Objectivism 2.0

The Human Animal

2011-09-08T07:07:00.000-07:00

More than 50 years after Atlas Shrugged and after much years of being Objectivist, I strongly believe that some update is necessary to Rand's original approach
In fact more than an update is an extension consisting in applying Objectivism deeper to the Human Animal: Ourselves

The Aristotelian "A is A" means also that WE are what we are, and in recent years after Rand's main body of work, several science disciplines has gone much further in the research about our very own nature as "biological machines".
In an oversimplified analogy our body and specially our brain would be the "hardware", our mind the "software" and our emotional system standing between both, and functioning as some kind of "firmware" specially in our early years of life

Rand focused her wonderful insights in our mind, the software, which is of course the proper terrain for philosophy but I think now that she overlooked the strong influence of our hardware in our behavior, moods, and choices, specially our Emotional System which is shaped by our "sense of life" = values in Randian terms but also by our biology and even the particular chemistry and hormone balance inside our brains

What follow are some concepts for discussion, followed by some Conclusions at the end:

1- Modern Evolutionary Psychology and Neuroscience are progressing more and more in revealing how strong is the influence of DNA-inherited traits in our behavior and moral choices and preferences
So Aristotle-Locke's concept of "Tabula Rasa" is valid to a certain (great) extend but not absolute since we have innate tendencies acquired thru darwinian evolution

2- The (also Aristotelian) "Eudaimonia" and thus our pursuit-of-happiness are very strongly influenced by our emotional system, in fact happiness itself is an emotionally based state of mind, complex, quite different for each individual, hard to define, but emotional in nature: We feel happy as opposite to we think we are happy

3- Altruism and Religiosity, two apparently DNA-inherited traits are central to the discourse of Objectivism vs traditional organization in Society
Recent studies strongly suggest that these two tendencies found in all World's societies across all Ages, are "hardwired" in our brains and helped specie's survival
As a sample of this line of though please read Matthew Alper's book "The God part of the Brain" or this article in LA Times

4- Human Society's evolution leads also to "biological weakness"?
Not to mention modern medicine hindering Natural Selection, Capitalism as the best-to-date political system is strongly linked to an evolved morality, and any regression in human history would likely diminish or eliminate Capitalism in modern Society with the subsequent possibility of returning to more salvage relationships among men that in turn would also call for "less evolved" individuals in order to survive?

5- Beatles' classic "All you need is love" is an expression that probably would produce revulsion in Rand and most Objectivists BUT there is something extremely important inside the very concept of "Love" that is essential to our survival as individual and species: The DNA-inherited natural tendency of "attachment" in the Human Animal which is also emotionally driven. Attachment to our beloved ones, to our projects, to other people, even to objects or devices that become important for us, allowing to move towards needs generated by these feelings that not always have an easy or even logic explanation.

6- Ayn Rand stressed the essential importance of a John-Galt style of relationship with Nature, absolutely agreed BUT dominion of Nature is dominion of just one half of our environment, as social animals we usually live in groups so our "Reality" is compressed of Nature and People with the latter posing also multiple challenges coming from our relationship with others, personal interactions, rules and laws, rewards vs punishment, control vs freedom, etc.

Conclusions:

A- We are what we are, A is A and it is pointless to deny our very own nature consistent with our current degree of evolution as species. Thus integrating Objectivist Philosophy into our complex "interior" (including specially our Emotional System) is a challenge that everyone has to solve in his/her own way. But to me we need adequate managing not denial, of all these DNA-inherited traits and tendencies that are more strong in some individuals than others but always present in the end.

B- Borrowing from conflict management strategies an interesting option I found is working "in the frontiers", meaning accepting that conflict is an essential part of existence and try to make our choices accordingly and as smart as possible. This is specially important in the relationship with all other people around us who usually are far more unpredictable and illogic than Nature that is much more benevolent in David Kelley's sense of the word

C- It sounds politically incorrect but I also believe that we should contemplate the need to be less overcivilized in some cases, keeping deep inside ourselves some residual "primitivism" just in case modern Society collapses and relationships among men change in some future. This applies also to the sometimes overprotective environment and education we are giving to our children?

Seven Deadly Sins against Reason

2010-12-13T04:39:00.000-08:00

The traditional Christian Seven Deadly Sins have nothing to do with Reason but with Altruism and God.
So we reject them.

Instead here they go "our" Seven Deadly Sins against Reason:

1- Lust
The real truth about sex is that it is not an end in itself, it is (or ought to be) a consequence of your triumph in life and not the supposed source of it.
Highly overrated in our modern culture by both its fans and detractors, it has not the power by itself to make you more successful or happier beyond the ephemeral range of the moment after which you will feel even more miserable than before if you are lying to yourself about yourself.
So the real sin is to revert the relationship between cause and consequence. Sex is GREAT but is not the cause of success, it is the consequence of it.

2- Gluttony
It is a sin eating too much, but it is not a sin against those less fortunate or against the limited resources of Mother Nature, it is a sin against yourself, your health, your body that is the hardware were your more precious software has to run: Your Mind.
Indulging yourself with some pleasure is GOOD as long as you earned it, as long as you remain in control of yourself.
The real sin is to take your decisions about your own pleasure (or your life in general) based in the opinions of others or the alleged false assumption about limited resources on Earth or the guilt induced by some ancient priests in order to keep you unhappy, fearful and consequently under their control.

3- Greed
It is definitely not a sin at all. It is a VIRTUE only publicized as a vice by those ignorant or haters of what life is, or worse by those with the most evil intention: to take your wealth away, to rob you from the reward earned by your effort, this noble resource that is a expression of your values and achievements and also a tool for getting your dreams done: Your money.
The real sin is not having greed, or having greed for the unearned.
It is the worst sin of all not having the greed to be better, to be more, to earn a place on Earth by your effort and intelligence, the greed to be richer in soul and body, in spirit and in practice in wisdom and gold, the greed to fight against laziness and the grey background of the emptiness before and after that marvelous spark burning against the cold nothing of eternity: Your Life.

4- Sloth
It is definitely a sin, but not against God, it is a sin against yourself and against life. Your success in life or even more your simple daily survival can be only achieved by effort and work and intelligence. If you are not doing it, other people are doing it for you and worse: if you are not paying them, they become your slaves, whether they know it or not, whether they do it because they have not choice or impulsed by the vice of altruism.

5- Wrath
Here things get more complicated. Where come your wrath from? It is rational or irrational? Against what? Just or unjust? What "Justice" means for you anyway? Your wrath is a consequence of your values, so it is hard to say if the wrath is good or bad in itself. You have to look for the causes, you have to check your premises, you have to revise your values and for this you have to know them, explicitly. You have to know yourself.
Wrath can even be a virtue when generated by the right values because it moves you, it can be also a powerful tool to defend yourself and the ones you love against aggression and injustice.
So the real sin is not wrath but only wrath generated by the wrong values. The real sin are wrong (irrational) values.

6- Envy
Envy is good or bad according to your later intentions. There are three different kinds of envy according to these intentions:
a- The good envy which impulse you to make the effort to win or build the material and/or spiritual resources that will allow you to achieve your desired neighbor's status or at least to get as close to it as possible according to your own real possibilities.
b- The bad envy which impulse you to try to unjustly deprive your neighbor from his own achievements ir order to get them, to steal his wealth, to rob his achievements, to enslave his soul or his mind when and if you can.
c- The worst envy which impulse you to try to destroy your neighbor's achievements or life, just because they remind you about your own worthlessness or your hate of your own miserable existence.

7- Pride
Considered by Christianity the origin of all Deadly Sins, it is in reality the best of all virtues and the origin of the single most important feeling toward happiness: Self-steem. Of course they don't want you to be proud, of course they don't want you to be happy. A proud and happy person can not be as easily controlled as a poor bastard that thinks about himself as worthless and unfit to existence, as unable to think by himself and to use his intelligence to survive and advance in life.
The real sin is not to be proud if you have something to be proud of.
The ultimate sin then is to have nothing to be proud of and do nothing about it.

Capitalism and the art of love

2010-05-13T07:07:00.000-07:00

(How stupid we were)

This nasty image reflects the cruel concept that a large majority of humanity has about Capitalism as the culprit of poverty and inequality in the world.

Nothing more unfair: Poverty does not exist, it is only the absence of wealth. As poverty is actually the natural state of man if he is stripped of goods and services he produces. Without these goods and services produced (by men) and shared (traded) in modern societies, we are at the mercy of the strong and inimical forces of Nature and reality, which we know well all we that ever found ourselves suddenly isolated from these goods and services either lost in a forest at night in the Winter or with the car accidentally broken in the middle of some solitary nowhere.

This wealth that we share and that protects us from poverty/nature (medicine, technology, food, shelter, transport, leisure, culture. etc.) is not generated spontaneously nor by "The Society" neither by God nor grows on trees, it is produced by men like us.
This wealth which we value so much explicitly or implicitly has grown extremely slowly in all the millennia who preceded us in the history of mankind and has multiplied exponentially only in the last 200 years specially starting from the Industrial Revolution and Capitalism.

