| | Steve: "If we focus to much on the negatives, we pay an emotional price for it."
Dean: "An emotional price huh? And what is the price of not putting any focus whatsoever on the negatives? Dude, I just recognized the federal government and federal reserve for what it actually is: a protection racket, and that is all you have to say?"
I know this isn't the topic of the thread, but I'm just going to think aloud on it, since it's been introduced, and a nerve has been hit that goes deeper than the conspiracy topic, or is the root of it...
Thinking about the question "how does one live rationally in an irrational society", a pat answer like being told to "keep a balance" can become a bit trite and unsatisfactory. (I think of Ron Merrill's discussion, in The Ideas of Ayn Rand. Merrill discusses Nathaniel Branden's push for something beyond traditional ethics:
"It is not enough, he suggests, to develop a set of rules for action, to tell people what what they ought to do. Ethics is not complete until it provides rules or prescriptions to advise people how to be moral."
Merrill also discusses Koestler's take on the issue: "Most moralists have been inclined simply to rely on human will-power (supplemented by reward and punishment), and thus have not much to contribute. Traditionally they have been prone to assume that if the patient only understands the roots of his behavior he will change it. As Arthur Koestler pointed out in Arrival and Departure, this thoery doesn't work."
So the idea of "keeping a healthy balance" can become simplistic if it ignores the context of society and the individual. Our society may be a bit ambiguous right now, but the worst example of this "balance your focus" becoming too simplistic would be that damned Life is Beautiful movie, with its, to my mind, anyway, unsatisfactory treatment of the true horror of the concentration camps. (Romantic Realism, or fairy tale?) (Viktor Frankel's book is much more realistic, and satisfactory, in comparison.)
But to put aside extreme cases, even Rand had this struggle, as demonstrated by her detached, "in the world but not of it" depiction of Roark vs. the despair found in the apocalyptic Atlas Shrugged. (And even Roark found himself, at times, contemplating the smashing of his own hands...) In Rand's letters, she asks a young Nathaniel Branden: "How can I cure you of screaming at collectivist in political arguments when I am still suffering from the same ailment myself?"
Barbara Branden claims that this suffering went even deeper:
"The whole state of the culture suddenly appears much worse then I had ever imagined" she said. "I no longer know to whom I'm addressing myself when I write. I know longer know where are the intelligences to which I've always addressed myself. I feel paralyzed by disgust and contempt. You can fight evil, but contempt is the most terrible feeling...you feel you are fighting lice, in a vacuum. And if I feel contempt for the whole culture-if it feels like I'm living in the last days of the Roman Empire-then what sense does it make to continue writing?"
(If Rand though SHE was living through another fall of a great empire THEN, how could she have lived through the here-and-now, today? It's easy to criticize, in hindsight, but the situation/outcome was more ambiguous for her, in the moment...we know Objectivism is down on ambiguity, and it can be harder for Objectivists to deal with it...)
One can debate the accuracy of Rand's perception of the culture, and even her objectivity, having just released Atlas into a hostile environment, but her subjective experience would not be soothed by "keep a balanced focus" if it came from someone not experiencing the same outlook.
(Certainly if it came from one with an opposing philosophy who is riding the crest of a socialist wave...like Keating telling Roark how successful he is and will be, while Roark contemplates smashing his hands...)
And this brings me to my point: the benefits and hazards of going online to get answers. The benefits are that one can overcome one's own myopic or solipsistic view of the landscape, and the dangers of reification, by getting outside perspectives. The hazard is to reify the perspective of others who may or may not be just as myopic or solipsistic. (And if one's outlook, from a vantage point of comfort, is based on not wanting one's one boat rocked, well...)
Ultimately, one has to keep the larger whole. And if that whole IS, in fact, something to be rightly concerned with, beyond one's own immediate comfort?
Barbara Branden speculates on Rand's vantage point:
"One must wonder if Ayn's suffering was not in part the price she paid, granted other elements in her psyche, for her astonishing intellectual powers. Historically, it's a price that men and women of vast intelligence have often paid. Such men and women stand alone, cut off from the world by a sense of distance from other people that is not an illness and cannot be cured. With the firsthand, blinding vision of the creator, they endure the loneliness of seeing farther and more clearly than others see, of understanding what others do no understand, of achieving what others cannot achieve, of moving forward with a dedication and tenacity that others cannot grasp. They feel invisible to the world-they are invisible, as is every creative genius...Why, then, did others not grasp what was so easy to grasp? Why did they not perceive what was so patently apparent?"
When one stands on the shoulders of giants, and thinks and acts on principle, the burden of balance is much greater. And how one deals with that in the short term, as much as the long term, depends on the degree of independence vs. interdependence on has on others...
(Edited by Joe Maurone on 2/14, 8:12am)
(Edited by Joe Maurone on 2/14, 9:41am)
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