How much individual freedom is possible?
Posted by coaldigger 6 years, 9 months ago to Ask the Gulch
When you consider the whole earth, are we as free as we have ever been and considering everyone, as free as possible at this point in time. In every country, there are many people that are unprepared to be free, some that can never be free enough and everything in between. What will it take to achieve complete individual freedom and how many generations?
You're spoiling my 40,000 feet American fantasy with reality.
To say quoting religious texts has no place here is ridiculous. It's part and parcel with our culture, with our language, a good third of our communication relies on shared, common, knowledge. If I were to say "he has an Oedipus complex," you would certainly understand the reference, and that reference would give you insight into what I was saying. You may be able to divorce from your pantheon of cultural reference all such references that deal with faith, but I cannot, and will not.Yet you feel justified, perhaps even vindicated in belittling, and demeaning not only me, but some others here as well. Simply because they hold views not in keeping with your own. That is not free and open debate. That's what's happening at College campuses across this nation. There's no free thought there, and perhaps there's none here either. Which is why I will not go away. After all, one thing that's really great about the internet is if, in your irrational hostility to people who think differently that you, you can't very well pick up a club and bludgeon them. THAT makes this forum, and thousands of others, true bastions of free and open debate. IF and only if, the person using the forum isn't driven off by others who feel their opinions are the only ones which matter.
To say that faith has no seat at any table with Reason, when life without faith is empty, is irrational, since it leaves all who sit at that table hungry for an indefinable something that Reason cannot assuage. There are too many people who, on their death-beds, regretted the shape their lives had taken (this is seen by their final words), who wished they had lived differently. Can regret be quantified by Reason? Can it be measured? or weighed? No. Regret is personal and varying, reaching to the depths of one's, indeed infusing one's very soul. The soul can't be quantified by Reason either. We say a man "has no soul," but that's an irrational statement... of course he does, it's simply stained by __ (take your pick of euphemisms).
A society without faith, is a godless society. And without a god, there would be no need for a moral code - Stealing, then, becomes permissible, because there's no god to answer to - Man would simply make laws as he went, arbitrarily, as needed, with no discernible cohesive theme. The proof of this is all around you. Without a moral code no man could be free - free to produce and live as they wished. And what of government? Will there be a ruling, or governing body is this Brave New World to judge disputes? No? We may as well, then, trade value for agates etched with a personal sigil... or maybe that's what you want... everyone to have their own coins stamped with their own likeness. Everyone with their own moral code. .. Chaos! That would be chaos indeed, "and every man did that which was right in his own eyes." Chaos! Which is irrational, in that rationalism can't quantify Chaos because it's the opposite of Law... of Reason. But then you can't really have creativity without Chaos, can you? In the same way, you can't have Reason without Faith, because Faith without reason is no faith at all... I repeat... Faith without Reason is no faith at all. The Bible puts it another way... "Faith without Works is Dead"
This is a forum for Ayn Rand's philosophy of reason, not a place for a contradictory mish-mash from mystics.
Faith is the opposite of reason. It is acceptance based on feeling -- mysticism in the context of religion -- a hopeless shortcut attempting to gain knowledge without regard to or in spite of the evidence of the senses and logic, i.e., fantasy. That is why it is incompatible with and the opposite of reason -- as are claims that faith is just as good as reason or that one can validly mix them and do both simultaneously. Any form of the arbitrary mixed with reason leads to hopeless contradictions and fantasies. That is the mess that those who deny that "Faith and Reason cannot occupy the same space" in their minds get -- they can physically do it but suffer the consequent destruction.
Faith has no cognitive validity whatsoever in any realm and anyone employing it is to be dismissed out of hand as arbitrary and cognitively irrelevant, as if he had said nothing, whether it is subjective personal feeling like revelation, appeals to sacred text, or any other intellectual authoritarianism attempting to override and bypass reason. This includes the infamous attempts throughout religious history to make reason the handmaiden rationalizing faith. You can't even argue with faith because it rejects all logical standards. See Ayn Rand's "Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World" in her anthology Philosophy: Who Needs It.
The invalid notion of basing reason on faith is an incoherent contradiction in terms, evading the source of the concept reason in the facts giving rise to it.
