An Empathic Lens and a Connected Universe

[Dglgmut]

Wait a minute. I just had the thought... If Roark likes to build and take pride in his buildings, what's wrong with trying to affect people and taking pride in their love?

[Brant Gaede]

Wait a minute. I just had the thought... If Roark likes to build and take pride in his buildings, what's wrong with trying to affect people and taking pride in their love?

Who wants to be the first to throw "Hitler" at this?

--Brant

I defer

[Dglgmut]

What? Hitler?

I meant like making people happy...

But, like Paul was saying about switching between different lenses, obviously you cannot commit yourself only to making people happy.

[Brant Gaede]

The way to hell is paved with your intentions.

--Brant

or very good facsimiles

[anthony]

Pity and compassion for difficult circumstances - although doubtless felt by Roark

I think Rand wrote in TF that Roark didn't feel pity until he felt pity for Gail.

And although it may be kind to be cold, kindness is never a motive for Rand's heroes. Kindness, like Roark's to Mallory, was about making happen what he (Roark) wanted to happen.

I sense that you try to apply conformist standards to characters (and ideas) who are

anything but so. Who are radicals, actually.

Suspending disbelief or disapproval when reading Rand ( or any writer) is allowing

her to be understood on her own premises - which is justice, too.

Even though Roark portrays Mr Self-Sufficiency, it is an error of mutual

exclusivity to render him as "cold". Or that his "self-awareness" obviates any

'other'-awareness. To have focused consciousness cuts both ways.(In-out)

This isn't an either/or, kind/cold thing. It's empathy for someone close, one

who has closely similar virtues and values - but knowing that the worst for you and he, is for you to commiserate - iow, to make a virtue out of suffering (his, or all suffering).

The best for him, is for you to acknowledge his strength, that this is only a passing glitch - and that he will recover, to gain his deserved 'justice' : Long-term empathy, one might say, rather than an easy temporary compassion. Which expression is the more caring - for a friend?

Comparable to a Mum who sees her toddler falling down in the playground, but who fights her impulse to go rushing over to cuddle him. She's totally focused on her

kid, but knows she won't always be around, every second in his future.

One has to get between the lines with Rand's fiction - as with any good novelist.

It is what's NOT said that is also significant.

[Dglgmut]

The way to hell is paved with your intentions.

--Brant

or very good facsimiles

So you take no pleasure when you can make someone else smile? Because it's the way to hell...

[Brant Gaede]

The way to hell is paved with your intentions.

--Brant

or very good facsimiles

So you take no pleasure when you can make someone else smile? Because it's the way to hell...

I make at least several people smile every day. It flows out of my personality and intelligence and ability to make up real short crazy stories seemingly out of nothing. It's no primary to me, however.

--Brant

you keep trying to reduce my statements to my last statement instead of dealing with what I'm saying as a whole; we go from significant to trite that way--the way to hell is Hitler taking pleasure and pride in being "loved"--and loved he was: 70 million died

[Dglgmut]

So you don't try to make them smile?

Do you agree that there is a range between devoting your life to affecting people and not caring how you affect people what-so-ever?

My point was not about living for an external effect, but about how the experience of affecting makes us happy. For the same reason Roark loved to build, girls like to pop pimples, and guys like to play video games, we like seeing ourselves change things in the moment... entirely for the sake of it. All I was saying is that intentionally trying to make someone smile or laugh, and succeeding, naturally feels like an accomplishment. And obviously we can choose who we want to be kind to, if anyone.

Your first thought was Hitler?

[Paul Mawdsley]

Like Old Nokomis you make it with the outside skinside, make it with the skinside outside...

What is the story behind Old Nokomis?

[Paul Mawdsley]

It is pretty easy to be happy when you never think about other people at all.

Roark thought he was a great architect, but he wasnt.. It made him happy to think so, which was the point of the novel.

Roark didn't think.

Roark was not an architect--in fact he never even existed.

--Brant

if you mix up your fiction and non-fiction categories you pretty much crash and burn

Must say I was having issues here too. Causally, fictional characters give insights into the real person who created them through reverse psychological engineering but they have no existence outside of the existence given to them by their creator. I find it very strange to talk about them as though they had existence separate to their author and to reverse engineer the thoughts, feelings and motives of fictional characters. Didn't Rand also have the tendency to speak of her fictional characters as though they were alive?

[Dglgmut]

Rand designed her characters to analogously represent her philosophy, and that's why we look at them. The characters exist as much as all her other ideas.

[Dglgmut]

Yeah, I understand you now, and I see the importance of the balance.

This balance also coincides with my understanding that we want many things at once, and must determine the best course of action considering all that we want, and not just one thing in particular.

