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Originally Posted by Professor S

You make a good point about things falling apart when people paint outside the lines, but because of her belief in individualism, its the individual who falls apart and not the group, because the group is looking out for their individual best interests. The main part that attracts me is 1) The belief that self-interest is not morally wrong, and honestly its not as long as you use reason/morality and 2) the realization that altruism is a myth, because we are being altruistic we are really just doing it because it makes us feel better about ourselves, so in the end all actions are based in self-interest. That doesn't mean that we should eliminate what we consider to be altruism, but that we shoudl recognize the reward of the act and accept it for what it is. If you help someone because it makes you feel good, is it worse than if you convince yourself it was selfless. Is the person any less-off because your motivation was based on emotional reward? There is no such thing as a selfless act, and in the end, our need to believe in altruism is a reflection of our own ego and not reality.

The 2 points you made are actually what most people live by. It's just that nobody ever stops to think about it.

I was going to say that I leaned towards altruistic, but after I looked up it's exact meaning, I saw that the completely-selfless community would be a utopia, probably impossible to achieve. And besides acting in ways that make you feel good, we all have to do something to live in our community. We expect something in return. I agree with what you say, but I still believe that people need to be in a community to survive.

Originally Posted by Professor S

I also found the BioShock Objectivist Dystopia to be fascinating, but to be honest, I found very little of it to reflect Objectivism as those that created and ran the world ignored all forms of reason, and without reason, objectivism doesn't exist.

Yes, maybe it wasn't an exact objectivist society, but it still had some of basic principles. But what do you mean by "reason"? Andrew Ryan's purpose of building the city was to make a morality-free environment so people could do whatever pleases them.. I think that's a good enough reason?

Originally Posted by Professor S

Please do not take my comments as an accusation of communism on your part, but I believe in today's society you either lean towards a collectivist of objectivist philosophy.

Of course not. This is a really nice discussion we're having, and I'm sure we wouldn't be accusing each other of anything

However, I'd like to say that I've always been an in-between person. I always believe that there's a healthy medium when I face two polar-opposite choices. Communism doesn't work in my opinion. What one earns is theirs. But like I said earlier, objectivism doesn't seem too right to me as well, because people need to interact with the people around them to survive, progress and be happy.