Evil, for Objectivism, means the willful ignorance or defiance of reality. This has to mean: that which cannot deal with reality, that which is whim-ridden, context-dropping, self-contradictory. Evil...
Has been said that Nazism is not a philosophy but a passion for destruction. Destruction, however, cannot be achieved with the Nazi consistency or on the Nazi scale, except by means of a certain philo...
An interest, writes Kant, is present only in a dependent will which is not of itself always in accord with reason; in the divine will we cannot conceive of an interest.
A philosophy of education, in short, is essential to being a proper parent; otherwise, you are merely turning your child over to blind chance.
Nihilism in this context means hatred, the hatred of values and of their root, reason. Hatred is not the same as disapproval, contempt, or anger. Hatred is loathing combined with fear, and with the de...
When the leading voices of the emotionalist Republic championed feeling, it was not as a source of knowledge or of human happiness, but of freedom: the freedom from objectivity, method, logic, fact. I...
The defenders of capitalism spent their time broadcasting the vibrations of guilt and futility. Implicitly or explicitly, they were telling the country: human intelligence is impotent to control the c...
The Social Democrats continued all the longtime traditions of their party and sought support in essence from only one segment of the electorate: the proletariat, i.e., the urban workers. The party’s g...
When the Americans flocked to pragmatism, they believed that they were joining a battle to advance their essential view of reality and of life. They did not know that they were being marched in the op...
The Nazi] death camps, notes a writer in The New York Times, were conceived, built and often administered by Ph.D.’s.
Religious writers often claim that the cause of Nazism is the secularism or the scientific spirit of the modern world. This evades the facts that the Germans at the time, especially in Prussia, were o...
The nationalists, at heart, were socialists. The socialists, at heart, were nationalists.
The principles of morality are a product not of feeling, but of cognition.
The sneer is expressed by philosophic movements which boastfully offer no message, by educators who deliberately teach no subject matter, by artists whose work eliminates recognizable content, by psyc...
Vice, in the Objectivist view, is not a rewarding policy; it is unconsciousness-willful, self-induced unconsciousness, while one continues to move around and function. To a conscious organism no cours...
Thus for Plato abstractions are supernatural existents. They are nonmaterial entities in another dimension, independent of man’s mind and of any of their material embodiments. The Forms, Plato tells u...
Social justice in this view not only allows but demands the use of force against the non-sacrificial individual; it demands that others put a stop to his evil. Thus has moral fervor been joined to the...
The voters were aware of the Nazi ideology. Nazi literature, including statements of the Nazi plans for the future, papered the country during the last years of the Weimar Republic. Mein Kampf alone s...
The victim’s submission to utter senselessness becomes the defeat of sense. His obeisance to absurdity becomes the refutation of logic.
The system which Hitler established—the social reality which so many Germans were so eager to embrace or so willing to endure—the politics which began in a theory and ended in Auschwitz—was: the total...
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