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Wednesday, October 20, 2004 - 10:40amSanction this postReply
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Well, I do appreciate all the words of encouragement and clarification...

And for the record, I would like to make even more clear, that for a long time I was certain that there was only one standard of happiness for everyone... and that I was pursuing it.  I had no comprehension that people who were living lives that I considered barren and reckless, and subsisting of little else than short-term thrills to hold them together, could actually be happy and fulfilled by that.

Honestly, I'm still not fully convinced they're really happy and well-adjusted... but then again, I have moments where I wonder if even I am.  You know, awhile back I read a college newspaper article where a library historian was interviewed about his life and his job, and he said something to the effect of -- and I found these to be brilliant words, even though they're paraphrased:

You will ultimately only be happy in a job that fits your neurosis. 
 
Or, as I would say it: 

Neurosis dictates niche.
 
Now, as I recall, this comment was jokingly made in regard to the question of how he came to pick his job and why he likes it so much... being a library historian, that is.  And granted, "neurosis" is not the most optimistic view of that mysterious quality in mention; I suppose you could also call it "need"... but then again, "need" to me, doesn't carry the sense of "kryptonitic" compulsion that "neurosis" does.  "Neurosis" connotes a weakness, a need that cannot be reckoned with, and must be fulfilled.

At any rate, the reason I mention all of this, is that perhaps it relates to what each of us regards as "fun" and "fulfillment".  I suppose that if your childhood were spent trapped in some scenario, say, with a childish, snarling, drunk of a father and an emotionally catatonic mother, out in some stark, understimulating, far rural area in a broken-down single-wide mobile home or something, then you would develop a set of very specific unmet needs in life that will dictate what your niche must later be.

I understand all of this.  What I don't understand and have little tolerance for, is people who are supposedly "happy" in their respective niches, and taking sniper shots at those whose niche would be described by psychologist Abraham Maslow as being "higher" -- however relative and/or correct that notion ultimately is -- and who are just trying to find their happiness, unmolested.

(Edited by Orion Reasoner on 10/20, 10:42am)


Post 1

Wednesday, October 20, 2004 - 6:25pmSanction this postReply
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Miss Branden,
    Are you psychic? I have been working on an article for a few days now that addresses some of the very issues you raised. Unlike yours, mine is more scathing and sarcastic!
George


Post 2

Thursday, October 21, 2004 - 12:19amSanction this postReply
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("The company of people" does not make anyone become someone he loathes. If that occurs, he has done it to himself, and to blame others is simply a cop-out. Look around you without fear, and you will see that there are decent people everywhere -- even if many of them do not agree with you in every particular. Yes, we have to be able to be loners -- for the joy of being alone with ourselves, not out of hatred of others.)

Very well said, Barbara. As I argue on the Introvert Advantage thread, we need to separate extraversion from "social metaphysicians" and such. There's a difference in living second hand, and seeking out like minded friends and family. And our need for solitude and individualism does not preclude a sense of community. Even Ayn had her inner circle:)




Post 3

Thursday, October 21, 2004 - 1:20amSanction this postReply
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May I also add that there is value in un-like minded people, too.

Post 4

Thursday, October 21, 2004 - 9:38amSanction this postReply
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"May I also add that there is value in un-like minded people, too."

No, you may not.

I mean, yes, you may.

:)

Actually, good point, Alec.

Post 5

Friday, October 22, 2004 - 8:53pmSanction this postReply
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Why Joe dear, I said "May I" in the rhetorical fashion, hence the lackage of question markery. Of course I'm not asking your permission to say it. Hell, I wouldn't ask your permission to take something from your refrigerator. You see, I hate you, Joe. Which is why I value you so much.

I think there was something funny in the coffee I just drank.

Alec


Post 6

Saturday, October 23, 2004 - 1:03amSanction this postReply
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Life is not easy for anyone, and many give up their dreams in despair, but that does not make them monsters. There are monsters in the world, but let's reserve that condemnation for those who deserve it.


Miss Branden, you have guided me on to an important idea. I pride myself on being able size up and dismiss the unworthy stranger in a flash. That is, to quickly place the stranger into comfortable categories:

* Sexy-bimbo-sorority-girl

* The Empty-aristocratic woman who will never have to work a day in her life

* The religious know-it-all who knows almost nothing

* The nihilist (abundant these days)

In short, I can quickly judge whether a person is worth my time, often before they've opened their mouths.

Still with me?

