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[Commenting note: I would very much appreciate it if commenters refrained from implying that this is a thing which solely happens in the social justice movement. It is really not.]
I often refer to a certain kind of behavior as “Ayn Rand villainy”, and people ask what I mean. Unfortunately, Ms. Rand has not written a concise explanation that precisely lines up with what I got out of her work, as far as I know, so I have to write one myself.
Rand characterized the emotion as “the hatred of the good for being the good”. Unfortunately, the problem with this description is that it sounds like a Care Bear villain, but to be honest Ayn Rand villainy is kind of a Care Bear villain mindset, so here we are.
An extensional definition of “the good”: Strength is good. Kindness is good. Not being in pain is good. Beauty is good. Pleasure is good. Fun is good. Talking to someone fascinating is good. Ice cream is good. The feeling when you’ve been working hard on a problem and the answer finally clicks is good. Holding hands with someone you love is good.
My radical position here is that good things are good and bad things are bad. It is not actually any more complicated than that.
(Note that some things which are typically considered “pain” or “suffering” may, in fact, be good things. For instance, grief is extremely painful, but if you offered most people whose spouse just died a Be Happy About Spouse’s Death button they would look at you and go “what the fuck? Of course not! I want to be sad that my spouse is dead, they were my fucking spouse.” The death of spouses is in most circumstances a bad thing, but the emotion of grief in response to spousal death is not.)
Now, sometimes people say that good things are bad because they want to feel Deeply Wise, and because of the natural human tendency, if they are being hit on the head with a baseball bat every week, to conclude being hit on the head with a baseball bat is a good thing. This is less pernicious, I think, than Ayn Rand villainy; you still have your basic value structure intact, even with some layers of rationalization on top.
One common manifestation of Ayn Rand villainy, in my experience, is the idea of deserving bad things. I’m not talking, here, about facing up to the natural consequences of your actions: if you do something wrong, people might dislike you, or you might lose something valuable to you, or you might even go to prison. However, there’s a difference between “I accept that, because I have harmed you, you may dislike me” and “you have to dislike me! I did something wrong! If you don’t dislike me, I am not being adequately punished!” Punishment of those who did something wrong is not an end in itself; it is a means to accomplish some other goal, like deterring those who might do bad things in the future, or allowing others to choose whom they want to interact with, or keeping you from situations where you might do harm again. Punishment is always a cost. Sometimes it is a cost worth paying. But it is always a cost, and in a perfect world we would do without it.
Some people conclude that they need to be punished not because they’ve done anything wrong but because of who they are as people. This is an even worse form of Ayn Rand villainy, because you can’t really stop being yourself. If you support punishment for specific bad things, then there’s at least the theoretical possibility you will stop doing things that are wrong and stop having topsy-turvy morality; if you support punishment for your existence, then your morality will always be flipped the wrong way around.
Another common manifestation is ascribing moral worth to suffering. Suffering does not magically transform someone into a good person. People who are experiencing bad things have the complete normal human range of personalities, from total sweetheart to complete asshole. But many times, people think that experiencing bad things in and of itself turns you into a good person, and experiencing good things in and of itself turns you into a bad person.
Let me say a couple of things I don’t mean. I’m not criticizing compassion: it is perfectly natural, when you see someone suffering, to want to help. I am not arguing against the idea that people often indirectly participate in systems which cause people pain or that people who haven’t experienced a certain bad thing can be astonishingly clueless and insensitive to people who have. But the problem in the latter situation is not the good things! It is the cluelessness, the insensitivity, or the participation in the harmful system.
There are a couple ways this can play out. First, people can deliberately make themselves suffer in order to make themselves better people: this is the failure mode of bad Stoicism and of bad Catholicism, the urge to self-flagellate, to deny yourself simple pleasures, to deliberately put up with people you loathe, to hurt yourself until you’re pure.
Second, people can feel guilty for not suffering. For instance, I’ve known a lot of people who spend a lot of time in online mental illness communities and then feel guilty about recovering. A lot of internalized biphobia takes this form too, particularly for people in heterosexual relationships: “how dare I say I’m an Oppressed Queer when I have this much privilege?” And a lot of white guilt, cis guilt, and other forms of unproductive privileged-person guilt take this form too. This is, of course, entirely backwards. There is nothing wrong with being more functional, getting married to the person you love, or interacting with cops without having to be afraid they’ll shoot you– the problem is that these really basic things aren’t extended to everyone. Feeling guilty for having something that everyone should have is fucked up.
