Monthly Archives: June 2022

The clumsy cry of despair in the novel Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand (source: Wikimedia Commons)

Love her or hate her, Ayn Rand was a far greater intellectual than Donald Trump. She actually studied the works of philosphers Arisotole, Locke, Kant, and Nietsche and and although the ultimate value of her pop philosophy fell far short of her own claims about it, she deserves mention in the context of todays culture war.

Was Ayn Rand a necessary pre-cursor to the rise of Authoritarianism in twenty-first century America? I think the answer must be yes even though, as a champion of individual freedoms, she would vehemently disagree. (Hint #1: This is because her absolutist, laissez-faire philosophy contradicts itself.)

When we examine Trump, we are torn between naming him evil genius and utter fool. Yes, he has an uncanny ability to attract educated followers who succumb to his beguiling ways and bend their ethics to the fracturepoint in the furtherance of his illegal and immoral schemes. But we also see that his eagerness to commit crimes and his penchant to spew hatredoften overrule his desire to hide such antisocial tendencies behind a curtain, like Nixon more carefully attempted.

Rand was born in Czarist Russia and was a teen during most of the Russian Revolution. From her perspective, socialism and totalitarianism were irreversibly intertwined, even though she acknowledged that Nazi rule in Germany began with a free electionand that Great Britain was only a partly-socialist nation. While we must concur with Rand that povertys breadth and the Kremlins atrocities in Soviet Russia are brutal condemnations of both the Soviet economy and its governing structure, she obviously got it wrong about Democratic Socialism as practiced for more than 100 years now, in Western Europe, which has achieved a relatively high degree of both econonmic and political equality among citizens (without excessive truncation of freedoms for individuals and businesses).

Rand was an avowed atheist, whereas Trump keeps his atheistic tendencies under wrap for political gain. While we know that Trump worships power and notoriety, Rand worshipped individual freedom and something she called objectivism which is essentially objectivity blended with rationalism (as contrasted with subjectivity and irrationalism).

Rand characterized two of historys co-parasitic evil forces with the names Attila (the tyrant) and the Witch Doctor (the priest). Hitler embodied both and to a lesser degree, so does Trump. The Witch Doctors role is to propagandize the massess so they dont believe their own eyes or their own brains (anti-objectivism) and Attilas role is to selectively apply brutal, excessive force on perceived enemies to create an example so the masses will fear using their brains independently of the leaders edicts.

Because Rand was also a strong advocate for law and order, its difficult to ignore the likelihood that her psyche must have had a bit of Attila blended in with the other portions of Thomas Jefferson and Adam Smith. (Hint #2: Rand believed governments primary role was to deter looting and rioting so that Producers could have more freedom to make unlimited profits.)

Therational side of Rand makes me think she would be in favor the work of the January 6 committee, however her blind love of absolute freedom, which issues pardons for all sins committed by Producers, makes me wonder if today, she might be a frequent guest on Tucker Carlsons show.

In the best light, we can think of Liz Cheney as a modern-day Ayn Rand a strong advocate for small government when it comes to regulating big business, yet a staunch defender of the American Constitution when totalitarian, fascist, and anti-rational forces attack it. However, there is a worst light scenario too.

A new articleby Tom Nichols in The Atlantic sheds some light additional light on why so many Trump supporters find it so difficult to abandon their irrational world-view even when the level of irrationality grows day-by-day, and the facts demonstrate so clearly that Trump is a both a tyrant and a witch doctor. From the Nichols article:

But living in an alternate reality is unhealthyand dangerous, as I realized yet again while watching the January 6 committee hearings and listening to the stories of Republicans, such as Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers and others, describing the threats and harassment they have received for doing their duty to the Constitution.

I think the Trump superfans are terrified of being wrong. I suspect they know that for many years theyve made a terrible mistakethat Trump and his coterie took them to the cleaners and the cognitive dissonance is now rising to ear-splitting, chest-constricting levels. And so they will literally threaten to kill people like Kinzinger (among others) if thats what it takes to silence the last feeble voice of reason inside themselves.

