Daily Linz 3 - Slime on SOLO
by Lindsay Perigo
There’s an artist I know to whom I once introduced the world of The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged and Objectivism. His existing milieu was that of pomo-wankerism ... of framed excrement, blotches and smears, clutter and entropy—the usual stock-in-trade of the contemporary artistic establishment. On his wall was a painting by one of his tutors—a human skull with an axe through it. That is his milieu still. Having contemplated what I had shown him, he announced to me that he couldn’t fault it, but neither could he accept it because to do so would require him to “turn my world upside down.” Since then he has projected a resentment towards me that I can only put down to my being the embodiment of a reproach. He knows his world to be depraved, and I am to blame for opening his eyes to its depravity. He would rather have remained in thrall to his mentors without being made aware that they were swamp-dwellers with sores oozing pus.
We see such pusballs gatecrashing on SOLOHQ. Not the excrement-framers themselves, but their philosophical parents. Their stock-in-trade is ambiguity, uncertainty, “well yes, but ...,” “not necessarily”—verbal clutter and entropy. They slither around in what Ayn Rand would call the “hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all.” Under the guise of “critical thinking,” they commit to nothing, and try to cast doubt on everything. Their goal is to destroy the hero in the souls of those they engage, because they resent it. They want to destroy it, not in one fell swoop, but “spark by irreplaceable spark”—slowly, subtly, insidiously. That’s what their verminous verbosity is all about. Inch by inch they seek to envelop their victims in their slime, till all sparks are extinguished.
Surely I exaggerate? Well, here’s a pusball on the Is Objectivism a Cult? thread, in response to Andrew Bissell’s accurate observation that pusballs deal only in greys, and can never bring themselves to a black-and-white appraisal of anything, even something so foul as rape:
“... the evil of rape hinges upon many things, including the pain it causes the woman who was raped and other things. However, let's say that as a consequence of the rape, your friend's girlfriend became a rape crisis counsellor and helped rape victims cope successfully with their problems by developing new counselling techniques. Is it too much to say that an unexpected benefit from the tragedy that befell his girlfriend were new solutions for rape crisis victims? That doesn't make rape good, but that might make a specific instance of rape have benefits for certain people.”
You can see the “well yes, but ...” right there—without the rape, there wouldn’t have been the “new solutions for rape crisis victims.” Its evil “hinges” on many things, including the victim’s pain? If it were painless, would that mitigate its evil? And note well, the rape was a “tragedy,” not an unspeakable atrocity. Pusballs speak in similar vein about 9/11.
Pusballs claim that a black-and-white “mindset” is one of the things that makes Objectivism a cult. If so, I’m a cultist, proudly. But it ain’t so. As Ayn Rand liked to point out, you cannot have your grey without the black and white of which it is a mixture. That there are grey areas doesn’t mean there are no black and white ones; it’s proof that there are! Objectivists are perfectly capable of taking greys into account, without losing sight of the primary colours.
What is a tragedy and an atrocity is that pusballs have hijacked the Cultism thread. The questions raised by Bill Dwyer ought to be examined, but not on the nihilistic terms set by the pusballs. Tom Rowland was putting up a sterling defence of the ARI, and the debate appeared to be promising. The pusballs should do SOLOists the courtesy of sitting this one out from the distance of their swamps. We get quite enough exposure to their ooze as it is.
The world of heroism and unclouded exaltation is alien to them, just as it is alien to the academic pomo-wanking tutors of my artist friend. But it is real, it exists, and it is Objectivism’s—for all that there are “Randroids” and cultists among the philosophy’s professed adherents. They are a marginal element, and do not represent, embody or define the philosophy. For chronic cultism, the pusballs should look to themselves. As Andrew Bissell (one of those whose fire they will never extinguish) put it:
The real cult we've seen rear its ugly head on this thread is that one that Ayn Rand aptly dubbed "The Cult of Moral Greyness." It's the idea—pervasive and dogmatically insisted upon in our culture—that the only wrong idea is the one that is held with certainty and without reservation; and in ethics, that the only false argument is the one that describes a particular idea, individual, or act as either totally-good or totally-evil.
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