Ayn Rand never, ever said that someone could be completely and utterly altruistic. This is simply a gross miss-representation of her published position.
She pointed out that altruism can only ever be practiced _inconsistently_! To practice it consistently is to die and then remove all trace of you ever having existed.
You are a pragmatist. You waffle. You are adrift and when you see someone standing on solid ground you call them an extremist. Extreme is just a relative term. She was extreme from where you have drifted to. Rand's moral foundation does not move.
@dffykvn "So unworkable nonsense based on a crazy idea without proof"
What do you mean 'without proof'?
"So if the principle leads to fatalities then it's better to hold onto..."
I have nothing against you abandoning your current principles if they are false or causing problems. I have everything against you promoting principle-changing on principle.
@TreeLuvBurdpu Argentina adopted the IMFs privatization of public resources and gutting the safety nets etc all of the ayn randian policies to let the private sector take control
It led to double digit unemployment, crappier services for much higher prices and made argentinians miserable
The guy that FOUGHT the IMF and went against the privitization crap by running the country responsibly actually beat the IMF and drastically improved peoples qualities of life
Privatizing californias public transit allowed the owners to destroy the entire system, its STILL fucked today
Banking deregulation led to the savings and loan scandal and more recently madoff and stanford who robbed everyone blind along with the other banking assholes
It happened in other countries too, when pinochet introduced "free market banking" to chile it led to a few guys owning the majority of banks then taking all of the money and running
@dffykvn Repealing a regulation does not gaurantee success. Some of the instances you mention were poor deregulation, most had nothing to do with deregulation.
"Banking deregulation led to the savings and loan scandal and more recently madoff and stanford who robbed everyone blind along with the other banking assholes"
It simply had nothing to do with banking deregulation. There is no way such a worldwide, persistent, and inter-industry slump could take place without central control.
Opening a system to fraud and loading the agency thats supposed to be dedicated to preventing fraud with people who say they oppose regulation because it interferes with the free market GUARANTEES that the regulations don't matter because there are no cops on the beat
Having strong regulations to prevent fraud is laissez faire economics if you stack the agency with people morally opposed to regulations, investigations and shutting things down
Are you referring to Nancy Polosi's verdict the day after the meltdown? She said it was caused by greedy people on Wall Street. When did greedy people show up on Wall Street? Someone should have told Nancy Polosi.
Funny thing is, her stated explanation of the collapse has not changed at all since the day after the collapse until now. Show has learned nothing new since then.
Some things work better as private enterprises, Gov't run shoe factories would never beat americas shoe industry Clothes? Ditto Cars? Of course!
Health care? We spend the most per person because we don't nip easily prevented diseases in the bud, the europeans all get routine checkups that most americans don't get
We spend more per person, cover less people and have worse health than other countries with pure public or public as a base with free market options they can pay for
Theres an overwhelming amount of evidence somethings work best as purely private, I don't find that objectionable
But when its a debate of whether you want to gut a public institution and replace it with a private one, if the private one gives worse services/outcomes/whatever for a higher price and doesn't serve as many people while all of the money goes to a few people who get rich off of it then there's no way in hell that keeping it private should be a defensible position
"I have nothing against you abandoning your current principles if they are false or causing problems. I have everything against you promoting principle-changing on principle
I'm against most rigid positions
This world isn't black and white and the black and white objectivist dichotomy doesnt work with the planet colored in many shades of grey
If the ideology is inflexible and demands consistency even if it costs human life then it should be ignored
@dffykvn "I'm in favor of some rigid positions where I'll hold my ground unless I can be proven wrong."
So Rand's "extremism" is the result of her not being proven wrong? Is that what you are saying?
You said she is an extremist because she is inflexible. You are inflexible, but only in areas where you can't be proven wrong. So she is an extremist because she is more inflexible than you, probably because she can't be proven wrong as often as it happens for you to be proven wrong. You're jealo
@dffykvn "hideously rich" This is precisely the premise by which all of your arguments sprout from. You think that making money is not virtuous and that serving others is the moral ideal.
I think that making money is virtuous (productivity). Productivity stems from FREELY using your own mind to make decisions. Therefore one has a right to make their own decisions regarding their own business regardless of the safety of whatever processes they are going through. AS LONG AS ONE IS IN ...
@dffykvn AGREEMENT WITH THEIR EMPLOYEES (THEY KNOW WHAT YOU KNOW), ONE CAN DO THESE PROCESSES. Lying about what processes one has to go through, and the environment you will be working in is criminally punishable, even if nobody gets hurt. The government's job is not responsible for making your own decisions whether as a businessman or an employee. It is merely responsible for prosecuting people who initiate force (lie, cheat, steal, murder, etc.).
@dffykvn Can you read? I have never said that lying your way to riches is moral. Get over yourself and whatever preconception you have of me or the philosophy I advocate. Read about it before making such ridiculous claims. Think about the connections your trying to make
"Yes he made the money using his ingenuity. I guess that'd make him a hero in your insane ass backwards society."
Come on!!!
I do not want a con artist Mecca, the more apt description of yours though is a paranoid Mecca.
@dffykvn "You obviously dont know a thing about ayn and objectivist bullshit"
I have actually written a whole research paper on the fountainhead. And I have read most of her non-fiction as well as Leonard Peikoff's Ominous Parallels. So sure, I don't know a thing.
This last post of yours (and building up from previous posts) have been classic to bordering insane strawman arguments. You have completely misrepresented Ayn Rand's philosophy. That is grounds alone for losing this argument. End.
She loved Hickman for his self interest...you know how he murdered that girl
She was crazy because of her sheer admiration of sociopaths
Also she was a pretty shitty writer
Her characters weren't realistic and didn't seem human
Also a SEVENTY PAGE monologue? seriously?
And finally the entire book was about how the poor are horrible for wanting a free lunch...and wasn't that one guys nvention an infinte energy "free lunch" machine?
I have a rigid position against full banking deregulation because of the examples set by Chile, Argentina and Iceland
All of the evidence has shown that fully deregulating banking and handing over public banks to private institutions leads to MASSIVE fraud and corruption
Governments who exact totalitarian control over money are disasters too
The best system is private banks with agencies to investigate and jail the wannabe madoffs and stanfords and rules to prevent fraud + protect customers
@TreeLuvBurdpu ps "you need black AND white to make grey" isn't clever
Thats literally what I said, the world isn't strictly black and white
While one position might work best on one thing another one might be the right approach somewhere else
Saying everything HAS to be this way no matter what while ignoring all of the other times that the policies failed with catastrophic consequences leads to disaster until the policies abandoned or ammended
First I like to thank you for thinking. We need more people to think. You put yourself out here and allow the world to shape your thinking, the confession within. Clearly you are unsure of your position. The altruistic position you credit to evolution is only true for family values. Rand did not experience this, thus she is inexperienced showing it. The trouble is not objective philosophy, the trouble is the idea that men need a leader (a daddy) to care for them once they are adults.
@filmaker04 All men need others in order to remain sane. One of the worst and most damaging psychological methods of torture is solitary confinement. We are not talking about a caretaker, we are talking about peers - much like the scientific community is a network of peers. The ways in which a degree of altruism is ingrained into our nature is easily shown through MRI and other scans that have identified where altruism takes place in normal human beings, such as mirror neurons.
Which will you choose? If you decide that man does have a right to his own life, you will come to the conclusion that to uphold any sort of policy that abrogates his decisions by the collective as an utter contempt to such a right. If you accept altruism, man is no longer protected, he can be discarded if any one deems it necessary. Do you think that would be a surprise? He has no rights, right?
@AlexanderEBott There are rights and then there are privileges. Property is an artifice supported by a monopolistic police state. I am of the opinion that there are two types of property, resources and labor. Man is entitled and has the right to the fruits of his labor, but owning resources is a privilege. I fully support civil rights, but the libertarian view of property rights is incomplete and extreme.
Who's economy, who's environment? You speak of these abstractions as if they are concretes. The economy, for example, is a concept used to refer to individuals producing goods in a particular geographic region.
Ayn Rand was an extremist. At a political level she offered you a choice. Either acknowledge man's inalienable right to his own life, or accept the altruistic demands that he sacrifice it on whatever scale it is asked of him at a given time.
@AlexanderEBott For a cult that rejects all philosophical works after Aristotle, I can say that objectivism does not represent enlightened self interest. That is because it is not enlightened. Evolution has provided man with an instinct that is altruistic to a degree and science is discovering the extent to which enlightened self interest goes beyond calculating the effect of every decision on an individual's net worth. Evolution has been at it far longer than objectivists.
@j0hnwi11iams Have you read any of the non-fiction written by her or Leonard Peikoff? What does "enlightened self interest" mean? Stop with the ad hominem attacks (cult). Altruism by definition is a conscious system by which one surrenders values for little or nothing in return. It cannot be evolutionary.
In regard to rights: You are a sick person if you believe that the right to one's own property, meaning the right to what one has produced, is merely a privilege.
As soon as someone develops a piece of land, resource, etc., he has created a value. Either something that he will personally enjoy directly. Or something that he will trade with other men.
If I create something it is mine. Can you understand that concept, "MINE". Who are you or anyone else to say what I can do with what I create. Do you own me?!? Am I your slave via the state?!? Take a reality check here with regard to the statements you are making.
But what if the choice is what to do with something he owns that violates another mans right to HIS life (horribly unsafe working conditions that the government should come in and fix)
Does an individual have an inalienable right to do what he wants with his life even if thats taking the life of another to save a little bit of money (methane vent in wrong direction)?
Why shouldn't he be inconvenienced if it keeps disasters and deaths from occuring (bp rigs shut down, massey mines closed)
Danger is involved in many fields of production. The principle that should be applied to this question is not whether man has a right to safe working conditions, but whether he has a right to enter into non-coerced contractual relationships. He does. If men are unwilling to work in certain conditions, they don't have to. That does not mean that the other end of production (business owner) must comply with their demands.
@AlexanderEBott Thats why libertarianism is just fine and dandy on paper
But in reality the worker would go to work not KNOWING that the methane vents in the wrong direction or his workplace is a deathtrap, next thing you know he's flash fried
When someone breaks the terms of a contract he's brought into court and sued so the victim of the broken contract can be made whole
You can't "make whole" a guy that had his skin muscle and fat burnt off of his bones or a guy whos buried alive
@dffykvn I am not a libertarian. I am an Objectivist.
This is what these conversations always develop into. What if's. First, let me ask you this. Can you go to the federal government and sue them for not checking "proper" regulations? I don't think so.
The responsibility rests within your hands whether you think your life is safe enough. If someone lies or cheats you of what you have come to agreement with, then the full wait of the law will come down on them criminally.
