Hello Absolutes

[Peter Grotticelli]

Hello, let me first thank ye here for existing, and thank Kat and Mr. Kelly for working to maintain such a standard here. Ye are making of the Internet a radio signal free of socialist control, by which John Galt may finally speak unharried. Rand's view of technology has convinced me that Internet fora are not time-wasting devices just because our ancestors didn't need them to live. Rather, we can live more productively than they did if we use them seriously.

I major in biochemistry at Stony Brook University on Long Island, New York, which has a post-reasonist philosophy department called Stoner Brook. Nihilistic professors could be thrown out if there weren't tenure, but alas, I go to a state institution, in which a university head cannot choose how students will learn because he cannot eliminate either his intellectual detractors or knuckle-draggers. Last semester, my professor for "Modes of Knowledge," a part of the "Honors College" set of required nonsense courses, gave me the same lousy grade and three-paragraph set of commentary on each of my papers for him, in which he said that my assertions were too broad - that I was trying to cover too wide a field in a short paper. Having only read Atlas Shrugged and having read it this summer, I had no concrete way to fathom it at the time, but I knew that epistemology had to be simple and logical, and that therefore no one could write a legitimate creative essay that proves one's knowledge of a first principle - for indeed there aren't any first principles, for they are not objective. Hence a paper of philosophy based upon my broad sociological observations is legitimate, though not necessarily accurate; but I could not see how one could write of philosophy with no basis upon what one sees in one's fellow men. Rand bolstered this conviction, for she demonstrates that we cannot have philosophy in a vacuum; we must base it upon our specific nature as homo sapiens. So the meaning of the class, like those of the related courses in the set like "Modes of Being," was still foggy to me at the end of the semester. Upon reading Atlas Shrugged, I was relieved to find that I was not stupid, but that the classes really were randomized expositions without foci. (I am lucky to have read it at all; my employer had let me borrow it last summer, but I had shelved it as a conservative and therefore inane work. What a malaise those fundamentalists have created!)

I did learn something valuable in the class, however, because we read Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which I learned that the world often has to wait for the old scientists to die before a paradigm can shift. I related this to the genetically obligate intransigence of - er, somebody who I shouldn't identify because I have identified myself and in turn would identify her - someone with whom I had fallen out several times due to my unfocused frustration with her mind. I know that she will never accept objectivism, because selflessness afflicts her. For many years, it had made masturbation physically repulsive to her, and only my insistence could bring her to it, though it still must disgust her to some extent. I know after reading Rand that I should not have bugged her to do it, for she is responsible for her own happiness. She is responsible for her selflessness that makes her repulsive to herself. I bugged her because I pitied her tense state, and thus felt guilty when I resumed masturbation after holding off due to guilt for many months. Having decided that life was too hard if virtue required me to divorce my right hand after all of those years, I considered suicide, and even drove to a wooded preserve through which train tracks passed, to see if I could make myself jump onto the tracks. I drove back home humming to myself in false emulation of contentment. Reading Rand showed me that a "face without pain, fear or guilt" held the ideal emotions of man on earth, and I saw, though I am only now focusing my vague notion into Rand's context, that pain could not be requisite for life without guilt - that would put a contradiction into Rand's characterization. Thus the pain of life without masturbation could not be required to purge guilt. For even the heroes of Atlas Shrugged are specific beings - homo sapiens - who have gonads that cause pain (which is like the pain of an itch more than acute pain, but is still pain) if their hormones are not secreted. I thank all the contributors to last December's thread about sex and Mr. Peikoff's work, and particularly Mr. Kelly for his absolute defense of masturbation in the absence of any definitive statements by Rand. Ayn Rand isn't a god after all; others like Michael Kelly can reason without basis in her words. As was said on the thread, and as Mr. Kelly has said in his introductory posts to this site, the details of objectivism must develop like the Constitution of the great Founding Fathers of the US. Each develops by amendment and interpretation, for each is vague in its applications, and immutable only in that which it states explicitly, e.g., that bit about an ideal "face without pain, fear or guilt." Even the twentieth-century socialists have left the explicit constitution intact, though they have added to it and have made minor alterations. So it is that orthodox objectivists, whom I hope to join more knowledgeably, ought to weigh Rand's explicit assertions more highly than her ostensible insinuations.

