Indulging a whim is not a self-loving act, it is carving a permanent scar into your self-image – an ineradicable mental wound that your memory will recall to your conscious attention again and again, for the rest of your life. To call anything like this a manifestation of egoism is a hideous – and obvious – philosophical error.Photo by: Fibonacci Blue
But as with gay marriage, virtually all libertarians and Objectivists are on the wrong side of this issue. They insist that both are somehow context-free political matters, conveniently ignoring their own putatively-steadfast claims that individualism is the politics of egoism. That might not even matter, though, since their conceptions of egoism are so stunted and crippled as to be little more than laboriously reified whims. Accordingly, their defenses of these and other modern atrocities turn on utilitarian claims (just like the Supreme Court!), putting them squarely on the Marxist side in virtually every pubic debate.
The problem, thoroughly explicated in Man Alive, is that your rational self-interest consists of the rational interests of your self for your whole life – not just your appetites right now. Indulging a whim is not a self-loving act, it is carving a permanent scar into your self-image – an ineradicable mental wound that your memory will recall to your conscious attention again and again, for the rest of your life. To call anything like this a manifestation of egoism is a hideous – and obvious – philosophical error.
Here’s how to fix that error in your thinking, if you’d rather be right than suffer this life-long agony:
Why are so many allegedly liberty-loving ideologues in bed with Marxists on hot-button social issues? Ask them. They’re utilitarians regardless of the undefended claims they make about egoism. And because they are utilitarians, they are consistent, reliable useful-idiot Marxists in every controversy that matters.
If you want to do better going forward, I can show you how.
