Well, i meant the environment described in her books. So something between the two, i guess.
They definitely use that kind of deceptive phrasing to excuse their callousness. I’ll give you that much, you definitely nailed it.
It’s kind of their signature move to do this sort of soccer-flop in response to any suggestion of empathy or caring or sensitivity.
“You should give blood.”
“How dare you command me to fall to my knees and lick the soles of a stranger’s boot. The very atoms of the universe itself condemn your craven solicitude. For is it not man’s most fundamental yearning to…” (it’ll go on for 50 pages or more)
The slightest deviation from total orthodoxy is a complete and irreversible repudiation of everything our creed stands for, and will result in the total destruction of our way of life.
Says just about every flavor of extremist claptrap ever written.
Ayn Rand on the disabled (from a 1981 Q&A):
I think it’s a monstrous thing — the whole progression of everything they’re doing — to feature, or answer, or favor the incompetent, the retarded, the handicapped, including, you know, the kneeling buses and all kinds of impossible expenses. I do not think that the retarded should be allowed to come near children. Children cannot deal, and should not have to deal, with the very tragic spectacle of a handicapped human being. When they grow up, they may give it some attention, if they’re interested, but it should never be presented to them in childhood, and certainly not as an example of something they have to live down to.
Also, to be selfishly hypocritical about it. Utter selfishness and contemptuousness towards other people is a virtue…as long as they are the ones indulging in it. But at the same time everyone else is supposed to be respectful of them, and certainly not “selfishly” take their stuff, even if it means starvation.
They expect everyone else to be polite and altruistically self sacrificing to them, while they run roughshod over everyone else while sneering at the people they are trampling. Which is fairly standard for selfish ideologies, claims like that “greed is good”, “might makes right” and so on are routinely abandoned the moment their adherents are on the wrong side of them. The Randian admiration of selfishness ends the moment somebody else selfishly takes advantage of them.
Which is why it’s a self defeating ideology. People who believe that selfishness is a virtue and compassion is a vice will take everything you have if they can, and complaining that they have no moral right to do so will be dismissed as irrelevant. Instead of Rand’s bugaboo of evil leftists taking your stuff in the name of helping the common people, you just get Randians taking your stuff because you can’t stop them.
At its least culpable, Randianism is the raising of the question: “well… what if I don’t? What is the punishment for being, as you paint it, ‘selfish and uncaring’ (and who gets to set the boundary lines for what constitutes that)? Scorn? Shunning? Confiscation? Prison? Slavery? Death?”
Yes, Randianism comes across as incredibly defensive; but this debate wouldn’t be happening if people just shrugged their shoulders at the selfish and said “meh– on them then; too bad”. In Rand’s own personal case, she witnessed hard-eyed unsmiling men with guns determined to abolish the “selfishness” of Capitalism, and fully prepared to regard anyone who would hinder or obstruct them as enemies worthy of death. That sort of leaves an impression.
She also received social security and used Medicare to treat the lung cancer she got as a consequence of being a smoker.
All of those, because that’s the kind of thing selfish people do to other people.
Randians just want to be able to be completely selfish, while everyone else isn’t. They love to “do unto others”, but don’t want anybody doing unto them.
Yes, because she paid for it, like everyone else. Social security is not a gift from the government; paying for Medicare via your taxes is not optional.
Various people keep harping on these facts, but they are completely irrelevant. What she was describing in her philosophy was how she thought the world ought to work. In the event, the world does not work that way. Would you expect her to throw away her tax dollars and get nothing in return?
Is Randianism really the first to raise that question, though? Philosophy of government and its interaction with morality is a lot older than that. The main innovation of Randianism appears to be the elevation of selfishness as a virtue and system of morality.
Her experience with Bolshevism seems to driven her to create a mirror-image belief system, under the assumption that the opposite of the worst thing ever should turn out to be the best thing ever. As a standalone set of ideas it’s not very novel or insightful.
I mean, the inherent penalty for convincing people to be selfish and uncaring, is that you are now surrounded by selfish and uncaring people. Success is its own punishment.
No, I would expect her to realize that as a member of society it is in her interest to cooperate to build a livable community, one in which people will sometime need assistance. I would also expect her to realized that her cancer was a consequence of her smoking (she denied the cigarettes were to blame), I’d also expect her to realize that her smoking poisoned others who weren’t so weak her as to need cigarettes. In short, I would expect her to spend about five minutes of thinking to realize that her entire philosophy was built on fear, self-loathing and pseudo-science.
I mean, yeah? If her whole thing is demonization of forced cooperation, and a posture of absolute principled moral rectitude, then she shouldn’t have been legitimizing that system for convenience. If you want to be a credible advocate for a moral system, you sort of need to model it in action.
And it’s not exactly true that Social Security or Medicare is a “pay it in, get it back” kind of thing. You pay a percentage of tax according to your earnings, but you may draw more or less than that according to your ultimate situation. In other words, from each according to their ability, to each according to their need. Supposedly she opposed that sort of thing.
This post is unarguably one of the most stupid things I have read on this board in the past few days. It is not worth arguing with.
That sounds a lot like self-sacrifice, which is of course evil. No, Rand was a principled person, with the best principles in the world - the kind that cost her nothing.
Moderating:
@Roderick_Femm, tone down the hostility. Technically, it was attacking the post, not the poster, but that was definitely too pointed for GD. Attack the reasoning in the post, or ignore it: claiming it was stupid and not worth arguing with did not further the debate.
This is just a guidance, not a warning. Nothing on your permanent record.
My definition of a healthy society is one where children freely play (outdoors).
Hmm, so when income-earning taxpaying Randians get government benefits like Social Security and Medicare, they’re just “getting what they paid for”. When income-earning taxpaying democratic socialists, for example, get government benefits like Social Security and Medicare, they’re just lazy mooching leeches.
Yup, that is in fact how social insurance benefits like Social Security and Medicare work. Healthy-living nonsmokers paid extra in payroll taxes so Ayn Rand could get her Medicare lung cancer treatments. The payroll taxes of a wealthy taxpayer who dies at 60 will help subsidize the Social Security income of a poor working-class taxpayer who lives and draws benefits till age 95. And so on.
It would be profoundly stupid for any kind of social insurance system to operate in any other way except on a “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need” basis. The whole point of any insurance structure is to have a broad and deep enough risk pool so that the contributions of people who pay in more than they need to take out can help cover the costs of the vice versas.
Me personally, it’s my fondest aspiration to be able to continue paying large sums into Medicare via payroll taxes till I’m close on 70, and then never need to draw one red cent in Medicare benefits for, say, the next 25 years. Realistically, I don’t expect I could possibly get lucky enough to lose so much money on my lifetime Medicare contributions, but a gal can dream.
Rand’s real error was in trying to make her philosophy a universal prescription. It obviously fails on a practical basis- she herself admitted that public services like courts and police are necessary, but was never able to square the circle and say how these should be paid for.
Her ideas work much better as self help, all that man as a heroic being, creation as man’s goal, Protestant work ethic on steroids stuff.
User fees. You get all the protection and justice you can afford, but you have to pay for the [selfish] individuals who have a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.
No way that could go wrong.