I’ll use this thoughtful post (HT: GVH) as an introduction to my latest blog link. John’s path of philosophic evolution is very similar to mine.

Great blog - check it out.

I intended to mention this pro/con piece as a wonderful example depicting the nature of philosophical debate in this country, but it’s already been mentioned here.

As part of a promotion at audible.com, several books are on sale including the unabridged version of Atlas Shrugged.

I highly recommend the audio book version. Not only has it proven to be a very convenient format for enjoying the story, but also a way to share the story with others. I keep the stack of 50 CD’s in a case that I leave in my car and occasionally will put on my desk at work. I’ve loaned it out on two separate occasions - both of which were facilitated by the format of the media.

To get this life-changing novel for $4.95 is a incredible value.

UPDATE: Unfortunately, I just realized that you must be a member to get the sale price. This fact was conveniently excluded from their add as well as the site. Still a great deal if you were to join for 3 months (minimum) @ $7.95/month, which would allow you three books at no additional charge plus the sale price on Atlas. Essentially, one could get 4 books for $28.80 total.

Book review: Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, by Ayn Rand (from HBL)

She wrote the book because she was confounded by the fact that young people blamed every societal ill on capitalism, which was hardly surprising since they had not lived under any other system. Socialism and communism, at the time she was writing, had legions of promoters and defenders, but capitalist ideals seemed to be trampled on everywhere and held up as evil. An American immigrant who had witnessed the economic misery and attacks on individual dignity that defined communist Russia, Rand had at an early age resolved to be capitalism’s defender.

…

Most of the ‘anti-capitalists’ of today actually know little about the system into which they were born. They have eyes only for some actors within it (such as large companies) and their apparent greed, while being blind to the fantastic freedoms and prosperity they have inherited. Free markets, they believe, will mean a ‘race to the bottom’ of greater and greater exploitation of workers. Such arguments fail to notice that the sweatshop workers in developing countries who make goods sold in the rich world have usually arrived there by choice, leaving behind back-breaking lives of rural poverty. Their wages may be a pittance, but they represent the beginnings of a way out; their conditions look bad, but are little different to those endured by our grandparents or great-grandparents when their countries were industrialising.

The usual accusation levelled at Rand and her followers is of extremism. A more intelligent view is that she was a supreme rationalist who valued personal freedom to the highest degree.

Capitalism for her was not just a system for people to get richer, but was the only system in which people were free to act according to their best interests. Today, because we take our comfortable lives for granted, we take capitalism for granted as well. [emphasis added]

I’m shocked to see such an accurate and objective review of Rand outside of the core Objectivist media circles.  This is a very good thing. If you only read one article this week, this should be it.

The preemptive race card is already being tossed out by the Kindergarten Party (HT) at the notion of an Obama loss.  An especially pathetic example is this garbage by Jacob Weisberg - the collectivist editor at Slate.com.

This is the second (that I’ve noticed) race-baiting read on Slate in the past few weeks - at least they’re consistent.  Weisberg alternates between two distinct tactics - 1) smear McCain based on age and his (alleged) lack of collectivist enlightenment, and 2) smear anyone even glancing at the thought of not pulling the Obama lever as a Klan member.

Both tactics are transparent, illogical and void of intellectual merit - standard leftist prattling.  A few quotes…

Obama has built a crack political operation, raised record sums, and inspired millions with his eloquence and vision. McCain has struggled with a fractious campaign team, lacks clarity and discipline, and remains a stranger to charisma. Yet at the moment, the two of them appear to be tied. What gives?

Hmmm… perhaps it could be that while McCain is just as bad, he manages to maintain a slightly more resilient cloak over his vision (i.e., his desire to destroy virtually every freedom that led to the greatness of our nation).  They both prescribe compulsory compassion and sacrifice as the answer.  Both are fully willing, and unfortunately capable, of inflicting massive economic destruction as they trample rights in their quest to reform and pressure (force by gunpoint) their altruist vision on America.

If you break the numbers down, the reason Obama isn’t ahead right now is that he trails badly among one group, older white voters. He does so for a simple reason: the color of his skin.

Or, considering older whites statistically are the most educated and wealthy, maybe A) they see through the bullshit of his entire campaign, or B) they realize that his socialized welfare-state vision cost money, and they’re the ones who’ll be paying for it.

