jujulu wrote: Ayn Rand... believed that people could live without collective help, out in the woods. She saw no need for government or any kind of collective society.
The above comment, is so appalling off-base, I feel compelled to address the misinformation for no other reason than honesty, if not general human decency, somehow demands it. People should not be lied to in an attempt to trick others into supporting ones viewpoint. Let the most accurate assessment stand, and then let the chips fall where they may, and people can decide for themseles.
Your comment, while very terse (and thus such a small comment probably escapes most peoples notice), seems to pack a lot of both implied and explicit content in it.
In no particular order, let me address some key points:
Fact No. 1: Rand's position on government
The first comment I want to make involves a very overt misrepresentation with respect to your claim that, (and I quote you directly here)
"she saw no need for government..."
Not only did Rand support the concept of government, she often was compelled to do so very vociferously in an attempt to counter some groups that were prominent at that time which were advancing a "second age"
(the first age being in the late nineteenth century) of anarcho-capitalism. She absolutely despised this groups ideas, regardless of how similar to her own ideas it may have seemed to outsiders [like yourself]. While in theory she supported limited-government much like philosopher Robert Nozick, it is a well known fact that Rand was a bit of a war-hawk
(and perhaps even more so, her heir apparent Leonard Peikoff) who often times let her dislike of various countries and their politics drive her into supporting slightly bigger government that she probably otherwise should have.
Some of Rands most notable debates were with [libertarian] anarchists
(see the debates with Roy Childs, etc...). These debates constituted a very notable part of her body of work. Objectivists today continue to take up this torch she passed, regularly sparring with libertarians over the issue of government, with Objectivists staunchly being in favor of government. Anarchists (of whatever type) were among one of her most hated groups, even when those anarchists promoted ideals that are almost identical to hers.
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The above dealt with an overt misrepresentation of Rand's position on government. The following critiques below deal with what I think is a borderline misrepresentation of her position.
jujulu wrote: Ayn Rand... believed that people could live without collective help, out in the woods. She saw no need for government or any kind of collective society.
Your comments are very brief and so it's hard to extract a larger narrative out of it, but being familiar with many of your posts at this point, I think I can extract some conext from it. Below, I am going to seek to clarify her position on several matters for the benefit of others who do not deserve to be misled. People should know what her real positions are so that they can make up their own minds. One shouldn't have to feel the need to lie or even subtly misrepresent somebody else's philosophy, just to trick others to hate it. People are perfectly capable of hating her ideas on their own merits if they so desire, without the need to distort the ideas.
Fact No 2: Rand's position on "primitive society."
First, we should address the often-made claim that Rand believed men could, or even should, live out in the woods with nobody else's help.
To the best of my knowledge, I am aware of little to anything that Rand eve said or wrote that seriously advances this thesis. The entire subject seems almost fabricated whole cloth. It is one of the most common misrepresentations of her position which is simply an extension of the
"rugged individualist" straw man argument.
The idea of
"Gulching" which Rand has much become known for bears virtually no real relation to the criticism that Rand promotes an atomistic lifestyle where each person takes atomism to its ultimate conclusion in the form of the complete non-interaction of all human beings. There simply is no comparison between the two things. It is a straw man of epic proportions.
Rands body of work:
(a) Has never promoted an isolationist lifestyle.
It takes an exceedingly high level of intellectual dishonesty to make the non-sequitur argument that just because she (and many libertarians, or back-to-the-landers, and hippies, for example), simply wanted to physically get the hell away from certain other groups of people who they view to be physically dangerous, that that somehow implies either: (a) an atomistic viewpoint, or (b) isolationism, or (c) that they want to disconnect from everyone, when most of the time all they really want is to disconnect from those they find morally repugnant and physically dangerous, and so may wish to be with others of like-mind.
That's not isolationism, that's simply good judgement in many cases. It's avoiding a direct threat, so that one may continue to live. In addition, it's abating political and philisophical friction between opposing groups, something that also can be considered a wise judgment call. And additionally, nothing in that move in any way inherently implies a lack of desire to engage in free market interaction with others, nor does such a move imply a lack of desire to not be with others. It simply means they don't want to interact with people they find to be morally repugnant, if not also physically dangerous.
