This is my first post to this forum.  I just could not resist.  Perhaps I can trigger the same interest.

I met my first Objectivist almost 40 years ago.  He was a choir director for a high school with tremendous energy and confidence, and a marvelous taste in music. He grouped his singers in quartets, so that each singer stood on their own and each enjoyed the richness of hearing every sound of every part - as one would in a real Galt's Gulch.  He was strong, decisive, magnetic, educated, creative, and independent. 

He also had the habit of making nearly instantaneous pronouncements, criticizing some student's statements or actions, as if he could tell the value of the person, the motivation, all of the facts, and the reasoning leading to the high-school student's opinion. After all, this was the ‘60s, the years of the hippies. There were lots of poor ideas floating from person to person. He would apply principles, "shooting from the hip", before checking for any facts or interpretations that might challenge his first hunch.  Many of the students had valid concerns, even though their solutions were wrong, their choice of words was poor, and their reasoning was primitive.  Many students left.  I gritted my teeth on the few occasions I was the target, and kept learning.  I also continued to watch the Objectivist movement, grow, fade, morph, surge, morph again …...

I think the unsteady growth of Objectivist ideas in our culture is due at least in part to three important problems which I have seen over and over again :

1)  There is a tendency for ideas to be presented in an unnecessarily blunt, complex or convoluted manner with words that have a different meaning in general usage than inside Objectivist circles. 

Some of us enjoy displaying our education, but it rarely enlightens anyone who does not already understand many of the points and references we are making.  We can also let off steam and rant, knowing that many in the audience will appreciate our position.  But these things also offend many, and bore others.  Do I care that they are offended or bored?  I care only that we are not teaching the valuable ideas we now, after some work, understand.  We can offer pedantic conversation and caustic blunt comments for our enjoyment among each other, or we can teach people who do not understand the ideas we hold, but from my experience we cannot accomplish both things at the same time.  And as a bonus, I have found myself happily learning -  merely from the effort to talk simply and plainly to other people about Objectivist principles. This latter type of talk does educate others.

2)  Many support the idea that anyone making any statement knows fully what they are saying and therefore are automatically owed offensive treatment.

I have a friend who has explicitly created his own philosophy and personality, without ever having known about philosophy or about the explicit idea that we are "self-made men".  When I first met him, I thought he was an objectivist because he was so fact and reason based in his actions and his search for solutions.  But then the words he used to do this began to contradict his actions.  As I worked with him, I began to see that the words were chosen in the same manner as many Christians follow their religion; they absorb the common usage of the words and select those portions which make sense to them (or which they can interpret in some way that makes sense), giving the speaker “the benefit of the doubt” and discarding the rest.  We have spent hours discussing the meaning of words like justice and human rights, and of history - which he was never really taught.  He never knew that the definitions of a word actually help us analyze an idea.  Nor did he know that sloppy definitions hinder us in the search for the truth. He never knew that of all the countries in this world, only America said we are all equal under the law and have rights take precedence over government power. This man is not a stupid uneducated man.  He is a productive self-sufficient lead engineer, originally educated in our American public school system.

3) Debates over ideas are delivered with a strong adversarial tone.

My husband enjoys an adversarial role.  Perhaps many men do.  But not all men do, and a very large number of women do not.  Many are alienated simply by the “know-it-all” tone Objectivists tend to use – as if all objective ideas are obvious to all but the most stupid people. They draw the conclusion that they are being insulted and dismissed even though they know they are doing a great many good things. 

On the other hand, most people do seem to enjoy exploring ideas as human beings studying nature – in other words, from the “same side”.  I have had many delightful hours looking at an issue with other people who were receptive to the questions of “How do we know this? “ and “ Could there be another explanation?” or “ Why not use this idea?”  It is not as emotionally satisfying as a rant, but it is very effective as a teaching tool.

I think that we can grow an understanding of Objectivism and of Objectivist strengths if we spend more time talking to people simply, inquisitively, and as fellow human beings, being neither offensively blunt nor obsequiously politically correct.  We will get farther along if we lead our listeners to be mentally inquisitive and logical. I know some people are extremely destructive.  But a great many are just bewildered, blundering along, trying to do the best they have the knowledge to do.  I think we should make it a point to explore a person’s statements and reasoning to be very sure the person is destructive before condemning him.

Does this mean that I am against condemning evil?  No.  Does this mean I believe in being politically correct?  Again no.  There are some people who never listen and have completely closed minds.  They do not care to do anything new or to refine and expand their knowledge.  In my experience, this is because they are power oriented rather than production based in everything they “earn”.  Condemning their position is just and right – not to persuade or convince them (which it won’t), but to make the issues clear to those who still believe in producing the goods and services they need and in treating other people as independent, appropriately self-directed human beings.  But even in this condemnation, if the idea is to grow the understanding of issues in the audience, why confuse the issue with a blunt abstractions that makes them wonder about ulterior motives.  Why not just address the facts in a very definite,confident manner?  Why not use our own words, not PC words, but real words which make the meaning clear?

