Teenage Boys & Ayn Rand

The Russian terrorist Vera Figner, a leader of the group that assassinated Tsar Alexander II in 1881, recalled how she lost respect for her father when he replied to a serious question: “I do not know.” This answer filled the child with “burning shame.” All important questions, Figner knew, have clear answers, and all reasonable people accept them.

Figner didn’t weigh pros and cons. No sooner did she hear some indubitably correct answer than she adopted it. Regardless of counterevidence, she never questioned a belief, just as one never doubts a mathematical proof. Figner was by no means unusual. This way of thinking—this certainty about being absolutely certain—characterized both the prerevolutionary Russian radical intelligentsia and, after the Bolshevik coup, official Soviet thought.

Born and raised in Petersburg, Alisa Rosenbaum—better known as Ayn Rand—shared this mentality. Though Jewish, her thought was Russian to the core. Rand’s fiction closely resembles Soviet socialist realism except for preaching the opposite politics. Call it capitalist realism. In the most perceptive article on Rand I have encountered, Anthony Daniels claimed, without much exaggeration, that “her work properly belongs to the history of Russian, not American, literature.”

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When I became a scholar of Russian literature, I immediately recognized Rand’s debt to the Russian radical intelligentsia. One can divide prerevolutionary Russian thought into two strongly opposed traditions: that of the radicals and that of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and other great writers. The radical tradition featured ideologues and revolutionaries, including devoted terrorists like Figner and Sergey Nechaev; anarchists Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin; populists Pyotr Lavrov, Nikolai Mikhailovsky, and the leaders of the Socialist Revolutionary Party; Marxists like Stalin, Trotsky, and Lenin; and a host of tendentious literary critics.

[---]

Rand’s reasoning was, in fact, remarkably sloppy. She regarded Aristotle as the greatest philosopher because he formulated the law of identity “A is A,” from which she claimed to derive a proof of radical individualism and the morality of selfishness. If A is A, then Man is Man and I am I, which (for Ran d) means that I owe nothing to anyone else. If Man is Man, then man must choose to survive, which means that it is irrational to let oneself be “looted” by unproductive people. If one is to survive, she reasoned, one’s ultimate value must be one’s own life. “The fact that a living entity is determines what it ought to do. So much for Hume’s question of how to derive ‘is’ from ‘ought.’” It is hard to say which is worse, Rand’s failure to understand the positions she dismissed or the shoddy logic she deployed in the name of infallible “reason.”

[---]

Rand utterly rejected the idea that some issues are ambiguous or call for compromise. “One of the most eloquent symptoms of the moral bankruptcy of today’s culture,” she declared, “is a certain fashionable attitude toward moral issues, best summarized as: ‘There are no blacks and whites, there are only grays.’ . . . Just as, in epistemology, the cult of uncertainty is a revolt against reason—so, in ethics, the cult of moral grayness is a revolt against moral values. Both are a revolt against the absolutism of reality.”

Middle-of-the-road thinking is for Rand “the typical product of philosophical default—of the intellectual bankruptcy that has produced irrationalism in epistemology, a moral vacuum in ethics, and a mixed economy in politics. . . . Extremism has become a synonym of ‘evil.’”

Is it any surprise that Rand strongly appealed to bright teenage boys? As comic book writer John Rogers remarked, “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”

[---]

I could not help recalling this famous phrase, which Rand must have known, when encountering her defense of essentially the same position. “Why must fiction represent things ‘as they might be and ought to be’?” she asked. Quoting from Atlas Shrugged—Rand had an annoying habit of quoting herself or her fictional heroes as authorities—she answered: “As man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul.” In other words, she concluded, “Art is the technology of the soul.”

Both Rand and the Soviets believed that, without the aid of supernatural power, humanity will accomplish what had always been regarded as miraculous. There are no fortresses Bolsheviks cannot storm, declared Stalin, while Rand attributed the same power to unfettered capitalism. Enlightened by the right philosophy, human will can accomplish anything.

