| | The subtle point here is to pick your battles. The goal -- of living the life you want in the world you want -- is the same. The means and methods to this same goal will be different for people (or Objectivists even) in relation to their own personal attributes and powers. Some will fight evil harder. Some will fight evil differently.
Stipulated.
I agree that there are better ways folks can use to get the life they want in the world they want.
Agree to that.
Teaching is the best way to fight evil. It's an appeal to the human mind as the answer to life's problems. In accord on that.
There is also the sense of life issue or the underlying current of coming alive. There's a good quote that says don't ask what the world needs, ask what makes you come alive -- because what the world needs is folks who come alive. Thanks for the lesson.
MEM: The dangers of bad government and malevolent religionists are not one-tenth of what we do to ourselves
Ed: True
We agree again.
The trick is to balance my energies between an appropriate level of destruction and creation, what Schumpeter called "Creative Destruction." In order to lay a new foundation, sometimes existing things need first be destroyed. I would say that an appropriate balance for one of my caliber of talent would be to apportion approximately 60% of my skills toward destruction (to "make room" for the good) and about 40% of my skills toward creation.
You may apportion your skills differently based on your attributes, but don't pretentiously presume to sit there and sell me on some kind of a Utopian fantasy that there should be 0.0% destruction going on in the world.
Clear a forest, build a farm. A building can outlive its usefulness. Machines wear out past the point of repair. What I seek to avoid is mindless destruction of anything threatening on the premise that perceived threats are bad by definition. Widgets, Inc. will be threatened by the invention of the Gizmo. Should they bomb the gizmo factory? I know that you would object to that and I know why and we agree on that. When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, they destroyed statues of Buddha. The statues were works of art that harmed no one... except, of course, that by their existence, they threatened Islam. Before 9/11, the worst terrorist attack against the United States government was carried out by an member of the Michigan Militia. It is one thing to withdraw your sanction... to live in the woods, etc.... and another entirely to destroy an office building in use. (Or even out of use. What if the bomb had gone off at midnight and killed no one? The act would still be barbaric.)
I am not a big fan of destruction. It needs to be justified on economic grounds. Jane Jacobs pointed out in The Economy of Cities that old forms continue. They change. They are incorporated into new things. They seldom disappear entirely. That is the nature of things, to remain useful for those who find use in them. I agree than 0.0% destruction is un-real, im-possible. I just ate an apple while writing this. My goal however, was not to destroy the apple, but to facilitate the uptake of 1.5 grams of vitamin C.
Also, religion isn't merely some abstract castle-in-the-sky, untied to any living, breathing, feeling humans -- such a castle could be destroyed without harming the humans tied to it by their deeply emotional apron-strings. A wrecking-ball of reason will necessarily "hurt the feelings" of others (as it destroys the counterfeit sources of value that many folks hold dear).
Your theme seems to be to go along to get along, after all, there's so much tied-up wealth owned by religionists -- you'd be a fool not to pander to them in trade. At the end of the day, you say, you'll be richer for having looked the other way -- and under your view, the richer guy is the winner (no matter how he earned his wealth).
Ed, as a nurse, would you refuse to treat a Muslim or a Christian or a post-modernist professor of philosophy? Before you buy from a store, do you subject the owner to a pop quiz on Atlas Shrugged?
If a religionist or a statist attempts to impose their beliefs on me by force, then, of course, I resist -- and if need be take the problem directly to them. That said, I work with another guard who is a Baptist minister. He knows that I am a heathen. When I go down to the service level to secure the dock, I know that he has me on camera. If ever anything goes wrong, I know that I can count on him to do whatever he can to assure my safety, just as I have his "six" when he is down there. We work together toward a common goal, independent of our personal beliefs. Our client is a heavily regulated banking conglomerate that profits from state intervention. As long as we get paid, all of that is another issue entirely. I just submitted a resume to a state-funded university hospital. Should I denounce them with picket instead? Objectivism is a personal philosophy that enables individual happiness, my happiness. If anyone cares to know what I think, I tell them. Mostly, I am content to live my own life by my own standards.
I politely disagree. Faith and force are corollaries and feed off of each other. If you benefit one, then you forward the principles of the other. It's a matter of feeding crocodiles, with the false hope that that will make you the last one to be eaten.
You must then limit yourself to doing business only with Objectivists, with approved Objectivists at that.... no factly-valued confused libertarian huggers or perhaps no intellectually heirloomed preservers of the original manuscripts or whoever... Today, it seems, you can do business with TSI, but you and I are drifting apart ... Who are you going to trade with if you refuse to "sanction" anyone who does not agree with you? Since 1957, there have been innumerable "Galt's Gulch" attempts and none succeeded. There is a lesson in that: it does not work for a reason.
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