| | From an internal experience, perhaps "more gravy than grave" suddenly in my awareness without apparent substance, these words seem to have formed themselves:
1) There are people that feel the need to have been right all along -- the Intrinsicists (i.e., the Mystics)
2) There are people that just feel the need to have been heard -- the Subjectivists
3) There are people that feel the need to have the truth of the matter -- the Objectivists
Ed, your trichotomy is neither exhaustive nor exclusive.
Not exhaustive:
What about "Salonists" those who seek someone who by outer appearence seems to know a lot and can thereby teach them. They are disciples. It is Authoritarianism, but in its purest form, the seeking ultimately not of a mere "author-ity" but of an Author. (Consider the lyrics: "Our fathers' God to Thee, Author of Liberty, to Thee we sing.")
We know the classic study of the Authoritarian Personality with its F-scale. The F (for "fascist") scale and the entire survey have been criticised for only identifying people with a certain kind of nominally "rightwing" ideology and ignoring leftwing authoritarians. In those days, Bolsheviks, Stalinists, and others all exemplified the same bent as the putatively "conservative." Eric Hoffer's The True Believer came closer to the truth, abstracting the essence and applying it to politics and religion both. We see many of those same traits among "Objectivists."
(Like Christianity and Communism, Objectivism preaches that once there was a golden age, but evil arose that stole it from us and now we face a powerful conspiracy but if we unite and teach others we can build a glorious new future.)
Not exclusive:
You can find all three of your "isms" active in Objectivism. Many people when reading The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged said, "Of course." That is why the books were, are, and will be popular. We figure some of this out for ourselves or we have some sense that everyone else is wrong about everything -- and let us be damned but we won't go along with it. (Note the anthemic pun in "we.") Once exposed to the truth, I suspect that many want to be validated by others, not so much for agreement, but for identification. I think that Rand's works would be bizarre, if once identified as an egoist, the hero were merely shunned. Getting burned at the stake is so much more fulfilling. I bet that inside your own head, Ed Thompson, you think that you rationally concluded, reasoning from first principles, and testing against external evidence, that Ayn Rand was accurate and precise in her assertions. You carried out the same experiments and arrived at the same truths. I think that if that is what you believe, then you are not very self-aware, but I could be wrong. Maybe there are true "objectivist Objectivists"... but then, there would be "objectivist Other-ists" as for instance the skeptical atheist scientist inquirers who believe that government should fund science.
In fact, you often can find all three within one person. The process from instincism through salonism and subjectivism to objectivism is probably a shared experience.
I keep searching for a prior reference for the following and if I cannot find one by the end of the 2007-2008 schoolyear, I'm going to claim it and see who sues. I believe that there exists a study or essay that shows that the "authoritarian personality" is someone who assumes that their own conceits and prejudices are shared by "most people." I have not watched an entire Superbowl. I have never seen Rosie O'Donnell banter with Barbara Walters. I wouldn't know Paris Hilton or that other girl who is like her but actually sings if they did not come with captions. And I don't think that "everyone" is either this or that or something else in a neat box that I constructed. The belief that people are complicated -- even the simple ones -- is called "individualism."
|
|
