Thread by @reasonisfun, What Ayn Rand gives people is a surrogate for good boundaries. People [...]

What Ayn Rand gives people is a surrogate for good boundaries.

People who don’t take themselves seriously and have poor boundaries find Ayn Rand, and are like “omg it’s legitimate for me to do what I want instead of what other people want”

(Plus other nice values like: Think about stuff! Be truth-seeking! Trade is good! Haters gon’ hate!)

But selfishness is confused qua surrogate for good boundaries.

It still takes for granted “us vs them”; it just comes down on the other side.

(Albeit the far more functional side, sure.)

Rand would say selfishness isn’t adversarial, and rational selfishness means everyone can get what they want.

“There are no conflicts of interest among rational men.”

But this misses things and gets you stuck in a few ways —

— First, it’s good to have boundaries whether or not they are ‘rationally’ defensible.

That’s because you don’t have full immediate explicit access to your mind. Most of your knowledge is inexplicit.

Rand accounts for not explaining preferences to others, but not oneself.

(This is one reason it’s better to think of life as being about pursuing your problems/interests, rather than about finding what’s True or Rational, or about getting rid of all your errors. All is but a woven web of guesses, and we don’t know what we know.)

It would be better to say: “There are no conflicts of interest.”

Apparent conflicts are due to either or both of the parties misinterpreting the facts of the situation. (Including abstract facts, like morality.)

There are never conflicts between facts.

So when Rand insists you disregard your “whims”, she is taking her opponent’s view and running with it.

This kind of “selfishness” demands a partial abnegation of the self.

There is an alternative: to take it *all* into account — explicit and inexplicit.

This is false:

“Desires (or feelings or emotions or wishes or whims) are not tools of cognition; they are not a valid standard of value, nor a valid criterion of man’s interests.”
— Ayn Rand, VoS

… It is the same as saying “thoughts are not valid tools of cognition [etc]”.

Both explicit thoughts and inexplicit emotions are cognitive/computational processes that are trying to model and understand reality.

Inexplicit stuff is esp. important for boundaries/self-interest.

Secondly, if selfishness is so non-adversarial, what’s with all the slurs?

second-hander, moocher, looter, leech, parasite, whim-worshipper, evader, mystic, witch doctor, Kantian

Someone with good boundaries doesn’t insult his friends with poor boundaries as “second-handers”.

That’s not even the problem they have. They may explicitly endorse the virtue of selfishness, but still find themselves self-abnegating (e.g. abnegating their wise whims).

(Roark is actually good in this respect. He mostly just does his own thing, until he picks up some bad ideas from Dominique. Chill with the destruction, guys. Go rage-write or hang out with friends, srsly.)

Thirdly, the slogan divides people up into “rational men” and the presumably irrational women.

… Jk. But it’s still talking about people rather than ideas. It has an “us vs them” quality.

Morality isn’t about a particular person, like “I”.

Ayn Rand emphasises “I” because there are indeed a lot of pessimistic self-sacrificial memes out there.

But it’s still framing her worldview in terms of other people.

Morality isn’t about you or me, it’s about both+everyone.

“I” isn’t even a single consistent thing!

That’s why she says ‘well, be selfish—but not if it’s just your whims’.

She has to find a way to pretend people are consistent, or have a single meaningful thing that’s “I”, which can be separated (and elevated) from other people. https://twitter.com/reasonisfun/status/965911330774573056