Ayn Rand, atheist
Ayn Rand refused to let religion into her Objectivism. At one point she bluntly said “Objectivism is in incompatible with any form of mysticism or religion.” (1)
Get that?
According to Rand you can’t be both a follower of her capitalistic ideology and a Methodist, Catholic, New Age spiritual believer, 12-Stepper, Evangelical, Southern Baptist, Mormon, Unitarian, Presbyterian or Orthodox Jew, unless you can walk on both sides of a fence.
Which poses a problem for millions of Rand-adoring capitalists because most of them believe in God.
She refuses that.
At another point in her letters she says she sometimes called herself an atheist as a kind of shorthand:
” I do not call myself an ‘Atheist’ as an identification of my metaphysical position…But I do use the term ‘Atheist’ in the appropriate context such as, for instance, in answer to the queries of religionists or of those who spread verbal confusion by claiming that ‘a belief in natural law is a belief in God’, etc.” (2)
If you’re a believer and you claim to be on Ayn Rand’s side, you should first know that capitalism and Christianity are opposed. Rand’s Capitalism is selfish. On the other hand Christianity is prosocial and altruistic.
Jesus acted like an anti-capitalist, kicking money changers out of the temple. His freely distributing fishes and loaves among a horde was an act of socialism.
Any Rand went on to develop a sociopathic politics, here.
(1) Letters of Ayn Rand, M.S. Berliner (Ed). New York: Plume Books. 1995. p. 621
(2) Letters of Ayn Rand, M.S. Berliner (Ed). New York: Plume Books. 1995. p. 577
So you think the best antipoverty program is a strong economy?
Still listening to that ‘rising tide lifts all boats‘?
After all we’re going through. After the reports, the statistics, the debates. Next time you hear somebody talk that ‘rising tide lifts all boats,’ just do a U-turn. Flip the channel.
It’s a wrenchingly insulting metaphor from a group of nasty people.
After the catastrophic events of the past years, they continue to natter the little sayism. ‘A rising tide lifts all boats.’
But this image never fits what you see, looking out the window, as you drive through the city.
It is a competitive society. They are proud of that. Now, the outcome of any competition is inevitably a winner and a loser. That’s an inequality. Obviously both people are not lifted; only the winner’s boat.
So they musts concede that in a competition (between people or between groups) one side increases, the other side decreases. The sum of the two is zero. That’s why it’s called a “zero-sum”.
So the truth we need to be telling each other is another picture. Scrap the boats. The accurate picture is: The higher the tree, the deeper the roots.
The economy is an organic whole. The top and bottom parts are not disconnected from each other. Not detached like boats, and that aspect is obvious. Everything is connected in society. The tree’s branches reach high into the glittering sun because the roots reach low into the clotted dark.
So in the business world. Stratospheric bonuses for CEOs are possible because the wages of the workers have not increased from mud-low.
So why do they keep drawing for us this picture ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’ on us?
Because generations of greed are so rationalized.
But why do they say so, when it is clear it is not so? Over and over, like preachers who shout from the pulpit for two thousand years that the rapture is coming, and for two thousand years the congregation then turns out of the church door in rapture. But on the way home, the congregation doesn’t see any rapture. Just the city. On the way home, they notice that every year, the limousines get longer and every year there are more homeless people.
We think: it can’t be. Some people are raised, yes. But not the poor. Not all are raised.
Educators: this is a teachable moment. That boats metaphor is insulting because it’s not rational. In any competition (on which business is based) one party wins because the other party loses. It is not possible that both the winner and the loser of a competition win.
The depth of this is that, after this is explained, that they will use their sayism again. But repetition is not the same as truth.
If we try to explain to them about the tree roots, they start to object, not on the basis of evidence, but with scorn that we do not understand.
That scorn is no substitute for reality. It is the way they nail their points. And it does not make the boats image true.
Politicians know the effectiveness of images and metaphor to convey complex processes because it’s hard to disprove an image. And in our culture of sound bytes, the shorter the communication, the better — few people stop to ingest an economic treatises. But a competing image, catching the imagination, has the power to move, because it combines concept and feeling. It has a sticking quality. Communicated, it has the power to upset a whole paradigm.