Not everyone with the Ayn Rand villain mindset targets themselves. One way it can play out is “I don’t like it when you’re happy or strong.” More often than one would naively suppose, it’s explicit, but it’s quite often implicit as well: for instance, a lot of people will claim they want what’s best for you, but they’ll get mad at you for liking things because you’re liking the wrong things in the wrong way, or every time you set a goal that’s important to you they’ll make fun of you for having the temerity to try. If someone does not like it when you enjoy yourself, or when you improve as a person, they are not your friend. They are hurting you. Friends want good things for their friends, and not bad things. It is in the definition.
Particularly if you’ve internalized it yourself, you can wind up in this really twisted dynamic where people wind up using your own virtue and their own suffering against you. It works something like this: “I am weak and in pain. That means I am morally good. You are strong and not in pain. That means you are morally bad, and because you’re bad I have the right to hurt you as much as I like. But you’re never going to be able to suffer as much as I do, your pain isn’t ever really going to count.” It doesn’t just play on your internalized Ayn Rand villainy– it plays on your compassion, your kindness, your love, and it can be incredibly difficult to leave those situations without leaving those virtues behind.
If someone is hurting you in those ways (and it is not a one-time fluke or swiftly corrected when pointed out), get out and run as fast as you can. I am so serious about this. You deserve to be in relationships with people who want good things for you and not bad things. This is not actually that burdensome a requirement. It is the bare minimum. They might have some really tragic backstory about why they keep doing it, they might be legitimately making a mistake, but it really doesn’t matter. They might be good people, but they are not good friends for you. If you are friends with people who want you to be in pain, it will eat you up from the inside out.
Thing of Things 
Since I’m me, I feel the need to point out the cognitive dissonance here.
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Reversed stupidity is not intelligence. It’s stupid to assign value to pain and suffering when you’re Pretending to Be Wise, or rationalizing getting hit on the head with a baseball bat. But doing the exact opposite of that stupid thing isn’t necessarily smart.
There’s nothing incoherent about believing that there are some times when it’s good to be sad, but also that people vastly overestimate how frequently these times occur. One reason that those who Pretend to Be Wise can fool so many people is that they usually start out with a grain of truth.
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“If someone does not like it when you enjoy yourself, or when you improve as a person, they are not your friend. They are hurting you. Friends want good things for their friends, and not bad things. It is in the definition.”
So one of the nastier tricks of Christianity is the way it helps the believer define being hateful as being loving, so that they can indulge in being hateful while patting themselves on the back. Its not an easy trick, mind. It takes a lot of work. There are many, many layers of apologetics that are encrusted around this nasty little social dynamic in order to protect the believers from having it fall apart on them- but Christianity has had a lot of brainpower devoted to it over the centuries, turned towards pulling this off.
So you end up with an infinitely loving god who wants only the best for humanity, but will consign all of humanity to eternal torment unless they attain what appears to be a morally neutral epistemic status regarding metaphysics. And I know there’s a response to that, but all the responses take you round and round the post, always ending up in a functionally identical place. “No, see, everyone believes God is real already, some people just pretend he doesn’t exist because they love sin. That makes belief in God a moral issue, not a morally neutral epistemic one.” “So you DO believe that nonbelievers are morally lesser than you and therefore deserve infinite unending agony. That sounds hateful.” “Nonono, see, we believe that we deserve it too, so that’s not hateful.” “But you have a get out of jail free card?” “That’s right.” “Which is belief in god?” “That’s right!” “Which you just said was a morally good act that nonbelievers are incapable of performing because they love sin so much?” “That’s right!” “Your efforts at simultaneously believing that your group is defined by capacity and willingness to engage in an important moral act, and that anyone not part of your group is defined by incapacity and unwillingness to engage in that moral act, is not compatible with your insistence that both groups are morally equal.”
