Posted on 08/28/2010 7:06:10 PM PDT by Mojave
This past spring, the Financial Industry Inquiry Commission held hearings on the world's recent financial crisis. The star witness was Alan Greenspan. The Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan translated Greenspan's typically elusive testimony this way: "I didn't do anything wrong, and neither did Ayn Rand by the way, but next time you might try more regulation."
There were obviously many reasons for the Great Recession. But I believe Noonan got to the root of one particular evil.
Fortune magazine once labeled Greenspan "America's most famous libertarian, an Ayn Rand acolyte." (While Rand formally rejected libertarianism, libertarians nonetheless admire her.) But today, both libertarians and Randians are disassociating themselves from Greenspan as quickly as Wall Street.
I don't want to get into a debate with the good people who are Objectivists on this site...politically we are allies...but it always makes me chuckle when they say guilt or fear have no place in human affairs...or to use these twins of coercion is somehow evil...have they never been in the military or raised kids !! Hell, without using guilt and fear against my three boys when they were growing up my household would have desended into anarchy!!! :))
And lets not even think about about what an army would be reduced to without these two little tools of every DI since history began !!
Oh thank you!!!
That’s a great resource!
Anything ending with -ism has its basis in its Ultimate Form: Utopianism. That place where all their theories work. Too bad it doesn’t exist. The rest of us have to deal with such trivialities as history and human nature.
Ism has been the deadliest suffix in the world.
You think "The Golden Rule" is narcissistic? What planet are you from?!
Greenspan wrote an articulate defense of the gold standard. I don’t think there’s any evidence that he pushed to restore the gold standard in the U.S. and many have commented that someone with such beliefs would end up being central banker to the largest economy on the planet. A return to the gold standard and floating exchange rates would obviate the need for a central banker.
What a sublime state of denial you've achieved.
You don't think that Ted Bundy's murder for pleasure would constitute the mindless self-indulgence, that Ayn Rand rejects in this quote?
That is not the Golden Rule - nor is the practice of “Objectivism” remotely Christian.
I can’t bring myself to read any more Christian whining about Ayn Rand. I’ve lost the stomach for it.
History proves, from the growth of Rome to the birth of the United States, that the key requirement for any such endeaver is for men to adhere to a duty above and beyond their pursuit of personal happiness or even their lives. How else to understand and explain what it was that motivated our ancestors to die at Valley Forge or Guadalcanal than a sense of duty and sacrifice. How else to understand and explain what our forefathers did when they came here with nothing except the belief that their sacrifice would make for a better life for their children
Even Aristotle said that true happiness is gained by making the correct moral choices throughout one's life.But the conundrum lies in that making the correct moral choices sometimes entails the sacrifice of what you think will make you happy or even your life. Because in the end happiness cannot be pursued for itself. It will always lead to selfishness and seperation from others. True happiness can only be the end result of doing something else. Like sacrificing for a great cause. Or doing your duty to your children or your parents or your country.
The reason Ayn Rand never had children and was unfaithful to her husband is instructive. She lived her philosophy. In the end she was not a builder, she was a consumer. She consumed the seed corn better men than she had produced. How ironic.
The fool that wrote this never read Atlas Shrugged.
Exactly. It was clear enough to me her beef with "morality" was entirely with the subset "charity" and the premise that it it should be dictated by government.
As has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread, lots of folks use her personal conduct and views on religion as a reason to dismiss her political and economic philosophy, without really understanding the separateness of the issues.
If anything, the fault with her political & economic philosophy was just a small matter of degree. The economic system here was intended to be laissez-faire, but never purely so, and our political system of separated powers was supposed to be the force that kept things in balance. I'm not sure she completely understood the founding principles of the United States and the central government's constitutional powers, and the dissection of history that went into their construction, and I attribute her absolutist view to that lack of understanding. But that is neither a reason to throw out the whole thing.
Were you in the French Foreign Legion?
My sense of duty does not exist because you think it should be what makes me happy. The child in me screams that you can't tell me what to do! I make a tacit agreement with my fellow man to adhere to the guidelines of moral and civil society only from my own enlightened self-interest.
I am a moral person because that is the best way to coexist with others and I logically expect only the same from them. No Saint or Potentate will coerce me into duty and sacrifice without justification.
You speak of finding happiness through a sense of duty and sacrifice to its own sake. The Gladiators of Rome through a sense of duty and sacrifice were coerced into giving their lives only to serve evil.
