Of Attila, witch doctors, and objectivists.

[Warren Whitmore]

All of the recent posts on religion has influenced me to re read For the new intellectual by Ayn Rand.

She lumps all violent types individual or collective as Attila the Hun, all religious types individual or collective as witch doctors.

The Witch doctor's psycho-epistemology and his relationship to Attila: the Witch doctor expects Attila to be his protector against reality, against the necessity of a rational cognition, and, at the same time, he expects to rule his own protector, who needs an unintelligible mystic sanction as a narcotic to relieve his chronic guilt. They derive thier mutual security, not from any form of strength, but from the fact that each has a hold o the other's secret weakness. It is not the security of two traders, who count on the values they offer each other, but the security of two black mailers who count on each other's fear. The field where they found each other was Socialism.

Experiment 1

So I am in a van with a bunch of members of my wife's family. And I decide to test this hypothesis out. My mother in law is a mystic if ever there was one. She is going on about the after life and such and so I say in my usual sensitive diplomatic fashion. What if when you croak you just break down and get eaten by worms and such. A bit to my surprise she immediatly swung into Atilla mode saying she was going to haunt me and such things. More surprisingly I thought just about everyone else dident even consider that when your life ended it ended as even being a possiblity open for discussion.

Experiment 2

The only paper I get on a regular basis is the Wall street journal that paper has columns on the front page with the events of the world on them. I catagorized each article as Attila, witch doctor, or objectivist. 65% Attila, 30% Witch doctor, and 5% Objectivist. These results may have been off by a bit because it was the week the pope died and there was a disproportional amount of that stuff.

Experiment 3

The pope died and record numbers of people from all over the world came to view the body.

When a military type dies there is a 21 gun salute and lots of additions to history books.

When Ayn Rand died very few noticed.

The data from these 3 experiments seems to suggest that only around 5% of the population use an objectivist thought process to convert data to concepts. Could this be correct?