Kevin Haggerty

I think Objectivists really shoot the movement in the foot when they reduce a work of art to the artist's sense of life. Art, if it's any good at all, "puts the mirror up to nature" which means that good art is bound to reflect reality in some meaningful way. So, if Objectivism really is the truth about reality, then great works of art should be consistent with Oism, don't you think? And knowing artists as I do, I think a lot of the best art is great in spite of what the artist consciously intended. Great art is bound to transcend the artist's conscious intentions and reflect in its honesty and it's courage at least, some basic truths about the human experience. I think Objectivists would be served much better seeking to discover the Objectivist meaning in as many works of art as possible. Just look at how far Marx and his minions have gotten interpreting all art as class struggle, until all of academia believes it; can't Oists do the same for the struggle of the individual? Which of Shakespeare's plays have the strongest Objectivist overtones, for instance? Is there a discernable "Objectivist spirit" running through western art? What are it's strongest examples? Robert Davison's recent article about A Christmas Carol over at ROR is an excellent example of Oist principles being found in the most unlikely places. Dickens' moral judgement always falls upon the individual and in his novel it is always individual choice that means the difference between a good man and a bad. I'm reminded of George Orwell's infamous essay critisizing Dickens for not being a socialist; for not making the collectivist arguments so dear to Orwell's heart. Anyway, not saying that Charles Dickens is Ayn Rand's spiritual father or anything. I just find this kind of thinking and rethinking a lot more interesting than the armchair psychologizing. So much of what passes for art criticism that isn't simple critical narcissism, is still only prejudice and propaganda. Rather than try to guess what Mr. O'Connor's sense of life was when he painted that picture, perhaps we would be better served by meditating on what meaning we the viewers find in the thing.

What Barbara said. Let me just add that this board here is still very, very young and very young things have a terrible time keeping their balance. Try to go too far, too quickly and you fall on your face. I've already had to take a break from posting here because I began to feel like I was just posting like I did on the old SOLOhq. I realized that Michael was bringing something new to life here and I was thinking of it in the same old ways. I think what Kat and Michael have started here has a real chance of growing into something we can all be proud of. Phil, I know you could have a powerful influence on what that something turns out to be.

Phil, Michael, Thank you for your appreciation (Phil, it's so good to see you here!). I love satire. I love the rhythm of caring and questioning that the audience goes thru as they listen to Clark. He can be so sympathetic, then so foolish, then sympathetic again. I wanted to create a surreal situation that nonetheless draws you in like a good biography. The main character in the novel has a speech about 9/11. He talks about how a mere six months of martial arts training could have given the people on those planes the confidence to deal with box cutters. But people are too complacent, he says, and he blames it on the fact that there are superheroes in the world. "Just imagine," he says, "Just imagine a world where there are no superheroes, where just normal people were the only kind of people in the world, where people would have to take personal responsibility for their survival! A world where people would have to grow the fuck up and quit waiting for someone to come out of the sky and make everything better! Don't you see? The superheroes are nothing but a crutch for the rest of us, keeping us primitive and violent, because no one knows what it's like to stand on his own two feet!" The irony is that my main character is himself a superhero... I love the idea of taking our escapist fantasies and subjecting them to serious psychological study. The fact that superheroes wear masks and lie to everyone about themselves is huge to me; to have so much power and be completely incapable of simple human intimacy. What drives these larger than life characters, really? What fuel runs their motors? You know?

I can only get my dog to spell things forward, so far, but he might be a little behind the curve...

As a highly principled artist, my own self, Roark's behavior makes perfect non-altruistic sense to me. Roarks actions don't help Keating as a person; they may seem to further Keating's agenda, but only tangentially. Keating learns nothing from Roark. I would contend that Roark isn't helping Keating at all, he's helping Keating's art. Keating presents him with problems, asks for help and Roark engages with the problem 'cause that's what Roark is on this earth to do. Keating the man is pretty annoying to Roark, but Keating's artistic problems are worth solving in their own right. Roark tries, as I recall, to brush Keating off more than once, but Keating insists and Roark has too much self respect not to try his hand at a new problem; it's not "taking off from his life" because that is his life. As a portrait of a driven artist, Roark is thoroughly convincing to me. As an example of a perfectly healthy human psyche? Not so much. But what if Roark, in his heart of hearts, were a psychologist instead of an architect? What if his medium weren't granite and steel, but the human soul? Then creating more beauty in other humans, healing their minds, would be of the highest value to him. Then, actually helping Keating or Dominique or even Toohey would be an expression of his self-esteem. Is consern for human health in general of value to humans as individuals? Psychology as it stands may be too primitive to tackle the problem of healing a Toohey, but what if it weren't? If we as individuals could actually, reliably improve the mental health of the world we live in by helping and nurturing the happiness of others, what then?

