SelfAdoration.com

To whom must the Ayn Rand Institute respond?

The people who murdered their own children and destroyed their still-born families on its bad advice.

Here are the egregious moral and philosophical errors Yaron Brook and the Ayn Rand Institute must answer for at once:

1. Ayn Rand’s pro-abortion argument is anti-objective reality, openly at war with uncontested facts of reality.

2. Ayn Rand’s position on abortion is anti-morality, the ethics of a hit-’n’-run ‘accident’.

3. By championing abortion Ayn Rand encourages deliberate, avoidable life-long self-destruction for her followers.

4. Ayn Rand’s support for abortion is incompatible with her putative egoism, rendering all human relationships temporary and fungible.

5. Ayn Rand’s advocacy of abortion is fundamentally anti-future; people do not invest in the prospects of entities they identify as vermin.

6. Ayn Rand campaigned for abortion using arguments functionally identical to Marxist claims, and her pro-abortion fanaticism is of a piece with the ongoing global Marxist genocide. Rand’s genocide is different from Marx’s, though: Marx’s minions claim they want to kill people they say are the worst. Ayn Rand methodically set about to kill children she knew to be among the very best specimens of humanity.

7. Yaron Brook and the Ayn Rand Institute have to answer to the victims of their indefensible sanction of abortion. On the atrocious advice of Ayn Rand and her minions, tens of thousands of young people murdered their own children, introduced ineradicable scars to their life-long self-image and bound their range of vision to the temporary, the fungible, the impermanent and ultimately, inevitably, unworthy. The Ayn Rand Institute takes children full of the hope for a fulfilled life and turns them into bitter, sclerotic, fatalistic misanthropes, destroying their promise while robbing them and the world of the promise of their offspring.

Ayn Rand quite literally destroyed her philosophical movement with abortion – but she destroyed so much more in her zeal for intrauterine infanticide. Yaron Brook and the Ayn Rand Institute must answer for all of this.

And that’s church:

January 9, 1994

I know I’m a bad friend, and that’s why I don’t let myself have friends.

It was in college that I started really working. I had always been busy, but it was in college that my work came to dominate my life. For those years I worked a hundred or more hours a week, sleeping every other day, sometimes every third day.

And in those years I had a recurring nightmare about the way my life was bent by work. In the dream, a stray cat would adopt me, and I would let it. It would live in my apartment and I would feed it and look after it. And then one day I would come home after having been gone, distracted by work for days on end, and I would find the cat dead in a open drawer, starved to death.

I knew exactly what the dream meant, and I began to be scrupulous in a ham-handed kind of way about the limits of my involvement, attachment, commitment. It was brutal and arrogant and very naive, but I felt I had to make it plain that when push came to shove, there was no one I would not push and shove out of my way. I knew I could not be depended on as a friend, so I was careful to permit no one to think I could.

And I worked unendingly for years, just like that. And I met and fell in love with and married my wife, and agreed to have children, and managed to handle it all very well – in my opinion. My wife’s opinion was somewhat at variance, and it took me quite some time to realize that what I thought of as major concessions to her needs were practically invisible to her. But to the extent that I have been successful at having people in my life, it’s been as a result of incorporating them into my objectives, rather than turning away, even temporarily, (more…)

Start here: I’m not trying to piss you off. If you don’t want to read what I have to say, don’t. There are scads of essays on this site, many recent and eye-opening, others older but canonical. You can find what you want here – or you can seek elsewhere. You have no reason to endure something you don’t want to read. You don’t have to, and I don’t want you to.

Now then:

This is funny: I live in a state of fairly continuous delight. It’s not always the case, but I would paint my state of mind most of the time – and especially when I’m working at something I love – as exuberance. It can be hugely external, and I know I sometimes wear my wife out when I’m playing with ideas out loud. But it can also be almost searingly apollonian – as here, as it happens – and I can sustain a kind of frenzied concentration for hours on end.