Less boat. More tree.
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Keeping the pilot light on
Since the late 1970s and Ronald Reagan’s inauguration we’ve seen supply side economics, deregulation, an explosive growth of free markets, the sapping of union power.
The Left’s objective is still vague. Liberalism gets its spirit from equity, justice, and collective action. That spirit is all but broken, witness the precipitous inequalities in America, witness the virtual disappearance from our language of terms like “the common good,” witness unions at their all-time low memberships, witness the Supreme Court retreating from enforcement of anti-trust laws.
During the Bush administration, the Left’s tolerance melted into passivity. Energetic leftists of the 1960s, once in the media spotlight, grew wealthy and cautious.
Not just that. Any spirit on the left was also broken down into fractions. Watch a peace march, a good place to find leftists, and you saw a sea of different banners, for as many different causes. All of them good. But there is no center.
The left reached another crisis point. Since then, an agitated search for what’s to blame.
It’s partly the money. The left needs to find something else besides wealth. Today, everybody in America sleeps safe under a star, the idea that one day, they will be rich. Americans navigate their whole lives by that star. So commercialism dominates everything – and it has saturated even the left. Commercialism everywhere. Lefties worry about their credit score and worry about security.
Sold out.
This President has abandoned any serious atteempts at facing up to the banks. It looks like loss of nerve.
Which way to turn?
After Obama took the presidency, the first order of business was the economic collapse – undoing the money mess created by the Bush administration. Rebuilding our infrastructure. Rebuilding our schools. – But all of those had the tone of cleaning up somebody’s old wreckage. Fixing health care. Job by necessary job. But all that is not ‘forward.’
It’s partly that Liberals have lost their ‘forward.’ This is as deep a crisis as our submission to Wall Street. It is a collective loss of nerve.
There’s no fallen flag to grab up in the Liberal movement because there is no longer any flag.
Congress has no unified ‘forward.’ The American people have no unified forward. Once, we had the Occupy Movement. It suffered from lack of any forward agenda, and caved to police action. So now liberals talk about their frightening college debts or get fearful about retirement. Since we have no more effective restriction on exorbitant interest rates, they sap anybody’s courage.
The heart of the matter is that there is no new ideology.
There’s few leftist commentators, talk show liberals who churn the air like windmills.
But no coherent new theory, to unify.
Except here.
Only on this blog can you read whetherexploitation is ethical. Only here can you read about the contradiction between the American workplace – undemocratic and authoritarian – and the surrounding democracy. Read why social inequality is a killer (there’s new scientific evidence). About the long shadow of materialism. On widening corruption. Here the zero-sum concept is explained. Read how, in the long run, exorbitant greed may threaten democracyitself. A brief summary of opposing Right and Left philosophies here andhere.
Opinion is power.
But every year for the last 30 years, debate has faded; the left almost became mute. Liberals have avoided theory confrontations. Not in Congress, not at beer parties.
Every time that happened, the left’s light dimmed.
Left ideology. This blog is where we keep the pilot light on.
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How the Right dominates
People are fascinated by conflict.
The Right wing is energetically shoving blame for the national economy onto the Left. One of the right’s bullies, Bill O’Reilly, dealt out his thrashings on t.v.
Right wing commentators run an ostentatious tyranny. It is the source of the public’s fascination with the Right.
The Left considers itself too nice for this bruiser style. The Left simply doesn’t have head-crushers like Limbaugh and O’Reilly. There is no Fox News on the left, and right-wing radio shows vastly outnumber left-wing. The Left thinks that being morally good, maybe showing a tolerant sense of humor, should be enough to prevail.
It is not, and the Left has no real idea how to push back. So the Left, with its natural compassion, its collective action, its trust, its usury laws, are all being put through the meat grinder.
Surviving a reactionary
One look at this man and you know you’re dead: here.
Civil war looming within the Democratic party?
The Democratic party has lost its soul. Here’s why.
If our children are being raised on Ayn Rand, we’re in trouble
– here’swhy.
Left Blog
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