Super Persons Anonymous by Kevin Haggerty Good evening everyone and welcome to the Saturday night meeting of Super Persons Anonymous, “Heroes and Villains Healing Together”, my name is Clark K. and I’m a recovering super person. (Hi, Clark.) They asked me to chair the meeting tonight, but before I get into my story (which I know most of you are probably sick of hearing by now), I wanted to read a passage from the Big Book of Bruce W. This is from the chapter “Taking Off the Mask One Day at a Time.” Wow. I was so wrapped up in that shit. You know, “truth, justice and the American way,” while the whole time I was lying to everybody I knew. It amazes me now that I never saw the hypocrisy in all that. I remember the first time I threw a bus. There was this alien… thing, I mean, person with tentacles and beams shooting out of his or her eyes, and he or she was obviously in crisis, very emotional, tearing down power lines and destroying property. This person, whose name I never even thought to discover (I think the papers simply called him or her “Monster X”) was easily taking everything I could dish out up to that point and without thinking I lifted a parked bus and hurled it. It wasn’t until years later, after I’d been out of the lifestyle, coming to these meetings for about a year, when I was looking up old newspaper articles in the library and I found out that the driver of the bus had died that day. His body was found in the bus wreckage, it had been his lunch hour and he had been taking a nap in the back seat. Musta been a pretty sound sleeper. The papers blamed his death on the alien person. Of course. The only thing more powerful than the denial of us super heroes is the denial of the media that chronicles our exploits. The papers always make it sound like all I ever did was show up and give my enemies some tough talk, maybe roughed ‘em up a little bit before they surrendered. I wonder sometimes if the papers really loved and believed in me so much, or if they were just scared out of their minds. The paper noted that the bus driver had no surviving relatives, that he was childless and his parents were both dead. You know, it was like, this could have been me. Only now he was dead. Because of me. Well, I started researching everything at that point. I was obsessed with exposing what Bruce calls the “inner villain,” looking for evidence of all my unacknowledged victims over the years. I know we’ve all been there. Anyway, having exhausted all the terrestrial libraries and news gathering agencies, I started moving out of the solar system into the larger galaxy and that’s when I found out the truth about my origin. As you know, Bruce in the Big Book puts a lot of emphasis on the so-called “origin” as the defining moment of our disease. The origin is the central trauma in the life of a super person that forever cuts us off from our ordinary humanity and with it, any hope of a normal existence. Our sense of self is so devastated by this trauma—whether it’s a bite from a radioactive animal, a freak bombardment of cosmic rays, or the double homicide of our parents as we look on helplessly—that we reconceive ourselves as the embodiment of the trauma. We even tend to rename ourselves after this force or creature that stole our lives from us—talk about becoming the disease. I never identified very strongly with that part of the program, though. Granted I’d lost both my parents, but it was, as far as I knew, a natural disaster and granted that natural disaster meant the destruction of my entire planet, but somehow it didn’t seem to add up to a self-destroying origin. I don’t mean to minimize my pain but seriously, plenty of refugees before me had lost their families and their way of life without becoming vengeful megalomaniacs. It just didn’t add up to me. You know, and my adoptive parents were so kind and my adoptive world so beautiful and green, as far as I could see I was one of the lucky ones. Oh man. This next part of my story is still so hard to get into, even after all these years of sharing my story in these rooms. Turns out I had my origin all right. I found where the rage comes from. I was down in the basement of some hall of records on I don’t know, Rygel 4, pouring over microfiche when I read an article that referred to my home planet. What was weird was that the article postdated the disaster. I just dismissed it as a typo, but deep down something shifted inside me and I knew. I kept finding references to my home world all over that part of the galaxy, until it was obvious even to me that my home world had survived somehow. The news of my planet’s continued existence never made me happy though. It still doesn’t make me happy. The next thing I remember was hurtling towards my home planet so fast I got there a week before I set out. The disaster had never even happened—no earthquake, no typhoons, no cataclysm of any kind. Even though they changed their names and moved, I found them easy enough. They’d moved out of our old house and were living in a crappy little apartment downtown. I’ll never forget seeing my dad’s face when he answered the door. He looked so old. His hair had gone completely white. We just stared at each other. Then he looked down, glancing around the hall as if he’d seen a rat or something. When he looked up again he said in this creepy little voice that I almost couldn’t recognize, “Can I help you?” Dad, it’s me, it’s Kal. “We don’t know anyone by that name.” It’s me, Dad! I’m your son. Back in the house my mom says, “Who is it at the door, Dear?” Then my dad shoots back still looking at me, “Never mind, Doreen, I’m handling it. Just stay there.” Doreen? Dad, what’s going on? I’m your son, what are you doing? “You have mistaken me with someone else.” You’re Jar-El, you’re my father and that’s my mother Lara in the apartment. Mother! It’s me, Kal, it’s your son! And with that my father slammed the door. I was absolutely stunned. I could have been through that door and crushed my father’s head between my thumb and forefinger as easy as breathing, I could have incinerated their apartment with a blink of my eyes, I could have torn the whole building from its foundations and tossed it into the sea but I couldn’t move. I just stood staring helplessly at my father’s door until he opened it again. I could hear my mother quietly sobbing in the room behind him as my father looked up at me and said, “If you don’t leave right now, I’m calling the police.” I couldn’t believe how cold he was being. But all of a sudden I think I saw my father clearly for the first time in my life. Hands shaking, mouth dry, eyes wide, standing on the balls of his feet, he was scared—terrified really, of me. And I realized that that was why they had abandoned me in the first place. They had been afraid of me. They were afraid of my. My power. But they were completely ignorant of their own. This frightened little old man and his weeping wife had trumped every bug-eyed monster and mad scientist that ever tried to take me down. Oh my god. The truth had been staring me in the face the whole time. For those of you that don’t know, back in my acting out days I suffered from a very peculiar weakness: a single piece of rock from my supposedly extinct planet could rob me of all my powers, leaving me in a semi-catatonic state, helpless. Scientists from seventy different worlds have given me thirty bullshit explanations apiece for why this happened but I knew the truth now. Every time I came into contact with any fragment of my home planet some part of me knew the secret truth it harbored. It cut right through my denial like gamma rays through silk. “We’re still here,” it would say. “Nobody died,” it would say. “Everything is just as it was, except we got rid of you.” I used to feel real sorry for Bruce, you know, losing his parents like he did, watching his father’s helpless body fall, seeing the face of his dead mother, the gunman cackling as he disappearing into the night. I couldn’t imagine anything worse. But now I think, Bruce, at least you can believe that your parents were kind. At least your parents are truly dead, and not just dead to you. Yeah, I know. Not a lot of “experience, strength and hope” to offer. But I have this. I wear it everywhere I go now as a reminder to always live in my truth. And I hardly suffer any ill effects from it at all anymore. At least not most days. Thanks for listening.

