July 2, 2012

• Full interview between Ayn Rand and Playboy can be found here: http://ellensplace.net/ar_pboy.html.

  PLAYBOY: Couldn't the attempt to rule whim out of life, to act in a totally rational fashion, be viewed as conducive to a juiceless, joyless kind of existence?

  RAND: I truly must say that I don't know what you are talking about. Let's define our terms. Reason is [a person]'s tool of knowledge, the faculty that enables [zem] to perceive the facts of reality. To act rationally means to act in accordance with the facts of reality. Emotions are not tools of cognition. What you feel tells you nothing about the facts; it merely tells you something about your estimate of the facts. Emotions are the result of your value judgments; they are caused by your basic premises, which you may hold consciously or subconsciously, which may be right or wrong. A whim is an emotion whose cause you neither know nor care to discover. Now what does it mean, to act on whim? It means that a [person] acts like a zombi, without any knowledge of what [ze] deals with, what [ze] wants to accomplish, or what motivates [zem]. It means that a [person] acts in a state of temporary insanity. Is this what you call juicy or colorful? I think the only juice that can come out of such a situation is blood. To act against the facts of reality can result only in destruction.

  PLAYBOY: Should one ignore emotions altogether, rule them out of one's life entirely?

  RAND: Of course not. One should merely keep them in their place. An emotion is an automatic response, an automatic effect of [a person]'s value premises. An effect, not a cause. There is no necessary clash, no dichotomy between [a person]'s reason and [zir] emotions -- provided [ze] observes their proper relationship. A rational [person] knows -- or makes it a point to discover -- the source of [zir] emotions, the basic premises from which they come; if [zir] premises are wrong, [ze] corrects them. [Ze] never acts on emotions for which [ze] cannot account, the meaning of which [ze] does not understand. In appraising a situation, [ze] knows why [ze] reacts as [ze] does and whether [ze] is right. [Ze] has no inner conflicts, [zir] mind and [zir] emotions are integrated, [zir] consciousness is in perfect harmony. [Zir] emotions are not [zir] enemies, they are [zir] means of enjoying life. But they are not [zir] guide; the guide is [zir] mind. This relationship cannot be reversed, however. If a [person] takes [zir] emotions as the cause and [zir] mind as their passive effect, if [ze] is guided by [zir] emotions and uses [zir] mind only to rationalize or justify them somehow -- then [ze] is acting immorally, [ze] is condemning [zem]self to misery, failure, defeat, and [ze] will achieve nothing but destruction -- [zir] own and that of others.

  This is probably the only position that I agree in entirety with Ayn Rand on.

  My brother had found the above interview and, upon reading it, handed it off to me (it's nice, in part, to have a sibling still in college, because then the rigorous consumption of intellectualism doesn't have to end just because I'm out of college, though I think it has more to do with his own obsessive intelligence).

  And it's a fascinating read; Ayn Rand certainly is very intelligent (or, at the very least, has a masterful command of communication). And yet (as I expected I would), I find myself disagreeing – in at least complete terms – with most of her.

  The obvious point of contention I'm going to have is with her assessment of literature (which, if I'm to be fully frank, I find rubbish), though I think the reason for this lies in that, while I believe I've said before – and do partially agree with her – that literature ought to (namely, in this case, regarding morality) make an arguable point, I don't think the writer (or the reader) has to necessarily agree with it. I do fall into the camp that believes that, the more ideas we're exposed to, the better we are off and that all thoughts and concepts should be examined in full. And, in particular when it comes to literature, there is importance in the craft of making you feel for, and to understand the motives of, characters you don't agree with.

  But this is mostly an aside, since, at the end of the day, I certainly have no interest in drawing sides based around personal tastes in literature. I disagree with Ayn Rand but would feel no compulsion to dissway her of her opinions, if she had no interest of changing them (and it's completely fair that she would likely find my own thoughts on literature to be rubbish as well).

   

  Rather, the larger points of contention that I have is Rand's conception of the proper use of government:

  PLAYBOY: What, in your view, is the proper function of a government?