On a positive note, I would like to say that I think Objectivism has had a greater impact than may be obvious.  In that choir, years ago, I would never have had the discussion I had a few days ago at work: 

Two men were bemoaning the welfare system, the lack of support for the American soldiers, and the diminished work ethic of today’s teens.  Their answer was a compulsory two to four years of military service for every teen in the US.  After all, they had served in the military and it had been very good for them.  When I pointed out that the teens would learn a lot of valuable things in our military service (being organized, meeting committments, co-ordinating, public speaking, and so forth), but that the law was a horrendous violation of human rights (telling people they had to risk their lives) the men tried to “fix” their solution.  Each time I replied with a simple example of a consequence of their “fix”.  In they end, they sat still, thinking.  Later on, I overheard one arguing using one of my points. 

This never would have happened in the 60s.  Nor would it have happened if I had charged into the conversation talking only of abstract principles and traditional Objectivist logic with my fists up.  Do we want to vent? Or brag? Or do we want to grow our world into a much better place?

Do I mean to attack Mr Perigo?  No, definitely not.  I just think there is more to the issue than either being too soft or too blunt.  Let's teach.

And am I to understand that Perigo had his falling out with IOS over the pictured bird?

Robert and Teresa, thank you for your warm welcome and your forthright reception of my first post.  I found your responses polite and refreshing, without tricks and traps.  Thank you.

Ø      One wonders whether certain people encountered Objectivism at a difficult or  rebellious moment of their lives -- most commonly, adolescence -- and have remained frozen there, as if their juvenile emotional state has been forever cast in amber.

( Robert, what an interesting picture you paint ! J)
 

I don’t think I can blame the teenage discovery of Objectivism though.  I first encountered Objectivism as a teen in high school, and introduced the ideas to several of my friends.  O’ism was wonderfully exciting to me because it spoke of optimism and self-reliance, and success based on effort and production.  It was a system of ideas which emphasized solving problems and respecting human beings and their individuality. I interpreted O’ist ideas as reserving harshly blunt analysis for self-defeating traits we wanted to understand and get rid of anyway – not against people with genuine misunderstandings.  As you can probably guess, there were many ( a dozen or so) students interested in exploring Objectivist ideas in the choral group led by the choir director I described in my earlier post.  However, the students generally thought that the criticism of the person, rather than the ideas, was a mistake by that director. 

We were very definitely in “a difficult and rebellious” time, though none of us were demonstrators or aggressive rebels nor angry.  This was during the 60s  in San Francisco at a time when there were many civil rights marches and anti-war demonstrations against the US war in Vietnam.  There were also the hippies locally, the Black Panthers, and even the Klu Klux Klan elsewhere.  Many people were angry because they felt their way of life discounted and threatened.  Lots of ideas were being argued back and forth and most teens, including us, believed very strongly that it was important to explicitly choose our positions on every issue to take a stand and to “make a difference”.  But the Objectivist students I knew were more scholarly and serious than angry and aggressive.

Ø      A more interesting line of speculation is: What in the Objectivist corpus has attracted so many angry, frustrated people?

It was not until the late 60s that I realized one very very dangerous idea was floating around among many O’ists – and around the various rebelling groups at the time.  This was the idea that made everybody angry:  that criticism should be directed more toward the person suggesting the idea ; it was an “us” vs “them” point of view, and those who supported that view believed they had a moral obligation to stamp out the evil which was in “them”.    I think the essential flaw was the idea that we could tell who was in the “them” group by some simple test.  In general society, “they” were not of our race, or our religion, or our class, or our philosophy.  Or even more simply and to the point, “they” were not our allies.  Among O’ists, “they” were people who departed from or questioned too deeply any of Ayn Rand’s ideas.  (I wonder if some of this treatment stemmed from the frustration of trying to analyze the answers to some of the tougher questions?).

The idea of an obviously evil person is like a gun – a life saver when it is accurate, and a disaster when it is not.  Ayn Rand said  “To abstain from condemning a torturer, is to become an accessory to the torture and murder of his victims.” I think she was right.  And in the voice of John Galt in Atlas Shrugged she said "Our first rule here, Miss Taggart …is that one must always see for oneself."  Again, she was right.  The difficulty is in knowing which to apply and when.  Many early Objectivists seemed to think they could tell simply by the words one used and the questions they asked, or from simple disagreements voiced against some of the ideas presented by Ayn Rand.                     . 

And now I am going to shock some of you by what I say.  I only mean to make one limited but important point embedded in the example I am about to give. Please do not assume I mean every parallel that could be taken by the following statements. 

