SOLO In Review, Part 1: In The Beginning
by Joseph Rowlands

Being a part of the SOLO staff is often a thankless job. Lindsay, Jeff and I have plenty to do to keep the site running smoothly. Running an article everyday means that someone has to make sure something is cleaned up and ready to go every night. When someone submits a gallery item with a broken picture, we have to fix it. When people send in their pictures, we have to put them up. And this just scratches the surface of how much time we invest. It's enough to make one ask, "What's the point?"

That's the question I'm going to try to answer in this series of articles. What is it that we hope to accomplish? How successful have we been? What lessons have we learned along the way? And where do we see it all going?

In the Beginning

Since it often helps to begin at the beginning, I'll do just that. I was first introduced to Lindsay Perigo towards the end of 2000 by a mutual friend. After a number of friendly exchanges, he let me in on his little secret. He was planning a new organization called Sense of Life Objectivists. He even sent me a copy of the original draft of the Credo, and asked for feedback.

SOLO was to be a home for homeless Objectivists. It was for people who thought Objectivism could be so much more than what was being offered by ARI and IOS/TOC. It was for those who wanted "The total passion for the total height."

In the beginning, SOLO had modest goals. It was to be primarily an online forum, with an archive of articles that captured the spirit of SOLO. In fact, the archive was called "Capturing the Spirit," which is the source of the current SOLOHQ's Spirit section. In addition, there were to be recommendations of movies and music.

SOLO wasn't aiming to take on the other Objectivist organizations. It aimed directly at perceived market failures. Lindsay described one as the reason/passion dichotomy. On one side you had people who believed cold, dry logic was the only way to express yourself if you wanted to be taken seriously. On the other, you had rabid hysteria where people showed how "radical" they were by announcing that we should nuke our enemies into the stone age. SOLO was to try to destroy this dichotomy, by unifying reason and passion.

Another market failure was the lack of focus on esthetics. At about the time that I met Lindsay, I was working with Jeff Landauer on Importance of Philosophy, a website premised on Objectivism, that attempted to discuss key ideas in philosophy and why they matter. Although much had been written on the other 4 branches, esthetics was almost virtually ignored. Looking at websites with a summary of Objectivism, they either ignored esthetics or left a sign that said "Under Construction." Esthetics, treated like an ugly stepchild, was and still is poorly understood by many Objectivists.

But SOLO wasn't just aimed at intellectual discussion of esthetics. It wasn't going to support a theory/practice dichotomy. If art satisfied an important human need, then SOLO was going to take that seriously. This was the basis for the music and movie reviews on the original SOLO site, and why the current SOLOHQ has an assortment of galleries. It was to provide real examples of art for those who take art seriously.

Although SOLO was created out of a disappointment with the other Objectivist organizations existing at the time, it wasn't created to be exclusive of them. One of the comments I made to Lindsay on the original Credo was to state that explicitly for clarification. There was and is no demand to pick sides. We welcome cross-fertilization, and many of the original participants were very friendly with TOC. A few were even friendly with ARI, including the first moderator of the original SOLO Yahoo forum.

These were the premises and the goals of SOLO in its original conception, according to my understanding. There was to be only one position in the organization: Lindsay Perigo, Convener.

In February of 2001, Lindsay Perigo announced to the world the birth of SOLO.

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