You can go round and round like that for days. And there are loads of other issues you can do the same thing with.
No one will EVER agree that they do not like it when you enjoy yourself. No one will EVER agree that they do not like it when you improve as a person. No one will EVER agree that thinking negatively of you and treating you like a bad person is what they do to feel better about themselves. No one will EVER agree that they’re willfully exaggerating your negative traits in order to feel better about themselves. They will ALWAYS have an excuse for why what seems to look like that isn’t really that.
And worse, there will be a community of people surrounding them who aren’t really that serious about the details, but who have just sort of picked up, in a vague kind of sense, the gist of it all. These people may be genuinely nice in a lot of ways, but they’ll still have a vague kind of idea that “people like you” are “problematic,” because those respected as moral authorities in their community said so.
Sooo…. point is, I’m not disagreeing with you.
I’m just adding in- If you take this post as important advice, you will be forced to, on occasion, look at people or groups of social people who possess social capital in your community and your social context, and who have plausible sounding, socially accepted explanations for why they are morally good people who are not at all evil… and you will have to decide that yeah, they’re evil. In spite of how much everyone fetes them, they’re evil.
And you’ll have to find a separate peace that those around you will not respect or honor.
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This is more of a grey area than you’re making it out to be, I think. Most of us would agree that the average German with knowledge of the Holocaust was complicit, even if they didn’t do anything directly to contribute. There really is something morally wrong with enjoying a comfortable existence while other people are being made to suffer in preventable ways.
If we’re not going to adopt the Ayn Rand or Peter Singer extremes on this question — neither of which seems workable in practice — then we have to fall back on quantifying. How bad are things, really? What potential impact could I have, if I were sincerely motivated? What alternative social or economic structures might credibly make things better? Note that these are precisely the sorts of questions that are litigated when any social-justice movement gains prominence. If they are answered credibly enough, the comfortable will conclude that it’s worth sacrificing some part of their comfort in order to help make a difference.
I guess what I’m saying is that a fully general argument either for or against the guilt of the privileged is impossible. Which I realize is part of your point too.
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What was the average German supposed to do? Commit treason by sabotaging the German army?
This is not an abstract question imo. I think the drug war is literally a state sponsored torture and kidnapping ring. This is not as bad as the holocaust but it is pretty bad (the drug war has been going on for a long time so it has done as much damage as many genocides though not the holocaust).
What do you propose I do about this? Start shooting cops? Dedicate my life to trying to improve the TOR network? If I decide not to do these things am I “complicit” in the drug war?
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I agree with both you and the parent comment.
How responsible am I for the negative actions my country performs, and what should I do about it?
Is the high inconvenience to fully withdrawing my support (e.g. becoming a tax evader or emigrating) a justifiable reason for not doing so? And wouldn’t I also have to account for support I’d be withdrawing from national activities that I like?
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No; the average German was supposed to do whatever they could, and the most common forms of resistance were to illegally harbor Jews or to help them flee. Is anyone going to argue that Oskar Schindler wasn’t performing a morally praiseworthy act? Of course not everyone is in a position to resist, but I covered that in my original comment.
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How can someone be complicit in something they didn’t cause? Suppose I see a burglar break into my neighbor’s house. Obviously, calling the police would be nice, but to not do so would by no means be being complicit in the burglary – the moral responsibility lies entirely with the burglar. I can’t be guilty of inaction unless I choose to take on more than my default responsibilities.
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Enjoying a comfortable existence is not the problem here; not doing anything to prevent suffering is. This distinction is important.
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Having a worse life would not, in itself, make the average German less complicit.
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The average German during WWII (the Holocaust only started in 1941, and the Final Solution was only decided and implemented in 1942) didn’t necessarily have a confortable life, living in a totalitarian and paranoid police-state, under a complete collapse of rule of law and due process, without even accounting for the normal effects of war restrictions, war shortages and allied bombings.
It’s also not clear that the average German knew about the Holocaust; the *deportation* of designated populations was well known and even boasted on public media by the Nazis as a propaganda tool, but the *genocide* aspect was kept highly secret and restricted to only a handful of camps (on the thousands that existed) none of which were within the pre-1939 borders of Germany, and it’s not before 1944 that unambiguous information of what was happening became commonplace in the west.