Before it and just 300 or 400 years ago Man as species still struggled in disadvantage against hunger, pestilence, distances and all the powerful forces of Mother Nature, because the growth of wealth goods and services was so small that it was much easier to get them by force: stealing.
For hundreds of thousands of years the formula to get better in life was very simple: Take an ax and crack the head your neighbor, the tribe next door or whoever had what you wanted, all which was called "conquer." Slavery, permanent warfare, rape, torture, exploitation and death were massive and general commonplace for us as a species until only 200 years ago. Even today there are large segments of the global population fighting in disadvantage against those same forces of Nature, experiencing firsthand the living conditions of that ancient past, these are all parts of the World where the Industrial Revolution and Capitalism have not arrived yet, or where for a variety causes they have arrived only partially.

Why then Capitalism is blamed for the historical ills it is actually healing?

Here are my guesses:

1- Philosophical and historical inertia:
Philosophers, intellectuals and leaders of the mankind (and along with them most of the population) have not yet grasped this relatively new historical phenomenon and continue analyzing the reality with parameters of the previous historical period, the feudal era where wealth was obtained by means of force and man was still the master of man. The "bad guy" was the rich because he had quite sure stolen his wealth somehow from others. He or his predecessors had to exploit, kill or torture many men weaker than them to acquire or preserve prosperity.
So many people still apply the same obsolete logic to the capitalist entrepreneur who not only do not steal by force the wealth form others but is the real hero of society because he produces the wealth, goods and services other men eventually enjoy. Capitalism is the only political-economic system that allows the free action of these modern heroes, who in turn do not produce that wealth guided by altruistic purposes, but do so for their own sake and here comes another reason why Capitalism is blamed:

2-Christianity and its inverted model of values:
2000 years ago a man named Jesus of Nazareth came up with a philosophy that says that it is wrong to do things for the benefit of your own but it is good to do things for the benefit of others. Why?
There is no logical explanation for this idea and it would take too long analyze the causes in this brief post, but the truth is that this position have become widespread ever since affecting the thinking capacity of a large majority of humanity promoting altruism as the ultimate ideal of nobility.

3- There is in all of us some primitive desire to return to be "Children"
So someone take care of us, so we don't have to pay for our mistakes, so we make decisions that have no significant impact on our lives because someone or something will forgive us and finally save us. The Catholic Church and many other religions exploit this feeling through a "pastoral paternalism" and divine figures appealing to our lost childhood: "God Father" and "Mother Mary" for example. The atheist collectivists instead favor a "paternalistic society" to whom we owe who we are and always ensure that our needs are satisfied not matter how good or bad children we are: We are all "Equals"

The explosive combination of these 3 concepts are mixed in the following reasoning:
If someone has more than others is bad because surely he took it from other people in some obscure way, plus it is also wrong to have when others do not have.
Someone has to be guilty of the plight of the less fortunate, a good Father does not make difference between his children

The nasty picture shown at the beginning is a living reflection of this thought, the chubby child with a McDonald's cup in hand and a western cap on his head signaling a hungry child probably from Africa, both under the words "enjoy Capitalism" written in letters of the logo of Coca-Cola represents more or less the following message: The "fat" Western society is guilty of the African hunger together with multinational business usually identified as a bulwark of "Heartless and stateless capitalism" that has plunged humanity into a nightmare of inequality and cold, materialistic injustice.
When it is quite the opposite, no one has done more for the poor (and every) men in the history of the human race that capitalism and "heartless" entrepreneurs who have progressed under its protective umbrella of individual rights.
Bill Gates, one of the wealthiest men of the world has indeed and unwittingly done (while generating his own wealth) much more for the men of planet Earth than the already holy Mother Teresa of Calcutta and all missionaries in history together.

But why "the art of love"?
I was reading last week a brilliant essay of Nathaniel Branden in the book "Capitalism: The unknown ideal'
Branden critically analyzes there in depth the ideas of the German philosopher Erich Fromm who wrote "The Art of Love" book that I read many years ago and thankfully forgot.
Fromm belongs to the obsolete large group of twentieth century philosophers who longed for Feudalism and the Middle Ages and the alleged and glamorized harmony between their fellow man and Nature that was "lost" in the industrial era, probably because his aristocratic ancestors did not die young working the land of the master or in one of the frequent famines or in an epidemic of cholera. He and all the modern stupid (and ecologists) that despise so much the advances of modernity and technology should be given a dose of their own medicine and left to live alone in the middle of the Brazilian jungle where they will quickly reach before 30 that "lost" harmony they long for... in heaven.

In the frontiers

2010-05-10T09:18:00.000-07:00

(Being alive)

First than nothing please let me define myself: I am a frontier man
What the hell does that mean?
Well... basically that I am rarely settled down on the "center" of an idea, concept, lifestyle, etc. because I am convinced that in the "frontiers" is where the conflict and action happen. And I regard conflict as source and maintenance-energy of life.

As the poet said:

"...This way we travel
in the frontier between the past an the future
between what we are and what we can be
between what we have and what we lack
surfing life over the waves of time
sometimes turbulent, sometimes calm.
Always in the frontiers..."

The concept of the frontier I am trying to explain here is different from the grayness of "the middle of the road" which usually means trying to compromise two positions, ideas or concepts trying to democratically mixing parts of both and usually leading to nothing but confusion and ineffectiveness.
The concept of frontier instead means that you are still on one side of the road but close enough to the other side in order to understand more deeply what the other position really means and where it comes from

What bout the frontiers of Objectivism?
I would say that people on "the center" of this philosophy could be called Orthodox Objectivists and are in Leonard Peikof's thought line and similar, on the other hand different other people are trying at the same time to go closer to the frontiers, sometimes unexplored frontiers waiting to be expanded, because Ayn Rand never really put together an extensive account of all her new philosophy covering every aspect of reality, present and future. probably an impossible task for just one person no matter how brilliant because in the end any philosophy or intellectual movement is something "alive" that should adapt and grow according to the progress of the civilization

On the other hand being "orthodox" in Objectivism is some kind of contradiction because it is a philosophy that encourages independence in though and critical individualist analysis even when Ayn Rand herself would probably had not approved most of Neo Objectivist approaches whatever this loose term means

So my the question is:
Should we take further Objectivism into new frontiers?
Or should Objectivism remain frozen around only the concepts and essays already given by Ayn Rand?

Since I already said that I am a "Frontier Man" for me the answer is clear...

Playboy March 1964

2009-09-14T08:37:00.000-07:00

(The naked thought of Ayn Rand)

This is a very interesting interview to Ayn Rand by Alvin Toffler published in the issue of March 1964 by Playboy magazine, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did and get emotive too when in the end Rand closes saying that she still believes in the greatness of Man
Link to to interview

Jesus Christ against Capitalism

2009-04-16T18:29:00.000-07:00

This man who lived 2,000 years ago is one of the most clear demonstrations of the long range power of ideas

His concepts modified the history of the World for the last two Millenniums, and specially during the last two Centuries due to the strong influence of the United States of America on the so called Western civilization.

Almost all the Christian commandments are harmful in one way or another to the Mind, the Reason, the Progress and the Self-steem of men but two of them are specially evil in modern times:

1-"You shall love your neighbor as yourself"
2-"You shall not kill"

The first one gives place to consider altruism or un-selfishness as one of the alleged highest virtues of our society, and is often stretched to the even more insane "You shall love your neighbor more than yourself" as the pinnacle of virtue

But who is "your neighbor"? The commandment doesn't mention anything about your relation with him: Is he your friend? your relative? someone you admire? someone unknown? someone known but despised by you? your enemy?
Does your neighbor deserve to be loved by you? Is he wise? idiot? honest, thief, criminal? brave or coward? helpful or useless? hard-worker or lazy? nice or indifferent?
The commandment doesn't specify anything, so we should assume that we should love everyone, anyone.

This commandment is deeply affecting the politics and economics of the World because no one dares to defend Capitalism on moral grounds, simply because it goes against this commandment which is taken as some kind of axiomatic truth, some revealed supreme virtue that everyone seems to agree with...
Why? Simply because it resonates deeply in our brain, in our soul where we have genetically hardwired thanks to our evolution as species other virtues like kindness or compassion or sympathy which are (were at least) essential for our survival as group and individuals because these virtues allow us to live in tribes and societies which in turn has the potential to greatly improve our chances of survival and our standard of life

But I say it is not possible to love your neighbor as yourself, it is an evil ideal impossible to comply in real life and thus created only to make people feel guilty. I say it is not right to love your neighbor as yourself without knowing who your neighbor is, without knowing if he deserves your love or your indifference or scorn or even your hate or your fear or whatever he could deserve according to your own values and to his virtues, his vices, his merits, his faults or his crimes...

The second one "You shall not kill" is a blind blank check extended to your current or potential enemies in order to allow them to harm you, is an invitation to become a sacrificial lamb for anyone that doesn't share the same ridiculous principle
You shall never kill? Not even in self-defense? Or in defense of your loved ones? Or to defend your property, your village, your country?
I hate pacifists almost as much as I hate ecologists. What kind of man offer the other cheek to his aggressor? A coward.

The "combo" of these two commandments exempt people from the responsibility about their own safety, and from the need to analyze more carefully the World and the people living in them, the need to discriminate between others, the "neighbors", on the naif belief that if one is good everybody will somehow love or appreciate us and nobody will finally or seriously harm us, or the mistaken idea that there will be always some one there to defend us. These commandments also encourage anyone else to act with impunity knowing that we are sacrificial lambs ready to be their next victims.

The chains of the Tribe

2009-03-19T00:39:00.000-07:00

(The Daddy-Society)

Society (the tribe) plays to the adult a role similar to that of parents about the child, providing care and guidance, supplying context, limits and support. But just as parents are good, mediocre and bad, so does societies.

