Ayn Randed Part 3: The Hypocrites

Just as you don't have to look too hard to find, or come in contact with, religious hypocrites (and I don't say this as any kind of comment on religion), you also don't have to spend much time searching for Objectivist hypocrites, if you understand the basic philosophy well enough. In my case, the Objectivist hypocrites came to me. How did I get so lucky? Perhaps it was just the karma I accrued from having accepted the philosophy for a brief time in my younger years.

So what makes an Objectivist a hypocrite? 

As I outlined in Part 2 from last week, Ayn Rand's core philosophical principle is that all human subjectivity is an artificial construct created by weak-minded people in order to avoid the harsh objective reality of seeing their own mortality too clearly. Therefore, the number one sin under Objectivism is choosing to avoid reality. So, as I found out soon enough, the two Objectivists that I met in quick succession from different social circles, back around the turn of the '90s, had one thing in common -- they both got drunk a lot. They didn't readily admit this to me, but I picked it up from casual conversation with mutual friends at moments when they weren't around.

I had concluded, many years before meeting these two, that any time someone felt a strong need to share their philosophy or religious beliefs with me, I could take it as a sign of their own insecurity in that belief system. Knowing this, I expected to encounter some form of hypocrisy not long after I met them and I recognized the Rand bait. Familiar with the lures, I managed to avoid the hook with one of them. With the other one, though, the logical contradictions of his arguments twice annoyed me to such an extent that I had to point them out, and both conversations ended exactly as I knew they would, with him angry at me for doing so. I didn't change his mind in either case, even though we both knew he had no logical answers to my questions, and so on those two occasions he left the room clinging to his nonsense, without giving my assertions any serious thought.

While Randians may try to pose as intellectuals, I've generally found them to be the type naturally drawn to a concept like The Virtue of Selfishness but uninterested in actually studying and understanding the foundations of that concept. In other words, they latch onto a belief system that tells them their selfishness is a good thing, and they just want to get the basics of the system. Neither of these two AR disciples cared to see the obvious contradiction between their stated beliefs and their constant need to find comfort in alcohol. As a peek into what might lurk beneath the cloak of an Objectivist's intellectual pretensions, I'll just mention that one of these two told me, flat out, without hesitation, and totally unrelated to anything else, that he thought the story about the hole in the ozone layer was a myth -- he wanted me to know that he didn't believe it.

To make one final note about seeking comfort in substances, can you name a common one that's as addictive as heroin, and that can be found in any convenience store in the U.S.? Next, can you guess the pen name of a certain female author, named Alisa Rosenbaum at birth, who indulged heavily in that drug over decades, and contracted lung cancer as a result? If you can answer these two simple questions, then you may have concluded, just as I have, that when a philosopher can't live up to her own ideals, you don't need to give her philosophy much serious consideration, as it doesn't actually make sense for real human beings living in the real world.

Ayn Randed, Part 2: Subjective Objectivism

So Ayn Rand built a whole philosophy, and a literary career, around the cold-heartedness that comes naturally to a sociopath/psychopath, redefining this lack of feeling as a character strength worthy of praise and emulation. She called her philosophy Objectivism -- why?

AR based her Objectivist philosophy on her assertion that all human subjectivity is an artificial construct created out of each individual's desperate need to avoid facing the objective reality of their own mortality. When I say all human subjectivity, I mean all. You might think, if you only know Ms. Rand's work tangentially, that I've chosen to simplify her concept for the sake of brevity and blog necessity, but not so -- her entire philosophy flows from this very simple fountainhead.

Along her philosophic journey, AR asserts that the enemy of every belief system is the true believer, because only a true believer will actually care enough to uncover and reveal the flaws of that system, and I agree with her on that --  in the few months when I circled her star, I began to feel more and more the pull of the gravity of reality, as the complexities of life moved me beyond her simplistic orbit. If a few short months I concluded that life was actually about 90% objective and 90% subjective, by which, I explained in answer to the quizzical looks, I meant that each quality occupies a 10% area at opposite ends of the spectrum and shares an 80% zone in the middle.

