Hello individuals of OL

[vfan1983]

Hi everyone, I'm Jen, a university student hoping to major in philosophy once I transfer. Nice to see an Objectivist forum where the Brandens aren't treated as the plague. I hope to participate in some good discussions here. Any other questions you have, feel free to ask.

[BaalChatzaf]

Hi everyone, I'm Jen, a university student hoping to major in philosophy once I transfer. Nice to see an Objectivist forum where the Brandens aren't treated as the plague. I hope to participate in some good discussions here. Any other questions you have, feel free to ask.

What are the issues you most want to discuss and share?

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Selene]

Jen:

Welcome to OL.

My daughter was known as the Pokeman girl.

What university are you attending?

Additionally, what brought you to Ayn's and the Branden's works?

Adam

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Jen,

Welcome to OL.

I hope you have a good time here.

Lot's of good people. You sound like another.

Michael

[Robert Campbell]

Hi Jen,

Welcome to OL.

What are you currently majoring in?

Robert Campbell

[Reidy]

Where are you transferring from / to?

[kiaer.ts]

[sbeaulieu]

Welcome to our neck of the woods

~ Shane

[9thdoctor]

"Hello individuals"? We're in fact all members of competing tribes, and you'll soon have to choose among us.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_CAs3q7G48

[caroljane]

"Hello individuals"? We're in fact all members of competing tribes, and you'll soon have to choose among us.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_CAs3q7G48

Speak for yourself, crybaby-once-accused-of-enevervated-postmodernist-tendencies! Those who should be digging gulches should not waste time throwing clods!

There are rational individuals here, who enjoy benevolent, cold, icy companionship and , uh, epistemology.

[Selene]

"Hello individuals"? We're in fact all members of competing tribes, and you'll soon have to choose among us.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_CAs3q7G48

Ms. Peterson:

Ninth Doctor has forgotten his manners.

On the left is Ms. Xray in drag;

In the middle is Phil the most Civil

And on the right is a Dan Ust who has gone on to argue with himself and his other personalities

Adam

[9thdoctor]

Speak for yourself, crybaby-once-accused-of-enevervated-postmodernist-tendencies! Those who should be digging gulches should not waste time throwing clods!

There are rational individuals here, who enjoy benevolent, cold, icy companionship and , uh, epistemology.

Alright then, no more Mr. Nice Guy.

[caroljane]

Speak for yourself, crybaby-once-accused-of-enevervated-postmodernist-tendencies! Those who should be digging gulches should not waste time throwing clods!

There are rational individuals here, who enjoy benevolent, cold, icy companionship and , uh, epistemology.

Alright then, no more Mr. Nice Guy.

OK,OK! You are reallistically Romantic and handsome as all get-out. Please, please re-herd those sheep.

[caroljane]

Jen,

Pay no attention to Ninth, we never know what he is talking about and doubt that he knows himself, and we are hoping you can help us with that cognitive conundrum.

[Selene]

Jen,

Pay no attention to Ninth, we never know what he is talking about and doubt that he knows himself, and we are hoping you can help us with that cognitive conundrum.

Hmmm pot calling the kettle black again?

Bringing up sheep...hmmm

Careful Ninth...Florida is almost completely surrounded by water...

Phil...socks...hmm

[syrakusos]

Ah! I think you scared her off. Thanks!

[9thdoctor]

Ah! I think you scared her off. Thanks!

I doubt it. She’s probably lurked for a while, and knows how silly we get. What’s this “enervated post-modernist tendencies” thing, where’d that come from? It seems the TARDIS is receiving garbled communications from The Daunciad.

[caroljane]

Ah! I think you scared her off. Thanks!

Jen, please confirm that you have not been scared off by the likes of Selene. I am sure you are made of sterner stuff. He is scary, but we are still all here to show that a scared tribe is stronger than a scary individual.

[vfan1983]

Hi everyone, thanks for all of the welcoming. Haven't had much time to do internet stuff since the other day. I'm really just interested in discussing the various aspects of Objectivism and how the principles apply to current events and daily life. I'm aware that sounds vague, but at the moment there aren't any things within that sphere that I came here specifically to discuss. I currently attend Kean University (which no longer has a philosophy dept. as of last year by the way), majoring in econ and wanting to switch to philosophy, and hoping to transfer to Rutgers in a semester or two.

