| | Hi Chris,
I hate to argue with you. I enjoy arguing with someone I can insult in every other word, but you make that impossible. In the first place, I couldn't get away with it, and in second place your too dang decent.
Oh well, I'll have to try to muddle through with plain old reason, I suppose.
Regi, I think you misunderstand.
Possibly, it wouldn't be the first time.
My point is that there are institutional issues that are at work in understanding the dynamics of things like the boom-bust cycle and all the other issues that plague our society.
Of course I may just be misunderstanding again, but is that "institution," by any chance the government, or, even such things that it controls, e.g. the stock market? If its not that, I have no idea what you mean. (I don't think you mean the Boy Scouts or the Churches.)
Radical social change requires changes on many different levels simultaneously, since each of these levels reciprocally reinforces the others. Fundamentally, it will entail a change of philosophy.
Well, here I go misunderstanding again. What exactly does the expression, "radical social change...on man different levels simultaneously," mean? What sort of changes are "social" changes? And what does, "different levels" mean? (Chris, I know I am only misunderstanding so you'll understand why these things seem like a bunch of floating abstractions to me.)
But it won't require convincing everybody.
Given our present system and situation, if less than half the people are convinced, just how are all these, "radical social changes," going to be implemented, and by whom? So, how many people need to be convinced, and how will convincing them bring about all these wonderful changes?
It will require a change in the dominant trends across the board. The "parasites," "moochers," and "looters" will always be with us; there may come a time, however, when they will be denied any institutional means by which to engage in their war on productive human beings. We can't possibly get there without a full-bodied and comprehensive analysis of those institutional means.
Since I do not know what the "institution" is you are referring to, I do not really understand this either.
That's one of the things Ayn Rand offered us, and I think it is one of her most powerful legacies.
I think I have read most everything Ayn Rand has written, still I missed the part where she talked about, "full-bodied and comprehensive analysis of ... institutional means." Of course she talked about government, and called it that, and said it had no other purpose than to protect individuals from coercive force by other individual or groups of individuals, foreign or domestic. If within that context there are "social problems," that aren't solved, tough. It's not the business of anyone to solve them, we'll just have to learn to live with them, or solve them ourselves.
Now I want to make one criticism. An awful lot of what you have said are generalities. You said, "Rand simply asked us to take into account the full context of forces at work: personal (psycho-epistemological and ethical), cultural (educational, pedagogical, linguistic, ideological, aesthetic), and structural (political and economic)."
But, of course Rand never asked that. She insisted context not be dropped, but that is not at all the same thing you said. She would never have said that, and in fact would have detested such a string of generalities as "forces at work," without specifying how they are forces and what is forced by them, or "educational" (what kind, public or private) "pedagogical" (redundant to educational) "linguistic" (specific ones, syntax, grammar, different kinds, human or machine, what?) "ideological" (the whole universe of ideologies, or some particular one, or some aspect of ideologies in particular, what?) "aesthetic" (beauty, art, theory, practice, what?) "political" (the present government, political theory, practical politics, what?) "economic" (economics theory, the state of the present economy, or capitalism vs, some form of collectivism, or what?).
There is no dictator in the world that would not find that list of "necessary contextual issues" to their liking. That is exactly how they have put over their programs, emphasizing their solution to these generalities, psychology, ethics, education, language, ideology, art, politics and economics. Unless you mean a specific kind of psychology, ethics, education, language, ideology, art (aesthetics) political system or economic system, it would be better to throw the list out, and stick to something specific.
Ayn Rand wrote the following in a letter to Leonard Read, founder and later president of the pro-capitalist "Foundation for Economic Education," publishers of The Freeman, November 12, 1944
"Just ask yourself what earthly purpose can be accomplished by spending money, effort and paper to tell men that "The ground of liberty must be gained by inches"? ... Standing by itself, such a sentence means nothing, says nothing, solves nothing. It is a generality, of no value unless the specific steps or inches are named. Anybody could subscribe to that sentence—and I mean anybody: Ickes, Roosevelt, Stalin or Hitler."
The same goes for your list of generalities. It is useless and meaningless unless a specific view of human psychology is meant, a single ethical system, a definite theory of education, particular principles of language, a definite ideology and theory of aesthetics.
This tendency to generalities has a name coined by my wife. She calls it accute academiosis. A tendency to generalities is only one of the symptoms.
Regi
|
|
