Barack Obama: Tribalist-In-Chief

In my previous blog entry, I described the “tribalistic mindset” and showed that it is the “anti-conceptual mindset”. I also opined that the possible reason for this uptick in discussion of the concept of “tribalism” was due to the election of Donald Trump. Commentators on the left seem to have seized on the idea to explain his rise, and also seem to be blaming Trump for what they see as more “tribalism” in our society and political system.

However, if we are going point fingers at politicians, then we need to take a look at Trump’s predecessor. The Obama administration fanned the forces of tribalism like no other President, and he severely damaged race-relations in the United States.

The intellectual groundwork of the Obama administration’s facilitation of tribalism lies in key aspects of the leftist ideology.

First, most leftists admire or tend to follow the ideas of Karl Marx. So, his ideas on the nature of the human mind, logic, and reason are important in understanding how leftist thinking tends to encourage the anti-conceptual, tribal mindset.

The Marxist epistemology is “polylogist”. (http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/polylogism.html). He thought your class determines your consciousness. For Marx, what class you are born into determines your logic, which is unique and distinct from other classes. The proletarians have their method of thinking, the bourgeoisie have theirs, the aristocracy theirs, etc. For Marx, there could be no reasoning with those who control the factors of production, because they fundamentally don’t think like proletarians. Only violence could bring about socialism. You couldn’t reason with members of the bourgeoisie any more than you could reason with a species of lower animal. (See my previous blog post for more on this: https://deancook.net/2018/08/16/karl-marx-polylogism-and-utopian-socialism-how-fundamental-philosophy-drives-history/ )

Marxist polylogism is not very different from those who believe that your race determines your method of thinking, and that other races fundamentally cannot understand you. An example of racial polylogism can be seen in an article discussing how the author believes a policy of “colorblindness”, i.e. *not* treating people differently because of their race is morally bad:

“Colorblindness creates a society that denies their negative racial experiences, rejects their cultural heritage, and invalidates their unique perspectives.” (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/culturally-speaking/201112/colorblind-ideology-is-form-racism)

Note how the author of this article focuses on “cultural heritage” (i.e., tribalism), and how black people have “unique perspectives…”, thereby giving the article a distinct whiff of racial polylogism. (But, that’s apparently okay when the author is black.)

Marxism appears to have either “set the seeds” for racial polylogism, or it has the same philosophic basis as racial polylogism.

According to Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff, the ideas of Marx were an outgrowth of the ideas of the philosophy of Hegel, who was in turn the intellectual progeny of Immanuel Kant. I haven’t studied Marx, Hegel, or Kant enough to know if this assertion is correct. (I take nothing on faith, even when Ayn Rand or Leonard Peikoff said it.) I note it here as a possible “lead” on the “philosophic roots” of the ideas of Marx and how those same ideas also led to racial polylogism:

“There are two different kinds of subjectivism, distinguished by their answers to the question: whose consciousness creates reality? Kant rejected the older of these two, which was the view that each man’s feelings create a private universe for him. Instead, Kant ushered in the era of social subjectivism—the view that it is not the consciousness of individuals, but of groups, that creates reality. In Kant’s system, mankind as a whole is the decisive group; what creates the phenomenal world is not the idiosyncrasies of particular individuals, but the mental structure common to all men.

Later philosophers accepted Kant’s fundamental approach, but carried it a step further. If, many claimed, the mind’s structure is a brute given, which cannot be explained—as Kant had said—then there is no reason why all men should have the same mental structure. There is no reason why mankind should not be splintered into competing groups, each defined by its own distinctive type of consciousness, each vying with the others to capture and control reality.

The first world movement thus to pluralize the Kantian position was Marxism, which propounded a social subjectivism in terms of competing economic classes. On this issue, as on many others, the Nazis follow the Marxists, but substitute race for class.” (_The Ominous Parallels_ Leonard Peikoff, http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/kant,_immanuel.html)

The second aspect of the leftist mindset that tends to foster tribalistic thinking is modern philosophy’s rejection of reason. This modern rejection is summed up in an Encyclopedia Britannica article:

“As indicated in the preceding section, many of the characteristic doctrines of postmodernism constitute or imply some form of metaphysical, epistemological, or ethical relativism. (It should be noted, however, that some postmodernists vehemently reject the relativist label.) Postmodernists deny that there are aspects of reality that are objective; that there are statements about reality that are objectively true or false; that it is possible to have knowledge of such statements (objective knowledge); that it is possible for human beings to know some things with certainty; and that there are objective, or absolute, moral values. Reality, knowledge, and value are constructed by discourses; hence they can vary with them. This means that the discourse of modern science, when considered apart from the evidential standards internal to it, has no greater purchase on the truth than do alternative perspectives, including (for example) astrology and witchcraft. Postmodernists sometimes characterize the evidential standards of science, including the use of reason and logic, as ‘Enlightenment rationality.‘” https://www.britannica.com/topic/postmodernism-philosophy (Accessed on 12-15-2018)

As a result, post-modern intellectuals tend to believe that reason is nothing more than a “tool of oppression” over the non-white races:

“A philosophy and religion professor at Syracuse University gave an interview to The New York Times Thursday in which he critiqued the notion of pure reason as simply being a ‘white male Euro-Christian construction.’” (https://dailycaller.com/2015/07/03/professor-reason-itself-is-a-white-male-construct/)

I’d note that this attitude about reason serves as great “psychological cover” for a leftist because any time they loose a debate, they can just say your logic, evidence, and reason is nothing more than a “tool of oppression” by the “white, male, heterosexual patriarchy”, and disregard it.

The third intellectual basis of leftism that tends to promote tribalism is its promotion of collectivism. It is a core tenant of leftism that groups are more important than individuals. Quoting from the Encyclopedia Britannica Article on “Collectivism”:

“The earliest modern, influential expression of collectivist ideas in the West is in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Du contrat social, of 1762 (see social contract), in which it is argued that the individual finds his true being and freedom only in submission to the “general will” of the community. In the early 19th century the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel argued that the individual realizes his true being and freedom only in unqualified submission to the laws and institutions of the nation-state, which to Hegel was the highest embodiment of social morality. Karl Marx later provided the most succinct statement of the collectivist view of the primacy of social interaction in the preface to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: ‘It is not men’s consciousness,’ he wrote, ‘which determines their being, but their social being which determines their consciousness.’

Collectivism has found varying degrees of expression in the 20th century in such movements as socialism, communism, and fascism.”(https://www.britannica.com/topic/collectivism , last accessed on 12-16-2018, emphasis added.)

For Marx, the father of modern collectivism, it was not (individual) men’s consciousness which determines their “being”, but their “social being”, which determines their consciousness. In other words, the individual is nothing, and the group, the collective, is all.

These systems of thought held by the Obama administration, the modern rejection of reason and the promotion of collectivism, create the proper “psychological attitude” for tribalistic thinking to flourish. This is because if reason is impotent, and if service to the group is considered as all-important, then an individual will consider his mind incapable of choosing what group he should serve. He’ll simply seek to join a group based on concretes like the fact that they look like him and talk like him:

“Now what are the nature and the causes of modern tribalism? Philosophically, tribalism is the product of irrationalism and collectivism. It is a logical consequence of modern philosophy. If men accept the notion that reason is not valid, what is to guide them and how are they to live? Obviously, they will seek to join some group -any group- which claims the ability to lead them and to provide some sort of knowledge acquired by some sort of unspecified means. If men accept the notion that the individual is helpless, intellectually and morally, that he has no mind and no rights, that he is nothing, but the group is all, and his only moral significance lies in selfless service to the group -they will be pulled obediently to join a group. But which group? Well, if you believe that you have no mind and no moral value, you cannot have the confidence to make choices -so the only thing for you to do is to join an unchosen group, the group into which you were born, the group to which you were predestined to belong by the sovereign, omnipotent, omniscient power of your body chemistry.

            This is, of course, racism. But, if your group is small enough, it will not be called “racism”: it will be called ’ethnicity’” (“Global Balkanization”, Ayn Rand, _The Voice of Reason_, https://www.amazon.com/Voice-Reason-Objectivist-Thought-Library-ebook/dp/B002OSXD7I/)

As we have seen, the philosophic roots of the Obama administration’s facilitation of tribalism lie in the ideas of mostly dead, white male philosophers, like Karl Marx. However, many previous leftist presidents have ascribed to similar philosophies. The Obama administration went further and actively promoted tribalism.

This promotion of tribalism started even before Barack Obama was President, although it has only become common knowledge in recent months, because the news media actively suppressed the information. In January of 2018, a photo surfaced showing a then-Senator Obama smiling and posing with Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam. (http://www.tampabay.com/news/nation/Decade-old-photo-of-Obama-with-Louis-Farrakhan-surfaces_164857663) (Farrakhan is a tribal mentality through and through. I recommend doing an Internet search and reading some of the things he has written and said if you are unfamiliar.)

This photo was taken during a 2005 Congressional Black Caucus meeting with Farrakhan on Capitol Hill, which demonstrates where the loyalties of the entire Congressional “Black Caucus” lie.

If this photo had come out prior to the Presidential election of 2008, it is opined that Obama would not have been elected. The photo is the moral equivalent to a white Presidential candidate posing and smiling with the leader of Aryan Nations. (http://insider.foxnews.com/2018/01/27/obama-farrakhan-photo-dershowitz-says-he-would-not-support-him-if-he-knew-about-picture)

Obama managed to hide his promotion of tribalism pretty well until a later event in 2012. This was the shooting of a black teenager, Trayvon Martin, by George Zimmerman, a homeowner living in Florida. (Zimmerman was subsequently acquitted at trial.)

Obama chose to inject himself into a purely local matter of criminal law. (http://whitehouse.blogs.cnn.com/2012/03/23/president-obama-statement-on-trayvon-martin-case/) He aided and abetted the news media in doing its best to ensure that George Zimmerman wouldn’t get a fair trial.

But, more than that, Obama made a statement that I think did more damage to race relations than possibly anything else he said before or since. When commenting on the shooting, Obama noted:

“If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.” (https://www.yahoo.com/news/obama-had-son-hed-look-trayvon-171805699.html)

This was like saying: “I am with black people because you look like me. I’m not the President of the United States, who serves abstract, and important, concepts like justice, rights, and the rule of law. I am the mouthpiece of a racial pressure group, and I will do everything I can to promote that racial group’s ‘collective good’, at the expense of the individual rights of people who don’t belong to that racial group.”

