Karl

Meaningless twaddle. Of course he basis his 'philosophy' on Atlas Shrugged. The sociopathic Neitzcshians all think the book is pointing to superman dominance. I've read many posts on philosophy sites by Neitzchians who think Rand was on the right path, but didn't go far enough. That's what you get for being a sociopath, when you only have a hammer, then every philosophy that suggests 'rugged individualism' is a nail. In essence he doesn't understand Rand any more than the collectivist socialists do, it just fits better with their world domination theories. Libertarians gravitate towards Rand without realising she rejects their ideology as equally as she does the communists. Unless you begin to understand philosophy from the ground up, then you will simply parrot the texts. So, for you, then your belief is in the primacy of consciousness, so you must start there and build an entire non conflicting philosophical base from that axiomatic premise. You don't need anything else to do the work. I did that from the premise that existence exists. Rand for me is only a pointer and so her philosophy must be interrogated and examined to look for irregularities, fractures. To do that, then you must grow an identical philosophy from first principles and compare.

That's where it ends up. Just another kind of practice predicated on the idea that ones own reality is defective and that there is a better way. Not withstanding, that if ones current reality is defective, then why should the new practice present a perfected one. I've said before that spritual/philosophical unhappiness/unfullfiment is the bait by which these new age, radical, esoteric practices propagate. If you cannot discover the truth by marching directly towards it, then these practices will offer distractions that will require investigation until they are uncovered as fraudulent. The problem is that there are a legion of these temptations and ones own lifetime is incredibly short by comparison. A good analogy is that you are already wearing the right pair of shoes, but you got them on backwards, with the laces undone and on the wrong feet. Al, that's needed is to put them on properly, tighten the laces and off you go. However, instead you prefer to visit a shoe shop which has no shoes that will ever fit you, but to cycle through the shelves in the hope something will. Every so often you find a pair that seem to fit, if you screw up your face to hide the pain they bring. It's only when the pain becomes sufficiently unbearable that you take them off and begin the hunt again. It doesn't matter if I point this out of course, you are blind to your own shoes because they also cause you pain, so why listen to the idiot suggesting they are the right shoes, just on the wrong way around. The shop is full of shoes and surely a pair must fit better, so you will keep on trying.

http://archive.lewrockwell.com/gatto/gatto-uhae-1.html John Taylor Gatto's book is available in full, chapter by chapter from Lew Rockwell's site for free, but has to be read online unfortunately. Funnily enough my formative years had no tv either, a very absent Father and a hippy mother into Carlos Castaneda. I read every science fiction book in our town library and every flat space in our home was eventually piled several feet high with novels.

"Altruism does not imply any sense of well-being or happiness in carrying out actions, aside from the fact that one is choosing to make a decision and so it is assumed that even if the decision makes you miserable that there must be some brain reward from making that decision or it wouldn't be done. It may not be able to be consciously perceived by the individual though. Many times altruistic behavior in fact makes one totally miserable and even resentful, but is done anyway for what is perceived to be a good or need or ideal of more import than the alternative/s behaviors. Often there is what is easy, and there is what is right. When people choose what they think is right, not out of guilt or fear or conformity-to-right or fear-of-wrong or expected benefit, but because they simply consider the right thing more important than their own ease, that is a form of altruism even though this can be mild and even for an 'abstract.'" This, right here is exactly what I'm talking about. I gave the example of the child who was told to share their toy and learned that sharing was a miserable experience, therefore to be miserable was a good thing. Consequently, to make someone else miserable by asking the same of them is seen as acceptable. That is the heart of what I'm saying. Do it with lightness of heart, because it gives pleasure to give, not out of a sense of guilt or duty. Otherwise, what is learned is to go against rationality and to do 'any' duty proscribed by any authority because it is dutifully necessary and therefore good. This is the lesson of Nazi Germany. It is why a man will give a stranger electric shocks until he apparently ceases consciousness. To be trained to do what feels emotionally/rationally uncomfortable, or unpleasant as ones duty has resulted in most of the misery on our planet. It's inherently anti-life even though it appears to be pro-life. I'm not talking here of things that are unpleasant but are rationally necessary for the purposes of survival. It certainly isn't a knee jerk reaction either. I was also trained to be altruistic-but what I was being trained to do was to made to feel guilty and to carry out actions which made me miserable. Is it any wonder our schools are full of bullies who can take advantage of kids who have been taught to 'share', or that we have allowed the meanest sociopaths to lead us through Government ? All that is required is to activate the trained instinct of guilt, duty and altruism to hold power over the weakest. 'Your country needs you'-'pay your taxes'-'the wealthy have the duty to shoulder the greatest burden'-we must accept and look after immigrants' Are examples. I'm sure you think I'm making too much out of a word (after all it's only a word), but the ideas that underpin it have far wider implications than just dropping a few coins into a charity box.

