Los Obliviados y Los OlvidadosQUOTE(Kurt M. Weber @ Mon 12th January 2009, 3:41pm)
QUOTE(maggot3 @ Sat 10th January 2009, 3:13pm)
I still find it absolutely unbelievable that people subscribe to Ayn Rand's abhorrent views, believe that that nonsense is applicable to real life,
Please show me a flaw in her logic or premises.
When I was just out of college, I had trouble diagnosing the flaw in Ayn Rand's notion of Objectivism. It occurred to me that having scientifically objective models of the world around us was a perfectly valid perspective.
It took me several decades to find the flaw.
When I was in college, my fraternity brothers criticized me for being "cocky". It was a word whose meaning was entirely unclear to me.
What they meant, of course, was that I came across as over-confident in my book-learning, a character trait they found annoying and off-putting. And I found their alienating attitude toward me inexplicably perplexing.
Part of the flaw in Ayn Rand's philosophy can be found in her failed relationship with Nathaniel Branden. Branden, being a psychologist and psychotherapist, was keenly aware of the kind of emotions that his clients routinely dealt with: anxiety, confusion, frustration, despair. His clients were anything
but cocksure of themselves. Therapists deal with problems of unfinished
Bildungsroman: their clients are very much a
work in progress, full of anxiety and self-doubt, endlessly questioning themselves and worrying about their undiagnosed, unanalyzed, and uncorrected shortcomings.
In his second book,
People of the Lie: The Hope For Healing Human Evil, M. Scott Peck recounted his difficulty dealing with young clients whose parents were more like Ayn Rand. He would treat the adolescent children whose parents were obliviously cocksure of themselves, whilst their children manifested the anxiety and self-doubt lacking in their parents.
If you want to glimpse an insight into the chasm between Nathaniel Branden and Ayn Rand, read M. Scott Peck's book.
What therapists like Branden and Peck sought to develop was
empathy — the ability to apprehend the affective emotional states of those who were
anything but cocksure, and become a conscientious and loving attendant to their journey of
Bildungsroman, their life journey of building their character.
The characters in Ayn Rand's novels appear, like Athena, fully formed from the head of Zeus, skipping over the years of development that educators and therapists attend. Contrast that with the Harry Potter character, whose seven-volume story is entirely one of
Bildungsroman, full of the drama of self-doubt.
A good scientist is not cocksure. A good scientist adopts a healthy attitude of skepticism, including a level of Socratic self-skepticism that enables a humble scientist to diagnose the subtle shortcomings of emerging theories (and derivative practices). A good scientist tries every imaginable way to
disprove all hypotheses before daring to imagine that any flight of fancy might be an objectively accurate model of the world around us.
This is the recurring flaw of the Randian character — adopting delusional beliefs (haphazard flights of fancy) and arrogantly acting on them without engaging in the rigorous scientific and Socratic process of conscientious self-examination. On Wikipedia, we often see this error when Admins form haphazard
theories of mind regarding other editors, and then arrogantly act on those unexamined flights of fancy as if they were the objective truth handed down by Yahweh on stone tablets.
Were a Randian Objectivist to become more like an authentic scientist, he or she would become more like Nathaniel Branden, M. Scott Peck, Seymour Papert, or Sherry Turkle, immersed in the subtle sociological and psychological aspects of cognition, affect, and learning.
It is easy for a young Objectivist to naively overlook the role of emotions in learning and personal growth. In one week, I'll be 64 years old. It's taken me the last quarter century to begin to understand the subtle interplay of cognition, affect, and learning. It's an overlooked subject you won't find explored in Randian Objectivism.