Children believe in gods. To children their parents are perfect benevolent beings from which all goodness springs. When parents abuse their children, children naturally asume that they did something wrong, that they deserved it somehow. It's not possible for a child to recognize that her parents are flawed, let along malevolent at times. Religion among adults functions exactly the same way. For religious people, they're survival is at stake. I'm not gonna break through that. So I don't worry if people say "god bless you" to me. Homeless people say it to me a lot and I've been known to say it back to them. Not because I believe as they do, but because it is obviously a comfort to them. It says, "I'm not your enemy, I'm not here to fight you, you're okay in my book, etc." On the other hand, when some born-again comes up to me and asks, "Do you accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Saviour?" I say, "You bet! I need all the friends I can get!" It really stumps'em!

Okay, Dragonfly, I think I understand you're approach a little better now. I'm all for criticizing hypotheses, but so often I find criticism in these areas amounts to simple destruction. It's like criticizing a movie by saying the thing should never have been made. I grant you, a lot of what people bring to these kinds of discussions amounts to mere wishful thinking, but I think it's interesting that even some unsentimental students of Objectivism find these speculations worth their time. What is there in the mind that makes us "wish" for these particular things, if indeed that's what's going on here? Some might say it was a simple case of faulty premises, but my experiences suggest that there's more to it than that. One thing though: it still looks like persistence of vision is what you're talking about. When we watch a movie, the images on the screen don't move any more than your dots do. The brain fills in the gaps between images and creates the illusion of movement. Isn't that exactly what happens with the red and green dots? It's similar to the mechanism that fills in the blind spot where the optic nerve connects with the retina; the mind fills in the gap with the best approximation it can. A question about your esperiment: are you saying that on the very first shift from the red dot to the green dot, the mind imagines the dot turning green before the green dot actually appears? Or is it only after the red to green pattern is established that the mind plays the time trick? It's interesting to me that the chosen colors are red and green. Puts me in mind of the game you can play where you stare at a red dot and when the red dot is removed a ghostly green after image remains. BTW, Rupert Sheldrake is studying "the feeling of being watched" right now, systematically with many subjects. You can go to his website and check it out. It's a pop website so on the first page or so there isn't a lot of real information, but if you look at the actual experiments, you might find something interesting. And I have a question about your last comments to Kat. You wrote, "We remember the few hits and forget the countless misses." I've seen this presented as fact many times (oddly enough, often employing exactly the same wording), but is there non-anecdotal evidence for this? Has anyone ever counted the countless? Pattern recognition would seem to be a basic perceptual faculty. Wouldn't such a principle as this false positive generating, superstitious tendency you describe absolutely undermine the effectiveness of pattern recognition, rendering all "patterns" merely wishful thinking? On the face of it, this principle could itself be explained away as a distortion resulting from low self-esteem along the lines of murphy's law, or some such. Perhaps we could call it Eeyore's razor.

