The Story of Human Sacrifice
 

Bob Wallace upsets a few apple carts here.

After thinking about this problem for a long time, I refined the Story to this: I am grandiose; you are devalued. I project my problems on you, scapegoat you, then human-sacrifice you.

Wallace applies this to Rand, to mass murders, to Islamists, to us, and to the state. I think it applies very well to our relationship to the Arab world. After 911 it became pretty fashionable to pretend the US never did anything wrong in the wider world and at the same time the Islamists projected all their problems on us, ugly reality but reality.

OK, to sum up:

- The worst crime in the world is hubris, where we declare some people good or evil.
- Ayn Rand is a dangerously disturbed psychopath.

- They hate us because, illogically, they blame us for their problems.
- We ARE responsible for their problems.

- We are attacking them because we see them as evil and want to sacrifice them.
- We are paranoid that they will destroy us.

Well that's one way to interpret what he said. More charitably, I'd say that he sees scapegoating as a constant problem because individuals and societies refuse to take responsibility for their actions. Admittedly, it is a lot easier to take responsibility for actions at the level of the individual. That is why its so important to keep decision making as local as possible, something the Greens occasionally give a nod to.

When it comes to foreign policy, those societies we lack significant informal connections with seem the least likely to separate the individual American from his governments policy. The decent treatment of our Olympic athletes in Greece can be taken as evidence of this separation in the European mind. In the Arab world Americans are oilmen and soldiers so its easy to scapegoat us as a whole people. Our lack of consideration for Iraqi losses leads me to believe that our view of the Moslem world is similarly stilted, even if better informed.

The story of hubris (pride rivalling that of the gods, not "grandiosity", though he gives both as the definition) being the worst sin goes back to the Greeks the word comes from; it's a standard feature of many Greek (and later) myths. If it took him several years to refine the "Story" to this, he obviously was a lousy researcher; a simple textbook could have given him as much. I'm not sure why he had to bring Atlas Shrugged into it other than to slam Ayn Rand, who is in any case dead.

The article is pretty much a rant; it wanders from point to point and doesn't come close to holding together. Tony's summary is quite accurate in portraying that.

Hubris isn't the crime, it is used to justify the greatest crimes in the world.

We are responsible for some of their problems, so they blame us for all of their problems. Some of them are evil, so we claim they all are evil.

The article rambled and could have been more tightly written, but the truth it presents remains valid for all that. The author's thesis that a false sense of grandiosity or pride (which is cause by an underlying feeling of insecurity) leads to envy and a projection of negative feelings upon another person or group. We then blame this other for our flaws and treat them accordingly.

The writer would have been better off briefly discussing Carl Jung's concept of the "shadow" and how Jung's analogy can be used to explain the current attitudes of various nations and religous groups.

The writer has a point about Ayn Rand, but I'm not sure why he threw her into the essay either except for the fact that he obviously dislikes her. Perhaps the author was throwing HIS shadow on Ms. Rand.

At any rate, Ayn Rand, living or dead, is as fair game as anyone else. Her books, unfortunately, continue to influence thousands if not millions. I read her at 16 and thought I was a philosopher. I re-read her again at 22 and couldn't believe that I'd been so easily influenced by what was nothing other than a couple of trashy romance novels with pretentious wordings.

I'd say Rand was more than that Mari. I think it's important that hard working, creative, productive people be seen as heroic. Their productivity is what pays for everything else in our society. Rand was very good at portraying how statism destroys that productivity. Unfortunately, she has followers who take hers as THE voice and don't just take her lesson and move on.

True, Griff. Many years ago, my best friend read Atlas Shrugged and became a complete asshole virtually overnight. It was scary. :eek: The last I heard, he's remained so, to this day.

I couldn't agree with you more about honoring creative, productive people. I think sometimes its the everyday Joe who sticks with his wife and kids, goes in and does his 8 hours plus who is one of the greatest hero's around. But Rand saw the world in black and white, just as that article described. People were either heroic producers or scumbag parasites - no shades of grey in between. She was as much a casualty of the cold war mentality as anyone. Rand had a certain intelligence to her. In another life she would have made an excellent accountant and never gone anywhere near a typewriter. The world would be a better place if she had gone to business school and kept her odd political beliefs to herself.

