Because We Can, by Robert Gore
Many commentators have correctly pointed out that these scandals are not about sex, they’re about power. The leitmotif of these tawdry tales is: I’m doing what I’m doing to you because I can. Horrifying as it had to been for the victims, they’re the tip of the abuse-of-power iceberg. This must be the beginning of the beginning, we’re nowhere close to the end. The powers that be have had their way with the world for decades, and for many of their victims the price has been far higher than traumatization.
This is an excerpt. For the complete article please click the above link.
This is an excerpt. For the complete article please click the above link.
this the result of losing sight of "Individual" rights and instead promoting "human" or other false "rights"...
saw this abuse at all the hotels I stayed at with the "celebs" we flew in with...women lined up to take turns with the celebs...and the celebs came to expect it...and all their fellow associates knew what was going and said nothing...
How about, "Take this dead body and bury it where it won't be easily found.?" is that worse than asking for the performance of a sexual act against one's will. A great leader has the integrity to never ask for an underling to do something that only would be done because of the superior's power over him. It's not money that makes the world go around, It is power.
There will always remain people in power who are drunk on power - we will have to fight that demon forever. But we can curtail this one aspect of it, and it is good to see it happening.
The military has long had the Old School precept that you cannot have an affair with anyone in your chain-of-command. I think implementing this in civilian life is a realistic place to begin.
Jan
If you exchange sexual favors for an emerald ring, that is a transaction, but if you exchange sexual favors for being placed in a position you have not earned, or barred from it when you have earned it because you refused sex, then this is a lie.
Were it just Weinstein, were he unique in this respect, you would have a point. But it was not: the entire culture of the Industry was built around this. If you wanted a part in a movie, and you did not have any powerful connections (money/family) then it was 'his way (the bed) or the highway'. The whole point is that this culture did not represent a free society.
Jan
Jan
the statists will sacrifice the individual for their greater good.
Everyone is squirming to condemn men, to delineate acceptable behavior and even to dictate thoughts, a spasm in evolution.
Examining the status of males and females throughout the various civilizations, from tribal to imperial, and comparing them to the wider practices of animals in general, we can draw certain conclusions:
The prime directive of life is life—survival, flourishing, reproduction, replication. To this end each lifeform carries a hardwired program for seeking mates and mating. How any particular lifeform achieves this goal may vary, but all else is subsidiary to this prime command. Mating is the driver of life.
Since reproduction is the first order of business, and it is achieved by the mating of male and female, how the sperm is delivered into its incubation chamber is irrelevant. The selfish gene will formulate whatever works, from putting females “in heat” to attract the males, to making males overpower any available female at every opportunity while fighting off rivals, to making females more receptive during their fertile days, to drawing males into a protective mode for their females and offspring, to a million other lures and lusts to service the libido.
Cultures evolve complex rituals to protect their genetic survival. Some cultures develop notions of private property, agriculture, technology, even ownership of females in harems to assure the strongest male can fertilize as many of the best and most attractive females as possible. Breeding is everything, no matter how complex and convoluted a social philosophy may become to justify it.
Ownership of resources to feed the broodstock becomes the next priority, sowing the seeds of territorial domination, predation, rape and pillage, aggression and expropriation, from raiding to enslaving to taxation to perpetual war.
Notions of individual rights and freedoms and equality are just one of an infinite number of social structures that can evolve to assure the most economical methods of propagation and sustenance. Voluntarily refraining from exploiting and depriving others is rarely achieved, as it is viewed as weakness by the power algorithm. Conquest, whether of rivals or of females, is the modus operandi of survival, supported by the emotional chemistry of the brain.
Now we are in a transition of homo sapiens from the purely animal response to a more intellectualized mode of societal relationships. We have invented personhood and consent, merit and hierarchies, science and material restructuring of our environment. We still have not learned that sending the strongest, healthiest and smartest of the breeding stock to be killed off in battles will compromise the genetic soundness of the species. We have not learned that fouling our nest will likewise create toxic environments that diminish the gene pool. But we still recognize and elevate the alpha male to leadership and power.
Then we squabble over the extent to which a male may express an interest in gaining female acceptance. Fewer females are interested in serving only as brood-sows or pleasure-objects. More females want to take on roles formerly reserved for dominant males. A new breed of Amazon or warrior princess is on the march. And a whole new industry of sex workers (maligned as whores) has blossomed to service the underserved males. What religious fossil would define these women as whores?
We may be too close to our current social matrix to be objective observers. Once upon a time women were flattered to be whistled at. Now even a look is deemed offensive, and a friendly hug or pat on the shoulder is interpreted as an attack.