I originally discovered Ayn Rand's works in high school when I had to read Anthem for summer reading. That was my sophomore year I think and though I liked the book I didn't look into Ayn Rand more until I was a senior. At that point I had been getting into politics and I kept hearing Ayn Rand's name being thrown around now and then, so I went back and reread Anthem and then my teacher gave me The Fountainhead to read, and it just progressed from there. I haven't gotten to read many of the Brandens' works at this point, though I did read Nathaniel Branden's essays in Rand's nonfiction books.

Also, lol @ the Lollipop Guild thing.

[kiaer.ts]

Hi everyone, thanks for all of the welcoming. Haven't had much time to do internet stuff since the other day. I'm really just interested in discussing the various aspects of Objectivism and how the principles apply to current events and daily life. I'm aware that sounds vague, but at the moment there aren't any things within that sphere that I came here specifically to discuss. I currently attend Kean University (which no longer has a philosophy dept. as of last year by the way), majoring in econ and wanting to switch to philosophy, and hoping to transfer to Rutgers in a semester or two.

I originally discovered Ayn Rand's works in high school when I had to read Anthem for summer reading. That was my sophomore year I think and though I liked the book I didn't look into Ayn Rand more until I was a senior. At that point I had been getting into politics and I kept hearing Ayn Rand's name being thrown around now and then, so I went back and reread Anthem and then my teacher gave me The Fountainhead to read, and it just progressed from there. I haven't gotten to read many of the Brandens' works at this point, though I did read Nathaniel Branden's essays in Rand's nonfiction books.

Also, lol @ the Lollipop Guild thing.

Rutgers still has a philosophy department. I recommend classes with Brian McLaughlin. He's friendly, smart, and eminently reasonable. HE was my undergrad advisor in my Philosophy major. He was not at all hostile to Rand or Randian arguments. (He likes Daniel Dennett.) My other favorite philosophy professors are retired though.

[caroljane]

Jen, if you have time you could join the book reading group on PracticalObjectivism Forum. They will be doing Atlas Shrugged.

[Peter]

Welcome, Jen! I have always thought that the hey day of Objectivism is when the Nathaniel Branden Institute was in existence. Those were the days.

Peter Taylor

Here are a few of the hundreds of letters I have saved over the years.

From: BBfromM@aol.com

To: atlantis@wetheliving.com

Subject: ATL: "Evil Ideas"

Date: Sun, 11 Jun 2000 18:23:17 EDT

I'm ready to try again to explain my discomfort with the concept of "evil ideas." I'm still groping, so please bear with me. But let me say that this discomfort most emphatically does not mean I'm suggesting that people cannot be evil, only actions can. Certainly people can be evil. The question in my mind is whether an idea, per se, can be evil.

It's safe to assume that "communism" is what those who say that ideas can be evil would use as an example. But we all have had the idea of communism in our heads: those who have accepted it as a value to be acted upon, those who have studied it, those who have considered it, those who have denounced it. So the mere presence of the idea in our heads is irrelevant to good or evil.

"Idea" and "belief" have been used as synonyms in many of the posts. But they are quite different. And this usage implies that the presence of an idea in consciousness can be evil--such that the communist and the student of communism equally hold an evil idea.

"Evil" should pertain to belief--that is, it should pertain to *acts of consciousness* with regard to anti-life ideas, the act of consciousness in accepting them as true.

Barbara

From: BBfromM@aol.com

To: atlantis@wetheliving.com

Subject: Re: ATL:Postscript to"Evil Ideas"

Date: Sun, 11 Jun 2000 20:04:41 EDT

An addition to my post on evil ideas:

If, as I suggested, evil requires an act of consciousness, not merely the presence of a false and potentially destructive idea--that means that the act of consciousness is volitional: it is an act of evasion.

Okay, let me restate my present position:

The locus of evil, of immorality, lies in a volitional act of consciousness, not in the presence or absence of any sort of idea. That act of consciousness, in order to be considered immoral, requires evasion and irrationality as the means to embrace ideas that are false and anti-life.