Well, I've been wrong. I've been pre-judging people for a long, long time. So long now that it's become a habit. A virtuous person can still get through to me but most others are out. Last night, I went out (had a music gig) with a different attitude. I just relaxed and let people be whoever they are. The dynamic was entirely different. To be sure, there was much irrational behavior going on around me but I personally felt better. I was open to interacting with the others. It made for a dynamic change. 

I hope you catch my meaning on this because it's important. If we pre-judge strangers the relationship dynamic is sabotaged before any effort is made.

What you said above got me to thinking about the pre-judgements I've been making and I wonder if Orion is in a similar habit. Orion?

I know what an epiphany feels like and this is one. Thanks!


Post 7

Saturday, October 23, 2004 - 2:45amSanction this postReply
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Lance,

Well, I think that reality exists, regardless of whatever we tell ourselves in order to make it through.

With that in mind, yes... there is truth to what you say.  It certainly is a lot more enjoyable to tell yourself that everybody is okay, and everything is fine.  However, that is an old jedi mind-trick that is, in fact, good for you... but is not necessarily indicative of reality.  If the people around you were rotters before you changed your mind-set, they're rotters during and after... unless somehow your change of mindset translates into external changes that they can see, and which prompt them to become better people.  It's possible, but not definite. 

So, you employ such feel-good techniques at your own possible peril.  What I prefer to do is to simply keep to myself, find some way to amuse myself, and keep one eye open to identify any possibly safe people to reach out to.


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Post 8

Saturday, October 23, 2004 - 7:05amSanction this postReply
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My greetings-

When I was young, I was a Nietzschean wearing steel armor.  I have been reading Msr. Reasoner's post with some bittersweet memories; he almost precisely strikes the notes of what I used to feel, walking in a world where human beings were blank, dead, thick husks with energy-draining wraiths for souls, best avoided, best warded against... and one had best no how to defend oneself, just in case.

But one thing I've been very surprised at is that when you don't go around with visible armor and allow people to let down their guard, people as individuals are far, far better then they are in groups.  The same person who is some tight-assed Republican, stiff in denial of their own happiness and those of others, can suddenly become a wonderful, touching, sensitive person when they have nothing to be afraid of, and no need for social pretense.  Similarly, in San Francisco as a trannygirl among the fruits, nuts, and flakes, I've found that liberals, when they are among a baseline equality where they are accepted as human beings, suddenly don't fear to speak their minds and judge, and adjusted for their own experiences and insights can be just as courageously and insightfully discerning as the most fearsome individualist.

Introversion is easily linked with a noble elitism of the heights, but one thing that was difficult for myself to learn was that it is very easy to move from the correct observation that others lack ambition for the heights one knows oneself to the false claim that others lack any feeling for any heights and as such have no interest in excellence.  I find myself constantly bowled over with shame at the complexity and vital ambition of lives I once dismissed which I didn't recognize excellence in... a blindness I acquired precisely from the love of excellence!

Extroverts do the same thing, of course.  Many people here have complained about the 'friendly' "please let me help you get away from that book and become social" maneuver... and I remember once wanting to answer something like "Why?  This book is better society than you are, gully dwarf!".  But the truth is that the social person has likely experienced passions of which the introvert is unaware and is doing the same annoying thing, in their way, as the introvert who walks into a crowd and mutters just-loudly-enough-to-be-heard (or with just enough allusion to be understood), something like "why don't these mindless yapping masses get a book and find something worthwhile?"

The problem is that there is a sad arrogance both ways.  This is a phenomena I see so many places.  I see conservatives, leftists, and libertarians fighting one another bloodily, spilling ink and hateful denunciations in rivers from very sharp quills, but when you get down to what motivates each one in their ownness, it is always a real passion, an insight that once seen one cannot allow to be lost, and much of the rest is a superstructure of preservation about this one experience.  Whether it's a conservative feeling a deep reverence for the textured beauty and rhythms of an embedded life, a libertarian defending the bright integrity of  ego and its own, or the leftist who has seen an unjust world's ignorant and haughty standards steamroll over every different feeling and fire, the resulting uglinesses of intolerant traditionalism, callous atomism, or nihilistic egalitarianism are often an ugly shell protecting fruit of genuine sweetness.  I think all sides spend far too much energy trying to smash those other horrid things into pulp, and seldom realise either that they themselves are imprisoned in their own kinds of confining shells, or that the very conditions that have made the same humanity into different species have inadvertantly produced those unique wonders that are many that are man.