Unfortunately, it appears a very obvious trend that some people get insulted by this kind of snubbing and disassociation, and so they then feel the need to launch a childish smear campaign not unlike when Child B has a falling out with Child A, and so one of the children gets all butthurt that his longtime friend no longer wants to be friend, and so like a petulently emotionally hurt child (s)he then starts spreading all kinds of false rumors about his former friend in some lame attempt to make others not like him. You can see the childish mentality of this every time the issue comes up in topics like states seceding from the union, or where a person says that a group of like-minded individuals should band together and go live someplace with other like-minded individuals. And this is what we have here with the Rand issue. We have the intentional distortion of the other parties position, trying to depict people who simply want to exercise their free liberty to disassocite from others they absolutely despise, where some of the people that allow themselves to feel snubbed then take this personally, and so then launch a dishonest smear campaign which is not representatie of the facts. This manifests in them childishly spreading distorted rumor by saying silly things like the Ojectivists want to "go live off in the woods, all by himself."
(b) Has never went out of its way to advanced the
"atomistic" philosophy in a way which is substantially different than the way most other people view the concept. Rand's only "crime" is that she advanced the idea that virtually every single human ultimately believes in atomism if they accept the concept of "I." Some people did not like her pointing this hypocrisy out, so they chose to make an issue out of it, even though almost every critic who has used this argument wasn't a genuine anti-atomist, and so was guilty of the same kind of atomistic thinking.
Out of the entire body of Rand's extensive work, very little of it actually has anything to do with atomism beyond advancing the thesis that human beings should have some degree of autonomy and there needs to be some degree of rejection to involuntary servitude. This is the same position that virtually every ethical school of thought ever devised thusfar has came to, and so why Rand gets singled out for criticism for doing the same exact thing that virtually every other system of ethics does reaks of the worst form of inconsistent hypocrisy.
How this "non-issue" came to be such a big "issue" when discussing Rand is not a mystery at all, however. And the answer is that almost the entire argument is one gigantic straw man created by the opposition. You see, this particular argument was intended, by design, to be the oppositions "big argument" which was supposed to once and for all destroy Objectivism.
The problem is really several-fold. First off, relatively little of Rand's work really even explicitly address the subject, so the radically disproportional overemphasis opponents place on this particular argument seems slightly misplaced. Even if we assume for sake of arguendo that Rand does hold to some variation of atomism in the same way libertarians do (along with virtually every other sapient creature who understands and accepts the concepts of
"I" - though some reject it), I would say most of the opponents firstly often fail to apply the very critique they offer to their own conception and acceptance of "I," and secondly, they sometimes overreach by offering a rejoinder to an argument that the opponent isn't been really making to begin with.
It is pretty clear to the unbiased that Rand's understanding of capitalism and the fact that it absolutely necessitates cooperation among market actors, obliterates the criticism that she somehow doesn't understand the causality between individual choices and how that impacts other market actors. The opposition is largely huffing into the wind, creating an argument where basically there virtually is very little argument to be had. And as mentioned previously, these same anti-atomists often fail to reconcile how their critique even comports with their own conception of "I," and with the amount of autonomy they think they should be given (i.e. "what is 'free'").
(c) Has never under any circumstances whatsoever opposed a society of individuls who collectively work together. Quite the contrary, capitalism and the free market necessitate that very quality, a fact that is somehow lost on the dim-witted.
(d) Rand would no doubt greatly admire a man who
could live entirely on his own, if he were so inclined to want that extremely challenging lifestyle. And so she damn well should admire it, as such a man would have a skill possessed by very few. Any man who would not admire somebody with such a skill is a petty and jealous man.
But again, that's largely an irrelevant discussion, as Rand never really even promoted this isolationist idea. This whole line of discussion is a wholesale fabrication on the part of dishonest people. What Rand promoted, time and time again, is capitalism. And capitalism, by its very nature, necessitates the cooperation of various market actors, whether it simply be two people on a desert island, or three hundred million people in a big country.
(e) It is also a well known fact to anyone familiar with her work, that Rand had a few peculiar cognitive biases, one of which was a fairly overt bias against cultures that she viewed had a primitivistic lifestyle. She felt that it was "wasted potential" to some extent. She did not think much of American-Indiands, nor many other cultures worldwide that did not possess a technologiclly advanced society, relative-wise to the time, and who did not embrace the free market to the extent that the United States did. She viewed such countries as culturally backward.