Why did Obama do this? Probably because:

“The case resonates with many black Americans, a key voting group during Obama’s 2008 election, who see it as an example of bias toward blacks.” (https://www.yahoo.com/news/obama-had-son-hed-look-trayvon-171805699.html)

I suspect so many black Americans were convinced George Zimmerman was guilty because many of them hold the tribal premise to some greater or lesser degree, although I obviously don’t have statistics to back that up. I’m not sure how one would even measure “tribalistic impulse” of a particular group of people, but I would like to see such a study. I suspect the results on the level of “tribalistic impulse” of American blacks, compared to American whites or Asians, would be stunningly high.

I believe Obama thought he had to say “If I have a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” to appease black Americans, but it was more than appeasement. It was active endorsement and promotion of the tribalistic impulse. It was encouragement to unleash some of the worst tendencies amongst some black Americans.

This pandering by Obama gave aid and comfort to the group known as “Black Lives Matter”, a group that always assumes if a white cop shoots a black man, then the shooting was unjust. For instance, when Michael Brown was shot by Officer Darren Wilson in Missouri, it was determined by the United States Department of Justice that Officer Wilson did nothing wrong:

“Based on this investigation, the Department has concluded that Darren Wilson’s actions do not constitute prosecutable violations under the applicable federal criminal civil rights statute, 18 U.S.C. § 242, which prohibits uses of deadly force that are “objectively unreasonable,” as defined by the United States Supreme Court. The evidence, when viewed as a whole, does not support the conclusion that Wilson’s uses of deadly force were “objectively unreasonable” under the Supreme Court’s definition. Accordingly, under the governing federal law and relevant standards set forth in the USAM, it is not appropriate to present this matter to a federal grand jury for indictment, and it should therefore be closed without prosecution.” (https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releases/attachments/2015/03/04/doj_report_on_shooting_of_michael_brown_1.pdf)

Despite that, there was a rush to judgment by what the media portrays as the “black leadership”. Jessie Jackson called it a “Crime of Injustice”. Al Sharpton, another tribalist, also shilled for Michael Brown in the face of the facts. (https://www.businessinsider.com/al-sharpton-denounces-darren-wilsons-excuse-michael-brown)

Always taking the side of a black person over a white person, without knowing any of the facts, demonstrates that the slogan “Black Lives Matters” is nothing but a statement of tribalism by the “black leadership”. (The notion of a “black leadership” is tribalism too, but the news media seems to believe Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton speak for black people, so that is how I refer to them.)

Despite the tendency of “Black Lives Matter” to always take the side of a black man, even when the facts didn’t support it, Obama expressed solidarity with the “Black Lives Matter” movement, and even went so far as to accuse police of widespread racial discrimination himself:

“’As a young man, there were times when I was driving and I got stopped and I didn’t know why,’ he [Obama] said.” (https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/257811-obama-defends-black-lives-matter)

I don’t think Barack Obama is, himself a tribalist, but I think his philosophy, ideology, and method of thinking drives him to pander to those who *are* tribalists. Another example of that pandering could be seen when it came to Obama’s policies on immigration.

When it comes to issues of immigration policy, Obama supported open borders, which I, more or less, also support. I believe that policy is consistent with freedom and free markets. (https://ari.aynrand.org/blog/2017/02/07/ayn-rand-on-immigration) But, Obama didn’t support the policy because he’s committed to Capitalism. He supported it because of the need to appeal to Hispanic voters, who, to the extent they are concerned about open borders, are likely concerned out of feelings of tribalism, rather than concepts of justice, freedom of movement, and the free market. This tribalism is why you will see people flying Mexican flags at pro-immigration rallies in the United States:

“‘Native-born Americans suspect that it is they, and not the immigrant, who are being forced to adapt’ to social changes caused by migration, he [Obama] said….’When I see Mexican flags waved at pro-immigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment…’ (https://dailycaller.com/2014/11/16/shock-flashback-obama-says-illegal-immigration-hurts-blue-collar-americans-strains-welfare-video/

Flying Mexican flags at pro-immigration rallies shows that, rather than being primarily about the abstract concepts of freedom and free markets, most of the “pro-immigration” sentiment of the Democratic Party is an expression of “Latin-American nationalism”, i.e., tribalism. They care less about the abstract concept of freedom of immigration than they do about ensuring that members of their racial and ethnic group can come and go as they please, into and out of, the United States. Would the “Hispanic leadership” in the Democratic Party care so much about immigration if most of the immigrants were German, or Chinese? (I doubt it.) Obama’s policies on immigration were another appeal to a tribalistic pressure group, just like his support of “Black Lives Matter”.

The tribal mentality discards reason because he is, fundamentally, the anti-conceptual mentality. (https://deancook.net/2018/12/15/what-is-tribalism-it-is-the-anti-conceptual-mentality/) This means tribalists will be strongly tempted to use force and violence when dealing with others outside their own ethnic group because they have no other recourse:

“Warfare -permanent warfare- is the hallmark of tribal existence. A tribe -with its rules, dogmas, traditions, and arrested mental development- is not a productive organization. Tribes subsist on the edge of starvation, at the mercy of natural disasters, less successfully than herds of animals. War amongst other, momentarily luckier tribes, in the hope of looting some meager hoard, is their chronic emergency means of survival. The inculcation of hatred for other tribes is a necessary tool of tribal rulers, who need scapegoats to blame for the misery of their own subjects.

            There is no tyranny worse than ethnic rule -since it is an unchosen serfdom one is asked to accept as a value, and since it applies primarily to one’s mind.” (“Global Balkanization, Ayn Rand, _The Voice of Reason_ https://www.amazon.com/Voice-Reason-Objectivist-Thought-Library-ebook/dp/B002OSXD7I/)

So, the consequences of Barack Obama’s pandering to the tribal mentalities in our country was predictable. Here are a few examples:

(1) Riots in Ferguson Missouri and elsewhere. (“Ferguson riots: Ruling sparks night of violence” https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-30190224)

(2) “Occupations” of College Campuses by leftist thugs.

A couple of these “occupations” have been memorable for their totalitarian tendencies. A journalism professor at the University of Missouri was so enamored with the little totalitarian “no go zone” she and other campus minority groups had created on campus, that she, and the brutes following her, sought to exclude journalists from the area. When one journalist defied her, she famously yelled out: “Who wants to help me get this reporter out of here? I need some muscle over here!”( https://www.yahoo.com/news/mizzou-professor-some-muscle-protests-resigns-143632236.html)

Deep down in this professor’s soul, and in the soul of every leftist academic, “muscle”, i.e., naked force, is what matters. This is because reason is an illusion to them, thanks to “post-modern thinking” and Marxism.

At Evergreen College in the Pacific Northwest, a college professor was forced to resign after he questioned the wisdom of asking white students to “voluntarily” leave the college campus for a day. ( https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/education/evergreen-professor-plans-to-sue-college-for-385-million/ )

Given the violent nature of the “anti-conceptual, tribalist mindset”, it won’t be long before the “voluntary” aspect of Evergreen’s “ethnic cleansing dry-run” is dropped in favor of the use of force.

But, the riots and the “college occupations” at least had the virtue of not leading to the loss of human life. The bloody climax of the Obama administration’s race policy was seen in my hometown of Dallas, Texas. In July of 2016, a sniper shot twelve white police officers, specifically because they were white, in what was described as the deadliest day for law enforcement officers since the September 11 attacks in 2001. (https://dfw.cbslocal.com/2016/07/07/shots-fired-during-downtown-dallas-protests/ )

Ultimately, I believe that much of our recent history has been driven by mostly dead, white, male philosophers, like Karl Marx. However, if we are going to start looking at political and social “conduits” for the philosophy driving tribalism, then our 44th President was one such conduit. If we’re going to point fingers at politicians for the uptick in tribalism in America, then we need to start with the villainous Presidency of Barack H. Obama.

What Is Tribalism? (It Is The Anti-Conceptual Mentality)

Use of the term “tribalism” seems to have gained currency over the past couple of years. Several books describing a descent into tribalism have been written, such as “Suicide of the West” by Jonah Goldberg and “Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations” by Amy Chua. (I have not read these books, and express no opinion here about their merit.) However, the first place I ever heard the term “tribalism” was in Ayn Rand’s 1973 article “The Missing Link”. (http://aynrandlexicon.com/ayn-rand-works/philosophy-who-needs-it.html)

I think what is largely fueling this interest in the phenomena of “tribalism” is the suggestion that it might explain the Donald Trump Presidency. (I will express no opinion on that, although I will show, in a later blog entry, that if we’re going to point fingers at Presidents, then the “tribalistic mindset” was encouraged and enabled *prior* to the Trump Presidency.)

What, exactly, is “tribalism”?

The definition of “tribe” is something like: “a local division of an aboriginal people.” https://www.dictionary.com/browse/tribe

A “define” search on Google returns the following definition: “a social division in a traditional society consisting of families or communities linked by social, economic, religious, or blood ties, with a common culture and dialect, typically having a recognized leader.”

I’d say it’s something like: a political-social group from a stone-age culture that operates as a group for purposes of survival.

When commentators like Jonah Goldberg use the term “tribalism”, I think it is meant in a “metaphorical sense”. I doubt that he literally means that a “tribalist” is someone associated with a stone-age political-social group known as a “tribe”. Instead commentators are saying the “mind-set” of a “tribalist” is *similar* to someone from this type of stone-age group.

The fact that the term “tribalism” is being used somewhat “metaphorically” rather than literally means that the term can be easily misused by people who don’t clearly understand the concept. For instance, a “Psychology Today” article cited to a “USA Today” article in which a valedictorian made the following quote and initially attributed it to Donald Trump: “Don’t just get involved. Fight for your seat at the table. Better yet, fight for a seat at the head of the table.” Then he said “Just kidding, that was Barrack Obama”, and the crowd allegedly then stopped clapping. The “Psychology Today” author said this was a clear example of tribalism.

Assuming this story actually happened the way it is reported, which I question, this is not *necessarily* an example of tribalism. The quote about “fighting for your place at the table” is extremely metaphorical. There is no literal “table”, and you don’t literally “fight” for it. So, *who* says “fight for your seat at the table” actually *does* matter. If Ayn Rand said it, I know enough about her philosophy of egoism and individual rights that I would know she meant you should develop the virtues of rationality, independence and courage, and earn your wealth on a free market. If Barack Obama says it, I know that someone with socialistic and anti-individualist tendencies like Obama means something like: “Get together with other looters and use the force of government to expropriate the wealth of the producers for yourself.”