Take, for example, the matter of room temperature, and the difference between how I feel it and how a certain female acquaintance feels it: I tolerate warm temperatures quite well, and she does not. Certainly, as the Objectivist in the room will tell you, there is an objective reality to the temperature, and that reality is knowable, but so what? Knowing the Fahrenheit number will probably not make me more uncomfortable, and it certainly won't make her less uncomfortable. So, according to the Objectivist idea, has one of us created a purely-subjective reality out of the need to do so? Is the woman's sensitivity to the heat actually a sign of weakness of character, and my lack of it an objective sign of my superior personal character?

Well, before I get too comfortable in my objective superiority, we need to have tea together on a cooler afternoon. I might tolerate the slight chill a bit better than my female friend, but when the hot tea arrives, she can drink it down right away, and it gives her some welcome relief from the cold. I, however, have to let that cup sit still in front of me for a good ten minutes or more before I dare to sip it, or else it'll burn my tongue. So, once again, there is an objective reality to the temperature of the hot tea, and the woman seems to objectively tolerate it pretty well, but have I constructed a subjective tea reality out of my need to avoid seeing my own mortality too clearly?

Contrary to Ms. Rand's philosophy, what about the possibility of two different people naturally experiencing the same objective reality in subjectively very different ways? I have noticed the woman's father also showing signs of discomfort in the heat, and I well remember my mother having a sensitivity to hot and cold foods very much like my own, so those observations tell me that our subjective responses to room and food temperatures come as a result of our different genetics, rather than from some murky, primal fear of death. These subjective temperature realities have provided me with a concise example of how Objectivism quickly falls apart in the face of life's complexities, if you study it and try to apply it to the world that turns us all around every day. Not that long after I had dropped into Atlas Shrugged, I crawled out, concluding, in a vaguely-Shakespearean way, that there are many more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in Ayn Rand's philosophy.

Ayn Randed, Part 1

"I've been Ayn Randed and nearly branded a Communist because I'm left-handed" -Paul Simon. I learned that lyric very well as a teenager, listening to Simon and Garfunkel's A Simple Desultory Philippic, but I didn't know how it really felt until nearly a decade later, when, in my early 20s, I swallowed all of Atlas Shrugged, along with a few other Ayn Rand appetizers. At first I felt quite full, but not long after, I started noticing a bitter taste in my mouth that didn't quite fit with my own personal attraction to kisses and other sweets.

Over a few months, conversations with friends began to reveal some flawed logic and loose ends, and when I learned from The Valachi Papers that Cosa Nostra members would refer to law-abiding citizens as the weak, the implications of that phrase sounded oddly similar, in a troubling way, to Ms. Rand's basic ethic that interprets empathy and concern for fellow human beings as a sign of weakness. In fairness to AR, she advocates indifference to others rather than criminality, and indeed, she also focuses on the importance of essential honesty to oneself and others as the foundation of self-respect, recognizing the importance of this concept as a necessary element of a healthy human psychology. Criminals hunger for self-respect, as she pointed out, with a hunger that can never find satisfaction, and on reading that, I soon confirmed it with observed reality.

Ultimately, for me, the objectivist philosophy fell apart due to its simplistic construction. For a few months, I could believe that it offered a reasonable outlook on life, but soon enough, experience taught me otherwise. Ms. Rand would have everyone believe, as she clearly did, that the drowning man got into the water as a result of his own actions, and therefore no one needs to feel any obligation to throw him a rope, or to try to swim out to him and bring him to shore.

Some of us, when we see someone in trouble, instinctively feel the urge to want to offer help, if we can. Others, such as the objectivists, and the Cosa Nostra bunch, don't feel anything at all (or, with the Costra Nostra gang, might even feel pleasure). Ayn Rand turned that emotional vacuum into a complete philosophy which assumes, among other things, that those of us who have altruistic urges don't actually feel something genuine for our fellow human beings -- we're just pretending, and/or fooling ourselves and others. Her philosophy tells us that we're acting out of societal expectations that have trained us to work against our own best self-interests, but the Randians don't know me and what I feel -- what I hear from the objectivists tells me more about them than it does about me.