So the MAGA base are scared to death of the consequences of their willful blindness and they lash out violently and pitifully in hopes they can postpone the day of reckoning.

Ayn Rand actuall spoke of this phenomenon, and it doesnt end well. There is scene toward the end of Atlas Shrugged where Dagny Taggart confronts a guard (an Attila) who is obstructing her access to John Galt (who is at that momentbeing tortured by James Taggart and others at the State Science Institute). Dagny sets up a philosphical dilemma for the guard to demonstrate his abandonment of his own reasoning faculties. The horns of this dilemma overhwhelm the guards undeveloped intellect. He tells Dagny its not fair for her to forcehim to make a decision, because hes not sure which action is right and which is wrong.

What follows is Dagnys penultimate conversion to authoritarianism, although Rand probably didnt view it that way.

Calmly and impersonally, she, who would have hesitated to fire at an animal, pulled the trigger and fired straight at the heart of a man who had wanted to exist without the responsibility of consciousness.

Come to think of it, perhaps Ayn Rand would prefer to be a talking head on Fox News.

Is it fair for us towonder what Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger would do if they were in Dagny Taggarts place? Im pretty sure I know what Elon Musk would do.

More here:

Ayn Rand v Donald Trump? - Daily Kos

The following is a letter to the editor submitted by a reader. It does not necessarily reflect the views of this newspaper. To submit a letter, email nbowe@dlnewspapers.com.

Too many Americans, especially laissez-faire Republicans but also neoliberal Democrats, are devoted to the selfish, authoritarian philosophy of Ayn Rand, a woman whose tragic early life experiences turned her into a woman so narcissistic and self-serving that she recommended we let others die on the streets if they dont have enough. That way, she said, we can have more than we need.

She never understood that many countries with robust capitalism, like Norway or Sweden, also have Medicare for all, subsidized childcare, sturdy maternal and paternal leave, and subsidized post-secondary education that doesnt require students to go into debt to earn a degree or learn a trade.

What matters in life is having enough, not too much. What matters is community, which translates into English as cooperation. Some Americans Ive met lately act as if the word comes from across the sea. It doesnt. The laws that are best are the ones that do the greatest good for the largest number of people.

Ayn Rand cult members claim to value freedom and individualism but, at one extreme, want to take away Social Security and Medicare, two programs that increase freedom and protect individuals. They also want to restrict a woman's right to choose how to live their own lives.

Some of us, despite inflation, have been lucky. We have enough. We take one day at a time, live each moment to the full, and give back as warranted by our means. Were civil even to those who curse us. We do our best to practice the Golden Rule do to others as you want done to yourself and the Serenity Prayer: Give me courage to change things I can, serenity to accept things I cant, and the wisdom to tell the difference.

None of us need more. We only need enough. Life is a series of adventures and misadventures. Theres great beauty around us. The earth zips around the sun at 67,000 mph. If you stand still, you can feel it move under your feet. Its fragile. All of us are stuck on it together.

The rules, therefore, are very simple:

Perhaps JFK, in his famous Peace Speech at American University in 1963, the year he was assassinated by a man with a murderous weapon, put it best: For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our childrens future. And we are all mortal.

See the original post here:

Letter: The rules of life are very simple - Detroit Lakes Tribune

We instinctually ascribe political and strategic genius to the authoritarians of the world. One American commentator described Putin as a "grandmaster of chess" when it comes to strategy. But anyone that acts as a tyrant over the people of their country, and causes the pain and suffering of a war, is no genius, writes Yaron Brook and Elan Journo.

No death toll can truly capture the devastation that Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and their ilk inflicted upon the world. The engineered Great Famine in Ukraine (Holodomor), the Holocaust, the Cultural Revolution, and the Killing Fields of the twentieth century should have taught us to evaluate dictators properly. But, depressingly, many politicians and intellectuals persist in misreading dictators.

