Reason, Faith and Gnosticism as Epistemology - James Lindsay

[tmj]

MSK " But it leads my mind to the scary place that Objectivism is a form of gnosticism, that Ayn Rand rebranded ancient ideas, adopted many of the core beliefs, then explained them through a lens she devised. " (couldn't quickly use the quote feature and then get rid of all else)

I would say that any resemblance to gnosticism in Rand would be born of a type of 'reactionaryism', her having lived through the real world consequences of communist Russia, the actual playing out in human reality of the Marxist gnosticism that Lindsay so aptly identifies and describes.

I assume that she and her family and therefore her backround were fairly secular. I always consider Rand as firmly grounded in and as being 'of the west'. I think I see her philosophy as a reaction to the elements of self sacrifice she identified in the west and sought to correct. 

And as part of 'westernism' , wasn't seeking to challenge the canon as it were, as much as highlight the errors and 'fix' 'it. So to what ever degrees gnosticism has had reverberations in the culture writ large , Rand would have been buffeted also.

And as you mentioned prior and something I now( dipping my toes in O'ist heresy,lol) see rather plainly is a lot of western religiosity in her work, especially the literature. But that should be expected , no ? As we are 'story' thinkers and our stories need to make sense, need to be told/heard from within our own milieu. 

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

T,

You mentioned two very good examples where Rand had contact with the morphed gnosticism (to coin a phrase and cut out bickering over jargon and semantics) that would have been put in seductive terms to her from the culture. 

But there are other ways gnosticism appears in Rand's ideas.

To start with, she came from an upper-class family. Not royalty, but upper-class enough for her to believe she was superior to the masses, so to speak. In We The Living, there is even a a passage she later changed about how the masses don't count so their deaths are not serious, or something to that effect. I would have to look it up. Don't even get me started on The Night of January 16th, which is pure Nietzsche in terms of an ideal hero, Bjorn Faulkner.

I mention this because, the more I study philosophy and religion, the more I believe most people gravitate toward these organized sets of ideas and stories, ideals so to speak, in order to make themselves feel good, and that means feeling superior to others most of the time. After whatever rituals or learning or experiences they go through, they become insiders and thus belong to a superior form of existing, a superior life form, a superior human that is the real human, not those other subhumans out there.  

This is a simple idea, not convoluted with all kinds of jargon and whatnot. It seems oversimplified, but once you see it, you see it everywhere. You can't not see it anymore.

If you become superior, you have truths that count, not that mountain of intellectual garbage out there. You see true beauty whereas those others out there content themselves with cheap pastimes and pollute their souls with nonessential trivialities. You know The Science whereas those idiots out there believe any old thing and call that knowledge. You know the meaning of life whereas those out there don't even know they are alive.

And on and on...

You are superior.

Until those 3:00 am wake ups when you are by yourself and wonder if all this isn't bullshit...

 

 

Here's a gnostic idea in Rand's fiction writing for you. If you read Rand's essay on the goal of her writing, she states clearly that she wants to project an ideal man. Notice she doesn't say a growing human being who can improve to a yet-to-be known state. Her pronouncement is static. The ideal man exists in her mind, is already formed, and she wants to put it out in the world as a model of what ideal humans look and act like.

She brings the future to the present, so to speak. So instead of humans growing into an unknown future, the task of people when reading her work is to grow themselves into what she has already arrived at.

This may seem like splitting hairs, but it is deep. In the mainstream religions, God exists outside of individuals and enlightenment is discovering how to get closer to--and more integrated with--God. How to learn more about God, thus more about their own potentials. In the gnostic view, the perfect God is within each individual, but it has been stifled for "reasons." (These reasons differ from esoteric religion to Nietzsche to communism to Rand to whatever set of ideas has this form of thinking in it.) 

So to uncover this God within, one must do this or that. Notice that Rand does not say one must seek moral truths to the best on one's understanding. She says "Man is a self-made soul." Soul-wise, man comes into existence in infancy as a blank slate to her. Then man fills this blank slate with stuff that produces an ideal human (an already pre-formed ideal). Either that or he ends up a hodgepodge of crap. What's more, he has to choose starting from the blank state form.

How does he choose? What standard does he use when he is a blank slate? There she is fuzzy. She gets clearer as the conceptual faculty develops in children. Her fuzziness on this even led her to say that growth of eyeballs, an infant's process of learning to see, is chosen. As if infants can choose to grow up into a blind person. Show me that sometime and, I swear, we will set up a tent in a circus and sell tickets to see it.  

Oddly enough, I find her errors like this her saving grace gnosticism-wise. To me, it shows her stubbornness (which, oddly enough, I admire  ), but also some cognitive dissonance. I believe with enough time, she would have changed those kinds of ideas in her thinking, just like she painfully threw out Nietzsche over power.

 

I could go on and on with this stuff. I will be adding videos and things I study as I go along in this thinking and learning.

There is one big beef I have with Rand, though. And, to me, it is another indication of the gnostic element in her approach. I am starting to use original sources in learning about the ideas of others. I need to read Kant, for example, before I bash him.  