Hey Dragonfly, You're telling me that you "wouldn't be too sure of that," when I'm not sure of it at all. I think you're missing the point here. Michael's invited us to chew on some ideas, and what you say to me amounts to "don't chew on that idea." Pardon me if I misunderstand you, but your line of reasoning here comes across as obstructionist. You would seem to be of the opinion that nothing of interest is happening here. Furthermore, your arguments seem to suggest that nothing of interest can be happening here. And yet you obviously have a stake in this discussion. What is it? Your arguments seem to hinge on a model of memory that is far more fallible than my own understanding of it. Your example of the two dots is typical of arguments I have read that seek to discredit the memory as a source of accurate information: it takes an extremely limited perceptual imprecision and uses it to justify a sweeping conclusion like, "the fact that we feel sure about what we just observed doesn't imply that it is what really happened." I think it implies exactly that, but there are exceptions and there are limits. Seeing a gradual color shift between two dots is clearly a result of visual mechanics, persistence of vision and the brain's making sense of data supplied by the retina specifically designed to confuse it. It has little or nothing to say about the conceptual faculty. Of course your version of what's happening is consistent with the external facts of the situation, but it does not reflect what appears to go on in the mind. Being vaguely aware of something, and "having the feeling that you're being watched" are two qualitatively distinct sensations. I suspect the mind has a reason for ordering them in this way. I'm interested in exploring what that reason might be. I intended in my original post to look at a great many seemingly isolated phenomena in a way that suggested a pattern of connection, which implied certain realities as yet unproven. Much of what exists at the edge of scientific awareness, far off galaxies and sub-atomic particles rely upon pattern recognition to begin our understanding. And barring some revolutionary advances in neuroscience, anecdotal evidence is about all we got when it comes to the conceptual functioning of the mind.

Let's not go in circles. The conscious and the subconscious are not distinct boxes that we can look into and describe what's there. Calling something "subconscious" is a lot like saying something is simply "unnoticed." I think of conscious awareness like a flashlight. The "subconscious" is all the stuff that falls outside its beam. That's why it's so hard to talk about. That's why it's very misleading to speak of it as a certain thing. It's not. Just because you can melt an ice cube doesn't mean it was never an ice cube to begin with. Subconsciousness is a state of certain kinds of knowledge, not a characteristic. And yet some things remain unconscious even after you talk about them. Haven't we all had conversations with a lover in bed and they've said the craziest things because they were still asleep at the time? Or say you have a close friend who repeatedly dates abusive partners. You and several other friends can spot these losers a mile away, but your friend keeps getting mixed up with them. You explain everything to your friend, describe the signs that tip you off, but it's no use. It may be another year or more before your friend is able to consciously assess what's been going on. Your friend is subconsciously drawn to these people. Here's a thing: I count money several times a day in my job. If I don't think about it, I can pick up exactly 20 bills from a pile, several times in a row, but if I try to do it on purpose I'll likely get 18 or 23, you know, very rarely 20. Then if I just go back to doing it automatically, I'll get it right again and again. My conscious mind gets in the way. There's a point in all atheletic endeavor where you have to let your body do the thinking. After a particularly impressive feat, someone asks you "how'd you do that???" and you have to say, "My body just knew what to do." What's most interesting to me about the type of experience Kat describes is the way the information forms in the mind. If I notice something at the very edge of my awareness, barely perceptible, my standard reaction is likely to be, "What was that?" followed instantly with a glance in its apparent direction that I might bring my full attention to bear upon this mysterious object. But something like Kat's "feeling of being watched" comes over you fully formed. Some part of the mind has already analyzed whatever sensory data you've received and conceptualized it as someone watching you. Not someone moving behind you, or breathing behind you, but watching. How can one perceive a passive fact like that? Furthermore, this feeling of being watched is not accompanied by an immediate and instinctive glance. The glance comes a moment later, when you want to know "who." On an instinctual level the mind seems to accept the information as complete. Why does the mind jump to such a conclusion? And why is the mind so often right when it does?

LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL! (To coin a phrase.) I'm sorry, Michael! I really wasn't fishing for ego strokes! You want me to post a play to the forum? None of my finished plays are on my computer. You kinda flatter me at a difficult moment. Okay, okay, here. This is a monologue from my new novel. I've been performing it around town at cabarets and fund raisers. The character speaking is Superman and he's chairing a 12 step meeting for ex-Super Persons (SPA), so you might get the in-jokes. ;) And since this is an Oist forum, I feel the need to make it clear that I don't endorse all of Superman's opinions or his choices, but I really, really feel for the guy... Good evening everyone and welcome to the Saturday night meeting of Super Persons Anonymous, “Heroes and Villains Healing Together”, my name is Clark K. and I’m a recovering super person. (Hi, Clark.) They asked me to chair the meeting tonight, but before I get into my story (which I know most of you are probably sick of hearing by now), I wanted to read a passage from the Big Book of Bruce W. This is from the chapter “Taking Off the Mask One Day at a Time.” Wow. I was so wrapped up in that shit. You know, “truth, justice and the American way,” while the whole time I was lying to everybody I knew. It amazes me now that I never saw the hypocrisy in all that. I remember the first time I threw a bus. There was this alien… thing, I mean, person with tentacles and beams shooting out of his or her eyes, and he or she was obviously in crisis, very emotional, tearing down power lines and destroying property. This person, whose name I never even thought to discover (I think the papers simply called him or her “Monster X”) was easily taking everything I could dish out up to that point and without thinking I lifted a parked bus and hurled it. It wasn’t until years later, after I’d been out of the lifestyle, coming to these meetings for about a year, when I was looking up old newspaper articles in the library and I found out that the driver of the bus had died that day. His body was found in the bus wreckage, it had been his lunch hour and he had been taking a nap in the back seat. Musta been a pretty sound sleeper. The papers blamed his death on the alien person. Of course. The only thing more powerful than the denial of us super heroes is the denial of the media that chronicles our exploits. The papers always make it sound like all I ever did was show up and give my enemies some tough talk, maybe roughed ‘em up a little bit before they surrendered. I wonder sometimes if the papers really loved and believed in me so much, or if they were just scared out of their minds. The paper noted that the bus driver had no surviving relatives, that he was childless and his parents were both dead. You know, it was like, this could have been me. Only now he was dead. Because of me. Well, I started researching everything at that point. I was obsessed with exposing what Bruce calls the “inner villain,” looking for evidence of all my unacknowledged victims over the years. I know we’ve all been there. Anyway, having exhausted all the terrestrial libraries and news gathering agencies, I started moving out of the solar system into the larger galaxy and that’s when I found out the truth about my origin. As you know, Bruce in the Big Book puts a lot of emphasis on the so-called “origin” as the defining moment of our disease. The origin is the central trauma in the life of a super person that forever cuts us off from our ordinary humanity and with it, any hope of a normal existence. Our sense of self is so devastated by this trauma—whether it’s a bite from a radioactive animal, a freak bombardment of cosmic rays, or the double homicide of our parents as we look on helplessly—that we reconceive ourselves as the embodiment of the trauma. We even tend to rename ourselves after this force or creature that stole our lives from us—talk about becoming the disease. I never identified very strongly with that part of the program, though. Granted I’d lost both my parents, but it was, as far as I knew, a natural disaster and granted that natural disaster meant the destruction of my entire planet, but somehow it didn’t seem to add up to a self-destroying origin. I don’t mean to minimize my pain but seriously, plenty of refugees before me had lost their families and their way of life without becoming vengeful megalomaniacs. It just didn’t add up to me. You know, and my adoptive parents were so kind and my adoptive world so beautiful and green, as far as I could see I was one of the lucky ones. Oh man. This next part of my story is still so hard to get into, even after all these years of sharing my story in these rooms. Turns out I had my origin all right. I found where the rage comes from. I was down in the basement of some hall of records on I don’t know, Rygel 4, pouring over microfiche when I read an article that referred to my home planet. What was weird was that the article postdated the disaster. I just dismissed it as a typo, but deep down something shifted inside me and I knew. I kept finding references to my home world all over that part of the galaxy, until it was obvious even to me that my home world had survived somehow. The news of my planet’s continued existence never made me happy though. It still doesn’t make me happy. The next thing I remember was hurtling towards my home planet so fast I got there a week before I set out. The disaster had never even happened—no earthquake, no typhoons, no cataclysm of any kind. Even though they changed their names and moved, I found them easy enough. They’d moved out of our old house and were living in a crappy little apartment downtown. I’ll never forget seeing my dad’s face when he answered the door. He looked so old. His hair had gone completely white. We just stared at each other. Then he looked down, glancing around the hall as if he’d seen a rat or something. When he looked up again he said in this creepy little voice that I almost couldn’t recognize, “Can I help you?” Dad, it’s me, it’s Kal. “We don’t know anyone by that name.” It’s me, Dad! I’m your son. Back in the house my mom says, “Who is it at the door, Dear?” Then my dad shoots back still looking at me, “Never mind, Doreen, I’m handling it. Just stay there.” Doreen? Dad, what’s going on? I’m your son, what are you doing? “You have mistaken me with someone else.” You’re Jar-El, you’re my father and that’s my mother Lara in the apartment. Mother! It’s me, Kal, it’s your son! And with that my father slammed the door. I was absolutely stunned. I could have been through that door and crushed my father’s head between my thumb and forefinger as easy as breathing, I could have incinerated their apartment with a blink of my eyes, I could have torn the whole building from its foundations and tossed it into the sea but I couldn’t move. I just stood staring helplessly at my father’s door until he opened it again. I could hear my mother quietly sobbing in the room behind him as my father looked up at me and said, “If you don’t leave right now, I’m calling the police.” I couldn’t believe how cold he was being. But all of a sudden I think I saw my father clearly for the first time in my life. Hands shaking, mouth dry, eyes wide, standing on the balls of his feet, he was scared—terrified really, of me. And I realized that that was why they had abandoned me in the first place. They had been afraid of me. They were afraid of my. My power. But they were completely ignorant of their own. This frightened little old man and his weeping wife had trumped every bug-eyed monster and mad scientist that ever tried to take me down. Oh my god. The truth had been staring me in the face the whole time. For those of you that don’t know, back in my acting out days I suffered from a very peculiar weakness: a single piece of rock from my supposedly extinct planet could rob me of all my powers, leaving me in a semi-catatonic state, helpless. Scientists from seventy different worlds have given me thirty bullshit explanations apiece for why this happened but I knew the truth now. Every time I came into contact with any fragment of my home planet some part of me knew the secret truth it harbored. It cut right through my denial like gamma rays through silk. “We’re still here,” it would say. “Nobody died,” it would say. “Everything is just as it was, except we got rid of you.” I used to feel real sorry for Bruce, you know, losing his parents like he did, watching his father’s helpless body fall, seeing the face of his dead mother, the gunman cackling as he disappearing into the night. I couldn’t imagine anything worse. But now I think, Bruce, at least you can believe that your parents were kind. At least your parents are truly dead, and not just dead to you. Yeah, I know. Not a lot of “experience, strength and hope” to offer. But I have this.I wear it everywhere I go now as a reminder to always live in my truth. And I hardly suffer any ill effects from it at all anymore. At least not most days. Thanks for listening.

