Ayn Rand on War
Wars are the second greatest evil that human societies can perpetrate. (The first is dictatorship, the enslavement of their own citizens, which is the cause of wars.)
“The Wreckage of the Consensus”
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 224
I recommend following the link and reading all of the secions of the Lexicon on WAR.
“The Wreckage of the Consensus”
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 224
I recommend following the link and reading all of the secions of the Lexicon on WAR.
"Philosophy and Sense of Life" (which is one chapter in the book The Romatic Manifesto) explains the role of philosophy in human life at the most basic (not scholarly or academic) level. We have discussed this topic before at https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post... The title essay in Philosophy: Who Needs It explains at a more advanced, explicit level what philosophy is and why we need it.
People don't start with philosophy at birth. It's part of the knowledge they learn or absorb from around them over time. As such, as a way of looking at the world it has varied in sophistication throughout human evolution as knowledge (and otherwise as beliefs) have accumulated or been lost, and passed on whether correct or not from generation to generation. The earliest form was primitive religion trying to explain the world through miracles and gods, passed on through common superstition. The very earliest form when the human means of cognition was first developing was necessarily extremely primitive.
The first known explicit formulation of the basic question of trying to find unity among diversity in natural terms is attributed to Thales in ancient Greece (6th century BC). That is what began the first recorded elementary philosophical outlook, which grew over the centuries through the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, and those that followed until the collapse of civilization in the Dark Ages. Plato was the first to attempt an integrated, systematic approach, though he was wrong on all major questions, and the best of Aristotle did not spread enough to stop the collapse. After the collapse it took about a thousand years before the west recovered in the "rebirth" during the Renaissance and then the emphasis on reason and individualism of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was made possible by the influence of the best of Aristotle struggling to the surface, having lost out the first time to Plato through Plotinus, which led to Christian thinkers like Augustine.
It's not as if there was some date at which the Enlightenment threw a switch and suddenly philosophy was correct; there was a gradual improvement until reason and individualism dominated in essence, culminating in that age with Locke for political philosophy. But Enlightenment philosophers had big problems and gaps. (In particular the egoism of their ethics was only implicit and they lacked an explanation of conceptual thought to defend reason.) The failures allowed the counter-Enlightenment reversion with the likes of Kant, Hegel and others leading to the retrogression we have today -- including remnants of religious thinking -- undermining the great achievements (including your own career) due to Enlightenment reason and individualism.
Most people do not and never have studied the details of the philosophers, but the basic ideas pervade thinking everywhere. To understand it you have to understand what the basic ideas are, where they came from, what they were in reaction to, and the arguments for and against them -- and what is right to advocate in their place.
You can see the dominant philosophical positions explicitly taken and their influence over the last 2,000 years of western civilization in a good history of philosophy, with none better than Leonard Peikoff's lectures:
https://campus.aynrand.org/campus-cou...
The complete audio of all the lectures with questions and answers, in two sets of recordings, is at:
https://estore.aynrand.org/p/95/found...
https://estore.aynrand.org/p/96/moder...
A huge and interesting claim. I'll have to read those books to comment. What you're saying is huge though. I see the mind as constantly tricking us with heuristics that worked from a selective-pressure standpoint but are non-philosophical. The selective pressures were for the genes to survive, not to lead to correct philosophy. So we have to be intentional to avoid logical pitfalls.
I think you're saying people start with a philosophy. Then did bad philosophies hold sway from when humans first appeared up to the Enlightenment?
(I had a professor who used to answer, "It's in the readin'. As MM says, the answer to my question maybe the type of thing Ayn Rand hid in books.)
There are no "ancient impulses". There are no innate ideas. And emotions are not primaries, they are automatic responses based on values accepted.
