Objectivist Rehab Program?
Posted by davidmcnab 9 years ago to Education
The fact that so many people (even people of genius-level intelligence) spend their lives stuck in looter thinking is evidence of just how insidious, powerful and persistent that mind-set is.
Ayn Rand's novels tend to take a black-and-white view of humanity: you're either a producer or a looter and nothing's going to change. But there are some exceptions. For instance, the young man on the pushbike who meets Howard Roark, sees his new housing development, and is transformed for life.
I'm not interested in people who persist in a life-long choice to remain looters. To me, they're like meth addicts who persistently refuse all help, or babies with their insatiable mouths firmly clamped on the tit of State. But I am interested in those who feel, deep down, that something is wrong, that there must be a better way.
For such borderline cases, there is value to be gained from a program to help them migrate to a whole new perspective. Such people need and deserve support - not in the alms-given sense, but in the sense that we all profit when someone new comes into the Gulch for real.
As someone who was raised an brainwashed in a left-leaning family, community, school and university, I can testify that the looter brainwashing effort is nothing short of spectacular. It's about the only thing the looters are brilliantly capable of. So it needs tremendous ingenuity and persistence on our part to support willing people out of that mind-set. This also implies a view of looters not as moral degenerates (unless they persistently refuse all help), but as victims of endemic organised fraud, victims of philosophical injury who often need help to recover. Just as with a lifelong drug addiction, the barriers to escaping looter consciousness are harrowing.
So I wanted to start discussion here on what a "looter rehab" program would need in order to have the greatest possible chance of success with willing people. A healing program, for willing people to evolve out of looter consciousness into free, empowered, ecstatic producers.
Ayn Rand's novels tend to take a black-and-white view of humanity: you're either a producer or a looter and nothing's going to change. But there are some exceptions. For instance, the young man on the pushbike who meets Howard Roark, sees his new housing development, and is transformed for life.
I'm not interested in people who persist in a life-long choice to remain looters. To me, they're like meth addicts who persistently refuse all help, or babies with their insatiable mouths firmly clamped on the tit of State. But I am interested in those who feel, deep down, that something is wrong, that there must be a better way.
For such borderline cases, there is value to be gained from a program to help them migrate to a whole new perspective. Such people need and deserve support - not in the alms-given sense, but in the sense that we all profit when someone new comes into the Gulch for real.
As someone who was raised an brainwashed in a left-leaning family, community, school and university, I can testify that the looter brainwashing effort is nothing short of spectacular. It's about the only thing the looters are brilliantly capable of. So it needs tremendous ingenuity and persistence on our part to support willing people out of that mind-set. This also implies a view of looters not as moral degenerates (unless they persistently refuse all help), but as victims of endemic organised fraud, victims of philosophical injury who often need help to recover. Just as with a lifelong drug addiction, the barriers to escaping looter consciousness are harrowing.
So I wanted to start discussion here on what a "looter rehab" program would need in order to have the greatest possible chance of success with willing people. A healing program, for willing people to evolve out of looter consciousness into free, empowered, ecstatic producers.
Speaking from the rational self-interest, 2 - 5 years in prison, would cost the taxpayers, 50 - 250K per inmate, so this would actually do two things.
1) Reduce the 5 year cost to the taxpayers,
2) Provide at least enough money for them to go to a tech school get some skill where they can provide value.
If all they did was squander it, and robbed, well then they stimulated the economy anyhow by spending it, and would be back in jail.
My bet is that if told to get some training a large number of the pot criminals might all go to Colorado and start their own grow houses, Free Market, and competition hehe.
Whether the laws against pot are morally right or wrong, they still broke the laws, I shall not reward them for that.
Their freedom, expunged records, and apologies are sufficient in my view.
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1. Willingness to own and claim responsibility for at least some errors and shortcomings.
2. Ambition of character, some desire and motivation to aspire and grow as a person.
If both of these are present in even a small degree, much is possible.
At this point, as has been pointed out, I have to meet them where they are already (which means to accept, acknowledge and respect their thinking - even as I disagree with it) in order to invite them to walk along with me down a different path.
If I can thus engage the person in open dialogue and inquiry, I can help them see the unarticulated beliefs or premises that underlie their faulty conclusions. Typically an honestly mis-guided person will be shocked to hear those statements when clearly articulated and not want to claim them as their own. So we then can construct alternative beliefs that they would feel prouder to stand for, we can build from there up to the higher level conclusions will displace the ones they have currently held as unsubstantiated mental stowaways for most of their lives.
Questions like "How has that been working for you so far?" can often jostle their thinking. And as always, when the pain of staying in the same psychological, power-draining trap, becomes greater than the fear of stepping into the unknown of an alternative paradigm and way of showing up to life, people's minds begin to crack open a bit, and a bit is all we need.
This is part of what I understand as the meaning of the "Gulch". A community immune to criminal attack from outside (and by "criminal", I'm including almost all governments). A place where persistent breaches of The Oath can result in expulsion, and where compromises such as that mentioned in the previous paragraph don't even have to be considered.
Churches and other private charities seem much better at telling which poor people are deserving and which are just moochers. Besides, shutting down private charity would mean even more beggars on the streets, and I hate having them around.
rare. . good thing I got one;;; my map was going
obsolete fast! -- j
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If you have the chance, find Simon Blackburn's "Lust" (part of a series on Seven Deadly Sins, cosponsored by the New York Public Library and the Oxford University Press) and read Chapter 10: "Hobbesian Unity". You fill find a description of great sex and learn that lust really is not a sin.
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really counts very heavily!!! -- j
p.s. some of the beautiful yesses I've seen
have been cat-and-mouse things, and I was
the mouse!
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p.s. the consent was know with the first eye contact, imho.
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like in the strange story "bridges of madison county,"
that the couple engaged in intimacy had consented
before the fact, and enjoyed that in itself -- enjoyed
the sense of knowing which comes from extreme,
accurate perception. . that is the way I read it. -- j
.
Whether the addiction is to drugs and alcohol or bad philosophy, the spark of change happens when the person comes TO himself and puts his life on trial.
I myself tired of taking care of others who were perfectly capable of handling life without my constant presence and energy input...they just were content to sit and live off my good graces and hard work.
I bottomed out after a contested divorce left me broke and broken.
It was then that I was introduced to Ayn Rand and her Objectivism and I have never since been tempted back into co-dependency.
handling" and I happen to think the opposite,
that tenderness and intensity that way are the
best glue holding intimacy together. . she went
back to her ex-husband who abused her. sad. -- j
p.s. it's not that I miss her that makes me sad;;
it's the abuse. . my wife is majestic and wonderful !!!
.
and skill to "take any question" like Rand did. . I'd
heard of this, about her interviews -- the interviewers
were astonished that she did not block out areas
which she didn't want to address. . Strong Woman!!! -- j
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