[---]

Children require sacrifice: this obvious fact indicates that people are not, and can never be, fully independent. Rand’s heroes and heroines apparently arrive at adulthood without having gone through childhood, let alone infancy. It is as if she believed that, like Athena springing fully grown from Zeus’s head, people are created by sudden flashes of insight. My point is not just that infants are utterly dependent on another person and that children only gradually learn to take care of themselves. It is also that no one chooses when, where, and to whom to be born. Unlike Howard Roark, people always inherit something they did not choose.

Rand wrote as if poverty always resulted from failure of willpower, as if no one is born into it. She was right to reject the deterministic view that people are wholly the product of heredity and environment; choices that cannot be wholly explained by such factors help make us who we are. But it is no less mistaken to treat people as entirely self-made and utterly responsible for their condition.

- More Here

I was one of those "teenage boys"; although I was like 22 or so when I read Rand for the first time and hooked. 

Then as time passed, I grew up and I understood how deluded I was. There are some very good self-reliance messages in her book a.k.a “pep” talk - I took those few hundred words and flushed out everything else from my life. 

Ayn Rand gives a "certain" view of the world which is completely against reality. Reality is uncertain and to top it off - our biology doesn't even allow us to see much of reality in the world. 

The answer is to be humble, keep learning and change your mind as our understanding of reality changes. 

Same Bullshit, Packaged Differently - From Ayn Rand To Rene Girard And Silicon Valley's Cognitive Dissonance

A couple of years ago I bought Rene Girard's now-famous book (thanks to Peter Thiel's dissonance) Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (please don't buy this crap). 

I couldn't even get through the first few pages... at least Rand's books are good reads. My head started aching and spinning... these are books that are better off used for recycling. That reminds me I have a handful of books that fall under that category of "not donate but recycle the paper". 

But yet, the morons in Silicon Valley read and follow his preachings religiously! 

It's none of our business what they read but unfortunately, these morons control so much of our lives and naturally it becomes our business what values and belief's these morons follow. Adrian Daub's has a great synopsis of this cognitive dissonance: 

Tech leaders have long been infatuated with thinkers who reverse the commonsense picture of how power in our society is distributed and how it operates. And we have largely gone along for the ride. Examples of self-styled victimhood are dime-a-dozen in Silicon Valley. 

The optic of a multibillion-dollar corporation spending millions of dollars arguing it’s been treated unfairly by being forced to play by the same rules as other companies already reveals the enormous distortion of scale involved in arguments of this type. The idea that your company is being victimized by nefarious professors and union organizers goes further, however: The kind of thinking that allows this to happen first involves a wholesale reconceptualization of power.

Thiel and Uber have to convince themselves that, if looked at the right way, power in society doesn’t flow as common sense would suggest it does. In this way of thinking, people who — to ordinary understanding — seem as though they have little or no actual power secretly have loads of it; the person who has somehow made billions and has a speaking slot at the ruling party’s national convention in truth has none of it. Tech loves its philosophical references and its profound-seeming ideas. So when it comes to this curious, but deeply useful, distortion of scale and power relations, tech unsurprisingly has expended extensive intellectual resources to convince itself of its victimhood.

Who made the powerless so powerful? While tech magnates almost never invoke him directly, the idea that in society the strong are the real victims goes back to 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and his On the Genealogy of Morality. Christianity, Nietzsche argued, had managed the trick of telling the strong and powerful to aspire to the meekness and powerlessness of the people they had power over — to adopt, as he put it, a “slave morality.” Once Christianity had pulled this off, the weak and powerless were the true oppressors. The powerful were forced to understand their strength as sinful. Suddenly unsure of themselves and terrified of damnation, they had become the victims of a world-historic con.

Nietzsche proposed that exercising power wasn’t bad and that a moral system that said it was, well, that was unnatural and unhealthy. He wasn’t interested in economics; it was a question of morality for him. Ayn Rand applied this idea to places where it mattered to tech: to board rooms, to industries, to entire societies. Rand’s fiction works portray a world in which the strong are being hemmed in by “second-handers” who weaponize their own weakness, their own dependence on others, while the “makers” are forced to submit to regulation in penance for their own autonomy.

