When I first wrote the article that started this thread, I was searching for evidence that using the word rational as a qualifier for “self-interest” might not be communicating what Objectivists want to say. I wondered if critics might be concluding that we are advocating unrestrained self-indulgence that would lead to the Hobbesian nightmare vision of “war of all against all,” because so few people grasp what rationality means. I honestly had no idea that certain RoR members would be providing such vivid evidence in support of my hypothesis. I guess I should try to be more appreciative.
Exhibit A: A member describes introspection as “daydreaming,” then says:
Its all in your head, meaning your brain is the one doing all that stuff. There is no self standing independent substantial mind. The notion is essentially ancient superstition. Right up there with Gods, ghosts, spirits and Muses. Descartes nonsense is responsible for untold death and suffering. Dealing with minds is like dealing with the Humours. It is a false notion with pernicious consequences.
Is that a revelation or what?
These remarks are reminiscent of Gilbert Ryle’s famous work, The Concept of Mind, published in 1949. Ryle was a radical behaviorist who downplayed the significance of private mental events, and made an effort to describe such events in terms of outward behavior. He did not deny the existence of mental experience, but characterized it as ghostly “shadow actions” in a “secret grotto,’ and characterized such “stream of experience” which only we can witness as devoid of consequence. He used daydreams as an example of our silent inner soliloquies, the assorted “thrills and twinges” which exist in our heads but do not really rise to the level of self-knowledge.
It doesn’t seem likely that we will be seeing a whole lot of rationality coming from people with such a view of their internal processes.
Another member describes his brain as “an imperfect tool, badly designed for the task… to deduce (sic) an objective reality.” He describes the “tricks our minds are hard-wired by evolution to perform” in terms that would have made Immanuel Kant proud. He becomes indignant when it is suggested that he try to understand Objectivism before attacking it, then protests that we are demanding that he become a “full-fledged believer,” and that I am telling him to “shut up” until he “fully concurs” with ideas he obviously has made no effort to comprehend.
(This same member argues that Atlas Shrugged, which continues to sell over 100,000 copies per year a half century after it was first published, hinders the spread of Objectivism because it is “objectively poorly written.”)
I didn’t have to go very far to find evidence to back up my thesis on rationality. Thanks for making my research so easy. And stay tuned. No doubt even more supporting data is on the way.
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