 Since all demands for equality are by definition meritorious regardless of merit, and since consequences are irrelevant, some interpreters say that inequalities anywhere should be fought against equally. But some inequalities are more egregious, say others, and thus more deserving of society's immediate concern. ... People, they say, know what they want, so no hierarchy of importance is required. [The moral man] starts anywhere, singling out for crusade the specific injustice about which he feels strongly; he is moved by emotionally charged concretes in the here and now. His eyes are not on a vision of an ideal human future, but on a perceptual-level flux of social sores--inequality of health insurance, of gender pay, of wheelchair access, et al--sores to be picked up piecemeal, fought against, and, if the emotional charge runs down, dropped piecemeal.
Leonard Peikoff
Book: The DIM Hypothesis. (2012). New American Library, p 175-6
"permission [to build a mosque near Ground Zero] should be refused, and if they go ahead and build it, the government should bomb it out of existence, evacuating it first, with no compensation to any of the property owners involved in this monstrosity."
Leonard Peikoff
"Forced to be Free", Reason.com, via link at Peikoff.com
Don't count on luck or God for success, but on your own thinking.
Leonard Peikoff
Peikoff explaining Rand's version of "Goodbye" (i.e., "Good premises") in the Epilogue to VOR
By its nature, evasion is a form of nonintegration. It is the most lethal form: the willful disintegration of mental contents. A man in this condition no longer has the means to determine consistency or contradiction, truth or falsehood. In his conciousness, all conceptual content is reduced to the capricious, the baseless, the arbitrary; no conclusion qualifies as knowledge in a mind that rejects the requirements of cognition. Thus the real evader, like the hypothetical one I mentioned first, reaches only one end and one kind of "safety": all-encompassing blindness.
Leonard Peikoff
Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand
"To abolish vice, establish virtue. To establish virtue, enshrine thought. To enshrine thought, identify its relationship to reality.
Leonard Peikoff
Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand
|
