There is no "law of nature" dictating "government abuse". That is your false, malevolent, deterministic premise about human "nature". Ideas are not determined, let alone determined to be malevolent.

Stability in government policy was part of the constitutional system to prevent emotional short terms swings. It could not guarantee a future free society without regard to the ideas that spread within the culture over time. That is why Franklin called it "a republic, if you can keep it."

Contrary to Edmund Burke and the conservatives, appeals to tradition, including the Constitution, are not the intellectual basis of a nation and not a substitute for philosophy.

Every society has dominant philosophical premises. It means that most people have accepted the same basic ideas. Of course it is possible in this century. You are seeing the results of it now in the negative. The best ideas must be spread by understanding. Force and manipulative "marketing" do not provide understanding. Slogans and "marketing" are not a substitute and imposing ideas by force is not possible. You cannot force a mind. In a culture of reason the best ideas are broadly accepted because they are correct and people see that, for the same reason that a correct physics dominated, once religion lost its influence, without force and "marketing".

The time to "travel across the Atlantic" is an anti-intellectual response to an intellectual issue. By the early 1800s American intellectuals were already being trained and influenced by European ideas and spread them here. Not only did they know how to read books that did not take a century to cross the Atlantic, they were being educated in European universities. One of them was Emerson. The spread of ideas in this country was a constant process for a century, including through educational institutions, not the result of a ship arriving in 1900 after a long voyage as the "biggest reason" why it took so long.

At the end of the novel no one demanded "conditions" for a return -- as described in the plot there was no one left to make such a demand to, and as Galt showed when he was captured he would not bargain with them at all. The heroes in the Valley were already working on improvements to the Constitution to soon be implemented, based on the protection of the rights of the individual into the future. You are saying nothing new by advocating limits on government, only restricting it to the political realm without means of achieving it.

You are advocating political reforms without regard to the intellectual foundations necessary for a culture to attain them (as was already described throughout the novel before the ending). That is your contradiction. You promote a higher threshold for legislation knowing full well that the support of individual rights required for that does not now exist, yet said nothing about the requirements for it, which you now degrade as nothing but "marketing". That is thoroughly anti-intellectual.

Your assertion that I am contradicting myself is false, unfounded, and gratuitously insulting. A proper philosophy is not "accomplished" by "marketing"; it is spread as correct ideas always are through understanding of the content, which I consistently advocate and you characteristically undermine as if it were irrelevant and impossible.

Who is the coward who is again systematically 'downvoting' my posts with no response? This is supposed to be an Ayn Rand forum, not a place for religious nuts to attack Ayn Rand and promote mysticism by unchallenged decree.

Of course they would go back. They didn't want to leave to begin with. In the context of the plot as described, once the obstructions were out of the way they went back to rebuild and resume a normally productive life in a free country. Why wouldn't they? Ayn Rand rejected the inevitability of doom as human nature. The novel illustrated the possibility of human success on a cultural scale.

Atlas Shrugged was not written to promote escapism in an impossible survivalist utopia.

You malevolent assumption that man is determined by nature to be tyrannical requires proof, which is impossible because determinism is inherently contradictory. You can't in logic make sweeping assertions and then demand that they be disproven in the name of not making just "assertions".

Everyone's actions depend on his ideas. The course of a nation and a cultural depend on the ideas people accept, not a pre-determination of doom. You are not just ridiculing the plot in Atlas Shrugged, you are rejecting the entire theme, Ayn Rand's philosophy, and the possibility of philosophy and human success.

Hey ewv, if you don't mind me asking, which other forums do you post at? Do you have a blog or something?

And thanks for going to effort of making posts like this.

I do not think that Martin Luther represented a fund-
amental change in philosophy; the Catholics and the Protestants both believe in the same mystic-altruist philosophy, and Original Sin. But I think that why he broke with his former Church is because he found that it had added a lot of things to Christianity that were not in the Bible; he wanted to "reform" it, but found that impossible. I hold no brief for the Christian religion, but I was just making a sort of analogy between trying to reform something (for instance, the public school system), that cannot be reformed, accepting the fact, and leaving to start something new.

If common Joe's want to be happy they should probably be on the side of men like Galt so they don't go on strike.
Otherwise they have no one to blame but themselves.

See http://my.fit.edu/~jbrenner/nanotechm...
name = fltech password = Brenner
slides #2, 33, 114, 171, and 172
AS movie photos are used with permission.

The content of Ayn Rand's philosophy is much deeper and much more radical than what your posts here indicate that you understand, and your posts here are restricted to mostly shallow libertarian-conservative politics that don't show much connection to Ayn Rand and her method of thinking. What do you do differently in the classroom?

No philosophy "should be self-evident". Nor can the understanding of ideas be spread by short term "marketing". This is a long, gradual intellectual process, not a political campaign.

Atlas Shrugged was romantic fiction with the theme as the role of the mind in man's life and in society, not a prescription for collapsing a country to take over without regard for philosophical ideas.