My point is, when making a metaphorical statement like this quote, *context* matters. So, the crowd in the story may have stopped cheering because they took into consideration what Barack Obama likely *meant* by that statement as: “We need more government force to take wealth from the producers,” while they didn’t think, rightly or wrongly, that Donald Trump would mean that. That’s not “tribalism”, that’s just taking into account context.

In order to avoid misusing the term “tribalism”, what is needed is a proper definition and understanding of the concept. Who has defined that concept? Ayn Rand did in her article: “The Missing Link”. What I intend to do here is provide my own explanation of the concept of “tribalism”, as Miss Rand used it, and possibly provide some additional explanation and insight into the phenomena.

So, what is the “mind set” of tribalism?

An example of “tribalism” can be seen in Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”.  The Montague’s and the Capulet’s are engaged in a sort of “tribalistic warfare” with each other.

Another probable example of “tribalism” from history would be the Hatfield-McCoy feud in Appalachian America. (https://www.history.com/shows/hatfields-and-mccoys/articles/the-hatfield-mccoy-feud)

In the case of “Romeo and Juliet”, if you’re a Montague, you associate with and fight alongside a fellow Montague. It doesn’t matter if your clansman was in the right or in the wrong -you’re on his side in a fight. Justice has nothing to do with it. Furthermore, it doesn’t matter if your fellow Montague is interesting or boring -you spend your time with him over a Capulet.

Basically, a “tribalist” will prefer and choose *his* group, right or wrong.

Since right or wrong doesn’t matter, it means truth and falsity doesn’t matter, which ultimately means: reality doesn’t matter.

This raises an interesting question, then: How do you choose your group? It cannot be on the basis of which group has the best ideas, because that would require comparing their ideas and behavior in accordance with the facts and some standard of justice. The way you pick your group, therefore, is by *not* picking it.

You are born to a particular group, and you accept the traditions, customs, and behaviors of that group without question. Your people worship a particular god, and you never question it. Your people regard certain lands as sacred, and you never question it. Your people only eat certain foods, and you never question it. Your people say members of a particular “cast” can only associate with members of certain other “casts”, and that’s that. The leaders of your people say that another group of people are your ancient enemies that you must exterminate, and you blindly accept it.

A “tribalist” accepts the contents of his mind, the ideas he happens to hold, as the given, and never questions them. In other words, mentally, a tribalist holds certain *concepts* in his mind, and those concepts have no correspondence to reality, but he holds them, regardless. (It may be that some of the ideas a tribalist holds could be mentally “connected” to the facts, logic, and reality, but he doesn’t bother to “test” any of his ideas in that manner.)

Since we’re talking about the ideas in somebody’s head, what exactly is an idea? (For my purposes here, “idea” and “concept” are synonymous.)

A “concept” is a mental blending of observed concretes that are similar to one another, in contrast to other things from which they are different, when some common characteristic is considered. (http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/concepts.html) For instance, two rocks have similar hardness, texture, natural origin, and size when compared to sand, a tree, or a television. On this basis, one can mentally blend together in one’s mind the similarities of the two perceived rocks and create a mental “file folder” designated by the word “rock” and defined as something like: “relatively hard, naturally formed mineral or petrified matter; stone.” (https://www.thefreedictionary.com/rock)

Furthermore, concepts can consist of other, mentally combined concepts that include new observations about additional characteristics of those earlier formed concepts and/or other concepts. So, for instance, with additional observations about different types of rocks, one can discover that some rocks originate from the cooling and solidification of magma or lava, which requires knowledge about volcanoes and the Earth’s core. (“Igneous rocks”) Other types of rocks are formed by the deposition and subsequent cementation of mineral or organic particles. (Sedimentary rocks) While other types of rocks are formed from the transformation of the other two rock types through heat or pressure. (Metamorphic rocks) These new sub-categories of the concept “rock” are called “higher-level concepts” or “abstractions from abstractions”. (http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/hierarchy_of_knowledge.html)

The above example of forming the concept “rock” is an example of a concept that corresponds to reality. Unfortunately, we can also hold ideas that *do not* correspond to reality. One can believe that “ghosts” are real, that there is a “rain god” that makes it rain, or that the Earth is the center of the universe. The ideas that we hold can be true or false, and it is the role of logic and science to distinguish true ideas from false ideas.

Going back to the “tribalist”, now, he is a person who simply accepts certain ideas in his mind without question. He accepts that the way his group dresses is the way to dress. He accepts that the way his group worships a deity is the way to worship. He accepts that certain lands are sacred because his group believes that. He accepts the traditions and customs of his group *because* they are the traditions and customs of his group.

So, a person who chooses to blindly accept the word of the group he is born into, and the ideas it holds, over and above corresponding his ideas to reality, to see if they are right or wrong, is, fundamentally, “anti-conceptual”. A “tribal mindset” is therefore an “anti-conceptual mindset”.

This “tribal mindset” will often show up in issues of justice. By “justice”, I mean judging the character and actions of other people in accordance with a standard and then treating them accordingly.

“Justice” is a concept that depends on a chain of prior concepts to understand. Some of these prior concepts include the fact that one must take certain actions in order to live, which means one has chosen to live. One must also have some concept of rights, in terms of the things that human beings are entitled to and that others may not rightly use force to deprive you of.

A “tribal mindset” doesn’t hold to any standard of justice because that would require him to judge members of his *own* group in accordance with a standard of right and wrong and treat them accordingly. A tribal mentality cannot do that because he has to come to the aid of his fellow “tribesmen”, regardless of whether they are in the right. If a Capulet sees a fellow Capulet being attacked by a Montague, he must come to the Capulet’s aid and fight alongside him. (I will note, as an aside, that this is not the same as seeing a friend or family member being attacked, and assuming they are the victim. You may base that on your *knowledge* that the friend or family member would not initiate physical force. That is acting in accordance with justice. Like I said, context matters.)

As we have seen, the “tribalistic mindset” is, more fundamentally, the “anti-conceptual mindset”. There is one other aspect of the tribalistic mindset that is related to its anti-conceptualism.

If we go back to the “define tribe” search on Google, then we see that a tribe is described as being “…a traditional society…” So, if one is described as “tribal” it means that they tend to follow tradition.

What “tradition” are we talking about in this context? We mean the customs, habits, ideas, and morals of the “tribe”. In other words, the man-made institutions of whatever group one is born into. (http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/metaphysical_vs_man-made.html)

This means if there is a better, but non-traditional, way to do something, the “tribal mentality” will tend to choose the less efficient, but traditional way. If his great-grand-parents hunted with a bow and arrow, he’s going to hunt with a bow and arrow, even though a gun would be superior. (Or, the tribal mentality will choose hunting over farming or an industrial culture because it is “traditional”.)

In other words the “tribal mentality” prefers his particular man-made institutions over reality, or his own life. He tends to make no distinction between what Ayn Rand called “the metaphysical” (reality) and “the man made”. (http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/metaphysical_vs_man-made.html)

What is “the metaphysical”? It is that which exists apart from human choice. The orbit of the planets around the sun is “the metaphysical”. They occupy their current orbits through a process of the laws of physics. The fact that water consists of two hydrogen atoms combined with one oxygen atom is “the metaphysical” – it is that way through the operation of the laws of nature and chemistry, not because of human desires or wishes to the contrary. The institution of marriage, on the other hand, was created by human beings. It would not exist apart from mankind. The rule of law is created by human beings. All technology is created by human beings to serve human ends. All institutions are created by human beings and can be altered or abolished by human beings. Concepts like “rock”, themselves, are human creations. Concepts serve human ends and needs. To serve human ends and needs, they must be consistent with the nature of the human mind, and, more generally, the nature of reality. (Their purpose is to promote human life.)

The “anti-conceptual mentality”, is someone who takes the contents of his mind as the given, and does not care to discover if those contents are true or false, i.e., if those concepts conform to the nature of reality and serve the purpose of promoting human life. To him, there is no distinction between the fact that the sun rises and sets every day (a metaphysical fact) and the fact that his particular ethnic group speaks a particular language or engages in certain customs. (A man-made fact). The anti-conceptual mentality says: “Nothing is certain but death and taxes.” But, only one of these is *actually* a certainty. Taxes are a man-made institution and can be changed or abolished, if enough people choose to do so.

Since this mentality has no distinction between the “metaphysical” and the “man-made”, the fact that his particular group happens to live in a certain area, wear certain clothing, or engage in certain rituals is the same as the fact that the sun rises and sets every day due to the Earth’s orbit around the sun and it’s rotation -although he probably doesn’t even consider why the sun rises and sets every day. (That would require too much abstract thinking.)

This type of mentality has no ability to examine the origins of the concepts he happens to hold or to determine if they are true or false, so anyone who questions the ideas he holds will tend to feel like a threat to him. He cannot justify what he believes. As Ayn Rand put it:

“This kind of psycho-epistemology works so long as no part of it is challenged. But all hell breaks loose when it is -because what is threatened then is not a particular idea, but that mind’s whole structure. The hell ranges from fear to resentment to stubborn evasion to hostility to panic to malice to hatred.”(“The Missing Link”, Ayn Rand, _Philosophy: Who Needs It_)(https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Who-Needs-Ayn-Rand-ebook/dp/B002JPGQ2A/)

As a consequence of his inability to use reason or abstract concepts, the anti-conceptual, “tribal” mentality will be tempted to resort to force when he encounters those who do not ascribe to his particular tribal world view, because he has jettisoned the use of reason in dealing with other men. (See “Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World”, Ayn Rand, _Philosophy: Who Needs It_ https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Who-Needs-Ayn-Rand-ebook/dp/B002JPGQ2A/)

Another result of this anti-conceptual mentality, is the tendency to favor members of one’s “tribe”, whether right or wrong, in any given situation. Additionally, since the “tribal mentality” cannot handle abstract ideas, he tends to view his “tribe” as people who look like him, have the same accent as him, or who speak the same language as him. Usually, he will favor members of his own race over others.

An actual example of this mindset occurred back in 2014. A white man in Detroit accidentally hit a black child with his car after the child randomly stepped out in the street. (Police determined the driver was not at fault.) (https://detroit.cbslocal.com/2014/04/04/white-man-beaten-by-mob-in-detroit-after-hitting-boy-with-truck-was-it-a-hate-crime/)

The white driver did the right thing and immediately stopped to render aid to the child. A mob of angry blacks attacked the white driver and brutally beat him and robbed him.