Probably a large majority of you are nowadays in agreement about that extremely overprotecting parents can be enormously damaging for their children. But the same majority seems to agree that the more protective it is a society with its members it is better. What not everyone perceives is the inverse relationship that inexorably exists between the social protection (control) and freedom.
The axis protection/control sooner or later ends up suffocating the axis freedom/responsibility, exactly as it happens in the relationship between parents and children.

Fleeing the often pathetic history of South America, I am living for now some time in the United States, a country that 200 years ago, just yesterday in historical time, was born as a symbol of freedom and individual rights (the real human rights) against the absolutism and collectivism of the old monarchical Europe.
But in the last 100 years it began to imperceptibly derive into the collectivism of a society which is becoming everyday a little bit more oppressive and controlling (it's still more free that South America and Europe, not to mention Middle Eastern countries and other semi-medieval cultures)

United States, once the bastion of freedom is going slowly and perhaps inexorably in the same direction they took (and failed in) the great collectivist experiments that delineated much of the macabre story of the 20th century of genocide and massive unnameable deprivation: The National Socialism of Adolf Hitler, the Fascism of Benito Mussolini, and the Communists of Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin, just to name a few.

Why?
Why the vast majority ends up preferring safety over freedom?
Is there finally a civilized way to protect minorities from the majority? (being the individual the smallest minority)
Constitutions are Amended and governments grow and grow as the decades pass, because people (the majority) is requesting this, and those same governments end up growing so much to crush the people who are supposed to protect.

All these people demanding more and more security and giving up in exchange their freedom, what a sadness...

They want the government-society-father to take care of their problems and provide everything necessary and even the unnecessary and then they duck his head obediently accepting orders for this same daddy who cares for us but of course also ends by telling us how we must live our lives and die our deaths.
The process of gradual loss of freedom in most western societies has been advanced over the years in a way similar to the "boiled frog syndrome"
A frog will jump out of the pot if thrown into the boiling water, however if the water is heated very slowly the frog does not realize and dies finally boiled.

In the ancient conflict between the pressure of the tribe and the individual, it appears that the individual continues to lose because he "needs" of the tribe to survive, as he needed from their parents when boy. When then will the great majority of humanity reach the majority of age?
That day will come some day? I hope yes

I hope that when my son is grown up they don’t come once again the dark centuries of the Inquisition or the Stone Age as they want all these ecologists- mystical-collectivists, dreaming to create a "perfect world" through decrees and laws and rules increasingly stifling our freedoms. Many even say they love the poor but they treat them as idiots

Fortunately the final and incorruptible judge was, is, and will be the Reality that accepts no magic solutions or whims so they are going to lose now or within 500 years, but how much evil they can do in the meantime? What kind of world will live my son into? I worry a lot, so I write.
As they should be worried the ghosts of over 100 million men, women and children who just talking about Hitler, Mao and Stalin were tortured and murdered in the name of a "Better World".
Better for whom?

They all started the same way: by telling people they had a "perfect solution" to the alleged social problems, that if people surrender their freedom they will take care of all.
And people believed them...

5 most common mistakes of men #3

2009-03-10T14:25:00.000-07:00

(The art of thinking wrong)

Part C
"Mistake Facts with Opinions"
(Failing to difference oneself from reality)

This is probably one of the most terrible mistakes people can make in their lives, and the mistake that is possibly hurting the most the modern Western Civilization.

Legions of persons, living in the protective umbrella of developed countries/cities/societies have totally lost the perspective about what it is really living in this World, what it takes to any individual of any living species to survive, flourish and ultimately to die
They have lost their reality checks and can go away with this because the "society" (the tribe) protects them from their own mistakes.

But reality, the final unappeasable, unappealable arbiter of everything usually comes sooner or later with the truth on one hand and a swath in the other and the candid smile of a child in the face to make accountable everyone for the mistakes made. Then "life is unfair" when it doesn't match my whims...

Example:
-"This cougar is just a big cat, let's have one in our backyard"
or
-"Rich people are responsible for the existence of poor people in the World"
or
-"Doctor Smith must save me from this strange tumor, otherwise I will sue him"

Of course everyone needs opinions because they are essential to make the infinite choices that allow us to keep ourselves alive and move forward.

But of course the cougar killed one of their kids, poor people existed before rich people and doctor Smith is not God.

And it gets worse since erroneous opinions are like transmissible diseases: They travel fast from person to person, hosting specially in brains not used to check information against the only a final judge of everything: Reality.

Some people of this kind are fortunate and can live all their lives in this sort of "pink lie" supported by the effort and thinking of other people. Other less fortunate just die or live unhappy because of their mistakes, without finally knowing what happened

This essential mistake is in big part responsibility from the default and ultimate failure of the ones supposed to help to guide the course of humanity's mental evolution: Philosophers, who contribute everyday to this confusion of Metaphysics with Epistemology allowing the fundamental mistake of taking one opinion of the World as the World itself.
They are supposed to be the enlightened, the best thinkers, the beacon in the night but instead they resigned from reason and engaged in the same mainstream fallacies and faults than the "common citizen" who they were supposed to help. Mysticism, grayness, subjectivism, ignorance, magic-thinking, laziness, cowardice, to name a few are the vices supposed to be fought by philosophers but they mostly don't.

It is up to everyone of us to correct this, because the future of the World and our kids is in our hands.

5 most common mistakes of men #2

2008-10-23T08:09:00.000-07:00

(The art of thinking wrong)

Part B
"Mistake Rule and Exception"
(The most used strategy to hide one's own laziness)

I see a lot of people outside there using the few exceptions to some obvious rule in order to dismiss the truth and continue believing whatever unreal arbitrary fantasy they have made for themselves or for the whole World.
It is a strategy that can be easily used to deny or justify almost anything, any point of view, any idea or whatever.

Example:
-"Dogs walk on four legs"
-"Yes but yesterday I saw a dog walking on just three legs, so it is not true that dogs walk on four legs"

For practical purposes if 99% of dogs walk on four legs you can safely say that dogs do walk in four legs.

This tactic is used by example to attack capitalism:
"Last Sunday I saw on TV the CEO of that big corporation going to jail for fraud: All the capitalist system is corrupt, money and ambition are the roots of all evil!" (quite fashionable these days with the current financial crisis going on)
Meaning: I don't believe in capitalism because I was told since my childhood that it is evil, then I will try to find any little justification to sustain my wrong opinion and never see the reality that 99% of the CEOs of a vast majority of companies are honest, competent, hard-working people, sometimes brilliant. (more brilliant than me for sure...)

Mistaking rule and exception is most of the times a way to hide our own mental laziness for accepting the rules, the facts, the reality and learn and change our mind.
It is failing to see the "measure" of the facts and the reality. It is failing to see the big picture and take the appropriate perspective in order to avoid a tree obstructing the view of the whole wood.

In practical life, specially concerning human affairs, it is imperative knowing the "statistic incidence" of an occurrence in order to form a correct opinion. It is not enough to feel unsafe just seeing in the news that someone in your neighborhood was robbed...

How much people are robbed in a month or a year?
1% don't worry, your neighborhood is still safe
10% your neighborhood is not that safe...
30% your neighborhood is definitely dangerous!
70% move now!! you are about to be robbed!!

The same thing occurs in the real-physical World with "tolerances", since perfection rarely exists.
Perfection is a delusion depending of the detail of measurement.

You could think that the surface of the glass of your living room's table is perfectly smooth and flat, but if you see it thru a microscope you will discover that at some scale of measurement this seems to be not totally true...
It is not flat and smooth anymore? Yes it is!
(Between the logical tolerances in a given context it is)
For all your practical purposes it still is

Conclusion: Only people not willing to be aware of the "measure" and the context of reality can dismiss a rule because of an exception, living in a world of delusions, always judging the reality by unreal "lifeboat" exceptional situations that finally never occur.

The same lifeboat that will not save their failed lives, when someday just before to die they finally realize that they wasted their existence.

5 most common mistakes of men #1

2008-07-24T07:22:00.000-07:00

(Analyzing the art of thinking wrong)

Introduction

Confucius in his "Analects" wrote 500 years before Christ that we should recover the meaning of the words.
Indeed. Words are arbitrary representations of things, ideas, etc. thus a word is more useful when its meaning is more clear.
Take by example the word "fascism" which was born as a definition for a left-wing collectivistic form of government leaded by dictator Benito Mussolini around the 1930's Italy. Today this word is used (specially by left-wing and/or progressive people) to design almost the opposite: Their enemies on the right-wing, or whatever the occasional user of the word happens to intent.
The word "fascism" has become some obscure synonym of evil. And evil is an opinion. The word lost its original meaning into multiple, even opposite concepts, and meaning too much is often meaning nothing.
We have to recover the meaning and clarity of the words, which means recover the meaning and clarity of our minds.
If everything is the same in the muddy clouds inside your head, it is easy for your mind to get bored and go to sleep, forever...

Part A
"Mistake Compassion with Pity"
(The ugliness of pity-based altruism)

Or perhaps the correct phrase would be "The ugliness of altruism-based pity", because for me pity is ugly.

And this is a clear case covered by the statement I made in the introduction: words used for everything become confuse and very influenced by the mainstream ideas of the time: Pity and compassion seems to be synonyms nowadays, but even when (thanks in part to long bad use) the etymology is not very clear, they are not.