The axioms identified by Ayn Rand, which I'm assuming you have some familiarity with, are neither arbitrary premises nor "derived" as in a deductive syllogism; they are concepts identifying and referring to facts that are implicit in and at the base of all knowledge. They are axiomatic concepts ('existence', 'consciousness' and 'identity'), not axiomatic assertions of particular facts like those in Euclid.
The meaning of an axiomatic concept is perceived and experienced directly but understood conceptually, i.e., abstractly. The axioms are stated in the familiar repetitive propositional form ("Existence exists", "Consciousness is conscious", and "A is A") as a reminder and a means to affirm and emphasize the concepts (not as "tautologies"), and because they cannot be further analyzed into constituent concepts.
But they can be explained and their role discussed as Ayn Rand did in Galt's speech and more technically in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, chapter 6. Also see Leonard Peikoff's exposition in Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (chapter 1) where he discusses Ayn Rand's axioms in a broader philosophical context, further showing their significance in relation to other principles.
In particular, the recognition of the law of identity "A is A" is the metaphysical basis of and the reason for the principle of non-contradiction in logic.
Ashley did not bring this up and brought up nothing good; his posts are malevolent religious mysticism.
The rational idea of the "universe is good" simply expresses the objective value of the universe to man -- it's where we live -- not a value judgment outside science and not faith.
When someone mystically asserts an intrinsic value of the universe apart from value to whom for what purpose -- like viros do putting 'nature' worship above man, or religious mystics do in their supernaturalism -- that is outside science and all reason.
Ayn Rand's principle of the 'benevolent universe premise' is related to this. It means that we are capable of dealing with reality to live by using our rational faculty to adapt the world to our needs and thrive in it, with happiness the normal condition of man. It's a principle of a sense of life, not metaphysics. It doesn't mean there is intrinsic (mystic) value to the universe apart from man or that the universe cares about and is good to us, or was created for us as the best possible (Leibniz's mysticism). The universe doesn't 'care' about anything; it simply is what it is and it is up to us to use our capacities to live in it and achieve happiness as our normal state, which we can and which some do, even though success is not guaranteed. This principle is in Galt's speech. The basic principles of how to do it are the purpose of epistemology (about how we use reason to know), ethics, and the consequent political philosophy, including the principle of the rights of the individual.
The opposite of Ayn Rand's 'benevolent universe premise' is what she called the 'malevolent universe premise', which is a sense of life that sees man as inherently and routinely doomed to failure and misery by his nature, with success an exception. (Ayn Rand's concept of this doesn't mean the universe is out to get us.)
(There was no reason why my post was 'downvoted'; it was done out of personal hostility by an emotionally out of control militant trolling my posts.)
I have been learning about this for a long time. I used to think reason had to be founded on unprovable faith-based axioms.
My crude understanding of Objectivism is that the axioms, the starting-points of reason, can be derived without faith. This means that faith and reason are incompatible.
I consider someone having faith that "the universe is a good". That's a value judgment, outside the domain of science. I do not understand what Objectivism has to say about this, so it's good you bring it up.
Things contradicting the principles of the civilization and their being overthrown do not seem related to me.
BTW, I see no reason this post should have been downvoted...voting back up.
"sneering, venomous, ignorant, irrelevant, meaningless, rambling, small-o objectivity and honesty, cranks, obsessed, leech, bitter, resentful, infesting, obsessive personal smearing, feuding...
Not at all the hallmarks of a man of reason. Good thing the Inquisitions (the Spanish ones) ended in the early 1800's
The only thing needed for human life and civilization are a willing couple and, without going into detail, all the particulars that lead to a live birth. That's it. Civilization? A whole lot of willing couples doing the same. How about a code of conduct so they can all live peaceably? How about the Hammurabi Code? Too harsh? Okay, then, how about seven of the Ten Commandments (leaving out the "religious" ones)? Sounds like a good foundation for a civil civilization, right? We'll all just get along fine, right?