While information had surfaced before that, it seemed so extravagant that many people (including many Jews) prefered to believe it was grossly exagerated war propaganda.
The moral obligation to fight deportations wasn’t obvious at the time anyway, since prison-camps for foreigners and ethnic-cleansing through deportation were common practices on all sides back then.
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“Most of us would agree that the average German with knowledge of the Holocaust was complicit, even if they didn’t do anything directly to contribute.”
I’ll readily bite the bullet and say the average German who knew of the Holocaust does not have moral responsibility, or at the very least is no more blameworthy than any of us commenting here. There is always some atrocity going on somewhere that you could be working to prevent, but aren’t. Inaction during the Holocaust only feels uniquely significant now because we know with hindsight that the Nazis ultimately lost badly.
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I wasn’t going to start with Nazis, but what the hell…. I was just introduced to Orff’s Gassenhauer, which is as pleasant and cheerful a piece of music as I’ve ever heard. I didn’t think classical music was supposed to be that pleasant.
So I look up Orff, and what do you know– he was living in Germany in the Nazi era, and he did nothing to help them and nothing to obstruct them, even when he probably should have taken some risks to help a friend.
Should this affect my enjoyment of Gassenhauer? My solution was to consider that I probably wouldn’t have done any better had I been in his situation, so who am I to judge him? I’m not sure that this is a good solution, but at least it keeps me from being distracted while listening to the music.
There may not be pure hatred of the good for being good, though there are certainly things that look like it if you’re being subjected to it.
For example, I’ve occasionally been miserable enough that other people’s happiness got on my nerves. Fortunately, I didn’t act on this by making other people unhappy (I hope I didn’t– it’s possible I did some of the more subtle versions), but if I had, it wouldn’t have been pure Satanic hatred of the good, it would have been trying to get good (feeling better for myself) in a way that made life worse for other people.
Arguably, even the nasty parts of SJ are an effort to make life better for a valued group at the expense of a hated group.The make life better part presumably incleds some normal human values.
Still, the spreading of misery (and training people to make themselves miserable, and then claiming it doesn’t really hurt in any way that matters) is clearly very SJ, but I’m interested in discussion of other places hatred of the good for being good shows up. For example, trolls are parasitic on good conversation.
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“Arguably, even the nasty parts of SJ are an effort to make life better for a valued group at the expense of a hated group.”
Well, that’s the game, isn’t it? No one wakes up and decides their going to make someone else miserable because doing so will make them feel better. They come up with a cassus belli. And the more believable and noble it sounds to them the better.
So the stereotypical homophobic uncle isn’t, in his mind, belittling gay people to make himself feel better. He has an elaborate series of justifications for why this is a righteous thing to do. Maybe he’s shaking them awake in hopes of helping them avoid hellfire. Maybe maintaining the moral standards that led to all of western civilization. Who knows, but he’s got something.
“I’m discomfiting the privileged on behalf of the powerless” is a great one.
The more widely the cassus belli is acknowledged as a good and valid cause, the better.
I sometimes pontificate on this… I once took a course that discussed business PR. The speaker discussed what he called the “villain, victim, vindicator” narrative framing. It’s pretty much always driven by the vindicator. The vindicator claims legitimacy from defending the rights of the victim, and glory from defeating the villain. It is in the vindicators interests to make the victim out to be as pure and innocent as possible, the offense against them as vile as possible, and the villain as evil as possible. Because that is what justifies the honor the vindicator receives for vindicating the victim and conquering the villain.
His advice was tailored towards things like, “your company/client employed someone who molested a kid” type stories. He argued that you could expect some fairly standard behaviors from the media as it adopted a vindicator role. For example, they’ll find something you could have done but didn’t, or something you did but you could have done faster, and use it to craft a narrative in which your company/client engaged in negligence or a villainous coverup. The likelihood that every company in your shoes handling an unusual circumstance might have similar vulnerabilities to attack will be ignored.
The only advice he could give was to watch for things a bad faith journalist could spin into fitting the villain narrative, and avoid doing them. For example, villains clam up then speak through lawyers. So don’t do that.