Favorite saying ascribed to a guy named Jesus (from the Gospel of Thomas): I love that last line (you know, very KASS)! LOL (I'm sorry, I'm sorry--I know I'm going to Objectivist hell for that.)

Hey Barbara, Thank you for the kind words and flattering comparison to one of the greats! Finding the universal by exploring the personal speaks powerfully of the benevolent universe. As to seeing my writing, I'm pretty sure if you went to the Seattle Public Library you would find two of my plays, Bob is Dead and Not a Nice Guy, in published form there (small local press), but otherwise they are absolutely out of print. Other work has appeared in various and sundry arts magazines and performed in various fringe venues. I'm currently working on a novel for the mass market (trying to bust out the local art scene, go national--yay me!), so maybe in a year or two you'll be able to get a copy (oh that's wishful thinking!). Thanks again, Kevin

Over in Michael's mockingbird thread he asked me: A new kind of sense organ...hrm. Seems to me that in order for the body to reorganize itself so conclusively as to give rise to a whole new organ, it would require some kind of survival necessity to do so. There would have to be some revolutionary new factor in human survival to account for it. Perhaps, in your science fiction story human beings could colonize another planet and something there would change our needs so drastically that the body would have to overhaul its sensory make-up. Let's play "what if" in the other direction, though. Thinking about what might be, always puts me in mind of how things begin. Let's think about the evolution of the fab five in the first place. What's so useful about any of the five senses in their most primitive incarnation that nature would select for enhancing and refining them to their present state of sophistication? What decisive advantage does the vaguely photosensitive creature have over the totally blind? How would the mere notion that there was "something over there somewhere, maybe" greatly improve the lot of the primitive organism? I'm thinking about "light," but this question applies to other senses as well--some utterly vague odor or something that might be some kind of sound, supposing the primitive brain were somehow able to conceptualize a meaningful difference between barely perceived sound and soundlessness. I mean, there's the problem right there: how do you evolve a sense of hearing, say, without first conceptualizing "sound" as something worth sensing? Of course this line of reasoning traditionally takes us in the direction of (god help us) intelligent design, but let's not go there--please! Here's where I'd rather take this: what if awareness had a primal sensory capacity built in? Philosophically, what if awareness stands in need of something to be aware of? What if the fact of simply being alive implied that there is a world outside of the self? What if all perception began on this conceptual level and awareness was a kind of pull, like gravity, toward the sensible world? What if this innate "knowledge" that there was "something out there" drove the evolutionary process? In short, what if awareness were a drive, like sex or hunger? Put another way, what if this connection between raw awareness and the sensible world were a force like gravity? As gravity pulls the physical body, so the sensible world would pull awareness. Just as the body creates complex structures of bones and muscles, peristalsis and blood pressure in reaction to gravity, so the primal organism would create complex structures to bring this raw awareness into sharper and sharper focus over millennia. What if awareness preceded its organization into five senses? Touch of course would seem like a natural development of even the most primitive organism. From this a creature gains a sense of movement, of collision, of presence. But if awareness is a drive, the motive force behind the senses, then even our most primitive awareness would have important implications. What if the evolutionary process had, therefore, a predictive faculty? What if our selfish genes, could extrapolate mutation beyond a specific slight shift? In that case, the first photosensitive cell in a creature's body could be extrapolated to something that would give the organism greater awareness of its environment and the "awareness drive" would push (pull?) the organism in that direction. Okay. Now, here we are several billion years later with five senses. But what of the awareness drive? What of the primitive predictive capacity of awareness itself? Well, if we look, we could say that examples are all around us in nature: the instantaneous schooling behavior of fish, the ability of migratory birds to travel thousands of miles unerringly without the benefit of sight or hearing easily could be accounted for by a highly evolved awareness drive. Animals perform amazing feats so regularly and effortlessly we don't even think to question how. How do deer run at full gallop through thick forest, often in absolute terror for their lives without running into trees or even tripping, when even one such injury would be enough to cripple an animal? And how do they move so noiselessly without spending the whole time staring at the ground ahead of them? Is sight the best way to predict the solidness of the ground ahead, anyway? Of the five senses, sight is the only way to encounter contour at a distance, but woefully inadequate as a measure of thickness and solidity. Do deer echo locate? Squirrels judge distances all day long with similar accuracy. If this were merely inhuman athletic ability, wouldn't all aging squirrels eventually fail a jump? Wouldn't all squirrels die from falls, and the woodland floor be littered over the years with dead squirrels? So okay, if there