Benj’s blog!

Sometime ago, large yellow boxes (a.k.a. speed cameras) appeared on University Boulevard in Nottingham. More recently white lines appeared on the road close to the cameras and yesterday I saw a guy fiddling around inside one of the cameras!

Until around Monday last week, if you looked carefully you could see the camera lenses were still covered with the protective plastic covers, these has now been removed!; for the past 6 months or so these things have been dead. So if like me, you’ve were cruising along the boulevard with occasional disregard for the speed limit, safe in the knowledge that the cameras were not active, think again now. In the next few weeks they’ll be turned on and the revenue generation road safety scheme will be active!

(I’m too tired to get into a discussion about how pointless these things are, and even if they aren’t, how badly positioned these ones are in particular!)

Sometime in 1997 I remember having a conversation on IRC with a friend about communism. What little I knew about it seemed to make a lot of sense; why shouldn’t it be possible to plan an economy and bring about perfect conditions for the citizens. Well, the friend, after trying to convince me the errors of mindset, told me to find a book called Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.

I don’t think Amazon had a UK outlet back then and I had to order it from Dilons (a local bookstore). A search on the dumb terminal and clarification on the pronunciation of “Ayn” (rhymes with mine) had my order placed and it would be about 2 weeks before it arrived. The book was pretty “fat”, and the type was small but I slogged through the first chapter. After a few more chapters I had decided Ayn Rand was very readable author and the story was very good.

For the past few years I had done practically no reading (for leisure), it was a refreshing feeling and I soon understood why the friend had recommended the book to me! I was “cured” of those thoughts about communism — I thought I understood the effects of planning and was convinced that capitalism was the future! Rand is a very clever author, extremely romantic and descriptive in the way she writes and managing to put across subtle but effective messages — Objectivism.

Objectivism is Rand’s philosphy for life and for a while after reading the book I was proud to go around calling myself an objectivist (for the next few years in fact). Objectivism had some key principles which I agreed with strongly (i.e. forget about religion!). I strongly recommend the book to anyone. The key points (as stated by Rand in this essay) are:

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This entry continues on from this one, so better make sure you’ve read that first!

So what is Rand saying? I’ll use Rand’s own definitions to make it clear. (For a more thorough treatment, see here.)

1. “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.” or “Wishing won’t make it so.”
2. “You can’t eat your cake and have it too.”
3. “Man is an end in himself.”
4. “Give me liberty or give me death.”

Let’s look at metaphysics, which can be defined as “the philosophical study of being and knowing”. Rand’s metaphysics state that “facts are facts, independent of man’s feelings, wishes, hopes or fears.”. In otherwords, we must accept things for what they are, “the facts are the facts”. An alternative view is that of religious; with religion we accept another level of being above that or what we can see or experience. Religion is no longer apprehending reality, but instead creating it.

To tackle epistemology, defined as “The branch of philosophy that studies the nature of knowledge, its presuppositions and foundations, and its extent and validity.”, I direct the reader to page 2 of the following by Dr Peikoff (Rand’s “intellectual heir”): The Philosophy of Objectivism: A Brief Summary. In summary the objectivist’s view is that, we as humans are capable of comprehending the facts as derived from the real world, thus epistemology and metaphysics are tied together: It is, therefore it is, or something like that!

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