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Selfish John's avatar

An Open Response to Craig Biddle's Evasion

You have chosen to respond to my systematic critique not by engaging its substance, but by retreating to the safe abstraction of "life as the standard of value." This evasion speaks volumes. While your latest article accurately presents this fundamental ethical principle, its timing and context reveal it as a defensive maneuver—an attempt to reassert philosophical authority while avoiding the specific contradictions I documented. You discuss morality in general terms precisely to avoid discussing your own moral contradictions in particular.

Your response demonstrates a critical failure to understand philosophy's hierarchical nature. Ethics cannot stand alone any more than multiplication can exist without addition. You attempt to perform complex ethical calculations while remaining willfully ignorant of the epistemological operations that make them possible. This would be like learning that 5×4 equals 20 while rebelling against the fact that 4×5 or 20/1 are all the same fundamental operation. You want the answer without understanding the process, the conclusion without the reasoning that makes it valid.

The problem isn't just intellectual—it's moral. Tribalism is tribalism, dependence is dependence, your evasion is evasion. None of these become virtues simply because you practice them while wearing the label of Objectivism. You cannot claim self-esteem while engaging in the very authority-worship that destroys it. Your approach represents the philosophical equivalent of wanting the product without the factors, the effect without the cause, the answer without the work required to earn it.

Angels on high

The analysis of Angelica Walker-Werth's attempted distinction provides a perfect case study of how supposedly Objectivist thinkers betray rational principles while maintaining the vocabulary of reason. Her effort to distinguish between "mental" and "physical" pleasures represents the same fundamental error as the Platonic dualism she claims to reject.

The "high/low" dichotomy is profoundly false and horrible because it represents a fundamental misidentification of human nature. The very notion of "mindless pleasure" is a contradiction in terms—all pleasure is experienced by a mind, by a consciousness. When you feel pleasure from basking in the sun or from reading philosophy, you're experiencing the same psychological mechanism: the emotional response to value-achievement. To claim otherwise is to misunderstand both consciousness and values.

If higher pleasures were possible in and by themselves, they could not be obtained otherwise unless one turns to mysticism and madness. The pursuit of "higher values" disconnected from "lower values" ultimately means brainlessness—it requires severing consciousness from its perceptual foundation, from the biological reality that gives values their meaning. This isn't philosophy; it's self-alienation disguised as enlightenment.

The correct, objective model is one of integration and hierarchy of values, not pleasures. Higher values are a guide for possible and desired development, but they must be derived from the processing and study of one's lower values. Higher values have NO meaning if one does not respect the actual values and possibilities now. You cannot build a skyscraper of ethical principles without first understanding and valuing the foundation of your own biological and psychological needs.

Walker-Werth's distinction commits the classic philosophical error of invalid concept formation. The pleasure of reading philosophy and the pleasure of a backrub both represent successful value-achievement for an integrated consciousness. To categorize them as different kinds of pleasure based solely on the complexity of conceptual engagement is to misunderstand the nature of both consciousness and values.

This corruption spreads from epistemology to ethics. A rational egoism built on this dualistic foundation becomes irrational in practice. It maintains the language of self-interest while undermining the psychological integration required to actually achieve it. This is how you get Objectivists who can eloquently defend individualism while supporting political figures who embody everything opposed to reason and individual rights.

Trump

This brings us to the ultimate demonstration of corrupted rational egoism: the Objectivist appeasement of Donald Trump. Here we see the final consequence of disintegrating philosophy from practice, of maintaining ethical principles while abandoning their methodological foundation.

Trump represents the absolute negation of Objectivist values. He explicitly rejects reason in favor of "gut feeling." He openly mocks independence and integrity. He shows contempt for individual rights, for consistency, for honesty, for every virtue you claim to champion. Yet I find supposed Objectivists making excuses for him, suggesting that he "just works."

But what does "just works" mean when divorced from principle? It means choosing not actual change, not dissolution of government or thinking and learning, but choosing between two ways to lose your soul instead of living or saving it for yourself. It means working without individualism, without reason, without personal independence, without honesty, without consistency in anything good. It means embracing the primordial collectivism of tribal politics while maintaining the pretense of individualism.