The last time powerful people had that much freedom there was a war and the unfettered elites that followed the older word for objectivism "The divine right of kings" were forced to sign the Magna Carta
I want there to be environmental laws, because a few thousand dollars in settlement money won't do me any good when I have a dozen forms of cancer and illnesses from crap that gets dumped that gets into my water and food
If your ideology has no solutions for things that happen in the real world then it's worthless
The idea of freedom of contract sounds wonderful...until you realize that all of the power would be in the hands of the employer
It would revert society back to the days of aristocracy where people with money got to abuse people without because of the unfair terms they had to live under and the only other option was starving
The reason why massey mines are death traps is because theyve coopted the regulatory agencies and brainwashed idiot voters with objectivist/ayn ran/ libertarian crap
The agencies don't want to "oppress the wonderful capitalist free market" by forcing him to make his mines safe
Because apparently the lives and health of his workers are worth a lot less than the free market religious dogma
BP spill wouldn't have happened if MMS didn't have free market fundamentalists appointing "deregulators"
When the free market idiots privatized californias public transportation, they made the transit system completely FUBAR, when the objectivists got their hands on the energy industry and deregulated it we got Enron
When ayn rand cultists got their wishes and deregulated banks we got the savings and loan scandal, further deregulation? Madoff Staford and the other evil people caused Great Depression 2
But if you really wanna see objectivism run amok look at deregulated chile under pinochet
@AlexanderEBott If protecting the unfettered freedom of a few people causes hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions or even a hundred million to be miserable then they shouldn't HAVE that kind of freedom
The freedom to run scams and con people using legalese or preying on their impoverished condition isn't a freedom that should be defended
Some freedoms aren't necessary and are inherently destructive so people SHOULDN'T have them
@dffykvn All these "dangerous" freedoms you think should be prohibited comes down to one thing, the freedom to think (and consequently the freedom to act on that thought). You are asking man to live contra his nature as a rational being (a thinking being). You want him to submit the individual to anyone's whims, so long as a majority agrees, and therefore the largest force can be applied. If someone as a worker sincerely thinks their job should be run this way or that, then think about...
@dffykvn then they should THINK about how they can convince whomever to agree with them. They do not have a right to that job, and they certainly do not have a right to force others into contractual agreements they don't want to be in. The only thing else to discuss is the case of fraud, and that is simple, courts. To presume a business owner/manager is guilty before he "does" something are not what laws are supposed to be. We do not presume murder. Therefore regulations are wrong.
@dffykvn "People should have the freedom to do things FOR people not freedom to do things TO people"
This is the premise by which your whole argument rests. Ethics to you is non-selfish. You think that freedom is okay as long as it benefits the most people.
I think it was Edward Cline who said, "Freedom is not a precursor to rationality, rather it is rationality (the virtue of reasoning) that is the basis for the need of freedom". It all comes back to fundamentals.
You fundamentally think man is incapable of thinking for himself, and that he should therefore be shielded from necessary thought processes.
I disagree. Man is capable of thinking for himself, should be allowed to, and should consequently be able to enter into contractual agreements that he deems are in his own self-interest. Anything else is a tyranny over the mind, and will eventually dissolve into slavery.
You seem to think it's ok to leave out critical information in contracts
An employer can make his workplace a death trap, and if his workers who SHOULD have a reasonable expectation of safety don't have degrees in egineering to spot how it's a deathtrap work there then they deserve to die, thats insane
Youre fighting for the freedom to con people and rip em off because if you aren't psychic and some predator decides to fuck you over or kill you you deserved it and dont deserve protection
You seem to also think thats its fine and dandy to fuck up the environment and it's morally wrong to use the government to stop that from happening
"Well I could interfere in the "free murkhet and keep the coast and hundreds of thousands of jobs and livelihoods from being destroyed with the gulfs ecology...but that'd be interfering in the free market which is WRONG!"
No matter how horrific the consequences and how easily preventable it is, people should suffer for a powerful guys freedumb
@dffykvn Who's environment? Nobody owns "the environment". That argument is squashed.
I am not saying anyone should suffer. You just assume people will. Have you paid any attention to what I have been saying. I am arguing for freedom based on the necessities for the human mind to function properly. Read some Ayn Rand, and then come back to me.
@AlexanderEBott by not changing the direction the methanes vented, saves a few hundred not making sure this measure is in place or that one then the horrible condition of the mine isnt something the miners sign up for
They're never explicitly told "you're signing up to work in a death trap" they have a reasonable expectation of a safe workplace
Your ideology takes all responsibility away from the owner who has the greatest capacity to fix things or the government which has the greatest...
@AlexanderEBott greatest ability to protect the workers and environment and puts it in the hands of the workers who will work ignorant of how deadly their conditions truly are until the mines caving in on their heads
If somethings someones property fine, but they SHOULDN'T have the FREEDOM to do things on THEIR PROPERTY that could kill the locals, poison them or destroy the environment for generations
Noone should have that kind of unchecked power, the consequences of not stepping in are..
@AlexanderEBott Horrific (BP, massey mines, mountaintop removal which poisons people living nearby)
Your ideology is beautiful on paper
But regulation (when properly enforced by people WILLING to do their job) PREVENTS the horrific fuckup that destroys the land for generations/poisons the locals/kills workers/all of the above
Sorry for the caps I added them to emphasize words I thought were important
Noone with that much power should have it without oversight or conditions
This person is just one of many who is very mistaken, and if afraid because he was taught to be afraid. He is mixing up socialism with what man does best as a community.
You've not made an argument in this video against Rand. Your one of those people who would rather talk about the concretes, sacrifices the principles, the generalizations, the conceptual and thus the mind for what ever whim of the moment concrete. You'd rather bicker over concretes then hold a consistent principled philosophical approach to reality. It is the very function of the mind that your against Mr. JohnWIlliams. Yes Rand is an idealist, yes she is an extremist, so are you.
So your "entity to protect public interest" you are saying this entity should be able to use violence to further the "public good" that's what you're saying?
Ayn Rand is not the first to succeed by telling the elites what they want to hear. Rand was reiterating Herbert Spenser's idea of Social Darwinism. Spenser was also hailed by the Robber Barons of his day.
Zsylvana suggested I view your video. I gave it 5 stars. If I understand you, you are a pragmatist who judges ideas & institutions based on what works best in a given instance. Pragmatism is about using the reality (ideas, institutions, etc.) that has the best consequences in that case.
Americans are unfamiliar with European societies and who they function. There are choices.
'By that standard any and all governments have a coercive element. It's the idea of people being "under" the law. Contracts are just an extension of that. ' The political economic system of capitalism creates the conditions that make working for a capitalist one of the few options open.
There is freedom to contract, but the contract enables the capitalist to exploit workers. This aspect of the contractual relationship is almost unavoidable. This is what you support - exploitation
"exclusive ownership of property, which, in itself, is un-democratic."
'So? That's probably because unrestricted democracy is a bad thing. You need an un-democratic element to assert rights over consensus.'
So then, you will not mind when we communists tell you that all industry and property is to collectivly owned and operated? Do not worry, it's just an "undemocratic element" lol.
Not every one can exercise their full democratic rights afterall.
'Who says they anyone is today? Are they enslaving these citizens without contracts against their will or are they operating by the rules of the free market and letting people enter into contracts freely?'
There's a coersive element. The worker does not own the means of production, they therefore must enter a contract with a capitalist. The decision to contract comes not entirely from their own free will. Instead, it derives from the necessity to survive.
Duh, that's objective notions of rights come with absolute standards for the basis of laws.
By that standard any and all governments have a coercive element. It's the idea of people being "under" the law. Contracts are just an extension of that.
Rand's definition of altruism is different from the one you're using.
To clarify a bit, I don't think the dichotomies she presents are false. I don't think she presents either free market or socialism. She presents free market or not free market.
She presents: either live only for yourself or not only for yourself-- which is different than live only for yourself or only for others. Weren't the founding fathers extreme? weren't they radicals in their time?
It seems that commentators get a thumbs down on this video, not if they curse or spam, but if they even open their mouth to express an opposing viewpoint.
i think you're just lovely...I've enjoyed your videoblogs,but...i need to disagree that human nature assumes destruction or disuse if we don't own it directly.Personally, I can attest not only to personal experience, i.e., I adore other humans and always seek out ways to support their expression in whatever form. Additionally, it is no longer just an assumption to know that we ARE all as you put it hardwired to be neurologically healthier when we are in love with eachother and not self seeking.
Also, why is charity not selfish? Charity is absolutely selfish! Who does not WANT to live in a benevolent world? We are all connected and we all live in this world together. Everyone wants to live peacefully and benevolently.
Reciprocal altruism, what you are describing, is not altruism at all. Altruism is sacrificing a value for a dis-value. This absolutely does not happen in nature, where all an organism has is its life.
On moral evaluations and decision making she has this to say:
"You might say, as many people do, that it is not easy always to act on abstract principles. No, it is not easy. But how much harder is it, to have to act on them without knowing what they are?"
90% of rational processing is sub-conscious.That is a result of evolution, it is intended to free up space for conscious thought and decision making so a human being can reason- and survive.
I'm sure you understand that you are a pragmatist. Ayn Rand had much to say on pragmatism that I think you should take a look at. Here's a quote by her:
"Concrete problems cannot even be grasped, let alone judged or solved, without reference to abstract principles.
Your defense and rejection of capitalism is on a purely pragmatic level. Man must have firm principles. Even the decision not to hold principles is a principle. The only choice is what principles we adopt.
'I do not think Marxism is the answer. I still see corporations filling a valuable role in society, although a far less powerful one.'
They do fill a valuable role-for themselves, mainly.
State run industries, arguably, have more job security. And, if they face economic problems, the state can assist, bail them out. Thats sounds preferable to bailing out a "private" company with your taxes right? This way, at least we all have a stake in all land and industry.
that's not what I'm getting at but no big collective gov. could actually hold your hand and care. The community doesn't care what your family is going through, whether you starve or flourish. It is up to the individual. I know that the dichotomy that Rand presents is goofy between altruism and individuality, but in essence she was right. Be selective of what you take from every philosopher, I have a Nietzsche pic he was rad, but I'm not like devoted lol
contractual agreements can be negotiated between employees and capitalists.
Also, there is statute, in new zealand, the Employment Relations Act
But the fact still remains that you work for them, they own all of the means of production. They own that business to make a profit.
Are they in debt? Perhaps, but their debt is made less severe by the fact that the bourgeois use their workers as security. They extract a profit from their ecxploited workers to pay their company debts off.
'Every business transaction between employer and employed is contractual. How by definition could that be exploitative?'
There exists an historic imbalance of power between the owners of the means of production and the workers. The workers are generally dispossessed of the means of production. Thus they sell themselves as a commodity to the petty bourgeois.
Also, many contracts are standard form contracts. I have just been scrutinizing one for someone.
'They want to profit from their own property. Is that really so wrong?'
Yes, they want the right, which i see as no right, to use another citizen for their own selfish financial gain. They want exclusive ownership of property, which, in itself, is un-democratic.
"which i see as no right, to use another citizen for their own selfish financial gain."
Who says they anyone is today? Are they enslaving these citizens without contracts against their will or are they operating by the rules of the free market and letting people enter into contracts freely?
"exclusive ownership of property, which, in itself, is un-democratic."
So? That's probably because unrestricted democracy is a bad thing. You need an un-democratic element to assert rights over consensus.
Einstein was also extremely smart, and he was a socialist. Having a high IQ doesn't necessarily mean that your theoretical version of reality is the correct one. Our limited understanding of reality has to be checked against empirical evidence. And if you get the wrong "inputs", it doesn't matter how powerful your "CPU" is, you are not going to get realistic answers. Consider all those brilliant economists that couldn't see the economic crisis coming, I'm sure many of them are extremely smart.