Pity is more close to mercy and misery, it is a feeling born from the supposed superiority of the non-suffering over the (supposed) suffering who is seen as permanently helpless and unable to recover by himself. Pity is normally a feeling without respect for the others. And there is a lot of people that like to feel pity just to feel somehow superior to others and then having a reason in their mediocre lives to increase a little their low self-steem by sacrificing themselves to "help" those others while in reality they are only helping their own poor and guilty souls to survive one more day trough their boring lives.

Compassion on the other hand is a feeling more born from sympathy, from identification with other's temporary misfortune, from identification with his merits and his struggle for improving. Born from the though "it could be me", born from realizing that finally we all are on the same game: The Life.
All struggling for survive, for happiness, for our particular values. Each one with his own good or bad fortune, abilities, willpower, energy, intelligence, but finally all under the same rules: The Reality.

So now when I see a hard-worker digging a hole in the street sweating under the hot sun of the summer for a small salary, I no longer see him as a victim of some obscure and unfair "system", I see him with his dignity, with respect. He is earning his living as we all do, doing his effort to survive, to feed his children, taking his risks everyday or not, as we all do.

Are you completely safe from dying tomorrow? No. Not even the richest man in the World is. Not even the wisest or the stronger. Not you, not me. So why do you feel pity for this man working on the street? Are you so superior? Is your life so much better? By which standards? Yours? Ok congratulations if you are better or happier from your own point of view, but pity is still an ugly feeling, respect would be much better.
Respect for yourself and for every man trying to win his own rewards in this old game called life.

5 most common mistakes of men (Soon)

2008-07-01T12:54:00.000-07:00

(The art of thinking wrong)

In the following five posts I will analyze some of the most
frequent errors of the untrained and/or evasive mind

Part A
"Mistake Compassion with Pity"
(The ugliness of pity-based altruism)

Part B
"Mistake Rule with Exception"
(The most used strategy to hide one's own laziness)

Part C
"Mistake Facts with Opinions"
(Failing to difference oneself from reality)

Part D
"Mistake Cause with Effect"
(The stupidity of pretending being by having)

Part E
"Mistake Individualism with Arrogance"
(Avoiding the mirror of the best)

Stay tune! :-)

Gods exist

2008-04-28T15:12:00.000-07:00

(We invented them)

The Gods have been there since the obscure beginnings of the humanity, when we finally emerged from the darkness, slowly finishing being monkeys and beginning being men.
Try for a second to imagine yourself in the shoes of these primitive creatures with a brain complex enough for beginning to think, but too simple to understand reality as most of we can do now. What could be then the answers to so many questions suddenly appeared?: Gods!
And we should probably be grateful to religions because they were the primitive (and probably irreplaceable) substitutes for philosophy in the first stages of man's evolution.

On the other hand Ayn Rand explicitly agreed from a metaphysical point of view, with the classic concept attributed to ancient Chinese culture: "Be brave enough to change what can be changed, humble enough to leave what can't be changed and wise enough to recognize the difference".
Gods have by definition all that we lack and men invented Gods because we are not Gods, i.e. we are not omnipotent nor omniscient and most people needed (still need) someone to take care of which they can't.

Background:
Atheists to believers spectrum:

Full believer: Honesty believes in miracles and in the God pictured in the Bible by example (or any other similar religion), he is convinced that people can fly, walk over water and create matter from nothing, or revive long dead bodies, contradicting all the known scientific and/or natural rules.

Half believer: Believe that there are some "divine" entities outside our current human-limited sphere of understanding, but don't believe in magic miracles or in priests from any particular religion. Probably considers the Bible as a metaphoric story

Agnostic: With a more scientific approach he is sure that the "magic" God pictured in the Bible by example (or any other similar religion) doesn't exist outside man's mind
But he is not sure if other Gods (superior "divine" entities) exist or not outside man's mind, because he doesn't care or because he has no scientific proof for either position

Atheist: Is absolutely convinced that no Gods exist at all outside man's mind, either the God pictured in the Bible by example (or any other similar religion) nor any superior "divine" entities of any kind. He only believes in what he can "touch and see" or what current science can proof.

Hypothesis:
There is some kind of "mystic instinct" in all men: Some kind of natural tendency to associate the things they don't understand or value very much to some "kingdom of magic" (Gods, angels, demons, spirits, reincarnation, gnomes, divination, astrology, whatever)

Thesis:
It is better for an Objectivist to know more about these "kingdoms of magic". Knowledge is personal and the most real knowledge can be only acquired by personal experience or proof, otherwise you just repeat by faith what other people said or wrote
Thus we Objectivists should know more closely about Gods or even worship some one (!), as long as we keep always clear in our minds that they are our invention: The God of money, the God of Wisdom, the God of Technology, the God of Love...

You can and should create Gods and these kind of Gods, your own Gods, should be concepts that you particularly value, admire and want to keep in some special place within your soul (your self-made soul as Ayn Rand said)
These "Gods" serve as an important part of the process by which your conscious mind constructs over the years your sense of life. (For an explanation about what I mean with "sense of life" please read Ayn Rand's essay "Philosophy and sense of life" in the Romantic Manifesto)

This extra knowledge about mysticism (and any other subject by the way) is also very useful to your mind in order to expand its limits an be able to extrapolate more concepts, based on more "points" of reliable reference-information

Explanation:
How can an Objectivist exercise his "mystic muscle" without renouncing to his principles?
Simple: Using the imagination, but always controlled by reason

Imagination is a powerful tool which importance is perhaps a little diminished in our Objectivist context where it is usually associated with fantasy, unreality, no-objectivity, no-reason
But correctly used imagination is one of the most powerful tools of reason. It allows to induction, to think about the not-yet-created. Imagination is essential to inventors, to discovery, to the thinkers of the not yet thought.

Unfortunately imagination is also essential (along with fear, ignorance, laziness, etc) for all sort of mystics and believers in the non-real and I suppose it is the reason for its "bad fame" around Objectivists. Imagination, like a wild horse, can easily get out of control, out of the control of reason.

Thus a fine mind uses a lot of imagination but always under control of reason. There it resides the huge difference

I particularly propose as an interesting imagination's exercise worshiping The Nine Divines (an invented mythology of the video game Oblivion). Isn't it funny inventing some magic around us?
And I also propose the main deity Akatosh be the "Soul of the World", this means all the knowledge accumulated by the effort of every individual that ever existed. The knowledge we inherited and which sum allows us to live in the wonderful World we live now, with internet, motorcycles, microwave furnaces, skyscrapers, guns, poetry, roads, satellites, medicine, movies and the Macbook computer in which keyboard I am writing just now these words.

However I see (at least) three basic dangers in misunderstanding the concept of Gods who supposedly are the ones in charge of the things we really can't change:

1-Believing in Gods as entities with existence outside man's mind and thus believing they are some kind of external, "real" beings with power on their own.

2-Leaving Gods the job that we are supposed to do: The job to change what we can change: adapt our environment to us, develop our own means to survive, use and improve our mind, fight for what we desire.

3-Finally giving to some priests or witch-doctors the supposed ability to communicate with the Gods and then say what should or shouldn't be done.

Conclusion:
I would not take so lightly the "fantasy" of men, it is after all one of the most powerful driving forces that took humanity up to here. Fantasy reflects the exercise of one wonderful quality of man: imagination. As every tool of the mind it can be used for good (projecting things for the future for example) or for evil (denying reality for example).
On the other hand John Galt exists (the character, not the "real" person obviously) and his influence would probably not have been necessarily more powerful or important if he was a "flesh and bone" person...
If religious people can't distinguish between reality and fantasy is their problem and beside that I usually don't argue with worshipers of any religion, it is pointless because they can't prove the existence of whatever their God happens to be and I can't prove otherwise.
More important: Religious people believe in Gods because they desperately need to, their minds and/or souls are not strong enough to stand existence and death or to have their own values, so it is good to have some compassion for those people, I used to be one of them after all...
Finally I don't think being an Objectivist necessarily means having a mind so "practice" that is incapable of distinguishing the shades of gray even and specially in the minds of adversaries. Reality (including man of course) is complex, so our mind have to be complex enough to properly understand it.
An oversimplified discourse is useful for a club where all people agree with you, but trying to "reach" other people with distinct mental structures is a different challenge.
You talk about how things work, but you are forgetting one of the most wonderful "things" on Earth: Man's mind. And the alleged existence of Gods explains a lot about how human mind works.

Never again I will say to a religious person that his or her God doesn't exist, it is a lie because all Gods exist, as literature, mathematical equations or music exist, since for good or worse we invented all of them. Even when I know the entire Universe is neutral to the existence of men on this little rock called Earth. Even when I know that Universe is not inimical against us, nor "love" us. Even when I know there is no consciousness (like ours at least) outside man's mind, only the cold eternal Universe that don't care if we live, die, love, do good or evil, make planes, satellites, Bibles, Giocondas or whatever.
I also know that Gods have been always there, but they are not responsible for the misuse we make of them.

The Self-Help Guide to Living in a Free Society

2008-04-27T03:02:00.000-07:00

(By Gen LaGreca from "The New Individualist" magazine)

Too many Americans are losing the ability to take care of themselves and are instead looking to the government to run their lives for them, in the tax-gouging, liberty-killing system called the welfare state.

Too many Americans seem willing to replace the life of a proud American eagle, flying alone and free, with that of a hapless chicken penned in a coop, waiting to be fed. The welfare state has all but squashed the essential skill of our survival: the skill of taking responsibility for our own lives.

