Just My Objective Opinion

Sorry I haven't posted anything on a couple weeks. I've been reading and listening to a lot about Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism lately. I really have tried to keep an open mind but the stuff is pretty laughable. They claim to have an objective morality, however, without a God (and Objectivists are nearly all atheists), it becomes impossible to have an objective morality.  In fact, just grouping the words "atheistic," "objective," "morality," makes me scratch my head.  Morality has to be completely subjective because it has to be conceived in a mind.  It cannot exist independent of a mind.  There is no rule book floating out there in space that says how we should live our lives (and if you say the Bible I'm going to slap you).  If Objectivists spent anytime looking at the word objective they would realize that their philosophy doesn't actually make any sense.

You might say, well Dedalus, you are writing about objectivity and how to find it.  What you are saying isn't that much different from their claims.  I would entirely disagree.  My claim is that there exists, out of the hundreds of millions of ways to live, one best way to live and we can consider that way of living an objective truth - because it is the best way and because that way might produce something eternal.  But it cannot simply be just thought up, because that would be subjective.  We would have to discover it.  And how do we discover it? Using the scientific method.  If we look at the past two hundred plus years and all the advancements that have been made in our world we can attribute it wholly to science.  And my claim is that if we can concentrate on science and if we can focus our time and resources to becoming a more scientific people we will surely see even greater and more rapid advancements in the human race which would eventually uncover a best way of living.  Objectivity, for me, is more of an end than a means - or more correctly it is an end that makes the means meaningful.

The ridiculous thing about Objectivists are that they are much more interested in philosophy in trying to understand the universe than science.  But philosophy is never adequate, it is never going to push humanity forward in any significant way because many things about our existence cannot be figured out using logic or reason.  I've noticed this trend lately that Christians and other cults (yes, most fundamentalist religions are cultish in behavior) have put a lot more emphasis on philosophy.  It is because they lost the science debate.  Science has shown that the earth is more than six thousand years old, science has shown that we have evolved and are evolving, science has shown - quantum mechanics more specifically - that the reality we are experiencing might be subjective, science has shown that homosexuals and any other types of persons are born the way they are, science has shown hundreds of other things that completely fly in the face of archaic religious claims that people continue to cling on to.  So what else do religions and cults do:  they rely heavily on philosophy.  Because anyone can have a philosophy.  All it takes is having a somewhat reasonable and a somewhat defensible opinion.

I've been listening to a couple of Objectivist podcasts lately.  There was one particularly egregiousness one in which they were discussing, in depth, their problems with Postmodernism.  Now, I'll grant it, as much as I love a lot of Postmodern art there is a lot of problems with it.  There is also a lot of problems with Postmodernism as a philosophy.  However, this podcast - and Objectivism in general - seems to love to paint this caricature of Postmodernism only to try and tear it down.  One particular argument I heard on this podcast (and I hear variations of this argument very often) is that Postmodernists love to profess how subjective our existence, reality and morality is but at the same time love to believe so strongly in things like feminism, collectivism and environmentalism, almost in an objective-like way.  This might be one of the more ridiculous statements made by folks on the far right.  So what they are saying essentially is that if people believe that our reality/morality is subjective then they have to forfeit their opinions.  That is absurd.  They have to know that opinions are completely subjective because opinions are pure formations of the mind.  (That reminds me, I've got to post something soon about environmentalism).

There's one last thing I wanted to share about Objectivism, a kind of summing up of what I think they are all about, a thesis statement if you will:  Objectivism is apologetics defending the wealthy against intellectuals.  Objectivists don't really care about the undeducated because uneducated people generally share their opinion that wealth is a virtue and that wealth is a reflection of hard work and ingenuity because they have been indoctrinated to believe this.  It is the educated people that have a problem with the wealthy because they can break away from their indoctrination to find the problems asscoiated with wealth (especially the disparity between the rich and poor) and Objectivism tries to deal with that problem.

But if there is one word I'd like to use to describe Objectivists that would shock people into seeing what they really are, that word would be "cult."  The uniformity of their opinion is astoundingly disgusting and their claims of absolute truth rival that of even the most fundamental religions.  Check it out if you don't believe me.