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Rand claimed that people had no survival instincts. She claimed that reason was humanity’s only mental tool of survival. She defined reason in this way: “Reason is the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by the senses.” She claimed that mentally normal people have complete free will in regard to the use or non-use of reason. She claimed that all emotions are triggered by reasoned judgments. Rand often said: “Emotions are not tools of cognition.”
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Her model of the mind has been discredited by research in the relevant fields of neurology, psychology, and child development. It is true that humans are not born with survival instincts in the way that amoebas or other microscopic animals have them. We are not born knowing how to survive or reproduce. However, we are born
with a multitude of automatic responses to varying types of incoming sensory data. Survival would be virtually impossible without these “instincts”.
Most importantly, the preponderance of evidence suggests that our most
basic feelings of happiness are triggered by experiences of physical pleasure.
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Without such automatic responses to the outside world, reason could make no evaluations of positivity or negativity.
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Research has determined that much of what Rand calls reason happens on a subconscious level. Therefore, its false to claim that people have complete free-will in regard to the use of reason. It’s also been shown that strong emotions distort reason, so that reason is not entirely objective.
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More scientific information on the mind can be found in:
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell, and in many books by Oliver Sacks, such as
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and
An Anthropologist on Mars.
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Ayn Rand also made logical errors. Rand claimed that each person should regard his or her own life as their supreme good. She said that this was logically necessary, because without life, no value could be experienced. It’s true that one must exist to do anything, but that does not force anyone to regard the continuation of life as a positive value. Each year, millions of rational people freely choose to commit suicide. Also, there are millions of people who classify their own lives as secondary or contingent values. The classic example of this is the soldier who goes into battle hoping to live, while being resigned to possible death.
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It’s clear that Rand’s assertion that self-preservation should be the basis of morality is an emotional or aesthetic preference. But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that it is objectively true.
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In that case, we would expect a set of moral rules that promoted longevity, health, and risk-avoidance, and that classified as evil anything that tends to shorten life. Suicide would be the worst possible “vice”. Concern for others would be contingent on their
relevance to one’s continued survival. There could be situations
where murder, robbery, or enslavement were justified.
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This is
not the type of morality that Rand admired.
She advocated a “man qua man” ethos that oddly resembled the old code of chivalry associated with such cultural icons as Don Quixote and Cyrano De Bergerac. There is a sentence in her novel,
Atlas
Shrugged, that perfectly illustrates the pivot she made away from
what would logically be expected from her premise, and the actual type
of morality she wanted to promote:
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“Man’s life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, of a looting thug, or a mooching mystic, but the
life of a thinking being — not life by means of force or fraud, but
life by means of achievement — not survival at any price, since there’s
only one price that pays for man’s survival: reason.”
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This statement flatly contradicts her foundational claim
that a person’s individual, biological life is the standard of good. While looting thugs and mooching mystics may not be lovely people, if they are doing what is needed to preserve their own lives, then they are doing right according to Rand’s premise. When she denies this, she is lapsing into self contradiction and illogic.
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I think that I have said enough to show why I object to Objectivism.
It’s morality is based on subjective emotion, and therefore, it’s not scientifically superior to other emotion-based moral systems, such as those preached by Christians or Buddhists. It’s very ironic that Rand made a
virtual religion, while constantly proclaiming that reason is superior
to faith.
—Don Cormier
I doubt that people’s behavior is governed by intellect. It’s more likely that it’s governed by instinctive drives, most of which are probably sexual, as is generally true of animals that reproduce sexually. People’s intellect might be nothing more than an additional “appendage” that they use to satisfy their instinctive drives. I suggest that people’s intellect is different in degree only, and not different in kind, from that of the other animals. Just take a look around. The results appear to speak for themselves, and they’re not encouraging. —editor