Excellence is not a heirarchical scale built in the image of an intrinsicist's scala naturae.  It is a circle of colors, grey in its vegetative center, ever brighter in its outer expressions, but no one color denotes the hue of the beatific vision.  Rather the ambition of the heights and the stature of just scorn belongs to those who press ever outward; those who share their nature are not the duller colors behind them of the same hue, but the equal brightnesses along the rim of a full circle of chromaticism.

These is a unity of heirarchy and pluralism.

I know you're different
   and you know I'm the same.
We're far too busy to be taking the blame
I've got some changes but you don't have the time;
   we can't go on thinking it's a victimless crime
No one is blameless...
But we're all without shame
We fight the fire...
   ...while we're feeding the flame.
                                             [Rush, "Second Nature"]

my regards,

Jeanine Ring 


Post 9

Saturday, October 23, 2004 - 7:57amSanction this postReply
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I Was hoping you would enjoy your "coffee," Alec. ;) But you would be well advised to steer clear of my fridge right now...there was some...umpleasantness..
(Edited by Joe Maurone on 10/23, 7:59am)


Post 10

Saturday, October 23, 2004 - 8:08amSanction this postReply
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Lance, you wrote:

"I hope you catch my meaning on this because it's important. If we pre-judge strangers the relationship dynamic is sabotaged before any effort is made."

I do get your meaning, and it is important. I am truly happy that I was able to help.

Barbara


Post 11

Saturday, October 23, 2004 - 8:16amSanction this postReply
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Jeanine, what a beautiful post! -- and one I agree with.

Barbara

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Post 12

Saturday, October 23, 2004 - 1:29pmSanction this postReply
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Well, I think that reality exists, regardless of whatever we tell ourselves in order to make it through.

So, you employ such feel-good techniques at your own possible peril.  What I prefer to do is to simply keep to myself, find some way to amuse myself, and keep one eye open to identify any possibly safe people to reach out to.

 
Reality exists. I don't dispute it. It's just that most people aren't the monsters you make them out to be. (And when I say "you" I'm also talking about myself). That too, is a reality.

Let's look at what it means to pre-judge. It means that you prepare knee-jerk response traps for outsiders to fall into. If a person says, "God bless you", they have unwittingly fallen into your trap. "What's your sign?" and they fall in the trap. "I hate my job and my wife!" and into the trap they descend. You'll say to yourself, "Well, of course you hate your job and your wife. You weren't prepared philosophically to make those choices and reality is pressing you down like an iron!" And so you feel superior and untarnished, and refuse to find out more.

In all these cases, you know very little about the will of the outsider. Maybe they are trying really really really hard to understand things and the best they've come up with is what they give you that day. The trouble here, Orion, is that we are setting up an environment that is practically impossible for a person to feel comfortable in. So we are eliminating the possibility to connect with other people.

There is something self-defeating about that.


Post 13

Saturday, October 23, 2004 - 8:41pmSanction this postReply
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Lance,

Very inspirational message... and very well-put.

And if I were the person I was, say, seven years ago, I would still be in the shape to afford to be so open-minded and full of the sort of largesse that you so heroically describe.  But something in me can't do that anymore.  I've been charitable beyond my means, and sucked dry by those without honesty or conscience.  Somethin' in me is jus' plain broke.

So, for some time now, I am shamelessly going to be in full-on self-protection mode, and just me, me, me.

If you don't like that -- and I understand that you probably won't -- then...

Que sera, seraaaaa...
Whatever will be, will be...
 
This is O-man, signing out.


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Post 14

Sunday, May 29, 2005 - 2:39amSanction this postReply
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Barbara:

Well said.
Look around you without fear, and you will see that there are decent people everywhere -- even if many of them do not agree with you in every particular. Yes, we have to be able to be loners -- for the joy of being alone with ourselves, not out of hatred of others.


The emotional leitmotif (now there's an AR word) of some who are drawn to Objectivism, it seems, is a generalized contempt for the bulk of humanity.

Reading Atlas Shrugged and other works of Ayn Rand, it's not hard to see why. The most noble among us are often set apart from the rest of a malignant humanity, at times as if they were a different species.

But the simple truth is that most people are much more alike than they are different. Many differences are perceived simply because we've not walked that proverbial mile in their shoes, nor lived in their skin, nor seen through their eyes. There, perhaps, but for the grace of circumstance, go I. 

We have a simple choice, I think: generosity of spirit or habitual contempt. It's hard to imagine anyone who would choose to be happy also choosing the latter.

