Rand Sighting: Citing Rand on Criminal Minds

[Jonathan]

I was flipping through the channels tonight and caught the last few minutes of an episode of Criminal Minds called "Minimal Loss." At the very end of the episode, the character Emily Prentiss says, "Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Ayn Rand."

J

[kiaer.ts]

I was flipping through the channels tonight and caught the last few minutes of an episode of Criminal Minds called "Minimal Loss." At the very end of the episode, the character Emily Prentiss says, "Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Ayn Rand."

J

My current signature quote was from the immediately prior episode.

[Rich Engle]

Yeah, those are the two I know . . .I watch that show quite a bit.

The new spin-off with Forrest Whittaker is looking pretty good, too!

Edited March 30, 2011 by Rich Engle

[william.scherk]

"Jordan Peterson on Ayn Rand on Dave Rubin, by Anoop Verna"

 

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I actually agree with Jordan here, except for his evaluation that Rand was not a great mind. (sigh... Why do they always have to do that?  )

Ayn Rand was not a great psychologist, and was not a great Jungian, that's for sure.  

I fully agree that she did not produce much of value on the personal moral struggle within an individual's mental development. But she was dynamite in creating a new genre of fiction that still sells like hotcakes and, for many, is a gateway drug into using their own minds with independence and reason instead of going with the flow and submitting to indoctrination. (Incidentally, that new genre is hard as hell to write--witness the abysmal efforts of those who have tried.)

Ayn Rand is on the roster of minds that changed, and still change, society for the better in the world. No matter how much people denigrate her, she is always present as inspiration and clarification (and a "command to rise") within all walks of life, from the rich and powerful all the way down to the poor and struggling. Only great minds get on that roster and stay there.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

Jordan Peterson is a twerp.

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

For the record, I am pretty sure Peterson uses Dostoevsky's novels as his standard of inner moral struggle in fiction. Rand did, too (see the things she wrote about Dostoevsky). I bet--in fact I'm sure--she chose not to write like that on purpose, not because she lacked the greatness to do so.

I don't mind that Peterson said Rand was not a great mind, though. I still love his work. Rand said Beethoven was not a great composer (at least as far as sense of life was concerned), Emerson had a very little mind, and so forth, and I still love her work.  

Michael

[KorbenDallas]

I don't think Peterson is as smart as he wants to think he is.

edit:  I haven't watched the video above.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

9 hours ago, KorbenDallas said:

I don't think Peterson is as smart as he wants to think he is.

edit:  I haven't watched the video above.

Korben,

Do you know what Peterson thinks of himself?

For that matter, do you know how smart he is?

How?

btw - If you want to bash Peterson from a Randian perspective, here is one of the best attempts I have seen. I disagree with much, but Joe made a serious attempt.

Michael

[KorbenDallas]

2 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Korben,

Do you know what Peterson thinks of himself?

For that matter, do you know how smart he is?

How?

btw - If you want to bash Peterson from a Randian perspective, here is one of the best attempts I have seen. I disagree with much, but Joe made a serious attempt.

Michael

Fundamentally his opinions about Rand are based off of his fallacy of psychologizing of her.  Also he doesn't understand Objectivism, yet he has studied it.  Those are my main reasons for the comments above.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

46 minutes ago, KorbenDallas said:

Fundamentally his opinions about Rand are based off of his fallacy of psychologizing of her.

Korben,

I disagree with this.

Peterson didn't even psychologize her in the Rubin interview. (Saying she hated communism, for example, is not psychologizing her.) Outside of his comment about her not being a great mind, he said several good things about her. He even said he recently reread Atlas Shrugged and enjoyed it quite a bit. (Watch the video and observe with your own eyes and ears, rather than imagine and get it wrong. It will lend more credibility to your statements.  )

I believe Peterson holds his view of Rand merely because, for him, despite crossovers with his own views, great thinkers are supposed to be interested in psychology, archetypes and the like.  

Just like Rand blasted so many great minds who agreed with many of the ideas she held because they were not interested in what she was or because they held different views than she did on this idea or that. (Need I list them?)  

Here's the truth and the pattern throughout history. Great minds often get myopic when examining the works of each other. And they get petty about expressing it. In other words, they are great in their own work and not so great in their evaluations of the work of others, especially when there is a lot of common ground.

History is replete with too many examples of this to get excited about mentioning any particular one. (It's like singling out a raindrop in a storm.)

None of this is a conspiracy. It's not an attack to destroy this person or that. It's not even one great mind misunderstanding the work of another great mind. (btw - That happens much less than it seems from everything I have read.)

It's just plain old human nature, the intense focus great minds get into, and garden variety cognitive biases. 

The last I heard, Jordan Peterson was a human. Ayn Rand, too.

 

It really is that simple.

Michael

[KorbenDallas]

1 hour ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Korben,

I disagree with this.