You are right. To re-phrase my statement: Rand was an extremist in that she was extremely rational (unlike smart people like Einstein who were obviously in error when it comes to politics)
Extremism isn't a criticism.
Rand had a brilliant understanding of economics and she did see it coming!
(1/2) It does not impress me when someone has a brilliant uderstanding of economics, especially if it's of the neoclassical variety: the invisible hand, trickle-down, etc. This brand of economics is founded on Newton's ideas (of a clockwork universe) and his mathematical formalism. We all know that Newton's ideas was disproven by Einstein and the discoverers of Quantum Mechanics.
@wdednam Newton's ideas were valid within the range that Newton was speaking to. Newton's math was not invalidated by Einstein. Newtons formula are still used today in fields. f=ma for instance.
@TreeLuvBurdpu (part 1) Yes and no, Newton's physics are valid only in limiting cases, a typical feature of physics theories. So far, even quantum mechanics and gen relativity are irreconcilible. Physicists are still very actively trying to unify these two theories, so even a hard science like physics is still a work in progress. The problem with free market economyics is that it can never be a hard science like physics because the concept of freeness is not well defined.
@TreeLuvBurdpu (Part 2) The boundaries of the market are ambiguous in that markets are propped up by many rules, we accept the legitimacy of certain regulations so totally that we don't see them, and hence they appear "free" to us: There ia a huge range of restrictions on what can be traded (e.g., votes, government jobs, legal decisions, university places, medicines having to be licensed to prove their safety, human trafficking). contd..
@TreeLuvBurdpu (Part 3) There are also restrictions on who can participate in markets (children, licenses for professions that have significant impacts on human life such as doctors and lawyers, in many countries only companies with more than a certain amount of capital can start banks, you cannot just turn up at the stock market with a bag of shares and sell them, companies must fulfill listing requirements before they can offer their shares for trading. contd...
@TreeLuvBurdpu (Part 4) Trading of shares is only conducted by licensed brokers and traders. Conditions of trade are specified too (refund policies of retailers, consumer protection, product liability, failure in delivery, loan default, zoning laws that ban commercial activities in residential areas, i.e., hawking). Price regulations (prices of loans as set by central banks through interest rates when they target inflation). These are all regulations that people take for granted.
@TreeLuvBurdpu If the boundaries of what you are studying cannot be scientifically defined , what you are doing is not a science. So, when freemarket economists say that a certain regulation will restrict freedom in a certain market if introduced, they are expressing a political opinion that they reject the rights defended by the proposed law. The ideological cloak is to pretend that their politics is not really political, but rather is an objective economic truth. contd...
@TreeLuvBurdpu (part 6) However, free market economists are as politically motivated as their opponents. From Ha Joon Chang, 23 things they don't tell you about capitalism, thing 1.
(2/2) Ayn Rand had little conception of reality. She called Altruists cannibals. Well, scientific studies have shown that Altruism is hard-wired into the primitive part of our brain and is not even a higher function with which we have to "suppress" our "primitive" and "innate" selfishness. Just look up Altruism on wikipedia and you'll find the scientific study on the neurological basis for altruism.
How particles behave is not related to economics, Rand's work was based on observable phenomena on that same level. Furthermore, it has been said neurology and psychology are the same "science" although psychology has been debunked and can never be a science. See: Manufacturing Victims by Tana Dineen, and Hans Strupp's recent study out of Vanderbilt University. Also see anything by Dr. Micheal Savage on the topic of brain function.
You've not made an argument in this video against Rand. Your one of those people who would rather talk about the concretes, sacrifices the principles, the generalizations, the conceptual and thus the mind for what ever whim of the moment concrete. You'd rather bicker over concretes then hold a consistent principled philosophical approach to reality. It is the very function of the mind that your against Mr. JohnWIlliams. Yes Rand is an idealist, yes she is an extremist, so are you.
So, I believe that any big infrastructural/service endeavour necessarily has to be the responsibility of the government. We don't need really need mass industrial production of shoes. It would promote diversity and creativity to let many thousands of families or co-ops start their own shoemaking businesses, imagine the choice we could have.
I personally am not opposed to small family businesses like bakeries, taylors, etc. or to co-ops. I.e., the owners of the business also have to be its workers. The problem comes when these businesses with the help of the government (legal privileges) are able to turn into the giant behemoths we know as corporations today. If they are very big, they inevitably amass enough power to influence government policy in a big way, regardless of whether they manufacture shoes or tanks.
(3/3) However, when volunteers generously placed their interests of others before their own by making charitable donations, another brain circuit was selectively activated: the subgenual cortex/septal region. These structures are intimately related to social attachment and bonding in other species. Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.
(2/3) In their research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA in October, 2006,[4] they showed that both pure monetary rewards and charitable donations activated the mesolimbic reward pathway, a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food and sex.
(1/3) I found the following nugget under Altruism at Wikipedia: Jorge Moll and Jordan Grafman, neuroscientists at the National Institutes of Health and LABS-D'Or Hospital Network (J.M.) provided the first evidence for the neural bases of altruistic giving in normal healthy volunteers, using functional magnetic resonance imaging.
just stopped you on shoes mate. All industry must be collectively owned by the masses and controlled viz the workers democratic dictatorship. You cannot have these capitalist exploitors usurping the role of the state.
The cappies want control in order to exploit workers and make a profit from them, that's why the cappies favour privatization.
That same lame mentality of anarcho-free market fascism is the very reason we are now experiencing the Great Collapse of Capitalism
If you use newspeak like this, then yes you can prove that capitalism is exploitative. I can do the same with socialism though.
"is the very reason we are now experiencing the Great Collapse of Capitalism"
Capitalism can't collapse permanently as private property is a priori. Even a socialist society has private property. It is just all owned by the government. It will mismanage it to the point where it collapses and then regular capitalism will reemerge.
I do not think Marxism is the answer. I still see corporations filling a valuable role in society, although a far less powerful one. I think labor needs to organize at least as well as the wealthy capitalists have. I call for more transparency in all social organizations, government, corporations, unions, churches, you name it.
Thank you, yes unions not Marxists are the way to go if you want to even the playing field. I may not like the behavior of unions all the time but at least they play by market rules.
Good video John.Yes of course your right.That Ayn Rand was a right wing extremist and the Objectevist movement just another atempt to hide egoistic calculation behind a Philosophical curtain.Keep up your good work,and don´t let the evil comments from such persons
"And that Friedman stood on that murders side will never be forgotten by history. "
I'm afraid that history already has forgotten it because "it" is not as you portray it. Milton Friedmann did not condone Pinochet's tyranny. He was explicit on this. He merely made a bad situation better. Just because you support a bad guy over a worse guy doesn't mean you like the bad guy.
you rock dude. private industry will cook their own mothers if it fits a bottom line. (sarcasm)
bust/boom capitalism has outlasted it's usefulness. there needs to be a collective universal effort with this planets future. that includes man limiting man's own ability to destroy itself by destroying it's resources..
no, actually the PNAC is defunct btw. it's no more for good reason.
Reaganomics and the Reagan muppets Bush/Cheney kind of sealed that movements fate.
the problem with PNAC's pathetic doctrine is it's unilateral stupidity, you see where that got us in Iraq, right?! it's the neo-wrong not knowing how to be a neighbor in the world community, and trying to bully everyone. and you see where that got us in terms of America's lowest approval rating in our history?! right?
Mr Cropper you should teach 8-12 kids Ayn Rand?Are they adaption ability in level with her "Philosophy"?Ayn Rand was Russian mystical in the worst sense of the word,passed through the Age of Reason or Enlightenment in the way that Western Europe did.Ayn Rand herself was not only quick on the draw in response to anything that even had the superficial appearance of irrationalism,a odd kind of scientific conservatism,a suspicion of novelty,anything more recent than the work of Sir Isaac Newton
The only thing you know for sure about your life is that it is POSSIBLE. You don't know how it came to be, except in an abstract sense through science. A speck of dust is not absolute, it is simply the statistics of very large numbers. Our existence in this universe is riddled with uncertainty.
You can see, in his voice and facial expressions, around 5:50, he suddenly realizes that there is a selfish basis for everything. His own words make him see, for a moment, that there is no conflict of interest between fully-rational, fully-selfish people (a redundancy).
But, he's making a video "refuting" that... so he just goes on talking. He only repeats his point that altruism is "baked in", but he thinks (hopes) that the audience didn't realize what he did for a split second.
Well, excuse me for pausing to think about how to express the adjunct thought. While there may be a selfish basis for everything on an evolutionary level, the human brain is designed to have some level of altruism. I go on further to state that this altruism is necessary for social cohesion. Our genes are ruthlessly selfish, but our minds are not.
I won't deny that hueristics exist, and that it's everything's natural tendency to disintegrate. But if our genes are "ruthlessly selfish", then in order to achieve harmony and optimal enjoyment out of life, shouldn't our minds be aswell?
Certainly it's easy to mistake a selfish motivation for an altruistic one, and even to sucessfully (in the short term) operate upon that notion, but eventually, as life becomes more and more sophisticated (and rewarding), its necessarily to understand it.
Our minds achieve enlightened self interest when it comes to social cohesion in many cases without our having to put much thought into it. We are simply altruistic in a great many cases and value the opinions of others.
1: The application of principles to reality: You're taking two different principles and dismissing them as "extreme" stances. To the contrary, principles are what allow us to see reality more clearly in complicated circumstances. Pragmatic principle-chuckers say that reality is too complicated to fully understand, and then they throw out their means to do so. Higher levels of abstraction help us see the forest for the trees... (cont.)
(cont.) ... and if you lose those principles, there's no way to act according to the big picture.
2. Altruism and selfishness don't mean what you're taking them to mean. Giving to charity is altruistic if you're doing it as a duty, out of guilt or as atonement for being better off than someone else -- and it is selfish if it is serving your own values, if it serves to increase the value you get out of life. Altruism means other-ism, as in altr- (like 'alternate' or 'alter-ego') -ism.
(cont. again) Making other people the center of one's goals and actions is altruistic, even if the person never gives to charity, and being selfish means making oneself and one's own values the only aim of one's life, even if the person gives to charity. Charity is a non-issue. Caring about other specific people in a genuine way is not altruistic, but it cannot be a duty or be based on non-values.
(cont. one last time) Summing up, your criticisms are based on not fully grokking what Rand is getting at. It's a lot of material to absorb, so nothing wrong with that. If you're interested, I'd recommend starting with googling "ayn rand lexicon principles" (no quotes) for info on why acting on principle is not extremism.
Now you have demonstrated that kind of extremism with your definition of altruism being "Making other people the center of one's goals and actions" by implying that it is an all or nothing proposition. It is possible to make other people the center of INDIVIDUAL goals or actions. This is how human behavior works, not all or nothing.
I am using the semantics where the difference between the two is intent, not result. While some level of altruistic intent may or may NOT serve your selfish interests, it is the intent that makes the gesture or behavior altruistic or selfish. Humans do not calculate this beforehand, it is very much unconscious.