I had learned the phrase Do unto others as you would have them do unto you at an early age, and while I moved away from the religious context in young adulthood, after a few years, I came back around to that same moral compass. I may or may not know how the drowning man got there, but if I can reasonably do something to help him, I will. When I feel the urge to help someone in need, I recognize that feeling as being genuine, no matter what objectivism might try to tell me.

Witness to Injustice

A few weeks ago I spent some hours in a courtroom as a witness to injustice. On one side, an eye witness acted as the sole accuser but offered no physical evidence to back the accusation. On the other side, the accused denied the allegation, and supplied an eye witness to corroborate her denial. Theoretically, the judge sat in the middle, although soon enough, he made his leanings abundantly clear.

The case involved a woman accused by a company of violating the judge's injunction concerning her proximity to that company's operations. The company's only evidence of the alleged violation came from eye-witness testimony given by a man who works for a subcontracting outfit employed by the company, which basically makes him a second-hand employee of the company. The woman denied the allegation, and offered as evidence corroborating eye-witness testimony from a man who had been there with her. Another witness appeared on behalf of the accused, but that witness did not have complete knowledge of all that occurred during the time in question. 

The only physical evidence presented at this hearing in relation to the charge was a picture taken by the company man. This picture showed the woman, not in the place where the company man claimed to have seen her, but rather, in exactly the place she had claimed to be -- in other words, the picture proved nothing.

So basically, I was looking at a case where a judge had to make a decision based solely on conflicting eye-witness testimony, with a complete lack of physical evidence. Eye-witness testimony, by itself, means nothing, and any judge worthy of the title should know that. Presumably, the judge did not know which witness was lying and which was telling the truth, so how should he have decided? If the woman in question was truly innocent until proven guilty, and the best the company could offer as proof of an accusation was the testimony of a single eye witness, in conflict with the testimony of the accused and her corroborating eye witness, then I don't know how a judge could decide that the company had proven that accusation beyond a reasonable doubt, but of course, that is what the judge decided.

Welcome to the latest episode in the ongoing campaign by Cabot Oil and Gas to keep Vera Scroggins from showing the world what they and other frackers are actually doing in her slice of northern PA. Even if I didn't know Vera personally, I know who I would be inclined to believe in this case, but honestly, I wasn't in Susquehanna County on that cold January day, so I don't actually know what happened there. I do know what innocent until proven guilty actually means, though, and what happened on the morning of February 25th in that courtroom in Montrose, PA, did not even remotely resemble that phrase.

Absent from the proceedings, as I recall, was any discussion of motive. As Perry Mason reminded us a few decades ago, motive, or lack of one, does not constitute evidence in a trial, but it can fill in a lot of the blanks, if properly understood. In this case, the company man had a much stronger reason to lie (keeping his job) than Vera's friendly witness could have had (friendship). Or, as that friendly witness put it to me shortly after the hearing, he knew that no matter what he said on the stand, he would still have a job the next day, and the same could not realistically have been said about the company man.

Anyone familiar with this case also could have asked what motive Vera could possibly have for violating the judge's injunction. What gain could she possibly receive from doing so? She certainly could have a lot to lose, in her current legal environment, if an incriminating picture popped up, showing her in open defiance of the court order, but, interestingly enough, no such picture has emerged, despite all of the tours she leads. From all I know about her interactions with the frackers, she has evidently done her best to stay within the boundaries set for her by this corporate-friendly court, and I can think of no logical reason why she would have chosen, in this one instance, to not do so.

I have no trouble, though, thinking of a logical reason why a fracking company would take her to court, falsely accusing her of something she didn't do -- the frackers have made no secret of their desire to silence Vera, by whatever means available.