How the West got Russia and China WrongRead more For example, when Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran was rising to power, he found admirers among Western intellectuals. In 1979 Richard Falk, a professor of international law at Princeton, dismissed concerns about Khomeinis political vision of Islamic totalitarianism. Falk suggested that Iran may yet provide us with a desperately-needed model of humane governance for a third world country. Thats not been the experience of Iranian women who are brutalized and jailed for failing to wear hijab; nor of gays executed by public hanging; nor of any Iranians who value their freedom; nor of any of the victims of Iranian-backed Islamist terrorism.

Remember when Bashar al-Assad of Syria was seen as a savvy reformer, invested in the welfare of his people? Except that he became notorious for inflicting chemical weapons on his subjects. Mohammad Bin Salman of Saudi Arabia was breathlessly hailed as a forward thinking, capable leader: yes, the selfsame MBS who ordered the hit and literal butchering of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist affiliated with the Washington Post.

But surely the most consequential examples today are Xi Jinping and especially Vladimir Putin.

In the words of one American commentator, Vladimir Putin is like a "grandmaster of chess" when it comes to strategy, whereas Barack Obama "stumbles with checkers." On the eve of Putin's invasion of Ukraine, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo described the Russian dictator as "very shrewd, very capable," adding "I have enormous respect for him... [Putin] is an elegantly sophisticated counterpart who is not reckless but has always done the math."

___

The notion of dictators as charismatic, capable strategists is an illusion

___

While Donald Trump was in office, he was one of Putin's superfans and apologists. Trump has described the Ukraine invasion as "genius," later praising Putin for having "taken over a country for $2 worth of sanctions."

This is a severe misreading, and the most obvious evidence can be seen in the battlefields of Ukraine. The reputedly formidable Russian military has struggled against courageous Ukrainians fighting in self-defense. It can also be seen in the extraordinary scale and extent of international sanctions imposed on Russia. But this misreading goes deeper than a strategy that backfired.

The notion of dictators as charismatic, capable strategists is an illusion. The illusion endures partly because they can appear successful, at least for a while. But the truth is that Putin and Xi, like their twentieth century predecessors, are fundamentally impotent.

Charismatic, inspiring loyalty? Oh, come on. They are at war against their own subjugated people.

___

Putin and Xi are not simply politicians who get a few details wrong. Theyre wrong all the way down

___

For individuals to live, think, produce, and thrive, the role of a proper government is to protect their freedom. It is freedom that fuels human progress and prosperity. No one who values human flourishing can look at Putin, Xi or any other dictator as anything but a lethal aberration.

Putin and Xi are not simply politicians who get a few details wrong. Theyre wrong all the way down. They dominate, brutalize and exploit those who think, teach, invent, produce, run businesses, create value at whatever scale. By violating the rights of their citizens, Putin, Xi and other dictatorial leaders defy the objective conditions necessary for individuals to live and prosper. They are destroyers. "To deal with men by force," observed philosopher Ayn Rand, "is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion."

Dictators are at war not only with their own people, but, ultimately, with reality. Putin and Xi are usurpers, and on some level they know it, but shut their eyes to that truth. The epic scale of censorship and repression under their reign is telling. Why intimidate, muzzle, and seek to control the thoughts of the population, if it truly found you inspiring and magnetic?

Orwell's fearsome "Big Brother" pales in comparison to China's vast surveillance of its population, social credit scores, and legions of censors. The regime crushes dissent, and it imposes thought control. When Dr. Li Wenliang spoke out about the novel Corona virus at the pandemic's outbreak, he was silenced, punished, humiliated; after his death from Covid 19, tragically vindicating his warning, censors scrubbed Chinese social media to erase public demands for freedom of speech. Or recall what happened to Peng Shuai, the Chinese tennis champion who accused a Party official of sexual assault: she was disappeared. (Only after an international furor about her vanishing, did she reappear for a stage managed interview.)

