I picked out the following quote from page 9 of this link: Man can reason with his senses. That is correct. Knowledge comes from reality. View attachment 6417
I object to laissez faire in its current context, such as leaving investors free to crash the world economy, allowing oil companies to foul nature, or for smokestacks to exceed emission limits. It appears that this is not what Ayn Rand had in mind, taking the less radical libertarian position that government intrusion in the lives of individuals is bad. I'm just not sure how some of that applies to the modern world as it did during her lifetime, much of which was under the Red Scare. All of that is peripheral to the question of Ultimate Reality, though.
I would take reason above knowledge. Reason is a guidance to the ideals envisioned. Knowledge is the realization. Knowledge repeated is revisioned where reason always continues.
I can't see how self-interest is very rational if it is "the highest moral purpose of life". A rationale of self-interest would afterall always entail sacrificing other's wants and needs for one's own advantage. It would say to hell with any one else's interests. It would devote itself to a life of narrow egocentric empowerment and wanton hedonism at the expense of everyone else. That doesn't seem like a very noble goal for one's life.
But the flaw in that is that if everybody takes this approach, civilization will collapse and people will be fighting over scarce food within a week. We actually are smart enough to realize that--well most of us, most of the time. Civilization is a contract among all citizens to cooperate, so everybody comes out ahead. This goes back to the Stone Age. As obligate carnivores with no fangs or claws, we had to hunt cooperatively in a pack and share the food. It's an instinct that's hard-wired into our caveman brains. The problem is that our "pack" has grown so much larger that it now includes people on the other side of the planet who are no more than abstractions. Our caveman has a little trouble grasping that and sometimes he throws a tantrum. But most of the time we keep him happy with beer, pizza, TV, football, motorcycles, air conditioning, and a domesticated wolf at his feet who thinks he's God. We could not support this population with a Stone Age organization of individual clans feeding themselves. I doubt that we could keep 100 million people alive that way. 200 years ago, more than 99% of the population were farmers. So if civilization collapsed, at least they would still have food. Today, in the developed countries, only about 3% of the population work in food production and distribution, and food is shipped from another continent! This was the essence of the Y2K crisis. Even if it took only one week to get everything working on January 8th, the people in the cities would already have run out of food on January 6th.
Well observed and well put. Not to mention our system that convinces us all that we will find happiness going to college and then working 60 hours a week at some job we hate to save up for a day when we will retire but probably be too old and sick by then to even enjoy it. I guess there's a little anarchic streak in me that says that the caveman is tamed and studded and put out to pasture in order to keep the system functioning smoothly. Cuz when you get too many bored and thinking cavemen that's when you get revolution just for the sake of revolution. Best to keep them sequestered in their own living rooms living out their time serving a vast profit-driven system they never chose to begin with. The ILLUSION of freedom to foster complacency and submission to the powers that be.
I agree with post # 7 Reason and knowledge can extend towards the mainstream thinking upon science as well Its difficult to break the mainstream thinking upon much of what we currently know People tend towards the idea that certain scientists are basically unquestionable , I find that this paradigm is hard to break Our ability to reason and then gain a more advanced knowledge on the subject is stalled and even retarded to some extent To be open to new ways of thinking , is and should be be based on the reasoning and knowledge gained by some different kind of reasoning which has depth of reasoning , and some do , carefully thought out and presented , whether this be philosophically based and/or mathematically based Either way should be investigated not with preconceived ideas or prejudice or comparisons to previous theories or ideas But through the ability to reason the idea or theory through Both reason and knowledge are powerful tools in which to understand and evaluate non-mainstream thinking Reason and knowledge should be kept open , at least open enough to investigate
