I Think, Therefore I Am Wrong

Ayn Rand used to call herself an Objectivist, with a capital "O". I'm not sure what she meant by that. I have read a couple of her books, and they didn't seem very objective to me.

The more I think about it, good and evil cannot be viewed objectively because they are not objects. They have no material substance. This doesn't mean that they don't exist. Space has no material substance either, but it certainly exists. In our perception, good and evil are just concepts in the human mind, but our perception is limited. It's possible that good and evil are natural forces like gravity, they have no material substance, yet they exert influence on material substances. The effects of gravity are can be more precisely measured than the effects of good and evil, which puts the study of gravity in the domain of science, while the study of good and evil remains in the domain of philosophy and theology, at least for now. Beauty is also a subjective human concept, but it is likely that there were beautiful things in the world before there were people in the world to appreciate them. With good and evil, it's not so likely, but it's not impossible.

Since good and evil are subjective human concepts, we have the choice of following somebody else's concepts or formulating our own. Our own concepts will not likely be totally original, they will be composed of bits and pieces gleaned from other people's concepts but, once we embrace them, they become our concepts. It's like Bob Dylan said when asked how many of the songs he does are his own, "Once I do them, they're all my own."

I think I've got those hoodlums figured out too. You know, the guys who wear their real or imagined badness like a badge of honor. They are not rebellious, they're just defiant. A rebel tries to overthrow an existing social order, or at least become independent of it. Some people seem to get a kick out of merely defying authority. If they overthrew the authority, then they wouldn't have anything to defy anymore.

I looked up that "Mu" thing, both on Old Dog's link and on Wikipedia. I have read some of that Zen stuff before, and I never could make any sense out of it. Maybe your not supposed to. If you think you have made sense out of it, it just proves that you don't really understand it. Those inscrutable Orientals!