Does your position as a taker rather than a producer color your understanding of/reaction to Rand?

(For the record, I think that she's good, and her ideas have merit, but the cult of slavish adoration that has grown up around her work is more than a bit scary.)

I'm pretty ignorant of Rand, I couldn't get thru ATLAS SHRUGGED, FOUNTAINHEAD, Etc. I did manage to read a book her ex-lover (I forget his name--he was younger than she and had a wife, I believe...) wrote about her years ago and he portrayed her as pretty nutty. Maybe that's just him, though. Sure sounded like she had control issues.

All depends on how you view it. I, for example, do not have control issues. I'm fine with control. What I have are lack of control issues.

OK, let's get a couple of things straight here, Wolf. I draw SSDI which I paid into the system for myself in the form of social security taxes for a period of almost 30 years, starting with my first job that I paid taxes out of my check from at age 18 (I worked before that, but it was babysitting or garden work for neighbors when I was in high school, so that didn't get taxed.) I am taking no one's money, but my own, thank you very much.

I noted that my attitude towards Rand changed when I was in my early twenties. At that time I was working the circulation desk of a public library and working towards a degree in biology at CU. Is that productive enough for you?

I can think of about a 1,000 things I'd rather be doing than fielding your bitchy remarks and hanging around in the cellar. If you believe that I made the choice to quit being a professional with private insurance (both medical and disability), earning what would now be approaching $50,000/yr, doing work I adored, just so I could live high off the hog on disability at a whopping $625.00 a month; maybe you're on the wrong side of the admissions desk.

I've posted just the bare bones of what I have endured, and you I've only scratched the surface of it. Are you a neuropsychologist, Wolf? Have you personally performed the rigorous neuropsych eval I just went through? Or maybe you're a neurologist and you've looked at my MRI and CAT scans and noticed the damage they show?

Since You are a professional in the area of mental health, I'm sure you understand that mild traumatic brain injury can manifest itself in any number of ways, including damage to the more primitive parts of the brain which regulate emotions, how it can destroy a person's executive function, or how a person can have short term memory difficulties, while long term memory remains intact. I'm sure that as a professional in the field, you know how a person such as me can virtually loose all spatial ability and sometimes get lost driving home. I'm sure you're aware of the emotional stress that can arise when someone goes through a long period of time becoming gradually more ill and not understanding why, and at the same time loosing their very capacity to understand anything. I'm sure that as a professional, you've visited the various CO poisoning sites on the web and refreshed your expertise on the ramifications of long, term, chronic CO poisoning.

I was responsible for automating the Fort Lewis College Library. I helped implement the West slope of Colorado's regional library consortium, I taught undergraduates there for 7 years and attained the rank of associate professor. I have two Masters' degrees - one in biology and one in Library and Information Science. I was responsible for running the reference service for a fairly larged sized public library. I was in charge of a $500,000 reference book budget as well as two slightly smaller budgets for aquisitions in the sciences and medicine. My library nominated me to attend the yearly national ALA (American Library Association) meeting two years in a row - a real honor. I was the science and medical book reviewer for Library Journal, a national publication used by virtually all librarians when making their collection building decisions. I was in charge of the Denver Botanic Gardens Library and acted as consultant to the Rocky Mountain Poison Control Center. In my free time I volunteered for the Children's Literacy Program and helped give little kids a chance to learn how to read outside the regular classroom.

You think I gave all that up just so I could subsist on $625.00 a month and be terrified everyday of ending out on the streets once again if my housing voucher doesn't come through? You know NOTHING of me, Wolf, and I'm tired of your snide remarks. I've tried to respond to you in a humorous way and not get into it with you, but today I am not in the best of moods. Go throw your shadow on someone else.

Yeah, but what have you done for me lately? ;)

Hmmmmm..... Let's see... Wasn't I sort of polite to you once in some obscure thread about 3 months ago? Oh, No! Wait! That was Radar. Never mind. ;)