I think you're pretty close to the core of this one. You identified that having something to protect gives you strength. And having a worthy cause to work for, for the same reason.
But what is that reason? What is it that gives you strength? What is the underlying cause of us gaining strength from certain causes?
I'm not certain I understand the topic well enough myself, but I think I have something that you might find insightful here.
Moral Idealism. That's where your power comes from. Whether you're fighting to protect a loved one, or you're fighting to pro...
I feel I must reply to my own post to update a bit as what I believe has changed a little.
By the nature of humans, every individual human is potentially valuable to you unless they prove themselves otherwise. Humans are capable of reason, productivity, trade, etc.
Just don't go sacrificing the actual (yourself) to the potential (the usefulness of a stranger). If you can aid someone in an emergency without risking yourself, there is a selfish justification for doing so.
I just came from a debate with a friend of mine about emergence, so here's a simple example of what emergence is and isn't that I just told to him. (That he rejected anyway.)
Let's take, as an example, a car. Motion is an emergent property in cars. (I'm talking about motion on the level we live on that allows whole objects to move great distances.)
The pieces of the car, gathered into a pile, could not move. So motion was not a property in the parts making up the car. Motion emerges when the parts are built into the complex relationship that makes up the car...
I come hailing as a more learned Objectivist than I was before. This article actually caused me to go find an online Objectivist community for the purpose of observing them to see if your assertion was true. I've found that it is not. I have not met a single "whiny" Objectivist out of all of the Objectivists I now chat almost-daily with.
Objectivism holds a primacy of existence attitude towards reality, as opposed to a primacy of consciousness attitude. This means that reality comes before our wishes, and if we want our wishes to come true, we hav...
Ah, but you see, I was arguing at the technical level, not on the "it's good to call it this" level.
I believe that absolute certainty is required. Not in all, and probably not even in most things. But absolute certainty has to be possible, because without it, I must give technical possibility to self-contradicting statements like this one:
"God exists, he is omniscient, infallible, and he can make a boulder that he cannot lift."
Can you tell me that all the pieces of that statement are technically possible?
P.S. I don't think I commit the ...
I cannot accept that Probability must be applied to everything. Which of course indirectly states that there are no absolutes, since probability has no 0 or 1.
If you discard absolutes, you must be willing to accept mysticism and contradictions.
I can create a long list of false or contradictory statements, and anyone who lives by probabilities must obediently tell me that every one of them is possible.
"Does God exist?" "Probably not, but it's possible."
"Can he create a boulder that he cannot lift?" "Probably not, but i
Where do you think social systems get their power? People give it to them, then the population becomes ignorant and/or apathetic and allows it to run amok with no attempts to strip it of the power they gave it.
The idea isn't that you just expose the evil. You have to deny it power over you.
It's those looters who don't approve of excellence who are keeping you down. Surely you would be rich and famous and high-status like you deserve if not for them, those unappreciative bastards and their conspiracy of mediocrity.
Any Objectivists who believe this have missed half of Ayn Rand's message and are doing Objectivism completely wrong.
Not only did they miss one of the main points of John Galt's three hour long speech in Atlas Shrugged, but people who level this accusation against Objectivism as a whole missed it as well.
The point I'm referring t...
Your article is based on the premise that it is important for us to help complete strangers who don't mean anything to us. That sacrifice is a constant of righteousness regardless of a person's beliefs or lack thereof.
From an objective viewpoint, sacrifice is wrong. Why should we have to give value in return for lesser value, or no value at all? We should help people because they have value to us, not because they are unable to be valuable at all.
"The man with guilt is the man who will do whatever you tell him to." The reason religious people do ...
You fail to make a clear distinction between simple and easy.