So, as stated in that thread, Ayn Rand cannot be considered a god, but we must check our premises before we say that she is not in any way superior to us here. We must consider this superiority, proven by means of a broad sociological perspective - the type that my Professor Non-Absolute decried because it had hard facts about humanity in it - in order to shake ourselves of the most dangerous and yet most sticky idea in the world, which President Thompson used so well in Atlas Shrugged - the idea that every philosophy has its place among coequal philosophies, none of which can be proven right. We know well that our universities are doing what Rand described fifty years ago: they are poisoning our youth with nihilism. To shake off this nihilism, we must consider broad sociology regarding the Ashkenazi of Rand's time. I posit only sociological facts: that members of this ethnic group have high average acumen, as the New York Times affirmed a couple of years ago, and that the group was never larger, and never will be larger for hundreds of years than it was in the early twentieth century. For it would have to increase by about 150% to get to where it was before the Holocaust, and by the proof of exponential mathematics, this population will take much longer to increase by 150% than the world population, which is five hundred times bigger and yet still takes decades to do it. Hence the group's population is much lower now than it was at its peak, which is precisely when Ayn Rand was writing The Fountainhead! Einstein, Feynman, Landau and Chomsky were/are also members of some of the largest generations of the Ashkenazi. So if we ask, "Why did Ayn Rand all of a sudden discover the one right philosophy - why in the mid-20th century and neither in the past or today when there are more geniuses in the world?" we may answer via facts, "There were never more geniuses in the world than there were in 1939, before the National Socialist German Workers' Party killed so many of them!" Good minds, and the objectivism that glorifies them, are never going to be popular with the Workers' Party, or with any majority, including the Supreme Court majority and minority these days. Alas, the gallant Four, whom FDR's supporters called the "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse," are no longer here; but even if they were, the President could expand the Court at his whim to dilute their power; but enough of whining.

I have a proposal for which I need millions of business partners: the exploitation of at least the earth's surface (if not its innards as well) before we bother with the extraterrestrial. The earth's ocean floor has ten times the moon's surface area, and there is an atmosphere right above the thin film of water, which is thin because its average depth is less than a thousandth of the earth's radius. The water could be dumped into a hole in the Sahara with a radius of about one thousand four hundred miles and a depth of about fifty miles. Elevated piping from desalinization plants could irrigate the former ocean floor and the rest of the arid earth, upon which lichens would break the ground for further life like they did at Mount St. Helens. Our largest task would be the flattening of the mountain ranges, though that would have to be redone from time to time. Vast new forests would replace oceanic algae as our major source of oxygen; since the forests would take hundreds of years to grow, we would drain the oceans gradually until the forests were grown. Vast profits could come from this new frontier, but only if the socialists relent and allow prosperous population density to grow upon it.

Edit: Also note that this ocean relocation would eliminate the possible doomsday scenario of flooding from global warming, which is rather plausible over thousands of years of climate fluctuation that is independent of man, and so is worth averting.

Edited July 31, 2007 by Peter Grotticelli

[Brant Gaede]

Welcome, Peter. Good luck with your education.

--Brant

[Dodger]

Mr. Grotticelli;

Two questions that you need to answer before I believe you to be worthy of further inquiry.

1) What do you love?

2) What was this post's intent? I daresay it was not an introduction

[Chris Grieb]

Peter; Welcome! As the vampire said "We always like new blood."

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Peter,

LOL...

That's quite a trip you laid out. I want to clarify something, just in case you have a doubt (and you probably don't). David Kelley is the Objectivist heavy and I am the new old-kid on the block (without the "e" in Kelly).

btw - You can call me Michael.

I don't remember my defense of "flying solo," but if it helped you, I am glad. Sex is something very personal and often way too fragile (it is the Achilles heel of most people). I read somewhere that guilt for masturbating was a prewired tendency in our brains placed there through evolution to prompt us to seek a partner and ensure reproduction of the species. In the lack of a better explanation, that sounds like a good starting point. Then repressive morality is added on top of that to intensify it. That's one way society controls us. (Gay people go through absolute hell with all this.) As with all prewired tendencies or urges, though, they can be superceded by the intellect. We can even mentally control our own hearbeat up to a point with enough training.

Now here is the important point. You do not know a person who is initially sexually attractive to you. All you know is that the person looks awfully hot. But you don't know the inside of that person—what makes him or her tick. You don't know if this is a good person or a jerk or even a screwed-up neurotic. A hard rule to learn in life is to never sleep with those who are a lot crazier than you are. (That sounds funny, but I am dead serious. It is an extremely painful lesson to learn.)

And the fact is, you know your right hand. It will never betray you or manipulate your feelings or make a mess of your life because it got jealous.

Real self love starts in learning to give up unnecessary guilt. Let society stay screwed up. It's going to anyway, so the best thing is to leave that part of it behind and embrace living without pain or fear or guilt while respecting the rights of others. If you can do that, then you are ready in all maturity to engage in deep love with another person.

