1. Alan Greenspan turned 100. While Greenspan is best known for being the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, he was a member of Ayn Rand’s Collective. In fact, he was one of the four signers to Rand’s To Whom It May Concern, which excommunicated Nathaniel and Barbara Branden in 1968. In his autobiography, Greenspan said that while he started to doubt certain aspects of Objectivism (such as that government could exist without coercive taxation), he remained friends with Rand until she died. Harry Binswanger said he could tell by the mid 1970’s that Greenspan wasn’t a consistent Objectivist. (I recall that he was harsher, but I can’t find the quote.) I’ve wondered why Rand couldn’t see that Greenspan was at least borderline betraying Objectivism.* Rand’s biographers have said she admired Greenspan because, unlike most of her followers, he was older and had an independent career.
2. The big news, of course, is the United States and Israel’s attack on Iran. As long-time readers of this blog know, the Ayn Rand Institute and its writers have considered removing the Islamic regime in Iran essential to ending terrorism in the West. In fact, Leonard Peikoff famously called for a nuclear attack on Iran following the attacks on September 11, 2001. I wondered what the ARI’s response given that the US attack was ordered by President Trump, whom ARI writers have compared to, among other people, Adolf Hitler. Their main opposition is that this military action wasn’t approved by Congress. In addition, ARI foreign policy spokesman Elan Journo doesn’t think Trump’s goal of replacing the current government with a friendlier regime (as hoped for in Venezuela) goes far enough. Journo says the US should install a government whose leaders have no connection to the existing regime.
3. Leonard Peikoff’s post- September 11 piece on ending terrorism hasn’t aged well. Peikoff said the very survival of the United States was at stake if we didn’t go to war with Iran — which to Peikoff meant commencing a ground invasion, occupying the country, and engaging in “the equivalent of de-Nazifying” Iran (which would presumably require the partial or complete suppression of Islam). None of this happened and twenty-five years later, we are still here. I don’t know what Peikoff knew when he published the article on October 2, but we now know that most of the hijackers were of Saudi Arabian origin and none was Iranian. Extremist Islamic terrorism in the West is much more Sunni than Shite (the majority religion in Iran) best I can tell.
4. Speaking of Iran, several Objectivist writers have noticed that interim Iranian leader Ali Larijani wrote his Ph.D. thesis on Immanuel Kant’s philosophy of math. Speaking of ominous parallels, Pope Leo just praised the oldest living priest, Fr. Bruno Kant, on his 110th birthday.
____________
*James Valliant said Rand’s mind was an MRI in detecting the problems in Nathaniel Branden’s psycho-epistemology.
---Neil Parille
3 comments:
Journo says the US should install a government whose leaders have no connection to the existing regime.
Easier said than done. Objectivists like to think of themselves as being more "rational" and attached to "reality" than other commentators, but like so many who have dogmatic opinions about this issue, they have no idea of the extent of their ignorance. Regime change is not only incredibly costly and difficult, the United States over the last two decades it's not any good at it. This attack on Iran is likely part of a larger strategy to weaken Russia and China by disarming their proxies around the world, thus reducing the chances that China will attempt to invade Taiwan next year.
I think it's a mistake to assume that there's any "larger strategy" involved. As someone who's been digging into the details over the last couple of years (something I never did when I called myself an Objectivist), there are many people influencing Trump's policy. That helps explain why it seem so capricious and fluid -- it constantly changes depending on who's pulling the strings at any given moment. One of them is almost certainly Putin, so the idea that there's a strategy to "weaken Russia" seems unlikely.
Me again (I've been dropping some comments in the last couple of days, quite randomly.) I should identify myself as Mark C.
That said, I just came across a post by an Objectivist associated with ARI named Stewart Margolis. He's a good guy, I think, from my interactions with him, who I've perceived as in the very beginning of a process of moving away from orthodox Objectivism. He just posted a piece on Substack titled "Would John Galt Retire?" It's worth reading, I think.
https://stewartmargolis.substack.com/p/would-john-galt-retire
I commented on his post with the following:
"Let me see if I can summarize this post… Ayn Rand created a fictional character as the expression of her vision of the “ideal man.” Comparing yourself to this fictional character creates a “nagging voice in the back of your head” that makes you question whether you are being “productive” enough — even though you are happy with what you’re actually doing. You can’t silence that voice, and so you envy your cats who exist in a state of “joy and sensual pleasure” by virtue of their lack of a rational faculty by which they might judge their “lack of productivity” as a flaw. And the standard against which they might judge themselves, if they were capable, is that same fictional character.
In my own intellectual journey, I genuinely find this post quite fascinating and very illuminating."
Post a Comment