So What To Do?
Most objectivists I have known say we have a long slog of educating people ahead of us and that we can't expect much to improve until this is accomplished. But Ayn Rand herself experienced that most people are very strongly resistant to this kind of education. They belittle and deny it from the beginning tossing out ad hominem and other logical fallacies with abandon.
We also experience a Government that is far far away from what objectivist minarchist legitimate government would be. On the order of 99% of all the regulatory and enforcement agencies writing and enforcing the rules on all of us are not elected or even very directly subject to control by anyone who is. So it is very unlikely that even an objectivist educated reasonably large chunk of the population could change much by voting or even running for political office.
So what is left? Violent revolution? We have said for so long that it isn't "time to shoot the bastards" that it looks to me like we lost the means and most importantly the will for such measures long ago. And we likely missed the window where that would have made much difference as well. However, in the face of a lawless and evil government resistance and even violent resistance seems quite rational.
So what else? Shrugging and just surviving in what happiness can be found with a few like minded people but with much our productive capacity not on offer and not making the world over as wondrously as it could? Being sort of hunkered down and staying smaller than we really are in protest?
Or perhaps swallowing our ideals and anger and just soldiering own thinking that if only that next invention gets done and out there and integrated that perhaps all these persons, ideologies and forces in the way will not ultimately matter?
Or perhaps it is time to build a real Gulch. A country of our own based on sound ethics and politics growing out of those ethics. I am reading with interest about artificial island creation, some as big as Manhattan. An objectivist city-state or eventual chain of them in international waters may be the only way to a fully alive and rational world that we have left.
Thoughts?
We also experience a Government that is far far away from what objectivist minarchist legitimate government would be. On the order of 99% of all the regulatory and enforcement agencies writing and enforcing the rules on all of us are not elected or even very directly subject to control by anyone who is. So it is very unlikely that even an objectivist educated reasonably large chunk of the population could change much by voting or even running for political office.
So what is left? Violent revolution? We have said for so long that it isn't "time to shoot the bastards" that it looks to me like we lost the means and most importantly the will for such measures long ago. And we likely missed the window where that would have made much difference as well. However, in the face of a lawless and evil government resistance and even violent resistance seems quite rational.
So what else? Shrugging and just surviving in what happiness can be found with a few like minded people but with much our productive capacity not on offer and not making the world over as wondrously as it could? Being sort of hunkered down and staying smaller than we really are in protest?
Or perhaps swallowing our ideals and anger and just soldiering own thinking that if only that next invention gets done and out there and integrated that perhaps all these persons, ideologies and forces in the way will not ultimately matter?
Or perhaps it is time to build a real Gulch. A country of our own based on sound ethics and politics growing out of those ethics. I am reading with interest about artificial island creation, some as big as Manhattan. An objectivist city-state or eventual chain of them in international waters may be the only way to a fully alive and rational world that we have left.
Thoughts?