[---]

Let’s say you like this idea of the powerful being the true victims, but you’d prefer it to be even more counterintuitive. The thought of René Girard might be for you. A philosopher who taught in Stanford’s French department for decades, he’s not as widely read as Rand. But Thiel was one of his students, and Thiel has made spreading Girard’s gospel one of his missions. Girard is most famous for his theory of the scapegoat: All desire, Girard taught, is mimetic — meaning we desire things because others desire the same things. Culture displaces the inevitable conflict that arises as a result by redirecting reciprocal violence toward one single, shared target. In this way, the tension that exists within any social group is refocused onto a single individual.

[---]

In a way, it’s not surprising that an industry used to getting its way would locate philosophies that buttress its attempts to evade regulation and generate positive PR. But two things stand out about tech’s adoption of this philosophical preoccupation with the victimization of the powerful. First, there’s the fact that we listen to tech leaders as thinkers in ways that are fairly unprecedented. My yoga instructor recently chose to “close out our practice” with some sage words from Steve Jobs — it’s hard to imagine Lee Iacocca being invoked in that way after a vinyasa flow. We live in a culture that defers to these ideas with exceptional credulity. That’s what makes this preoccupation so troubling: If rich people want to adjust their categories to deal with their inevitable cognitive dissonance, then that’s one thing. But what if they adjust ours in the bargain?

In other words, to summarize the cognitive dissonance: A troubling number of silicon valley folks truly believe themselves as our saviours! Thanks to a deadly combination of Rene Girard's bullshit and unfulfilled childhood fanaties inherited from Marvel comics. 

David Solan's Atlas Hugged!!

David Sloan Wilson has written a new book "Atlas Hugged" (pun intended), a devastating critique of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism and its impact on the world. Her philosophy has and continues to ruin millions of lives like any other addictive substance except addictive substances are usually objective but this one is purely subjective mythological magic. 

Atlas Hugged e-book is free or you can buy the paperback. 

Thank you, David. Thanks a million for fighting magic with fiction. 

We sapiens need a constant reminder that nothing is permanent; which means ideology is nothing but sheer magic which proclaims it can successfully "pin" time to be a constant. 

Check out a few hilarious excerpts here: 

Everyone knows about the existence of cults and their disturbing ability to steal minds.  Otherwise normal people give away everything to wait for the second coming of Jesus or aliens from outer space.  Midas and my grandfather would scoff at those irrational beliefs, but the society that they founded had all the earmarks of a cult.  The first structure that they erected was a giant gold-plated dollar sign atop a granite column.  They also invented an oath that members were required to recite at frequent intervals:  I SWEAR BY MY LIFE AND LOVE OF IT THAT I WILL NEVER LIVE FOR THE SAKE OF ANOTHER MAN, NOR ASK ANOTHER MAN TO LIVE FOR MINE.  The word “give” was banned from their vocabulary.  Every human transaction was paid for with the gold and silver coins minted on site.  Obviously, this was only possible thanks to the vast wealth of Midas Mulligan, who provided a bank account for each new member based on how much had been “stolen” from them in the form of taxes in the outside world.  While the members of other cults waited for Jesus or aliens from outer space, the Galtians waited for society to collapse while working to build a microcosm of the perfect society for themselves. 

[---]

The first person to leave the cult was my grandfather.  He simply disappeared, just as he had disappeared from his engineering job.  This time he didn’t even leave a note or a boastful proclamation.  My father, John Galt II, was two years old and grew up knowing only the legend of John Galt I.  Then other members started to drift away.  Finally Midas Mulligan reached his breaking point and withdrew his financial support, observing wryly that the Galtians were more heavily subsidized than any socialist society.  Like fleas shaken from the back of a dog, the Galtians were forced to make their way back to the society that they’d mocked and seek the forgiveness of family, friends, and former business associates.