were such a cockamamie thing as an "awareness drive," what happened to this faculty in humans? Why don't we all have this capacity? Why isn't the awareness drive as strong in humans as our sex drive or our need for food? Well, let's say that all these drives exist to improve our survival; so, what if our survival no longer depended upon awareness? What if humans had moved beyond normal evolution and so evolved beyond awareness as a need? A more primitive creature's awareness of the world around it is the key to its survival. What if modern man's ability to manipulate his environment were to replace awareness as the guarantor of survival? The efficacy of and need for an awareness drive presupposes many and constant unknowns that directly and grossly affect the organism's viability. For most creatures on this earth, there are thousands of transactions with their environments which they must "get right" on the first try or parish. But we humans have created so many alternatives and back-up plans through agriculture, technology, and medicine, that there is very little in our existence that we have to get right the first time or even the tenth. Our bodies have obviously retreated from direct importance in our survival (hence our clawlessness and fanglessness; our relative physical ineptitude when compared even to the common house cat). What if our raw awareness, in the form of the "awareness drive" were similarly to have atrophied? Insulation from every form of weather, an utter absence of predators and the absolute assurance of finding sustenance at the local Safeway would render the awareness drive obsolete. We can see the consequences of our evolutionarily weakened physical bodies easily enough, but what would be the consequences of an atrophied "awareness drive?" The most technologically dependant societies might see a marked decrease in the pursuit of knowledge, many people putting their focus instead into acquiring wealth to better manipulate their environment; the great majority of people in a society might be grossly ignorant of how anything worked. We tend to think of "self esteem" as a function of our human minds alone, but what if a primitive form of "self esteem" was nascent in a creature's awareness that its actions have effect and that the animal itself therefore, is effective? Technologically advanced societies then would experience a profound crisis of self-esteem. But how could self-esteem be connected to primitive awareness? We all know the story of the baby elephant that is tied to a post. The baby elephant learns from trial and error that it cannot free itself from the post and stops trying. Later, even when the elephant has grown large enough to uproot whole trees, it doesn't try to escape when tied to the meager post because it has already learned that it can't. "Learned helplessness," we call that. We also know that wild animals in captivity often simply die, many displaying the outward signs of depression in the last months of life. So, by negative example at least, it would seem plausible that a sense of effectiveness, an awareness of being able to meet their needs through direct action exists and is a sign of health in animals. But what if such an animal were able to devise technology, or were given technology that would prolong its life regardless of its personal effectiveness? What then would become of its "self-esteem?" I think it's very interesting (and in light of my musings here, of course, very apt) that Nathaniel Branden's investigation into the nature of self-esteem would lead him to the threshold of some kind of "anomalous cognition." My apologies to Mr. Brandon, but I haven't read his works; does he at any point discuss the origins and evolution of self-esteem? Can it even be said that animals have an emotional investment in their being able to affect their environment? Which leads me (maybe not you, but it does me) to a discussion of the subconscious. No one studies psychology for long without running across the provocative notion that much of what we do and feel happens subconsciously. Objectively speaking, animals are said not to be conscious. But are they then subconscious? Certainly they experience emotions; certainly these emotions are a reaction to some relation between themselves and the world, some awareness. It is further interesting that something like my "awareness drive" could account for a great many "psi" phenomena. People with such abilities would simply be expressing an atavism, comparable to webbed feet. The vast majority of such "anomalous cognition" would take place entirely at the subconscious level and would, therefore, resist observation and investigation by conventional laboratory study; as a survival mechanism, the awareness drive would tend not to work under laboratory conditions, just as it would have shut down nearly completely in the environment created by modern western culture at large. It's likely that the membership of the western scientific establishment would be drawn from populations with the greatest technological advancement, and therefore the greatest remoteness from this awareness. If, as I’m suggesting, the major factor in the loss of this awareness were environmental, then very young children might be expected to experience some aspect of this awareness and lose it as they became more and more subject to their environment. Remnants of this awareness, though lost to modern man, would exist in literature and folklore from the remote past. It would stand to reason that populations having the least contact with modern technological convenience would have a much greater tendency to express atavistic awareness to the point that such cultures might take "psi" phenomena for granted. Anyway...Michael, thanks for posing the question. I sure had fun answering it!