Why is that funny – to me, at least? Because it’s just excellent comedy, the radical juxtaposition of two opposites – the expectation that I simply must be angry or dour or cynical and the actual experience of being, for me and for people who spend time with me. I am having fun – deeply satisfying fun – almost all of the time. So much so that I don’t even think about it, except when I consciously direct myself to think about it. And that, thinking about the way my mind functions, is a delight for me just by itself.

Delight, exuberance, searing concentration – these are Mothertongue ideas, and this is the job that art does for us: Poets and painters and playwrights and novelists use abstractions in ways that induce us to see not mere words or images but the essence of being (more…)

The ass-backwardness of every moral philosophy but mine is easy to explain: Every error emerges from the anti-factual claim that human behavior can be controlled from the outside with the right external imperatives. Refusing to acknowledge that human consciousness is exclusively local to the individual human being and cannot be “governed” from the outside is the error undergirding every other error.

I talked about this at church yesterday, and I expect there is no other church this exacting about moral philosophy. Witness:

I cited the seven rules of The Church of Splendor, which is simply my list of intellectual rules of thumb for sustaining a joyously admirable exuberant indomitability. Who knows? They might-could work for you, too. These are they:

1. I don’t go to your church.
2. I am not arguing with you.
3. Don’t be an asshole.
4. Butthurt is not contagious.
5. Never play the other man’s game.
6. Keep your own counsel.
7. Look out for your own.

And I mentioned The Gods of the Copybook Headings by Rudyard Kipling, which is presented herewith to lend some class to this joint:

The Gods of the Copybook Headings

by Rudyard Kipling

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was (more…)

Ayn Rand’s moral philosophy is allegedly egoism. I say allegedly because it seems less egoistic to me than it is anti-collectivist – and only then if we ignore the craven utilitarianism Rand used to “defend” her adultery and her stand on abortion.

That much doesn’t matter. I invented egoism as a (no pun intended) self-consistent moral philosophy, and so it falls to me to explain why abortion – intrauterine infanticide – is, alike unto every other kind of murder, necessarily anti-egoistic.

This is not difficult, at least not for me. For one very big thing, being instrumentally involved in an abortion is enduringly damaging to the lifelong self-image of the actor:

[H]aving an abortion, performing one, encouraging one or paying for it are all morally-reprehensible acts. They cannot advance or enhance your own self-adoration, and, necessarily, they must retard and diminish your self-love, in the immediate moment and enduringly thereafter. It is not even necessary to look for real-life evidence of this argument, but, of course, that evidence abounds.

Do you want to dispute this? If one abortion enhances your self-love a little, will six abortions cause you to love your self a whole lot more? How about strangling kittens? Whether you like it or not, seeing your self committing atrocities is abhorrent to your mind, and no amount of rationalizing self-destructive behavior will turn vices into virtues.

You could argue that abortion or exposure can be exigently necessary — as, for instance, in extreme emergencies or when your family is already starving to death. But even then, the action cannot make you love your self more and must make you love your self less. Again, existentially, in real life, there are no counter-examples. Too much the contrary.

Worse, the Ayn Rand Institute-sanctioned cult of abortionism robs the human race of its humanity itself:

A pregnancy, expected or not, makes you take the long view. Choices that once seemed (more…)

Answer: Anytime some dumbass pretend-philosopher maunders about unreality.

 
PS: From Man Alive:

The universe is internally self-consistent. This is what we mean when we say it “makes sense” – the laws of nature are comprehensible to us because they are all consistent with each other, all superficially differentiated manifestations of the law of identity. This is actually a matter of controversy right now in theoretical physics, where the self-consistency of the universe and humanity’s seemingly uncanny adaptation to it are held to be evidence – in the mother of all We-Now-Know-We-Know-Nothing theories – that there is not merely one universe, but, the physicists claim, as many as ten to the five-hundredth power universes.

I am not making this up. I’m inclined to think that there can be only one everything-that-exists, and that, where the math does not conform to the observed evidence – where the map does not correspond to the territory – it is probably not the evidence that is incorrect. And doubt you nothing, the theologians are dancing in the streets: No longer are they the only madmen insisting that the cosmos consists of the products of their fevered imaginations. They get to play the Even-Physicists-Agree card over and over again, to the detriment of clear thinking everywhere.