This is the tribal mentality. A mob automatically assumed that the driver of the vehicle was “in the wrong” because he was a different skin color. Abstract concepts like “justice”, or even the traffic laws, were beyond their range of thinking. To them it was just: “white people bad” and “black people good”. (However, I’d also note that the beating was stopped after a black woman, a nurse, intervened, and convinced them to stop beating the white driver. Her actions were extremely admirable, and showed an incredible courage. The group beating the man were an example of the “anti-conceptual mentality”, while the nurse, who convinced them to stop, was an example of a reasoning individualist, committed to justice and the rule of law.)

Fundamentally, the mob that attacked the man in Detroit was a group of people incapable of much abstract thought. They had never learned to think conceptually, and had therefore chosen to cling to their group like a stone-age group of savages. They reacted violently the first chance they got. But, their fundamental problem wasn’t tribalism, which was an effect, not a cause. The cause was the anti-conceptual mentality.

Anti-conceptualism causes tribalism, because all tribalism is the anti-conceptual mentality. (http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/anti-conceptual_mentality.html)

The Self-Interested Purpose of Concepts

When I give the Objectivist definition of “selfishness” as being “primarily concerned with the maintenance of one’s own life”, the retort I have gotten the most over the years is something along the lines of: “That’s just your’s and Ayn Rand’s highly-unsual definition of ‘selfishness’, and nobody else shares it.”

Unfortunately, anyone saying this doesn’t understand the purpose of concepts and knowledge. Why do we need a concept of “selfishness”, or any other concept for that matter? What is the purpose of knowledge? For Rand, all knowledge serves the purpose of promoting, maintaining, and enhancing “man’s life”. Since reality is what it is, and human beings are what they are, you must form concepts in order to live. So, the concept of “selfishness” must be formed based on the choice to live and your nature as a human being. That means the correct definition of “selfishness” means: “being primarily concerned with the maintenance of one’s own life,” not “violating the rights to life and property of others” or “treating others unjustly” -which tends to be what most good non-Objectivists mean when they speak of “selfishness”.

So, a bank robber should not be described as “selfish” because it doesn’t distinguish him from the people who own the bank and the depositors at the bank, who all presumably want to live and pursue happiness -which is selfish. A bank robber should be described as a “force-initiator”, a “criminal” or a “rights-violator”. Similarly, a man who cheats on his wife shouldn’t be described as “selfish” because it implies that you should go out and marry someone not because you love them but because they have “need” of you. It implies that you should marry someone not because you consider them to be the best spouse you can get, but because they are the *worst* spouse you can get -which is rather insulting to your spouse. A man who cheats on his wife should be described as “unjust” or a “promise-breaker”, not selfish.

The people who have suggested that my definition of “selfishness” isn’t in accordance with the “socially-accepted definition” don’t understand that all concepts serve my self-interest, and reality is what it is. That’s why I learn new things and gather knowledge in the first place -I’m rational because I want to live, not because rationality serves some unspecified purpose, unrelated to my life. If the “socially accepted definition” of any concept isn’t in accordance with the choice to live and the nature of reality, then it is the socially accepted definition that needs to change.

Context-Dropping

Someone posted this article on Facebook about a drink company getting sued because they claim that their product is “all natural”, but it contains what the plaintiffs in the lawsuit say are not natural ingredients. https://www.einnews.com/pr_news/463609871/beaumont-costales-files-class-action-lawsuit-against-lacroix-water

I jokingly responded with: “They meant ‘natural’ in the sense that everything that exists was created by the big bang”. Obviously, this is not what is meant by “natural”, as most of us use that term, in drink or food products, so it was recognized I was making a joke.

I regard what I did there as what Ayn Rand called “context dropping”. http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/context-dropping.html

When done seriously, and not in the context of a joke, it indicates a serious thinking problem, especially if it is a “mental habit”.

In Objectivism, context is considered a very important concept. http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/context.html
The Objectivist view of concept-formation depends on having a context. So, for instance, when you form the concept “cat”, you do so in a certain context. You see two or more concrete instances of cats, which have distinct identities. They might have different colors and different amounts of fur and size. One cat may be old, while the other cat is young. But, when you look at those two concrete cats in comparison to, say, a parrot, their similarities, are much greater than any of their differences. According to Objectivism, you cannot form the concept “cat” without a “foil” of some other entity that is so different, that these two entities seem similar by comparison. (You’ve then achieved what Objectivism calls the “unit perspective” http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/unit.html
on cats, and can then say that you are omitting the differences between the two cats on the premise that they must have some size, color, and amount of fur, but it can be any within certain ranges, which is “measurement-ommission” http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/measurement.html
.)

I think if you are a “habitual context dropper”, then your mind would be paralyzed, because you couldn’t form concepts with any great success.

However, in logic, I think what I was jokingly doing would be considered the “fallacy of equivocation”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivocation

The “fallacy of equivocation” is an example of an “informal fallacy”. https://www.txstate.edu/philosophy/resources/fallacy-definitions.html

However, I’ve noticed that most of the informal fallacies in logic seem like instances of what Rand called “context dropping”. For instance, argument ad hominem involves attacking someone’s character or motives for holding a particular viewpoint rather than the truth or falsity of that viewpoint. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominemhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

Pointing out bad motives can sometimes be a valid form of critique, such as when you are pointing out that a witness in court has a motive to lie about what they are testifying about. That has to do with whether the witness is an accurate reporter of *facts observed*, whether they are “credible”, rather than a *logical argument*, which, assuming the truth of the facts used, is independent of the credibility of the person making the logical argument. http://www.fallacyfiles.org/adhomine.html

So, what I suspect is that all informal fallacies in logic are really just common examples of what Rand called “context dropping”. Unfortunately, Miss Rand didn’t write much on what she considered to be “context dropping”, although I noted early on in my reading of her that she used the term a good bit. It’s unfortunate that she didn’t write more on this, as I believe she coined it. The closest I’ve ever seen to the same meaning is “taking something out of context”.  https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/take+something+out+of+context 

However, that has more to do with just misrepresenting what someone said by quoting just some small portion of what they said. “Context dropping” as Miss Rand used the term is more about something that goes on within the mind of the person, with their own thinking, which becomes incorrect because of their failure to “hold context”.

Evidence

Lets say Albert tells me he saw Victor commit a murder 30 years ago.

Victor categorically denies it.

I say to Albert: Do you have any physical evidence of this murder? (Even a dead body?)

Albert: No

I say to Albert: Do you have any other witnesses that can corroborate what you are saying?

Albert: No, in fact some of the people who I say were there say they don’t remember this.

I say to Albert: Where were you when this happened?

Albert: I was at a party.

Me: Were you drinking?

Albert: Yes.

Me: How long ago did this happen?

Albert: 30 years ago.

I don’t actually think Albert has said anything here. All he has is his statement, and he admits that he was drinking. I know drinking alters perception of reality and memory. https://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/aa63/aa63.htm

Albert has no credibility, and I’m simply going to regard his assertion as “arbitrary”. He has no credible evidence to back up this assertion. Albert’s assertion is neither true nor false. It is simply “arbitrary”. It’s like the claim: “There’s an invisible gremlin on my shoulder, but only I can see it. Now prove that I’m lying.” The onus of proof is on he, or she, who makes the assertion.

“‘Arbitrary’ means a claim put forth in the absence of evidence of any sort, perceptual or conceptual; its basis is neither direct observation nor any kind of theoretical argument. [An arbitrary idea is] a sheer assertion with no attempt to validate it or connect it to reality.” http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/arbitrary.html

If your response is: “You can’t prove Albert didn’t see this murder,” then you’re essentially asking Victor to “prove a negative”. Victor says it didn’t happen. How is he supposed to present evidence of something that didn’t happen, when the person making the assertion hasn’t really presented any credible evidence for it?

Now lets say two people both make an assertion that on two separate, and unrelated, occasions, Victor committed two separate murders. They both admit they had been drinking at the time, and have no other witnesses to corroborate what they assert, nor do they have any physical evidence to back up what they assert. The fact that two people (or three, or four) make completely unrelated assertions doesn’t somehow make any one of those assertions more or less true. You cannot say “A is true because B is true,” and then turn around and say: “B is true because A is true.” I think this is an example of “Begging the Question”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

If you could show that Victor had, in fact committed one murder with some independent evidence of that murder, then that probably would be some evidence that he had committed the second murder. This is because we know that someone who does an action one time will tend to act in accordance with a pattern or habit when doing the same action on another occasion. But, you’d first have to put forth some independent evidence that he committed the first murder. Simply using the unsupported assertion that Victor committed a first murder to prove that he committed a second, unrelated, murder, and, in turn, using that second, unsupported assertion of an unrelated murder to prove that he committed the first murder, is bad reasoning.

Now lets say you were accusing Victor of some sort of sex crime, like indecent exposure or attempted rape. Victor says it didn’t happen. He denies it. If a person claims that they had been drinking alcohol 30 years ago when they witnessed this incident, does that hurt their credibility as a witness? Yes. The analysis is the same. If they have no physical evidence of this, and no other witnesses to corroborate their story, then the accuser has made what can only be described as an arbitrary assertion with no credible evidence to back it up.

The fact that a second accuser comes forward and makes an accusation of a separate, unrelated sex crime, where the accuser admits she was very intoxicated, doesn’t somehow make it more or less likely that the other accusation is true. If fifty women come forward making fifty different claims of completely unrelated criminal acts on separate occasions, that doesn’t somehow make any one of those accusations any more or less true unless you can show that at least one of those accusations is true with independent evidence. (In which case you could say the one independently established assertion is proof of a habit.)

Most people will accept my reasoning on the murder, but will want to say that attempted rape is different. They will likely say that women are generally embarrassed or ashamed to report rape, and that this is evidence that a woman, on any given occasion, is telling the truth. This is the fallacy of division. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_division Even if 99% of the women making rape allegations are telling the truth, that doesn’t mean you can say, in any given instance, that a woman accusing a man of rape is telling the truth. We know that some percentage of women make false rape accusations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_lacrosse_case So, you cannot simply assume that any particular woman, in any particular case, is telling the truth.

