Reply #24: see that was civil

[sui generis]

and without personal judgment - agreed she was mostly batshit.

I'm not in the dry socket of supporting a dead economic argument - just saying I like some of the ideas without the context of economics. On reflection that probably means that I like a turn of phrase, not the philosophy couching the phrase, but that nuance is lost here on grandiose kneejerk pronouncements. Vuh.

At any rate thanks for the level headed response - when I was an adolescent I was horrified by some of the tracts I read and yet occasionally I caught a glimpse of the social underpinnings that drove her philosophy. I don't know if "greed" and "indifference" figured into her weird dissociation so much as a limbic post-narcotic vacuum from ranting on black mollies, but I am certain that the rest of us social animals perceive those views as dangerous, and require the usual villagers and pitchforks to manage instead of just picking through it like grownups.

A biologist might take a view that the underpinnings Rand relies on merely describe what humans perceive "wild" nature to be, and a lot of what we filter about the world is done to justify to ourselves that life isn't fair. Well it's not fair, but what makes humans different than predatory insects is that we perceive the mental states of the individuals around us and that we are also social beings, and we DON'T live in a free-for-all world.

I am an individualist in the noblest sense of that. I am not owned by my citizenship. I am not owned by an employer. Every thing I do at the interface of other people has an implied contract, and if the contract is out of balance, it's not worth maintaining for either party. A true individualist recognizes that you don't HAVE economic systems and social structures without recognizing everyone else's individual token in the game, and that an unfettered free for all is no longer "individualism" but closer to Rand's evolutionary psychosis.

Just the same, I think there was a noble idea early on that was left behind in the development of her philosophy over time - maybe that's the part I don't reject.