You say Reason and Faith are incompatible? I disagree. The very mention that I disagree, you want my opinion shut down... or at the very least, you want me to go away... this is not the right place for that kind of "reasoning". You seem to balk at faith because, seemingly to your mind, faith is not a matter of reason, and vice versa; they're competing dogmas as opposed to two sides of the same coin. But where do we get our ideas of right and wrong, if not from [gasp!] God, or a god? Why is it wrong to take something from someone else? Because our parents said so? Society said so? or because there is this niggling little voice on the inside which say, "You know that's not yours, don't take it!" And who began the whole "stealing is Wrong" meme? Moses? Hammurabi? Because it didn't just pop out of thin air. Morality is whatever a society says it is? So why does our western culture (and a good 99.999% of the world's population) say it's wrong to steal? Reason, can't answer that question for you, because doesn't possess innate morality... Reason is neither moral nor immoral. Man has a built in propensity for evil. He can give himself over to it, or deny it for a time, but he can't escape it, and Reason can't answer WHY stealing is wrong; only a moral code can do that. Without a moral code Rand's Atlantis, Galt's Gulch, is a futile experiment doomed to failure. Rand's "Anthem" clearly shows what happens to a society without a moral code.
Every child knows stealing is wrong - before they even know the difference between the two. You don't have to teach children how to be selfish. They come by it naturally. You say you want to live in a world ruled by Reason, devoid of Faith, yet you shut your mind to simple truths.... Reason says, post a sign saying, "wet paint, do not touch," and what happens? The wall gets touched... repeatedly. If a sign wasn't posted at all, few if any people would even touch the wall. That's the whole premise of Sin. Yet you can't have Religiosity and Reason sitting next to each other at the dinner party.
Reason tells us all that stealing is wrong, many actually call it Sin. Yet, because "Sin" is not in YOUR lexicon of Reason, because it smacks of religiosity, you insist such words (because they're religious in nature) have no place in a rational discussion?
That, sir, is irrational.
My gf and I aren't using our share, dammit. We use about 1500 gal/mo and most of that is her 2 1/2 baths a day. We even have a veg and herb garden. Guess I need to take really lo-o-o-o-ong showers.
His pronouncements on "closed belief systems" are irrelevant and meaningless. Whatever it is he thinks he believes himself it is not Ayn Rand's philosophy, which he reveals that he still does not understand, shown directly by the rambling about metaphysical idealism and subjectivism that has nothing to do with it.
Anyone can believe anything he wants to, in his own name, but Ayn Rand's philosophy is what she described and explained it to be; it is not "open" to whatever else someone else wants it to be either in his desired replacements or his misrepresentations while attacking it. This is simple small-o objectivity and honesty, not "religion".
This forum is not for cranks, still obsessed after half a century with personal hatred and hostility towards Ayn Rand and her supporters, as they look to leech off an audience of people attracted to her ideas. Their bitter, resentful infesting of Ayn Rand forums to carry on their obsessive personal smearing and feuding are of no value and contrary to the guidelines for posting here.
If you are still capable of rational understanding after whatever it was that happened to you, and want to understand whatever it is that attracted you to Atlas Shrugged, then go back and look at the philosophy that made it possible and what is required for human life and civilization.
https://www.accuweather.com/en/weathe...
You sure seem to pretend to know a lot about me with your personal attacks with all that "ugly feelings", etc., that I must hold. Nowhere did I mention Soviet style purges. You also know nothing about any groups that I may or may not have tried to join 50 years ago. In fact I do no join groups and never had. I have been a loner all my life and do not need such a crutch as belonging.
As for closed belief systems, one would have to consider them to be completely true. Objectivism is a philosophy and to be practiced would have to be considered true without anything wrong in it. If it is not questionable by the practitioner, it is a religion. That is why many Objectivists consider that it is open to questioning and need to be made objective in all areas. There is no such thing as an objective ideal man. The "man qua man" concept seems to mean that the concept "man" is of the concept "man" as some kind of floating abstraction for an ideal rational man, which resides only as an idea in a mind and is not objectively perceived in objective reality. It is something which has to be mentally created by a human mind by discovery of what is necessary for a man's existence.
Reason... true reason... doesn't ask you to divest yourself of anything, in that everything is useful, in it proper place. You espouse a world free of religion... "especially Christianity" as one commenter put it. This is irrational.
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