It isn't about oneself, it is about no self. Don't you really mean kindness, caring, compassion ? These are self generated actions done in complete conscious knowledge that the voluntary action brings with it sense of well being/happiness in the carrying out of those actions. I'm anti altruist because it's evil. The only preachers of altruism are those that wish to enslave others. I know it's often used mistakenly for voluntary charitable action, or kindness, it seems a stupid thing to pick on, but note that Orwell wrote a book on the power of words. Our Governments frequently transpose meanings and Churchill said that the next battles would be fought over the words that would create people's reality. It's the same as people who work voluntarily for a company, for pay, saying that they are slaves of the company owners. Start thinking like a slave and it won't be long until you are one.

Ive never read Eliot but I intended to this year. I have two books 'the mill on the floss' and one other I can't remember in my Amazon wish list. Your post has reminded me I should pick one of them up.

I disagree entirely. That words can mean multiple things does not imply that they cannot be defined accurately. That people throw around concepts without a clue about the underlying definition is just mental laziness and a poor excuse. Altruism isn't a sliding intention, it means to give selflessly. That is to say without the existence of an independent self, as if one was incapable of caring one way or another and somehow managed to perform the action whilst being completely oblivious of performing the action. Altruism is a very dangerous kind of word. It contains within it the seeds of an entire philosophy that denies identity and existence. It treats man like an amoral robot that must contain his obsessions and desires. That he must simply act in the interest of the common good because he is living in a delusion and knows nothing. Words have power, they communicate ideas and can do so whilst the user is unaware of the philosophy that has been accepted. It has polluted their consciousness and they have not raised the slightest objection to the premises on which it is based. The entire point of the AYP practices was to produce a condition under which one performed action less action, thoughtless thought. This is no more than practised, unthinking obedience, surrender and slavery of the mind. Just stop thinking and do. Thinking is what makes it all so unpleasant say the practitioners. All that mental activity and churning just drown out the truth. Accepting the poisoned Apple was the lesson of Snow White. Let's not go about mentally eating things that look like harmless ideas and begin to examine and define them more exactly before we swallow them down.

I'm sure she would be more than happy to be described as a Romantic :-) we need more of that and less of the Kantian death cult. I'm always amused by those who criticise Rand without ever having read her work. She was neither an empiricist nor a spiritual mystic like Kant. She explained those two philosophical dead ends as the Mystics of muscle and spirit. She was considered by the academic community to be a lightweight because she didn't write an epistemological treatise, but instead wrote stories that communicated her philosophy to the guy in the street. The blue collar worker who did not live in such a rarified stratum of self aggrandising egotism and was considered incapable of appreciating their unbounded wisdom. Academics have a condescending, dismissive and wholly arrogant approach to anyone who attempted such a thing as educating the great unwashed masses who are thought little better than cattle. What's more, at the time, a woman was definitely inappropriate. As neither you nor AP seem inclined to find out these things for yourself and instead continue to mis construe both Kant and Rand I shall leave you to pat each other on the back whilst I go do something else.:-)

LOL I hear the sound of a desperate clutching at straws. ;-) You mean the Kantian Scam. It certainly fooled you :-)

There is no such thing as unselfish concern. We aren't robots, our actions are entirely selfish. That doesn't exclude us having empathy, compassion, charity, sympathy or pity, but none of those are altruistic.

I can't get back on topic because this is crucial to the discussion by a chain of reasoning. If we dig into Kant in a haphazard way then the chain is broken. I have asked you to say in your own words where this moral law is derived, where the idea of duty comes from ? You can't, because Kant never did say, instead he avoided making that trap for himself and by doing so, he exposed his flaws. Kant denies consciousness identity, he believed that we cannot know reality. He is a subjectivist as was Plato, but Plato wasn't a religious mystic. Kant changed platonic individual subjectivism to mass delusion of collective subjectivism. Here in lies the root of Quantum physics. That reality as experienced, is a mass subjective conscious delusion. A philosophy that sidelined reason, applied subjectivism and mysticism to every branch of human endeavour from politics, to economics and most particularly to science, has substituted pragmatism for reason. The Mystics have crept into every area of life. From the animal spirits of Keynes, to the God particle and the effect of consciousness on physical particles, to the Delphic oracle of modelling of global temperature changes.

You realise you are ascribing notions of human reason to an animal at this juncture ? I mean the owner, not the cat :-)

Altruism isn't good at all. That's the problem. It comes from the same place as duty, sacrifice, obligation. That's why I hold no hope at all. Unless the philosophy is radically altered we will be plunged into bloody revolution. This is why we are beginning to see the rising of more extreme political parties, but they are extreme because we judge them from a fallacy of the misuse of the mean. It isn't that we should choose a place to sit in the carriage of the train we are currently travelling on, as much as we are on completely the wrong train on the wrong track. Anything we do is going to built on the same underlying philosophy leading to the exact same outcomes. Build on sand and the quality of the building will always be related to that foundation.

He does make me laugh at times. I know his style- like mine-can wind people up, but I like his different sense of expressing outrage. You cannot imagine more right wing western media to come out with Kumbayah.