Many have discoursed on what an Obama victory could mean for America. We would finally be able to see our legacy of slavery, segregation, and racism in the rearview mirror. Our kids would grow up thinking of prejudice as a nonfactor in their lives. The rest of the world would embrace a less fearful and more open post-post-9/11 America. But does it not follow that an Obama defeat would signify the opposite? If Obama loses, our children will grow up thinking of equal opportunity as a myth. His defeat would say that when handed a perfect opportunity to put the worst part of our history behind us, we chose not to. In this event, the world’s judgment will be severe and inescapable: The United States had its day but, in the end, couldn’t put its own self-interest ahead of its crazy irrationality over race.

Sorry Jacob, putting a individual of a particular race into office won’t resolve the philosophical cancer at the root of racism.  Buying votes through class-warfare and income redistribution bribery will only breed more non-thinking idiots prone to taking intellectual shortcuts.

Racism is an intellectual shortcut driven by laziness or stupidity.  A collectivist takes the quick and easy route in dealing with others by choosing to derive elements of their character by group-based inheritance.  Unfortunately, just as inheritance in object-oriented programming, not all attributes are guaranteed to withstand becoming concrete from abstraction.  As Ayn Rand wrote:

A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race—and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin.

Invoking or establishing the awareness to deal with another human as an individual requires one to have the philosophic underpinnings needed to see men as individuals who should be valued according to their minds.  Considering the philosophic bankruptcy of our world and the deliberate indoctrination resulting from near universal acceptance of the collectivist mindset, most people stand little chance to hold a fundamental appreciation of individual sovereignty.

Objectivism is the only school of thought that involves such appreciation and applies it consistently.

The only way to eliminate racist ignorance will be for Americans to (re)discover the value of the individual.  To celebrate a charming vote-buying champion with the phony symbolism of monumental achievement does nothing more than perpetuate the group-think mentality responsible for the ignorance they wish to defeat.

If we continue on our present path our children will grow up thinking of freedom as a myth.  In a nation riddled with government meddling we’ll have equal opportunity for sure - very little of it.   Since collectivists deny reason (causality, justice etc.) and derive self-esteem from the sum opinion of others, Jacob’s emphasis on the world’s opinion seems fitting.

As a brief tangent, I find it important to distinguish racism, a broad implementation of collectivism, from stereotyping, a classification or initial conclusion based on social or cultural patterns.  If I drive through a rough part of town and see a group of shady characters, I absolutely assume many conclusions based on stereotypes.  Extending well beyond race (which the criteria for such conclusions could but doesn’t necessarily include), any attribute that pertains to the setting or an entity within is considered. This is not intellectual laziness.  This is thoughtful perception - especially when such stereotypes include a premise of significant profit or loss to the beholder.  A individualist-minded observer would realize that any one of those thugs *could* represent the epitome of reasonable ingenuity - despite the odds.

You may or may not agree with Obama’s policy prescriptions, but they are, by and large, serious attempts to deal with the biggest issues we face: a failing health care system, oil dependency, income stagnation, and climate change. To the rest of the world, a rejection of the promise he represents wouldn’t just be an odd choice by the United States. It would be taken for what it would be: sign and symptom of a nation’s historical decline.

What Jacob fails to understand (or care about) is that none of those “big issues” are responsibilities of a government within its proper scope.  The fact that the US has deluded itself into thinking otherwise is the real symptom of the historical decline he misdiagnosed.

Weisberg and others contend that racism will play a large role in the election.  Whether they actually believe that, or conveniently commission its use for the root of a variety of tactics, I don’t know.  I’d guess they don’t either, but they have to luxury to play the card from both sides of the deck, so it doesn’t matter.  They can use it both to paint non-leftist whites as unenlightened, mouth-breathing, Fascist cavemen (as some voters certainly are), and as a form of denigration, regardless of legitimacy, to guilt others into not being “one of those guys.”

This double edge sword represents a textbook Argument from Intimidation - “only a racist wouldn’t support Obama.”

While any objective individual will attest, especially one living in the south, that caveman racism is certainly still alive any well - I think the fact that Obama is an avowed Socialist scares off many more whites that does his race.  As Myrhaf wrote

I firmly believe Obama is the least American, most European presidential candidate ever. This little man has no idea what made America great. His vision of America’s ideals is exactly what is destroying American liberty and individual rights.

Indeed he is absolutely against every ideal that brought about the American splendor.  To Obama, accountability is a term only applicable in the pragmatic context of denigrating republicans or big business, justice is only valid in the wretched context of “social justice”, and freedom is a diet-life clobbered by pragmatic, feel-good statism bent on the wholesale violation of individual rights.

Our quality of life is a direct result of individuals who valued personal achievement.  Obama publicly promotes witholding personal achievement and its wretched materialist nature, and that self-esteem is merely a derivation of one’s ability to become a spoke in the collective wheel.

