it begins, at least as a conscious being?
    I fully agree with the necessity and appropriateness of divorce, in some cases. But I don't agree with doing a menage a trois; I think if you don't love your spouse, you should just get a divorce. (If in a country where this is legally impossible, maybe that would be different, at least if appropriate notice were given to the spouse. But I think it should be one person or the other, not trying to have both).
    I'm not trying to interfere in other people's personal business; I mean that if I were married, that other stuff is something I simply would not tolerate; I'd rather just get a divorce.
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  • Posted by $ Suzanne43 4 years, 6 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Probably because too many Jews are secular and not religious. They are Jews in name only. Further evidence of that is that they vote for Democrats.
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  • Posted by $ allosaur 4 years, 6 months ago in reply to this comment.
    While writing my above post, me dino almost placed "--Jews" direct behind "Bet there's some--" but I paused and thought "No! No! No!" and inserted "practicing."
    Why is me dino thinking of a lot of Jew voters? (Notice the absence of a modifier). Now I'm thinking of Barbara Striesand. Rather not. Me dino go bye bye now.
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  • Posted by teri-amborn 4 years, 6 months ago in reply to this comment.
    She taught me how to think in "abstractions".
    That brought the Bible "alive" to me.

    Suddenly everything was thoughts...
    Principles replaced "rules".

    Really, Ayn saved my brain.
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  • Posted by $ Radio_Randy 4 years, 6 months ago
    The only thing (in Atlas Shrugged) that I immediately disagree with (and I may be mistaken with my understanding) was her stance on charity.

    In the movie, John Galt made a much more convincing argument in stating that they (the strikers) were not against charity IF it were on their terms...he didn't simply shut himself off to giving.

    In that particular case, I would have to agree with the movie's opinion, as that is the way I see it.
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  • Posted by mia767ca 4 years, 6 months ago in reply to this comment.
    really made a big impression on me...then time with Branden later on in life...one on one...very lucky...
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  • Posted by Eyecu2 4 years, 6 months ago
    My biggest issue with Ayn Rand's positions is on religion. I am a Christian and have many times articulated my argument on Religion vrs Atheism with Pascal's Wager.
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  • Posted by AMeador1 4 years, 6 months ago in reply to this comment.
    I think it was the people in the Libertarian movement she was primarily talking about. I have seen the same thing. Too many people that don't really know what they think, politically or otherwise, get angry at their Dem or Repub parties and 'Libertarian' sounds good. Literally - the name itself. Much like many Dems think they are Progressives - yet are not - but they like the implication of the name. As such, and from my personal experience as well, too many people who call themselves Libertarian are all over the spectrum and don't really know were they themselves really stand or what Libertarian stands for - as it is defined. I don't give the Libertarian movement much political credibility at the moment because of this. "They" are simply too divided in what they "think" and will not get anywhere for some time - if ever. They will have more impact on swinging elections from Dem to Rep and vice verse - but not to themselves. Maybe that will change over time - but I think it will take a long time.
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  • Posted by ycandrea 4 years, 6 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Ditto with everything you both said. I am a Christian and I do not like carte blanche abortion. I have been under fire here in the Gulch and I have been asked to leave. I am also a true thinker and I own my mind and I analyze everything down to the root to get to the truth of things. I have always been like that. I have read Atlas Shrugged and many, many other Ayn Rand books. I love her! But I do not agree with everything she says because somethings do not pass muster.
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  • Posted by AMeador1 4 years, 6 months ago in reply to this comment.
    I envy you - I wish I had come across Rand many years earlier, but to have gotten personal time with her would have been awesome!
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