A monk said: You offer very bad arguments again and again…

A monk replies–

Like the ancient immortals said
Don’t want ’em to get your goat
Don’t show ’em where it’s hid
But that’s just what I did
            –Van Halen, “Stay Frosty”

So, I have some more bad arguments to offer, again–

We’re going to solve all the problems of the world obviously. We’re not going to give up on altruism … I thought I would try to defend Objectivist Philosophy…

Objectivism clarifies the cognitive dissonance required to emit that text–

• Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive.
• We cannot fight against collectivism, unless we fight against its moral base: altruism. We cannot fight against altruism, unless we fight against its epistemological base: irrationalism.
• If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.
• [Altruism] is a moral system which holds that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the sole justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, value and virtue. This is the moral base of collectivism, of all dictatorships.
• What most moralists—and few of their victims—realize is that reason and altruism are incompatible.
• Altruism does not mean mere kindness or generosity, but the sacrifice of the best among men to the worst, the sacrifice of virtues to flaws, of ability to incompetence, of progress to stagnation-and the subordinating of all life and of all values to the claims of anyone’s suffering.
• Men have been taught that their first concern is to relieve the suffering of others. ... To make that the highest test of virtue is to make suffering the most important part of life. Then man must wish to see others suffer in order that he may be virtuous. Such is the nature of altruism.
• Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they are philosophical opposites; they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society.
• Guilt is altruism’s stock in trade, and the inducing of guilt is its only means of self-perpetuation.

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