Nine pages, 2.2k views, 165 replies. I can't even remember if I have been on this lake before, what fish are biting, what the Lead Topic is ranting about. My gawd, I would ask for a summary, but I think I have to do some homework first.

Rough notes taken from the thread, a first copy, quotes from the thread. Fuck giving a reference for the quote. Either you recognize your own voice and your sentence or you don't; in any case it is the Statements that interest:

Source: Smallness of Mind

Phil calls people he dislikes "small-minded" and "petty." He dislikes such people because they resort to name-calling and personal attacks. The universe is in constant flux, but Phil never changes.

Ayn Rand set the stage for allowing personal vendettas to supercede rational discussion by excommunicating so many of her own admirers

I'm sure she would have had more long-lasting friendships if only her expectations had been lower

The fact that a jerk/genius has admirers who constantly enable and rationalize his jerkiness, makes the jerk's behaviour more contemptible. A genius of all people, we feel, should know bettter.

Rand must have been very lonely.

if her expectations had been reasonable.

The hostilities could be easily forgotten if only the aggressors (who often try to disguise themselves as the victims) would just act like adults and recognize and apologize for their behavior.

I would say rather, if her expectations had been reasonable.

A great mind has no extra right to be a jerk, yes - but no less either.

the USA government is guilty of a bad, bad thing with Wilhelm Reich.

the orgone accumulator, is now being vindicated in controlled double-blind experiments.

One word I believe to be a cover-all, that represents the counter to pettiness,

is 'grace', or 'graciousness'. Gracious in success, and during set-back.

As Objectivism matures, and loses its defensiveness, I feel positive grace will go with it.

For me the notion is synonymous with Barbara Branden.

Phil, I think you've done a great job here of explaining what's behind the small-mindedness and resistance to reality that is so often displayed by zealots

many of the people in Objectivist circles who want to be seen as gurus, and who want to control others, are usually pretty lacking in abilities and accomplishments. I think they need to see themselves as real-life Roarks and Galts, and, since they're not -- since they can't produce at much more than a mediocre level -- their only option to keeping the fantasy alive is to tear down others.

Envy.

You're envious of those who are better thinkers and producers.

It is one of the sneakiest of emotions and hard to detect in others or even in oneself.

Does the human mind have a spatial extension to which a spatial adjective such as "large" or "small" can be applied?

The phrase "small minded" should be clearly labeled as idiomatic usage.

I was referring to the abstract contents of the human mind.

Achieving happiness is a major challenge. Witness the amount of depression, alcoholism, drug abuse, divorce, domestic violence, inhuman brutality and sheer boredom that surrounds us every day.

If you are miserable, you tend to lose the ability to treat other people decently.

I can't think of any other phrase to cover the root motivation for the hostility (where you put envy) except conflict of faith-story.

To be blunt, that's some heavy shit.

But that doesn't have anything to do with envy

This might be a form of vanity or conceit, but once again, it cuts so deep that I think it goes beyond this kind of superficial emotion.

The philosophy as "its own avenger" was the way she put it describing her break with Nathaniel Branden.

I feel depressed when I read petty comments and the narrow outlook of debates within and without the 'Objective-ist' communities.

But a small-minded focus is not something we see only in politics. Scientific and academic debates often turn into personal squabbles

vilify and humiliate their personal enemies

Peikoff, then Hsieh, then Perigo are imitated on every side

I have been mainly lucky and therefore happy in my life, yet at times when I had a minor ache or pain, or just felt wildly irritated for nor reason, I have been rude or offensive to others.

I didn't envy them, hate their philosophy, feel threatened by them or usually even know them as they were complete strangers. I was just hurting and needed to lash out and be mean.

From all the screaming I have observed from scientists, I believe some of the most inflexible and irrational faith-stories I have ever witnessed come from that quarter. Some of that stuff gets weirder than Candomblé at its most primitive uga-uga.

I spend a lot of my time here calling my good friends terrible names.

I think that zealots like Phil, Comrade Sonia and Pigero believe that they should be seen as occupying the upper echelon of intellectualism. When they don't get the respect or attention that they feel they deserve, they throw tantrums, and they go on the attack. And, again, that tells me that envy is a big part of it. These people are not the intellectual giants they imagine themselves to be, and the rage comes out when they are shown to be quite small-minded and petty.

I imitated the leader

To use the words ",manhood" and "Perigo" in the same sentence is challenge enough, and I am not talking about sexual preference here.