Rand was notorious for criticizing other thinkers based on second-hand information. She was honest in saying she had not read something (like Kant or whatever), but, still, that is not what an ideal reason-base human would do--with one exception. An ideal reason-based human based on a gnostic approach does not need to learn about truth anymore because he is already ideal. His task is to clean away intellectual rubble rather than probe what something means.

I do not use this standard anymore. It is static, not dynamic, and certainly not organic. I admit I started out with Rand's ideas doing precisely that when I judged other thinkers. I didn't read them. I judged them based on Rand's opinions. Now I do read them. And, man, have I found big-ass holes of misunderstanding inside myself.  

Nowadays, I seek intellectual commentary from people who do read original sources. Between what Rand wrote and what these people say, I have a pretty good warm-up when I face a work that is full of big words and convoluted sentences. I am late in getting to a classical education, but that is the path I have chosen.

To stress my point about Rand's approach (which I had to change in myself), in gnostic thinking, one does not need to seek truth by following the horizon and grow into being able to learn more and deeper truths. One merely needs to learn how to peel away the debris that is covering up the truth that is already there.

(How did the debris get there? As Rand would say, blank-out.  However, it is usually blamed on someone or something like society.)

One doesn't have this problem when one seeks to identify correctly, then judge. 

 

Here is a long-ass video of what I mean by commentary called Decoding Weaponized Philosophy.

(I don't want to get into the snark about LaRouche. Agree or disagree with his conclusions, he was one hell of an historian. His facts are based on original sources and you can check them. That is what I seek and get from him when his name comes up. I let the other stuff go. Although Matt discusses LaRouche at times, I believe Math is an intellectual giant in himself, greater than LaRouche. At least for what I seek. And Courtnay is someone I discovered recently. God, is she smart and insightful when discussing the things she reads. What a delight.) 

 

Your comment about seeing religious themes and stories in Rand's works is absolutely true. In fact, this is the part I most love in her works. Those themes and stories are universal and have been handed down over centuries. Rand added a unique flair in presenting them and, I believe, she was magnificent. 

I also love how she inverts clichés. "Judge and be prepared to be judged" and things like that. In this case, both the original and Rand's version say the same thing at root. Do not be trivial in your judgments of others. Lead them to do like you do by your example.

 

I gotta stop. This has gone on way too long.  

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I can't resist a quote by Matt Ehret from the last video:

"The Delphic method is to take something true and then infuse poison into it."

 

 

In other words, people would go into the Temple where they read things like "Know thyself," or "To thine own self be true," on the Temple wall. Then after they experienced all the drugs and ritualized bullshit therein, they would come out as babbling idiots.

That describes well over 90% of propaganda and mass mind control these days.

 

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

One last comment about my observations above.

My worldview was informed by Ayn Rand and it still is. I love her fiction works most of all.

So I am not trying to denigrate her. I am comparing her to standards of truth I encounter that do not align with her work as stated.

My intention is not to debunk her. It is to separate wheat and chaff so I can better use the wheat to make the bread of my own life.

In other words, she is there in my life and she is not going anywhere. Now there are others, too.

By taking this path, my life has become infinitely richer.

The light of curiosity and wonder never goes out in my soul.

 

Michael

[tmj]

I was philosophically baptized in O'ism. With a capital O, lol. 

I had never heard of Rand and was down to the last book on my shelf that I never even really looked at so I figured I meant as well read it. From the first pages Atlas Shrugged was for me an enthralling experience, having grown up without any religion I at least had come to understand what a religious experience was.

It was an older paperback and it had an index card- sized flyer type advertisement placed in it from the publisher, if I recall the purchasing recommendations were moot as that publisher no longer sold those items, but at least I had a list of other works by Rand to track down, this is pre-interwebs when you had to be motivated to find 'stuff' and boy was I motivated! Evidently I became like Second Renaissance's best customer , all the printed material I could get my hands on and all the taped lectures, too, I was in deep.

I had the ammunition to turn my aggressive agnosticism to a bold militant atheism, a firm footing to pass moral condemnation on anything and everything and a heightened sense of man worship. I was a proud outward facing Rand enthusiast,but with the caveat that I never actually said , even avoided saying the words "I'm an Objectivist" because I knew I wasn't Galt , which is a whole other animal and essentially not something 'from' Rand, but I suspect some reading may have an inkling about.

Anyways , I say all that just to show my bona fides , point being I was in for so long and so hard that at some point I forgot to check 'my' premises and even failed to appreciate some premises I took on board without scrutinizing.

I'm a bunch older now which means my store of premises grew and there is a lot of checking these days ! Lots of sources to find and scrutinize , and I find it important to try and do it from an even more 'objective' frame There is just a lot of shit I just don't know(yet)!

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

T,

It's too soon to say this, but if you become a speaker of truth, you will find yourself alone a lot.

That's part of human nature.

However, sometimes that part of speaking the truth works well to clear a path for a new direction.

I think you are going to like where OL will be going in the future.

And I think you will love the audience.

 

I don't want to say more, though. It's too soon.

Besides, it's better to do than say.

 

Michael