Human beings are "philosophical creatures" in that we cannot live on the range of the moment; we require an integrated view of existence. Such an outlook on life is acquired, deliberately or by absorption or some mixture, and is held implicitly or explicitly, but cannot be avoided. See Ayn Rand's "Philosophy and Sense of Life" anthologized in The Romantic Manifesto. Being a "philosophical creature" does not mean everyone is or should be an academic scholar of philosophy (and given the nature of most of it, heaven help us if we tried). But it is necessary that the intellectuals, including educators, know enough to spread and use the right principles.
Regarding the rest, I see humankind as usually driven by emotion and ancient impulses. Reason and philosophy are the exception when we rise above our first instinct. You believe, in my understanding, that we are philosophical creatures who often adopt bad philosophies, bad in the sense that you can logically derive contradictory propositions from them, and that these bad philosophies, besides just being incorrect, cause problems.
Nations are not "going away"; the choice is whether the use of force by government is used to defend the rights of the individual or violate them through more dictatorship, welfare statism, and other varieties of socialism resulting in both war and oppression of individuals within their borders. That choice in political philosophy depends on the more fundamental principles of ethics, how knowledge is attained, and a view of the nature of reality and man's relation to it. The choice to resort to cynical manipulation and fear is the result bad choices in the rest.
Well, it's an idea I like that feels fanciful or utopian to me. I suspect the idea of creating a confederacy or union of the British colonies based on philosophical ideas would have seemed far-fetched to me at the time.
"There is no trend for nations to "go away"."
If that's true and we need nations to prevent socialism, then that's one fewer thing to worry about. I do think separate nations are disappearing one way or the other, and I don't think that resists or encourages socialism.
There is no trend for nations to "go away". The whole world is still carved into nations. There is only a utopian collectivist-statist ideology that still seeks control of "one world". We are "dealing with it": it's called self defense, and that doesn't mean "imagining" nations "stay as they are".
This is interesting. I'm torn between a) a romantic view of colonists in a remote area taking Enlightenment philosophy and trying to build a working society around it and b) the idea that the gritty reality of it must involve all the things I mentioned.
" Imagining a utopian 'one world' without regard to what most people think and value is not an answer."
Regarding everything you said about obliteration of nations, I do not have a utopian view of it leading to good things. I'm saying the trend is already in progress, IMHO, and we should deal with it rather than imagining that nations will stay as they are. If lack of separate nations leads to socialism, we're in big trouble, because I think nations are going away whether we like it or not.
Obliteration of nations obliterates the possibility of free societies because the "one world" does not culturally support individualism. In most areas it is welfare statism, and it goes downhill into more extensive varieties of socialism and other forms of dictatorship from there. This has previously been explained. Imagining a utopian 'one world' without regard to what most people think and value is not an answer.
I really think those three things I mentioned do cause increase recognition of rights. Reason delivering products and services means people have a non-philosophical motivation for learning it. Sharing stories tricks people into putting themselves into other's shoes and seeing rights violations from the other party's point of view. Catching criminals and clearing innocent suspects leads to more respect for the law.
" Without a government to enforce our rights there are no rights and no capitalism. "
Right
"That is what "one world" gets you."
I don't see that (hence the false choice between one world and capitalism), but if it's true we're in deep trouble because the one world is getting smaller every day.
Ayn Rand did not present a false choice between capitalism and separate nations. Where did you get that from? Without a government to enforce our rights there are no rights and no capitalism. That is what "one world" gets you. You haven't addressed anything I wrote.
In any case, I think nations are going away regardless of whether they're good or bad for individual rights.
The excerpt from To Young Scientists sounds (without full context) like it offers a false choice between capitalism and separate nations. You can have any combination of those.
325 million out of about 7 billion worldwide -- 5% of "one world" -- have no chance to protect the rights of the individual against the tender mercies of the likes of the UN representing the overwhelmingly dominant collectivism and outright tribalism of the rest of the world.
