September 26, 2009
Apollo and Dionysus
This Internet thingy is going to be big.
It's the weekend, listen to Ayn Rand compare the big news events of 1969: Apollo 11 vs. Woodstock. Seventy minutes, great stuff!
Hat-tip: Insty
Posted by John Kranz at September 26, 2009 3:30 PM
Try to imagine those two self-selected groups of people switching places and attempting to do what the others did-
Cape Canaveral> "Wow man, this hydrazine stuff is really a bummer trip. What were those science dudes thinking when they made this shit up?"
Lester's Farm> "First get all these damn people out of the way and get some latrines dug! Tell the stupid pot-heads to come back in 2 weeks, if they can figure out how to use a calendar."
And we're supposed to believe that human beings are all "equal?"
On the moon mission itself, Robert Heinlein considered it an evolutionary moral imperative for the human race. "Behaving on a still higher moral level were the astronauts who went to the Moon, for their actions tend toward the survival of the entire race of mankind."
Posted by: johngalt at September 27, 2009 11:37 AMI have not been able to stop thinking about this since I heard it. What a powerful speech and what a gift to have this available on the Internet 40 years later.
At the risk of breaking the comity, I have to get on an old horse. Mister Piekoff and the Objectivist movement really need to advance her words and ideas rather than using her name to advance their own. (Of course, the same goes for Lew Rockwell and the Mises Institute.)
Posted by: jk at September 27, 2009 11:57 AMFirst I would say that I'd like to see Objectivism be more of a "movement" than it actually is. Second I'll contend that the living heirs to Rand's philosophy do advance her ideas rather than their own. The difference I've noticed, however, is in the delivery. It is very common for those of us fully versed in the philosophical underpinnings to "skip to the conclusion" which almost always comes across as harsh, un-compassionate and therefore, to many critics, almost inhuman. But Ms. Rand herself had the discipline to start from a point of agreement and make a case that no rational man could find fault with. She was not only a great thinker and philosopher, but a great teacher. She was a gift to mankind who, through her writings and recordings, will still play a large part in the evolutionary survival of the human race. (And if she doesn't, it probably won't.)
Posted by: johngalt at September 28, 2009 12:32 PMAdmittedly I'm far from an authority on Rand, but I know enough to say a few basic things. Her philosophy is simply superior because it starts from a set of principles. No pun intended, but morality is objective and can be no other way. Economic value is subjective, but morals cannot be. Then you move on to "It's immoral to force a man against his will when he harms no one else." The key thing is to stick to these principles in every situation.
There's no compromise in Rand's philosophy. There's no attempt to rationalize keeping a small minority down so that we can "maximize happiness" or achieve "the greatest good for the greatest number." And this is directed at JK: there's no pragmatism. It isn't about winning votes or gaining political power: it's about being right.
If you read my friend Billy Beck's blog, occasionally he has taken self-professed Objectivists to task as being useless. Really, that's how he described them earlier this year: "I am here to point out the genuine tragedy of just how abjectly useless Objectivism has been in this fight. For a philosophy that espouses mind/body integration that Objectivism has so well, I would not have imagined such a herd of inert brains-in-vats, so content to watch this whole project going to hell while they whistle "Ave Maria". (Yes: I'm going to make that a focus-object of the derision. Perigo will always deserve it, the flubber-spined slob.)"
I, however, could never say anything of the kind. I simply don't know enough Objectivists, whether true Objectivists, self-professed poseurs Billy's linked to, or shams like McArdle who aren't worthy of the modified monikers.
Posted by: Perry Eidelbus at September 28, 2009 1:44 PMI'd like to give Perry the last word and end on our shared appreciation for the clarity of Ms. Rand's ideas and delivery. But I have been called out. Not responding to a drunk subordinate almost cost General Pierce the 1852 election and I have less goodwill to spare.
The Objectivists and the Libertarians doom themselves to irrelevance by failing to appreciate electoral exigencies. Brian Dougherty's Radicals for Capitalism is a blueprint for irrelevance.
Rand called the libertarians "hippies." Neither could deal with Buckley or caucus with (yuch, spitooey!) believers. Their great ideas are ignored because they can be ignored. Their followers -- as a group -- are feckless and ineffectual. Your friend Beck has a point.
Posted by: jk at September 28, 2009 5:38 PMWell, principled Objectivists and libertarians (not the wishy-washy ones who vote GOP "as the closest of the options," as I used to do) are not at all "failing to appreciate" what it takes to get elected. Remember that Rand refused to join a party or movement because she didn't want to sell out her principles. By contrast, how many times did GWB strike a deal or extend an olive branch to Democrats, only to get backstabbed in one way or another?