This points to the importance of developing another part of the self...one I am definitely still working on personally. We need a well developed executive-self that sees and manages all our parts, all our ways of seeing and being and feeling and doing, from a place of self-understanding, wholeness and broad vision, for the betterment of the whole self and all our needs. The job of the executive-self is to find dialectical synthesis of all our parts into one self without creating a state of self-judging, owning and disowning within. The added benefit of this approach is to maintain the flow of information about our universe through all our lenses without blinding ourselves to important parts of self and our world.

I remembered this post and just wanted to quote it because I think it's very good. I guess the executive-self is developed by occasionally bringing parts of ourselves into our consciousness until all of our subconscious facets, or what-have-you, have been aligned to meet in the middle.

[Brant Gaede]

It is pretty easy to be happy when you never think about other people at all.

Roark thought he was a great architect, but he wasnt.. It made him happy to think so, which was the point of the novel.

Roark didn't think.

Roark was not an architect--in fact he never even existed.

--Brant

if you mix up your fiction and non-fiction categories you pretty much crash and burn

Must say I was having issues here too. Causally, fictional characters give insights into the real person who created them through reverse psychological engineering but they have no existence outside of the existence given to them by their creator. I find it very strange to talk about them as though they had existence separate to their author and to reverse engineer the thoughts, feelings and motives of fictional characters. Didn't Rand also have the tendency to speak of her fictional characters as though they were alive?

Yes. And she projected them onto some others. Nathaniel Branden was John Galt plus some minor tics or flaws.

--Brant

[Brant Gaede]

So you don't try to make them smile?

Do you agree that there is a range between devoting your life to affecting people and not caring how you affect people what-so-ever?

My point was not about living for an external effect, but about how the experience of affecting makes us happy. For the same reason Roark loved to build, girls like to pop pimples, and guys like to play video games, we like seeing ourselves change things in the moment... entirely for the sake of it. All I was saying is that intentionally trying to make someone smile or laugh, and succeeding, naturally feels like an accomplishment. And obviously we can choose who we want to be kind to, if anyone.

Your first thought was Hitler?

I don't remember my first thought.

--Brant

I'm not a dentist; I don't pull teeth

[Paul Mawdsley]

Do you have to empathize with someone to value them?

You could argue that collectivists lack empathy for producers... or for anyone who feels they deserve happiness. Rand empathized with people who didn't get much empathy.

Selective empathy is a primary tool of narcissists and is what distinguishes them from sociopaths. The narcissist is driven by a lack of separateness and lives in a space of selective empathy, allowing in only the vision of others who he judges as seeing himself positively. He develops elaborate tools for manipulating other people's perspectives to see him positively and cuts them out, moves on, or expels them, when these tools stop working. The narcissist lives in a space of empathy with a void where a sense of separate self should be, finding a twisted sense of self-value through other people's positive view of him and a twisted sense of competency through being able to manipulate others to feed his needs. The narcissist has empathy without seeing intrinsic value in others.

The sociopath has no empathy, period. His vision comes purely from his separateness. Others have value only insomuch as they feed his needs and his amusement. The sociopath can value people without having empathy but has no sense of their intrinsic value.

I believe we need empathy to truly have a sense of people's intrinsic self and intrisic value.

I don't know enough about Rand's private life to talk about her capacity for empathy there. Personally, I don't doubt her capacity for it. From my readings of Nathaniel's and Barbara's books, and from things I have learned on OL, I do think she had a powerful lens inside how others saw things, even if not how others felt things. I would say she had an incredibly evolved vision and an under-evolved emotional self. This comes through in her own writings. Her empathy too was evolved in the area of seeing inside other people's vision but was under-evolved seeing inside their feelings. Basically, you can't see in others what you can't see in yourself and vice versa. These things grow together or not at all.

Rand showed empathy of vision before judgement but put judgement before empathy of feeling. This made her healthy in the world shaped by objective vision and unhealthy and narcissistically oriented in the realm of emotional/social vision. This is why she was able to create an incredibly heroic philosophical vision while having a devastating emotional/social world filled with pain.

Emotional empathy before judgement operates through layers of openness and vulnerability. As Shrek said, we are like an onion. We take others in and share something of ourselves one layer at a time. Some don't get past the outer layers. For others, each person opens and shares a little more as the trust grows and the relationship deepens. If one stops sharing or one shares too much, balance is broken and it's a sign of something broken in the flow. The deepening of trust, openness and vulnerability stop at this point. Our deepest friendships continue to explore ever deeper areas of trust, openness and vulnerability creating a space of mutual safety, understanding and authenticity. I think this is what Aristotle talked about but Rand never knew. There is no power imbalance in this space between two people. Power imbalance is what someone with deep emotional hurt needs to feel safe. I think this is what Rand needed to feel safe. She needed to feel in power and in control to feel safe socially. The idea of coming from a place of mutual trust, openness and vulnerability is just too anxiety provoking for a lot of people. But it is the path to connection and social happiness. And, the truth is, connection and social happiness give us the foundation we need to make the most of our individual pursuits in a complete life. It's not either-or.

