Second-guessing Ayn Rand (and experts in general.)

I just now fully realized something that stemmed out of a curious behavior I first witnessed over a decade ago. I find that many (but not necessarily most) fans and followers of Ayn Rand have a tendency to ask a certain type of “What if” question. Usually the question is in the form of “What would Ayn Rand think about (fill in the blank)?” Now on the surface this wouldn’t necessarily seem bothersome, but I always tended to find it peculiar. I think I now know why it’s not only strange to me but in fact un-Objectivist as well. I won’t go so far as to say that this type of question is anti-Objectivist for one simple reason: It is gratifying in a minor way for a person to realize that they came to the same conclusion as the one someone else who he admires had derived.

Nevertheless, I think this is a remarkable behavior for _Objectivists_. Consider that the whole entire philosophy is geared towards _reducing_ the individual burden for trying to make sense of the world. Ayn Rand flatly stated that concepts are formed in order to condense a bunch of information so that it is easier to retain and otherwise manipulate. If a person had to constantly “reinvent the wheel” in the manner of reforming a concept every time he came across a particular instance of that concept, then that person would effectively undermine their own conceptual ability. (Also, this type of questioning is _not_ typically necessary for one to check their logical premises.)

I am not saying that asking what Ayn Rand thought about a specific event or issue is anti-conceptual (although it tends to be a hallmark of people who are new to Objectivism.) I _am_ saying that that line of questioning if taken seriously as a means of gauging one’s understanding of Objectivism is self-defeating. While it is certainly true that principles are derived from real experience (by way of induction), it isn’t appropriate to go on “fishing expeditions”. That is, it’s not particularly helpful for a person to ask what someone else who happens to be expert in _some_ field thinks about a specific issue _if_ that questioner already has the means to discerning the answer for himself by doing his own logical work. If a person properly studies Objectivism (or at least basic logic), then that person will already have a way of making evaluations. This leads me to another divisive point.

A person has their own personal context, and I’m not appealing here to relativism of any sort either. While it may be fun to know what an expert thinks about something (as an interviewer might ask in a gossipy sort of way), it would not have to be immediately relatable to a questioner’s own circumstances. Again, my point isn’t related to whether someone _can_ benefit from such questions. I am saying that these types of questions are inefficient for learning. To put it differently, these types of questions are tangential as far as gaining _a proper method_ of learning is concerned.

I think that if people have been studying Objectivism for several years, and they are still particularly interested in wondering what Ayn Rand thought about some very specific circumstance, then that person has failed to understand how to induce and then apply the relevant Objectivist principles. Unless the person in question is a researcher or a historian, he should be relating concrete circumstances to principles in order to understand how those circumstances will affect his own life. It should be noted that even a historian (or for the matter, a reporter or actor) can not live vicariously through other people’s lives as a primary means of learning. That type of behavior is precisely the type which Ayn Rand was referring to when she coined the term “second-handers”. While we must rely on experts for ancillary aspects of our lives, we have to become “experts” on our own respective lives for each of us to fully realize our best efforts.