gattsuru comments on Stupid Questions December 2014 - Less Wrong

16 Post author: Gondolinian 08 December 2014 03:39PM

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Comment author: advancedatheist 08 December 2014 07:44:20PM *  1 point [-]

Did organized Objectivist activism, at least in some of its nuttier phases, offer to turn its adherents who get it right into a kind of superhuman entity? I guess you could call such enhanced people "Operating Objectivists," analogous to the enhanced state promised by another cult.

Interestingly enough Rand seems to make a disclaimer about that in her novel Atlas Shrugged. The philosophy professor character Hugh Akston says of his star students, Ragnar Danneskjold, John Galt and Francisco d'Anconia:

"Don't be astonished, Miss Taggart," said Dr. Akston, smiling, "and don't make the mistake of thinking that these three pupils of mine are some sort of superhuman creatures. They're something much greater and more astounding than that: they're normal men—a thing the world has never seen—and their feat is that they managed to survive as such. It does take an exceptional mind and a still more exceptional integrity to remain untouched by the brain-destroying influences of the world's doctrines, the accumulated evil of centuries—to remain human, since the human is the rational."

But then look at what Rand shows these allegedly "normal men" can do as Operating Objectivists:

Hank Rearden, a kind of self-trained Operating Objectivist who never studied under Akston, can design a new kind of railroad bridge in his mind which exploits the characteristics of his new alloy, even though he has never built a bridge before.

Francisco d'Anconia can deceive the whole world as he depletes his inherited fortune while making everyone believe that he spends his days as a playboy pickup artist, when he in fact he has lived without sex since his youthful sexual relationship with Dagny.

John Galt can build a motor which violates the conservation of energy and the laws of thermodynamics. Oh, and he can also confidently master Dagny's unexpected intrusion into Galt's Gulch despite his secret crush her, his implied adult virginity and his lack of an adult man's skill set for handling women. (You need life experience for that, not education in philosophy.) On top of that, he can survive torture without suffering from post-traumatic stress symptoms.

So despite Rand's disclaimer, if you view Atlas Shrugged as "advertising" for the abilities Rand's philosophy promises as it unlocks your potentials as a "normal man," then the Objectivist organizations which work with this idea implicitly do seem to offer to turn you into a "superhuman creature."

Comment author: gattsuru 08 December 2014 09:27:18PM *  2 points [-]

A number of these matters seem more narrative or genre conveniences : Francisco acts a playboy in the same way Bruce Wayne does, Rearden's bridge development passes a lot of work to his specialist engineers (similarly to Rearden metal having a team of scientists skeptically helping him) and pretends that the man is still a one-man designer (among other handwaves). At the same time, Batman is not described as a superhuman engineer or playboy, nor would he act as those types of heroes. I'm also not sure we can know the long-term negative repercussions John Galt experiences given the length of the book, and not all people who experience torture display clinically relevant post-traumatic stress symptoms and many who do show them only sporadically. His engine is based on now-debunked theories of physics that weren't so obviously thermodynamics-violating at the time, similarly to Project Xylophone.

These men are intended to be top-of-field capability from the perspective of a post-Soviet writer who knew little about their fields and could easily research less. Many of the people who show up under Galt's tutelage are similarly exceptionally skilled, but even more are not so hugely capable.

On the other hand, the ability of her protagonists to persuade others and evaluate the risk of getting shot starts at superhuman and quickly becomes ridiculous.

On the gripping hand, I'm a little cautious about emphasizing fictional characters and acknowledgedly Heroic abilities as evidence, especially when the author wrote a number of non-fiction philosophy texts related to this topic.