Applying these principles to the case of Judge Kavanaugh, we have two women who admit that they were drinking when each of these incidents happened. I base my understanding of the situation on two news articles, that I recommend you read:

First alleged incident: http://www.waxahachietx.com/zz/news/20180916/kavanaugh-accuser-speaks-out-on-sexual-assault-claim

Second alleged incident: https://www.businessinsider.com/brett-kavanaugh-sexual-assault-yale-deborah-ramirez-2018-9

As far as I can tell, neither of these women has found any independent witnesses to corroborate what they’ve said. Neither of them has any evidence other than their assertion that they witnessed this, and they have less credibility in my mind than Judge Kavanaugh, because they both admit they had been drinking when these incidents allegedly occurred, while Kavanaugh says it didn’t happen.  I say “credibility in my mind” because I don’t know either these women or Judge Kavanaugh personally, so I only have the information contained in news articles on which to assess credibility.

The third accuser has prepared an affidavit. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kavanaugh-accuser-michael-avenatti-reveals-julie-swetnick-today-2018-09-26/

She was careful to never say whether or not she had been drinking alcohol at the parties where she allegedly saw Judge Kavanaugh assault and gang rape women. The question of alcohol consumption is highly relevant for determining her credibility as a witness, and the fact that she was at a “party environment” suggests to me that she probably was drinking alcohol. If she had NOT been drinking, then it would make sense to put that in her affidavit, because it would make her much more credible.

If she were subject to cross-examination, the FIRST question I’d ask her is whether she had been drinking alcohol when she witnessed these things, and how much? That goes directly to her credibility given the memory impairing effects of alcohol.

Additionally, she states in line 14 of her affidavit that “I am aware of other witnesses that can attest to the truthfulness of each of the statements above.” But, she doesn’t say WHO those people are. Why not? It would instantly make her story more credible if she gave names of other witnesses who could corroborate what she’s saying. The fact that she doesn’t do so makes her story very suspicious.

The fact that she was willing to sign an affidavit, and it is therefore “sworn”, doesn’t make it more credible. Since the affidavit is not being used for any lawsuit or for any legal proceeding, I doubt she could be prosecuted for perjury, if it were shown she was lying. If anything in the affidavit was shown to be a lie, none of the lies would be considered “material”. For instance, someone could sign an affidavit saying “I swear that the sky is red,” and then post it on the Internet, but I don’t think that would make them guilty of perjury because the statement “the sky is red”, while a lie, isn’t material to anything from a legal standpoint. (There is no lawsuit where the color of the sky is an issue.)

Given the fact that she doesn’t say if she was drinking alcohol when she witnessed these things, and given the fact that she claims there were other witnesses, but didn’t name them, I regard her entire affidavit as suspect. Any reasonable person who wasn’t lying would know that others would want to know these things and would state them in the affidavit.

She has yet to give an interview. This is also very suspicious and makes what she is saying suspect. It appears that she isn’t willing to let reporters ask her any of the basic questions that are raised from reading her affidavit. Although, I’ve heard, she will give an interview on Sunday for a pay cable channel. (This also sounds strange to me.) At any rate, I hope she is asked some of these basic questions.

These are the three accusers that have come out to date. I find none of them to be credible based on the news stories I’ve seen. I am not saying they are lying. I’m saying they have not presented any credible evidence for what they are saying. I therefore regard their statements as “arbitrary” -having no evidence to back them up. Before I’m prepared to treat a man as a criminal in my personal or professional life, and denounce him and avoid him, I need some level of actual evidence to demonstrate that what the speaker is saying is true.

The other issue in my mind is: Does any of this matter?. All of these incidents of alleged rape or attempted rape are well outside the statute of limitations for prosecution. The only way this matters is in Judge Kavanaugh’s advise and consent process by the Senate. Senators can hold hearings on the issue, but where do they draw the line? Do they have to have a hearing on every outlandish accusation made by any person about a nominated Federal Judge before they can perform their advise and consent role? What if someone claimed Judge Kavanaugh was an alien sent here to take over the world? Should an obvious nut be allowed to testify? Senators have to assess credibility of potential witnesses based on news reports like the ones I’ve cited. Then they have to come up with some standard of “probable cause” on who to have as a witness, and I think, based on that, no reasonable Senator could even regard these women as credible enough to testify at a hearing.

Movie Review: “The Wife” (With Plot-Spoilers)

Last night I went to see a more “serious” or “literary” movie, as opposed to the usual “shoot ‘em up blow ‘em up” action movie, or the simple “boy meets girl” romantic comedy. The movie I saw was called “The Wife”. There were several things I didn’t like about this movie, and I was reminded of why I think such films are almost always just leftist propaganda.

I think there is too much of a temptation for fiction writers to write about fiction writing, which is what you will see in “The Wife”. It indicates to me that the script-writer spends too much time hanging out with their other writer friends and, their only social circle is their writer’s group.

When I see “writing about writing”, it appears to me that the author hasn’t gone out and lived enough and experienced enough to have anything to say, other than to talk about the process of writing. It indicates to me that the writer lives in a sort of “echo chamber” with other writers. (This isn’t the only “echo chamber” the author of the script for “The Wife” seems to live in, but more about that later.)

“The Wife” starts out with an elderly man and his wife finding out he has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The setting for the movie appears to be sometime in the late 20th Century. No one uses cell phones, and they don’t appear to have caller ID on their phones. Additionally, they fly to Europe for the Nobel Prize ceremony on a Concorde Jet, which hasn’t been in service since 2003.

Most of the story takes place during the few days leading up to the awards ceremony in Stockholm Sweden, with flashbacks to the past of the Husband and Wife. These flashbacks eventually reveal a crucial secret about the husband’s writing. That secret is (Plot Spoiler):

 

 

 

 

The Husband didn’t write any of his novels. His wife wrote all of them, with very little input from him.

I disliked the setting and plot premise of this movie “right off the bat”, because I have almost total contempt for the Nobel Prize and the people who receive it. When it comes to the sciences, like Physics, the Nobel Prize actually means something because Physics is a legitimate science.

I have less respect for the Nobel Prize in Economics. Probably, some decent economists receive the award. FA Hayek received it, and he was pretty okay, as far as academic economists go. But, I also have a feeling the Nobel Prize in Economics should be called “The Nobel Prize in Leftist Economics”, since that is what most of its recipients probably are.

When it comes to the Nobel Prize in Literature, I am 99.9999% certain that it is nothing more than an award for what passes for “literature” within the “post-modern”, egalitarian, and “limousine leftist classes” of cities like New York, San Francisco, London, and Paris. I have nothing but contempt for the Nobel Prize in Literature and the people who receive it.

So, the fact that the main character was receiving a Nobel Prize in Literature meant I held great dislike for him right from the beginning, because I think only a complete “literary blaggard” could win it. But, it was even worse than that, because it turns out the person receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in “The Wife” is a complete “second-hander”, as Ayn Rand would say. His wife wrote all of his novels. (Although, I guess that means I think his wife is the literary blaggard, and he’s just a second-hand hack.)

Aside from the setting in Stockholm, the rest of the movie is set in a series of flashbacks to the past of the Husband and Wife, and how they met and eventually married. This is how it is revealed that the Wife wrote all of the Husband’s novels.

The Wife met her Husband when she was a college student and he was her creative writing professor. He was already married with a child, but he had an affair with her, and eventually leaves his first wife. We also eventually discover in subsequent flashbacks that he has been fired from his teaching position for having an affair with a student.

Early on, the Wife meets another female author, who apparently hasn’t had much success at writing. This older author tells her to stop writing and makes some vague reference to male sexism in the world. As the flashback subplot unfolds throughout the movie, we discover that this is probably the reason the Wife lets her husband take the credit for her writing -although they are never 100% clear on why she would let him do that. (More on that later.)

The notion that male sexism prevented women in the 1950’s and 1960’s from being successful authors was insulting for several reasons. First, it is not in accord with historical fact, and is simply an attempt to push a “feminist narrative” of “male oppression” that “keeps women writers down”. There have been numerous important female writers both during and before the 1950’s. To name a few: Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind), Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom’s Cabin), Mary Shelley (Frankenstein), Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice), Agatha Christie (Murder on the Orient Express), and Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird).

Second, the notion of “male sexism keeping women down” in publishing completely ignores one of the greatest fiction writers of the 20th Century. She did it all on her own, and the fact that she was a woman didn’t hurt her success in the least: Ayn Rand.

Miss Rand was a female writer who wrote literature in the 1940’s and 50’s dealing with fundamental questions about the individual and his relationship to the state and society. Her novels have been very successful. It wasn’t “male sexism” that opposed her. It was the “literary left”, which has hated and despised her from day one. It’s not men keeping great writers like Miss Rand down -its the “limousine leftist intelligentsia”.

Like I said, they never gave a realistic explanation for why this woman would have let her husband take credit for her writing in the movie. They simply implied it was all because of “male sexism”, which I’ve shown is not based in historical fact. There have been many female writers who were recognized as great and had successful careers, well before the 1950’s, when the flashbacks of “The Wife” take place. The movie did “touch on” two possible explanations that I found far more realistic, but it never fully developed the ideas, because it would have challenged several “sacred cows” of leftism.

The Wife in the movie met her husband as a student when he was her married professor, and they started an illicit affair. The Husband was fired when this came out, and it ended his teaching career. He then turned to writing, but it turned out he wasn’t a very good writer.

One of the more powerful scenes in the movie is during a flashback when the Wife has honestly told her husband that his writing isn’t good, and he throws a tantrum. (It’s a bad idea to let your spouse tell you if your writing is good or not.) She is in love with him, and I think she feels guilty for getting him fired from his teaching job. So, she offers to re-write his first novel.

This premise could have been “fleshed out” more in the movie. Her guilt over breaking up his marriage and getting him fired could have provided a much more believable motivation for why she would let him take credit for her writing. However, this is the era of “Me Too Feminism”, in which any professor who had an affair with his adult student is automatically going to be condemned as the person at fault. To suggest that a college professor’s adult female student could have any blame for his getting fired from his job is going to run afoul of one of the Hollywood left’s “Egalitarian Sacred Cows”. As a result, this premise was only hinted at in the movie, and not made sufficiently clear to establish that this was, in fact, the Wife’s motive for letting her husband take credit for her writing.

There is another possible motive “hinted at” in the movie for why the Wife lets her husband take credit for her writing. When the elderly Husband and Wife are having a fight after his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, the Wife has told her husband that she is leaving him. The Husband, who is Jewish, says she is not Jewish and that all of the things in the novels he supposedly wrote are about Jewish characters and subjects from his life. Basically, the husband accuses the wife of “cultural appropriation”.