The pendulum has swung to its totalitarian negative terminus. All men are defined as pigs, with only sex on their minds. We can only wonder why women spend endless resources and effort to look enticing, to look “hot”, enriching the cosmetics and garment industries. Could it be to compete for studs?
When first feminism (femininity?) and then masculinity (masculinism?) is set as the new rule of the day, can we someday arrive at humanism?
That has been recognized, and in a broader form than just losing genes. There have been many observations of the stupidity of great minds being killed in senseless wars, such as the brilliant young British physicist Henry Moseley killed in World War I. Mosely had already made important discoveries of principles for the organization of the periodic table of the elements, but became a radio operator who was mindlessly slaughtered by Turks when he was overrun in a hopeless battle. The loss was incalculable for the future of physics regardless of what his genes might have produced. Likewise for the much earlier case of Archimedes being sliced to death by a brute Spartan soldier who had been told to bring him alive. How many others whom we never heard of were senselessly murdered before accomplishing something great? Who knows what else may have been accomplished.
But the emphasis is and should be on individual values, not the evolution of the future species or service to the collective of the current generations. Whether someone volunteers for a legitimate war of defense, or is carried away by emotions treating some war as if it were the super bowl, or is conscripted into a slaughter without his choice or is killed as a nonparticipant in an attack, every individual life has supreme value to himself and others close to him, and has the potential to produce some degree of value to others he may not yet even know. Even the best may not matter to the gene pool if their accomplishments result from how they use the minds they have that are otherwise normal. Potential loss to the gene pool is a fact, but the right of the individual to his own life is fundamental to ethics. Millennia of senseless wars throughout human history have caused unfathomable loss of human values, and so have defensive wars that at least preserve values. The future gene pool is only one aspect.
I found your comments thought provoking, and for the most part they corresponded to my experience and study. You left some unanswered questions, only because they are at this point open issues and it will take some time to see how they play out. I agree with you that reproduction and propagation of the species is the prime directive for man as for every other species. Do you think this awareness crept into Ayn Rand's thinking? She talked and wrote about the requirements of man's survival, but I haven't seen anything that indicates she thought much in terms of genetics, or evolutionary biology and its hard-wiring. I'm not sure she would even agree with the concept of hard wiring, although I think it's a difficult concept, in light of what we know now, to refute. These questions are not just addressed to puzzlelady. The rest of the Gulch feel free to contribute your thoughts
Thanks for taking the time to post your perceptive comment.
Ayn Rand was searching for the ideal man, whose emotions are ruled by his reason, who was past the stage of instincts and “conditioned reflexes”, and whose consciousness is integrated with objective reality. His vision is beyond the whim of the moment, and his sexual response is to the highest value in the other person as an individual, not for mere animal response.
Now Rand and most of her circle had little interest in children, although she wrote a couple of children into Atlas Shrugged almost as an afterthought, like a brief footnote. Dagny is 37 when she meets Galt, probably not likely to enter parenthood and make a lot of little Galts. Rand’s virtue of productiveness is in creative advances in technological and intellectual areas, not genetic reproduction. She is seeing the next possible stage of human evolution. As an arch- individualist, she denounced tribalism, and what is tribalism but subservience to the group for both genetic and ideological collectivism.
In Rand’s view of what is possible for the ideal man (and woman), individuals are no longer held captive by their organic conditioning. Their mind can override, and that is where her sense of selfishness comes in, that the individual asserts rational ideas over physical programming. And that includes prevention of pregnancy. At this stage, heredity is through ideas, not just through DNA. Rational ideas, please.
Here is the bit of irony, that love and sex are still selecting mates, just by more complex criteria of value. The woman still selects, though by a more intellectual judgment, whose immortality she wants to vote for with her body. Why would Rand write her famous steamy love scenes if not to celebrate her view of physical expression of conceptual attraction? As long as sex exists between humans, the life force is still operating. Natural selection still goes after the best it can get.
Many years ago, Playboy had a question-and-answer feature, and to the question of which part of a woman’s body was the most important to stimulate, their answer was, “The mind.” Must have learned it from the Ayn Rand interview…
Now where is mankind headed with its large and complex brain, its evolving cognition and intelligence? To the stars? To preserve life beyond the death of our Sun? To engineer both our genes and the Cosmos?
Arthur C. Clarke, that other great visionary, wrote of a people who had advanced beyond the corporeal, who could code their consciousness into the very fabric of the Universe. And “in all the Galaxy they had found nothing more precious than mind, and so they nurtured its emergence everywhere.”
We have our work cut out for us.
"In Rand’s view of what is possible for the ideal man (and woman), individuals are no longer held captive by their organic conditioning. Their mind can override, and that is where her sense of selfishness comes in, that the individual asserts rational ideas over physical programming."