How about the principle the Rand just hates that people have no direct objective experience, but only get clues about objective reality through subjective experience? She hates Kant for pointing that out. I find a concept of objective reality useful and the methods for determining the nature of that objective reality through science useful. I also find the concept of enlightened self interest useful but only on an evolutionary level. I do not have to reject Kant in order to do that.
Of course the only choices aren't pure collectivistic totalitarian dictatorship versus pure individualistic laissez faire capitalism. The alternative, one of them anyway, is what we have today: the ugly and unjust spectacle of a "mixed economy"; a mixed bag; some altruism and some collectivism mixed with some individualism and some egoism. Some corruption mixed with some morality. You can have poison with your food, if choose. Rand never said otherwise.
You don't need to attack altruism to argue against collectivism. Sharing others people's money is not altruism. People like to pretend it is because they don't want to be truly altruistic and share there own, but there is not necessary dichotomy between altruism and individualism. One can simply choose to individually give ONES OWN (emphasis on OWN here if there are socialists reading this) money in an altruistic way.
Collectivism means the subjugation of the individual to a group. Ethnic groups, racial groups, class groups, it doesn't matter. It's a denial of the primacy of the individual. Altruism is just other'ism; a person exists to serve others. They are entirely compatible.
The issue is whether you do or do not have the right to exist without giving other people money.
"It's a denial of the primacy of the individual. Altruism is just other'ism; a person exists to serve others. They are entirely compatible."
Well there's a subtle catch here which I think is going unnoticed. Altruism is supposed to be individually motivated. Collectivism is: "we are going to force others or each other to serve each other" by contrast altruism or at least my conception of it is "I will go personally help someone because I want to." By definition you can't force altruism.
I think collectivism can only be rationalized through enlightened self interest. For example, it can be argued that the swine flu originated due to NAFTA encouraging non compliant swine farms to move the Mexico where they had no sanitation standards.
"I think collectivism can only be rationalized through enlightened self interest"
Well yes, I would agree with you here. We make roads and public libraries for this purpose. Or in the case of NAFTA and the swine flu, better FDA standards on imports and better collective border security would serve our national self-interest.
Just for reference I don't like people who want to get rid of all government either. We have to maintain the public good be that good defined selfishly or altruistically.
The key to arguing for or against specific acts of altruism is from enlightened self interest. If only a limited number of altruistic members of society decide to devote resources to a cause, then:
1) Other individuals in the position to help but don't will still benefit (they reap the positive externalities).
2) There may not be enough to actually solve the problem (It may do little or nothing to lower crime).
"The issue is whether you do or do not have the right to exist without giving other people money. "
In that case I would strongly agree with you. People certainly have a right to be selfish, and a right not to give their money away. All I'm saying is that it doesn't necessarily imply that it is wrong to be personally altruistic with your own money either.
Altruism isn't the same as redistributing someone else's money because some socialist is too selfish to share his own.
But one could argue that government is a social contract you agree to by virtue of the fact that you live here (and are not forced to). Taxes by their very definition are redistribution of wealth. The question is what you get in return. People pay taxes out of enlightened self interest, because they choose not to live in a country with no government.
Is government a social contract one agrees to by virtue of the fact that one lives in a given geographic area (and is not forced to)?
Yeah, I mean black slaves in the US south, and Jews in pre-Hitler Germany, probably had a chance to leave their respective geographic areas, so they agreed by virtue of "social contract" to be coerced.
No it is not. I say nothing about how the contract is negotiated. I would assume that it is more desirable to have some form of consensus, or at least majority, agree on what policies need to be enforced. That is what democracy is all about. I am simply making a case for taxation, not describing the whole of government.
I think what you meant to say was that they probably did NOT have the freedom to leave. In any case I wouldn't excuse unfair behavior, and certainly those are cases of unfair coercion. Rule of law is forced, but fair coercion.
"In any case I wouldn't excuse unfair behavior, and certainly those are cases of unfair coercion. Rule of law is forced, but fair coercion."
This is begging the question. Taxation, and especially progressive taxatation, is ipso facto "unfair coercion". What, to you, is "fair coercion"? To justify this preposition, you would need an entire theory of morality and justice; just asserting something to be "unfair" or fair coercion is sufficient, I suppose.
I take a more functional perspective in terms of what is fair. I am concerned with the functioning of society so therefore anything that causes dysfunction is by definition unfair. The distribution of wealth in this country is unfair as evidenced by the crash.
Ayn Rand never, ever said that someone could be completely and utterly altruistic. This is simply a gross miss-representation of her published position.
She pointed out that altruism can only ever be practiced _inconsistently_! To practice it consistently is to die and then remove all trace of you ever having existed.
TreeLuvBurdpu 8 months ago
You are a pragmatist. You waffle. You are adrift and when you see someone standing on solid ground you call them an extremist. Extreme is just a relative term. She was extreme from where you have drifted to. Rand's moral foundation does not move.
TreeLuvBurdpu 10 months ago
@TreeLuvBurdpu So unworkable nonsense based on a crazy idea without proof is better than something practical based on reality?
Wow.
So if the principle leads to fatalities then it's better to hold onto the principle than the pragmatic solution which saves lives?
Objectivism must be a mental disorder
dffykvn 8 months ago
@dffykvn "So unworkable nonsense based on a crazy idea without proof"
What do you mean 'without proof'?
"So if the principle leads to fatalities then it's better to hold onto..."
I have nothing against you abandoning your current principles if they are false or causing problems. I have everything against you promoting principle-changing on principle.
TreeLuvBurdpu 8 months ago
@TreeLuvBurdpu Argentina adopted the IMFs privatization of public resources and gutting the safety nets etc all of the ayn randian policies to let the private sector take control
It led to double digit unemployment, crappier services for much higher prices and made argentinians miserable
The guy that FOUGHT the IMF and went against the privitization crap by running the country responsibly actually beat the IMF and drastically improved peoples qualities of life
dffykvn 8 months ago
Deregulating energy gave america Enron
Privatizing californias public transit allowed the owners to destroy the entire system, its STILL fucked today
Banking deregulation led to the savings and loan scandal and more recently madoff and stanford who robbed everyone blind along with the other banking assholes
It happened in other countries too, when pinochet introduced "free market banking" to chile it led to a few guys owning the majority of banks then taking all of the money and running
dffykvn 8 months ago
@dffykvn Repealing a regulation does not gaurantee success. Some of the instances you mention were poor deregulation, most had nothing to do with deregulation.
"Banking deregulation led to the savings and loan scandal and more recently madoff and stanford who robbed everyone blind along with the other banking assholes"
It simply had nothing to do with banking deregulation. There is no way such a worldwide, persistent, and inter-industry slump could take place without central control.
TreeLuvBurdpu 8 months ago
@TreeLuvBurdpu It's called massive fraud
Opening a system to fraud and loading the agency thats supposed to be dedicated to preventing fraud with people who say they oppose regulation because it interferes with the free market GUARANTEES that the regulations don't matter because there are no cops on the beat
Having strong regulations to prevent fraud is laissez faire economics if you stack the agency with people morally opposed to regulations, investigations and shutting things down
dffykvn 8 months ago
@dffykvn "It's called massive fraud"
Are you referring to Nancy Polosi's verdict the day after the meltdown? She said it was caused by greedy people on Wall Street. When did greedy people show up on Wall Street? Someone should have told Nancy Polosi.
Funny thing is, her stated explanation of the collapse has not changed at all since the day after the collapse until now. Show has learned nothing new since then.
TreeLuvBurdpu 8 months ago
@TreeLuvBurdpu What the crap are you talking about
You mean "Sir" Alan Stanford that destroyed the nation of Antigua wasn't greedy?
Madoff wasn't greedy..
Madoff, the guy that ripped off THE FUCKING HOLOCAUST MUSEUM wasn't greedy?
ALL OF THE PEOPLE RESPONSIBLE ARE GREEDY WALL STREETERS AND BANKERS
How the hell was Pelosi wrong?
Please tell me
How exactly was she wrong when she said greedy wall streeters caused this shitstorm?
Then who was behind it? The fucking mennonites?
dffykvn 8 months ago
@dffykvn
Madoff did not cause or trigger the world-wide financial meltdown.
TreeLuvBurdpu 8 months ago
@TreeLuvBurdpu Really?!? Duh
He was just one of the scam artists
Bank of America, Lehman, Goldman Sachs, "Sir" Allen Stanford
They all used the climate of deregulation to their advantage to run financial scams
It's LEGAL for goldman to bet against deals they make
Thank you so much for repealing Glass Steagal Mr Gramm...you really did usher in a new era of financial innovation and creative accounting
dffykvn 8 months ago
Some things work better as private enterprises, Gov't run shoe factories would never beat americas shoe industry Clothes? Ditto Cars? Of course!
Health care? We spend the most per person because we don't nip easily prevented diseases in the bud, the europeans all get routine checkups that most americans don't get
We spend more per person, cover less people and have worse health than other countries with pure public or public as a base with free market options they can pay for
dffykvn 8 months ago
Theres an overwhelming amount of evidence somethings work best as purely private, I don't find that objectionable
But when its a debate of whether you want to gut a public institution and replace it with a private one, if the private one gives worse services/outcomes/whatever for a higher price and doesn't serve as many people while all of the money goes to a few people who get rich off of it then there's no way in hell that keeping it private should be a defensible position
dffykvn 8 months ago
Comment removed
dffykvn 8 months ago
"I have nothing against you abandoning your current principles if they are false or causing problems. I have everything against you promoting principle-changing on principle
I'm against most rigid positions
This world isn't black and white and the black and white objectivist dichotomy doesnt work with the planet colored in many shades of grey
If the ideology is inflexible and demands consistency even if it costs human life then it should be ignored
Ps if you reply make it to this post
dffykvn 8 months ago
@dffykvn "I'm against most rigid positions".
So you are in favor of some rigid positions?
"This world isn't black and white and [...] colored in many shades of grey."
You need black _and_ white to make grey.
TreeLuvBurdpu 8 months ago
@TreeLuvBurdpu -_-
I'm in favor of some rigid positions where I'll hold my ground unless I can be proven wrong
I'm rigidly in favor of keeping creative enterprises private
Government made music? Government manufactured art? Government made tv shows? FUCK NO!
Governmnt made shoes? Government made cars? FUCK NO!!!
I have that rigid position because ALL of the evidence shows that that positions correct
Countries where the govt controlled those industries were DISASTERS
dffykvn 8 months ago
@dffykvn "I'm in favor of some rigid positions where I'll hold my ground unless I can be proven wrong."
So Rand's "extremism" is the result of her not being proven wrong? Is that what you are saying?
You said she is an extremist because she is inflexible. You are inflexible, but only in areas where you can't be proven wrong. So she is an extremist because she is more inflexible than you, probably because she can't be proven wrong as often as it happens for you to be proven wrong. You're jealo
TreeLuvBurdpu 8 months ago
Part 1 Are you being willfully ignorant?
She had extremist views because they were completely inflexible and she wouldn't care about evidence that she's wrong
But lets put it in the context of an idiot who takes ayn seriously
I gave you a list of places where ayns policies were disasters and destroyed countless lives/livelihoods to make a handful hideously rich
The difference between me and you is that I'm open to being proven wrong
Unfortunately for you evidence is on my side
dffykvn 8 months ago
@dffykvn "hideously rich" This is precisely the premise by which all of your arguments sprout from. You think that making money is not virtuous and that serving others is the moral ideal.