Barbara

From Barbara Branden 3/10/01 atlantis@wetheliving.com

Re: ATL: RE Godlike‏

My own difficulty with John Galt is not that one COULD NOT be like him, in essence -- that is, a person of great accomplishment who embodies the Objectivist virtues, the apotheosis of the human potential -- but that in certain respects one SHOULD NOT be like him. Galt, like Howard Roark and like Rearden, (Francisco is the exception to this) is a man who deals with people, even people whom he loves, in an almost totally cerebral way; one knows by other means that he is a man of great emotional passion, but one sees it only in his sexual encounter with Dagny. One understands deductively the passionate commitment that has driven him all the years of his strike, but one rarely hears it in his words.

I believe that the emotional repression of Ayn Rand's heroic male characters is one of the reasons that so many of her admirers came to see repression almost as a virtue and not to fight it in themselves.

Ayn Rand further buttressed this error in her male characters by having her people make remarks to the effect that they would never allow a woman they love to see them in pain. This was Rand's own philosophy; she told me that when she first had met Frank O'Connor, she did not tell him of all the miserable and mindless jobs she had to work at -- because she never wanted to face him in pain. It seemed she felt that to show her suffering to the man she loved would be the equivalent of demanding his help, even his pity. Why she believed that, I do not know. And perhaps it was all the hidden and repressed pain in her life that caused her, in later years, to talk about little except her suffering.

Barbara

www.BarbaraBranden.com

[Jerry Biggers]

Hi everyone, thanks for all of the welcoming. Haven't had much time to do internet stuff since the other day. I'm really just interested in discussing the various aspects of Objectivism and how the principles apply to current events and daily life. I'm aware that sounds vague, but at the moment there aren't any things within that sphere that I came here specifically to discuss. I currently attend Kean University (which no longer has a philosophy dept. as of last year by the way), majoring in econ and wanting to switch to philosophy, and hoping to transfer to Rutgers in a semester or two.

I originally discovered Ayn Rand's works in high school when I had to read Anthem for summer reading. That was my sophomore year I think and though I liked the book I didn't look into Ayn Rand more until I was a senior. At that point I had been getting into politics and I kept hearing Ayn Rand's name being thrown around now and then, so I went back and reread Anthem and then my teacher gave me The Fountainhead to read, and it just progressed from there. I haven't gotten to read many of the Brandens' works at this point, though I did read Nathaniel Branden's essays in Rand's nonfiction books.

Also, lol @ the Lollipop Guild thing.

Welcome Jen, to OL, probably the most open discussion forum of all things Objectivist on the internet.

You state that you have not yet read many of the Brandens' works. Allow me to suggest Nathaniel's The Psychology of Self-Esteem: A New Concept of Man's Psychological Nature (1970), which follows quite closely his course on the Principles of Objectivist Psychology, given at Nathaniel Branden Institute in the 1960s. Most of the other essays he wrote for The Objectivist Newsletter and The Objectivist were incorporated into his subsequent books,such as The Disowned Self(1971), Honoring The Self: Personal Integrity and the Heroic Potentials of Human Nature(1983), The Psychology of Romantic Love(1980, also based on his earlier NBI course), Taking Responsibility: Self-Reliance and the Accountable Life(1996), and The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem(1994).

Both Nathaniel and Barbara were excellent lecturers. You may hear their delivery style in audio tape or CD sets of their original NBI courses, Basic Principles of Objectivism (also now in print formant as The Vision of Ayn Rand [2009, Laissez-Faire Books/Cobden Press]) and Barbara's The Principles of Efficient Thinking (currently, only available as an audio set, but may be issued in book format, shortly).

In addition to the original sources above, as a college student, you might be interested in the best scholarly overall survey of Ayn Rand's thought, and its historical and philosophical importance, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, by Chris Matthew Sciabarra (1995, The Pennsylvania University Press). This is written in an academic style, with extensive footnoting and bibliographical information.

[caroljane]

Welcome, Jen! I have always thought that the hey day of Objectivism is when the Nathaniel Branden Institute was in existence. Those were the days.

Peter Taylor

Here are a few of the hundreds of letters I have saved over the years.