The Galtian movement was a failure in every way but one.  It had not resulted in a widespread strike of doers.  The static electricity engine was a folly.  The microcosm of the perfect doer society went the way of so many other utopian visions.  But Ayn Rant’s better-than-real cosmology was a survivor that had been propagated around the world by The Speech.  Everyone who fell under its spell became convinced, as fervently as any religious believer, that the path to salvation was to concentrate exclusively on making money for oneself.

Quote of the Day

That’s not a world of selfishness or greed. It’s a world of cooperation and mutual benefit through the pursuit of self-interest, enabling satisfying lives not only for the Hank Reardens of the world but for factory workers. I still want to live there.

…In scene after scene, Rand shows what such a community would be like, and it does not consist of isolated individualists holding one another at arm’s length. Individualists, yes, but ones who have fun in one another’s company, care about one another, and care for one another—not out of obligation, but out of mutual respect and spontaneous affection.

Ayn Rand never dwelt on her Russian childhood, preferring to think of herself as wholly American. Rightly so. The huge truths she apprehended and expressed were as American as apple pie. I suppose hardcore Objectivists will consider what I’m about to say heresy, but hardcore Objectivists are not competent to judge. The novels are what make Ayn Rand important. Better than any other American novelist, she captured the magic of what life in America is supposed to be. The utopia of her novels is not a utopia of greed. It is not a utopia of Nietzschean supermen. It is a utopia of human beings living together in Jeffersonian freedom.

- Charles Murray on Ayn Rand

Wisdom Of The Week

For instance, Ayn Rand novels like The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged have spread an ethic of hard-core individualism through American culture, inspired the Tea Party, influenced the Federal Reserve (Alan Greenspan was a Rand disciple), and made the rise of politicians like Ron and Rand Paul possible.

How can fiction—the fake struggles of fake people—transform the real world? Until recently we have had no idea.  But in the last several decades psychology has begun a serious study of story’s effects on the human mind.  Fiction teaches us facts about the world, influences our morals, and marks us with fears, hopes, and anxieties that alter our behavior. As the psychologist Raymond Mar writes, “Researchers have repeatedly found that reader attitudes shift to become more congruent with the ideas expressed in a [fiction] narrative." In fact, fiction seems to be more effective at changing beliefs than non-fiction, which is designed to persuade through argument and evidence.
What is going on here? Why are we putty in a storyteller’s hands? The psychologists Melanie Green and Tim Brock argue that entering fictional worlds “radically alters the way information is processed.” Green and Brock’s studies shows that the more absorbed readers are in a story, the more the story changes them.  Highly absorbed readers also detected significantly fewer “false notes” in stories—inaccuracies, infelicities—than less transported readers.  Importantly, it is not just that highly absorbed readers detected the false notes and didn’t care about them (as when we watch a pleasurably idiotic action film). They were unable to detect the false notes in the first place.

And, in this, there is an important lesson about the molding power of story.  When we read non-fiction, we read with our shields up. We are critical and skeptical.  But when we are absorbed in a story we drop our intellectual guard. We are moved emotionally and this seems to leave us defenseless. Anecdotes about those rare ink people—like Rand’s John Galt or Stowe’s Uncle Tom--who vault the fantasy-reality divide to change history are impressive. But what is more impressive, if harder to see, is the way our stories are working on us all the time, reshaping us in the way that flowing water gradually reshapes a rock.

- Jonathan Gottschall

Also check out Jonathan Gottschall's brilliant new book The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

Hitchens Destroys The Cult Of Ayn Rand

Brilliant!!

The Perverse Allure Of A Damaged Woman - Ayn Rand

"Rand was broken by the Bolsheviks as a girl, and she never left their bootprint behind. She believed her philosophy was Bolshevism's opposite, when in reality it was its twin. Both she and the Soviets insisted a small revolutionary elite in possession of absolute rationality must seize power and impose its vision on a malleable, imbecilic mass. The only difference was that Lenin thought the parasites to be stomped on were the rich, while Rand thought they were the poor.
In a country where almost everyone believes—wrongly, on the whole—that they are self-made, perhaps it is easier to have contempt for people who didn't make much of themselves. And Rand taps into something deeper still. The founding myth of America is that the nation was built out of nothing, using only reason and willpower. Rand applies this myth to the individual American: You made yourself. You need nobody and nothing except your reason to rise and dominate. You can be America, in one body, in one mind.
She said the United States should be a "democracy of superiors only," with superiority defined by being rich. Well, we got it. As the health care crisis has shown, today, the rich have the real power: The vote that matters is expressed with a checkbook and a lobbyist. "