"To join such groups means to reverse the philosophical hierarchy and to sell out fundamental principles for the sake of some superficial political action which is bound to fail. It means that you help the defeat of your ideas and the victory of your enemies."
Most people you meet who call themselves "libertarian" are basically hippies, you know. They want free love and the freedom to abort the result, the freedom to dope up, essentially the freedom to bum around without having a government telling them what's moral. This is ok, but the problem is that they have no philosophical underpinnings. They don't understand capitalism.
I've been doing a lot of thinking lately and have stopped calling myself a libertarian, with good reason. More to come later on my own blog.
Posted by: Perry Eidelbus at September 28, 2009 11:06 PMWe may be getting deep into deceased equine territory, but your response hews pretty closely to my ideal. I called for a libertarian group based on the NRA. It would support candidates from either party who stood for its ideals.
I was fooled into believing that GOP == liberty in the 90s and I will not make that mistake again. By the same token, I watched the gooberheads at Reason tear down a string of Republican candidates and that got us, wait for it, President Barack Obama."
So, yeah, principled objectivists and libertarians must avoid blind partisanship. But they must also recognize political exigencies. And if that sometimes means voting for the lesser of two evils -- I'm all for less evil.
Posted by: jk at September 29, 2009 10:44 AMBut what has voting for the lesser of two evils given us? You're still trapped with the less-bad devil, who will still plague and rule you. The solution is not to appeal to the center to win elections, especially when you can't build a third party into something meaningful. Democrats and Republicans have both made it clear that they want to continue their two-party system. So the only solution is to cast off our chains.
Would things have been any better under a President McCain, who you may recall touted his own $300 billion mortgage bailout plan? With a Democrat-controlled Congress, it's not as if they'd extend Bush's tax cuts; it's hard enough for them to raise the AMT cap! So just imagine how we'd have crept toward health care "reform," bit by bit, hence Glenn Beck's frog thing.
Posted by: Perry Eidelbus at September 29, 2009 1:39 PMMy suggestion, Perry, is that if the liberty minded engaged in the current two-party system, the choice would not be Obama vs. McCain. I would have preferred Giuliani, and perhaps a sizeable libertarian wing could get a Phil Gramm or a Jeff Flake in the mix. Maybe James Webb on the D-Side.
Senator McCain was my least favorite GOP candidate since John C Fremont, but do I wish he had won. Oh yeah, much less evil.
You'd have had a bunch of bailouts and nonsense. But the secured debt holders of GM and Chrysler would not have been mauled by the Executive branch, we would not be discussing "public option" health insurance, and we sure as hell would not have heard the ridiculous appeasement speech at the UN.
Posted by: jk at September 29, 2009 1:57 PMWe've talked about Giuliani before, and he has not repudiated his "Freedom is about authority" words. His style, to this day, is all about that, so there's no way that libertarians or Objectivists could have supported him.
You say, "Oh yeah, much less evil," but in the next sentence, "You'd have had a bunch of bailouts and nonsense." So we may not have had socialized health care, but I find it strange that you say "much less evil" when we'd still be saddled with debt that encourages people to start dumping our currency.
China has been grumbling for months, and look at the dollar vis-à-vis the yen. Before the news reported the probability, I already knew the Bank of Japan would intervene. But it's not strengthening the dollar by reducing the supply, it's that Japan will inflate their currency faster than we're inflating our own.
And with Obama, the "public option" has been taken off the table. I am not surprised. This makes it possible to pass the bill under the flag of "bipartisanship," and the "public option" can be triggered at a future date once private insurers have been regulated into ineffectiveness.
The one thing I'll concede is Obama's absurd, self-aggrandizing speeches around the globe, but those are small potatoes compared to what he's doing to us back home.
Posted by: Perry Eidelbus at September 30, 2009 12:00 AMYup, Giuliani failed to repudiate something he said in 1992 to your satisfaction, so better to have President Obama than a rabid supply-sider. QED.
Interesting, though: I met a friend-of-a-friend who was highly placed in the Giuliani campaign. He told me that I was spun. Hizzoner spent a gob of dough in New Hampshire and Republicans would not overlook his socially liberal values. jk loses ten points.
Posted by: jk at September 30, 2009 11:53 AMStop falling for the either-or fallacy that the entrenched parties want us to believe. Don't be so ready to accept what they put down in front of you -- demand better. Just because Giuliani presents himself as a "supply-sider" doesn't mean he's pro-freedom.
That and I ascribe to the hypothesis that non-registered NH Democrats voted as independents for McCain in the primary, to give momentum to the old and wishy-washy candidate that Obama could beat. Posted by: Perry Eidelbus at September 30, 2009 3:25 PM | What do you think? [12]