  RAND: Basically, there is really only one proper function: the protection of individual rights. Since rights can be violated only by physical force, and by certain derivatives of physical force, the proper function of government is to protect [people] from those who initiate the use of physical force: from those who are criminals. Force, in a free society, may be used only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. This is the proper task of government: to serve as a policeman who protects [people] from the use of force.

  To my knowledge, Rand never states the reason for avoiding the use of force against other citizens, but I'm going to make an assumption and assume that it's because the use of force to overpower another is a negation of their freedom.

  The point where we severe agreement is that I would argue that force is not the only power that may negate another's freedom. I'd first bring up (which Rand may or may not agree with me on) that people require, at least from the start, proper education in order to properly assess the world (using her own conceptualization of the world: a person is not born understanding the world; thus, they are emotional. As such, they blunder through the world incapable of learning from it, possibly to never reach the understanding that they must use reason to comprehend it. As such, an education that makes clear to a person the use of reason and logic is necessary to make sane and safe people).

  It is a lack of this necessary education that allows for people to become (and remain mired in) racism. And it is this racism, on a large-scale, that enabled Jim Crow. Of course, one might respond back that this is why we need limited government. To which then I would appeal to the housing crisis during and following the African American Great Migration for the south to the north, during which real estate sellers would purposefully over price tenement- and slum-like conditions to African Americans and ensure that the African Americans could not receive housing in any white neighborhood. This wasn't an instance of legalized racism (which is why the Civil Rights Movement in the 60s failed in their attempt to combat racism in the north); this was individuals making racist choices (so much for "[...]there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women[...].").

  And those individuals tried to do something about it (again, civil rights movement); the top five most segregated cities in America all maintain a dissimilarity index in the high 70s to this day.

  So, to recap, the fundamental difference I have with Rand on this point is that physical force is not the only force capable of being wielded against individuals. And, as such, I fully and fundamentally believe the government should protect against this.

  But perhaps another flaw is that Rand believes that laissez-faire capitalism works, whereas I (again fundamentally) do not.

  And I think these two points can be, once again, summed up in a fundamental difference in view that I have with Rand: she (as well as libertarians and anarchists), to some degree, believes people can be trusted (this is applicable with the phrase "to some degree" because, even if you think complete freedom enables a constantly vigilant and self-sufficient person to resist those who might attack him, this trusts that those who might find more advantage in overpowering you will be unable to (or that you can outwit them); and, for those who would appeal to others out of those others fearing for their own rights at the hand of the amassing mob, you are trusting that those individuals will be intelligent enough to understand that concept – Nazi Germany would seem to disagree with you).

   

  This was more or less the point that I came to with my cousin when discussing whether she felt the FDA ought to be struck down. She felt it ought to be and that there were alternatives to it through privatized means. Incredulous, I asked how she could trust what was to go into her stomach with privatized forces, to which she pointed out, "There's our difference; I don't distrust people." Does anyone know why your health listing of food says Dietary Fiber rather than just Fiber?

  Because that's the base of it: the market will not respond in what's best for people; the market responds with what's best for the market. If someone can make a profit selling bread with sawdust in it rather than simply selling a quality product, they often will do it. If dolls of Stalin as an adorable humanitarian become popular, the market will mass-produce them in full-force.  Forget the fact that it's glorifying a mass-murder.

  And while there may be an outcry against sawdust bread, there is the requirement that every individual remain vigilant against such things so that they don't happen once again, which may be difficult if you live in a tenement in Chicago and can't leave because people 6 decades ago constructed it as an economic trap to make sure you could never enter their neighborhood.

  The very reason the American government is a republic instead of a democracy was out of distrust of people as a mass-group, to allow representation of minority opinions instead of mob-rule by the majority.

  And, for all the obsession with freedom and liberty, there can be neither freedom nor liberty in any system which allows the control (either through physical force or psychological force of society) of others by others.

   

  And I think, ultimately, this is why I must part with Rand: her societal ideas are, ultimately, based in ideal rather than what is practically realistic, much like communism.

  • 4:35 pm
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