- More Here

How Ideology Ruins Lives

One of the best posts I have read this year - by Alex Knap (checkout the heartbreaking story - How Ayn Rand Ruined A Childhood):

"Human beings are not omniscient, nor are they identical. Two people who experience the same event may walk away with a completely different meaning and story about what happened. We all walk through life carrying with us memories, ideas, and experience, and so it’s inevitable that we will disagree with one another. That we will have radically different notions of life from one another.

But to reject a person because they have different ideas is the worst kind of pride. To allow your ideology to prevent you from sharing your life with another person seems abhorrent to me. People are wonderful. Different ideas are wonderful. Different thoughts, feelings, and stories are wonderful.

To miss out on all that because it doesn’t fit in with the story you tell yourself is a tragic waste of life — a missed opportunity to experience true communion with other people. It’s a one-way ticket to a lonely, bitter old age.

I think that it’s important to work out the meaning in your own life. I think it’s vital to develop a philosophy for yourself. But it’s equally important to realize that you are not that philosophy. You are not that meaning. Philosophy; meanings — they’re just ideas. You have to embrace that in your life, your ideas will change. You will think differently about things as you experience new people, new places, new books, etc. But those changes in ideas don’t change who you are. Remembering that is, I think, vital for a happy life."

Ayn Rand Took Government Assistance While Decrying Others Who Did The Same

Heights of cognitive dissonance - here:

"An interview with Evva Pryror, a social worker and consultant to Miss Rand's law firm of Ernst, Cane, Gitlin and Winick verified that on Miss Rand's behalf she secured Rand's Social Security and Medicare payments which Ayn received under the name of Ann O'Connor (husband Frank O'Connor).
As Pryor said, "Doctors cost a lot more money than books earn and she could be totally wiped out" without the aid of these two government programs. Ayn took the bail out even though Ayn "despised government interference and felt that people should and could live independently... She didn't feel that an individual should take help."
But alas she did and said it was wrong for everyone else to do so."

Ayn Rand & The World She Made - Q&A with Anne Heller

New Book On Ayn Rand

After Anne C Heller's Ayn Rand biography, now another biography - Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. Great review of both the biographies here - similarities to what I wrote after reading Heller's book (here).

"1.There was her repeated claim that she owed no philosophical debt to anyone except Aristotle. It would be more accurate to say that everything in Objectivism is derivative of ideas that thinkers from John Locke to Adam Smith to Friedrich Nietzsche had expressed before. That's the way advances come about—in Isaac Newton's famous words, by standing on the shoulders of giants. But Newton, like other important thinkers, knew it and acknowledged it. By insisting that Objectivism had sprung full blown from her own mind, with just a little help from Aristotle, Rand was being childish, as well as out of touch with reality."

"2.First, Rand expressed the glory of human achievement. She tapped into the delight that a human being ought to feel at watching another member of our species doing things superbly well. The scenes in The Fountainhead in which the hero, Howard Roark, realizes his visions of architectural truth are brilliant evocations of human creativity at work"

"3. Ayn Rand never dwelt on her Russian childhood, preferring to think of herself as wholly American. Rightly so. The huge truths she apprehended and expressed were as American as apple pie. I suppose hardcore Objectivists will consider what I'm about to say heresy, but hardcore Objectivists are not competent to judge. The novels are what make Ayn Rand important. Better than any other American novelist, she captured the magic of what life in America is supposed to be. The utopia of her novels is not a utopia of greed. It is not a utopia of Nietzschean supermen. It is a utopia of human beings living together in Jeffersonian freedom."

She never dwelt on her Russian childhood but she failed to acknowledge the fact that what she went through in Russia shaped the person she became.