I read an account of Muslim history which explained the ideas and growth of the Arab Muslim culture and found an extremely interesting parallel in ideas and history on one point.  The Muslims also believe that they have a moral responsibility to stamp out evil, and that an evil person is very easy to identify.  For that religion, an evil person is  1) anyone who becomes a Muslim but does not appear to follow Muslim law as it is stated by the current religious leaders or 2) someone who leaves Islam or 3) an atheist.  Anyone who fits one of these categories deserves death – literally.  If a person does not have the moral courage to kill a person who rebels against the rightful Muslim leader, then the person who fails to kill the rebel is no longer Muslim and deserves death along with the rebel.  To those of you who have been associated with the Objectivist movement a long time, doesn’t this sound familiar (though much more extreme)?  This idea is the reason there are Shiites and Sunnis, each attacking, torturing, and killing the other even though they are all Muslim.  (If any reader would like to know the sequence of events in detail, I have included a paragraph at the bottom of the page with that information).  I also think this idea has caused many unnecessary and self-defeating disagreements among legitimate Objectivists.

You many be rightly wondering what conclusions I have drawn from this example, because there are many unfounded possibilities.  I think there is one very valid caveat.  People are not automatically evil because they disagree with our O’ist leaders or because they make mistakes we think we would never make.  We need to restrain our inclination to crush their arguments with moral indignation, taking an implied pat on the back at their expense, if we are to make the power and justice of Objectivism clear.  Some of the world’s ideas are hideous, yes.  But if we explain the workings of those ideas well enough with enough supporting evidence to people who are mistaken but who really care about being good people, they will eventually understand.  They do not want to be wrong, any more than we do.  They just don’t have the same skills nor see the dangers.

So how can we truly tell an evil person when they are not serial killers, chronic con-artists, avowed Muslim terrorists, etc?  The analysis I use is as follows:  First, if a person has evil ideas and a rigidly closed mind, then he is beyond my ability to help him and I must not interfere with his experiences of the natural consequences of his positions.  He will eventually self-destruct.  And I don’t want to be near him when he does (or anytime else for that matter) because of his rigidly closed mind.  Second, if a person also uses destructive ideas to gain subtle power over other people, or if he is overtly aggressive or violent toward other people, then he is evil and must be blocked in the best, most effective, most commensurate manner possible, and preferably in a way that helps legitimate people understand the issues.  The evil person won’t be listening anyway.

If anyone has a better set of tests for evil, which do not do injustice to the goodness in people, or a better response, I would very much like to hear it.  In addition, if I have made any errors in my description of Muslim history, or of the religion, please let me know.  I am not an expert in Middle Eastern culture.

And finally, to address William:

Ø      My favourite part was the entailments of your discussions in the workplace. My first question, being a HR Manager, is "Why were they arguing politics on company time?"

At the time, I was working at a government site.  Politics, reminiscing, pontificating, and all kinds of discussions were a nearly constant occurrence at that location.  The idea was to advertise one’s cleverness, education, and potential value, constantly, with little or no excuse.  One person had a rule of thumb that stated  “if the workers were productive 80% of the time they were in the work place (roughly a 6 hour total work day by commercial standards) that was a stellar achievement”.  Our taxes are buying less than five hours of work a day at some government locations, and that is considered appropriate by some government managers.  At the commercial locations I have worked, the standard has been a 9 or 10 hour day spent focused on the work itself, and not counting social networking.

As to the rest, I found it an interesting puzzle to make the links for the various characters in your statement, but disturbingly unjust.  In my experience, Objectivists are trying to make the world a better place rather than accept the traditional fallacies which have brought us to an increasingly less free, less abundant country. Whenever people are breaking new trail, they make mistakes.  I think the real test is whether they are open to feedback, correct the mistakes, and continue to grow.  As far as I know, Kings, Queens, etc are just social figureheads taking the glory and the money but doing very little else that is constructive.

And no, I am not “Phil” in a mu-mu.  I am a 54 year old woman, married, with one son.  I am a software engineer who has lived much of her life among non-objectivists with only forums like this one as a life-line.  Thank you for being a part of that life-line, RoR.

Historical events leading up to the Shiite / Sunni split:

First Muslims killed their appointed leader Uthman ibn Affan in 656 for weakness and nepotism. Then Ali, cousin and son-in-law to Muhammed (spelling is from the book),  became leader.  Muawiyah, relative of Uthman, rebelled against Ali, was avenging Uthman’s death, and wanted to be leader.  Now according to the rules, Muawiyah deserved death because he rebelled against Ali.  But Ali won the battle and pardoned Muawiyah.  So now Ali was no longer Muslim (according to the Kharijites who had been supporters) and was killed since he did not have the moral courage to kill Muawiyah.  Ali supporters considered this a horrible injustice to Ali as the legitimate descendant of Muhammed.    When a similar sequence of events happened again between the sons of Ali and Muawiyah, Ali’s son formed the Shiite group separate from the Sunnis.   They have been at war ever since, and each group believes they have a moral obligation to attack the other group. 

Maybe we should be glad, since it should reduce their overall effectiveness in spreading Islam.

Ref:   Islam and Politics by John L Esposito, Syracuse University Press.