He wasn’t talking about social justice, but he may well have been because social justice turns that toxic dynamic up to eleven.
The standard social justice death spiral goes like this.
1. Everything is a little problematic is you look at it from the right perspectives. This is because whether something “is problematic” depends on how it’s contextualized. Easy example- friend of mine is a fan of this one art exhibit on cultural appropriation, in which a picture of white people doing/wearing Japanese stuff is superimposed on a picture on a nuclear blast. Pretty much everything is offensive if you contextualize it as being done by people who dropped a nuclear bomb on you. But that context isn’t the only one that can be applied to white/Japanese relations.
2. Ignore that this entails that some concerts about problematic material aren’t important. Ignore that this entails that some callouts are more problematic than the things being called out.
3. Call out someone for something supposedly problematic. Feel free to be aggressive and aggrieved. Even better if you can get lots if people to call out the target, so that some can be truly hateful and offensive.
4. Chances are he or she will deny it, and/or be defensive.
5. Take advantage of the many social justice community norms under which disagreeing with a callout, getting defensive after being called out, or otherwise responding negatively to an attack are, themselves, “problematic.”
6. The villain role having been firmly placed upon the poor suckers head, enjoy the emotional cathartic payoff of participating on large scale communal shaming.
It’s even better if you can call out a large group, like “white people.” Because one target might slip away from you, and effectively refuse to play the game. But an entire race? Someone will definitely respond in a way you can draw focus to, and use.
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A non-SJ example of “hatred of the good for being the good”, which I’ve committed myself in moments I’m not proud of, is what I’d call the “you can’t fight City Hall” pathology.
Some brave person takes on a personal risk to do something they believe in. They want to become a novelist, or campaign against an injustice, or w/e.
You’re threatened by this, because it sounds really hard and scary and it makes you feel inadequate by comparison. So you keep telling the person “but won’t that hurt you? isn’t it risky?”
It may start out as sympathy, and you may start out thinking you’re being protective of your reckless friend, but over time it takes on a note of anger. “Don’t you know you can’t just DO things like that?! How dare you try to do things like that!”
At bottom, it just hurts you to see someone doing a thing that you can’t do, and you take it out on them with anger.
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One context where hatred of the good for being good comes up (and I think this is probably the most common one): competitive hierarchies. Everyone who is good is a threat to you. It’s bad when others succeed, are confident and at ease, get stronger, learn, improve, make friends, have good luck. Forgiveness, loyalty and cooperation are bad even when you’re the one who benefits, because then you must call it weakness and hate it so you can justify taking advantage.
Another one, which is a more common case of the you can’t fight City Hall described above by srconstantin: change resistance. The change doesn’t have to be risky or particularly hard. It applies to weight loss, exercise, vegetarianism/veganism, donating to charity, quitting drinking or smoking and organizational restructuring. You can count on the other lobsters pulling you down and sabotaging you.
Another: the attitude of some conservatives toward those on welfare. They seem to think people who receive financial support from the state should justify the charity by being miserable, and that the amount of support should be set so that you can’t be anything but miserable if you rely on it.
Another: the neoreactionary position on women’s rights. I admit I don’t understand it well enough to even form a coherent mental model for myself, much less pass the ideological Turing test. A friend who is a true believer tried explaining it to me over months, what I got from that was that they want what’s best for women, but reserve the right to define what that entails. It is good if women are happy, but only if what makes them happy is taking on the role of obedient wife or daughter. It is good that women are strong, capable, intelligent and independent, but only if they use this power to better accomplish the goals set for them by their male guardians, and never for themselves.
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There is nothing wrong with being more functional, getting married to the person you love, or interacting with cops without having to be afraid they’ll shoot you– the problem is that these really basic things aren’t extended to everyone.
This expresses exactly why I dislike the choice of the word “privilege” by SJWs. The implicit connotations of privilege are that it’s a thing that no-one should have. But, as used in social justice, it’s overwhelmingly something that everyone should have.
Since we can’t change the word any more, it’s really important, right down at the 101 stage, to make clear that the intention is not to deprive white people of safety from the police, but to grant it to everyone, not to force men to face unrealistic body images in the media, but to remove that problem from women (etc). The earlier that can be drilled home, the fewer people will internalise the wrong connotation.
