In fact, the right to hold property often subverts my right to live. For if I reside in a community where no one can own property, my fellow residents will probably grant me the right to remain alive. But if I live in a community where private property is the rule, then some of my fellow citizens may easily take it into their heads to murder me for my property. It may be that if I am able to own my own land, I will tend to work harder for a living and therefore survive better than I might otherwise. The core purpose of the objectivist philosophy is to maximize production through incentive. But one can have incentives without ownership as almost all successful companies provide for their employees. It is incentive connected to performance, not ownership that is the prime mover. It is silly to believe that only because I have property rights will I manage to survive.
12. "Men of self-esteem, uncorrupted by the altruist morality, are the only men who can and do value human life," (Branden, 1962).
Who, first of all, is uncorrupted by the altruist morality? According to the objectivists, practically no one. Does no one, then, value human life?
Take, secondly, individuals, such as Francis of Assisi, Thomas ???? Kempis, and Florence Nightingale--who clearly were "corrupted" by the altruist morality. Did all these individuals hate other humans and see no value in human life?
Take, thirdly, people (such as, presumably, the fanatically religious objectivists) who are totally uncorrupted by the altruist morality. Are they likely to value any human life other than their own? Theoretically, they will probably value others because they are human, and if they value themselves, they will tend to accept others as worthy, too. But, in actual practice, are they likely to do very much to help others in times of disaster, when they are acting incompetently or weakly, or at other times of crisis in their lives? I wonder.
13. "A rational man does not hold or pursue any desire out of context. And he does not judge what is or is not in his interest out of context, on the range of any given moment," (Rand, 1964).
Rational men, then, obviously never rationalize, never have irrational desires or whims. No short-range hedonists, they--ever!
14. Said Branden: "Suppose...a happily married man, deeply in love with his wife, meets another woman for whom he experiences a sexual desire; he is tempted, for the space of a few moments, by the thought of an affair with her; then, the full context of his life comes back to him and he loses his desire; the abstract sexual appreciation remains, but that is all; there is no more temptation to take action," (1966a).
If objectivists really think that a man loses his sexual desire for another woman when he is happily married, remembers the full context of his married life, and that he thereafter has no more temptation to jump into bed with this other woman, they are not considering practically all the red-blooded males whom I know! In fact, they are not even considering some red-blooded male dyed-in-the-wool objectivists with whom I am personally acquainted. The objectivist fanatically religious concept of male sexuality and its being restrained by the full context of the individual's life is literally and figuratively not for this world.
A man or woman may certainly resist temptation to have adulterous sex experiences when he or she considers the full context of life. But the notion that a sexually normal person will lose desire and have no more temptation for another person when he remembers his mate and their marital relationship is strangely akin to the Old Testament commandment: "Thou shall not covet thy neighbor's wife," and to the New Testament philosophy: "If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out." Super-idealistically and fanatically, to say the least, objectivists expect fallible human beings, in pursuit of their important values, not merely to forego actions but also to surrender their lusts. The orthodox Muslims, Christians, and Jews had better move over--they have a young rival group, which is equally ascetic in its religious demands!
15. "Mental health is unobstructed cognitive efficacy" (Branden, 1967a). When any individual with truly unobstructed cognitive efficacy is born and reared, I shall be delighted to meet him or her; but I am not holding my breath till this encounter occurs. In fact, just as Harry Houdini once offered a reward of ten thousand dollars to any alleged medium whose psychic tricks he could not unmask, I am thinking of awarding an equal sum to any person whose alleged unobstructed cognitive efficacy I cannot unmask. I don't expect to pay it!
If mental health is really unobstructed cognitive efficacy, and if the objectivists are, as the ample evidence presented throughout this book surely tends to show, pretty consistently illogical, fanatically religious, perfectionist, contradictory, unrealistic, and super-demanding, by their own standards they must have some significant degree of mental illness?
16. Collins points out that Ayn Rand keeps making many flat, extremist statements, some of which are apparently made for shock value, even though they have little empirical content. Thus, she states that "America is culturally bankrupt" and "America's intellectual leadership has collapsed." (1961).
"These maxims," Collins notes, "are good enough for the sawdust trail, but do not bring us very far in a philosophy of culture."
It might also be pointed out that this kind of speaking and writing is intellectually dishonest. It is bad enough when Ayn Rand and her objectivist fellow travelers actually believe many of the extreme, all-or-nothing fanatically religious statements that they make. But when they make them largely for shock value, without any real belief in them that is perhaps even worse. The first form of behavior is merely stupid; the second hypocritical and manipulating. This in the face of the fact that the objectivists, in particular of all groups, ostentatiously take pride in their supposed intellectual honesty!
17. There can be no compromise between freedom and government controls. "If you accept "just a few controls,' you surrender the principle of inalienable individual rights and substitute for it the principle of the government's unlimited, arbitrary power. You thus deliver yourself to gradual enslavement." You cannot compromise at all on basic principles or on fundamental issues. What would you make a "compromise' between life and death? Or between truth and falsehood? Or between reason and irrationality? (Rand, 1962).
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