The Objective Standard

There is NOTHING more important to you and your life than that body of ideas you hold that make up your own personal philosophy.  You are human, which means that your means of survival is your mind, and it operates on the basis of ideas, facts and principles.  You can leave it as it is, which for many means a hodgepodge of contradictions undercutting the best within you, or you can elect to straighten it out and make it work optimally for you.  If you are one of those everyday giants who elects to straighten out one's mental innards, then you need to know about a terrific new journal of ideas called The Objective Standard.

Just a word about your inner mental jungle, it comes about this way for everyone.  We grow up absorbing all sorts of notions, facts/pseudo-facts, beliefs/truths, emotions/thoughts, and so on, implicitly simply because we are not born philosophers of ourselves in any formal sense.  In that absorption process, we pick up a lot of crap, and there's not a whole lot we can do about until we mature into the conceptual consciousness level.  Then we can tackle all that is implicit and make it explicity and non-contradictory.

Not just any explicit ideas and efforts will do, however.

If we are to make the right kind of changes, in fact, even to recognize what needs to be done, we must have the facts and principles of objective reality to do them with.

Aiding that process and feeding the soul is this journal, The Objective Standard.  It has completed the first year of quarterly publications, and each issue has been indescribably valuable.

Here is what is in the fourth quarterly issue of the first year of publication:

Winter 2006–2007 Vol. 1, No. 4

• From the Editor (accessible to all)

Articles

The Tragedy of Theology: How Religion Caused and Extended the Dark Ages

Andrew Bernstein

Critiques Rodney Stark’s best-selling book The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success. Bernstein’s analysis proves Stark’s thesis to be historically false and philosophically impossible. The fundamental factor that led to freedom, capitalism, and Western success, Bernstein shows, was not the Christian, scripture-based approach of applying “reason” to the goal of understanding “super-nature,” but rather the Aristotelian, observation-based method of applying reason to the goal of understanding actual nature. Read the opening paragraphs (full article accessible only to subscribers).

“No Substitute for Victory”: The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism (accessible to all)

John Lewis

Consults historical precedent to evaluate America’s response to the attacks of 9/11. Considering key historical attacks against America, along with her responses to those attacks, Lewis highlights the moral and practical issues involved, and draws vital lessons that Americans must grasp and apply in the current war—if we want to win it. Read the article.

The Educational, Psychological, and Philosophical Assault on Self-Esteem

Edwin A. Locke

Examines the misconceptions of self-esteem that are widely accepted and propagated by educators and psychologists today, illustrates the philosophical causes of those misconceptions in modern philosophy, and presents the correct view of self-esteem along with its philosophical roots in rational philosophy. Read the opening paragraphs (full article accessible only to subscribers).

Property and Principle

Larry Salzman

Analyzes Bernard H. Siegan’s Economic Liberties and the Constitution, showing the first edition of the book (not the second edition) to be a valuable source for those seeking to understand how legal protections for property rights in America were gradually lost. Salzman also shows that, although Economic Liberties has certain virtues and is one of the best scholarly books on the subject, it fails to provide a proper philosophical grounding of property rights, and thus cannot stand on its own in defense thereof. Read the opening paragraphs (full article accessible only to subscribers).

Mr. Jekyll and Dr. House:
The Reason-Emotion Split as Manifested in House, M.D.

Gena Gorlin

Examines the popular television series House, M.D., zeros in on its main flaw—acceptance of the reason-emotion dichotomy and all that it entails—and shows why this potentially excellent show is tragically mixed. Read the opening paragraphs (full article accessible only to subscribers).

Correspondence

We value your thoughts on articles in The Objective Standard, and we welcome your letters to the editor—whether critical, argumentative, or complimentary. Well-written letters will be published in our "Letters and Replies" section toward the front of the journal and, when appropriate, may be accompanied by writers’ responses. Letters may be edited.

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The Objective Standard (print ISSN 1559-1905, online ISSN 1559-1913) is published quarterly by Glen Allen Press, LLC, P.O. Box 5274, Glen Allen, VA 23058. Although The Objective Standard publishes articles by writers from the Ayn Rand Institute, the two organizations are entirely separate and distinct. The views expressed in any given article in The Objective Standard are those of the author of that article and do not necessarily reflect the position of the journal or of the Ayn Rand Institute. Copyright ©2006 by Glen Allen Press. All rights reserved. Material on this website may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form or manner, without prior written permission from the publisher. To request permission, please Email Craig Biddle.

Check it out.  And, more on this journal later.

Comments

[Richard]

Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago of the random accumulation of knowledge until he experienced the fire of the camps. I'm not sure that he expressed it in those exact words but he wrote about how that fire brought him to Christianity and burned off the dross of all the second-rate ideas that had been resident in his head.

We are at a time in the West when we must return to First Principles. We no longer have the luxury of assuming that those who have preceded us and benefited from our civilization are capable or even willing gardians of the Crown Jewels of it all.

[Richard]

. . . guardians

[GM]

Richard,

Thank you for stopping by and commenting. I think most of us would agree on your second paragraph. The BIG concern is in identifying correctly those "First Principles."

I am making a bit of a leap, based on your first paragraph, that you might mean those First Principles are from Christianity. Here we would part company on what we mean by First Principles.

No religion is sufficient as a means to get to or to convey First Principles, and no religion can tolerate getting to actual First Principles because those principles are incompatible with religion.

If you mean something else, please clue me in.