Putin's railroading and "disappearing" of critics, the poisoning of opponents, the eradication of every last vestige of an independent media, the marinating of the population in endless propaganda: these are a confession of weakness, a fear of facing the facts. Thought control puts the regime's wishes above facts, on the premise that wishing makes it so. There's no "war" in Ukraine, only a "special military operation" -- and any Russian who denies this or objects to it can face up to 15 years in prison.

What Putin, Xi and their cronies have achieved are regimes geared toward exploitation. Putin-aligned oligarchs have ransacked the country. China's caste of party-aligned operatives have raked in billions, amid the countrys impressive economic rise. That rise, now seemingly slowing, occurred despite not because of Chinas dictatorial leadership. It was a consequence of the slight degree of economic freedom the Party condescended to permit -- and which it is now undoing.

___

To put it bluntly, many Western intellectuals and policy makers have an irrational prejudice against freedom, especially as manifested in markets

___

There's nothing charismatic, nor "shrewd" nor "sophisticated" here. Such dictators and their hangers-on are thugs, gangsters and murderers who operate under the state's (ostensible) moral authority. Human parasitism is an expression of not of efficacy, but of impotence.

Why then do some people view Putin and Xi as impressively capable, strategic leaders? Here are two factors.

First, to put it bluntly, many Western intellectuals and policy makers have an irrational prejudice against freedom, especially as manifested in markets. You can see it in the bias against markets, deemed messily inefficient, and in favor of central planning. While we both reject this common perspective, our point here is not to persuade you that we're right about markets. Rather, it's that many in the West are afflicted by what you might call Central-Planner Envy, and this leads them into warped thinking. It picks out supposed accomplishments -- "Behold the highspeed trains in Xi's China!" -- while evading the full reality of the uncountable individuals whose rights are trashed in the course of maintaining the regimes systems pervasive repression.

A second, more significant explanatory factor is Western appeasement of Russia and China. Instead of frankly recognizing the evil character of these regimes, Russia and China are afforded the undeserved moral status of civilized countries. By agreeing to sit down with them at summits and multilateral meetings, our heads of state perpetuate the fiction that Putin and Xi as efficacious and benevolent leaders that belong in the company of rights-respecting nations.

The United Nations is a major culprit in whitewashing these regimes. Both have permanent seats on the UN's powerful Security Council(!), despite violating the organizations stated principles -- flagrantly, repeatedly, and on a vast scale. What about the massacring of pro-democracy student protesters at Tiananmen Square in 1989? Dousing the last embers of intellectual freedom? Interning thousands of Uighurs in concentration camps? Wiping out the last vestiges of freedom in Hong Kong? Ongoing piracy of foreign-owned intellectual property? The dishonest handling of the COVID pandemic? No, China has learned that it is effectively untouchable.

This official whitewashing encourages, and is reinforced by, the willingness of American and European companies to invest in China and Russia as if they were basically free, civilized, moral regimes. The consequences are pernicious. Putins regime, for example, has benefited handsomely from the inflow of foreign capital and joint-ventures with BP, Shell and Exxon. But, since the war in Ukraine, all three of these companies are frantically departing the Russian market, suffering losses in the tens of billions of dollars.

___

The notion that Putin and Xi (and their ilk) are charismatic, efficacious leaders is false. They have pit themselves against the facts and against human life

___

When you reflect on how the U.S. and European nations dealt with Putins past aggression, his initiation of war against Ukraine on February 24, 2022, is exposed as foreseeable, rather than strategically shrewd let alone genius. Passive appeasement by the U.S. and Europe emboldened Putin. Consider the incisive observation of Evgeny Kissin, an expatriate Russian pianist and composer, who on this issue exhibits greater clarity of vision than political leaders in Washington, London, and the capitals of Europe:

if the West had applied the same sanctions against Putins regime as it is applying now 8 years ago, after the annexation of the Crimea, there would have been no war in the Ukraine now. Ill tell you even more: had the West applied such sanctions in 2008, in response to Putins invasion of Georgia and the de facto annexation of South Ossetia, Putin would not have annexed the Crimea five and a half years later and maybe, by that time he would even no longer be in power. And more: if the West had applied such sanctions back in 1999-2000, in response to the genocide in Chechnya, there would definitely have been no invasions of Georgia and the Ukraine.

