WatDabney

When did we start rewarding politicians for being angry and stupid?

Ron Mael would beg to differ.

We’re Not Gonna Take It by Twisted Sister. Of course.

We could well be heading towards something interesting in the not very distant future.

I’m not sure if Musk sincerely believes his wealth makes him untouchable or if he’s too self-absorbed to even consider the matter, but it works out to the same thing either way - he’s likely wrong.

He can get away with a fair bit manipulating an emotionally stunted egomaniac like Trump, but when he starts trying to butt into European politics, he’s going to find himself running up against families that have been pulling political strings for centuries now, and who don’t fancy crude upstarts with nothing more than money going for them, and if he proves to be too much of a problem for them, they’re going to squash him like a bug.

The DNC needs the far right. Without it, their candidates would have to run on actual positions, rather than just “Vote for us because we’re not Republicans.”

I mostly like “rational self-interest” as a sort of framing device.

I believe egoism to be a fact. I think every choice that * every* person makes is self-interested, even those that appear to be entirely altruistic.

Presuming that to be true, there are two things that I consider vital - that people are aware that that’s what they’re doing, and that they focus on doing it as rationally as possible.

And yes - “rational” is a slippery concept. The details are elusive at best, and much more to the point, necessarily subjective (which IMO is the part that Rand most vividly got wrong and Stirner, by contrast, got right). But while that means that a sort of universal formalization of the concept would be difficult at best, I tend to think it’s not necessary - that if people essentially stay within the guardrails of “rational self-interest” and maintain some measure of intellectual honesty and sound critical thinking, whatever it might all shake out to be couldn’t help but be at the very least more broadly good than bad, and certainly more broadly good than the various delusional authoritarianisms to which we’re subjected.

Thanks for the response.

Certainly there’s more nuance to them. As I said, I think that “rational self-interest” is fundamental to both of them - it’s nothing close to the sum of either one.

And for the record, I have zero respect for objectivism and a great deal of respect for egoism.

But that’s really beside the point. I’m not arguing for or against either one. My point has been explicitly about the underlying concept of rational self-interest in and of itself, and specifically the fact that it’s consistently misrepresented by its critics (or more precisely by Rand’s critics, who incorrectly ascribe the idea to her and her alone).

I think what I’m describing is fundamental to both of them, that most of the differences between the two philosophies are at the peripheries, and that far and away the most significant difference between the two is that one was proposed by Rand, who’s a designated target for people eager to earn hip internet leftist cred through a public display of unequivocal hatred, and the other was proposed by Stirner, who’s someone that most are only vaguely aware of, if at all.

But that’s the stance that proponents of ‘rational self-interest’ have settled on.

No - it’s the stance that people who want to self-affirmingly publicly proclaim their hatred of Rand have assigned to proponents of rational self-interest.

That’s the heart of my criticism - people don’t discuss or debate the idea - they just trip over each other in their rush to be the one to most vividly proclaim their hatred of Rand. Hating Rand is like a hip internet leftist membership badge, so every time her name comes up, everybody who wants to solidify their image as a hip internet leftist rushes in to say, “Hey! Look at me! Look at how much I hate her! That means I’m one of you!”

And since the hatred comes first, everything else is shaped to accommodate it. Like, for instance, misrepresenting the idea of rational self-interest so that it becomes something easily condemned so that it can be added to the list of reasons to hate Rand.

She is, however, acting in her own rational self-interest by keeping all the value of the new machine for herself and not passing it on to her workers.

No, she rather obviously is not, as vividly illustrated by the fact that she caused so much hostility that she ends up going to the guillotine.

She is very clearly acting in her irrational self- interest.

If she were acting in the group’s rational self-interest, she would allow them to work half as long.

And if she were acting in her own rational self-interest, she would do the same, since her well-being (and in fact, as neatly illustrated in the comic, her very life) depends on the well-being of the group.

Since she is acting in her own rational self-interest, she threatens to fire her workers if they do not work the same hours as before and pass the value on to her.

No. Again, she is rather obviously acting in her own irrational self-interest, as vividly illustrated in the last panel.