But even stipulating the physicists’ claims, in the massively redundant cosmos prescribed by these theories there will be at least ten to the five-hundredth power instantiations of William of Ockham around to demonstrate the awesome detergent power of the law of parsimony. It can’t make black swans white again, but there is nothing like it for day-to-day clean-up of those nasty intellectual messes.

Academics don’t like to be mocked, and contrary to all appearances, they are not actually trying to invite derision. But when they insist that everything is really nothing or that science proves that science proves nothing or that the one tiny piece of existence that one of them studies is actually everything-and-then-some, just about anything they say is going to sound absurd. That’s a (more…)

What, according to Business Insider, are the the 13 things mentally-strong people don’t do?

It turns out that they don’t show up for work as Incandescent, Sociable or Cautious people.

Read the list. Mentally-strong people are Driven people. Every item on BI’s list is a characteristic habitually exhibited by the Driven, rarely by anyone else. Even more exclusively, habit number six, “They don’t fear taking calculated risks,” marks the mentally-strong as Dc’s – Driven/Cautious personalities. How can I tell this is so? Ds’s are much less interested in calculating risks – and then they will tend to evaluate choices according to their emotional and social costs and benefits. Di’s like me will take just about any risk, provided it promises pyrotechnic results.

And everyone else? Not so mentally-strong, per the article.

This is cargo-cult journalism, of course: What else is wrong with you, and how can you fake what you think you’re missing out on, thus to make yourself feel even more inadequate?

Here’s the way the world works: You are what you are, and you won’t become a Driven personality by wishing you were one, by pretending to be one or by hating yourself for not being one. You can attempt to adopt more-Driven habits, and this can help to increase your Driven characteristics over time. But chances are, if you are Cautious, Sociable or Incandescent, you will never know the fearless confidence of the Driven. Why? Because failure matters to you – as evidenced by your worry about what traits you lack.

Most mass-market business books are written by Driven people for Driven people. The authors don’t know that. They think the rules of life they pioneer – because they don’t trust any eyes but their own – are universal laws of nature, where in fact they are simply useful rules-of-thumb for other Driven people – who typically will not read them. The buyers of these books will be Incandescent, Sociable or Cautious people, and they will learn less of value than they will gain in pain, since – not being Driven by pre-disposition – they won’t be able (more…)

James Taggart’s first words in Atlas Shrugged are, “Don’t bother me! Don’t bother me! Don’t bother me!” That’s a nice intro, because that’s how an Incandescent/Cautious temperament responds to a crisis. The various crisis responses in Ayn Rand’s epic novel must by now seem hauntingly familiar to the lower-down denizens of the Ayn Rand Institute – as they watch them being played out, with horrifying similarity, in real life.

They should show some compassion. Imagine how it must hurt the ARI big-brains to reflect upon Ayn Rand’s admonitions about evasion:

Dropping below the level of a savage, who believes that the magic words he utters have the power to alter reality, they believe that reality can be altered by the power of the words they do not utter – and their magic tool is the blank-out, the pretense that nothing can come into existence past the voodoo of their refusal to identify it.

I kid you nothing: It really says that. Lots more, too, and great stuff. No one could bitch about vice like Ayn Rand.

But still: The worm must turn. The longer the Ayn Rand Institute evades the Planned Parenthood abortion scandals, the more pellucidly obvious it becomes that they have nothing to say, that Ayn Rand’s argument for abortion is hideously anegoistic because it is anti-reality and that by championing abortion for the past fifty years, the Ayn Rand Institute is complicit in an unconscionable evil.

But they can’t say that, because that would be the truth.

And they can’t actually uphold Ayn Rand’s childish utilitarian argument for abortion because then they would have to acknowledge that they’ve known all along that abortion is self-destructive.

What the Ayn Rand Institute needs – pronto! – is a non-denial denial. They need to acknowledge the gruesome videos and abhor some side-issue aspect of the story, all while evading their own complicity in the charnel house entirely. Call it evasion by seeming-non-evasion – an install-it-yourself woolen eye-shade.