You are ridiculing Atlas Shrugged with malevolent projections of what would happen as a sequel to the collapse at the end of the plot in Atlas Shrugged that are irrelevant and miss the point of both the novel and everything Ayn Rand explained about what is required to reform this culture. Ayn Rand did not share such a deep-seated malevolent cynicism over the nature of man preventing a happy ending to the novel. Neither are the millions of inspired fans who are are not ridiculing it.

You state that every society of any kind is the result of its dominant philosophical attitude. Is it even possible in a non-totalitarian society in the 21st or subsequent centuries to have a dominant philosophical attitude? Wouldn't a society having a dominant philosophical attitude require some degree of force? Or at least marketing?

It is precisely because government abuse is a law of nature that America's founders made it remarkably difficult to enact change.

Check your premises.

When an example in real life proves my statement false (as opposed to merely your assertion), then I would gladly stand corrected. I will die long before there is an example to disprove me in any country on Earth, and I am not an old man yet.

The Valley was not a country and early America was not its "model". It was the private property of Midas Mulligan who invited a handful of his friends who were leading the strike to spend one month out of the year in a well-earned vacation. That spread to a larger but still small group who ultimately remained year round because of the specific danger outside. It was not a country to emigrate to as a substitute, and they continued to work on the strike as their major project.

The plot in the novel did not deal with "preparing a society for Objectivism" and the purpose of the Valley was not to preserve what what was worth preserving until anyone else was "ready for Objectivism". The strike served the sole literary purpose of illustrating the role of the mind in human life and society by showing through the fictional device of a strike, with artificially highly accelerated action, what happens when the mind is withdrawn. The artificial fictional acceleration of time allowed return to the outside world much sooner than had been expected, but that world had not been made "ready for Objectivism", which was never an issue in the novel, only the collapse of the looters in power.

Ayn Rand wrote the scenes in the Valley in order to show how the best people interact with each other, in essentialized form of romantic fiction, without the distraction of the events in the outside world. It was not a prescription for a utopian survivalist society or a utopian future country, and not a call for a "strike" to bring down the country. She subsequently explained at length what is required in non-fiction for reform of this society through the spread of the proper philosophical ideas.

Yet we see a whole cadre of those focused on doom ignoring the intellectual requirements as they pursue a floating abstraction in search of a survivalist utopia. This has been pursued by a very small fringe group off and on for over 50 years, including such impractical schemes as starting a new country on a floating reef in the ocean, all of which she denounced in her lifetime.

In order to make the point of her theme of the role of the mind Ayn Rand's romantic fiction was intentionally not "realistic" She was very realistic in explaining what must be done in this world.

I know that it is not possible to implement such a much higher threshold in a culture that overwhelmingly rejects it. My proposal for a "much higher threshold" is only possible in a society that acknowledges the rights of the individual as moral rights. My proposal would have been a necessary precondition to my "return from the Gulch". Legislation should be rare and obvious.

It is you that is the one who is contradicting yourself. You will never accomplish your philosophy as the basis for reform unless you successfully market it. Granted, that is an extremely tall order, one that I don't think is possible, but you have absolutely no hope for ever having a society based on Objectivism without at least a lot of marketing.

I do that daily both on my own campus and at some of the few universities left that embrace enterprise.

It did take a century then for progressivism to gain a foothold in America. Part of that was because of the wrong premises being spread without challenge, but the biggest reason why it took that long was the distance and expense of traveling across the Atlantic in that era. Now, with both air travel, phone communications, and the Internet to spread bad ideas quickly, countries can go from productive to wretched very quickly (Cuba in the early 1960's, Venezuela more recently).

Then go and understand the content, then use your position on the faculty to spread the proper ideas in defense of what you have been doing.

I don't reject Atlas Shrugged. It was an excellent novel, except for the ending. Put yourself in the shoes of the main characters of Atlas Shrugged. Honestly, would you go back? Anyone foolish enough to go back to the world under those circumstances deserves what they would get.

It took a century for the spread of counter-Enlightenment ideas before the progressive statists gained a foothold. You are now describing a situation in which the country is already intellectually ripe for it. That was inevitable only because of the wrong premises that spread without challenge. It was not metaphysically inevitable as a built in doom of human nature.

You agree that a "higher threshold" is not possible to implement without broad acceptance of the rights of the individual as a moral right, which acceptance does not now exist, then contradict yourself, saying that because of that "you propose such a much higher threshold". How do propose to implement such a "much higher threshold" in a culture that overwhelmingly rejects it? Doubling down on rejection of philosophy as the basis of reform does not get around the necessity of philosophical reform.

All three novels were romantic fiction and not "realistic". Anthem was an allegory, not even remotely realistic. That doesn't make romantic fiction ridiculous. Your selection of the pinacale of Ayn Rand's writing, Atlas Shrugged, for rejection, holding it up for ridicule for it's fictional happy ending, goes beyond any assessment of romantic fiction. It is a rejection of the theme that you can't even allow to be imagined. It's a statement of your own malevolent sense of life.