Although we are besieged by self-help guides of every kind - from how to train a parakeet, to how to cook pasta, to how to combat addictions to alcohol, or obsessive 'Net surfing, or other disorders - there is one guide to personal improvement that is conspicuously absent from today's cultural scene. It's a guide that statist politicians and the groups that support them do not want us to discover. It's a guide to curing the worst dependency of all: the urge to satisfy one's needs by dipping his hand into the wallet of his taxpaying neighbor.

To combat this affliction and to rediscover the meaning of freedom we need a "Self Help Guide to Living in a Free Society." It might read something like this:

1. If you don't go to school and don't work hard to get ahead, don't expect the same rewards as those who do. You haven't earned them.

2. Don't expect others to pay for your foolishness. If you spill hot coffee on yourself, be more careful next time. Don't sue the restaurant that served you or push for a law to regulate the temerature of coffee. And if you're on a jury, don't award people huge sums for being irresponsible.

3. If you coose to live in a hurricane zone, then buy insurance or take your chances. Don't expect the taxpayers of Minnesota to cover your losses.

4. Drop the communal mentality that aims to force one course of action on everyone, paid for by one cosmic bank account: the taxpayers'. Don't ask, "Should we go to Mars?" If you want to go, go - as a private venture and stake claim when you get there.

5. Don't meddle in others' affirs. Don't ask, "Should we ban this drug for arthritis because it has side effects?" Consult your doctor, not the government, and let others decide for themselves how severe their arthritis is and the risks they're willing to take. Other peoples' joints are none of your business.

6. Don't expect the government to look after your health. If you think certain foods will clog your arteries, then don't eat them. Don't call for a battalion of bureaucrats to control other people's blood vessels

7. Don't try to force your personal living standards on everyone by pushing for the government to ban harmless activities. If you don't approve of gambling on the Internet, then don't do it. Leave others alone if they choose to gamble and are causing you no injury.

8. Don't try to get a home for free. It's not free. Get a job and pay for it. Don't force others to pay a premium on their homes so that you can get yours at their expense. If you want affordable housing, then support the deregulation of the industry, which will lower prices for everyone.

9. If you default on a loan, accept the consequences, lick your wounds and avoid making the same mistakes again. Don't expect the government to bail you out with money fleeced from the taxpayers who made a more prudent lending and borrowing decision.

10. Don't try to get ahead by forcing people to give you special privileges. Your sex or race doesn't qualify you for a degree or a job. Only merit does.

11. Don't look for a risk-free life. There is no such thing. If you buy a malfunctioning toaster, return it for a refund. If it is truly harmful, seek redress in court. But don't unleash a squadron of inspectors to regulate every toaster on the planet, just to protect you from one defective cord.

12. Don't instigate laws to stifle your competitors or to give your business special governmental favors. If you can't win customers by offering them the best products and services in a free market, then close up your shop and get a job working for a competitor who can.

13. Don't force people to support your pet causes. They are entitled to use their money to support their own causes. Look for private funding - not government grants - to find a cure for a disease, to produce a play, or to preserve an old mansion. The government has no business giving you charity with money that it uncharitably seizes from other taxpayers.

14. Don't support laws to control your employers. They're covered by the Constitution, too. They have the right to decide whom to hire, what to pay, and how long a lunch break will be in the businesses they own. If you don't like the terms, go elsewhere - and work to loosen the regulatory noose around business's neck, so you'll find better job opportunitites.

15. Don't expect any guarantees in life. There are none. You can lose your job, your investments can fail and your fiance can leave you. You have the right to pursue happiness, but no one ensures you'll attain it. Stop trying to use the government to shield you from life's risks.

16. Stop shouting, "Tax the rick!" The rich are also citizens whose rights are protected by the Constitution. The rich have the right to pursue their own happiness, not yours; and they are entitled to the fruits of their labor, just as you are to yours. Instead of chipping away at the rights of the rich, redirect your engery to creating wealth and joining their ranks.

17. Don't campaign for the government to give you things for free. If it pays your medical bills, then it controls the treatment you'll get or wont get. There is no such thing as a free lunch, but there is such a thing as being swallowed by a shark.

18. In short, recognize that every person - not just you - has an absolute right to his own life, liberty, property and pursuit of happiness. Being a good citizen is like being a good neighbor: You live your life privately and you respect others' rights to do the same. You keep what you make, and they keep what they make. You don't force your opinions, causes, needs, or problems on your neighbors, and they don't force theirs on you.

To live in a free society, each person must embrace the responsiblity for his own life that comes with freedom. To defeat the creeping tyranny of the welfare state, we must rediscover the founding principle of America: the power, the moral rightness, and the glory of the individual as the master of his fate and the captain of his soul.

Big and Small

2007-12-27T12:01:00.000-08:00

(Delicatessen in a war-zone)

A month ago, the same day that my son came to the World a priest was saying a speech at the (catholic) church where we were invited to a relative's ceremony.
He was addressing dozens of innocent children around ten years old with these exact words: "...You all have to promise that you will never put yourself first, that you will always sacrifice for others because thinking first in yourself is the worst sin of all..."
Perhaps it was the reason why my son tried to born at the church itself, tired, bored or worse feared about so much stupidity
In any case he came at the right moment to save us from continue hearing the priest's discourse and hurry to the hospital

And I suddenly understood that long night observing through the huge windows of the hospital's room at the distant lights of the city, that this is a war-zone, that the priest's message was not ingenuous, that the enemy is still building trenches outside, still poisoning the people's minds, still trying to make everyone (including probably themselves) unhappy, guilty, lost, weak, disappointed, low self-esteemed, coward, and the list goes on...

I suddenly also realized that it was perhaps somehow pointless trying to discuss in this blog small details about Objectivism, subtle differences with the original Ayn Rand's thoughts or ARI's position about some minor subjects, when in reality there was a war outside those dark glasses, in every corner of the temporarily dormant city, at every school, at every TV show, home and work place, inside every mind. The oldest war in the World, the war of good against evil.
Would some "internal" discussion make weaker a philosophy? Would some argument about a tree make people losing the forest? Would some little difference allow the enemy to attack with more chances to win? I don't know.

But well... Anyway and finally it is surely not pointless the exercise of the mind, the desire of going beyond, the need of using the intelligence. So from now on I will just try to put in this blog my own thoughts about my experience as objectivist. A little success here, a poem, a little discovery there... You never know who can read, you never know who could some idea be useful to.

Politics: Capitalism

2007-10-08T13:18:00.000-07:00

("Give me liberty or give me death.")

In the following post I will analyze some concept/s of the essentials of the classical Objectivism as published in the ARI pages proposing expansions, complements and/or new thoughts about them.

Traditional Objectivism:

Politics
"The basic social principle of the Objectivist ethics is that no man has the right to seek values from others by means of physical force—i.e., no man or group has the right to initiate the use of physical force against others. Men have the right to use force only in self-defense and only against those who initiate its use. Men must deal with one another as traders, giving value for value, by free, mutual consent to mutual benefit. The only social system that bars physical force from human relationships is laissez-faire capitalism. Capitalism is a system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which the only function of the government is to protect individual rights, i.e., to protect men from those who initiate the use of physical force." Thus Objectivism rejects any form of collectivism, such as fascism or socialism. It also rejects the current "mixed economy" notion that the government should regulate the economy and redistribute wealth.

Expanding the concept:

As I said in my previous post I was born in a country with a "mixed" quite socialized economy and I am a product of its public education and health systems without which my middle-low class family probably couldn't have had the possibility to afford my education and proper grown up when I was a child...

If I unreservedly support the Ayn Rand's doctrine of a full laissez-faire capitalism, am I going against my own historical survival as living organism?
It is probably a question that I will never be able to answer in the same way that nobody knows if Ayn Rand would have been the same person if she wouldn't have been educated in the Leningrad State University of the disappeared USSR. And when I say "the same person" I mean the same rational mind and the same hate against the socialism which she was a product of, the same hate that latter in her life impulsed her mind toward individualism and finally created the conditions for the discovery of Objectivism.
Destiny exists: It is what already happened...

Needless to say that in the big picture I support capitalism as (until now) the only political system capable of fully defending individual rights, and the freedom to grow based of your own effort and intelligence

But there is a detail in which I have some doubts about a full totally unregulated laissez-faire capitalism: Children
Almost every book, essay and principles of Objectivism are addressed to "persons" to men, to a man or better "the" Man, you, I.
Did you note that in Ayn Rand's novels there are almost no children?

So my central question is: Are children really "persons" in the full philosophical sense of the word about what Objectivism speaks?
Are they free to choose? Are they capable of bearing total responsibility for their acts? Can they be left to their own effort?
In any case at which age?

From my very personal point of view a person doesn't born as a person, it takes a process to become a person
This is by the way the main reason why I am not against abortion: an unborn baby is not yet a person in the total sense of the word, he is a "promise" for a future person.
Anyway at some hard-to-define point between 10 and 20 years old a child become a man depending on his life's circumstances, it is a slow gradual process that takes years to happen, from the very moment of the birth until you are capable to face existence by your own.
In fact in most countries the law says that you are some kind of "property" of your parents until at least 15 years old or more.
In most modern western cultures by example you are nor free to choose even the color of your shoes until you are 8 or 10 or your religion until you are 12, nor your high-school, your ideas, or your bedroom until you are 14 or more, and your parents are responsible for your crimes in front of the law until you are 16 or 18.

