Facts are self evident

[Ichthus77 (Ichthus77 (formerly She™))]

@Maxx

her A=A law of no contradiction

That is the law of identity. And let’s find out how she went wrong from there:

@Ichthus77

He was as confused as Ayn Rand when she called selfishness a virtue and said it was selfish to find joy in mutually making the other greater and ourselves less in mutual consent recognition (altruism).

And yet, instead of exponentially multiplying or iterating that value, we try to capitalize on the human to the point we feel comfortable, zero unease, talking about human resources and human capital. And that is the swamp we fester in if we even make it out of the womb without our parts being auctioned off to the highest bidder…for science.

@Ichthus77

Simone Weil says we must each use our “one single and identical reason” to “try to represent [liberty] clearly to ourselves” (Oppression and Liberty, 94) as a “guiding principle” (ibid, 90) of progress towards which people of good will actively and methodically row together. But, before even that, the stimulus necessary to overcome all challenges to liberty is that “each would see in every work-fellow another self occupying another post, and would love him in the way that the Gospel maxim enjoins. Thus we should possess, over and above liberty, a still more precious good; for if nothing is more odious than the humiliation and degradation of man by man, nothing is so beautiful or so sweet as friendship,” (ibid, 94). Fellow-feeling.

Rational love. Trumps Ayn Rand all day, erryday.

Weil, Simone. Oppression and Liberty. Routledge & Kegan Paul (transl), 1958.

@Ichthus77

Any act that treats someone the way they want to be treated in order to get something from them (other than the joy of helping them get what they need) is “masked” selfishness. Do we call that psychopathic, or just immoral? Ayn Rand calls it (altruism with self-interested motives…she doesn’t see any other kind) a fake selflessness. She doesn’t think there is genuine selflessness. And somehow, ironically…she sees it as self-hating, because she thinks it guilts people, none of whom (to her) are genuinely selfless/altruistic, including those who practice rational self-interest. She was right about masked selfishness, but wrong about genuine selflessness. And it’s wrong to call other-focused joy “selfish” and to say rational self-interest that is other-focused is a “virtuous” selfishness. It isn’t selfishness at all. She makes profiteering without regard for others look good by spinning people around in a semantic whirlwind.

And what if one does have buy-in other than the empathic joy of others’ needs being met? Is it automatically selfish like Rand suggests? No more than unintended negative consequences, even if foreseen, that could not have been avoided, make an act immoral—despite the fact that intending them WOULD have definitely been immoral. Was the buy-in intended? Was it avoidable? Rand would not counsel someone to check their motives there.

But… she DID contrast that against the Nietzschean brute

@Ichthus77

You are right that Jesus was selfless in giving his life (at any age). Rand (and myself back then) was wrong that the fact he had a WHY automatically made his HOW selfish.

¿Is this true:

@Ichthus77

Selfishness as Ayn Rand defined it does not conflict with Golden Rule (self=other) selflessness (she was mistaken that altruism is selfishness… and that non-brutish selfishness is selfishness…), because she rejected the selfishness of the brute, and acknowledged that interest moderated by reason is not brutish (in disregard of the other). She didn’t realize she was arguing for that which she strawmanned.

@Ichthus77

The right of a self to pleasurable access (or whatever) without consent ends where the other begins.

If that boundary is violated, the other must be protected to the same degree the boundary is violated.

I believe that is in line with something chief justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. is purported to have said… I do believe Ayn Rand agreed with it.

And here’s an excerpt from back when I included all my tangents instead of filtering them out… blushes…

@Ichthus77

A selfless act is focused on “other” whereas a selfish act is not. Loving oneself is necessary in order to love others as one loves oneself. Rand said this: “the actor must always be the beneficiary of his action” – if only she had meant that “the other” is a reflection of the actor… but she didn’t mean that. She meant that an act you yourself do not benefit from is a wrong action (a sin, evil). She contradicts herself by implying there is no sin, no evil, no wrong actions of this sort, because “A ‘selfless,’ ‘disinterested’ love is a contradiction in terms.” However, that is based on an incorrect understanding of “selfless”. It doesn’t mean “disinterested” – it just means the interest is focused on “other”.