On his new weekly podcast, Yaron Brook has started giving listeners “homework” to help build a foundation for the issues he we be discussing on the show. For this week’s show he asked that everyone read the introduction to Ayn Rand‘s The Virtue of Selfishness. I had read this a couple of years ago, but a previously un-highlighted paragraph jumped out at me.
The context of this quotation is a discussion of the difference between egoism and altruism. The most essential
In this presentation from 2006, Dr. Onkar Ghate presents a fascinating discussion on the relationship between religion and morality. He makes the case that the rise in religion is the result in the remnants of the American sense of life seeking some code of absolute moral values in the absence of such values in the secular culture. As Dr. Ghate says:
It [religion] is in large measure a quest by individuals who have been abandoned in a moral desert and think they see in religion an oasis.
Onkar
This is a somewhat edited and greatly expanded version of a comment I posted to Peter Schwartz’s Washington Post article, “Objecting to the ‘season of giving’.” You can find my posted comment here. 2000 characters was just not enough space to get across fully what I wanted to say in support of his article in the face of the vast majority of comments that had been left. Or at least I didn’t have the time to make my comment that short.
I would like to thank Peter
I was asked on Twitter the other day to explain the difference between Objectivism and raw greed. Twitter is not really a good platform to answer such a question, but my attempt was two tweets:
short and incomplete answer: time frame. Objectivism=long range, lifetime view; “pure greed”=short range, spur of the moment
And rationality (Objectivism) vs irrationality (raw greed).
I thought I would make an attempt here to provide a more complete answer given my current state of knowledge.