This simply goes to further illustrate how poorly constructed some of the most common straw man arguments used against her are. They aren't even remotely good straw man arguments, as far as straw man arguments goes. This cognitive bias she had against what she viewed as primitive cultures substantially undermines the misrepresentative claims by many critics that she wanted people to live isolationistic and atomistic lifestyles disconnected from others, something which is intrinsically impossible by definition of what capitalism necessitates, but a fortiori, such a straw man contrived primitivistic and atomistic lifestyle is even more incompatible with the more adanced forms of capitalism which she often tended to admire.
Fact No 3: Rand's often misunderstood (and often intentionally misrepresented) position on "collectivism" in the broad sense of the word.
It never ceases to amaze me how many critics of Rand completely botch her position on both
collectivism and
individualism. It's like watching a train wreck or an abortion gone horribly wrong. It is almost inconceivable to me that so many critics could have such a glaring misundersting over conceptual distinctions which are so trivial, that it often leaves me wondering whether the person truly cannot grasp the distinction, or whether they are just dishonestly misrepresenting it on purpose to trick others into hating Rand. Why do this? If Rand's philosophy is so odious and misguided, why the need to completely abortion her positions with misrepresentations? Why not just be honest about such a trivial point, and then just let the people see it for themselves, and judge accordingly?
Many political philosophy related concepts have a dual meaning. This dual-meaning arises between the value-neutral usage of the word, and the ethical usage of the word. The concepts of
collectivism and
individualism, very predictably, are no different. The semantic distinction between the concepts of force and violence are also two very notable other examples of this. The concept of collectivism has several meanings, but is it really too much to expect people to apply the appropriate meaning under the appropriate contexts?
A large part of Rands political philosophy and ethical system puts heavy emphasis on these two concepts. If one cannot grasp the trivial distinction between the value-neutral usage of the word and the ethical usage of the word, then one is doomed to failure.
Rand believes in capitalism and the free market. Capitalism, by its very nature, necessitates collective cooperation in the value-neutral sense of the term, as a prerequisite. Without it, capitalism and the free market cannot exist. A market without market actor
s (emphasis on the plural nature of the market) is no market at all. Which part of that is difficult to understand? You can't have your cake and eat it too with this kind of argument. You cannot on one hand first claim that Rands is obsessed with hyper-capitalism, and then at the same time go about whining and complain that she hates collective cooperation among humans, when that cooperation is one of the necessary requirements of participation in a market based system (of whatever form, be it capitalist or otherwise).
Beyond that baseline acceptance of collective human cooperation to promote capitalist markets which Rand fully accepted and admired, I have already raised the
a fortiori argument above in the section on her views of primitive cultures in which I explained, not only does Rand support collective cooperation, but even moreso, she has a very outspoken preference for hyper-capitlist societies, and so by logical extension, she tends to have a preference for hyper-collectivized societies. Which not only makes the critics who explicitly say or damn well imply that she opposes value-neutral collective cooperation wrong, it a fortiori makes them even more so wrong.
The conceptual distinction Rand makes regarding collectivism and individualism revolves around an ethical framework in which she established the necessary and sufficient criteria for other concepts such as consent and voluntary cooperation, as well as the necessary and sufficient criteria to establish the litmus tests for obligations.
It has never been Rands position that all collective cooperation is bad. Not in the value-neutral sense of the phrase, nor in the ethical sense of the phrase. Only a limited subset of collective cooperation is considered a moral wrong by her, and the subsets are dictated by the ethical framework which distinguishes when, and if, cooperation can be compelled (such as through the concept of obligation).
Fact No 4: Rand's position on "collective societies."
I'm not even going to bother with this one. It would simply be a reiteration of all the above points. It should be abundantly clear that Rands desire for capitalist societies, particularly considering her preferential bias towards hyper-capitalist societies (at least in terms of her personal preference), renders impotent the incoherent claims that she somehow opposed a society of collective cooperation. Capitalism and the free market requires just such a condition of cooperation to exist, else there is no market.
Rand's philosophy does absolutely nothing that any other system of ethics doesn't do, be it mutualism, communism, socialism, communism, lieralism, conservatism, libertarianism [ad infinitum], insofar as delineating the boundaries between what types of collective cooperation is considered morally good, and what collective cooperation is considered morally bad. Anyone that doesn't understand that has a far bigger problem than not understanding Rand. Their problem is that they don't understand ethics writ large, as they seem to be missing the fact that all ethical systems draw these distinctions. Hence, complaining about Rand drawing the same ethical distinction that every other ethical system makes is a completely vacuuous (and hypocritical) criticism.
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