The notion that Putin and Xi (and their ilk) are charismatic, efficacious leaders is false. They have pit themselves against the facts and against human life. To the extent such dictators advance toward their stated goals, they wreak havoc. Zoom out from Ukraine, where Putin's forces are floundering, and recall that Stalin's reign brought nothing but death to his own people. Hitler lost a world war, laid waste a continent, and put to death tens of millions.

Reflecting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a key figure in the final solution, Hannah Arendt coined the phrase the "banality of evil." Its an idea that remains controversial. If you take it to mean that evil is in fact small, unglamorous and commonplace, there's some truth in the observation. And it certainly applies to Putin, Xi, and other dictators; picture Saddam Hussein upon being dragged out of hiding from an underground rathole.

But this idea is at best incomplete. Theres a deeper truth about the character of evil, which Ayn Rand discussed in her writings. Rand observed that evil was impotent that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real and that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it."

View original post here:

The Banality of Putin and Xi | Yaron Brook and Elan Journo - IAI

WASHINGTON Back when green was merely a color as opposed to a movement, Bill McKibben was on the frontlines of the environmental wars. After graduating from Harvard in 1982, he worked at the New Yorker but eventually left to publish The End of Nature in 1989, a book that established him as a leading thinker on the damage human activity is causing to the planet and future generations of humans.

Since 2001, he has been teaching at Middlebury College in Vermont and publishing books, including most recently The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon. A memoir of sorts, the book is best explained by its own subtitle: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened.

Bill McKibben was one of the speakers for an Earth Day event organized by the Center for Earth Ethics in April. (Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Though hardly romantic about the past, McKibben is especially dismayed by the American present, wondering how we became a society strained by bleak racial and economic inequality, where life expectancy was falling even before a pandemic deepened our divisions, on a heating planet whose physical future is dangerously in question.

McKibben spoke to Yahoo News from his home in Vermont on what he said was a lovely day. It was humid in Washington, D.C., where climate change will soon enough render weather conditions akin to what Mississippi experiences today.

Yahoo News: You write about neighborliness. What is that, and why is it important?

Bill McKibben: I use a number of different words to talk about the same thing, which is the sense that we belong to communities as large as our species and as small as our neighborhood. Over the course of my life, we encountered the extremely radical idea that our only duty was really to ourselves, perhaps our family.

That was the key switch. Jimmy Carter represented one world, and Ronald Reagan the other. We made a decisive choice.

To you, the neoliberal turn is the disastrous one that has brought us to this point?

It goes deeper than just neoliberal economics. When Im discussing Christianity, I think thats what happened there too, from community to evangelicals single-minded focus on my personal Lord and savior. Weve ended up in a very transactional and hyper-individual world in so many ways.

Story continues

I might be misreading, but I dont think you see this solely as the project of philosophical conservatives.

There were certainly seeds of it that came out of the 60s as well. Do your own thing had Ayn Rand (an influential novelist and philosopher) on some level too.

If, in a sense, our entire society is complicit in this arrangement, could it be that simply most people want to live this way?

Its possible. Its a very interesting question. Clearly human nature contains both things, right? Theres a draw to a kind of selfishness, and that, evolutionary biologists can explain. But theres also a draw to a kind of sense of community and connectedness that again, even evolutionary biologists can explain. Good working societies hold these things in balance right down to the idea that you might need a gun because you had to have a well-regulated militia. But thats a very different world than the world where everyone decides they want their own AR-15 because thats what freedom means.

