WORDISM: JOE AND AYN RAND | nationalsalvation.net
In response to my remarks about how he should not just walk away rather than apologize, Joe responds in two comments I put together here in two paragraphs;
The difficulty is in the elimination of falsehood. Man prefers falsehood. This is to say that man prefers blindness. It is extraordinarily simple and rewarding beyond belief to glimpse truth. But the veil of falsehood must be dropped. The resistance to the dropping of the veil of falsehood is ordinarily enormous. A man can live his entire life wrapped in the veil of falsehood. But truth exists. It goes nowhere. It bows to no one. It makes no compromise. Truth does not hurt as has been said by some. Jesus said it frees. That's true. It does free. That freedom simply means we are no longer bound by the falsehood that previously bound us. That falsehood is practically unlimited. Joe knows this is true.
Many years ago Joe Rorke said that there were two things that he did not want to be. He said he did not want to be a teacher and he did not want to be a preacher. Joe Rorke is not a teacher and Joe Rorke is not a preacher. Joe Rorke is nothing more than a voice in the wilderness. Truth may pass through Joe Rorke but Joe Rorke is not truth. Joe Rorke does not possess truth. Nobody possesses truth. Truth is.
Comment by joe rorke
MY REPLY:
It would be both tiresome and false for me to say Joe's approach is the Objectivism of Ayn Rand.
But the arguments he presents here I became used to over forty years ago from that group.
The argument Joe presents here is that the world consists of Joe Rorke and truth.
So one's outlook is based on 1) oneself and 2) objective fact.
As I told the Objectivists, these are wonderful points, but it all runs into one objective fact:
It doesn't work.
In the real world each Objectivists is willing to fight his own battle and leave the problems of others to them. He has no obligations.
Like all forms of Wordism this would work fine if everybody in the world went along with it.
But in the real world, if they didn't have other people who have moral obligations to defend them, Objectivists would be slaves inside a week. As I told the Objectivists, what I see is their being chained down as galley slaves - after all, which one is going to be the one to take on the slave driver FIRST - and then finding ways to minimize their effort at pulling their particular oar.
They pronounced me Irrelevant to truth.
Robert Ardrey discusses a troop of baboons where some males, who had not earned the right to breed yet, went out and led the leopard away from the troop. Some died doing it, as they knew they would. Obligations to something besides purely abstract truth are essential to the survival of every social animal.
On the other end, we have the "power comes from the barrel of a gun!" crowd. They say military heroism is the only ethic. Obedience is the only ethic. So after the obedience crap of the group that calls itself the Greatest Generation, Objectivists were an intellectual relief of gigantic proportions.
I AM a preacher. IAM a teacher. I don't think I have made a secret of that.
Joe says I manipulate. The Objectivists call me a "thug," which means someone who would use force to make people defend society. Both are right.
If Bob's Blog is a success, it will manipulate the hell out of you. You will be a force for what ***I*** want you to be a force for.
Lawyers tell me I would take the law into my own hands.
They are dead right. The only Constitution I recognize says that We the people are taking power without any Great Principles or any appeal to the Lord or the King.
Innocent people get punished because we are human. Many say that it is better for one innocent person to go free if a hundred guilty ones have to be acquitted, too. The problem with that is that it doesn't work. Every time one of that hundred commits a crime, it will punish another innocent person.
This is all a balance. It is messy balance and a nasty one. Every Wordist contrasts this with the perfection he offers. All of the Wordist approaches that offer us some kind of perfection are a human disaster. Joe wants no part of this balance. He wants to be Joe.
As long as there are patsies out there who will make it possible for Joe to be Joe, this will work just fine. At this point Joe is more valuable to the balance than any of the self-sacrificers, but our world would be useless and helpless without them.
But they are worse than useless without the Joes.
Joe and the Objectivists are part of the very balance they claim to rise above.