One might also wonder about the judge's motives in this case. Could a gas lease on his property have predisposed him to lean in favor of the company? Does he have friends from the gas company who will happily buy him lunch when he issues a finding in their favor? Is this what passes for justice in Susquehanna County, PA, these days? Maybe it's time to start asking these questions, and perhaps a few more?

What To Do With $5 B?

If you live in New York State, I'd like to ask for your help on this one. As it happens, Albany has a one-time $5 Billion windfall landing in its 2015 budgetary lap, as a result of big bank settlements and fines.

What to do with that $5 B? Personally, I'd like to see NYS

•  create jobs in all sections of the state 

•  reduce peak demand on our overloaded electrical grid 

•  increase renewable energy production

•  lower water/sewer rates around the state

•  reduce waste volume to landfills

•  lower landfill methane emissions

•  upgrade waste-water treatment facilities

•  give farmers access to better quality and more environmentally-friendly fertilizer 

•  give food suppliers access to more convenient waste processing 

Does that sound like a lot? Actually, Albany could do all that and more simply by using the windfall to modernize the anaerobic digesters of waste-water treatment plants throughout the state. For this reason, I started this petition to let Governor Cuomo know about a good way to distribute that $5 Billion around the state. If this sounds good to you, please sign my petition, and share it as widely as you can.

To sign the petition,

click here
or go to:
https://www.credomobilize.com/petitions/use-the-2015-windfall-to-modernize-new-york-s-wastewater-digesters?

Thank you for whatever help you can give me on this, and may it be one more step towards that renewable energy future that we need to create for ourselves as soon as we possibly can.

Also, if you'd like to know more about the biogas process, which could and should become a major component of the long-term renewable energy strategy, the website for the American Biogas Council has a wealth of information, at www.americanbiogascouncil.org.

Abortion Barbie Reaches a New Low for Republican Gut-ter Politics

Wendy Davis's R opponent in the 2014 campaign for Texas governor recently reached a new low for Republican gut-ter politics (and get her politics) with his tasteless Abortion Barbie smear. If you've wondered how low the Rs will go, the As low as necessary answer of an earlier Reagan/Bush era seems in the post-Rove epoch to have morphed into an As low as possible current strategery.

This AB ad campaign shows an unprecedented disdain for a woman's ability to choose, or even have a conscious thought process in choice, with its implication that women give no more thought to that choice than they would to a child's toy. In light of recent statements from their side of the aisle, apparently a lot of male Republican politicians don't give women credit for any conscious thought process, even apart from this very weighty decision that I personally would bet very few if any women make lightly. I imagine the conversations among R males that sound like Of course you can't expect a woman to make the right decision about abortion when most of them can't even figure out what they're doing behind the wheel and other variations on that theme. The AB campaign represents the latest restatement of an old right-wing chestnut we've heard over and over again for the last 40 years: An abortion is too important a decision to be left up to a woman.

On another level, though, AB also represents the latest R appeal to gut-level politics, aimed straight at the mob-mentality reptile brain of the target. When the salesman wants to sell something, especially if that something has a sizable percentage of snake oil, he doesn't want the target to think about it -- if he can get the targeted voters to loathe and fear Wendy Davis by making them believe she is AB, then they will flee into the arms of the darling R candidate, breathless and sweaty from the run. This has worked well for the Texas Rs in recent history, and they hope it will again, because who would vote for this latest candidate if they actually thought about it, or the last two before him? 

Like all other human beings, I too have a reptile brain, and it tells me that the madmen who crafted the AB campaign earned their paychecks. When I say madmen, by the way, I don't know if they actually work out of an office on that famous avenue, but I do expect that they are all men. However effectively this ad works on the reptile brain, though, it stirs a much different emotion in me than the one intended -- it makes me angry, because I also have a higher brain capable of critical thinking, and that part of my mind detects the potent stench of snake oil in this AB concoction that insults the intelligence of anyone who truly has intelligence. I sincerely hope that enough Texans also pick up on that offensive odor and make the smarter choice in November, rather than the more fearful one.