What I've been reading

Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne C.Heller. I haven't read Ayn Rand in almost 15 years (because of this). Last time I read anything on her was in Alan Greenspan's biography when it came out few years ago.

This is such a well written book that for the past two weeks I felt like I was living with Ayn, Frank and their whole brigade. Heller is obviously not a Randian but for a polarizing figure like Ayn Rand, its hard to write an unbiased biography. I don't think it was biased but Objectivists might despise this book.

Following quote while writing Galt's speech (from page 268), sums up her dichotomous personality - "If a person tells you that he regards reason and emotions as antagonists, he is telling you that his emotions are irrational and that he wants to get away with something dishonest dishonest."
Therein lies the genius of Rand's intellect. She was an ardent follower of Aristotle but she had the insight to understand (what neuroscience tells us now) that reason and emotions go hand in hand. But yet she ignored emotions as part of her philosophy and protagonists; that's probably her cognitive dissonance at work. Anyone reading Rand for the first time should keep this in mind before getting carried away and becoming a polarized polemic.

"Don't ask me about my family, my childhood, my friends or my feelings. Ask me about the things I think." It's just a empty rhetoric since whatever she become was because of her past. Her ego never let her accept that fact.

No doubt, Ayn Rand is one of the gifted intellectuals ever but in search of her immortality, she failed to live her life and became a terrible human being. If I had a chance I would still love to sit in one of her weekly meetings but I would never trade anything to have her life. In any case, having read Fountain Head as a young man, I still feel indebted to her for making me think.

Ayn Rand - A simple truth

Here's more of Ayn Rand bashing. Some interesting analysis -  to love Rand, one should have read her in their adolescence.

"I never made it through either of  Rand’s two big novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. To enjoy either, I suspect, you had to have encountered Rand in adolescence, when so many of life’s lasting enthusiasms are forged."

Thats very true but I also would like to add that her books perpetually feeds the confirmation bias irrespective of congruity. Her flashy characters anchor easily into adolescent minds, shaping their future. I wish there were more science writers who have this anchoring effect on adolescence sans the polarization. That's something we can all learn from Ayn Rand.

Limitations of Mrs.Logic

Sam Anderson argues on how "Ayn Rand never got into an argument she couldn’t win. Except, perhaps, with herself". His case against Ayn Rand, vindicates me for not reading Atlas Shrugged even though Fountain Head is one of my favorite book and I do admire Rand's philosophy. The logic sounds weird but it helps me from being biased and someday when I over come some shortcomings I will catch up on Atlas Shrugged. Anderson should have been less harsh on her personal life, which obviously influenced her but never a decent thing to bring in personal life to attack a person. If you want to refute a person believes, do it with facts who go against their believes. Rand wasn't an all out hypocrite but was driven by a unique philosophy with only some of it pragmatic and lots of it lacked   the concept of empathy. In the end, she died alone with her cats, on the surface it sounds sad but probably that's what she would have wanted. It makes he speculate that she must be one of those people who had bottled up all the empathy and opened it up only to self.

Its stupid to put anyone on a demigod pedastal, when we have natural human  imprefections. There are so many factors involved here like some theories can be incongrous, some lost in transaltion, some not pragmatic and the most important human short coming, the distrotion of the memory. The best option is prudent to filter the best information out of the anyone and in the process from history (without being a cognitive miser). Instead, if we want to use every past theories for a great quasi-intellectual debate with no specific destination expect for ones self satisfication on accomplishing a great oration.

"Few men can be satisified with their own private consciousness (without any social recognition)" - Adam Smith.

I think, Mr.Smith meant Women too.