Peterson didn't even psychologize her in the Rubin interview. (Saying she hated communism, for example, is not psychologizing her.) Outside of his comment about her not being a great mind, he said several good things about her. He even said he recently reread Atlas Shrugged and enjoyed it quite a bit. (Watch the video and observe with your own eyes and ears, rather than imagine and get it wrong. It will lend more credibility to your statements.  )

 

I respectfully disagree with the above.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

3 hours ago, KorbenDallas said:

I respectfully disagree with the above.

Korben,

This is your right, but you haven't presented anything showing you are familiar with Peterson's ideas.

This is a philosophy forum. Each of us have our own standards of intellectual excellence.

I prefer the standard of first-hand knowledge.

Here's an example. First-hand knowledge is why you won't see me bashing Kant (joking banter excepted  ). I simply haven't read enough of him to comment to the satisfaction of my intellectual excellence standards. I've only read small passages.  

I have read what others think of Kant, including Rand. And I have commented on their comments on Kant's comments. (And others have commented on my comments on other's comments on Kant's comments, and I have commented back on their comments about my comments on other's... er... where was I?  )

But I never attribute their comments or any opinions I arrive at of Kant's ideas based on their comments to Kant himself.

I would need first-hand knowledge of Kant's ideas--in context at that, for me to feel comfortable attributing anything to directly to him. The closest I come is saying something like: "According to [so-and-so], Kant thinks [yada yada yada]."

I hold accuracy as a virtue when I make value judgments. I even came up with my "cognitive before normative" epistemological sequence based on adhering to accuracy. If one does not identify something correctly, his judgment of it is probably flawed since it is a guess at best.

Michael

[KorbenDallas]

Wait, why be familiar with Peterson's ideas when what I am critiquing is what he has said about Rand---I don't need to intellectually dive into his ideas to know that he's wrong about Objectivism.  Still, I watched a couple hours of his videos several months ago and I made my qualification on him then, and also that I wouldn't watch him anymore.  The video in this thread was not among them, but I read the transcript posted in this thread and it's more of the same:  psychologizing Rand as an attempt to debase her philosophically---which you and I have already disagreed on.

With Kant, I have read some him in B.A.G. Fuller's presentation of him, but it seemed like nonsense so I stopped.  I won't agree with Rand's position that Kant was the enemy of Reason, I have some estimates about Kant from what I've read and researched, but I have nothing to share on the forum, so I don't.  And Kant isn't a value to me so I don't pursue it.

Anyway, might be a good opportunity to say that Rand was wrong about Beethoven, so there's that.  

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

2 hours ago, KorbenDallas said:

Wait, why be familiar with Peterson's ideas when what I am critiquing is what he has said about Rand...

Korben,

It's because you didn't just critique what he said about Rand.

You said he's not as smart as he thinks he is (and, from the level of familiarity you have shown with his ideas, you can't know what he thinks of himself), that he was psychologizing Rand (which is wasn't--it's right there in the video), and that he doesn't understand Objectivism (which he does--I am pretty sure of that from seeing him talk about this in other places).

In my view, if you want to make the claims you made, it might be a good idea to verify them before stating them in public as facts. That means looking at his ideas. It's the cognitive before normative thing. Instead, you preferred to judge things about Peterson you don't know, then try to see if anything comes up that will substantiate your negative opinions (normative before cognitive).

If you were just talking about his opinion of Rand not being a great mind, I wouldn't be talking about this. Why? Because you would be judging what you saw. And he actually did say what he said. It's pretty easy to identify that correctly.

btw - If I did not make it clear, he's wrong about his evaluation of Rand being a great mind. She is a great mind. So he's flat out wrong. I think he suspects this, too. It even showed up when he started talking about her doing archetypes in her fiction in the video--and I detected a sudden pause like when someone reflects on something that had not occurred to them before.

He said several things about Rand's work that were correct, too. Identification-level things and even positive things.

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

2 hours ago, KorbenDallas said:

... I read the transcript posted in this thread and it's more of the same:  psychologizing Rand as an attempt to debase her philosophically...

Here is Rand's meaning of psychologizing in her own words (from here):

Quote

Psychologizing consists in condemning or excusing specific individuals on the grounds of their psychological problems, real or invented, in the absence of or contrary to factual evidence.

That's just not in the video or in the transcript. Peterson doesn't even talk about Rand's "psychological problems, real or invented."

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

2 hours ago, KorbenDallas said:

Anyway, might be a good opportunity to say that Rand was wrong about Beethoven, so there's that.  

Korben,

Finally we agree.

 

But I think we agree that Rand was a great mind, too.

Apropos, just to be cantankerous, let's remember that Rand bashed Beethoven because she was psychologizing about him. She thought he had a malevolent sense of life and, in her meaning, that was a huge psychological problem.    

Michael

[Peter]

I have seen two Rand references in New York Times Sunday Crossword books recently. I like the ones in spiral notebooks even though they only contain 50 puzzles each, because of the ease of holding and writing in them.