| | I read AS at the age of 11 or 12 - 1959 or 1960 - because it was the last book of several hundred I had read of my wannabe-sf-author Aunt's collection that looked like it might possibly be science fiction - which it technically is.
I didn't meet another student of objectivism until high-school, and he was a very aloof, chill, better-than-thou person who never exchanged more than a few sentences with me or anyone else that I noticed. I don't have a clue as to his name.
I qualified for the Georgia Governors' Honors Program (where they took the top 400 public high-school students and sent them to a college campus, with star-quality lecturers, for the summer) in both English and Chemistry. The kids there (high-school sophomores or juniors) were universally very bright and generally incredibly well read. I think that a handful of them were avowed objectivists, but most, or a high percentage anyway, of them had read AS.
However, the dominant intellectual theme was Marxism. I didn't get along all that well with the Marxists, but it turned out that they were much more in tune with the science fiction that was my reading mainstay. Again, the alleged objectivists came accross as extremely anal to the point of hostility.
In college I had a similar experience. Only a handful of people were self-proclaimed objectivists, and they were largely unapproachable. My impresssion is that the main problem with spreading the philosophy has been the typical psychology of its alleged adherents, especially the utter failure to make the assumption that the person one is disagreeing with must have had some kind of reason for their position. Instead, the "objectivist" either berates them - like that's going to convince them of anything - or walks away in a virtuous huff.
Once one makes that assumption, then it is not a matter of confrontation, but rather of exploring where they went wrong. Often this involves taking their framework and translating it into a common set of ideas that you both agree with, and then demonstrating within that common framework what it is that you're saying that is new.
For example, with a Marxist there are innumerable points of intellectual congruence to build upon. They accept rationality (leaving aside the implicit contradictions with true rationality and the Hegelian dialectic, or the idea of intellectual class determinism) as a standard, they claim to be scientific in their approach, they even frame their position in terms of egoism. This gives you a strong base of premises to start examining and from which you can work to the major points of disagreement.
|
|
