Date: Mon, 04 Oct 1999 01:54:01 -0500 From: Sandi & Scott Spaeth <vespags-AT-stlnet.com> Subject: more Ayn Rand nonsense... Hey all, After my last email where I admit that I was influenced by Ayn Rand, I remembered an essay I had written some years back (dunno when, sometime after I got a computer but before I had run across the Anarchist FAQ, which was the first anarchy web page I found and which lead me here). Unfortunately, it isn't a whole essay, just a start of one, but I think it might shed some light on where at least some objectionables and wrong-libs are coming from (probably not). "The difficulty I have with Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism stems from a fundamental dissagreement we have. Her opinion is that an idea belongs wholly and inviolably to its creator. Hence, we have Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, rather than Objectivism as a living and varied philosophy. This would be fine except for two difficulties. The first being that I find in it so much appealing to me that I cannot leave it alone, and the second (and much more serious) being that no one who truly thinks and reasons for themselves can be a disciple, and yet that is what is precisely demended by Objectivism. The central idea of Objectivism, that every individual is an end in himself, I find highly agreeable. It places personal achievement regardless of outside opinion as the central goal of every man. This too, I agree with, but I begin to feel leery of the word ‘every’. Every implies universal inclusion, and no philosophy can endure under that weight. Nothing is true, philosophically, for eveyone. It cannot be, for everyone is not the same. Can I say that being neither a leader nor a servant is the ideal? Yes, for me it is. Is it the ideal moral situation? Yes, but here it ceases to be realistic. Too many are willing to throw the responsibility that is demanded by such an ideal away in favor of the convenience and security of others making their decisions for them. There will always be followers, people that choose and desire to live in servitude, people who are most comfortable in a hierarchial setting. And because of that, because no vacuum in the social setting is allowable, there must be people to step in and act as shepards to the great masses of sheep. Objectivism, to be real, must be a chosen option to the small number of people who will choose a lifestyle, or it is simply another dogma for the masses to pay lip service to." Anyway, I thought I'd share. Dunno how I feel about that "there will always be followers..." bit now - as anarchists, we claim the opposite, that everyone wants to be free - but right this moment, I don't know it that's true. cheers, Scott --------------------------------------------------------- The freedom of each individual is the ever-renewing result of numerous material, intellectual, and moral influences of the surrounding individuals and of the society into which he grows up and dies. To wish to escape this influence in the name of a transcendental, divine, absolutely self-sufficient freedom is to condemn oneself to non-existance... Such absolute independence and such a freedom, the brainchild of idealists and metaphysicians, is a wild absurdity. -Mikail Bakunin 1871 Piston Ported Vespas: http://www.piston-ported.homepage.com words http://home.stlnet.com/~vespags/words.html ----------------------------------------------------------
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