Reason and freedom have always led to what people want -- if they want to live as individuals. It is not what looters want, on the scale of nations it is not the trend in most of the world, and it is under progressively increasing attack here, including by those "liberals" who want to open up "the goods" of America to the rest of the world by turning it into an "open borders" international welfare central. "'Come one, come all -- and vote for 'democratic socialism' so that it can't be stopped by the minority of the world in the way."
The cause of wars internationally has always been the dominance of statism, not the existence of nations, and not the existence of free nations in particular. Statists who rule nations are confined within national borders only because that is all they could attain power over, as much as they would have liked to control much more or the whole world (as many of them have dreamed of and attempted). The nations they have controlled have shifting boundaries that are whatever they can get at the time. The answer to that is not to eliminate the concept of nations for "One World". They fight for power; we seek to maintain a defended region in which our rights are respected. The need for borders has not "been removed"; they are a moral necessity that collectivists want removed to destroy freedom of the individual.
As Ayn Rand put it in "To Young Scientists" in 1962, anthologized in The Voice of Reason , "capitalism does not force individuals or nations into the collectivist slave pen of a world government. The so-called One World is merely 'one neck ready for one leash.' Capitalism leaves men free for self-defense, but gives no one the political means to initiate force or war."
And,
"A nation, like any other group, is only a number of individuals and can have no rights other than the rights of its individual citizens. A free nation—a nation that recognizes, respects and protects the individual rights of its citizens—has a right to its territorial integrity, its social system and its form of government. The government of such a nation is not the ruler, but the servant or agent of its citizens and has no rights other than the rights delegated to it by the citizens for a specific, delimited task (the task of protecting them from physical force, derived from their right of self-defense)...
"Such a nation has a right to its sovereignty (derived from the rights of its citizens) and a right to demand that its sovereignty be respected by all other nations." -- from “Collectivized ‘Rights’” in The Virtue of Selfishness http://anthemfoundation.org/for-profe...
The reason for nation states, natural borders separating people, has been removed. I see nations as a vestige of a bygone era.
"But we still have (some very long) wars with nations and the threat is always there."
I think this will decrease because reason and mutual trades rather than force "deliver the goods". If value were in cattle, there are spoils to be had by stealing them, even though it's wrong. In the modern world, doing the right thing (reason and free enterprise) gets people what they want.
A very succinct and sobering way to put the peril nuclear, nanotech, and biotech pose to humankind
I realize now it sounded like I was saying one world order would be peaceful and free. I don't think that. I just think wars between nation states are going away. I also think there is a separate long-term trend away from violence. These are both good trends, but it does not mean there will an end to war-like violence (e.g. drone strikes on people suspected of murder) in my lifetime. I don't think there will be a place with low taxes that respects people rights to speech, weapons, free-speech, and so on in my lifetime.
There is no sign that world-wide statism causing war is declining. That is what an eventual elimination, or near elimination, of war requires -- a replacement of irrationalism, collectivism and statism by reason and individualism making proper government possible world-wide -- and that surely is not happening today.
It is not possible to have peace without government for the protection of the rights of the individual. Worse than war is statism, under which the rulers conduct war to oppress defenseless citizens. 'One world' abolition of borders and nations would not protect us from gangs and dictators; it would not even make it possible to pretend that there are no wars despite leftist evaders pretending that collectivism is "peace".
See Ayn Rand's "The Roots of War".
Reason 1: The horrific aspects of war in the ancient world have disappeared. They now exist only as rare atrocious crimes. I expect this trend will continue.
Reason 2: War between nation states started when people in distant cities started thinking of themselves as part of a single nation. There were roads to carry people can good from one city to another, but there were geographic, cultural, and language barriers caused people on the other side of a range of mountains to be considered a different people, a different nation. Those boundaries are meaningless. Declaring things of value at customs is a relic from a time when I couldn't send software, firmware, hardware CAM files, and money around the world instantly almost for free. If I'm correct that the nation state is in its last gasp of life, war between nation states will disappear. It may persist as are against international extremists groups, but that may be toned down due to the general trend I mentioned in reason #1.
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