I think that making money is virtuous (productivity). Productivity stems from FREELY using your own mind to make decisions. Therefore one has a right to make their own decisions regarding their own business regardless of the safety of whatever processes they are going through. AS LONG AS ONE IS IN ...
AlexanderEBott 8 months ago
@dffykvn AGREEMENT WITH THEIR EMPLOYEES (THEY KNOW WHAT YOU KNOW), ONE CAN DO THESE PROCESSES. Lying about what processes one has to go through, and the environment you will be working in is criminally punishable, even if nobody gets hurt. The government's job is not responsible for making your own decisions whether as a businessman or an employee. It is merely responsible for prosecuting people who initiate force (lie, cheat, steal, murder, etc.).
AlexanderEBott 8 months ago
You don't know how things work in the real world
And yes hideously rich
Madoff and the others became hideously rich by creating clever ponzi schemes
Madoff robbed the fucking holocaust museum
Yes he made the money using his ingenuity
I guess that'd make him a hero in your insane ass backwards society
I guess the guys that made the ponzi scheme that looted most of the chilean banks deserved to have all of that money because of their ingenious scam
You want a con artist Mecca
dffykvn 8 months ago
@dffykvn Can you read? I have never said that lying your way to riches is moral. Get over yourself and whatever preconception you have of me or the philosophy I advocate. Read about it before making such ridiculous claims. Think about the connections your trying to make
"Yes he made the money using his ingenuity. I guess that'd make him a hero in your insane ass backwards society."
Come on!!!
I do not want a con artist Mecca, the more apt description of yours though is a paranoid Mecca.
AlexanderEBott 8 months ago
You obviously dont know a thing about ayn and objectivist bullshit
If Madoff pursued his "enlightened self interest" by robbing The Holocaust Museum blind then that bitch ayn would've approved of it
Your ideas have failed miserably every ****ing time they're implemented
I can show you real world examples where my ideas have succeeded in making peoples lives better
You have a horrific record of failure while I have a list of success after success, so do I win?
dffykvn 8 months ago
@dffykvn "You obviously dont know a thing about ayn and objectivist bullshit"
I have actually written a whole research paper on the fountainhead. And I have read most of her non-fiction as well as Leonard Peikoff's Ominous Parallels. So sure, I don't know a thing.
This last post of yours (and building up from previous posts) have been classic to bordering insane strawman arguments. You have completely misrepresented Ayn Rand's philosophy. That is grounds alone for losing this argument. End.
AlexanderEBott 8 months ago
Did you research Ayns admiration of Hickman?
She loved Hickman for his self interest...you know how he murdered that girl
She was crazy because of her sheer admiration of sociopaths
Also she was a pretty shitty writer
Her characters weren't realistic and didn't seem human
Also a SEVENTY PAGE monologue? seriously?
And finally the entire book was about how the poor are horrible for wanting a free lunch...and wasn't that one guys nvention an infinte energy "free lunch" machine?
dffykvn 8 months ago
I have a rigid position against full banking deregulation because of the examples set by Chile, Argentina and Iceland
All of the evidence has shown that fully deregulating banking and handing over public banks to private institutions leads to MASSIVE fraud and corruption
Governments who exact totalitarian control over money are disasters too
The best system is private banks with agencies to investigate and jail the wannabe madoffs and stanfords and rules to prevent fraud + protect customers
dffykvn 8 months ago
@TreeLuvBurdpu ps "you need black AND white to make grey" isn't clever
Thats literally what I said, the world isn't strictly black and white
While one position might work best on one thing another one might be the right approach somewhere else
Saying everything HAS to be this way no matter what while ignoring all of the other times that the policies failed with catastrophic consequences leads to disaster until the policies abandoned or ammended
dffykvn 8 months ago
First I like to thank you for thinking. We need more people to think. You put yourself out here and allow the world to shape your thinking, the confession within. Clearly you are unsure of your position. The altruistic position you credit to evolution is only true for family values. Rand did not experience this, thus she is inexperienced showing it. The trouble is not objective philosophy, the trouble is the idea that men need a leader (a daddy) to care for them once they are adults.
filmaker04 10 months ago
@filmaker04 All men need others in order to remain sane. One of the worst and most damaging psychological methods of torture is solitary confinement. We are not talking about a caretaker, we are talking about peers - much like the scientific community is a network of peers. The ways in which a degree of altruism is ingrained into our nature is easily shown through MRI and other scans that have identified where altruism takes place in normal human beings, such as mirror neurons.
j0hnwi11iams 10 months ago
Which will you choose? If you decide that man does have a right to his own life, you will come to the conclusion that to uphold any sort of policy that abrogates his decisions by the collective as an utter contempt to such a right. If you accept altruism, man is no longer protected, he can be discarded if any one deems it necessary. Do you think that would be a surprise? He has no rights, right?
AlexanderEBott 10 months ago
@AlexanderEBott There are rights and then there are privileges. Property is an artifice supported by a monopolistic police state. I am of the opinion that there are two types of property, resources and labor. Man is entitled and has the right to the fruits of his labor, but owning resources is a privilege. I fully support civil rights, but the libertarian view of property rights is incomplete and extreme.
j0hnwi11iams 10 months ago
Who's economy, who's environment? You speak of these abstractions as if they are concretes. The economy, for example, is a concept used to refer to individuals producing goods in a particular geographic region.
Ayn Rand was an extremist. At a political level she offered you a choice. Either acknowledge man's inalienable right to his own life, or accept the altruistic demands that he sacrifice it on whatever scale it is asked of him at a given time.
AlexanderEBott 10 months ago
@AlexanderEBott For a cult that rejects all philosophical works after Aristotle, I can say that objectivism does not represent enlightened self interest. That is because it is not enlightened. Evolution has provided man with an instinct that is altruistic to a degree and science is discovering the extent to which enlightened self interest goes beyond calculating the effect of every decision on an individual's net worth. Evolution has been at it far longer than objectivists.
j0hnwi11iams 10 months ago
@j0hnwi11iams Have you read any of the non-fiction written by her or Leonard Peikoff? What does "enlightened self interest" mean? Stop with the ad hominem attacks (cult). Altruism by definition is a conscious system by which one surrenders values for little or nothing in return. It cannot be evolutionary.
In regard to rights: You are a sick person if you believe that the right to one's own property, meaning the right to what one has produced, is merely a privilege.
AlexanderEBott 10 months ago
As soon as someone develops a piece of land, resource, etc., he has created a value. Either something that he will personally enjoy directly. Or something that he will trade with other men.
If I create something it is mine. Can you understand that concept, "MINE". Who are you or anyone else to say what I can do with what I create. Do you own me?!? Am I your slave via the state?!? Take a reality check here with regard to the statements you are making.
AlexanderEBott 10 months ago
But what if the choice is what to do with something he owns that violates another mans right to HIS life (horribly unsafe working conditions that the government should come in and fix)
Does an individual have an inalienable right to do what he wants with his life even if thats taking the life of another to save a little bit of money (methane vent in wrong direction)?
Why shouldn't he be inconvenienced if it keeps disasters and deaths from occuring (bp rigs shut down, massey mines closed)
dffykvn 8 months ago
@dffykvn Thank you for the curiosity.
Danger is involved in many fields of production. The principle that should be applied to this question is not whether man has a right to safe working conditions, but whether he has a right to enter into non-coerced contractual relationships. He does. If men are unwilling to work in certain conditions, they don't have to. That does not mean that the other end of production (business owner) must comply with their demands.
AlexanderEBott 8 months ago
@AlexanderEBott Thats why libertarianism is just fine and dandy on paper
But in reality the worker would go to work not KNOWING that the methane vents in the wrong direction or his workplace is a deathtrap, next thing you know he's flash fried
When someone breaks the terms of a contract he's brought into court and sued so the victim of the broken contract can be made whole
You can't "make whole" a guy that had his skin muscle and fat burnt off of his bones or a guy whos buried alive
dffykvn 8 months ago
@dffykvn I am not a libertarian. I am an Objectivist.
This is what these conversations always develop into. What if's. First, let me ask you this. Can you go to the federal government and sue them for not checking "proper" regulations? I don't think so.
The responsibility rests within your hands whether you think your life is safe enough. If someone lies or cheats you of what you have come to agreement with, then the full wait of the law will come down on them criminally.
AlexanderEBott 8 months ago
@AlexanderEBott That doesn't do you any good when you're dead
The people that need to work to eat would go to work not knowing that their workplace is either filled with health hazards or a death trap
Since they're poor they can't afford a lawyer and any lawyer that works for future pay on the winnings would go broke before the business would
Can you sue the federal government? I'm pretty sure you can, I'm not a lawyer but I'm pretty certain in a good number of circumstances you can
dffykvn 8 months ago
@AlexanderEBott Noone should have that much freedom
The last time powerful people had that much freedom there was a war and the unfettered elites that followed the older word for objectivism "The divine right of kings" were forced to sign the Magna Carta
I want there to be environmental laws, because a few thousand dollars in settlement money won't do me any good when I have a dozen forms of cancer and illnesses from crap that gets dumped that gets into my water and food
dffykvn 8 months ago
@AlexanderEBott And What if questions are necessary
If your ideology has no solutions for things that happen in the real world then it's worthless
The idea of freedom of contract sounds wonderful...until you realize that all of the power would be in the hands of the employer
It would revert society back to the days of aristocracy where people with money got to abuse people without because of the unfair terms they had to live under and the only other option was starving
dffykvn 8 months ago
The reason why massey mines are death traps is because theyve coopted the regulatory agencies and brainwashed idiot voters with objectivist/ayn ran/ libertarian crap
The agencies don't want to "oppress the wonderful capitalist free market" by forcing him to make his mines safe
Because apparently the lives and health of his workers are worth a lot less than the free market religious dogma
BP spill wouldn't have happened if MMS didn't have free market fundamentalists appointing "deregulators"
dffykvn 8 months ago
When the free market idiots privatized californias public transportation, they made the transit system completely FUBAR, when the objectivists got their hands on the energy industry and deregulated it we got Enron
When ayn rand cultists got their wishes and deregulated banks we got the savings and loan scandal, further deregulation? Madoff Staford and the other evil people caused Great Depression 2
But if you really wanna see objectivism run amok look at deregulated chile under pinochet
dffykvn 8 months ago
@AlexanderEBott Every time things get deregulated a few people make profits on their little scams then things go kablooey
Chiles deregulated banking system was bankrupted by a massive ponzi scheme (where else has that happened)
Apparently trusting people not to defraud a nation by removing the force of law/regulation with the honor system has never worked
Iceland privatized its banks, the banks ripped iceland off, they're now public and recovering
Same with argentina
dffykvn 8 months ago
@AlexanderEBott If protecting the unfettered freedom of a few people causes hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions or even a hundred million to be miserable then they shouldn't HAVE that kind of freedom
The freedom to run scams and con people using legalese or preying on their impoverished condition isn't a freedom that should be defended
Some freedoms aren't necessary and are inherently destructive so people SHOULDN'T have them
dffykvn 8 months ago
@dffykvn All these "dangerous" freedoms you think should be prohibited comes down to one thing, the freedom to think (and consequently the freedom to act on that thought). You are asking man to live contra his nature as a rational being (a thinking being). You want him to submit the individual to anyone's whims, so long as a majority agrees, and therefore the largest force can be applied. If someone as a worker sincerely thinks their job should be run this way or that, then think about...
