WatDabney

Imagine how ethically and intellectually bankrupt you have to be to note that publicizing something you do undermines public trust in your office, then conclude not that you’re wrong to do it, but that other people are wrong to publicize it.

Government of the working class by the ruling class for the ruling class.

Of course she doesn’t, but the ruling class needs to make an example of someone - they’re not about to let us peasants get away with defying them.

Antisemitism gets harder to resist every day.

It’s not an accident that the US has militarized police granted essentially free reign, the largest prison system in the world and plans in the works for internment camps.

Human history broadly runs in cycles, yes.

But the history of a particular civilization is strictly linear, with a beginning, a middle and an end.

Humanity is at a crossroads.

Either we’re going to solve the problem of psychopaths with power and wealth warping societies to accommodate their psychopathy, or, at the very least, modern civilization is going to collapse.

I see no third alternative. The Musks and Trumps and Putins and Netanyahus (and so on and on) of the world will, if allowed, destroy us all, because they’re quite literally too mentally ill to restrain themselves.

Of course they did - the MSM is the public relations arm of the ruling class, and a significant part of their job is ensuring that the peasants don’t revolt.

It’s really not.

It really is.

It’s mostly nepotism and reproducing the an untouchable ruling class that creates an autocracy.

And all along the way, people protecting the budding autocracy from criticism by diverting attention to the faults of some other system in some other place and/or time.

Put simply; when one system goes too far into autocracy, you should entertain the values of another system.

Um… sure. But that’s neither what you were doing nor what I was criticizing, so it’s not relevant.

Condemning that is approving of the current autocrats.

So… condemning people trying to shift attention away from the current autocrats by bitching about some totally different aurocrats is protecting the current autocrats?

Are you even trying to make sense any more, or are you just desperately stringing together random claims?

But perhaps you’re a particular fan of Trump/Musk.

Just desperately stringing together random claims. Got it.

The road to autocracy is paved with people who meet every criticism of the system with, “But look at how bad this other system is!”

Any system that gives a relative few authority over everyone else will sooner or later become autocratic, simply because that power inevitably comes to be held by those who desire it the most and are most willing to do whatever it takes to gain and hold it, and they tend to be greedy, power-hungry, dishonest, amoral assholes.

As far as that goes, the only real differences between systems are the specific hoops the assholes have to jump through.

Broadly, in a capitalist system, political power is awarded to the wealthy, while in a communist system, wealth is awarded to the politically powerful.

So the greedy, power-hungry, dishonest, amoral assholes follow different paths in different cases - accumulating wealth with which to buy access to political power in one or climbing the ranks of the ruling party in order to gain wealth in another - but the overall dynamic is always the same.

And that’s a large part of the reason that I’m an anarchist.

I mostly like “rational self-interest” as a sort of framing device.

I believe egoism to be a fact. I think every choice that * every* person makes is self-interested, even those that appear to be entirely altruistic.

Presuming that to be true, there are two things that I consider vital - that people are aware that that’s what they’re doing, and that they focus on doing it as rationally as possible.

And yes - “rational” is a slippery concept. The details are elusive at best, and much more to the point, necessarily subjective (which IMO is the part that Rand most vividly got wrong and Stirner, by contrast, got right). But while that means that a sort of universal formalization of the concept would be difficult at best, I tend to think it’s not necessary - that if people essentially stay within the guardrails of “rational self-interest” and maintain some measure of intellectual honesty and sound critical thinking, whatever it might all shake out to be couldn’t help but be at the very least more broadly good than bad, and certainly more broadly good than the various delusional authoritarianisms to which we’re subjected.

Thanks for the response.

Certainly there’s more nuance to them. As I said, I think that “rational self-interest” is fundamental to both of them - it’s nothing close to the sum of either one.

And for the record, I have zero respect for objectivism and a great deal of respect for egoism.

But that’s really beside the point. I’m not arguing for or against either one. My point has been explicitly about the underlying concept of rational self-interest in and of itself, and specifically the fact that it’s consistently misrepresented by its critics (or more precisely by Rand’s critics, who incorrectly ascribe the idea to her and her alone).

If I had my way about it, I’d have a tree planted over me, but I don’t expect to know the difference, so I don’t really think about it much.

If the world actually made sense, the phrase “Elon Musk asks court to” would possess the exact same significance (or lack thereof) as the phrase “Joe from down the street asks court to.”

I think what I’m describing is fundamental to both of them, that most of the differences between the two philosophies are at the peripheries, and that far and away the most significant difference between the two is that one was proposed by Rand, who’s a designated target for people eager to earn hip internet leftist cred through a public display of unequivocal hatred, and the other was proposed by Stirner, who’s someone that most are only vaguely aware of, if at all.

But that’s the stance that proponents of ‘rational self-interest’ have settled on.

No - it’s the stance that people who want to self-affirmingly publicly proclaim their hatred of Rand have assigned to proponents of rational self-interest.

That’s the heart of my criticism - people don’t discuss or debate the idea - they just trip over each other in their rush to be the one to most vividly proclaim their hatred of Rand. Hating Rand is like a hip internet leftist membership badge, so every time her name comes up, everybody who wants to solidify their image as a hip internet leftist rushes in to say, “Hey! Look at me! Look at how much I hate her! That means I’m one of you!”

And since the hatred comes first, everything else is shaped to accommodate it. Like, for instance, misrepresenting the idea of rational self-interest so that it becomes something easily condemned so that it can be added to the list of reasons to hate Rand.

She is, however, acting in her own rational self-interest by keeping all the value of the new machine for herself and not passing it on to her workers.

No, she rather obviously is not, as vividly illustrated by the fact that she caused so much hostility that she ends up going to the guillotine.

She is very clearly acting in her irrational self- interest.

If she were acting in the group’s rational self-interest, she would allow them to work half as long.

And if she were acting in her own rational self-interest, she would do the same, since her well-being (and in fact, as neatly illustrated in the comic, her very life) depends on the well-being of the group.

Since she is acting in her own rational self-interest, she threatens to fire her workers if they do not work the same hours as before and pass the value on to her.

No. Again, she is rather obviously acting in her own irrational self-interest, as vividly illustrated in the last panel.

Any purely rational person (as opposed, mind you, to an empathetic one) would take the option to do that.

What on earth leads you to believe that rationality and empathy are mutually exclusive?

As social animals, empathy is eminently rational, and in fact I would argue that rationality is impossible without it.

Rational group interest IS rational self-interest.

As social animals living in communities and as part of any number of groups, we must, if we’re rational, be mindful of the well-being of groups, because our own well-being depends on it.

‘Rational self interest’ is just being selfish.

No it in fact is not. Selfishness causes any number of negative consequences - suffering, hostility, crime, conflict, rebellion, war, death… So it’s bludgeoningly obviously irrational, and therefore cannot be rational self interest.

Or more pointedly, they are all things that illustrate ways in which it’s in your rational self-interest to not be a dickhead.