The Inside Story of a Disability Scammer

"I know there are people scamming the system -- I've seen them." So said a guy about a year ago who was then renting a room in my house. I tried to tell him that people had previously told me he was scamming the system, in an effort to make the point that unless you really know someone, you can't judge their disability, but every time I tried to say that, he got very defensive about his genuine need for assistance. I didn't question his need, and I told him so, but he couldn't understand how anyone could think he was a scammer, and he kept telling me that he knew for a fact that undeserving people were scamming the system. Along the way, he also mentioned skin color at least once or twice when referring to the scammers, as often happens when this subject comes up.

I've heard the stories for most of my life, and without knowing the facts, I tended to believe them early on, though life has since taught me many times not to make such judgments without first-hand knowledge of the circumstances. I remember an apartment manager in Alameda, CA, telling me a few entertaining and unusual stories, and then among them he threw in the usual disability scammer tale. The person collecting the disability check, who rented a place in one of the managed buildings, supposedly had severe back problems, but, as the tale always goes, the manager witnessed the disabled guy doing things that someone with such back problems could not possibly do, leading to the obvious conclusion. I believed the story-teller's first-hand account of what he had witnessed, and at the time I had no possible counter explanation, but life can teach you some answers if you actually want to learn them, and since then, I have learned quite a few.

About that guy living in my house, I had truly been told that he was scamming the system, and the people who told me this cautioned me against renting him a room. I could tell from just knowing him a little that he was a bit of a get-over, and I couldn't tell how much I could trust him, but I also knew that I couldn't judge whether or not he had good reasons for his disability status, and that I'd have to know him better before I could make that judgement.

Initially, I did think maybe the guy was getting over on the system. He told me he had, in his younger years, worked hard and made a 6-figure salary, but he felt frustrated that most of his money went to pay for his alimony and child support, so at a certain point he decided there was no point in working so hard, and he just gave up. That sounded like a scammer. In addition, he was generally a cool guy, who had been a biker until the injuries finally caught up with him and he had to sell his Harley. He also had some programming and electrical skills, which included showing me how to wire an electric dryer circuit. Added up, that mostly looked like a scammer, although the biker injuries did give me a clue that maybe he might have some genuine need for the disability status.

Over time, though, I began to notice and understand the pattern, and I eventually figured it out without him admitting it to me -- he was bipolar. That explained his alcoholism, and also the days when he didn't seem to sleep at all, contrasted, only a few days later, with days when he seemed to not get out of bed for 36 or 48 hours. Sometimes he could barely get up and down the stairs, due to his back pain, and other times, he almost bounded up and down those stairs. If you saw this behavior from a distance, you might think he was faking it with the back pain thing, but he had no reason to put on an act for me. 

Understanding the nature of bipolar disorder, I now believe that it holds the key to many, and possibly even most, of those disability scammer stories. If you didn't know my renter's tale, you could easily believe he was scamming the system, and some people who knew him did believe that. If you saw him out in public, when he was at the top curve of that cycle, he seemed fine, and he didn't look or act like he was in pain, because he wasn't, but you also wouldn't know that maybe 2 or 3 days of the previous 7 or 8, he was in so much physical or psychic pain that he didn't even get out of bed, and that on other days, when he did try to get out of bed, he could barely make it up and down the stairs. As is so often the case in life, once again, the lesson is Judge Not, especially if you don't have all the evidence. My renter hadn't learned that lesson, and so, ironically, he was looking at other people much like himself, though he couldn't see the similarity, probably due at least in part to his focus on the color of their skin, and he was judging them to be scammers, just as others judged him. Knowing his story, I knew he wasn't a scammer, and if I could know their stories, I would bet that most if not all of the ones he judged to be scammers are in reality not scammers either. Not knowing their stories, I'm more than willing to grant them their benefits without any great concern about how they might be getting over on the system -- I'll bet they're not.