From: BBfromM@aol.com

To: atlantis@wetheliving.com

Subject: ATL: "Evil Ideas"

Date: Sun, 11 Jun 2000 18:23:17 EDT

I'm ready to try again to explain my discomfort with the concept of "evil ideas." I'm still groping, so please bear with me. But let me say that this discomfort most emphatically does not mean I'm suggesting that people cannot be evil, only actions can. Certainly people can be evil. The question in my mind is whether an idea, per se, can be evil.

It's safe to assume that "communism" is what those who say that ideas can be evil would use as an example. But we all have had the idea of communism in our heads: those who have accepted it as a value to be acted upon, those who have studied it, those who have considered it, those who have denounced it. So the mere presence of the idea in our heads is irrelevant to good or evil.

"Idea" and "belief" have been used as synonyms in many of the posts. But they are quite different. And this usage implies that the presence of an idea in consciousness can be evil--such that the communist and the student of communism equally hold an evil idea.

"Evil" should pertain to belief--that is, it should pertain to *acts of consciousness* with regard to anti-life ideas, the act of consciousness in accepting them as true.

Barbara

From: BBfromM@aol.com

To: atlantis@wetheliving.com

Subject: Re: ATL:Postscript to"Evil Ideas"

Date: Sun, 11 Jun 2000 20:04:41 EDT

An addition to my post on evil ideas:

If, as I suggested, evil requires an act of consciousness, not merely the presence of a false and potentially destructive idea--that means that the act of consciousness is volitional: it is an act of evasion.

Okay, let me restate my present position:

The locus of evil, of immorality, lies in a volitional act of consciousness, not in the presence or absence of any sort of idea. That act of consciousness, in order to be considered immoral, requires evasion and irrationality as the means to embrace ideas that are false and anti-life.

Barbara

From Barbara Branden 3/10/01 atlantis@wetheliving.com

Re: ATL: RE Godlike‏

My own difficulty with John Galt is not that one COULD NOT be like him, in essence -- that is, a person of great accomplishment who embodies the Objectivist virtues, the apotheosis of the human potential -- but that in certain respects one SHOULD NOT be like him. Galt, like Howard Roark and like Rearden, (Francisco is the exception to this) is a man who deals with people, even people whom he loves, in an almost totally cerebral way; one knows by other means that he is a man of great emotional passion, but one sees it only in his sexual encounter with Dagny. One understands deductively the passionate commitment that has driven him all the years of his strike, but one rarely hears it in his words.

I believe that the emotional repression of Ayn Rand's heroic male characters is one of the reasons that so many of her admirers came to see repression almost as a virtue and not to fight it in themselves.

Ayn Rand further buttressed this error in her male characters by having her people make remarks to the effect that they would never allow a woman they love to see them in pain. This was Rand's own philosophy; she told me that when she first had met Frank O'Connor, she did not tell him of all the miserable and mindless jobs she had to work at -- because she never wanted to face him in pain. It seemed she felt that to show her suffering to the man she loved would be the equivalent of demanding his help, even his pity. Why she believed that, I do not know. And perhaps it was all the hidden and repressed pain in her life that caused her, in later years, to talk about little except her suffering.

Barbara

www.BarbaraBranden.com

This crystal anecdote just keeps resonating, and resonating with me. I haven't read all of Rand's fiction, but there was a story where the heroine says, "What pain?" after winning her love after weary tortuous trials. The association with the Catholic strictures to repress pain, to redirect it, to "give it up" as a sacrifice, or to turn it on oneself, comes unavoidably to mind.

How greatly she must have suffered, all alone.

[anthony]

Welcome, Jen! I have always thought that the hey day of Objectivism is when the Nathaniel Branden Institute was in existence. Those were the days.

Peter Taylor

Here are a few of the hundreds of letters I have saved over the years.

From: BBfromM@aol.com

To: atlantis@wetheliving.com

Subject: ATL: "Evil Ideas"

Date: Sun, 11 Jun 2000 18:23:17 EDT

I'm ready to try again to explain my discomfort with the concept of "evil ideas." I'm still groping, so please bear with me. But let me say that this discomfort most emphatically does not mean I'm suggesting that people cannot be evil, only actions can. Certainly people can be evil. The question in my mind is whether an idea, per se, can be evil.