Any purely rational person (as opposed, mind you, to an empathetic one) would take the option to do that.

What on earth leads you to believe that rationality and empathy are mutually exclusive?

As social animals, empathy is eminently rational, and in fact I would argue that rationality is impossible without it.

Rational group interest IS rational self-interest.

As social animals living in communities and as part of any number of groups, we must, if we’re rational, be mindful of the well-being of groups, because our own well-being depends on it.

‘Rational self interest’ is just being selfish.

No it in fact is not. Selfishness causes any number of negative consequences - suffering, hostility, crime, conflict, rebellion, war, death… So it’s bludgeoningly obviously irrational, and therefore cannot be rational self interest.

Or more pointedly, they are all things that illustrate ways in which it’s in your rational self-interest to not be a dickhead.

All of Ayn Rand’s own examples of rational self interest were irrational and against her interests.

Yes, they were. She was a shallow, ego-driven, willfully ignorant reactionary.

But that has nothing really to do with rational self-interest as an idea.

It’s such an easy philosophy to mock because it’s just really stupid.

Except that it’s not.

What’s stupid is the plainly irrational choices that are made and ascribed to “rational” self-interest.

True rational self interest would involve creating cooperative structures that give a safety net if anything goes wrong.

Exactly.

So the simple fact of the matter is that when someone argues against those safety nets, they aren’t actually arguing from a position of rational self-interest.

The philosophy hasn’t failed - they have.

That series of steps, common or not, is bludgeoningly irrational, and for multiple reasons.

In fact, the introductory part of the comic, showing her rejecting the entirely rational option of working half as long to produce the same amount clearly communicates the point that it’s irrational, as does the last frame, illustrating the consequences of her self-evidently irrational choice.

I’m still waiting for a critique of rational self-interest that doesn’t fail right out of the gate by stipulating an irrational position or decision.

This one wasn’t even vaguely close.

Funny. Far and away the most noxious person I’ve seen on this thread isn’t the OP, but you.

Does that matter?

I’m toying with the idea that we’re all wrong, and it was actually widespread fraud that “won” the election for Trump.

And that’s the entire point really.

Behind all of the sturm und drang and all of the Christian nationalist noise and all of the hate and all of the furor is, and has been from the start, a handful of fabulously wealthy psychopathic fuckwads who recignized in Trump an opportunity to protect and even expand their entirely undeserved and grotesquely destructive privilege.

Actually, that’s been the case for just about exactly 16 years. I watched it happen in real time.

I went through a libertarian phase in the 80s and 90s, mostly because I couldn’t reconcile my anarchist sensibilities with the fact that humanity just isn’t ready to do entirely without authority. I eventually just gave in and shifted to anarchism, since it’s really the only position that’s consistent with my principles, and I just treat it as more of an ideal toward which to strive than an actual immediate goal.

In any event, I knew the libertarian movement of the era. It was more right- than left-wing even then, but it was primarily libertarian, exactly as the term implies - primarily focused just on minimizing political authority.

Then came the Tea Party.

The first Tea Party protests were organized by actual libertarians and were specifically against the Wall Street bailouts in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis that Wall Street had essentially single-handedly caused. And notably, they were against the Bush administration.

But then, shortly after Obama’s victory, with a suspiciously well-timed and widespread boost fron the legacy media reporting on an even more suspiciously well-timed on-air comment by Jim Cramer, the Tea Party was recast into a Republican protest against the left. And it almost immediately transformed from a series of protests against the Wall Street bailouts to a traveling right-wing carnival of hate. (And conveniently enough, the focus on the Wall Street bailouts completely vanished).

While I saw that happen I didn’t recognize the near-immediate Overton Window shift it triggered until I noticed a sudden influx of libertarians on anarchist forums. And they all had the same story - they had abandoned their libertarian forums because they had been taken over by angry, stupid Republicans.

And that became the status quo. The former libertarians mostly settled into their own sub-community of “anarcho-capitalists” and the libertarian movement is now pretty much just angry, stupid Republicans who are only marked out by the fact that they lean more into corporatocracy and militarism than religious fundamentalism and social war.