AlexanderEBott 8 months ago
@dffykvn then they should THINK about how they can convince whomever to agree with them. They do not have a right to that job, and they certainly do not have a right to force others into contractual agreements they don't want to be in. The only thing else to discuss is the case of fraud, and that is simple, courts. To presume a business owner/manager is guilty before he "does" something are not what laws are supposed to be. We do not presume murder. Therefore regulations are wrong.
AlexanderEBott 8 months ago
@AlexanderEBott Noone should have absolute freedom
People should have the freedom to do things FOR people not freedom to do things TO people
The freedom you're talking about is a negative freedom where you give it to one group creating an abusive situation with another
Not every miner has an engineering degree, they won't be able to eye ball whether or not they're working in a death trap
If they sign up as a woker to mine and the owner (massey) saved a few hundred bucks by not cha...
dffykvn 8 months ago
@dffykvn "People should have the freedom to do things FOR people not freedom to do things TO people"
This is the premise by which your whole argument rests. Ethics to you is non-selfish. You think that freedom is okay as long as it benefits the most people.
I think it was Edward Cline who said, "Freedom is not a precursor to rationality, rather it is rationality (the virtue of reasoning) that is the basis for the need of freedom". It all comes back to fundamentals.
AlexanderEBott 8 months ago
You fundamentally think man is incapable of thinking for himself, and that he should therefore be shielded from necessary thought processes.
I disagree. Man is capable of thinking for himself, should be allowed to, and should consequently be able to enter into contractual agreements that he deems are in his own self-interest. Anything else is a tyranny over the mind, and will eventually dissolve into slavery.
AlexanderEBott 8 months ago
You seem to think it's ok to leave out critical information in contracts
An employer can make his workplace a death trap, and if his workers who SHOULD have a reasonable expectation of safety don't have degrees in egineering to spot how it's a deathtrap work there then they deserve to die, thats insane
Youre fighting for the freedom to con people and rip em off because if you aren't psychic and some predator decides to fuck you over or kill you you deserved it and dont deserve protection
dffykvn 8 months ago
@dffykvn When did I say it is okay for businesses to lie? Come on. I hope you can do better than this.
I never have said they deserve to die. All I am saying is that it is not the government's responsibility to guide people's thinking.
AlexanderEBott 8 months ago
Theres a difference between a lie and leaving out CRITICAL info
If I go to work I should be able to assume it isnt a poorly maintained death trap
You said the government shouldn't get involved to make sure the mines safe, doesn't poison or kill the workers or destroy the environment
In other words you don't want them to be able to close down death traps that can kill workers or the environment
You didn't say they deserved to die, you said the government shouldn't keep them from dying
dffykvn 8 months ago
You seem to also think thats its fine and dandy to fuck up the environment and it's morally wrong to use the government to stop that from happening
"Well I could interfere in the "free murkhet and keep the coast and hundreds of thousands of jobs and livelihoods from being destroyed with the gulfs ecology...but that'd be interfering in the free market which is WRONG!"
No matter how horrific the consequences and how easily preventable it is, people should suffer for a powerful guys freedumb
dffykvn 8 months ago
@dffykvn Who's environment? Nobody owns "the environment". That argument is squashed.
I am not saying anyone should suffer. You just assume people will. Have you paid any attention to what I have been saying. I am arguing for freedom based on the necessities for the human mind to function properly. Read some Ayn Rand, and then come back to me.
Why did you spell freedom and market wrong?
AlexanderEBott 8 months ago
Noone can own the environment = EXACTLY MY POINT!
Freedumb=The freedom to do stupid shit to make a few bucks that winds up killing a lot of people
I dislike ayns view of the world, its contrary to human nature and how human society progressed, thrived and continues to survive
The owners of the bp rig felt that it was in their best interest not to keep it well maintained. The free marketeers wouldn't shut it down
Thanks to the miracle of the free market the gulf ecosystem was decimated
dffykvn 8 months ago
@AlexanderEBott by not changing the direction the methanes vented, saves a few hundred not making sure this measure is in place or that one then the horrible condition of the mine isnt something the miners sign up for
They're never explicitly told "you're signing up to work in a death trap" they have a reasonable expectation of a safe workplace
Your ideology takes all responsibility away from the owner who has the greatest capacity to fix things or the government which has the greatest...
dffykvn 8 months ago
@AlexanderEBott greatest ability to protect the workers and environment and puts it in the hands of the workers who will work ignorant of how deadly their conditions truly are until the mines caving in on their heads
If somethings someones property fine, but they SHOULDN'T have the FREEDOM to do things on THEIR PROPERTY that could kill the locals, poison them or destroy the environment for generations
Noone should have that kind of unchecked power, the consequences of not stepping in are..
dffykvn 8 months ago
@AlexanderEBott Horrific (BP, massey mines, mountaintop removal which poisons people living nearby)
Your ideology is beautiful on paper
But regulation (when properly enforced by people WILLING to do their job) PREVENTS the horrific fuckup that destroys the land for generations/poisons the locals/kills workers/all of the above
Sorry for the caps I added them to emphasize words I thought were important
Noone with that much power should have it without oversight or conditions
dffykvn 8 months ago
@AlexanderEBott ps if you reply to a post please reply to this one :P
dffykvn 8 months ago
Standing in the middle of the road generally results in an accident which ends badly for those who choose this position!
natesgrandma 10 months ago
This person is just one of many who is very mistaken, and if afraid because he was taught to be afraid. He is mixing up socialism with what man does best as a community.
He couldn't be more wrong.
MrPaulK1 10 months ago
You should read her essay "Extremism: or the Art of Smearing".
SomeUsefulIdiot 11 months ago
This has been flagged as spam show
You've not made an argument in this video against Rand. Your one of those people who would rather talk about the concretes, sacrifices the principles, the generalizations, the conceptual and thus the mind for what ever whim of the moment concrete. You'd rather bicker over concretes then hold a consistent principled philosophical approach to reality. It is the very function of the mind that your against Mr. JohnWIlliams. Yes Rand is an idealist, yes she is an extremist, so are you.
zeddicus12 1 year ago
So your "entity to protect public interest" you are saying this entity should be able to use violence to further the "public good" that's what you're saying?
XanatharEye 2 years ago
Hi Again:
Part II:
I also worked for DEC (after IBM).
Ayn Rand is not the first to succeed by telling the elites what they want to hear. Rand was reiterating Herbert Spenser's idea of Social Darwinism. Spenser was also hailed by the Robber Barons of his day.
Live & Be Well / Mike Hogan
radiohogan 2 years ago 2
Hello John:
Part I:
Zsylvana suggested I view your video. I gave it 5 stars. If I understand you, you are a pragmatist who judges ideas & institutions based on what works best in a given instance. Pragmatism is about using the reality (ideas, institutions, etc.) that has the best consequences in that case.
Americans are unfamiliar with European societies and who they function. There are choices.
All the Best / Mike Hogan
radiohogan 2 years ago 2
'By that standard any and all governments have a coercive element. It's the idea of people being "under" the law. Contracts are just an extension of that. ' The political economic system of capitalism creates the conditions that make working for a capitalist one of the few options open.
There is freedom to contract, but the contract enables the capitalist to exploit workers. This aspect of the contractual relationship is almost unavoidable. This is what you support - exploitation
Guevaristas 2 years ago
"exclusive ownership of property, which, in itself, is un-democratic."
'So? That's probably because unrestricted democracy is a bad thing. You need an un-democratic element to assert rights over consensus.'
So then, you will not mind when we communists tell you that all industry and property is to collectivly owned and operated? Do not worry, it's just an "undemocratic element" lol.
Not every one can exercise their full democratic rights afterall.
Guevaristas 2 years ago 2
"nd property is to collectivly owned and operated? Do not worry, it's just an "undemocratic element" lol."
No, that's democracy gone to its final conclusion. It's what we call an "illiberal democracy."
Remember French democracy was like this as well, and it too led to dictatorship.
JohananRaatz 2 years ago
'Who says they anyone is today? Are they enslaving these citizens without contracts against their will or are they operating by the rules of the free market and letting people enter into contracts freely?'
There's a coersive element. The worker does not own the means of production, they therefore must enter a contract with a capitalist. The decision to contract comes not entirely from their own free will. Instead, it derives from the necessity to survive.
Guevaristas 2 years ago 2
"There's a coersive element."
Duh, that's objective notions of rights come with absolute standards for the basis of laws.
By that standard any and all governments have a coercive element. It's the idea of people being "under" the law. Contracts are just an extension of that.
JohananRaatz 2 years ago
Rand's definition of altruism is different from the one you're using.
To clarify a bit, I don't think the dichotomies she presents are false. I don't think she presents either free market or socialism. She presents free market or not free market.
She presents: either live only for yourself or not only for yourself-- which is different than live only for yourself or only for others. Weren't the founding fathers extreme? weren't they radicals in their time?
Chrisnoscrub047 2 years ago
It seems that commentators get a thumbs down on this video, not if they curse or spam, but if they even open their mouth to express an opposing viewpoint.
And they say objectivism is dogmatic! Haha!
CommodoreV 2 years ago
i think you're just lovely...I've enjoyed your videoblogs,but...i need to disagree that human nature assumes destruction or disuse if we don't own it directly.Personally, I can attest not only to personal experience, i.e., I adore other humans and always seek out ways to support their expression in whatever form. Additionally, it is no longer just an assumption to know that we ARE all as you put it hardwired to be neurologically healthier when we are in love with eachother and not self seeking.
qiqeeprana 2 years ago 2
Also, why is charity not selfish? Charity is absolutely selfish! Who does not WANT to live in a benevolent world? We are all connected and we all live in this world together. Everyone wants to live peacefully and benevolently.
Reciprocal altruism, what you are describing, is not altruism at all. Altruism is sacrificing a value for a dis-value. This absolutely does not happen in nature, where all an organism has is its life.
CommodoreV 2 years ago
On moral evaluations and decision making she has this to say:
"You might say, as many people do, that it is not easy always to act on abstract principles. No, it is not easy. But how much harder is it, to have to act on them without knowing what they are?"
90% of rational processing is sub-conscious.That is a result of evolution, it is intended to free up space for conscious thought and decision making so a human being can reason- and survive.
CommodoreV 2 years ago
I'm sure you understand that you are a pragmatist. Ayn Rand had much to say on pragmatism that I think you should take a look at. Here's a quote by her:
"Concrete problems cannot even be grasped, let alone judged or solved, without reference to abstract principles.
Your defense and rejection of capitalism is on a purely pragmatic level. Man must have firm principles. Even the decision not to hold principles is a principle. The only choice is what principles we adopt.