Planned Parenthood is pulling exactly the same ploy when it beefs that the videos are selectively edited. They’re not (more…)

This has been a good week for me. Vide:

• The more I pick at the Ayn Rand Institute, the more I find to pick at.
   
• I summarized my empathy-based reinterpretation of the DISC Assessment.
   
• I worked my way all the way through a thorough-going atheist refutation of every pro-infanticide argument; I’ve shown pieces of it here, but I can deal, I think unassailably, with every claim.
   
• And I came up with a brand new anarchy game that, where implemented, will substantially discount incentives to violence, putting a premium on peaceful dispute resolution.

The game – which I’m calling Batman’s Bluff, at least for now – is dread simple: If you’re a hothead who insists that your neighbors need to do something about some annoyance, we will back you – but only if you go unarmed. You’ll be more apt to be peaceful that way, and if there is blood to be shed, yours will be shed first.

The point is to engineer peace, instead of always trying to find ways to palliate the consequences of conflict. If you can live and let live, you’re my kind of people. If you can’t, I want to help you help yourself pursue better opportunities in the lives beyond this one – if any such there be. At a minimum, I want you far away from my life and my values – and there’s more than one way to eighty-six a creep.

Yes, it’s anarchy at The Church of Splendor. My admonition: Make peace, not trouble.

This week I find myself serially coming back to The Dutch Uncle Game, which I talked about last fall. The game itself is fascinating to me, and of course I’ve been playing it in my own way for all of my life. But the ideas I discussed when I invented the formal version of the game keep coming back to me: The notion of being a Dutch Uncle itself, along with the attendant moral leadership. The idea that butthurt is not contagious, the fourth rule of The Church of Splendor. The DISC elaborations I discussed this morning. And the Ayn Rand Institute, amazingly enough, since I talk about them in the video, too – specifically about Don Watkins, who was gracious enough this week to show me where his shoe pinches.

The DISC of Ayn Rand is interesting just by itself. She was a Ci rhapsodizing Dc’s. She tended to kill the Di’s, like Gail Wynand, and any Sociable she ever wrote about was either miserable in life (Steven Mallory) or dead by the end of the book (Cheryl Brooks Taggart, Eddie Willers). She crucified the Incandescents – mirthfully but never mercifully. Her post-Atlas Shrugged life was a Cautious tyranny composed of everyone who hadn’t abandoned her yet, with a tight cadre of mostly (brutally brow-beaten) Sociables hanging in with her to the bitter end – expressing a storgic love for her that she seems never to have expressed for anyone.

Leonard Peikoff, Ayn Rand’s intellectual error, is a Ci, maybe, but it’s hard to tell, taking account that he’s lived a lie – affecting to be whatever it was Rand demanded that he be, rather than his own man – for his entire adult life. The Ayn Rand Institute is run as a Cautious tyranny to this very day. That’s how I knew how they would react to the Planned Parenthood videos. The Cautious are too overwhelmed to be of any use in an emergency, so I knew they would be deer-in-the-headlights panicked. There hasn’t been a solid bowel movement at ARI headquarters in two weeks, and their (more…)

I talk about DISC all the time, but if you don’t already know what I’m talking about, I may be leaving you lost. I can link to Wikipedia’s DISC Assessment page, but that’s truly inadequate for my purposes.

Why? Because I’m talking about my own reinterpretation of DISC based on the underlying mammalian and reptilian empathy strategies people deploy when making choices. I worked these out when I was writing Nine empathies and Shyly’s delight, but I’ve only glossed those ideas here. That changes today, not alone because I want this post to link back to from future DISCussions.

So: Start here: DISC is a quick ’n’ dirty personality profiling system for understanding how an individual person will tend to make choices. It is distinguished from the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which can help you understand how individuals think.

My opinion is that you should be DISC profiling the people in your life all the time. They are different from you, and if you are not constantly reminding yourself of those differences, you will become progressively more disappointed with their persistent failure to be you. The reason for that is an idea I call dyspossibility – and we’ll get to that.