So it is reasonable letting these "persons-to-be" only in the hands of their parents? Are potentially bright children "guilty" of the eventual low capacity, poor educational level, or laziness of their parents?
On the other side it is reasonable that parents are full "proprietors" of their children? That they decide all about them from type of education to diet? I don't know if it "reasonable" but it seems to be fair, since children are born only by their decision, their desire, their sole responsibility and right. And after the children are born and for several years parents are the only supporters of their lives with their own effort hope and sometimes sacrifices. So it seems parents have earned the right and freedom to decide over their children's future, but for sure in modern societies this freedom shouldn't be the same unlimited kind of freedom that people have to decide about any other of their properties, since children are potentially and progressively persons, men.

What can then do a capitalist system or government in order to balance this delicate equation? And first of all should the government do anything at all about this?
In my opinion yes: Government should find the way to guarantee to these persons-in-formation gradually the same individual rights that must guarantee to grown men, including the fundamental right of freedom and defense against unjustified aggression of others.
But what freedom could there be in modern societies without education? I have always associated very closely freedom with knowledge. So I deeply believe that government should encourage an facilitate (not guarantee by law) the access of children to knowledge and education that from my point of view is probably the best form to guarantee their future freedom, and the best bet in order to ensure the continuity of the free capitalist system itself over the centuries

I am sorry...

2007-09-27T17:36:00.000-07:00

(Apologize)

It is sad to suddenly discover that I was somewhat stupid most of my life.
Almos all my existence I was close to Objectivism in some basic vital attitudes and thoughts, specially those concerning to Metaphysics (Objective Reality) and Epistemology (Reason), but when it came to Ethics and Politics my mind was a strange mixture that I now regret and even when it could be quite worthless I have to confess my sin: I was more close to the "left wing" in most political and ethical points of view when I was young and even later. I have to say however in my defense that they were inherited ideas and concepts from my family and not from my own intellectual harvest, which doesn't necessarily redeem me from my responsibility anyway.

Over the time I questioned those ideas more and more and my points of view were gradually moving to a more realistic perspective, as long as I confronted myself with questions like: Why being rich "has" to be bad? Why socialist countries were falling one after other? Why the masses "have" to be always right? Where come the wealth from? How I would like to live? Who am I in reality and what I want as values?

So for all that I did and said wrong before, for al the ideas I repeated without deeper researching or getting more first-hand information, for all the people I despised and blamed, for all the thing I "thought" without really thinking: I apologize

But then some day, some time ago, it came to my hands a book from Ayn Rand (Thanks to my friend Daniel for this) and since then I finally found myself reflected in a coherent philosophy, my soul found a home.

But a question still arises inside me:
If I am now Objectivist, but I come from a family (and a country) very far from this philosophy, if I am a typical product of a "mixed" quite socialized economy and I have to be grateful to the public education and health systems of my country without which my middle-low class family probably couldn't have had the possibility to afford my education when I was a child...
What about totally laissez-faire capitalism as the ideal political system for a country? It would have been possible for "me" to exist in such a context? If I deny my roots and totally support Ayn Rand's thought in this particular matter (even when she herself said that it has not been yet fully implemented in any country) Would I be in contradiction with the basic principle of Objectivism that is defending my own personal survival as living organism? Including of course my mind?

I will analyze this in my next post about "Politics: Capitalism" the last remaining of the four basic principles of Objectivism stated by Rand "while standing on one foot"
Stay in tune! :-)

Ethics: Self-interest.

2007-09-21T07:06:00.000-07:00

("Man is an end in himself.")

In the following post I will analyze some concept/s of the essentials of the classical Objectivism as published in the ARI pages proposing expansions, complements and/or new thoughts about them.

Traditional Objectivism:

Ethics

"Reason is man's only proper judge of values and his only proper guide to action. The proper standard of ethics is: man's survival qua man—i.e., that which is required by man's nature for his survival as a rational being (not his momentary physical survival as a mindless brute). Rationality is man's basic virtue, and his three fundamental values are: reason, purpose, self-esteem. Man—every man—is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others; he must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; he must work for his rational self-interest, with the achievement of his own happiness as the highest moral purpose of his life." Thus Objectivism rejects any form of altruism—the claim that morality consists in living for others or for society.

Expanding the concept:

No doubt Rand's ideal of man is high and man's reason has the most value in the modern-western-civilized society of the 21th century (please see Nathaniel Branden's article "The Objectivist Ethics in an Information Age Economy" about this subject)
It always seems to me that Ayn Rand made her philosophy thinking in an ideal man living in an quite ideal society, as she said "How things ought to be"
But what happens when you grew & live in a place where these values are not so "valued" by society, where irrationality is the rule and not the exception, where it is not so easy to stand for your objectivistic principles? Or at least not that easy to follow the "rules" (1) derived from them?
Easy: you think more, you put your reason to work even harder to analyze much more carefully your choices in order to find the best possible way to live even when it is not so perfect as it "ought" to be
You try to live in a manner that allows you to reach a whiter degree of gray in a society where the gray context slowly tends to black everyday, if we take the metaphor used by Ayn Rand herself in her essay "The Cult of Moral Grayness" from the book "The Virtue of Selfishness"

My contribution in some practical advices:

1-How you defend your personal rights in a quite collectivized society barely floating in the midst between the chaos of the jungle law and some light forms of socialism, where the opinion and laws of the majority is far stronger than your right to live as you want and even to defend yourself from external aggressions?
By example:
You have no real right to self-defense because you are not allowed to have arms but the bad guys always manage to get one and kill you in any corner where the police never appear to protect you
Or angry groups of "poor" people cut the street protesting for some alleged injustice or claiming for undeserved privileges or money while you have to be always alert to turn back your car without any protest because they have the "right" to assault you if they want
The answer is simple:
Keep a low profile because your are basically outnumbered. And try to walk over the thin red line between legal an illegal if you need to, and look for some way to defend yourself because nobody will care of your dead body if you not.
Stay out of trouble specially if there is some camera of the news around because journalists will only try to make you the public bad story of the day, specially if you think in some way different from the masses.
Conlcussion: If the law is against your rights then try to stay as far from the law as you can

2-How do you participate in the global culture when your country lives near the stone age in technology, ideology and market strategies?
By example:
It is almost impossible to get even a decent internet connection, or products that are not consumed by the majority who are mostly advocates of the local low-quality goods and folklore and hate everything from central countries because they are "imperialists" and it is not possible to buy things from these countries because the borders and customs are closed in order to force you to buy only national bad products or nothing at all.
The answer is also simple:
Never give up in growing, in try to keep yourself in tune with the global pulse, the World is far bigger than your little town. You should always try first the "right" way, but when the society where you live doesn't allow you to do so, then feel free to try alternative options in order to learn new things, to enjoy the culture, to expand your mind. Nobody will refund your life if you waste them remaining an ignorant fool only for keeping irrational laws that you didn't made. It is risky (as everything worthy in life) but remember the example of Hank Rearden in "Atlas Shrugged" when he didn't have problems in evading the law when the law it self was illegal.
Conlcussion: Rationality is always the best option, and it become more essential in directly proportional form with the irrationality of the context

3-Keep your principles as your most valuable treasure but avoid falling into fanaticism or extreme dogmatism and most of all always try to be happy.
Ayn Rand's Objectivism is a goal, is the lighthouse in the night, is the horizon to head to, but never sacrifice your own happiness to follow her teachings so strictly that you get suffocated by your own desire of perfection, take the Objectivistic path step by step and eventually allow yourself a break, because otherwise you will end hating and dropping Objectivism as any other dogmatic religion that puts your freedom in a cage.
Objectivism is meant to be a lifelong commitment but because you like them, because it is good for you and helps you to enjoy better your life, and not because you have to comply with some sort of new "Objectivistic ten commandments" (Please see Nathaniel Branden's article "The Benefits and Hazards of the Philosophy of Ayn Rand" about this topic).
The driving idea behid this analysis is that practical application of philosophy to your real life has to be evaluated both in quality and quantity, and when you speak in the real World about "quantity" about measurement, it appears immediately the concept of "tolerance" which is the margin of error allowed according to your quality requirements.

Conlcussion: I think that even when Ayn Rand herself wouldn't have approved some part of your particular life or actions, I am sure that she would have approved an approach to her philosophy based on individuals as free, analytic protagonists of their own lives, and not "intellectual lambs" that follow another prophet. Because she was a free soul before anything else.
As she said: "Reality confronts man with a great many "musts," but all of them are conditional; the formula of realistic necessity is: "You must, if " and the "if" stands for man's choice...."

(1) There is a very interesting analysis of rules vs principles in the David Kelley's article published in the Atlas Society's site "Ruled -- Or Principled?" where I extracted the following concept:
"We do need objective standards. But objectivity requires principles, not rules. The choice is to be principled, acting on one's own understanding of reality, or to be ruled-by an explicit authority or by the cramped and encrusted dictates of tradition. For anyone who values his own life and his own autonomy, that's an easy choice."

Mr. Kelley

Haikus for the Objectivist Warrior - Part two

2007-09-20T07:50:00.000-07:00

(Poem)

A battle that can not be lost
is not a battle
A battle that can not be won
is a waste of time

If your wonder was suddenly lost
don't be too sad
You pay for participate in the game
not for winning it

Be ready to die today
Conflict is the engine of life
Change is the blood of the World

Ends give place to new beginnings
It is autumn
and a leaf falls from the tree

Never abandon your dreams
or they will abandon you too...
forever

The pleasure of being oneself

2007-09-14T17:09:00.000-07:00

(Selfishness as a virtue)

Nathaniel Branden was the "second in command" of Ayn Rand in the Objetivism of middle 20th Century. They were also friends and lovers for several years until they suddenly broke up in 1968.