CommodoreV 2 years ago
"abstract principles"
hah hah he he he hah hah, you've been had! Yeah, baby, go abstract yourself into life...hah hah he he
qiqeeprana 2 years ago
qiqeeprana, I'm not sure what you mean by this.
CommodoreV 2 years ago
'I do not think Marxism is the answer. I still see corporations filling a valuable role in society, although a far less powerful one.'
They do fill a valuable role-for themselves, mainly.
State run industries, arguably, have more job security. And, if they face economic problems, the state can assist, bail them out. Thats sounds preferable to bailing out a "private" company with your taxes right? This way, at least we all have a stake in all land and industry.
Guevaristas 2 years ago 2
fuck environment, fuck the entity the leviathan that will cheat you. You think the entity cares about you? man you are a silly fool
444DeanMachine 2 years ago
It is not an all or nothing proposition.
j0hnwi11iams 2 years ago
that's not what I'm getting at but no big collective gov. could actually hold your hand and care. The community doesn't care what your family is going through, whether you starve or flourish. It is up to the individual. I know that the dichotomy that Rand presents is goofy between altruism and individuality, but in essence she was right. Be selective of what you take from every philosopher, I have a Nietzsche pic he was rad, but I'm not like devoted lol
444DeanMachine 2 years ago
contractual agreements can be negotiated between employees and capitalists.
Also, there is statute, in new zealand, the Employment Relations Act
But the fact still remains that you work for them, they own all of the means of production. They own that business to make a profit.
Are they in debt? Perhaps, but their debt is made less severe by the fact that the bourgeois use their workers as security. They extract a profit from their ecxploited workers to pay their company debts off.
Guevaristas 2 years ago
'Every business transaction between employer and employed is contractual. How by definition could that be exploitative?'
There exists an historic imbalance of power between the owners of the means of production and the workers. The workers are generally dispossessed of the means of production. Thus they sell themselves as a commodity to the petty bourgeois.
Also, many contracts are standard form contracts. I have just been scrutinizing one for someone.
Guevaristas 2 years ago
'If everyone owns it -no one does.'
exactly!
'They want to profit from their own property. Is that really so wrong?'
Yes, they want the right, which i see as no right, to use another citizen for their own selfish financial gain. They want exclusive ownership of property, which, in itself, is un-democratic.
answer other questions later...
Guevaristas 2 years ago
"which i see as no right, to use another citizen for their own selfish financial gain."
Who says they anyone is today? Are they enslaving these citizens without contracts against their will or are they operating by the rules of the free market and letting people enter into contracts freely?
"exclusive ownership of property, which, in itself, is un-democratic."
So? That's probably because unrestricted democracy is a bad thing. You need an un-democratic element to assert rights over consensus.
JohananRaatz 2 years ago
"Thinking" like this person demonstrates has resulted in the growing fascism we're experiencing in the U.S. today.
mdonnett1 2 years ago
Ayn Rand was an extremist in that she was extremely smart. Good luck with your little video there.
justinwlaurab 2 years ago
Einstein was also extremely smart, and he was a socialist. Having a high IQ doesn't necessarily mean that your theoretical version of reality is the correct one. Our limited understanding of reality has to be checked against empirical evidence. And if you get the wrong "inputs", it doesn't matter how powerful your "CPU" is, you are not going to get realistic answers. Consider all those brilliant economists that couldn't see the economic crisis coming, I'm sure many of them are extremely smart.
wdednam 2 years ago
Yes sometimes extremely intelligent people like Einstein as smart as they are do not have the benefit of the hindsight of history.
JohananRaatz 2 years ago
You are right. To re-phrase my statement: Rand was an extremist in that she was extremely rational (unlike smart people like Einstein who were obviously in error when it comes to politics)
Extremism isn't a criticism.
Rand had a brilliant understanding of economics and she did see it coming!
justinwlaurab 2 years ago
(1/2) It does not impress me when someone has a brilliant uderstanding of economics, especially if it's of the neoclassical variety: the invisible hand, trickle-down, etc. This brand of economics is founded on Newton's ideas (of a clockwork universe) and his mathematical formalism. We all know that Newton's ideas was disproven by Einstein and the discoverers of Quantum Mechanics.
wdednam 2 years ago 5
@wdednam Newton's ideas were valid within the range that Newton was speaking to. Newton's math was not invalidated by Einstein. Newtons formula are still used today in fields. f=ma for instance.
TreeLuvBurdpu 8 months ago
@TreeLuvBurdpu (part 1) Yes and no, Newton's physics are valid only in limiting cases, a typical feature of physics theories. So far, even quantum mechanics and gen relativity are irreconcilible. Physicists are still very actively trying to unify these two theories, so even a hard science like physics is still a work in progress. The problem with free market economyics is that it can never be a hard science like physics because the concept of freeness is not well defined.
wdednam 8 months ago
@TreeLuvBurdpu (Part 2) The boundaries of the market are ambiguous in that markets are propped up by many rules, we accept the legitimacy of certain regulations so totally that we don't see them, and hence they appear "free" to us: There ia a huge range of restrictions on what can be traded (e.g., votes, government jobs, legal decisions, university places, medicines having to be licensed to prove their safety, human trafficking). contd..
wdednam 8 months ago
@TreeLuvBurdpu (Part 3) There are also restrictions on who can participate in markets (children, licenses for professions that have significant impacts on human life such as doctors and lawyers, in many countries only companies with more than a certain amount of capital can start banks, you cannot just turn up at the stock market with a bag of shares and sell them, companies must fulfill listing requirements before they can offer their shares for trading. contd...
wdednam 8 months ago
@TreeLuvBurdpu (Part 4) Trading of shares is only conducted by licensed brokers and traders. Conditions of trade are specified too (refund policies of retailers, consumer protection, product liability, failure in delivery, loan default, zoning laws that ban commercial activities in residential areas, i.e., hawking). Price regulations (prices of loans as set by central banks through interest rates when they target inflation). These are all regulations that people take for granted.
wdednam 8 months ago
@TreeLuvBurdpu If the boundaries of what you are studying cannot be scientifically defined , what you are doing is not a science. So, when freemarket economists say that a certain regulation will restrict freedom in a certain market if introduced, they are expressing a political opinion that they reject the rights defended by the proposed law. The ideological cloak is to pretend that their politics is not really political, but rather is an objective economic truth. contd...
wdednam 8 months ago
@TreeLuvBurdpu (part 6) However, free market economists are as politically motivated as their opponents. From Ha Joon Chang, 23 things they don't tell you about capitalism, thing 1.
wdednam 8 months ago
(2/2) Ayn Rand had little conception of reality. She called Altruists cannibals. Well, scientific studies have shown that Altruism is hard-wired into the primitive part of our brain and is not even a higher function with which we have to "suppress" our "primitive" and "innate" selfishness. Just look up Altruism on wikipedia and you'll find the scientific study on the neurological basis for altruism.
wdednam 2 years ago
How particles behave is not related to economics, Rand's work was based on observable phenomena on that same level. Furthermore, it has been said neurology and psychology are the same "science" although psychology has been debunked and can never be a science. See: Manufacturing Victims by Tana Dineen, and Hans Strupp's recent study out of Vanderbilt University. Also see anything by Dr. Micheal Savage on the topic of brain function.
XanatharEye 2 years ago
So you're a fan of Rand. That explains a lot. You live in your own world of ideals that reality seldom penetrates.
j0hnwi11iams 2 years ago
Pathetic, you make a personal attack instead of attempt to argue.
XanatharEye 2 years ago
You've not made an argument in this video against Rand. Your one of those people who would rather talk about the concretes, sacrifices the principles, the generalizations, the conceptual and thus the mind for what ever whim of the moment concrete. You'd rather bicker over concretes then hold a consistent principled philosophical approach to reality. It is the very function of the mind that your against Mr. JohnWIlliams. Yes Rand is an idealist, yes she is an extremist, so are you.
zeddicus12 1 year ago
So, I believe that any big infrastructural/service endeavour necessarily has to be the responsibility of the government. We don't need really need mass industrial production of shoes. It would promote diversity and creativity to let many thousands of families or co-ops start their own shoemaking businesses, imagine the choice we could have.
wdednam 2 years ago
I personally am not opposed to small family businesses like bakeries, taylors, etc. or to co-ops. I.e., the owners of the business also have to be its workers. The problem comes when these businesses with the help of the government (legal privileges) are able to turn into the giant behemoths we know as corporations today. If they are very big, they inevitably amass enough power to influence government policy in a big way, regardless of whether they manufacture shoes or tanks.
wdednam 2 years ago
(3/3) However, when volunteers generously placed their interests of others before their own by making charitable donations, another brain circuit was selectively activated: the subgenual cortex/septal region. These structures are intimately related to social attachment and bonding in other species. Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.
wdednam 2 years ago
(2/3) In their research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA in October, 2006,[4] they showed that both pure monetary rewards and charitable donations activated the mesolimbic reward pathway, a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food and sex.
wdednam 2 years ago
(1/3) I found the following nugget under Altruism at Wikipedia: Jorge Moll and Jordan Grafman, neuroscientists at the National Institutes of Health and LABS-D'Or Hospital Network (J.M.) provided the first evidence for the neural bases of altruistic giving in normal healthy volunteers, using functional magnetic resonance imaging.
wdednam 2 years ago
just stopped you on shoes mate. All industry must be collectively owned by the masses and controlled viz the workers democratic dictatorship. You cannot have these capitalist exploitors usurping the role of the state.
The cappies want control in order to exploit workers and make a profit from them, that's why the cappies favour privatization.
That same lame mentality of anarcho-free market fascism is the very reason we are now experiencing the Great Collapse of Capitalism
Guevaristas 2 years ago 2
"capitalist exploitors"
If you use newspeak like this, then yes you can prove that capitalism is exploitative. I can do the same with socialism though.
"is the very reason we are now experiencing the Great Collapse of Capitalism"
Capitalism can't collapse permanently as private property is a priori. Even a socialist society has private property. It is just all owned by the government. It will mismanage it to the point where it collapses and then regular capitalism will reemerge.
JohananRaatz 2 years ago
"owned by the masses and controlled viz the workers democratic dictatorship."
If everyone owns it -no one does.
"The cappies want control in order to exploit workers and make a profit from them, that's why the cappies favour privatization."
They want to profit from their own property. Is that really so wrong?
Every business transaction between employer and employed is contractual. How by definition could that be exploitative?
JohananRaatz 2 years ago
I do not think Marxism is the answer. I still see corporations filling a valuable role in society, although a far less powerful one. I think labor needs to organize at least as well as the wealthy capitalists have. I call for more transparency in all social organizations, government, corporations, unions, churches, you name it.
j0hnwi11iams 2 years ago
Thank you, yes unions not Marxists are the way to go if you want to even the playing field. I may not like the behavior of unions all the time but at least they play by market rules.
JohananRaatz 2 years ago
Good video John.Yes of course your right.That Ayn Rand was a right wing extremist and the Objectevist movement just another atempt to hide egoistic calculation behind a Philosophical curtain.Keep up your good work,and don´t let the evil comments from such persons
drag your good mood down!
cjanne9 2 years ago
"And that Friedman stood on that murders side will never be forgotten by history. "
I'm afraid that history already has forgotten it because "it" is not as you portray it. Milton Friedmann did not condone Pinochet's tyranny. He was explicit on this. He merely made a bad situation better. Just because you support a bad guy over a worse guy doesn't mean you like the bad guy.