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There’s been people talking for a long time about the value of distinguishing between what everyone should have and what no one should have, and they’ve been ignored by SJWs.
In terms of understanding differences between people’s experiences, it’s worth conflating the two kinds of privilege. For example, if a black person complains about being harassed by the police, it’s too easy for a white person to say “Well, you shouldn’t be harassed” which isn’t the worst thing to say but which isn’t practically or emotionally very useful.
However, in terms of policy prescriptions or the general emotional tone, it’s crucial to distinguish between what everyone should have and what no one should have, and I think SJWs avoid doing this– some of them because they like spreading misery and some of them because they’ve been convinced by the first batch that spreading misery is the only acceptable strategy.
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SJ often insists on using framings that are useful for understanding differences between people’s experiences to make policy prescriptions or assign responsibility, because the conceptual distinction is easy to miss and because promiscuously using those framings seems empathetic. (And framings that are useful for policy prescriptions do get used to erase people’s experiences, in part because other people who miss the conceptual distinction think it’s necessary to do so to get policy right, but also sometimes just out of sadism.)
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(Also, having commented in this thread I now feel obligated to state my agreement with Ozy that Rand villainy is not a thing that happens solely in SJ)
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The connotation is there because even benign privilege is something no one should have relative to others. If everyone had all the things everyone should have, that wouldn’t mean everyone is privileged. It would mean no one is privileged.
I don’t think this is a thing SJWs don’t agree with or are unaware of. It’s just an unfortunate side effect of polarization and tribalism that this doesn’t get discussed that much. In a sufficiently polarized atmosphere, increasing the subtlety of a position is tantamount to derailment. Non-SJW people are remarkably resistant and hostile to everything SJWs are saying, including things about privilege, so SJWs become defensive and frustrated and resist derailment and increase pressure.
The polarization is not solely the fault of rabid SJWs. Being a more moderate (in thought and action, not views) kind of SJW myself my perception is biased so that I’m both subjected more to the worst people of the other side, and more sensitized to their horribleness, than to the worst people who are on my side. Even correcting for this, and then correcting for insufficient correction, I’m convinced that the least constructive voices that do the most harm are not coming from among us.
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I’m willing to grant that there are worse people opposing SJ than there are on the SJ side. However, SJ makes moral claims that I’m more vulnerable to, so I personally hate it more.
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To be a little clearer, the worst of the anti-SJ people might kill me, but it’s Sj which is telling me that the world is a worse place because I exist, the only way I can sort of redeem myself, but not really is to help people who will hate me forever for things I didn’t do, and if I were a moral person I would suck it up.
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“Social justice” versus “anti social justice” is a terrible way to divide up the world anyway. Social justice makes affirmative moral arguments, and all it takes to be “anti” it is not to accept them. The result is like dividing the world into “people who think its a good idea to comment on blogs under the name Patrick” and “people who don’t,” and noticing that the latter group has all the serial killers.
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If you call the desired end state “no one is privileged”, it seems like that’ll make you more likely to think of improving things by taking from the privileged rather than giving to the disprivileged, and vice versa.
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It’s definitely not always the case that the person in a relationship who resents the other person’s success is the lower-status one. Some people will hang out with people they think of as inferior so that they look better in comparison–and they want them to stay that way.
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“Punishment is always a cost”
I feel like this is a common attitude in the rationalist/EA sphere, but it definitely doesn’t reflect my values, or those of most people I know, I think. My utility function has term that makes me value bad things happening to people if they’ve done bad things themselves, as an inherent good, and not just a means towards deterrence etc.
The uncharitable part of me wants to think that most rationalists have this term as well, and they’re just not in touch with it because nobody has ever done something *truly* bad to them and theirs, but of course, I can’t know that. Maybe you guys are really just that much more benevolent than me.
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Rationalist and utilitarian aren’t necessarily the same thing.
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No, true, although the overlap is heavy as a point of fact.
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I don’t, in fact, think I have it. But it’s irrelevant whether I have it, only whether I endorse it.