These are the DISC personality types, denoted with three different sets of appellations:

I’ve used a lot of different words for the DISC types over the years, but the terms I like best are the ones I came up with for Shyly’s delight: Driven, Incandescent, Sociable, Cautious. Those terms offer us a way of understanding a person’s personality from his own point of view – from the perspective of his over-arching value-pursuing motivation, which we can see here:

Driven people yearn to get things done, and this makes them socially dominant. The guy who claps his hands together hard and says, “C’mon! Let’s do this!” is the Driven member of your social group. Driven people are natural leaders, the only kind of bosses people will tolerate without resentment.

The Incandescent craves attention. They are typically very well turned out, every hair in place, and they are often found (more…)

Writer David McGowan is the author of an enchanting conspiracy theory: Was the Laurel Canyon music scene of the late ’60s and early ’70s a sophisticated intelligence operation devised to defuse the anti-Vietnam-War movement?

As with all conspiracy theories, a willingness to suspend disbelief is the price of entry, but McGowan has this going for his theory: If he’s right, it worked. Before Laurel Canyon – before The Mamas and The Papas, CSN, the Byrds – the kids were radicalized. Afterwards, they were mellow, content to tune in, turn on and drop out.

I don’t subscribe to McGowan’s conjectures, but they’re fascinating, especially the huge number of connections he is able to make to the military intelligence apparatus: If you wanted to make it as a rock star in folk/country-rock L.A., a dad high up in the spy business turned out to be a big career boost.

I’ve been thinking in a McGowanly way about the libertarian agenda since last summer, when I realized that Stefan Molyneux’s anti-family stance was fundamentally at odds with the growth of his internet cult. I think Molyneux is engaged in a frenzied obsession to commit mass-parricide-by-proxy – I think he is killing his own parents over and over again in pantomime – but anti-familialism pervades libertarian philosophy.

That’s a problem. Why? Because philosophical movements grow by families. The initial growth comes from converts, obviously, but the long-term growth, from a fringe group to an established cultural force, comes about when children who were raised in the movement’s doctrine raise their own children in it. Two converts become seven adherents become twenty-five champions in just two generations. Add in on-going evangelism and you’ve got a growth machine that just won’t quit.

Libertarianism doesn’t have that. It is evangelical, if obnoxiously so, but it is all-but-adamantly anti-family, with the anti-family agenda being pushed relentlessly by theorists like Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard and gadflies like Molyneux. This is bad for people who subscribe to their ideas, since the family is the sine qua non building block of human civilization, the last redoubt against the (more…)

Piers Morgan: ‘My highest moral virtue is my ferocious animal savagery.’

With emphasis: Rhapsodizing violence is evil. It is even more self-destructive if, like Morgan, you know your homicidal rage is entirely affected. Batman is insane, but Walter Mitty is self-annihilating.

My take:

The paths to error are infinite, but two landmarks I have learned to rely on, in listening to people trying to justify their evil actions, are the logical fallacies Tu Quoque and Two Wrongs Make A Right. Tu Quoque is Latin. It means, “You do it, too.” When you catch your teenager swiping a beer, the pre-fabricated rationale will surely be, “Well, you drink, why can’t I?!?” And you were probably very young when you first heard some little proto-brute justifying his vengeance by bellowing, “Well, he hit me first!” – ergo, two wrongs make a right. You should probably be on your guard against any statement that starts with a “well” and ends with an exclamation point. That particular verbal construction seems to fit very comfortably in the mouths of liars and thugs. But when you hear those two logical fallacies being deployed in tandem, what you are hearing, almost certainly, is a cunningly-crafted rationalization of an abominable injustice.

I’ve known Don Watkins net.wise for 15 years or so, and I met him in real life last Fall in Tampa. I comped him a copy of Father’s Day – because the last thing the world needs is more divorced parents. I’m not surprised to see he’s blocked me. Blood makes noise, after all, and cognitive dissonance craves nothing more than silence.

Remember The Affectionate Display, Don.

I know why.
I can help.
I repay effort.
I grow regardless.

Ave atque vale, brother. Your integrity is neither dead nor unmourned.