Your statements imply that there is a tension between "physical programming" and "organic conditioning," on the one hand, and "rational ideas," which must override them to free individuals from their "captive" state. I agree with you, but I think Rand stated and believed a much more radical proposition: think rationally and one's "physical programming" and "organic conditioning" would follow. I refer to Francisco's famous "sex speech" to Rearden.
I assert that this is simply not true. Recognizing as I do Ayn Rand's inestimable value, I would still rather look at a picture of a beautiful woman (of whom I have no idea of her intellectual and phiosophical worth) than a picture of Rand. My response to the beautiful woman is heightened if she's scantily dressed and/or provacatively posed. One can say that's esthetics, but it's not, it's a primal and sexual reaction. I know myself that well, at least. One can also say it's because my mind has not reached the pinnacle of perfect rationality, which is certainly true.
Even if my mind attained such a state, I don't think it would change my preference in pictures or my occasionally staring at attractive younger women in the gym. My rationality might override those types of reactions, but it would not realign or eliminate them. More study is needed, but I would hypothesize that rationality and sexual desires come from two different regions of the brain; the two can occur simultaneously and be contradictory, and the former doesn't govern the latter.
Rand argued that there was no conflict between mind and sexual desire in a rational person. According to Barbara Branden's book, she was mystified and infuriated that Nathaniel Branden left her for a younger, prettier, but less intellectually accomplished woman. I agree with Rand, you, and ewv that our rational minds can overcome our sexual desires, but I don't agree with Rand that there is no tension between the two. Rand's fury might have been justified, but not her mystification. By her lights Branden was not wholly rational (even before he left her) and so would have irrational desires, including his ultimate choice in women.
Ayn Rand did not say to think rationally and "physical programming and organic conditioning", whatever that is, would change. Ayn Rand spoke in terms of a "programming" metaphor regarding ideas and subsequent automatic functioning of the subconscious. Change your ideas and that important aspect of the operation of the mind will change accordingly. There are no innate ideas pre-programmed. And one's emotional responses depend on one's values, which are by choice, not pre-programmed. They may be thought out or be passively absorbed by default to different degrees, and can be changed, but a lifetime of patterns does not easily or instantaneously change just by "thinking rationally".
Ayn Rand didn't write some children into Atlas Shrugged just as an afterthought. They had no essential role in her particular plot-theme, but she showed the contrasting development of the Taggert children and what it led to in an interesting way. She used the Valley as a means to show how the best people interact and live with each other, and the rational raising of children had to be a part of that -- contrasted with the children in Starnesville and other brief descriptions of the impact of the 'outer world' on children and the threat to their future there.
She saw the ideal as rational individuals choosing a productive life in any of many optional ways, not as mindless breeding machines (Balph Eubank: "a woman who runs a railroad, instead of practicing the beautiful craft of the handloom and bearing children.") She regarded raising children as one possible productive activity, but not as a duty. You are right that "In Rand’s view of what is possible for the ideal man (and woman), individuals are no longer held captive by their organic conditioning. Their mind can override, and that is where her sense of selfishness comes in, that the individual asserts rational ideas over physical programming. And that includes prevention of pregnancy. At this stage, heredity is through ideas, not just through DNA. Rational ideas, please." Yes.
Ayn Rand wrote about rational choices of individuals in pursuit of their own personal values; ethics is not about pursuing a collectivist, deterministic "reproduction and propagation of the species is the prime directive for man". Ethics is not to serve evolution of the race, and evolutionary biology has no teleology, it has no purpose, it just is as the way life works. How species evolve is a result of what survives, not a goal; that was a crucial principle in Darwin's science of evolution. For Ayn Rand, the role of genetics is its result in the capacity for rational thought as our nature, which is the starting point for ethics. How our nature evolved over millions of years does not matter to identifying what is and what we should do with it in accordance with ethics. Man's choices are for his own life, with his own happiness as his moral goal, not the collective species with a duty to breed for it.
Man IS the apex predator, whether male or female, ignore that at your own peril.
Considering the number of people whose philosophical underpinning is "Me first, screw the rest" the consequences are not surprising. Regrettable, but not a surprise.
I'll let you all in on a personal secret....
Live PD, has become my favorite program on TV. Why you ask? Because no matter how frustrating my week has been from less than pleasant interactions, my experiences are not that bad in comparison. It also blindingly illustrates that we will never plumb the depths of human stupidity.
end. It becomes hard to sort even what the right side is any more. We should have our military here and send them out to retaliate if we are attacked (as on 1Sept 2001), possibly if Israel (a real ally) is attacked, and maybe if there is a threat from North Korea. But endlessly and endlessly in the Mideast?--Excuse me, I don't see much good in that anymore.