JohananRaatz 2 years ago
you rock dude. private industry will cook their own mothers if it fits a bottom line. (sarcasm)
bust/boom capitalism has outlasted it's usefulness. there needs to be a collective universal effort with this planets future. that includes man limiting man's own ability to destroy itself by destroying it's resources..
UN haters are heads stuck in the mud.
tomitstube 2 years ago 2
"UN haters are heads stuck in the mud."
Kind of like PNAC haters who are stuck on the "old" American century I presume?
JohananRaatz 2 years ago
no, actually the PNAC is defunct btw. it's no more for good reason.
Reaganomics and the Reagan muppets Bush/Cheney kind of sealed that movements fate.
the problem with PNAC's pathetic doctrine is it's unilateral stupidity, you see where that got us in Iraq, right?! it's the neo-wrong not knowing how to be a neighbor in the world community, and trying to bully everyone. and you see where that got us in terms of America's lowest approval rating in our history?! right?
tomitstube 2 years ago
we all know ayn rand is a crackpot, but she's kind of irrelevant anyway.
FreakishDonQuixote 2 years ago 2
"You don't know what an absolute is."
So you admit absolutes exist? We just disagree on identifying them?
"Your life is an absolute. A speck of dust is an absolute." John Galt
And the firebombing of Dresden was an absolute. Nothing fuzzy about it.
I suspect, proteanview, that YOU do not know what an absolute is, and you foolishly announce their absolute non-existence.
MrCropper 2 years ago
Mr Cropper you should teach 8-12 kids Ayn Rand?Are they adaption ability in level with her "Philosophy"?Ayn Rand was Russian mystical in the worst sense of the word,passed through the Age of Reason or Enlightenment in the way that Western Europe did.Ayn Rand herself was not only quick on the draw in response to anything that even had the superficial appearance of irrationalism,a odd kind of scientific conservatism,a suspicion of novelty,anything more recent than the work of Sir Isaac Newton
zsylvana 2 years ago 4
The only thing you know for sure about your life is that it is POSSIBLE. You don't know how it came to be, except in an abstract sense through science. A speck of dust is not absolute, it is simply the statistics of very large numbers. Our existence in this universe is riddled with uncertainty.
j0hnwi11iams 2 years ago
You can see, in his voice and facial expressions, around 5:50, he suddenly realizes that there is a selfish basis for everything. His own words make him see, for a moment, that there is no conflict of interest between fully-rational, fully-selfish people (a redundancy).
But, he's making a video "refuting" that... so he just goes on talking. He only repeats his point that altruism is "baked in", but he thinks (hopes) that the audience didn't realize what he did for a split second.
grantsinmypants2 2 years ago
Well, excuse me for pausing to think about how to express the adjunct thought. While there may be a selfish basis for everything on an evolutionary level, the human brain is designed to have some level of altruism. I go on further to state that this altruism is necessary for social cohesion. Our genes are ruthlessly selfish, but our minds are not.
j0hnwi11iams 2 years ago
I won't deny that hueristics exist, and that it's everything's natural tendency to disintegrate. But if our genes are "ruthlessly selfish", then in order to achieve harmony and optimal enjoyment out of life, shouldn't our minds be aswell?
Certainly it's easy to mistake a selfish motivation for an altruistic one, and even to sucessfully (in the short term) operate upon that notion, but eventually, as life becomes more and more sophisticated (and rewarding), its necessarily to understand it.
grantsinmypants2 2 years ago
Our minds achieve enlightened self interest when it comes to social cohesion in many cases without our having to put much thought into it. We are simply altruistic in a great many cases and value the opinions of others.
j0hnwi11iams 2 years ago
Two main problems I see here:
1: The application of principles to reality: You're taking two different principles and dismissing them as "extreme" stances. To the contrary, principles are what allow us to see reality more clearly in complicated circumstances. Pragmatic principle-chuckers say that reality is too complicated to fully understand, and then they throw out their means to do so. Higher levels of abstraction help us see the forest for the trees... (cont.)
nine9s 2 years ago
(cont.) ... and if you lose those principles, there's no way to act according to the big picture.
2. Altruism and selfishness don't mean what you're taking them to mean. Giving to charity is altruistic if you're doing it as a duty, out of guilt or as atonement for being better off than someone else -- and it is selfish if it is serving your own values, if it serves to increase the value you get out of life. Altruism means other-ism, as in altr- (like 'alternate' or 'alter-ego') -ism.
nine9s 2 years ago
(cont. again) Making other people the center of one's goals and actions is altruistic, even if the person never gives to charity, and being selfish means making oneself and one's own values the only aim of one's life, even if the person gives to charity. Charity is a non-issue. Caring about other specific people in a genuine way is not altruistic, but it cannot be a duty or be based on non-values.
nine9s 2 years ago
(cont. one last time) Summing up, your criticisms are based on not fully grokking what Rand is getting at. It's a lot of material to absorb, so nothing wrong with that. If you're interested, I'd recommend starting with googling "ayn rand lexicon principles" (no quotes) for info on why acting on principle is not extremism.
nine9s 2 years ago
I've had plenty of time to "grok" Rand so you can put away the lame excuse.
j0hnwi11iams 2 years ago
Now you have demonstrated that kind of extremism with your definition of altruism being "Making other people the center of one's goals and actions" by implying that it is an all or nothing proposition. It is possible to make other people the center of INDIVIDUAL goals or actions. This is how human behavior works, not all or nothing.
j0hnwi11iams 2 years ago
I am using the semantics where the difference between the two is intent, not result. While some level of altruistic intent may or may NOT serve your selfish interests, it is the intent that makes the gesture or behavior altruistic or selfish. Humans do not calculate this beforehand, it is very much unconscious.
j0hnwi11iams 2 years ago
How about the principle the Rand just hates that people have no direct objective experience, but only get clues about objective reality through subjective experience? She hates Kant for pointing that out. I find a concept of objective reality useful and the methods for determining the nature of that objective reality through science useful. I also find the concept of enlightened self interest useful but only on an evolutionary level. I do not have to reject Kant in order to do that.
j0hnwi11iams 2 years ago
Of course the only choices aren't pure collectivistic totalitarian dictatorship versus pure individualistic laissez faire capitalism. The alternative, one of them anyway, is what we have today: the ugly and unjust spectacle of a "mixed economy"; a mixed bag; some altruism and some collectivism mixed with some individualism and some egoism. Some corruption mixed with some morality. You can have poison with your food, if choose. Rand never said otherwise.
qtronman 2 years ago
You don't need to attack altruism to argue against collectivism. Sharing others people's money is not altruism. People like to pretend it is because they don't want to be truly altruistic and share there own, but there is not necessary dichotomy between altruism and individualism. One can simply choose to individually give ONES OWN (emphasis on OWN here if there are socialists reading this) money in an altruistic way.
JohananRaatz 2 years ago
Collectivism means the subjugation of the individual to a group. Ethnic groups, racial groups, class groups, it doesn't matter. It's a denial of the primacy of the individual. Altruism is just other'ism; a person exists to serve others. They are entirely compatible.
The issue is whether you do or do not have the right to exist without giving other people money.
qtronman 2 years ago
"It's a denial of the primacy of the individual. Altruism is just other'ism; a person exists to serve others. They are entirely compatible."
Well there's a subtle catch here which I think is going unnoticed. Altruism is supposed to be individually motivated. Collectivism is: "we are going to force others or each other to serve each other" by contrast altruism or at least my conception of it is "I will go personally help someone because I want to." By definition you can't force altruism.
JohananRaatz 2 years ago
You're talking about something else. You're talking about the political application of these concepts.
qtronman 2 years ago
I think collectivism can only be rationalized through enlightened self interest. For example, it can be argued that the swine flu originated due to NAFTA encouraging non compliant swine farms to move the Mexico where they had no sanitation standards.
j0hnwi11iams 2 years ago
"I think collectivism can only be rationalized through enlightened self interest"
Well yes, I would agree with you here. We make roads and public libraries for this purpose. Or in the case of NAFTA and the swine flu, better FDA standards on imports and better collective border security would serve our national self-interest.
Just for reference I don't like people who want to get rid of all government either. We have to maintain the public good be that good defined selfishly or altruistically.
JohananRaatz 2 years ago
The key to arguing for or against specific acts of altruism is from enlightened self interest. If only a limited number of altruistic members of society decide to devote resources to a cause, then:
1) Other individuals in the position to help but don't will still benefit (they reap the positive externalities).
2) There may not be enough to actually solve the problem (It may do little or nothing to lower crime).
j0hnwi11iams 2 years ago
"The issue is whether you do or do not have the right to exist without giving other people money. "
In that case I would strongly agree with you. People certainly have a right to be selfish, and a right not to give their money away. All I'm saying is that it doesn't necessarily imply that it is wrong to be personally altruistic with your own money either.
Altruism isn't the same as redistributing someone else's money because some socialist is too selfish to share his own.
JohananRaatz 2 years ago
But one could argue that government is a social contract you agree to by virtue of the fact that you live here (and are not forced to). Taxes by their very definition are redistribution of wealth. The question is what you get in return. People pay taxes out of enlightened self interest, because they choose not to live in a country with no government.
j0hnwi11iams 2 years ago
Is government a social contract one agrees to by virtue of the fact that one lives in a given geographic area (and is not forced to)?
Yeah, I mean black slaves in the US south, and Jews in pre-Hitler Germany, probably had a chance to leave their respective geographic areas, so they agreed by virtue of "social contract" to be coerced.
So a man must
qtronman 2 years ago
This is nothing other than a default support for the status quo, regardless of what that status quo is.
qtronman 2 years ago
No it is not. I say nothing about how the contract is negotiated. I would assume that it is more desirable to have some form of consensus, or at least majority, agree on what policies need to be enforced. That is what democracy is all about. I am simply making a case for taxation, not describing the whole of government.
j0hnwi11iams 2 years ago
I think what you meant to say was that they probably did NOT have the freedom to leave. In any case I wouldn't excuse unfair behavior, and certainly those are cases of unfair coercion. Rule of law is forced, but fair coercion.
j0hnwi11iams 2 years ago
"In any case I wouldn't excuse unfair behavior, and certainly those are cases of unfair coercion. Rule of law is forced, but fair coercion."
This is begging the question. Taxation, and especially progressive taxatation, is ipso facto "unfair coercion". What, to you, is "fair coercion"? To justify this preposition, you would need an entire theory of morality and justice; just asserting something to be "unfair" or fair coercion is sufficient, I suppose.
qtronman 2 years ago
* taxatation = taxation
qtronman 2 years ago
just asserting something to be "unfair" or *fair coercion is sufficient [for you] I suppose.
qtronman 2 years ago
I take a more functional perspective in terms of what is fair. I am concerned with the functioning of society so therefore anything that causes dysfunction is by definition unfair. The distribution of wealth in this country is unfair as evidenced by the crash.
j0hnwi11iams 2 years ago
Altruism is in the genes? Can you prove this biologically?
qtronman 2 years ago