Nailing Questions To The Church Door?
Feb 23, 04 | 8:50 am by John LopezJohn Venlet notes Diana Mertz Hsieh’s departure from The Objectivist Center.
I’m unimpressed. There is another letter that has been sitting, out there in space, for a very long time:
No one can evade the fact that, historically, the state is a blood-thirst monster, which has been responsible for more violence, bloodshed and hatred than any other institution known to man. Your approach to the matter is not yet radical, not yet fundamental: it is the existence of the state itself which must be challenged by the new radicals. It must be understood that the state is an unnecessary evil, that it regularly initiates force, and in fact attempts to gain what must rationally be called a monopoly of crime in a given territory. Hence, government is little more, and has never been more, than a gang of professional criminals.
…
There are only two alternatives, in reality: political rule, or archy, which means: the condition of social existence wherein some men use aggression to dominate or rule another, and anarchy, which is the absence of the initiation of force, the absence of political rule, the absence of the state. We shall replace the state with the free market, and men shall for the fist time in their history be able to walk and live without fear of destruction being unleashed upon them at any moment—especially the obscenity of such destruction being unleashed by a looter armed with nuclear weapons and nerve gases. We shall replace statism with voluntariasm: a society wherein all man’s relationships with others are voluntary and uncoerced. — Roy Childs, Open Letter To Ayn Rand.
So, Diana Mertz Hsieh nailed some questions to the door? Roy Childs drove a stake through the very heart of Objectivist politics. Would it be unfair of me to call the resounding silence that Childs is treated with a “blank-out”?
In any case, I wish Diana Hsieh well in her studies of Objectivism. Indeed, I hope that someday she turns her eye, and her pen, to Roy Childs.
February 23rd, 2004 at Feb 23, 04 | 1:14 pm
…Stakes Rather than Theses
Over at No Treason, John Lopez notes my post “An Objectivist Martin Luther” wherein I mention Diana Hsieh’s recent public statement, the theses, to …
February 23rd, 2004 at Feb 23, 04 | 3:52 pm
Then again, Roy changed his mind.
February 23rd, 2004 at Feb 23, 04 | 4:18 pm
Did he? Roy never finished his self-refutation, and no Objectivist to my knowledge has taken up the torch. Consider:
— Ronald Neff of The Last Ditch
February 23rd, 2004 at Feb 23, 04 | 4:23 pm
Roy says….. “…, but an incoherent goal pursued with enough diligence and success must always produce unexpected and even shocking outcomes.”…… i would go further and say ANY goal, coherent or otherwise will produce unexpected/ shocking outcomes…. it’s called the law of unforseen consequences and is the reason ALL “..isms” are imperfect.
February 23rd, 2004 at Feb 23, 04 | 7:28 pm
Micha,
So what if Childs changed his mind? His original argument stands on it’s own merits regardless of what he came to think of it.
February 23rd, 2004 at Feb 23, 04 | 7:38 pm
I think Venlet’s characterization of this is very apt when he says Hsieh “nailed her theses to the door of The Objectivist Center”.
This is her second schism, isn’t it?
February 23rd, 2004 at Feb 23, 04 | 7:40 pm
I found that taking Ayn Rand’s philosophy seriously left no choice but anarchism. As the Serpent might say, she controlled my mind with logic.
We might all be better off today if Rand had concentrated on producing more fiction and less repetitive scholarship.
February 23rd, 2004 at Feb 23, 04 | 10:27 pm
> We might all be better off today if Rand had concentrated on producing more fiction and less repetitive scholarship.
I was talking to my wife about this Saturday, how doubly tragic it was that she wanted so desperately to be recognized for her work and that she got the counterfeit of respect from a cadre of sycophant toadies. She is not without guilt–she was the infantilizer of her infants–but she wasted the rest of her life as Big Mother to a bunch of boobs–in the end necessarily betraying everything she’d done before then.
February 23rd, 2004 at Feb 23, 04 | 10:31 pm
Swann: but she wasted the rest of her life as Big Mother to a bunch of boobs–in the end necessarily betraying everything she’d done before then.
It’s not Rand’s fault.
Personally, I blame the “government”.
February 23rd, 2004 at Feb 23, 04 | 11:42 pm
Hsieh is a tiresome fanatic: her “issues” with the “Objectivist Center” seem mostly hallucinatory and, in general, everything sucks.
February 24th, 2004 at Feb 24, 04 | 12:03 am
Personally, I think Childs’ argument, presented in his letter, cannot be refuted. My limited experience with Objectivist groups has led me to the conclusion, as Greg mentions, that certain individuals who embrace Rand’s theories are simply “sychophant toadies” who propound Rand’s theories, not so much as rational thought, but as dogma. If any individual expresses a thought outside of the “bible” of Objectivism, they are heretics. The danger of dogmas is not limited to the falsities proscribed by religions.
February 24th, 2004 at Feb 24, 04 | 1:51 am
It may be worth pointing out to readers who haven’t followed this soap opera for years that TOC and Hsieh at least had the good sense to distance themselves from the worst of the sycophant toadies.