First, I will note that the implicit premise here is a little bit “disturbing”. It is implied that this nice “Shiksa” has been “exploited” by her Jew husband, who is taking credit for her writing. The idea sounds a little bit “too close” to what a certain German political group in the 1930’s said about “Jewish exploitation of Germans”, and what certain “black nationalists” still say today about the Jews. However, I think fear of “cultural appropriation” accusations by critics would have formed a better premise for why the Wife couldn’t take credit for the writing.

It is widely believed among the “literary left” that only a person from a particular culture or race can write about characters from that culture or race. If a white person writes about a black protagonist, he is likely going to be condemned for “cultural appropriation”, which is regarded as a form of racism. Paradoxically, if a white author has only minor black characters, then he will be accused of using the “magic negro trope”, which is also supposedly racist.  A white author is damned by the left if he does, and damned by the left if he doesn’t have major black characters.

This premise that the Wife cannot write about Jewish characters because she isn’t Jewish is only “hinted at” in the movie in one, single scene. Additionally, if they were going to make this the motivating factor for why the Wife lets her husband take credit for her writing, then they should have made it more apparent by making the husband black, where she is writing about black characters and experiences. This would have made the fear of accusation of “cultural appropriation” more obvious. (Even better would be if it had been about a white husband married to a black woman, where the black woman is taking credit for the husband’s writing about black female characters and situations.)

It is clear to me why “The Wife” came out at this moment in time. It is a reaction to the election of Donald Trump, and the stunning and unexpected defeat of Hillary Clinton. There was a “certainty” among the left that Hillary Clinton would be our next president in 2016. Part of this arrogant refusal to see reality was based on the notion that Hillary Clinton had somehow “paid her dues”. I think that much of the “feminist agitation” of the last two years, including the so-called “Me Too Movement”, is the feminists throwing a “tantrum” because Hillary Clinton lost the election.

Hillary Clinton’s husband, Bill, was a well-known philanderer, who “couldn’t keep it in his pants”. “The Wife” attempts to explain Bill’s infidelities by showing the Husband in the movie to be a serial adulterer. The implication is that he is cheating on his wife because he knows he is a “writing hack” and resents the fact that his wife is actually the great writer. Sleeping with other women is his form of “retaliation”.

Similarly, feminists are convinced that Hillary was the “real President” during the Bill Clinton Presidency and that Bill was just a womanizing “political hack” that Hillary had to use because there are too many sexists out there who wouldn’t elect her President. Bill supposedly knew that Hillary was the “better politician”, and so he slept with women because of his deep-seated sense of inferiority in the face of Hillary’s supposed genius. (I doubt this is why Bill Clinton was an adulterer.)

I will note that Ayn Rand wrote about a similar situation in her novel “Atlas Shrugged”. There, the main female protagonist, Dagny Taggart, is only the “Vice President in Charge of Operation” of the family railroad business. Her worthless brother, James Taggart, is the “President” of the company, although he is just a “figurehead”, who gets in the way of Dagny when she tries to operate a successful business.

However, Miss Rand, unlike feminists, was “subtle” in her recognition of the genuine injustices against women. Furthermore, Dagny Taggart never sits around bemoaning her plight like modern-day feminists do, nor does Dagny Taggard act like a “victim”. Miss Rand also recognized there was plenty of injustice to go around, and that some of it was aimed at men by women. In “Atlas Shrugged”, Hank Reardon is treated quite badly by his wife, Lillian, who belittles his desire for sex as “animalistic” and “dirty”. (I suspect this was a common attitude of wives towards their husband’s sex drives throughout history.)

To somewhat “re-purpose” a famous line from Texas Senator Lloyd Benson: I’ve read “Atlas Shrugged”, Dagny Taggart is a literary friend of mine, and Hillary Clinton is no Dagny Taggart.

I think the more likely reason Hillary Clinton wasn’t elected President while her husband, Bill, was is two-fold: (1) Hillary Clinton was too far to the left, especially for a country just coming off the Ronald Reagan years. (2) Hillary Clinton had, and still has, a very unlikeable and abrasive personality. Like it or not, being President is partly about being able to “connect” with a lot of people in a subtle and probably “subconscious” way. If that wasn’t true, then some “autistic” Economics professor with zero interpersonal skills could probably be President. This lack of “connection” with the mass of people by Hillary Clinton had nothing to do with her gender and everything to do with her “haughtiness”. It was this pretentiousness that caused her to avoid putting much focus on campaigning in states like Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and it probably cost her the election.

“The Wife” is just Hollywood providing a “victim narrative” for why Hillary Clinton lost the election, with the standard left-wing “trope” of “male sexism” that supposedly “keeps women down”. The movie misses any opportunity to explore more realistic explanations for why there are second-handers in the world, and why there are people who let the second-handers take credit for their ideas and effort.

 

Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris Discussion/Debate Videos – Vancouver 2018

I spent the better part of my Labor Day weekend listening to this conversation between Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson. I just couldn’t stop listening to them because the conversation was so interesting. I highly recommend listening to both day 1 and day 2. The moderator, Bret Weinstein, who I was unfamiliar with, did a really great job.

In the last 10 minutes of day 2, Sam and Jordan summarize their positions.

My commentary is included in brackets [Like this.]:

Jordan:

2:07:00

He agrees with Sam that we need to ground our ethical structure in something “solid and demonstrable”, but he’s not sure how we do that.

He’s not sure we can derive a value structure from YOUR experience of the observable facts. [He emphasizes the word “your”.] There are too many facts, you need a structure to interpret them, and there isn’t very much of you.

That structure is provided neurologically. You have an inbuilt structure. It’s deep. It’s partly biological its partly a consequence of your socialization.

It may be derived from facts over the evolutionary time frame, but it’s not derived from facts over your lifetime, and it can’t be.

There are too many facts in reality for us to make sense of all of them without some sort of structure. That structure is provided by evolution. We need some sort of “a priori structure”. [He used the term “a priori structure” over and over.]

[I still have my same initial criticism of Jordan on this point. Why does the world need to “make sense”? Why do we need to “make sense” of all those facts? As a Randian, I say it’s because I want to live, and if I want to live I need to deal with the facts as best I can. That provides me with a “fundamental frame work” of value -which is my life as a living organism and a human being. But, I don’t know that Jordan would accept that. So on what ground does Jordan need to have the world “make sense”?]
Sam:

2:11:00

The conversation is the point.

Making sense in a way that is consequential because these are issues are of great consequence.

It matters whether we converge on the most important issues in human life.

I’m worried that religion doesn’t give us the tools that we need to converge.

What gives us the tools is a truly open-ended conversation.

You have to look at anything that creates any obstacles to that conversation being truly open-ended.

Religion presents those obstacles first and most readily. Its the idea that certain things have been decided for all time and that there is no future evidence or argument that is admissible.

There is a section of the bookstore [Sam gives an analogy here]. In that section of the book store, we cannot say those books need revision. We can pick and chose what works of Shakespeare that we like. With religion, you have to find some “tortured” way to make the most of god’s “diabolical” [Sam’s word] utterances. [I would have preferred it if Sam hadn’t used the word “diabolical”, since I think that is unnecessarily inflammatory.]

Jordan’s style of talking about religion and narrative seems to let people off the hook on that point. [I agree. This is the biggest problem with what Jordan Peterson is saying. It lets people “off the hook” and appears to be an attempt to “shield” their religious belief from any analysis by me or others.]

No one has the “right” to their religious sectarianism at this point in history -we need to say that. [I don’t think Sam meant people don’t have a right in a political or legal sense to the free exercise of religion. I think he means they don’t have a right to say those things without their being questioned by anyone.]

************************************

You can listen to these by going to either Sam Harris’ YouTube channel or Jordan Peterson’s YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0-oC_49fq4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-Z9EZE8kpo&t=6s

Karl Marx, Polylogism, and Utopian Socialism – How Fundamental Philosophy Drives History

I’m currently listening to: “The Long 19th Century:European History From 1789 to 1917”  Professor Robert I.Weiner (Disk 4, Lecture 7), from  ‘The Great Courses’ series.

https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/long-19th-century-european-history-from-1789-to-1917.html

It is a pretty ‘middle of the road’ series with no obvious ideological skew other than, maybe, ‘slightly left of center’, since it’s a mainstream college professor.

In it, he says Karl Marx called the other socialists ‘utopians’ because they believed that socialism could be achieved through peaceful means, maybe even with the assistance of other classes. That is where the term ‘utopian socialist’ comes from.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopian_socialism

Marx, on the other hand, believed that only violent class struggle could achieve socialism.

I realized when listening to this that Marx’s metaphysics and epistemology was driving his politics. He thought that your class determines your consciousness -that what class you are born into determines your logic. He was a ‘polylogist’ who believed in ‘many logics’. The proletarians have their method of thinking, the bourgeoise have theirs, the aristocracy have theirs, etc.

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/polylogism.html

Thus, for Marx, there could be no reasoning with those who control the factors of production, because they fundamentally don’t think like proletarians. Only violence could bring about socialism. Any socialist who thought you could reason with the bourgeoise was a ‘utopian’ -not recognizing reality. Marxism was therefore self-described as ‘scientific socialism’.

This explains the inevitable Marxist penchant for mass killing when they took over in a country. Anyone who wanted a peaceful transition to socialism was seen as naive at best.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism

Later, what I think happened is others picked up this same idea of polylogism and applied it to things besides class -such as your race or ethnicity. (Specifically, a certain political group in 1930’s Germany.) Once again, without a common frame of thinking and logic, any such proponent of ‘racially unique logic’ would be led to believe that no reason or discourse is possible between the races, and that only violence or separation is the solution.

I vaguely knew about polylogism from reading Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff. http://www.peikoff.com/lr/home.htm But,  I never really saw how one’s views on logic and the nature of the mind could have political ramifications like they clearly did on Marx when he referred to his fellow, non-violent, socialists as ‘utopians’. Furthermore, any time a Marxist committed murder, he had the perfect rationalization handy: He is serving the forces of historical necessity, and no reasoning is possible with the forces of counter-revolution because they don’t think like him.

Fundamental philosophy really does have political and social consequences for history.

Objectivism Conference Day 6

Logic Course Day 6

Most of Day 6 was a “questions and answers” session, and I don’t have much in the way of notes.

