05.02
Objectivism
What a wonderful name for a philosophy. It just roooooolls off the
tongue. I mentioned in my last post that I thought it had some flaws,
but I think it also has some strong points. It’s kind of like the
emergent church of socio-political philosophy. It seems to me to be a
large part reactionary to the tenants of socialism and postmodernism,
and that’s not a bad thing at all except that there has to be more to a
philosophy than just a reaction to another philosophy. Here are it’s
main principles:
- Reality exists as an objective absolute
are facts, independent of man’s feelings, wishes, hopes or fears. - Reason (the faculty which identifies and integrates the material
provided by man’s senses) is man’s only means of perceiving reality,
his only source of knowledge, his only guide to action, and his basic
means of survival. - Man—every
man—is
an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist
for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing
others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of
his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life. - The ideal political-economic system is laissez-faire capitalism.
It
is a system where men deal with one another, not as victims and
executioners, nor as masters and slaves, but as traders, by free,
voluntary exchange to mutual benefit. It is a system where no man may
obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force, and no
man may initiate the use of physical force against others. The
government acts only as a policeman that protects man’s rights; it uses
physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate
its use, such as criminals or foreign invaders. In a system of full
capitalism, there should be (but, historically, has not yet been) a
complete separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the
same reasons as the separation of state and church.
Let’s take it’s principles one by one:
- Objective Reality – Right on! Any philosophy that denies
objective reality is doomed to an infinite regress from the very
beginning. We are off on the right track so far. Good work Ayn. - Reason only – Whoa! You mean we come to the conclusion that
objective reality(#1) exists by reasoning it out? No, no, no. It’s
pretty obvious that we all know we are objectively real way before we
can reason out why. Intuition is a far too important method of
knowledge to just leave it out altogether like that. - Enlightened Self Interest – This might work if we are all
Darwinian people-o-saurs that only exist to get our genes into the next
generation by any means possible(which Ayn believed by the way) but a
world without benevolence just for the sake of it is a world
that doesn’t fit with what we know of humanity. People often want good
for others without any selfish motivation. To call that wrong is just
wierd. - Un-Moderated Capitalism – Now, I love me some capitalism. I
could eat it 3 times a day so I’m on board until the last little part
where there should be a complete separation of state and economics.
I’m no economist but it seems like pure capitalism is just about as
successful as pure democracy. That is to say it’s an absolute wreck
given just a little time. Monopoly laws and such are good things.
When everyone is acting according to #3, you will have to police that
baby all the time.
Like I said, there are some good points and bad points. Most of the
bad points come from atheistic wishful thinking where the world would
be such a great place if there were no God but everyone still played by
the rules.
