The War Between the Implicit and the Explicit

The Intellectual Activist ^ | November 2, 2010 | by Robert Tracinski

[Gomer1066]

In the first five parts of this series, and particularly in Part 5, I presented a new theory of history and the role of philosophical ideas in history. This article presents the theory behind that theory, discussing the deeper epistemological issues that are raised by the rest of the series.

To begin, let me briefly summarize the essence of my theory. I have argued that the standard Objectivist theory—the view that a culture is changed by explicit philosophical ideas propagating downward from the ivory tower to the specialized sciences, to art, to the man on the street—is incomplete. This "top-down" propagation of ideas does exist, it is important, and it has often been described well in existing Objectivist literature. But it does not explain everything—and more to the point, it cannot explain "what went right" in certain crucial respects in recent decades.

To do that, we need to understand the spread of ideas from the bottom up. By that, I mean two phenomena. First, there is the discovery of valid ideas in science, economics, politics, architecture, and so on. Discoveries in free-market economics, for example, capture real truths about human nature, about the nature of the world, about the role of man's mind in sustaining his life. I cited, as one example, Julian Simon's famous formulation that the individual mind is the "ultimate resource"—a counterpart, expressed in terms of economics and demographics, to Ayn Rand's philosophical identification of the rational mind as the source of all values.

[Gomer1066]

Excellent political philosophy by an expert that puts an intellectual nuclear bomb in the hands of the Tea Party.

[Ronbo1948]

A hard read for this cowboy but well worth the effort.

I think Objectivism, the system of philosophy created by the late great Ayn Rand, is the big gun to take on Marxism so loved by Obama and the Democrat Party.