The only notes I have concern “propositional fallacies”.

The first is “self-exclusion”, which was defined as a form of self-refutation consisting of a contradiction between the content a proposition asserts and the act of asserting it.

An example of “self-exclusion” was: “We cannot be certain of anything.” I’ve heard this before. And my understanding is basically that by saying this, you are stating something with certainty, but you just said that you cannot be certain of anything…so you wind up in a sort of paradox or internal contradiction by saying this. I’m assuming the speaker called it “self-exclusion” because the speaker is, consciously or unconsciously, looking to “exclude” their statement from the general principle it asserts.

The speaker noted that you almost never “reach” anyone by pointing out when they’ve stated a self-exclusion like this. That is also my experience. Marxists will say that your class determines your consciousness, and that you can never get away from that, yet these same Marxists came from the bourgeois, and not the proletariat that they claim to speak for. But, if that is pointed out, they’ll just come up with some sort of complicated rationalization for why they’re different. (Although this might be more of an example of the next propositional fallacy.)

The second propositional fallacy that I have in my notes is the “stolen concept”. As far as I know, this is a term coined by Ayn Rand. http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/stolen_concept,_fallacy_of.html

A stolen concept was defined by the speaker as a hierarchy violation consisting of the attempt to use a concept in a way that ignores or denies the prior concepts on which it depends for meaning. One example given by the speaker of a “stolen concept” was: “A fully free society is an impossible ideal.” I think what the speaker meant was that “ideal” is being used without considering what “ideal” means. An ideal is “the possible”, so to say that an ideal is “impossible” is to disregard the fact that the concept of “ideal” is hierarchically dependent on the concept of “possible”. Another example of a “stolen concept” given by the speaker was: “We have an obligation to preserve the environment.” Here, “obligation” is being used without considering its logical hierarchy. What I think the speaker meant was this: Objectivism starts out by asking “Why be moral at all?” or “Why do we need morality?” http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/morality.html
Without getting into the details, which can be found in “The Objectivist Ethics” in _The Virtue of Selfishness_ by Ayn Rand, Objectivism says the concept of “moral obligation” depends on the concept of “value”, which depends on the concept of “mans life”, and the fact that you only need moral principles if you want to live. If you don’t want to live, then no moral principles are necessary. (Not only that, but no thinking, definitions, or concepts are necessary -we need to be rational in order to live.)

The idea of “hierarchy” requires a bit of explanation for someone not familiar with Objectivism. In the sense that it was being used by the speaker, “hierarchy” is a concept from Objectivism, or, at least, that is where I learned the concept. In “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology”, in the chapter on definitions, Rand says:

“Since the definition of a concept is formulated in terms of other concepts, it enables man, not only to identify and retain a concept, but also to establish the relationships, the hierarchy, the integration of all his concepts and thus the integration of his knowledge. Definitions preserve, not the chronological order in which a given man may have learned concepts, but the logical order of their hierarchical interdependence.” (See “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology”, Rand, Page 40, Kindle Edition, https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Objectivist-Epistemology-Expanded-Second-ebook/dp/B002OSXD8C/
)

What Rand meant when she spoke of “hierarchy” of concepts was the idea that certain concepts must logically depend on certain other concepts. A probable example of this is the concept “organism” compared to the concept “dog”. If you introspect a little, you will notice how the concept “dog” seems much “closer” in your mind to that which you perceive around you. How is it “closer”? You can visualize a dog in your mind with a single mental image, but how do you “visualize” an “organism”? “Organism” is a concept denoting any type of living thing, whether it is a plant, an animal, or an amoeba. You could draw a simplistic picture of a dog, but you couldn’t draw a picture of an “organism” and really “get it”. You’d have to have multiple pictures of different type of living things that are organisms. (A question here might be *which* dog do you visualize? Do you visualize a German Shepherd or a Chihuahua? But, only as compared to the concept “organism”, the concept “dog” is easier to visualize because you could visualize any particular dog you’ve seen, while you couldn’t visualize any *particular* organism you’ve seen and “grasp” the concept -you’d have to visualize different types of organisms, and doing so simultaneously would be difficult due to the “crow epistemology”, further discussed below.)

In fact, even “plant” and “animal” are concepts that seem, in some sense, to be “further” away from what you observe in the world around you. “Plant” can mean a rose, or a blade of grass, or a a tree. “Animal”  can mean a squirrel, a wasp, an oyster, or a human being. Rand also seemed to believe that the concept “animal” is logically dependent on underlying concepts like “squirrel”. Although, I will note here, that Rand discussed this issue at a seminar with various people, and she seemed to indicate that it is possible a child could form a concept “in a very loose way”, like “living entity” versus “inanimate object”, and then later subdivide the concept into “man”, “animal”, “plant” on the one hand and “tables”, “rocks”, and “houses” on the other. (See Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, Page 204, Kindle Ed. This appendix is her speaking extemporaneously, in response to other people’s questions, so whether it would have been her definitive view on the subject upon further consideration can also be questioned.) Rand said there was the possibility of “options” in terms of how a particular child formed a concept and the chronological order in which concepts were formed. When we speak of “hierarchy” we are speaking of the “logical order” of concepts, from an adult perspective.

I think it is probably impossible to form the concept “organism” without first forming the concepts of particular types of organisms because the concept “organism” involves too much observational data to be formed as an initial matter. Your mind cannot hold all of the observations that would be necessary to form that concept without underlying concepts. This phenomena of our minds is called “the crow epistemology” or “the crow” in Objectivist circles due to a story that was told to Ayn Rand at some point. The story is found at the beginning of chapter 7, “The Cognitive Role of Concepts” in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.

The concept of the “crow” can be grasped by way of the story in ITOE. You can read it there for the complete version, but here is my “run down”: Supposedly, a scientist ran an experiment in which someone hidden would observe another person walk into a clearing in the woods where a flock of crows had gathered. The crows would fly away at the approach of the person. The crows only returned to the clearing when the single person left the woods by the same route he came in. Then two people entered the forest, and went into the clearing. The crows left, and wouldn’t come back until *both* people had left. Then three people, to the same effect on the crows. Then, four people. Same effect on the crows. Then, when five people entered the woods and walked to the clearing, something different happened. Only four people left the forest, while the fifth person presumably hid somewhere in the forest near the clearing. The crows came back to the clearing because they couldn’t discern in their minds that while five people had entered the forest, only four had left.

Rand notes that regardless of whether this story is true, the phenomena can be grasped introspectively in your own mind. You can tell that “|||” is three, probably without counting. However, without counting, try to discern “|||||||||” from “|||||||||||”. It’s fairly difficult, without engaging in some sort of conceptual thought. (You might be able to discern a length difference in this example, but that wouldn’t be available to the crows in the forest, and measuring length is likely a form of conceptual consciousness anyway. If you made the lines I’ve drawn here nine random dots in a circle versus ten random dots in another circle, you probably couldn’t discern any difference without counting.)

Rand’s concept of “hierarchy” takes this fact about how our minds work, “the crow”, into account and then tries to develop a system of thinking based on it. So, she is not saying that the concept “dog” is somehow more fundamental than the concept “organism” in some sort of “metaphysical sense” -out there in the universe. http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/metaphysical.html
In reality, apart from human beings, there are just things. Human beings categorize them based on the needs of their minds and lives -which are also specific things with a specific identity.

I believe this feature of the human mind and the concept of “hierarchy” has practical consequences for how you should approach learning. For instance, if you want to study Biology, the science of living organisms, you have to learn something about individual living things. You study particular frogs by dissecting them. This helps you to learn about frogs. Then, you study particular pigs by dissecting fetal pigs. This teaches you something about pigs. Then, you see what frogs and pigs have in common, as animals. Then you study particular roses and particular trees and learn what they have in common as plants. Then you can discern what both plants and animals have in common as organisms. By way of contrast,  a Platonist will say there is an “ideal pig” somewhere in the Platonic realm and the pigs you see around you are just “shadows” of the ideal pig in the Platonic realm. http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/platonic_realism.html  https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism/

Then, the Platonist will say that there is an “ideal organism” in the Platonic realm, and all organisms are just a reflection of the ideal organism in the Platonic realm, and so on. But, none of these concepts necessarily have any logical connection in the mind of a Platonist. There isn’t any hierarchy there. The “ideal features” of an organism exist in the Platonic realm in some “pure” form, while the “ideal features” of a pig also exist in the Platonic realm in their “pure form”. I doubt that a science of biology would even be considered necessary for a Platonist. The Platonist could study pigs at the same time he studies the stars and human consciousness. There is no greater or lesser connection in the mind of a Platonist between pigs and other animals than there is between pigs and the chemical composition of the interior of the sun.  They’re all just a reflection of their ideal form. Furthermore, the Platonist believes he can learn something about the concept of “organism” without studying individual organisms. He just needs to “tap in” to the Platonic realm somehow.

I by no means consider myself to be an expert on Miss Rand’s epistemology, so what I’ve stated is just my own best understanding at the moment. If you found any of this interesting, I’d recommend reading three books. First, read “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology” by Ayn Rand. https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Objectivist-Epistemology-Expanded-Second/dp/0452010306/  Then read “Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand” by Leonard Peikoff https://www.amazon.com/Objectivism-Philosophy-Ayn-Rand-Library/dp/0452011019/
, especially the chapter on “Objectivity”. Finally, although I am only about halfway through it, you should read “How We Know: Epistemology on an Objectivist Foundation” by Harry Binswanger. https://www.amazon.com/How-Know-Epistemology-Objectivist-Foundation/dp/1493753142/

This last book is by the author who was speaking at the conference, and I think what he spoke on is covered in his book, so to the extent that I’ve misinterpreted anything he said, you can learn what he thinks by reading the book.

As far as other speakers were concerned on day 6, I don’t have any notes. I think I didn’t find the other topics covered that day of sufficient interest to attend any of them, when there were still things I wanted to see on what would likely be my only extended vacation of the year from work. (This gets into what Ayn Rand described as “the hierarchy of values”.  http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/teleological_measurement.html
)

Looking at the pictures I took on my phone, that was the day I took a bus south on Coast Highway to a place called Crystal Cove, near the beach. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Cove_State_Park  Although I had never been to that specific area, it reminded me of the Southern California beaches I would go to with family and friends as a child, so the geography, climate, vegetation, ocean, and wildlife all evoked strong memories for me from years that were probably fairly formative of my personality. There was a strong “nostalgia element” for me.