This phenomenon reveals the dirty secret of much modern Objectivism: for many of its adherents, it has become just another tribal identity rather than a methodology of reason. The principles become signaling mechanisms rather than guides to action. The movement becomes focused on boundary-policing rather than truth-seeking. And the result is the exact opposite of what Ayn Rand intended: instead of independent thinkers, you get orthodox followers; instead of reason, you get rationalization.

Epistemology

The solution to this corruption isn't better ethics—it's better fundamentals. You need to talk less about morality and more about basic logic, definitions, and reduction. You need to focus on how you know what you know, how you form valid concepts, how you distinguish self-evident truths from arbitrary assertions.

I don't care about the masses of people who will never understand these distinctions. I care about the individuals who should know better—individuals like you who have the capacity for genuine understanding but choose tribal comfort instead. Ethics is only a map for navigating values, not the territory itself. It cannot create values out of nothing, nor can it solve every problem by itself. A map is useless if you don't know how to read it, if you don't understand the relationship between the symbols and the actual landscape.

Your ethical principles are that map—beautifully drawn, exquisitely detailed, but ultimately useless if you cannot connect them to perceptual reality. The tragedy of your approach is that you've become a curator of maps rather than an explorer of territories. You spend your time polishing the map, arguing about its details, showing it to others—but you rarely venture into the actual landscape to test it against reality. All your criticism of religion is aimed at a weak, dummy adversary. But religion is bad architecture, bad architecture is what constitutes the primacy of consciousness, and you've lost to it.

Consistency is regular practice, not a static achievement. The ideal of consistency is the way of knowing whether you're committed to practice or not. You can achieve many things intellectually, but you can betray them only by passivity and dependence in effect. That is what you do. You maintain the appearance of philosophical commitment while engaging in the very evasions that make genuine commitment impossible.

You think only when you're supposed to think, only about what you're supposed to think about. You don't think just to see clearly; you think to adhere to others or to maintain your self-image as an "orthodox Objectivist." This is the ultimate betrayal of the philosophy you claim to represent. Objectivism demands that you place reality above all else—above tradition, above authority, above social acceptance, above your own previous conclusions.

Your non-response to the anarchist critique, your false equivalence between Kirk and historical martyrs of reason, your tribal definition of Objectivism—these aren't minor errors. They're systematic manifestations of a deeper psychological pattern: the preference for tribal safety over philosophical consistency.

I thought you were different. I thought you were a man of genuine integrity, someone who would follow reason wherever it leads regardless of the consequences. I admired your work, your clarity, your apparent commitment to principle. That's why your evasions disappoint me so deeply—they represent the betrayal of what I believed you stood for.

Thank you for what you were before. Thank you for the articles that genuinely advanced understanding, for the moments when you truly championed reason over tribalism. I'll take those moments with me. I'll build on them. But I cannot follow you into the territory of evasion and compromise.

The measure of a philosophy isn't in its elegant formulations but in its consistent practice. By that measure, you've fallen short. But the principles themselves remain valid, waiting for thinkers with the courage to apply them without compromise. Those principles require proper architecture and deep understanding—the basics means to know. Principles are super-condensed integrations of self-evident truths. If not grounded in this understanding, they are lost and betrayed. Ethics is a derivative discipline that depends entirely on getting the basics right.

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Dave Walden's avatar

As usual, a powerful article!

How I have come to understand "morality' is as follows:

Man has "free will." He may exercise this powerful capacity as he chooses. This capacity gives rise to the very concept of morality. Take away his will and his freedom in its exercise, and the need for such a concept as morality logically vanishes.

Morality then defines responsibility. If Man must choose between alternatives that range from the furtherance of his life to its destruction - both materially and spiritually, then he is responsible for the choices he makes. If he is responsible for the choices he makes, then he must have the right(s) necessary to fulfill this responsibility - qua man.

The above reasoning is why I always tout responsibility prior to "rights."

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