It's safe to assume that "communism" is what those who say that ideas can be evil would use as an example. But we all have had the idea of communism in our heads: those who have accepted it as a value to be acted upon, those who have studied it, those who have considered it, those who have denounced it. So the mere presence of the idea in our heads is irrelevant to good or evil.

"Idea" and "belief" have been used as synonyms in many of the posts. But they are quite different. And this usage implies that the presence of an idea in consciousness can be evil--such that the communist and the student of communism equally hold an evil idea.

"Evil" should pertain to belief--that is, it should pertain to *acts of consciousness* with regard to anti-life ideas, the act of consciousness in accepting them as true.

Barbara

From: BBfromM@aol.com

To: atlantis@wetheliving.com

Subject: Re: ATL:Postscript to"Evil Ideas"

Date: Sun, 11 Jun 2000 20:04:41 EDT

An addition to my post on evil ideas:

If, as I suggested, evil requires an act of consciousness, not merely the presence of a false and potentially destructive idea--that means that the act of consciousness is volitional: it is an act of evasion.

Okay, let me restate my present position:

The locus of evil, of immorality, lies in a volitional act of consciousness, not in the presence or absence of any sort of idea. That act of consciousness, in order to be considered immoral, requires evasion and irrationality as the means to embrace ideas that are false and anti-life.

Barbara

From Barbara Branden 3/10/01 atlantis@wetheliving.com

Re: ATL: RE Godlike‏

My own difficulty with John Galt is not that one COULD NOT be like him, in essence -- that is, a person of great accomplishment who embodies the Objectivist virtues, the apotheosis of the human potential -- but that in certain respects one SHOULD NOT be like him. Galt, like Howard Roark and like Rearden, (Francisco is the exception to this) is a man who deals with people, even people whom he loves, in an almost totally cerebral way; one knows by other means that he is a man of great emotional passion, but one sees it only in his sexual encounter with Dagny. One understands deductively the passionate commitment that has driven him all the years of his strike, but one rarely hears it in his words.

I believe that the emotional repression of Ayn Rand's heroic male characters is one of the reasons that so many of her admirers came to see repression almost as a virtue and not to fight it in themselves.

Ayn Rand further buttressed this error in her male characters by having her people make remarks to the effect that they would never allow a woman they love to see them in pain. This was Rand's own philosophy; she told me that when she first had met Frank O'Connor, she did not tell him of all the miserable and mindless jobs she had to work at -- because she never wanted to face him in pain. It seemed she felt that to show her suffering to the man she loved would be the equivalent of demanding his help, even his pity. Why she believed that, I do not know. And perhaps it was all the hidden and repressed pain in her life that caused her, in later years, to talk about little except her suffering.

Barbara

www.BarbaraBranden.com

This crystal anecdote just keeps resonating, and resonating with me. I haven't read all of Rand's fiction, but there was a story where the heroine says, "What pain?" after winning her love after weary tortuous trials. The association with the Catholic strictures to repress pain, to redirect it, to "give it up" as a sacrifice, or to turn it on oneself, comes unavoidably to mind.

How greatly she must have suffered, all alone.

Ah, Carol, yes.

When I first began learning the full story (on this forum, largely, from Barbara and others) of the 'real' Ayn Rand, it was sorrowful for me, and sobering.

How I would have loved that Rand could have had a wonderful life - always!

Such a mind, such a woman; how real and noble she was,to me; what I had taken from her... and what I had personally invested in her philosophy.

You mean she wasn't perfect? And neither was her life? Then what were the implications to my life?

Then came some understanding, gradually some liberating, and then some growing up.

Such a mind, and such a woman! - still stands.

She was also a human being, and belonged to the same species that carries on despite its mistakes, always striving for the better.

She just rose and reached further than everyone else, and her stumbles were more palpable.

Ayn Rand paid little attention to psychology as you know, and this, i.m.o., was her only major error. (As OL's psychology section so rightly says "What philosophy can't do, psychology does.") Rand was absolutely right, that emotions can and should be integrated. Reason is King. However, the inner self does not always automatically follow suit.

Ultimately, through all this, and the more I learn and apply, my appreciation for her - and her work - is rising, not lessening. Reality does do that.

Still...still, I feel the same painful images you do of her silent stoicism towards the end: "How greatly she must have suffered, all alone".

(Sorry. This sort of rushed out.)