Hey Michael, the way you frame the discussion puts me in mind of T. S. Eliot's essay The Metaphysical Poests. The gist of the essay is that Milton is the reason that after Shakespeare died there wasn't any great art in the English language for a few centuries or so (hey, look, this is T. S.'s opinion, 'kay?). During the Jacobean period in England, he argues, artists were metaphysical explorers, not heirophants. Art was morally complex, full of wonder and mystery. Then Milton came along with his new purpose for art: "to justify the ways of God to men." With those words, the universe lost all its mystery, all its wonder and art became a merely didactic enterprise. Art was subjugated to "good taste" and "high moral value" and lost all its vitality. The obvious Oist parallel is the closed system/open system debate. Just think of Alexander Pope as a 17th century Randroid. Once the sytem is closed, artistic exploration isn't needed anymore. Creating art is hard, it's expensive. It requires all we have, not just our minds with its rigorously reasoned axioms. Art demands that we dig into our deepest selves and show the world what we find there, not just the bits that fit into our philosophical idealism--what we find. Rand was able to write great Oist literature because Objectivism was what she found when she looked deep into herself, it was instinct, obsession and identity with her--so that's what she wrote--not some dry set of axioms handed down by the ARI. So where are all the people of talent? Out there on the far horizon, amigo. Battling the sea monsters at the edge of the world. Bringing the best of what they got to the fight and never looking back. They're out there where Ayn Rand went. They're not following in her footsteps. They're blazing new trails. A line from one of my own plays comes to mind, "Poet's just another name for a better man than you." Maybe Michael, you don't see these best-sellers and blockbuster movies, CD's and plays because you haven't written them yet! Seriously, when you look around for the book you want to read and it doesn't exist, it just might be because you need to write it.

Hey Michael, I couldn't agree with you more. The very notion that Oist morality might require that I harm or condemn another person whether they posed a specific and direct threat to me or not seems wrong at its core. I cannot imagine a context in which my real personal happiness would be enhanced by the pain and suffering of another human being. Certainly, if he threatens my life, I need to stop him by what ever means presents itself, but once the threat has been avoided I see no reason to extend my relationship with my attacker beyond that point. It would interfere with my happiness. As I think you know, I come to Oism pretty much by way of SOLOHQ, not, as is usual, through the novels. What first caught my eye was this idea of sense of life and the benevolent universe. And yet the more I read of Objectivist thought (I mean, of course, the thoughts of SOLOists), the more I saw aggression and condemnation put forth as the ideals of human behavior. Anecdotally at least, it would seem that Oism's benevolent universe is chock full of evil doers. Certain Oist discussions of crime and punishment seem particularly bizarre at times. The idea that rationality somehow requires that we reduce our morality to Newtonian physics (i.e.: an eye for an eye, every action must have an equal and opposite reaction) would seem to fly in the face of sense of life (or at the very least, my sense of life). To my way of thinking, personal power and self esteem are the most important context for human action and the source of real happiness. There is a point at which one's personal power makes specific retaliation unnecessary or even counter productive, particularly with respect to sense of life. I'm thinking of the example of the knife wielding thief in the shadows as I walk down the street at night. He clearly intends to do me harm, but what he doesn't know is that my study of kung fu has rendered him mostly harmless. There is no reason I can think of to harm this fellow if I can avoid it. To indulge in violence as just punishment for his mere intent to harm me would absolutely interfere with my sense of life. Let him go, I say; no harm, no foul. The Oist obsession with punishment for misdeeds, though pragmatic in many instances, lacks a moral underpinning that I can get excited about, particularly in light of the way in which personal power can change the nature of the interaction from one of force to mere ill will. Furthermore, it seems self evident that training in self defense so that I can neutralize my attacker without harming him would be morally preferable to having to shoot him--I'm certain that it would be psychologically preferable for me. It would concern me were I to discover that Oism did not support this principle. Anyway, not exactly germane to your Mockingbird Principle, but I have been chewing on these ideas for a while now and they seemed appropriate nonetheless. As to consciousness being a product of brain activity, I point to evolution for support. There was a creature who spent her life unconscious until the moment of her (and so her race's) first conscious thought. Now, did her consciousness fall into her head out of the sky? I don't think so. I think it was generated by the equipment she had on hand at the time. To say that consciousness is not a result of brain activity, is to say the it is the result of something else. And what the heck would that be? -Kevin

Hi Michael, it's good to be here! Oh, yes, her ancestry plays a big part in the book. To Kill a Mockingbird is thoroughly autobiographical. Scout is based upon Harper herself, her real life father was a lawyer. Also, Dill, the odd little boy with the somewhat mysterious homelife was modeled on Truman Capote; they grew up together.

Hey, Michael if you liked the movie, you should read the book. The movie covers at most a third of the action of the book and pretty much ignores the specific context that gives Atticus' actions their full meaning. I saw the movie again recently myself, and couldn't help seeing something of the Objectivist in the person of Atticus Finch. Another book with many overlapping themes which describes a similar moment in our history is Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. With a title like that I wouldn't expect a lot of Oists to pick it up, but it's a shame, because the book has much to say on the subject of individualism, personal integrity and innocense. And Hurston is by no means a close up friend of religion. Here's a snip: