The Rightwing Randian Blankout Syndrome (R2BS), Part 2 Will Ayn Rand and Objectivism survive it?
Well, I may have gotten a little carried away in Part 1 in the tone and manner in which I laid out something I see as a serious problem within the movement. At least one of my regular "right-wing" but nonRandian readers responded with hostility to the point of throwing my stuff into his
electronic-mail nether regions.
It really wasn't my intention to slam the nonRandian multitudes (I've even gone back to part one and removed the derogatory term "booboosie") who may themselves exhibit R2BS symptoms. Those symptoms reveal positions I think may fairly and objectively be called fascist, militarist, and/or closeminded. Most Bush-Cheney partisans don't take umbrage at these adjectives, they revel in them. (Sorry, my friend, I was only trying to be descriptive not pejorative.)
My intention was to castigate the Randians who hold these fascist, militarist, and/or closeminded positions. We folks in the freedom movement expect so much more from explicit advocates of reason and individual liberty.
Even there, I probably took a bit of the low road by using language of the same strident hue Randians like to use against us neo-Randian libertarian apostates. In retrospect, and next time, I feel a more loving and erudite tone is better. My bad.
Further, just because a Randian—or anyone else—takes one of the positions I identify as symptoms of R2BS doesn't mean he or she is actually blanking out on that position. For example, I've had some email suggesting the orthodox theory of global warming (GW) is suspect; I believe people who question GW are incorrect, but it doesn't follow their minds refuse to treat objective reality as an absolute.
So let's get to cases. I want to elaborate on the nine areas I listed in Part One where I feel Rand and her designated heirs, or her designated heirs once-removed, have strayed from the course of advancing human consciousness and well-being.
1) First and foremost, the R2BSer typically denies the existence of conspiracies of power, in particular, denying the existence of the primary hidden cabal that has run the United States government since at least 1913 with the advent of the Federal Reserve Act[1] and the income tax amendment.
On number 1, I simply mean it's fairly clear to most of us freedom fighters in the field that we're up against
some very nasty dudes who, much like royalty, have amassed an extraordinary amount of (our) money and power. The Cartel and its secret societies, chiefly the CIA, exercise sophisticated techniques of social control, even mind control. Few Objectivists know anything about the Cartel, and most would deny that it has any effective, much less negative, role in politics.
2) Second, the denier believes the official story of 911 despite overwhelming in your face evidence that none of the key 911 events comes even close to being logically explained by that fairy tale.
The 911 truth movement is approaching breakthrough strength. On the link above, I list 21 contradictions that point to 911 as a black op of Cartel agencies. When the truth of 911 is determined, it will sweep away the whole marauding mass of lies behind the Bush-Cheney syndicate and the media pukes who make blanking out an art form.
3) Along the same lines of one and two, the blankout is normally accompanied by failure to consider any instance of government deceit and coverup.
In every one of those cases, the government or its secret agencies have committed or enabled to be committed heinous crimes. Most libertarians realize conspiracies of political power are a natural development from big government, particularly Cartel-dominated government. When people try to dismiss the facts and the arguments by calling anyone who questions the official story a "conspiracy theorist," I respond it's more exact to call us "causality theorists." A is A and facts are facts; if one prefers to evade facts, one is what I call a "blankout theorist."
Granted, just because you don't believe in global warming doesn't make you a denier or a blanker-outer. On the other hand, in my judgment the odds are high that GW deniers are letting the emotional-perceptual mode of consciousness[2] get the best of them. There's much to discuss under this bullet, but let me leave it for the time being with the following question: "Are there any peer-reviewed scientific papers that
explicitly contradict the orthodox GW theory?"
5) Fifth, failing to grasp the fundamental flaw in the state's franchising of monopoly corporate power, failing to see the violation of the nonaggression principle that occurs by granting privileges (derived from the Latin "private law") to business interests and affording these business entities unequal protection before the law.
This is a hugely important issue: the moral legitimacy of the corporate legal franchise. An entirely different sort of civilization emerges if and when the corporate genie is stuffed back into the lamp of temptation. Consider how our lives might change if corporate charters restricted operation outside a state's borders, prohibited corporations from owning other corporations, prohibited corporate boards from having members on other corporate boards, rescinded limited liability protections or legal personhood, and so on.
6) Sixth, probably the most critical blankout is support for the American state in its unconstitutional CIA-led military aggressions in the Middle East and killings, tortures, and disappearances everywhere on the premise of a terror threat concocted by the Cartel through the "new Pearl Harbor" of the 911 attacks.
7) Lately a movement has emerged that may be called the "demonization of the left."
Former Marxist David Horowitz and his whacky gang over at FrontPage—many Randians have fallen for his shrill Zionist[3], corporate-militaristic-state drivel— take blanking out to a whole new level: i.e. "That jackboot on your face does not clad the foot of a Bush-Cheney Nazi wannabe. Instead, it's from those mass-murdering, crazed leftist-environmentalist-stoner-hippies for peace."
8) Finally, on the civil liberties issue, most sane people acknowledge the war on drugs as one of the most irrational and destructive government policies ever inflicted on humanity...
Drug freedom is at best a minor issue for the R2BSer.
9) Though not truly a subject of blanking anything out, most Objectivists have little interest in the life extension or transhumanist movements.
This blindspot comes from Rand herself, who
never dealt with the very real prospect of extended, vigorous, youthful, individual human life... which was being discussed as early as the 1960s in, say, cryonics pioneer Robert Ettinger's The Prospect for Immortality.
With so many who call themselves Objectivists stuck with some combination of the above R2BS symptoms, one wonders whether Objectivism qua rational philosophy will make it to the end of the century.
Certainly Objectivism as a set of ideas will survive, as will the passion for reason and liberty engendered by Ayn Rand (at least when battling genuine collectivism). But few will embrace the ends of any Randian organization that roundly disrespects peace, justice, civil liberties, the environment, and reason itself.
If someone were to come up with a pro-Randian group with a name like "Reasonable Objectivists of the Libertarian Left" (ROLL), or even simply Reasonable Objectivists for Humanity, I'd certainly consider enlisting. How about you?
[1] Here I recommend the brilliantly written tome by G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jekyll Island, which describes how the power-elite (interests of corporate and banking dynasties of Rockefeller, Morgan, Warburg, Rothschild, and Kuhn-Loeb & Co., together representing more than a quarter of the world's wealth at the time) met on this private island of J.P. Morgan's off the coast of Georgia in 1910, with the purpose of designing the ultimate banking cartel known as the Federal Reserve System.
[2] The emotional-perceptual mode of consciousness as distinct from the conceptual mode is not a cognitive process, but it is often treated as one. An example is someone who has an immediate negative emotional reaction on hearing the words "Al Gore" and regards that feeling as validly negating whatever assertion Gore makes.
[3] I mean Zionist in this context as the longstanding, fervent religious movement to establish Israel as a Jewish country in the area of the Middle East that had come to be commonly referred to as Palestine (and to forcefully dispossess non-Jewish and/or noncooperating inhabitants of Palestine who had lived there for centuries).
Well, I may have gotten a little carried away in Part 1 in the tone and manner in which I laid out something I see as a serious problem within the movement. At least one of my regular "right-wing" but nonRandian readers responded with hostility to the point of throwing my stuff into his 