While Hsieh is worried about the open system favored at TOC I gotta tell ya that the closed system favored by the ARIans is a pink nightmare.
I’ll never forget the time Betsy Speicher explained to me that John Galt was not an Objectivist because he had no knowledge of Rand. How’s that for a closed system?
Oh and this post begins one of my favorite usenet threads. Among many treasures here you will find the post wherein Lynette likens me to a sore on Stephen Speicher’s ass.
February 24th, 2004 at Feb 24, 04 | 3:12 am
Speaking of usenet:
Our scene opens in the frozen Artic, somewhere near the DEW line. Our protagonist, Chris Wolf, stumbling through the icy drifts, sees a small Eskimo child. “Foooood!” rasps Wolf, his hands twisting into claws, already salivating at the thought of Eskimo-child-steak-tartare. “I must have protein to survive, and survival admits of no puny weak-minded moralistic restraits.” Sneaking up behind the motionless parka-clad Eskimo child, the resourceful Chris Wolf delivers a flawless martial-arts-type kick to the back of the innocent child’s head, calculated to snap it’s little neck like a rotten twig. However, the effect is much the same as if Wolf had kicked a concrete freeway abutement, and our resolute survivalist collapses back into the snow with a shattered foot. The “child” slowly turns around, to stare at Wolf with it’s black, dot, painted-on eyes. “Bad man.” says lung.
The Artic silence is briefly interrupted by the hideous shrieks of our unlucky hero and we draw a curtain on the rest of the increasingly lurid, Lucio Fulci-esque scene, pausing only to observe that the late Wolf’s blood and various internal organs make a surprisingly aesthetic
pattern on the clean white snow.
PLUR,
JS
February 24th, 2004 at Feb 24, 04 | 3:22 am
February 24th, 2004 at Feb 24, 04 | 4:49 pm
John Venlet: The danger of dogmas [are] not limited to the falsities proscribed by religions.
I couldn’t agree more Mr. Venlet. In fact, sometimes it seems as if almost anything can evolve into a dogma-loaded “Religion”, for example “Feminism”, or “Environmentalism”, or “Atheism”, or “Materialism”, or possibly even a devout belief in Anarcho-capitalism.
February 24th, 2004 at Feb 24, 04 | 5:46 pm
There is no danger if an individual is devout about a particular “ism.” The danger arises when the devotee shrugs aside reason and descends into zealotry which is, in most cases, enforced via bastinado.
February 24th, 2004 at Feb 24, 04 | 6:28 pm
I am still in agreement with you Mr. Venlet.
But did you mean “bastinado”, or “self-flagellation”?
February 24th, 2004 at Feb 24, 04 | 6:36 pm
I meant what was written.
February 24th, 2004 at Feb 24, 04 | 6:48 pm
In that case, who is “whipping” you Mr. Venlet?
Or are you claiming that your views are free of Dogma (persistent falsity erroneously perceived as truth)?
February 24th, 2004 at Feb 24, 04 | 7:29 pm
No one whips me, unless I allow them to.
I do not recall claiming anything. I speak only what I think is truth. I am not standing with a cudgel in my hand to ensure any individual’s retention of what I state as truth.
I, willingly, will accept correction of what I may erroneously state as truth, if the correction is logically and rationally able to be considered as such.
February 25th, 2004 at Feb 25, 04 | 7:29 am
It’s funny how events coincide as they do. I just read Childs’s Open Letter for the first time earlier today and here I find it again. As an Objectivist, but not a Peikoffian or ARIan, who has been persuaded by Rothbard and other Austrian anarcho-capitalists, I found myself agreeing wholeheartedly with the Letter. Rand did not take her ethics to its ultimate and logical conclusion in her politics.
Judging from Hsieh’s personal statement, in rejecting Objectivism as an open system she is accepting it as dogma and rejecting the idea that it could be improved in any way. She has in fact taken a step back towards the dogmatism of the ARIans, if not all the way back.
I think David Kelley is right in arguing that it is the fundamental principles of Objectivism that are important and that Objectivism must be viewed as an open system. Rand’s applications of them were not necessarily always correct, as Childs demonstrated. As he argues, a truly good Objectivist would be willing to recognize when Rand or himself had been wrong and would feel obligated to correct that error. It is hard to blame Rand for making the mistake of supporting limited government in the first place. The state is a well entrenched myth. But in light of the evidence provided by Austrian anarcho-capitalists like Rothbard & Co., other free market anarchists, and the irrefutable logic of Childs’s Letter, it must be admitted that she “blanked out” the truth.
I am often reminded of a quote from Nietzsche: I went looking for great men and found only the apes of their ideals. It is obvious that Ayn Rand failed, in the end, to live up to her own ideals, but that does not invalidate the fundamental core of Objectivism.
Ok…this ended up being longer than I intended, so I’ll quit while I am (hopefully) ahead. :o)