[OT] Ayn Rand (was: Sugestions for New Releases of Debian)
On 06/09/2012 12:37 PM, Paul E Condon wrote:
I'm too new to Debian to say how good or bad that history is, but it
seems OK to me. I have long wished that someone with real Social
Science creds would study us as a counter example to the maunderings
of Ayn Rand.
OK, sorry, but I had to latch on to this. Being a former (reformed?)
objectivist, I have to offer a bit of a defense for Rand. I have long
been of the type that believes Rand (the writer, not the person) was
misunderstood, i.e. she is not truly against selflessness, just parasitism.
Ayn Rand wrote:
Do you ask if it's ever proper to help another man? No - if he claims
it as his right or as a moral duty that you owe him. Yes - if such is
your own desire based on you own selfish pleasure in the value of his
person and his struggle. Suffering as such is not a value; only man's
fight against suffering, is. If you choose to help a man who suffers,
do it only on the grounds of his virtue, of his fight to recover, of
his rational record, or of the fact that he suffers unjustly; then
your action is still a trade, and his virtue is the payment for your help.
I don't think her philosophy is necessarily against the altruism that
Debian embodies, because I think she misunderstands the concept of
altruism. I'll give her the benefit of the doubt as a non-native
English speaker. As it applies to Debian, we all use and/or
contribute. Why? Because we all receive a benefit. Only the RMS-s of
the world are on some sort of ideological good/evil free software
crusade. The rest of us think that free software helps all of us and
has a practical benefit. We believe that free software is more secure
(Linus' Law), and more useful (esp. in terms of customization) than
closed-source software. We *want* this benefit o continue to exist,
both for our own and others' benefit. We want others to be able to grow
and learn, and Debian is a way of doing this. Contribution is not so
much of a moral obligation as much as all of us doing something *we love
to do* and contributing it back so that others can use and improve on it
as well for its own sake - to our own pleasure.
OK, I've wasted enough of the list's bandwidth </rant> :-)
--
rbmj
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