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I get angry and want retribution/punishment/justice, too. It’s possible to feel this and believe that it’s probably better to punish according to some other principle than the anger the victims are feeling. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
It may help that I have a very visceral intuition that anger is bad* and that acting according to an impulse that arises from anger will strengthen rather than resolve it. This is borne out by evidence.
* Not morally bad, but very harmful for the person experiencing it if prolonged, plus it feels truly awful.
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I don’t think that the bulk of Ozy’s point is changed if you assign positive value to punishment, as long as you assign some value to proportionality (i.e. the suffering the punishment inflicts should be proportional to the suffering the person being punished caused).
I don’t know for sure, but I think you’d probably agree that punishment is only valuable until it reaches a certain level of proportionality, after which it becomes a cost again.
Ayn Rand villainy does not recognize proportionality. It does not attempt to limit punishment so it is proportionate to the crime. It punishes without limit. It punishes people who haven’t even done anything, just for being a certain kind of person.
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Well, OK, but what word do we use for people in Russian government who suggest banning med school graduates from working in private health care until having worked in a state hospital for n years, or people in Venezuelan government who force McDonald’s to lower Big Mac price in order to “cheat” Big Mac Index? Ayn Rand supervillains?
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Good post, but I’d just like to point out that each and every worthwhile thought in Rand’s oeuvre is a wholesale rip-off from Nietzsche.
Please don’t read Rand. Read Nietzsche.
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‘Punishment of those who did something wrong is not an end in itself; it is a means to accomplish some other goal’
I disagree.
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>An extensional definition of “the good”: Strength is good.
This sounds like the beginning of some big Villain Dogma.
Strength is Good.
Chaos is Freedom.
Ignorance is Knowledge.
(Yes, I know you didn’t mean it in a “might makes right” way.)
>One common manifestation of Ayn Rand villainy, in my experience, is the idea of deserving bad things. […] “you have to dislike me! I did something wrong! If you don’t dislike me, I am not being adequately punished!”
This is less a “manifestation of ayn Rand villainy” and more of a basic human emotion.
If someone gives you a thing, you want to repay them. If someone breaks the rules, they need to be punished. If someone hurts you, you want revenge.
On the one hand, like … half of Christian doctrine is about suppressing this. Forgiveness is good, be thankful to God, blessed are the peacemakers, repent of your sins, ask and ye shall recieve, turn the other cheek – even Render Unto Ceaser had an undercurrent of “yeah, we’re being oppressed by the Romans, but be polite about it.”
On the *other* hand, it’s not totally unreasonable for an unbiased observer to conclude that this is How Morality Works, and start doing horrible pseudo-utilitarian calculations where Hitler deserves ten million years of torture and we have to go back in time and resurrect him. Like. I don’t think this is about “hating the good”, I think it’s a … mistake. More like obsessing over something worthless or evil than obsessing over something *good*.
> […] people can deliberately make themselves suffer in order to make themselves better people: this is the failure mode of bad Stoicism and of bad Catholicism
This seems like an empirical question. Obviously suffering-in-general isn’t magic, but I can believe that – for example – fasting might help someone practice their willpower and self-control.
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The biggest gaudiest example of hating the good for being good is Islamist terrorism and totalitarianism. I’m a little surprised no one thought of it faster.
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Rand had several versions of hating the good in her novels. Jim Taggart seems to have just been bad since he was a kid. Ellsworth Toohey has a backstory– his mother wanted to help, so she had no interest in Toohey’s normal sister, but Toohey was sickly enough to get his mother’s attention.
Dominique recognizes Roark’s value, but thinks he can’t succeed, so she tries to destroy him. I’m not sure she makes psychological sense.
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“Islamic terrorism” happens for a wide variety of reasons and there’s little evidence that “hating good for being good” is the sole or main reason. “Hating good for being good” is often a component of religious fundamentalism, but that’s not limited to groups who use terrorist tactics, and not all groups that use terrorist tactics can be regarded as fundamentalist.
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I agree with this 99%.
I sometimes feel like a good solid dose of physical pain, maybe a caning or a flogging, would be therapeutic or cathartic, and I think my life is made slightly-to-moderately worse off by the relative difficulty of acquiring such.
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Also there’s competition, which can give you a frowny face response to someone else’s good work.
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