Search the Community

As many of you are probably aware, Porter Robinson once released a dubstep track titled "The State", which featured lyrics directly quoted of Murray Rothbard's For a New Liberty. YouTube video: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=npfdrO1Dp6A The section that Porter quotes (from the audio book read by Jeff Riggenbach) mentions how taxation is mass robbery, how the state operates by coercion and violence with the direct threat of confiscation and imprisonment, and a bit more. A few days ago, Excision and Pegboard Nerds posted a song titled "Bring the Madness". The lyrics and song are posted below, but they seem to make references to the NSA and police state ("cameras that capture your image at City Hall, realize they listen whenever you make a call"), the illusion of political freedom ("Strength is the army that bands against bands of dead presidents determining life of man"), the scam of fiat currency ("greed got us bleeding in streets for cheap paper"), and others. What also struck out was the line "take back the Atlas", which, while it seems a bit out of context, has a double meaning either of the world and the Greek god or of the world and Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Considering I'm still in the middle of reading it, I am not sure, but it was the first part, besides "government racket", that led me to see libertarian themes. Thoughts? http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8dZDdW7v4Q8 https://www.musixmatch.com/lyrics/Excision-Pegboard-Nerds-feat-Mayor-Apeshit/Bring-the-Madness

What better to do on New Year's Eve than to philosophize, am I right? So I am reading "Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand" by Leonard Peikoff and I want to share with you how I came to accept the axioms of Objectivism because this was a big struggle for me. Maybe this can be of help to others and perhaps I can have any potential mistakes corrected. My understanding is that there are no contradictions between the metaphysics of Objectivism and UPB. However, the approaches are distinct in that Objectivism has a focus on establishing its theoretical framework in a more formal way as can normally be found in philosophical works while UPB focuses on establishing its tenets through looking at what people do in conversation. In other words, UPB does not really contain axioms in the traditional sense other than what is self-evident when people argue. I.e., UPB takes a shortcut and I assume this is done due to it being more effective and practical in everyday life. Objectivist metaphysics, on the other hand, goes deeper in that it uses axioms that refer to our first sensation of the world. The three Objectivist axioms are Existence, Consciousness, and Identity. My error in grasping them was that I am used to evaluating concepts through the method of how one establishes arguments: Through evidence plus deductive or inductive reasoning. The challenge here is that the validation of the Objectivist axioms require no deductive or inductive reason. It is not something that is grasped through analysis. Rather, what I needed to do was to dilute my focus on the abstractions and simply look at the world around me with its various objects, actions and properties. When I focus on just looking around I have to accept that something (identity) exists (existence) of which I am aware (consciousness). This is self-evident just by perceiving the world. I am not sure whether identity are a function of existence, of consciousness, or of both, but I think that it does not fundamentally matter because without accepting this axiom I contradict myself. This because I have to implicitly rely on identity when I use concepts which I evidently do since I am writing this forum post. Another interesting thing about Objectivist metaphysics is that identity is an implicit of existence rather than something that refers to an essence that are in the things. The latter is what Aristotle stated in one of his principal works: "Metaphysics." In other words, in Objectivism existents do not have identity. They are identity. I am not sure what to make of that but I really find that fascinating. Hope that helps and please point out any errors. Happy 2015!