I don't see it as a "tough guy" or "manhood" issue so much as just pigheaded stubbornness.

Largeness of Mind is the willingness to transcend the bounds of received knowledge of wisdom if experience and the facts requires one to do so.

If you think your sense of life is deficient, there's not much you can do to change except maybe study more Objectivism, change your premises and things like that. But whether you'll be successful is a crap-shoot.

Hubbard, in his own kooky way, actually came up with a system of gradually moving up the scale from the dark side to the happy side.

I will not defend Scientology, but I will not let PC peer pressure silence my ideas, either.

A sense of life is not a substitute for explicit knowledge.

Values which one cannot identify, but merely senses implicitly, are not in one’s control.

Introspectively, one’s own sense of life is experienced as an absolute and an irreducible primary—as that which one never questions, because the thought of questioning it never arises. Extrospectively, the sense of life of another person strikes one as an immediate, yet undefinable, impression—on very short acquaintance—an impression which often feels like certainty, yet is exasperatingly elusive, if one attempts to verify it.

Exhilaration

Aesthetic

Enthusiasm

Cheerfulness

Strong interest

Conservatism

Mild interest

Contented

Disinterested

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Boredom

Monotony

Antagonism

Hostility

Pain

Anger

Hate

Resentment

No sympathy

Unexpressed resentment

Covert hostility

Anxiety

Fear

Despair

Terror

Numb

Sympathy

Propitiation

Grief

Making amends

Undeserving

Self-abasement

Victim

Hopeless

Apathy

Useless

Dying

Body death

And, if you are into self-improvement, you can set up a program for yourself of trying to move up the scale, adapting it as you see fit.

he way to get from being small-minded to "large-minded" is to accept that you need to change. And on this point, I agree--in broad terms--with Rand's sense of life idea. If you learn how to take stock of your soul (sorry, you have to figure out how to do that on your own since Rand doesn't tell you), a sense of life is a good indicator of where you are at spiritually and whether you will be small-minded about certain issues.

A baby cannot experience emotions like envy, resentment,bitterness or guilt because her cognition is not far advanced enough

Rand's writing on emotions in VoS is some of her best.

At a newborn level, infants have a primitive form of emotions called affects and these cover a broad range of expressions.

There are now experiments where researchers film newborns 24 hours a day just to observe their behavior.

An emotion without a physical expression is not an emotion.

there is no such thing as an emotion without "physical feelings."

An emotion is the psychosomatic form in which man experiences his estimate of the relationship of things to himself. An emotion is a value-response. It is the automatic psychological result of a man's value-judgments.

The motivational power and function of emotions is evident in the fact that every emotion contains an inherent action tendency, i.e., an impetus to perform some action related to the particular emotion.

Emotions trigger the limbic system (basically the hypothalamus, hippocampus, amygdala and a few other parts) to send out hormone-squirting commands.

People who research such things have discovered that when they make happy and/or sad faces for long periods of time, they actually do get happy and/or sad--and this is corroborated with brain scans.

The way Rand describes emotions works for some emotions but not all.

A sense of life, once acquired, is not a closed issue. It can be changed and corrected—easily, in youth, while it is still fluid, or by a longer, harder effort in later years. Since it is an emotional sum, it cannot be changed by a direct act of will. It changes automatically, but only after a long process of psychological retraining, when and if a man changes his philosophical premises.

How does Rand know that a sense of life is fluid in youth?

a sense of life is not an irreducible primary, but a very complex sum

Isn’t changing “sense of life” one of the typical goals of psychotherapy?

Happiness is certainly not identical to 'sense of life.'

Rand's sense of life concept does not come with a method for improving it, but instead can actually result in Phil's "smallness of mind" notion.

My refusal to adopt hatred as I look at objects of hatred has caused many people to be frustrated with me over the years.

"Objectivist psychotherapy" is what Nathaniel Branden did pre-break and stopped doing post-break.

One of the many great things about OL is, the compliments are implied and unspoken yet picked up and felt

Sheldon and Spock are my heroes

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**Phil is on ignore, and most folks ignored his taunting and gave the topic of Small Minds a bit of go. These are simply statements I copied from that thread, most often statements that are simple and declarative, with known subjects and objects. These statements mostly are self-contained, stand-alone, and thus open discussion, which I guess is why they attracted my eye. There are also questions that caught my eye. Some questions are large and some are small, but these are the ones that survived the first cull.