How are you authoring, by what mechanism are these principles, prescriptions arrived at ? Kant doesn't explain the process at all. All he says is that man is autonomous in choosing them and arrives at them through reason, but not through nature. Yet that nature includes desire in Kants world view, not just the materialistic sense of nature but in the cognitive emotional sense. He just says that we 'decide' but not on how that decision is arrived at, other than to say it's rational. How does a Kantian arrive at a decision on what is good and what is evil ? By what measure, what informs him. What does Kant say about pleasure and happiness in relation to ethical decision making ? "Hence, choices made because of obsessions or thought disorders are not free in this negative sense." In other words he couldn't cross the gap, because to do so would imply consciousness had identity and we therefore could dispense with religion entirely.

Thats interesting, but how does Kant say from where this reasoned moral imperative arises ?

Im chanelling my inner Shanlung and I must say I find it rather Cathartic. It's the Rotan for them all. :-)

Well, Isn't it true ? Where did Kant say men got this moral imperative, this duty ? He said it came from reason, not from mans nature. He split the two. Hence, divine revelation or intrinsic coding which just happened to be there somehow. That's why he said he had given up on knowledge to allow a space to be made for faith. He was a very religious man. That can never be extracted from his work. He applied his mind to gird up his own belief in mysticism.

So now you are making excuses for Kant ? His epistemology was deficient because he failed to explain how ethics originated. It's like designing a space rocket but being unable to make it lift from the launch pad. Sure, he created a technical tour de force and he was most definitely the most influential philosopher of the last 500 years. Who can argue. We wouldn't be in the mess we are in, suffered two world wars with collectivist maniacs, wrecked our economy and dumbed down the West to a degree that our 2000 year old civilisation will likely topple over. All these whining altruistic socialists that would rather sacrifice themselves to Kants illustrious moral imperative than prosper and survive are the result.

Kants 'a priori duty' is divine revelation trumped up as reason. Rand didn't have a priori ethics divinely appearing in the mind of man. She held cognition to be an active process that accorded with existence. The key here is existence is identity; consciousness is identification. Man must define his ethical principles by the use of reason in accordance with existent reality. That it's mans individual experience, through a individual identified consciousness, by the active process of a reasoning mind and that, is the whole of it. Objectivism holds that man should be virtuous in order to have and hold values that bring him the greatest happiness. Kant held that man should not be happy, that he should extract nothing from life that gave him pleasure and that was his moral duty. Kant said sacrifice, Rand said life. It's that simple. Kants philosophy led directly to the adoption of communism and fascism in the 20 th century and to the current awful mess of social subjectivism, positivism and pragmatism.

In Europe we like nice ideas and loving everyone, being brotherly, sisterly and totally accepting of anything except those who don't agree with that ideology is par for the course. It's for the great social good don't you know, the great cosmic family. Even when there is obvious violence going on, then the hippies blame it on the circumstances the refugees have had to face-they are the victims right ? They have had to put up with Western, white, privileged make aggression that made them poor, desperate and violent. A bullet through the head, gang rape, theft is the least price that we must expect to pay for our guilt. We have a society of self haters, riddled with guilt and filled with the need to assuage their inner horrors with suffering. Be it environmental transgressions, or the feeling of owning some property that deprives some other person in some undefinable way. This is the end result of altruism. A group of lemmings so completely devoid of any happiness that throwing themselves wantonly on the sacrificial pyre is better than continuing to live. The hardened middle eastern psyche and Africans must be unable to believe their luck. A group of rich idiots ready to give away everything including their lives in an attempt to assuage their awful guilt and misery. I say let these nihilists sacrifice. We round everyone of these terminal altruists up and take away all their possessions, put iron around their necks and let them serve everyone else like the animals they wish to become.

I'd expect nothing less from you Apech.

That really has to be the nicest compliment I have ever received :-)

Psychologising here, but I often think this is a result of childhood 'sharing'. You know 'that' kind of 'sharing' in which it is really the adult acting like the state and removing the toy from one child to give to the other. What moral lesson does this impart to both children. 1. That sharing is self sacrifice. That it must be endured even though it feels bad because a moral authority with power over you demands it. 2. That it is fine to grab another child's toy because that is ethical sharing. The child does not have to feel bad about taking the toy, because the other child is the one who must suffer as they did in the previous example. Thus begins the idea that 'sharing' must feel bad to be good and stealing can be morally condoned if it is considered to be sharing. What's worse is that the child that takes the toy knows in their hearts that the other child is feeling bad and though they feel self righteous in obtaining the shared spoils, they also feel bad as a result of the action. A lose- lose situation.

They are little devils, we keep them as 'forever kittens' for our own amusement and end up mothering them. Our cat would have a mad 20 minutes scratching everything in the front room and then paw at the door to be let out. So we would let her out and close the door. Less than a minute later she was back at the other side of the door clawing at a loose piece of wood which made an annoying clack, clack, clack sound until we opened the door and let her back in. At which point the game commenced all over again. Run, run, scratch, run, scratch, paw at door, let out, clack, clack, clack, let back in, run, run, scratch... You little b'stard im going to kill you...