Once I got off the bus, I walked through scrub brush, trails, and down a hill to the actual beach, which was quite secluded. There were few people around, which gave the area a “magical” quality to me -like being the only person left in the world. This is a feeling that I think is nice to feel from time to time, although, if prolonged, it feels quite lonely. From there, I wandered down the beach for some distance until I found a series of dilapidated houses and a small bar and restaurant near the beach. From there, I had a beer, then walked back up the highway, and eventually caught a bus back. (The buses in the area were not great in terms of how often they ran, but I preferred a slow $4 bus ride to what might have been a $20 Uber ride.)

That night, I went to a West Coast Swing dance lesson and social dance, which I enjoyed a lot. I didn’t want to leave California without West Coast swinging.

Objectivism Conference Day 5

Logic Course Day 5

My notes show that we started with a  review of the homework. The first was coming up with the definition of “Rationalization”. Once again, I tried to work this idea out without using reference materials or the Internet for a definition.

The definition of “rationalization” I came up with prior to this class was: “An express explanation for something you do that hides or conceals your actual reason.”

The first thing that the speaker noted was that “rationalization” tended to be an “automatic thing”.

Examples the speaker gave were: (1)  a person who is dieting might say: “It’s all right to have that pie, it’s the weekend.” Or, (2) another person who wants to excuse his bad behavior might say: “I’m not to blame, because ‘freewill’ doesn’t exist.”

Facts giving rise to the concept of “rationalization” were: Freewill, “Honesty vs. Dishonesty”, “Rationality vs. Emotionalism”

“Near-relatives” of “rationalization” were: (1) “The check is in the mail” -Which I take as when someone says they have paid you when they really haven’t, but intend to do so very soon; (2) “Flattery” – which is where you complement someone with the motive to get something from them, or where you don’t really mean the compliment.

The “genus” or “rationalization” was described as: Deception.

The “differentia” of rationalization was described as: Deception of others and/or oneself about what’s really justified.

The full definition of “rationalization” given by the speaker based on the discussion was then: “Phony justifications manufactured to make emotionalism look enough like reason that one can indulge the emotionalism.”

The speaker then went over some “fallacies of conceptualization”.

According to my notes, which may be incomplete or not entirely accurate, the speaker discussed two broad categories of “fallacies of conceptualization”: (1) Insufficient Conceptualization, and (2) Mis-conceptualizations.

Regarding insufficient conceptualization, the speaker described three types: (a) Concrete-boundedness (i.e., non-conceptualization or non-integration); (b) Floating abstractions (i.e., “aborted conceptualization); and (c) “Frozen Abstraction” (i.e., insufficient conceptualization).

Regarding concrete-boundedness, I have no notes, but it is described some in the Ayn Rand Lexicon: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/learning.html  http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/guild_socialism.html

The remedies for floating abstractions given by the speaker were to come up with: examples, definitions, and “reduction”. (This last term is an Objectivist term that you can find more information about in Leonard Peikoff’s book: “Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand”).

Regarding “frozen abstraction”, the speaker gave as an example: “Communism = Soviet Union”. I believe what the speaker was getting at here is that when you criticize communism by pointing to examples of the bad things the Soviets did, an apologist for communism will say “That was just the Soviet Union, I am a socialist, and my society will be different.” Basically, the speaker denies that what they believe is the same as what happened in the Soviet Union by saying in their mind: “Communism=Soviet Union”.

The example I came up with of “frozen abstraction” was “morality=altruism”, or “morality=religion”. So, you can only be moral if you are religious or an altruist. I got these examples from Rand. http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/frozen_abstraction,_fallacy_of.html

Within the category of “Mis-conceptualization” the speaker said these are “invalid concepts”. They either: (a) have no units, (b) have the wrong units, or (c) are what Rand called “anti concepts”. Keep in mind that “units” is an Objectivist term. http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/unit.html

Regarding mis-conceptualizations that have no units, I have no examples in my notes, but I think the speaker was referring to terms like “ghost”. Since ghosts have no units, it is a mis-conceptualization to have a concept of “ghosts”. Although, I think “ghosts” can be a valid concept in the sense of: “A mythological being that exists only in fiction and made-up stories.” Just like “Elf” is: “A mythological being that exists only in fiction and made-up stories.”  There is no referent in reality, but you can have the concept “ghost” as long as you have as part of your definition that the thing isn’t real.

Regarding mis-conceptualizations that have the wrong units, I have in my notes that the speaker spoke of “package deals”. This is a term adopted by Ayn Rand. http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/package-dealing,_fallacy_of.html  The speaker said a “package deal” puts together in one concept things that are incompatible. For instance, “extremism”.  The speaker said the solution to this was the rule of “fundamentality”. http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/fundamentality,_rule_of.html

Regarding “anti-concepts”, which is a term coined by Ayn Rand, the speaker said these are bad concepts designed with an “evil purpose”.http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/anti-concepts.html

The speaker said “socialization” is an example of this. “Socialization” was described by the speaker as a theory that the child gets his values and norms from other children. He says it implies that everyone is a “Peter Keating” and there are no “Howard Roark’s” http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/selflessness.html
. That learning is all “imitation” and that there is no observation of reality.

Another example given by the speaker of an “anti-concept” was “homelessness”, which is an attempt to destroy the concept of “bum”.

This isn’t in my notes, but I think what he was getting at was how you are throwing out all moral and ethical judgments that come with someone who chooses not to work and to just sit on the side of the road collecting money despite being able-bodied and able-minded to work. I think you have to distinguish between people who are not mentally-ill and have all of their limbs and choose not to work, who should be described as “bums”, versus people who are either mentally ill or missing body parts and can be somewhat morally excused for having no place to live and being unable to care for themselves. Calling both of those groups “homeless” destroys the moral distinction between those two types of people panhandling on the streets and sidewalks of most major American cities.

Objectivist 4th Of July Celebration
That’s all I have in my notes from July the 4th. Since it was a holiday, I believe there were no other lectures that day. There was an hour-long 4th of July celebration that I attended. Someone sang “America the Beautiful”, which I hadn’t heard since Elementary school in Texas.

One of the distinctions I remember between Elementary school in Texas versus when I attended it in California in the 1980’s, was the promotion of patriotism in Texas by saying the Pledge of Allegiance and singing “America the Beautiful” in Elementary school. (I have some criticisms of Texas Elementary schools too, but that is for another time.)

There was also a reading of the “Declaration of Independence” at the Objectivism conference, which I realized is probably not read in school any more, since it refers to “merciless Indian Savages” and also makes allusions to “domestic insurrections”, which is clearly a reference to slaves in the South. http://www.ushistory.org/Declaration/document/

Neither of these references bothers me at all -but I’m probably ‘out of touch’ with the cultural mainstream of America at this point. I’m certainly “out of touch” with most people who have a college degree -but I view this with pride.

I suspect if the Declaration is read in school today, it is with a heavy dose of retroactively imposing the knowledge-level of modern-day persons on people from the 18th century. Or, more likely, teachers in schools today emphasize the references to Indians and slaves in the Declaration of Independence in an effort to get students to mentally “throw out” the essential message of the Declaration of Independence, which is that all men have “unalienable rights”,  in order to make way for the “Progressive’s” collectivist ideology of socialism and the destruction of the sanctity of the individual.

As an aside, this is pretty much the same agenda associated with any effort to take down monuments to Thomas Jefferson and George Washington on the grounds that they owned slaves. It’s an attempt to take a non-essential of these historical figures and turn it into an excuse to destroy their essential meaning as historical figures  -which was that they advocated limited government, whose purpose is to allow people to pursue their unalienable rights to life liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We study and revere certain historical figures because of their effect on the present, not because they were entirely consistent or because they had views or activities that were common to many people of that era. For instance, Isaac Newton is studied and revered because he developed a system of Physics that is still widely used today, not because he believed he could transmute lead into gold through alchemy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton%27s_occult_studies

The notion that Newton had some unscientific views was a reflection of the era he lived in. The fact that he “rose above it” to develop the Theory of Universal Gravitation is why he is remembered today, and why he is regarded as a hero of science. That is the “essence” of Isaac Newton as a historical figure -even if the man didn’t always live up to that standard in some areas of his life.

Since Objectivism is explicitly an atheist philosophy, when the group-pledge was said at the conference, the words “under God” were explicitly removed. The guy leading the pledge of allegiance also somewhat “jokingly” noted that since half the audience was foreign, they were “excused” from saying it.

My own “relationship” with the Pledge of Allegiance is somewhat complicated, and I chose to simply stand while other Americans at the conference participated. (I have blogged before on saying the pledge, and I won’t re-iterate it here.)

Ayn Rand Institute Tour
I believe after the 4th of July Celebration, all I did conference-wise was go on a tour of the Ayn Rand Institute  that was being given. It was fairly interesting to see where the organizers of the conference worked on a daily basis. It had a lot of art work up on the walls, and various other things that would be of interest to Ayn Rand fans, so I enjoyed seeing it.

Trip to Balboa Peninsula
I then spent my afternoon touring the Newport Beach area, specifically Balboa Peninsula, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balboa_Peninsula,_Newport_Beach
, which appeared to be the heart of the local tourist industry, with numerous beach houses and public beaches. Since it was the 4th of July, it was very crowded. I was glad I took a bus to the base of peninsula and then walked in, since traffic made travel by car almost impossible.

I was pleased to see so many American flags on display around the peninsula, as I have a perception of California as an anti-patriotic, left-wing state. Although, I think Orange County, the home of John Wayne, is somewhat of a “cultural outlier” on the coast of California. Orange County has more in common with Texas than it does with Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other major population areas of the Golden State. One evening, I happened upon the web site of a local venue where dancing occurs, and I did a bit of a “double take” when I saw a Confederate Flag. (Even mentioning this somewhat concerns me, because I can see leftists now combing the dance venues of Orange County looking for Rebel flags so that they can ship in large numbers of protestors from Los Angeles to disrupt that business.)

Generally, my impression of the City of Newport Beach was fairly negative. I found it to have a “museum quality”, with few people, and very little “youthful energy”. I saw no production going on -just consumption, with a bunch of malls. It felt like a big shopping center or retirement community to me. A nice place for a vacation, but I don’t believe I’d enjoy living there. That day on the peninsula was an exception to my feeling. There were a lot of young people doing all of the things, both good and bad, that young people tend to do. The area felt very “alive” as a result.