I have lived and will live an upright life according to God's plan and only expect happiness to follow as it will. True happiness can only be the end result of living a correct life and hopefully finding a wonderful wife's smile, or the sweetest dog in the world laying his muzzle in you lap when you least expect it, or driving down the highway and seeing a sea of Irises growing wild around an abandoned and crumbling chimney.
Duty alone means nothing without the enlightened self-interest that makes that duty worth doing.
Lets take the same statement and put it back into context as written.
Do you ask what moral obligation I owe to my fellow men? None—except the obligation I owe to myself, to material objects and to all of existence: rationality. I deal with men as my nature and theirs demands: by means of reason. I seek or desire nothing from them except such relations as they care to enter of their own voluntary choice. It is only with their mind that I can deal and only for my own self-interest, when they see that my interest coincides with theirs. When they don’t, I enter no relationship; I let dissenters go their way and I do not swerve from mine. I win by means of nothing but logic and I surrender to nothing but logic. I do not surrender my reason or deal with men who surrender theirs.
She says, "I seek or desire nothing from them except such relations as they care to enter of their own voluntary choice."
In other words, she does unto others only that which she would expect from them. That is pretty straight isn't it?
Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You - Matthew 7:12I never said or implied that the practice of “Objectivism” was even remotely Christian. I do say that “Objectivism” is very moral in the most reasoned way.
I read up to page 4. The writer completely misunderstands Rand and Atlas Shrugged. For example, he seems to believe her heroes would be the people who drove us into an economic crisis. Not so. They were the bad guys in her book.
The writer also seems to believe Greenspan drove us into collapse by employing the philosophy Rand preached. Where did Rand say the Feds should meddle with the economy?
The article is way off-base.
History proves, from the growth of Rome to the birth of the United States, that the key requirement for any such endeavor is for men to adhere to a duty above and beyond their pursuit of personal happiness or even their lives. How else to understand and explain what it was that motivated our ancestors to die at Valley Forge or Guadalcanal than a sense of duty and sacrifice. How else to understand and explain what our forefathers did when they came here with nothing except the belief that their sacrifice would make for a better life for their children
As hard as you try you still cannot come up with a satisfactory explanation for why some men were and are willing to give up there lives for their country. The best you can do is this:
Duty alone means nothing without the enlightened self-interest that makes that duty worth doing.
You try to define sacrifice and duty as a some kind of commercial transaction..everybody wins...yea , right...try telling that to a guy who just jumped on alive grenade to save his buddy. Even you don't believe that.
You might be a little closer to your real reason to hate the concept of duty and sacrifice before self with your little joke that the child in you screams that i can't tell you what to do. You sound like a nice guy, but enlightened self interest might be a cool debating point but in the real world I thank God we had tougher and more selfless men than you hitting those beaches and fighting in those foxholes in all the wars we fought to allow you to sleep safely in your bed at night.
Enlightened self interest as an explanation for sacrifice and duty..INDEED !! What a heartless, cold and UNHEROIC WORLD THAT WOULD BE.
FREEING should read FOREIGN above.
You will notice I did not assert that any current political system does respect individual liberty.
However, what the Founders intended, not our current system, came pretty close.
It is sad that what they attempted to create has been destroyed.
What a sublime state of denial you've achieved.
You don't think that Ted Bundy's murder for pleasure would constitute the mindless self-indulgence, that Ayn Rand rejects in this quote?
To answer your question..."NO."
Look at the entire quote:
Do you ask what moral obligation I owe to my fellow men? None—except the obligation I owe to myself, to material objects and to all of existence: rationality. I deal with men as my nature and theirs demands: by means of reason. I seek or desire nothing from them except such relations as they care to enter of their own voluntary choice. It is only with their mind that I can deal and only for my own self-interest, when they see that my interest coincides with theirs. When they don’t, I enter no relationship; I let dissenters go their way and I do not swerve from mine. I win by means of nothing but logic and I surrender to nothing but logic. I do not surrender my reason or deal with men who surrender theirs.
Pu in context, clearly Rand's principle doesn't apply to Bundy.
You may have mistaken me for someone else. That is exactly the point I was making.
I was asking if Mojave didn't think Ted Bundy's murder for pleasure would constitute the mindless self-indulgence, that Ayn Rand rejects.
Clearly murder for pleasure does constitute mindless self-indulgence and is rejected by Ayn Rand.
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