Mr. Branden today

While still friends they published together a marvelous collection of articles under the name "The virtue of Selfishness" from where I extracted some interesting parts of the Branden's article "The Psychology of Pleasure" that I would like to comment here.

"Pleasure, for man, is not a luxury, but a profound psychological need. Pleasure (in the widest sense of the term) is a metaphysical concomitant of life, the reward and consequence of successful action—just as pain is the insignia of failure, destruction, death.
Through the state of enjoyment, man experiences the value of life, the sense that life is worth living, worth struggling to maintain. In order to live, man must act to achieve values. Pleasure or enjoyment is at once an emotional payment for successful action and an incentive to continue acting.
Further, because of the metaphysical meaning of pleasure to man, the state of enjoyment gives him a direct experience of his own efficacy, of his competence to deal with the facts of reality, to achieve his values, to live. Implicitly contained in the experience of pleasure is the feeling: “I am in control of my existence”—just as implicitly contained in the experience of pain is the feeling: “I am helpless.” As pleasure emotionally entails a sense of efficacy, so pain emotionally entails a sense of impotence.
Thus, in letting man experience, in his own person, the sense that life is a value and that he is a value, pleasure serves as the emotional fuel of man’s existence".

No doubt since those years Nathaniel Branden has become more and more one of the champions of self-esteem around the World and no doubt either he is right:
Self-esteem is a basic need for a solid and better man in any historical time, but since self-steem comes strongly from facing and overcoming challenges, it is more critical now when the opportunities for real challenges in modern western societies are quite diluted by the relative "safety" provided to individuals in almost every aspect of daily life.
In this matter there is still a question that probably only the far future will answer: Will be the man able to survive as species in despite of the weaknesses produced in the individuals (both bio-physically an psicho-mentally) due to their own evolution in societies that seem to provide every century more safety and less "real" challenges?
Where "real" means challenges where success would signify the possibility of continuity and descendancy and failure could signify the loss of life and extinction

To know more about the Branden's modern approach to self-steem I recommend his article "Our urgent need for self-steem" which you can download here (1)
Or visit this section of the Branden's site for more articles about this matter

Types of men according to Mr Branden:
(A humorous Hollywood-based little cartoon :-)

"One of the hallmarks of a man of self-esteem, who regards the universe as open to his effort, is the profound pleasure he experiences in the productive work of his mind; his enjoyment of life is fed by his unceasing concern to grow in knowledge and ability—to think, to achieve, to move forward, to meet new challenges and overcome them—to earn the pride of a constantly expanding efficacy."

Katsumoto in "The last samurai" seems to be a solid warrior and a man who takes risks for his ideas and lives the life as an adventure

"A different kind of soul is revealed by the man who, predominantly, takes pleasure in working only at the routine and familiar, who is inclined to enjoy working in a semi-daze, who sees happiness in freedom from challenge or struggle or effort: the soul of a man profoundly deficient inself-esteem, to whom the universe appears as unknowable and vaguely threatening, the man whose central motivating impulse is a longing for safety, not the safety that is won by efficacy, but the safety of a world in which efficacy is not demanded."

Sam Lowry in "Brazil" was a clerk that routinely go to work everyday in the same, small, gray office inside one of the huge control buildings of a totalitarian regime

"Still a different kind of soul is revealed by the man who finds it inconceivable that work—any form of work—can be enjoyable, who regards the effort of earning a living as a necessary evil, who dreams only of the pleasures that begin when the work day ends, the pleasure of drowning his brain in alcohol or television or billiards or women, the pleasure of not being conscious: the soul of a man with scarcely a shred of self-esteem, who never expected the universe to be comprehensible and takes his lethargic dread of it for granted, and whose only form of relief and only notion of enjoyment is the dim flicker of undemanding sensations."

Sergeant Garcia in "Zorro" only waits everyday to finish at work and drink a beer at the tavern to forget his sad and boring life

"Still another kind of soul is revealed by the man who takes pleasure, not in achievement, but in destruction, whose action is aimed, not at attaining efficacy, but at ruling those who have attained it: the soul of a man so abjectly lacking in self-value, and so overwhelmed by terror of existence, that his sole form of self-fulfillment is to unleash his resentment and hatred against those who do not share his state, those who are able to live—as if, by destroying the confident, the strong and the healthy, he could convert impotence into efficacy."

Oswald Cobblepot in "Batman Returns" is one of the more disgusting villains ever, who hates himself and everything in the World

Conclusions:

Self-steem is a value that is empowered by the virtue of pride.
It is possible to be the hero of your life, everyday can be an adventure, everyday can be enjoyed.
It is possible to live the life in a manner which you can be proud of yourself.
There is nothing more important than this if you want to be happy.

All quotations are from the article "The Psychology of Pleasure" by Nathaniel Branden published in the Ayn Rand's book "The Virtue of Selfishness" - I strongly recommend this book that you can buy at Amazom.com
Download here (1) the complete article in PDF format
(1) If any of these links offend any copyright please email me your complain and it will be cancelled

Something for nothing

2007-09-12T13:09:00.000-07:00

(Rush song)

To sweep the clouds away
Waiting for the rainbow's end
To cast its gold your way
Countless ways
You pass the days

Waiting for someone to call
And turn your world around
Looking for an answer
To the question you have found
Looking for
An open door

You don't get something for nothing
You can't have freedom for free
You won't get wise
With the sleep still in your eyes
No matter what your dreams might be

What you own is your own kingdom
What you do is your own glory
What you love is your own power
What you live is your own story
In your head is the answer
Let it guide you along
Let your heart be the anchor
And the beat of your own song

You don't get something for nothing
You can't have freedom for free
You won't get wise
With the sleep still in your eyes
No matter what your dreams might be

(Rush Website)

Epistemology: Reason

2007-09-11T16:19:00.000-07:00

("You can't eat your cake and have it, too." )

In the following post I will analyze some concept/s of the essentials of the classical Objectivism as published in the ARI pages proposing expansions, complements and/or new thoughts about them.

Traditional Objectivism:

Epistemology

"Man's reason is fully competent to know the facts of reality. Reason, the conceptual faculty, is the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man's senses. Reason is man's only means of acquiring knowledge." Thus Objectivism rejects mysticism (any acceptance of faith or feeling as a means of knowledge), and it rejects skepticism (the claim that certainty or knowledge is impossible)."

Expanding the concept:

No question the reason is man's only means of acquiring knowledge and to know the facts of reality
More: Man itself "is" reason, since what everyone of us are, what each one of us calls "I" reside nowhere else that inside our respective minds.
And when traditional Objectivism "...rejects mysticism..." it is expressly referring to any acceptance of faith or feeling as a means of knowledge.
But Gods exist, feelings exist, emotions exists, intuitions exists. Let's analyze them from an Objectivistic point of view and see where they come from and what they could be useful for.

My contribution:

1-Gods exist, we created them! As we created theater plays, mathematical equations, the Mona Lisa, or our reasons to love
And we own them a great debt: They served in the early past of the humanity to the first differentiation between matter and ideas, earth and sky, and ultimately as the first system for establishment and preservation through generations of the primitive ethical values that gave origin to civilization.
There is a God that I specially like: "The Sould of the World" that is the sum of all the thoughts, the work, the knowledge, the art, the effort, the wishes, the dreams, the beliefs, the books, the lives, etc. accumulated thought history by the Human Race since we were almost monkeys and someday we suddenly threw a bone to the sky...
This "God" is our heritage as specie and the "shoulder" each one of us stands on as individuals, in order to be able to grow further...

But most people use different Gods to avoid thinking, to avoid fear to death, or to justify their nonsense, their laziness, their lack of intelligence, their robbery to other people or even their massacre of other human beings.
So what can Gods be useful for an Objectivistic man, who usually doesn't believe in Gods in the same way other people do?
I like martial arts and some time ago I read an ancient Japanese book called "The Demon's Sermon on the Martial Arts" by Issai Chozanshi, where he differentiates in a man's attitude: "letting things to fate" from "letting things to Gods"
While "letting things to fate" is just letting happening whatever the "fate" has for us, without taking any responsibility in our destiny, without doing anything to change them, without using our mind to find a solution to our problems, "letting things to Gods" is the opposite attitude what means really doing our best effort in order to achieve the results we are looking for, using our intelligence, our creative work, playing our best cards on the table. But finally we have also to recognize that we are neither omnipotent nor omniscient, so the results are never guaranteed. "The rest is in God's hands" could be a good phrase to resume the concept, when used in the correct sense.

Everyone has their own Gods, whether they are inside churches or at home represented by their careers, the money, the family, friendship, success, culture, fame, people they admire, or the best motorcycle in town: Their beliefs, their values.

2-As for emotions, feelings and intuitions Ayn Rand herself in "The virtue of Selfishness" says:

"Emotions are the automatic results of man’s value judgments integrated by his subconscious; emotions are estimates of that which furthers man’s values or threatens them, that which is for him or against him—lightning calculators giving him the sum of his profit or loss"

It is quite clear that emotions, feelings and intuitions are very related between them inside our mind and they can be in daily life powerful friends to be used in our benefit or fearsome enemies that will turn against us if we can't manage or use them properly
Those three elements are no doubt product of certain processes inside our mind somewhere in the frontier between our conscious and subconscious, they have nothing of "divine", "occult" or "paranormal", and without entering in any profound psychological analysis, which I am not skilled enough for, we all can more or less testify that they appear quite suddenly triggered by some situation or stimuli and most of the times are not easy to control.