Theres a lot in your book about debts that need to be paid. Can you explain that concept?

Weve come to this extraordinary period of just unimaginable wealth creation. But we now understand some of the cost, the expense of others. Whether there were people in our own society shut out from the economic escalator ride or people who are having their lives turned upside down by the carbon that we poured into the atmosphere in the course of becoming that prosperous.

Im old-fashioned enough to think that debts owed should be repaid.

Often debts are only repaid if theres some compulsion to do so, right?

Thats true. In this case one lacks any method of forcing it. Thats why one writes books and organizes and so on and so forth. And appeals to the conscience of people, which is not a completely fruitless appeal.

But should government be more muscular in these areas?

Of course. But government is just another way of saying all of us working together. So unless we build a consensus within our society that we should do these things, then the government is not going to do them.

What I am trying to get at is that some progressives have shown frustration with democracy. They cant compel these changes that you write about, but they recognize their necessity.

Yes, and if one perhaps had an alternative to recommend to democracy, maybe it would be worth thinking about it, but probably not for me. Because, as the book points out, I grew up in Lexington, Mass., and I had the notion that democracy is important imprinted on me at an early age.

You start out the book with a very poignant image of what it was like to grow up there. Im guessing home prices have increased, well, not literally exponentially but considerably.

Id say literally. The house my parents bought for 30 grand, which was roughly 200 grand in todays dollars, it sold last year, and the last person who bought it paid a million dollars for it and immediately tore it down, and on this narrow footprint of land has built something that looks like a cross between a junior high and a medium security prison.

Exponential is the only word to describe how fast home price values have gone up. And thats the definition in a sense of unearned income. People just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

And what does that mean? What does the proliferation of wealth as represented by real estate and stocks, what does that do to society?

It makes permanent whatever divisions and inequalities were present when you got on the escalator. It makes sure that people who werent able to get on the escalator at the bottom, never catch up. The numbers are really quite remarkable about what happened to, say, the wealth gap between white and Black Americans over this period of time.

Are racial reparations necessary?

Yeah. I mean who knows what were going to call them? And Im well aware that to say that is a great gift to right-wing politicians. Do you talk about them? But in terms of justice, theres no question.

I think thats the underlying reason people are so crazy about having anyone teach about racism in the public schools. Its not because I think people are worried that their children are going to be burdened with guilt. Children are smart. Children have studied history for a long time and done just fine. Its because people are feeling guilty themselves and dont want to have to think about it. Because why would you want to think about it?

What would it tell you about this country if Trump or someone like him were elected in 2024?

The body rallied to fight off the virus once. But clearly it weakened us yet more to do it, and it doesnt feel right now like the body politic is especially strong or in a place to fight off those fevers again. We shall see. But, I mean, it would be a sign, I think that that fever had not broken.

Can you explain the relationship between cultural issues, the political issues you write about in this book and the climate work that youve been doing for many years now?

The ideological framework that weve been living in since Reagan was absolutely perfect for constantly expanding our demands on the environment and absolutely poisonous for figuring out a way to rein in the climate crisis.

These decades have been a period when the U.S. has uniquely possessed extraordinary leverage because of its wealth and superpower status. And all that leverage was used in the wrong direction when it came to climate change.

Are you pessimistic about the future?

Well, look, the title of the very first book that I wrote about all this back when I was 27 or something, it was The End of Nature. So Im not a Pollyanna. But Im also, you know, I spend all day as a volunteer and organizer, and I wouldnt do that if I had decided there was no use. Im not an idiot either. Ill keep it up as long as I can make a plausible argument to myself that its worthwhile, and if I cant, then I will retire to the back porch to drink bourbon.

What kind of bourbon do you like?

What do you got?

See the article here:

American culture is destroying itself, and the planet, says leading activist Bill McKibben - Yahoo Philippines News