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Rational Self-Interest (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 4 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Do you believe ayn rand believed in rational self-interest?

If so, why was she against all forms of welfare and socialism? If not, isn't she the inventor of the concept and thus the arbiter of what it should mean? Doesn't that mean you're changing the definition to suit your needs?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Funny... this is actually a different account than I was originally posting from - I switched to it because the entire thread has vanished from fedia.io.

And pretty much the first thing I see here is this response, which I didn't even know existed before.

Not a good look for fedia.io.

Anyway...

Do you believe ayn rand believed in rational self-interest?

I think she probably thought she did, but I also think she obviously didn't even begin to understand it.

If so, why was she against all forms of welfare and socialism?

The glib answer would be because she didn't even begin to understand rational self-interest.

The more likely answer, which somehow manages to be even more shallow, is because the USSR was nominally communist and she hated the USSR.

If not, isn’t she the inventor of the concept and thus the arbiter of what it should mean?

No.

Even if she was in fact the inventor of the concept, which she most assuredly is not, she still wouldn't be the arbiter of its meaning.

Though she was such an egotistical authoritarian that if she were alive today, she'd undoubtedly be insisting that she was.

Doesn’t that mean you’re changing the definition to suit your needs?

Kind of.

While I really couldn't care less what Rand envisioned, so certainly feel no desire to hew to her conception, I haven't changed it to suit my "needs" per se. I've changed it as necessary so that it actually is, as far as I can see, what it appears to refer to - "rational" "self-interest."

I think it's a sound concept, and that Rand, blinded as she was by her emotions, her authoritarian habits and her gargantuan ego, didn't grasp it.

Thanks for the response.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Your problem is that when people argue against rational self-interest, they're arguing against what ayn rand meant by it... because she coined the term and defined it, and as she defined it, it's really stupid.

You're just talking about rational self interest the phrase, which has nothing to do with her ideology, and is not what is ever being criticized... because again she is the inventor of the ideology.

This is akin to if you argued with a communist, saying communism is obviously wrong because you don't like particular communities such as terrorists and commun-ism means belief that all communities are good. This is technically a correct interpretation of the etymology, but is not what anyone means when they refer to communism. You've completely redefined the term that has already been defined by a particular person who coined it, because you prefer to use the etymological definition rather than the definition created by the inventor of the term. You are then arguing that people using the term as it was defined by it's creator are using it wrong, even though there is a particular history associated with this term and people are referring to that history. Why do you believe that the historical value of the term is less important than it's etymology? If we follow this structure, most meaning will fall completely apart.

for example, the word meaning, mean-ing, without the history that binds us in our communication that could mean the process of being mean, there's no reason this doesn't work etymologically, but we have history with these terms that make them have meaning beyond their etymology.