Reflections on the current state of Objectivism
I wrote the following in response to a friends-only post on LiveJournal, in which a Rand-admiring friend in academia claims Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism offers no worldly advantage. For example, if you look at leaders in various fields of human endeavor, Objectivism is no more represented among those people than in the general population.
A few thoughts I’ve not yet had a chance to integrate fully:
- I agree with something Nathaniel Branden said once, that knowing someone calls him- or herself “an Objectivist” tells you almost nothing about that person - except perhaps whether they are likely to go to church on Sunday. It doesn’t tell you how honest they are, how rational they are, how hard-working they are, how respectful they are, how successful they are, how happy they are, etc.
- Personally, the biggest advantage I got from Objectivism was having a coherent framework for my ideas. That certainly seems valuable, but it’s hard for me to measure its value in an empirically demonstrable way, i.e., in terms of a “worldly advantage.”
- Overall, whatever advantages there are to some of Rand’s more profound ideas (e.g., your life is an end in itself, you should follow reason, you should be productive), some of the benefits they confer in the real world may well be offset, statistically, by some of her more self-defeating ideas (e.g., encouraging inappropriate moralizing, promoting crude understandings of psychology, discounting the role and importance of emotions).
- When I look at the things that have helped my success and happiness the most, they’ve come more from my exploration of Eastern ideas rather than Objectivism. Objectivism gave me the theory, but the orientals gave me the practices (meditation, Buddhism, radical acceptance, qigong etc.).
From what I have seen, many of the ways that people get ahead in this world are social, emotional, and biological. Objectivism has precious little to say about any of these.
Overall, if you want to define Objectivism as the optimal philosophy for living life on earth, I think we’re looking at something that’s still very crude and preliminary. It’s not even out of beta yet. You might say we’re the beta testers.
My question is, who’s working on the next release? This one’s a bit stale, if you ask me.
Originally published at Mudita Journal. Please leave any comments there.