[Xray]

And, the truth is, connection and social happiness give us the foundation we need to make the most of our individual pursuits in a complete life.

Connection and social happiness are closely tied to our biological needs as group beings who cannot survive alone.

But we know all our connectedness and social happiness on earth will inevitably end one day.

I often think of this as somewhat paradoxical: living with personal goals, with a sense of purpose and meaning here on earth is so essential for us, while our small planet floats in an 'insentient cosmos' that is subject to entropy.

Maybe that's why Dagny and Hank Rearden rejected the Second Law of Thermodynamics applied to the Cosmos: because it would contradict their philosophy?

[anthony]

Post Deleted

[Dglgmut]

Paul, your post makes a lot of sense.

I'm seeing people as sort of pinwheels with each color representing a category of need and emotion (emotions are there to guide us to what we need, right?), and the disowning of self that you talk about is the repression of any category of need and emotion.

When we focus on one need for too long, and ignore the emotions rooted in our other categories of need, we can potentially damage our access to those emotions. I think this is connected to the whole physical addiction to emotions thing. When we repress emotions we consciously avoid them, until the evasion becomes engrained.

By this logic, one can become evasive of emotional empathy if they are exposed too long to a person dangerous to empathize with. What I mean by that is if another person does not find value in you, you cannot empathize with them for long or you start to see yourself in the same way. I believe you (Paul) expressed this as seeing people as for me or against me.

In the case of Rand, people want to be understood; she generally wasn't. People did not empathize with her, probably because they weren't smart enough. She refused to see the world as others did, and instead made it her mission to show people what she saw.

Edit: I'm still not convinced that empathy allows us to find value in others. Empathy is a tool to help us access the value in others, with permission. The more competent we feel empathizing with others and creating comfort, the more potential value people have to us. People who feel socially incompetent may see the value in others, but avoid them because they anticipate reactions of discomfort, which nobody wants.

You don't have to be Hitler to want people to be comfortable around you. However, you can't expect any one need to compensate for other, unsatisfied, needs. Just because you're good at peeling onions doesn't mean you don't have to learn to prepare other foods.

[Dglgmut]

I don't remember my first thought.

--Brant

I'm not a dentist; I don't pull teeth

Let me put it this way: Roark loved to build, and it made him happy. The pleasure he got from it was derived from human nature... he was taking something that is in us to survive and extended it into self-actualization.

Connecting with people is an evolutionary human need, and we can extend that the same way. Roark's projects demanded competency in engineering, while more social pursuits demand competency in empathy.

[Brant Gaede]

Connecting with people is an evolutionary human need

If you just take out "evolutionary" you are left with your naked bromide. All complicated life has this "need."

--Brant

[Paul Mawdsley]

Connecting with people is an evolutionary human need

If you just take out "evolutionary" you are left with your naked bromide. All complicated life has this "need."

--Brant

A question occurs: is it evolution that gives rise to the need for connection or the need for connection that gives shape to evolution?

[Selene]

Connecting with people is an evolutionary human need

If you just take out "evolutionary" you are left with your naked bromide. All complicated life has this "need."

--Brant

A question occurs: is it evolution that gives rise to the need for connection or the need for connection that gives shape to evolution?

Paul:

A semi chicken-egg question.

However, I would err on the side of neither.

If we are accepting the premise that the "survivability" of the species is based on behavior that reproduces genetic survivors, can we make any conclusion?

It is self evident that we, as a species, that we have survived.

It may be true that we desire to believe that one or the other has caused this survival. However, by what standard could you determine that question.

Adam

interesting issue

[Brant Gaede]

Connecting with people is an evolutionary human need

If you just take out "evolutionary" you are left with your naked bromide. All complicated life has this "need."

--Brant

A question occurs: is it evolution that gives rise to the need for connection or the need for connection that gives shape to evolution?

Does your question have any seeming gravitas?

--Brant

[Dglgmut]

Love is no substitute for self-esteem; don't think that's what I'm saying. I believe social competence can be a source of self-esteem.

Let's look at a quadriplegic again. Can he have self-esteem? If he has value to others, and his only virtue is social competence... can he value himself for his ability to make others value him???

He has almost no independence... unless you consider his likability an accomplishment he can be proud of.

Dealing with reality includes dealing with people.

[Xray]

Wait a minute. I just had the thought... If Roark likes to build and take pride in his buildings, what's wrong with trying to affect people and taking pride in their love?

Imo one can't equate the two examples because the analogy does not match.

While it is understandable that someone takes pride in an object he/she has produced (or to the production of which he he/she has contributed substantially), trying to affect people in order to be loved has a touch of 'manipulating others minds' to it. So the "pride" in that case woud be not about the love one gets in return, but about one's ability to influence people. I don't think btw that 'pride' is the correct term for this.