First, I do not think that America wages wars or kills millions just because we can. In fact, America has been very circumspect and hesitant in military actions since the Vietnam War, preferring to use air power for “surgical strikes” in aid of non-American “allies” on the ground rather than putting American boots on the ground, or sending a few “advisors” to organize the opposition to whatever force is on the other side. (I make no distinctions as to good or bad choices we make in this. And our actions in Iraq and Afghanistan not withstanding). But I digress.
To say that we must uncover the corruption associated with America’s wars, presumably against the “less than” people of the world, and the “predation” that drives it is to 1) say that there is no legitimate reasons for the actions whatsoever, and 2) to ignore aspects of human nature that by themselves encourage some humans to take advantage of other humans or situations they find themselves in, and for their own benefit. While we can decry these most human of tendencies, the fact is that these drives are generally derived from the instinct for survival. And I dare say that no government will ever eradicate these tendencies completely.
The real reason that I agree this must be “the beginning of the beginning” is that the sexual scandals are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to corruption in our government. It is my hope that ultimately some courageous people will come forward to expose the other abuses of power by the Establishment such as the bribery, collusion, self enrichment, and other corrupt practices perpetrated by members of Congress of both parties, along with the unelected Washington Establishment Big Wigs who support and fund the parties and their minions.
Perhaps if the sex scandals lead to the exposure of the abject and pervasive corruption of America’s Ruling Class in general, and the removal of the individuals involved from their positions of power. Then perhaps whatever predatory components as you describe exist within America’s military actions can be eliminated (as much as possible). Thus we may be able to better consider war’s impact on those who you call the “less than”s, both at home and abroad.
It is an admission of guilt on the part of the 'victim' when they state that they had to give in to get what was wanted for themselves. Unless they were being forcibly abused there was never a chance for the abuser to succeed unless they decided to participate. It was never important to the victim to complain until it became popular to complain to get more attention. Sexual predation is minor compared to the destruction of property and life that is forgotten about while the majority wags their tongues worried about who got what from whom for what and they demand that it is their right to decide rather than admit the decision should have been made by the individual at the moment something was offered.
I didn't claim to "have anything in common with Eisenhower," I cited his warning. "A-philosophical" is not even a word, but philosophically, I stand for reality as absolute, rational egoism, logic, and laissez faire capitalism as the ideal political system (as perusal of my web site will make clear). In foreign policy, I believe in the noninterventionism espoused by George Washington and John Quincy Adams (in his famous "In Search of Monsters" speech). Again, any persusal of my web site will make that clear. As far as the military, I believe it's function should be limited to defense of the US proper, a stance that flows logically from my overall foreign policy beliefs.
I am sure not all of that comports with Ayn Rand's beliefs, but much of it does. I was not aware of any requirement that one had to toe the line on all of her positions or one could not contribute to Galt's Gulch. And who the hell made you the arbiter of "the purpose of this forum"?
Respond or not to this post or anything else I put up on Galt's Gulch, that's your choice. However, your blatant mischaracterizations of what I say and believe preclude me from responding further to you, and I will not do so.
Gore tried to invoke Eisenhower as someone critical of how the defense industry was evolving as cover for the leftist nature of his own foreign policy views, including his disgusting "sexual predation" analogy. There was in Eisenhower's time, and still is, a lot to criticize, but Eisenhower did not use anti-capitalist Marxist slogans accusing profit and treasure of being the cause of war.
Companies profiting from producing for defense, which is not by nature evil, is not the source of national foreign policy. Companies with a strong presence in Virginia and Washington where they compete for contracts and consult with the military on complex projects are not directing a foreign policy of wars for "profit" and "treasure", and are not "worse than sexual predation". He is so far out on the leftist "non-interventionism" ignoring the threats today in a much 'smaller' world than the 18th century that the pornographic hyperbole came naturally to him.
Those interested in Ayn Rand's ideas on how statism, not profit, are the cause of war can read her essay "The Roots of War" in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. It is the polar opposite of Gore's neo-Marxist 'libertarian' nihilism, which floating abstractions are a long way from what he misrepresents as demands to "toe the line".
The purpose of this forum as pro-Ayn Rand was established by those who created it -- for those interested in Atlas Shrugged and the movie as their popularity grew. No one "the hell made me arbiter" and no one is expected to be an expert on Ayn Rand or "toe the line" in advance. That is Gore's own smear. He exploits this forum regularly to promote his a-philosophical libertarian blog -- including his infamous exhortation to sabotage and destroy the economy -- with commentary often antagonistic to Ayn Rand's principles and little or nothing said supporting them. Anyone can challenge his commentary, pointing out the discrepancies, and anyone has a right to. That is not being "arbiter" and is not an excuse for his smug, belligerent resentment in his personal attacks..