Paul Ryan/Ayn Rand/Objectivist Libertarians: Reaction to Bombings

[Procrustes Stretched]

Paul Ryan/Ayn Rand/Objectivist Libertarians: Reaction to Bombings

They can't have it both ways. What is it Congressman Ryan preached to his staff and his constituents and fan base? What is it Ayn Rand said about altruism? What is it the Ron/Rand Paul Family preaches as part of their selfish extremist libertarianism? How would the philosophies of these people guide the actions of true blue followers if they took the principles these leaders espoused, to their final and logical conclusions?

Would Ayn Rand admire people who ran towards the WTC, the School Shooters, the Shooters on military bases and in public theaters? What of the people who are being called heroes in Boston, being called heroes because of altruistic actions?

This my dear friends is something to think long and hard about. This is the type of thing that keeps me coming to places like usmb. This is what I fight about. It is both a source of motivation and sustenance when I think of 'what is it all about?' .. when I think of giving up and allowing the noise makers and alarmists have their way.

When we stay silent we become part of the problem. We earn blame. It is the responsibility and duty of citizens to be involved in the public debates and join in the goings on in the politics that end up guiding what kind of a society we will live in.

Lots of horseshit about the future, but what about now? What about what we can actually affect and control?

In an interview with Bill Moyers, Joseph Campbell talked about a paper which Schopenhauer wrote that poses this question: "how is it that a human being can so participate in the peril or pain of another that without thought, spontaneously, he or she sacrifices his or her own life to the other? How can it happen that what we normally think of as the first law of nature and self-preservation is suddenly dissolved?"

Campbell cites a story where a police officer in Hawaii grabs hold of a man just as the man jumps from a cliff and the two nearly go over the edge together. A second police officer grabs the first and all three are saved. Campbell goes on Do you realize what had suddenly happened to that policeman who had given himself to death with that unknown youth? Everything else in his life had dropped off -- his duty to his family, his duty to his job, his duty to his own life -- all of his wishes and hopes for his lifetime had just disappeared. He was about to die.

Later, a newspaper reporter asked him, "Why didn't you let go? You would have been killed." And his reported answer was, "I couldn't let go. If I had let that young man go, I couldn't have lived another day of my life."

How come? Schopenhauer's answer is that such a psychological crisis represents the breakthrough of a … realization … that you and that other are one, that you are two aspects of the one life, and that your apparent separateness is but an effect of the way we experience forms under the conditions of space and time. Our true reality is in our identity and unity with all life. This is a metaphysical truth which may become spontaneously realized under circumstances of crisis. For it is, according to Schopenhauer, the truth of your life. [Joseph Campbell, with Bill Moyers. The Power of Myth. 1988. Doubleday, Page110.]

I'd rather live in a world that valued the ideas and ideals of a Joseph Campbell than any of them from a Paul Ryan, Ayn Rand, Ron or Rand Paul...and I am sure most civil, honest, decent, sane and reasoned and rational people would agree with me here.

Dante

dD

 

[Procrustes Stretched]

Throughout history, man has been offered the following alternative: be “moral” through a life of sacrifice to others—or be “selfish” through a life of sacrificing others to oneself. In The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand blasts this as a false alternative, holding that a selfish, non-sacrificial way of life is both possible and necessary for man.

The Virtue of Selfishness - The Ayn Rand Institute

[youtube]lv3VkSwhhkU[/youtube]

 

[Procrustes Stretched]

All I can say is 'thank gawd the right wing libertarians are not in charge'