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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Solon who wrote (65320)	11/2/2002 10:55:04 PM
From: average joe	Respond to of 82486

I’m blameless, it’s all your fault. The Secret Teachings of Ayn Rand by Bob Wallace People occasionally ask me, "If you’re a libertarian, why do you dislike so much of Ayn Rand’s writings?" This is a valid question, since she has had such influence on libertarianism (in my opinion, very much an excessive and not altogether a positive one). I answer, "It’s because of her secret teachings." This usually piques their interest. I have to start with the story of the Garden of Eden to explain why I have such a low opinion of Rand’s philosophy. In it, when God catches Adam and Eve breaking the rules, Adam points his finger at Eve and says, "She made me do it!" Eve points her finger at the serpent and says, "Well, he’s the one who made me do it." What Adam and Eve are doing is scapegoating; Adam scapegoats Eve and Eve scapegoats the serpent. It’s saying, "I’m blameless; it’s all your fault." And in some versions of the story scapegoating is what gets them kicked out of the Garden of Eden and brings evil into the world. The psychiatrist M. Scott Peck, in his book, The People of the Lie, writes that scapegoating is involved in "the genesis of human evil...[s]capegoating works through a mechanism psychiatrists call projection...[people] project evil onto the world," he writes. The Nazis and the Socialists were 20th century scapegoaters par excellence. They blamed all their problems on Jews, Christians, Eastern Europeans, capitalists, kulaks...the list unrolls. Estimates of the deaths in 20th century wars range up to 200 million. When you project all your problems onto others – turn them into bad people – what is the most extreme solution? Kill them, of course. The psychiatrists Melanie Klein and Joan Riviere wrote this about projection, "The first and the most funda