Quote:
Originally Posted by Dan D
With all respect, but this is waffle imo. I don't think that we share the same "reality", for one. Second, I have no idea what "reality" Ayn Rand is talking about. May be we agree, but I can't tell from just the Quote. Third, you need to define "reality" on a term we at least can all agree upon. Otherwhise we are talking Klingon or Greek or something.
In other words: I don't understand.
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Lets make this as pragmatical as possible then.
You have a pain in your tooth. You ignore it and instead of going to the dentist, you tell yourself that it will go away from alone, and that it is not meaning anything, or whatever that allows you to avoid going to the dentist. The hole in your tooth does its work, it gets deeper, and wider, the pain gets unbearable, you go almost insane. That is because you avoided to recognize the reality of that you had a hole in your tooth. You made yourself believe different, but that does not save you from the consequences: the pain almost kills you, and the tooth dies and gets pulled. You delayed the outcome, and made it worse.
Or do you think the pain you feel is not real? For having an unreal pain, you screamed surprisingly loud. And me - I have heard you for sure in what you call "my reality". Either we live in the same reality then, or our two realities are fundamentally linked.
In a way, Rand talks about what I call Karma: the inevitable causal link between cause and effect. People can deny unwanted truths and realities. They can do like little kids that play: they can do and act "as if". But real life facts still find you, inevitably, always. Doing "as if", assuming "as if things were like this and not like that", is extremely popular in politics both left and right, and modern money-printer-economics. They think that the rules of the market would bend and the nature of facts would distort on behalf of ideological ambitions and desires. This has never worked in the past, and it can never work in the future. It does not work that way, reality still presents you the bill with the costs for the ongoing ignorance, and the illusions you maintain. We currently experience the truth in that, in the slow collapse of our wellfare states, the increasing socialist regime and etatism, the growing "strong state", the financial cataclysm slowly unfolding, the faster and faster fall into the mealstrom of modern state-enforced paper-money. We spill oil into the fire everyhwere, we insist that oil is the cure, not the origin of the fire. We can assume that this helps to ease our problems, we can deny the facts. But the backblow from our illusions nevertheless will catch us, no matter what our freaking ideologies make us believe, and for what reason we fell motivated to still hold them up. Ideology moves mind, not innocent facts. You can delay the payment of the final bill, but you cannot avoid it forever. And the longer you delay it, the higher the bill in the end will be. The longer you allowed the damage to pile up, the higher the heap of garbage that you need to clean up.
There is nothing metaphysical or mysterious in Rand's quote. Its just plain reason, and sober logic. Reason and logic like in "if you spend more than you earn, you gonna get problems sooner or later."