[Bret L]

((My only question is why Rand's husband had (apparently) a vasectomy.
It's well known he and Rand weren't ****ing. And apparently he was a
sexless and apathetic, really not very bright failed artist. I was a
randroid and I had no idea of this.....Bret.))


Wordism Won’t Work

Posted by Bob on July 3, 2009 at 12:50 pm
Filed Under Coaching Session, History, Political Correctness | 3
Comments

" There is a giant revival of Ayn Rand going on.

Ayn Rand is the perfect focus for today’s frustration. She has
brilliant criticisms of the liberal mentality. You get to object to
your heart’s content. But in the end she is harmless. She demands an
and to all of a bugaboo called “government.

I was here when they had the last big Rand, “Objectivism,” boom, in
the 60s. No one was allowed to take on the assumptions behind the New
Frontier, Great Society, hippy liberalism of the 60s, so Rand was
perfect.

There was a group called Preform. It was to get or build an island for
a group of people who would live according to the Book of Rand. There
was to be no government, only contracts between individuals.

The world would leave them alone, because they were a sovereign area.
Preform Island would have no military. Any attack would presumably
defend itself by a spontaneous posse of individuals. Here is one of
the obvious cracks in the religion of Objectivism.

The idea was that this army of total individuals would contract with
each other to fight. Remember this is a Wordism based entirely on
personal advantage. It is made up of people who are not just totally
self-interested, but whose ONLY motivation is self-interest. Ayn
Rand’s magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, a number of strong characters
opposing the universally milk sops leftists. But not one of them had
or planned to have any children.

Rand’s husband had himself sterilized.

I haven’t been in a lot of combat. The WWII Generation says my little
firefights were not REAL combat. They tell each other that Korean War
vets were in “the police action,” not in a Real War. But I can’t
imagine, in the fights I was in, that a Completely Self-Interested
Individual would honor an impersonal CONTRACT in those crucial minutes
when he could just get off the firing line. How could Randian Wordism
justify someone in going right into the fire to make it possible for
an isolated buddy to fall back?

They can’t even justify LOYALTY to their own children, much less a
stranger they made a contract with.

Similar to Randianism, and my own field of special study in my
doctoral work in economics, was the field of Public Choice, in which
two of my professors got Nobel Prizes. It comes to many brilliant and
accurate conclusions, as Rand does. It sees voting as the outcome of
self-interest on the part of voters.

But its first failure is similar to the one I just cited for
Objectivism, it is so simple and fundamental that, for people like so
many BUGS commenters, they instantly get away from it and go on to
less simplistic subjects.

This is that failu under the assumptions of Public Choice, it is
not rational for an individual voter to vote AT ALL. It costs time and
effort to vote. If your vote is entirely for your own self-interest,
there is no way in the world to justify your standing in the voter
line for one minute.

People vote be because they want a say in how THEIR SOCIETY will go.
The idea of getting some INDIVIDUAL to go to the polls on the basis of
his own personal self-interest is absurd. The idea that the world
would ignore Preform Island is absurd, and the idea that a group of
totally self-interested vigilantes would hold together under fire
without LOYALTY is a concept only a hypnotic Wordist can take
seriously.

That is why the establishment allows Rand to be published in massive
editions in the new craze. That is why Public Choice is allowed to get
Nobel Prizes. Both of them deny racism or nativism or any other
loyalty. And the priesthood of Political Correctness has no fear of
anything but LOYALTY."

http://www.whitakeronline.org/blog/2...ism-wont-work/