The Objectivist doomsday scenario

[Gullible Jones]

I've been thinking about this for a while. I'm not sure I'm on the right track, or even coherent, but here goes.

Your average Rand-loving Libertarian type seems to think that everyone should be out for him/herself. Everything should boil down to self-interest. Helping others in the process of helping yourself is great, but altruism is bad because it gets things done through guilt instead of self-interest.

But:

1. If you could stand to benefit from harming someone else, and are unlikely to face punishment for it... Then this system says it's okay to go ahead and harm them, no? Which is untenable from a social viewpoint.

2. If you are only interested in yourself, why should you give a damn about the long-term survival of your species? You want to keep everyone else around while you're alive, so that you have company and presumably a support structure, but once you're dead it doesn't matter.

IOW, it seems to me that this model is not just flawed, but guaranteed to fail horribly, in a way that could wreck a high-tech society completely and kill billions of people.

Help me out here. Am I cutting down a straw man, or is Objectivism really that stupid? Have I got things wrong or am I stating the obvious?

[Simon_Jester]

Well, Randism doesn't reject the concept of (for example) love; there's still at least the potential for caring what happens in the future because you value some of the people who are going to be living in it because they're your kids.

That's really not enough, mind you. In practice, yes Randism leads predictably to crises as soon as you get Randists in positions of power. People with little ability to remake the social fabric according to their theories won't cause much damage by acting in accordance with Randism, because aside from being a lousy excuse for a friend it won't change their basic social behaviors: working at a job, raising a family that they personally care for, et cetera.

But when powerful people are Randists, they wind up stomping carelessly on the average citizen, and damaging the structures that maintain the social order. Because in Randism, those structures are seen as restraints on the heroic rugged-individualist, not as being the analogue of a governor on a steam engine that keeps the thing from spinning out of control and exploding. We see this kind of thing today with the neoconservative movement, which is for practical purposes quite Randist when it comes to setting domestic economic policy.

Randism is, ironically, a much safer philosophy for servants than for masters.