The Fountain Head Effect

Ayn Rand's Fountain Head is one of my all time favorite book. I read it when I was 23 and (obviously) had a huge impact on me. I liked it so much that I didnt want to distrub the essence of that book by reading any of her other books (I have read here essays). It's a weird logic but it worked out good so far and till date I haven't even read Atlas Shrugged (which usually has a polarizing effect on most and so far I have escaped unscathed).
One of my all time favorite quote is:

"It is not in the nature of man—nor of any living entity—to start out by giving up, by spitting in one's own face and damning existence; that requires a process of corruption, whose rapidity differs from man to man. Some give up at the first touch of pressure; some sell out; some run down by imperceptible degrees and lose their fire, never knowing when or how they lost it. Then all of these vanish in the vast swamp of their elders who tell them persistently that maturity consists of abandoning one's mind; security, of abandoning one's values; practicality, of losing self-esteem. Yet a few hold on and move on, knowing that that fire is not to be betrayed, learning how to give it shape, purpose and reality. But whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man's nature and of life's potential." - Introduction to The Fountainhead,The Objectivist, March 1968, Ayn Rand.

Above lines had so much impact on me that every time I try to rationalize my irrational actions, I playback those lines, which in turn complicates the rationlizing algorithm making it harder for my grey matter to process.

Philosophy 101

I have often heard people say Philosophy it's not for me, it's boring, it's depressing, I have no time for it or some even say philosophy is for progressives !!. I used to get annoyed by these statements but with subdued passions in time, it was obvious what people were missing without understanding the ubiquitous-ness of philosophy. 


This speech by Ayn Rand, titled Philosophy: Who needs it? addressed to the graduating students of West point military academy in NYC (and complete collection essay's here ), is the best place to jump start our philosophical part of the brain:


"You might claim--as most people do--that you have never been influenced by philosophy. I will ask you to check that claim. Have you ever thought or said the following? "Don't be so sure--nobody can be certain of anything." You got that notion from David Hume (and many, many others), even though you might never have heard of him. Or: "This may be good in theory, but it doesn't work in practice. You got that from Plato. Or: "That was a rotten thing to do, but it's only human, nobody is perfect in this world." You got that from Augustine. Or: "It may be true for you, but it's not true for me." You got it from William James. Or: "I couldn't help it! Nobody can help anything he does." You got it from Hegel. Or: "I can't prove it, but I feel that it's true." You got it from Kant. Or: "It's logical, but logic has nothing to do with reality." You got it from Kant. Or: "It's evil, because it's selfish." You got it from Kant. Have you heard the modern activists say: "Act first, think afterward"? They got it from John Dewey.


Some people might answer: "Sure, I've said those things at different times, but I don't have to believe that stuff all of the time. It may have been true yesterday, but it's not true today." They got it from Hegel. They might say: "Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." They got it from a very little mind, Emerson."


Irrespective of your stance on Objectivism (Ayn Rand's philosophy), your "political" affiliation or love/hate relationship with Atlas Shrugged, this speech mostly gives a general outlook and a great place to begin contemplating the importance of philosophy in life. (For the record, my favorite Ayn Rand book is Fountainhead ) 

We all don't have to be philosophers (albeit, a lot of them think they are!!) but the sheer size of the spectrum philosophy covers makes it one of the important things under the sun. 

The idea of democracy to the idea of Capitalism; cultural differences to social sciences; astronomy to science; all of their roots are some way or other influenced by philosophy.

Studying any philosopher is a great place to start but don't pick a  favorite philosopher or philosophy earlier or at any time until you have a rudimentary understanding of the western and eastern philosophy and philosophers. It's difficult not to pick the favorites early with the way our brain works (achoring and adjustment even without number, I guess) but it will lead to biases without understanding the others.

Ayn Rand hates Immanuel Kant who in-turn hates Aristotle. It's not worth being polarized without having a full sense of what we are being polarized about. Every philosopher is worth reading, we can learn little something from everyone and it will eventually feed into your own unique philosophy.

What Ronald Bailey wrote  (in Liberation Biology) "Ignorance is not freedom. Knowledge is freedom; Igonrance is stagnation." says it all.

I am still a student and will be till the end. I fell in love with western philosophy after coming to this country. I grew under the influence of eastern philosophy, in retrospect it's a unique blessing  having to be influenced by both these diverse philosophies. So far it's been one heck of a ride. Until the last few years I wasn't reading much into philosophy but of-course everything changed since that four legged stress busting powerhouse checked-in.