Nathan Hawking

(Edited by Nathan Hawking on 5/29, 1:53pm)


Post 15

Sunday, May 29, 2005 - 2:42amSanction this postReply
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I was wondering what happened to Orion,Jeanine and especially George.e.Cordero?
Do they now post under different pseudonymns?


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Post 16

Sunday, May 29, 2005 - 10:56amSanction this postReply
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When I first read AR, I couldn't wait to meet Objectivists, but my encounters with them in the late 60's and early 70's sent me screaming in the opposite direction. I met my first true friend from the Objectivist movement in the mid-90's- her name is Barbara Branden. BB told we in the summer of 2004 to read Solo because there really was a different attitude.There really is, and we can all see it in this thread.
I revel in people who are different from me; I learn so much more from them. Different- not good vs. evil or right vs. wrong. How much richer my life is because my partners have been Portugese, black, Chinese and Mexican, than if they had all been Scottish/ English as I am.
Lance- it sounds to me as if you took a giant step towards maturity and wisdom last night- keep it up.
Alec- "I want to find out what you are putting in your coffee and put a shot of it in all my generals" - to mangle Lincoln a bit.
Jeannine- we'd do fine. I'm a loose-ass Republican.

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Post 17

Sunday, May 29, 2005 - 1:34pmSanction this postReply
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Good point, Barbara. There really is a difference between Ellsworth Toohey and the Wet Nurse.

 

Or Robert Stadler and Dominique Francon. Like any other belief that can affect character, the no-hope fallacy can itself take different forms in different people, and justify different assessments of those people. Both Stadler and Dominique fall prey to the no-hope fallacy, but Stadler is someone you would finally decide you just can't deal with, given how morally twisted he becomes. Whereas Dominique manages to thrash her way out of her dark pessimism (and always did accept as authentic what she saw in Roark, whereas Stadler did not accept as authentic what he saw in Dagny). Plus, Dominique is sexier than Stadler.  

 

Same thing in life. Certainly there are people with bad ideas who would treat you honorably at all times and are sexy. And others with ostensibly better ideas, on at least some counts, who turn out to be snakes and are not so sexy. Everybody has a story, and finding out what it is and what a person's actual alternatives and choices have been requires getting to know that person. Most people are really not the dastards one would be justified in condemning from afar, though obviously such dastards do exist too.

 

   [davidmbrown.com] [Laissez Faire Books]



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Post 18

Sunday, May 29, 2005 - 3:17pmSanction this postReply
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A point that may be relevant here is that besides very fine people who are devotedly embarking on living a happy life but are meeting with obstacles, and monsters who are bent on destruction, there is a very large group who are intermittently making an offer and then abandoning it, coming back to it, then leaving it all aside again, and this is how they proceed most of their lives. Like the folks at my gym--a few stick with the program, a few just give up completely but most are there now and then, taking huge breaks, then getting panicky and resuming it all. This is I think what many people do with their lives. They are nice enough, especially if you catch them on an upswing (and they often hide from us when they are in a slump). But as to embarking upon living a sustained excellent life, that's sadly rare. Which, in my view, should help us understand why there is a lot of unfinished business in the world and why the best regime, a free society, isn't likely to arise other than in rare historical moments.

Post 19

Sunday, May 29, 2005 - 4:27pmSanction this postReply
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Barbara,

There is so much that is right in your article, and so much that we needed to be reminded of, that I hesitate to bring up a quibble - because it is one that can devastate one's life if ignored.

Bad premises need to be kept in context, and in the context of normal life premises matter much less than character and sense of life. But in times when character and sense of life are not enough, and principles are called on - in times of crisis and hardship - people do revert to their explicit premises, and act accordingly. Friendships in good times are fun, and "sunshine friends" have their utility. But one of the functions of friendship is social solidarity in tough times, and then, when one's Randian perspective clashes with collectivist and supernatural beliefs of "the authorities," that "sunshine friend" will be on the other side.

I speak from experience here. Back when I lived in New Jersey, one of my neighbors was the local Refom rabbi. We had a great deal in common in character and sense of life, and I considered him one of my closest friends. Then, while an elected member of the local school board, I uncovered a scandal involving the local Sopranos, and was "taken out" with computer-generated "child pornography" that was planted - probably by arrangement between the local "Family" and the local police - in the garbage outside my apartment. It took 11 days of imprisonment and torture in the local jail before the State Forensic Lab, brought in by my lawyer to examine the "evidence," proved that I was innocent. My rabbi "friend" refused to so much as visit me. He sincerely believes that everything happens according to God's will, and so if God let me get jailed I must have deserved it.

Your mileage may differ.

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