Sure, there are idiots who wouldn’t vote for a person of a different race even if he were the perfect embodiment of their political philosophy, but shouldn’t spitting in the face of reason, rights, and freedom cost B.O. a few votes?

by Michael S. Berliner

America’s cities and towns will soon fill with parades, fireworks, and barbecues, in celebration of the Fourth of July, the 232nd birthday of America. But one hopes that the speeches will contain fewer bromides and more attention to exactly what is being celebrated. The Fourth of July is Independence Day, but America’s leaders and intellectuals have been trying to move us further and further away from the meaning of Independence Day, away from the philosophy that created this country.

What we hear from politicians, intellectuals, and the media is that independence is passé, that we’ve reached a new age of “interdependence.” We hear demands for mandatory “volunteering” to serve others, for sacrifice to the nation. We hear demands from trust-busters that successful companies be punished for being “greedy” and not serving society. But this is not the message of America. It is the direct opposite of why America became a beacon of hope for the truly oppressed throughout the world. They have come here to escape poverty and dictatorship; they have come here to live their own lives, where they aren’t owned by the state, the community, or the tribe.

“Independence Day” is a critically important title. It signifies the fundamental meaning of this nation, not just of the holiday. The American Revolution remains unique in human history: a revolution–and a nation–founded on a moral principle, the principle of individual rights. Jefferson at Philadelphia, and Washington at Valley Forge, pledged their “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor.” For what? Not for mere separation from England, not—like most rebels—for the “freedom” to set up their own tyranny. In fact, Britain’s tyranny over the colonists was mild compared to what most current governments do to their citizens.

Jefferson and Washington fought a war for the principle of independence, meaning the moral right of an individual to live his own life as he sees fit. Independence was proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence as the rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” What are these rights? The right to life means that every individual has a right to his own independent life, that one’s life belongs to oneself, not to others to use as they see fit.

The right to liberty means the right to freedom of action, to act on one’s own judgment, the right not to have a gun pointed at one’s head and be forced to do what someone else commands. And the right to the pursuit of happiness means that an individual may properly pursue his own happiness, e.g., his own career, friends, hobbies, and not exist as a mere tool to serve the goals of others. The Founding Fathers did not proclaim a right to the attainment of happiness, knowing full well that such a policy would carry with it the obligation of others to make one happy and result in the enslavement of all to all. The Declaration of Independence was a declaration against servitude, not just servitude to the Crown but servitude to anyone. (That some signers still owned slaves does not negate the fact that they established the philosophy that doomed slavery.)

Political independence is not a primary. It rests on a more fundamental type of independence: the independence of the human mind. It is the ability of a human being to think for himself and guide his own life that makes political independence possible and necessary. The government as envisaged by the Founding Fathers existed to protect the freedom to think and to act on one’s thinking. If human beings were unable to reason, to think for themselves, there would be no autonomy or independence for a government to protect. It is this independence that defines the American Revolution and the American spirit.

To the Founding Fathers, there was no authority higher than the individual mind, not King George, not God, not society. Reason, wrote Ethan Allen, is “the only oracle of man,” and Thomas Jefferson advised us to “fix reason firmly in her seat and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God.” That is the meaning of independence: trust in your own judgment, in reason; do not sacrifice your mind to the state, the church, the race, the nation, or your neighbors.

Independence is the foundation of America. Independence is what should be celebrated on Independence Day. That is the legacy our Founding Fathers left us. It is a legacy we should keep, not because it is a legacy, but because it is right and just. It has made America the freest and most prosperous country in history.

To see a video version of this op-ed click this: INDEPENDENCE

Michael S. Berliner is co-chairman of the board of directors of the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, Calif. The Institute promotes Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand—author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.

Copyright © 2008 Ayn Rand® Institute. All rights reserved.

This is Gus Van Horn at his finest. He adeptly integrates the importance of rights, not compromising one’s principles, and the folly of animal rights proponents.

As illustrated here and here, I have always been one who develops deep attachment to pets. But, as irrational entities they have no rights, and therefore should be unquestionably subordinate to humans in every way. It is precisely their lack of rights which precludes any objective law pertaining to them other than those protecting domestic animals as property.

I’m overwhelmed with joy. I stumbled on this refreshing LTE in reference to the insidious “gun free” mentality. There are conflicting premises floating amongst the primary Objectivist circles. At times, the subject of guns, open or concealed carry, and objective laws pertaining to their uses and limitations seem almost taboo. Specifically, the question of what involving a firearm constitutes a threat of force.

I’m encouraged to find others who see reality as I do, and that I’m not intrinsically at odds with some obscure Objectivist tenet that I’ve yet to integrate.