What can we do then? Just abandon ourselves to these apparently "irrational" (a hard word to swallow for an Objectivist) parts of us?
No. There is always something to do instead to just "let things to fate". These three elements: emotions, feelings and intuitions can be very powerful tools for us in certain situations where speed is required over the more deep and accurate but slower totally-conscious analysis (emergency situations or daily routines by example)
Can they be wrong? Of course, as anything inside ourselves, because they are nothing more than the product of our mind in last instance. The good news are that we can work on them, modify them if necessary even when they are produced in some physiological centers where we don't have total control with our consciousness.
How?
The human being comes to the World as "tabula rasa" and these three elements are somewhat automatic reactions related with the "software" we write in this tabula rasa during our lives, specifically they are very closely related with our values
So modifying our values, changing our deepest mind, is the only way to modify the "source" where our emotions, feelings and intuitions are based on.
I know our values strongly comes from our early childhood, our education, our life's experience, etc. but they are no immutable, they can be learned, changed, expanded, improved...
With effort you can be a better person than your are, closer to your dreams, closer to the ideal man you want to be.

Believe me it can be done. I did it. I was originally destined by birth to be a poor fool, unsuccessful, unhappy loser in my life, and I was, and it took 43 years of internal work, changes, learning, efforts and challenges to be a better person, but I am. And even when I could think that I somewhat lost almost 40 years of life, it would have been much worse never knowing a better way of life, never knowing myself, never being happy as I am now. More: I have the priceless proud of having won a hard game. The fun is on the road, the objectives are just the engine.
In the beginning it can seem to be an extremely difficult and even impossible task, it can take years, decades, but as long time passes the task gets easier due to practice and despite the results it is a good and rewarding way to live, because there will be always something new in the horizon.

Note:
You can finally ask why the Ying-Yang icon in the picture? The answer is that you don't have to be worried about the results of this sometimes enormous effort when they are not totally the ones you expected, this icon symbolizes the cycles in the flow of life: if you are not totally successful today, persist, endure, don't abandon. Because tomorrow the tide can be more in your favor or the internal work can finally give the desired fruit in some future, it is never in vain.
This icon also symbolizes the ethics, the black-and-white idea, the concept that for an Objectivist nothing "is the same", ideals are not meant to be gray. But as you can note there is a small circle of black in the white, (and vice-versa) meaning that finally nothing is perfect, so don't be over-exigent with yourself to the point of not enjoying the life, a little character's defect only demonstrates that the character in the whole is good, even when this defect should be marked for later improvement. An exception only proofs the rule, doesn't invalidate them. More: Complex systems with some little internal contradictions tend to be more stable than "perfect" ones, but this will be a subject for some future post...

Haikus for the Objectivistic Warrior

2007-09-11T11:25:00.000-07:00

(Poem)

Always follow your mind
that beats inside your chest
that flows through the veins of your World
nothing else

Never trust the collective
your neighbor, the police, the state, the law
When it comes to defend your life
you will probably be alone

Don't believe them, revenge is legitimate
nothing else will calm your pain
if someone took something of yours
Eye by eye, tooth by tooth

Train to defend yourself and
your loved ones
The cemeteries are full of good-hearted lambs
with altruistic intentions

My motorcycle roars softly under my legs
Rush sounds in my ears mixed with the wind
The road is the life
The life is the road

In the evening the sun goes down
green leafs say goodbye to the Winter
From the top of the pyramid
you quietly watch the entire World

Metaphysics: Objective reality

2007-09-06T05:59:00.000-07:00

("Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed" )

In the following post I will analyze some concept/s of the essentials of the classical Objectivism as published in the ARI pages proposing expansions, complements and/or new thoughts about them.

Traditional Objectivism:

Metaphysics
"Reality, the external world, exists independent of man's consciousness, independent of any observer's knowledge, beliefs, feelings, desires or fears. This means that A is A, that facts are facts, that things are what they are—and that the task of man's consciousness is to perceive reality, not to create or invent it." Thus Objectivism rejects any belief in the supernatural—and any claim that individuals or groups create their own reality.

Expanding the concept:

No question reality exists outside human perception: A is always A no matter some people's beliefs or how many people are not totally aware of this basic fact.
And when traditional Objectivism "...rejects ...any claim that individuals or groups create their own reality..." it is certainly referring to a positive reality for man living "qua man" (Because it is undeniable that some individuals or groups are in fact able to "create" diverse types of false or distorted realities in their minds)

My contribution:

1-The "real" reality, the things in their most profound an complete nature are never fully knowable.
Since we perceive them only with our wonderful but limited senses and minds we can only know a part (eventually a big part) of them.
We can easily test this affirmation by learning anything new about some thing around us: we know now more about that specific thing that we knew few seconds before and this process of deepening the knowledge about anything can be infinite. Also can be infinite the possibilities of evolution of our brain so in the same way that we perceive better and deeper the reality than a chimpanzee, the man in the future will certainly be able to perceive them better and deeper than us.
Of course concluding that we don't and we can't know anything at all is a huge mistake from lazy, nihilistic or skeptic minds, because we yes can know enough about almost anything to deal with them for any human purpose.
As a practical example we can know enough about a chair in order to handle them, move, use, reproduce, repair, change, etc. or whatever other purpose.
More: Any excess of knowledge about the chair, like the crystalline molecular structure of the nails, or the hardness coefficient of the wood are normally not useful for practical purposes, so they would only take a precious vital time to learn and a costly space in your brain's memory that could be used instead for more important things

2-From the previous point we can conclude a very important assertion:
We only know about the reality our own perception of them.
We always build inside our mind a mental model of the reality around us and every thing on them including ourselves. This is the reason because it is so important develop, refining and matching our mental models as close as possible with the objective reality, it is a matter of survival and success in the real World. Our consciousness, our reason, our intelligence, are definitely the best tools to do this.
The more complete, complex and accurate the mental model we construct of the reality, the more chances to be successful in daily life either for particular tasks or projects or for long term objectives like living a long happy existence for example.

3-If points 1 and 2 are true then we have a very powerful tool to change our World: Our own mind.
Either by wishing the change as the first primary step to then think the way and move forward to "do it", or using your mind to change itself.
This last option is specially critical in an essential matter which is the perception of ourselves inside the whole reality.
Who are you? (who do you think you are?) And perhaps even more important: Who do you want to be?
Can you really move the mountain that is obstructing the Sun with your current resources? Or it is easier to move yourself to be able to see the Sun?
In the same manner the easier way to change the World is changing the way you see and interpret them, it means changing, improving, expanding your mind in order to be able to achieve your values. Or even learning other values or changing yours when necessary, by example when they don't fit the reality or don't make you happy.
Because what makes everyone of us finally happy or unhappy is our perception and interpretation of the reality and not the reality itself

For me the ultimate challenge is being free to chase your dreams about yourself, becoming able to be the hero of your own movie: your existence.

Objectivism 2.0

2007-09-03T20:32:00.000-07:00

(Introduction)

I have to say first that I was quite much objectivist long time before knowing about Ayn Rand's Objectivism and her wonderful work.
Thus adopting this philosophy was for me more a return, a deepening and an affirmation than a discovery.
But despite this, reading each one of her books was a shocking, beautiful and exciting experience.

By the way perhaps you have noted that in the header of the blog about Ayn Rand and her philosophy I purposely used this word "...beautiful sense of life ever discovered..." it is because while reading "The Virtue of Selfishness" I suddenly realized that her philosophy the Objectivism was always there, in the common sense of our ultra-modern everyday life, or in the ancient savannah where the first tribes of Homo Erectus struggled to survive almost two millons years ago using the most powerful weapon ever created: their minds.

While reading any of the Ayn Rand's writings I constantly wonder why there were no other people capable of putting together all the Objectivism's truths as brilliantly as she did...
Perhaps the answer is that she suffered the oppression of the Russian's socialism and mysticism in her own flesh before escaping to USA, or perhaps this little, almost fragile woman, was more brave, intelligent and intellectually honest than virtually any man before.

While other philosophies are more close to "invents" (some of them really weird and even awful), Objectivism is a simple, enlightening magnificent discovery.

The modification in the color of the Atlas Shrugged's picture above symbolizes the evolution, the only constant: the change.
The Ying-Yang's border icon represents other concepts which I will talk later about, like the theory of conflict, the cycles of the processes, the importance of the frontiers, the exceptions and the rules, the quantity vs. quality in the philosophy and life, the tools of intuition, emotions and feelings, the Gods and religions, etc.
Those other concepts eventually complement, expand and enhance the original Ran'd vision of the Objectivism, without getting in contradiction with its basic principles.

This blog will be also eventually dedicated to talk about other Objectivism related experiences, art, etc. like the Canadian group of music Rush by example.

The roots

2007-09-03T14:01:00.000-07:00

(Objectivism basis while standing on one foot)

1- Metaphysics: Objective Reality.
("Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed"
or "Wishing won't make it so.")

2- Epistemology: Reason.
( "You can't eat your cake and have it, too." )

3- Ethics: Self-interest.
("Man is an end in himself.")

4- Politics: Capitalism.
("Give me liberty or give me death.")