Michael

[Dragonfly]

Superseded, not superceded.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Dragonfly,

Bull.

See here and here and here and here and here and here. This guy here says the following:

I hate it that (at least in some places) "supercede" seems to have superseded "supersede" while I wasn't paying attention.

Dave

Some still call it an error, but that's an error. (Besides, I got spoiled by the Portuguese spelling.)

Michael

[Dragonfly]

Your first link says it: "It continues, however, to be widely regarded as an error".

[Peter Grotticelli]

Thanks for the welcome, friends. Ye are admirably frank and open here, just as my employer is; for ye have nothing to hide. Ye haven't James Taggart's insecurities.

Michael, it is good to hear that intellectual innovation can relieve guilt from masturbation. It is an adaptation to our environment similar to that of animals - like growing a coat of hair for the winter - but the distinction is that we adapt by means of reason.

Mr. Hill, I most emphatically love the current and historical figures who have advanced the natural and formal sciences, regardless of their philosophies. For I believe that there is a genetic element that restricts one's philosophical decisions, which one can only resist painfully. I recognize the right of genetic socialists to live without pain, and so I cannot expect them to painfully convert to anything resembling objectivism. But I will never love them for anything they do besides natural and formal science.

This was an introduction.

Dragonfly: MS Word 97 spells superceded either way; since 1997 predates most of the Internet's corruptions of spelling, the variation is not likely based in globally circulated typographical error.

Edited July 31, 2007 by Peter Grotticelli

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Your first link says it: "It continues, however, to be widely regarded as an error".

Dragonfly,

Just being fair.

I never have been one to go along with the crowd for the sake of conformity. I have always needed more than a rule one must blindly follow because it is "widely regarded."

Translating made it clear to me how much languages change over time. It's a pain at times, but that's what happens. And this is exactly what has happened with the supercede/supersede issue. It is time to throw in the towel. Both are now correct.

That view is "widely regarded."

Michael

[Dragonfly]

That view is "widely regarded."

Not according to Merriam-Webster.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Dragonfly,

I will keep in mind in the future that Merriam-Webster is your own primary authority on English language usage.

Michael

[Dragonfly]

I will keep in mind in the future that Merriam-Webster is your own primary authority on English language usage.

Or Collins English Dictionary.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Dragonfly,

I often use these two, but I also use other "widely regarded" references for spelling.

Michael

[Dodger]

Mr. Grotticelli:

Your intentions, please.

Oh, and Michael:

Now here is the important point. You do not know a person who is initially sexually attractive to you. All you know is that the person looks awfully hot. But you don't know the inside of that person—what makes him or her tick. You don't know if this is a good person or a jerk or even a screwed-up neurotic

Wrong.

I know everything I will ever need to know about a person on the first glance.

Shallow people do not consider appearances.

NOTE: That was not a type-o.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I know everything I will ever need to know about a person on the first glance.

Mitch,

It works both ways. You might deprive yourself of enormous happiness on judging too hastily.

People surprise you. Over life, I have no doubt you will be very surprised by the loved one who betrays you in the most heartless manner and the enemy who stands up to a crowd in your honor.

I used to think like you do, but I discovered the hard way it doesn't work like that in reality. Nowadays, instead of an "either-or" approach for judging new people coming into my life, I use a graduated filter based on them.

I start with the presumption that everyone is good. But I also include the knowledge that they all can be bad, at least at times. Then I open a window in my life and give the person 100% trust within that window. My future acts will depend on what that person does. If he returns the trust 100%, I open a new window in the same manner. If he comes back mostly honest, but a little working an angle, say 70% honest, I reduce the size of my window that much, identify which 30% part I do not want next to me and I simply do not let it in. But I do let the other 70% good in. If he comes back with 100% scam, I close the window.

This has been a good manner for finding peace in my life with new acquaintances. It is not foolproof, but it is vastly superior to a snap judgment.

This brings up love at first sight. Does it happen? Of course. And it is marvelous when it is not destroyed later by getting to know the person better. So if this ever happens to you, go for it and feel deeply. But I would try to use some kind of filter like I stated above if signs start appearing that there are negative elements that were not apparent in the first heady days. Closing your eyes and pretending they do not exist is a surefire recipe for very painful heartache.

Incidentally, I cut people I care deeply about a lot of slack.

Michael

[Peter Grotticelli]

Mr. Hill,

By posting this I intended to gain the selfish pleasure of making others write with a basis on my life. But I exchange value for value; in return, others may relate my story to their own lives and perhaps likewise purge themselves of pain and guilt.