This interview with Lisa Van Damme is a must read for parents who value their children’s education.

I had heard the name John Allison in the context of reason, Capitalism and success before, but I was unaware of just how explicit his philosophic convictions were. This interview is the most inspiring conversation I’ve heard in some time. If more business leaders held these premises, and integrated them into their career as John has, the potential impact on the human race would be tremendous. For anyone who owns their own business or who’s in an influential position within one, implementing the core values or mission statement of BB&T could very well invoke monumental change. In fact, any group, entity, family or organization could benefit from the mindset of BB&T.

BB&T’s Core Values:

The great Greek philosophers saw values as guides to excellence in thinking and action. In this context, values are standards which we strive to achieve. Values are practical habits that enable us as individuals to live, be successful and achieve happiness. For BB&T, our values enable us to achieve our mission and corporate purpose.

To be useful, values must be consciously held and be consistent (non-contradictory). Many people have conflicting values which prevent them from acting with clarity and self-confidence.

There are 10 primary values at BB&T. These values are consistent with one another and are integrated. To fully act on one of these values, you must also act consistently with the other values. Our focus on values grows from our belief that ideas matter and that an individual’s character is of critical significance.
Values are important at BB&T.
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1. Reality (Fact-Based)
What is, is. If we want to be better, we must act within the context of reality (the facts). Businesses and individuals often make serious mistakes by making decisions based on what they “wish was so,” or based on theories which are disconnected from reality. The foundation for quality decision making is a careful understanding of the facts.

There is a fundamental difference between the laws of nature (reality), which are immutable, and the man made. The law of gravity is the law of gravity. The existence of the law of gravity does not mean man can not create an airplane. However, an airplane must be created within the context of the law of gravity. At BB&T, we believe in being “reality grounded.”
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2. Reason (Objectivity)
Mankind has a specific means of survival, which is his ability to think, i.e., his capacity to reason logically from the facts of reality as presented to his five senses. A lion has claws to hunt. A deer has swiftness to avoid the hunter. Man has his ability to think. There is only one “natural resource” - the human mind.

Clear thinking is not automatic. It requires intellectual discipline and begins with sound premises based on observed facts. You must be able to draw general conclusions in a rational manner from specific examples (induction) and be able to apply general principles to the solution of specific problems (deduction). You must be able to think in an integrated way, thereby avoiding logical contradictions.

We cannot all be geniuses, but each of us can develop the mental habits which ensure that when making decisions we carefully examine the facts and think logically without contradiction in deriving a conclusion. We must learn to think in terms of what is essential, i.e., about what is important. Our goal is to objectively make the best decision to accomplish our purpose.

Rational thinking is a learned skill which requires mental focus and a fundamental commitment to consistently improving the clarity of our mental processes. At BB&T, we are looking for people who are committed to constantly improving their ability to reason.
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3. Independent Thinking
All employees are challenged to use their individual minds to their optimum to make rational decisions. In this context, each of us is responsible for what we do and who we are. In addition, creativity is strongly encouraged and only possible with independent thought.

We learn a great deal from each other. Teamwork is important at BB&T (as will be discussed later). However, each of us thinks alone. Our minds are not physically connected. In this regard, each of us must be willing to make an independent judgment of the facts based on our capacity to think logically. Just because the “crowd” says it is so, does not make it so.

In this context, each of us is responsible for our own actions. Each of us is responsible for our personal success or failure, i.e., it is not the bank’s fault if someone does not achieve his objectives.

All human progress by definition is based on creativity, because creativity is the source of positive change. Creativity is only possible to an independent thinker. Creativity is not about just doing something different. It is about doing something better. To be better, the new method/process must be judged by its impact on the whole organization, and as to whether it contributes to the accomplishment of our mission.

There is an infinite opportunity for each of us to do whatever we do better. A significant aspect of the self-fulfillment which work can provide comes from creative thought and action.
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4. Productivity
We are committed to being producers of wealth and well-being by taking the actions necessary to accomplish our mission. The tangible evidence of our productivity is that we have rationally allocated capital through our lending and investment process, and that we have provided needed services to our clients in an efficient manner resulting in superior profitability.

Profitability is a measure of the differences in the economic value of the products/services we produce and the cost of producing these products/services. In a long-term context and in a free market, the bigger the profit, the better. This is true not only from our shareholders’ perspective (which would be enough justification), but also in terms of the impact of our work on society as a whole. Healthy profits represent productive work. At BB&T we are looking for people who want to create, to produce, and who are thereby committed to turning their thoughts into actions that improve economic well-being.
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