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Chanta Rand [Love Under Const Blueprint for Love Ronnie's St
Bethany Shaw [Werewolf Wars Into the Unknown (epub)
Brett Josef Grubisic This Location of Unknown Possib
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[heft] Perry Rhodan 1651 Am Rand der Grossen Leere
Arundhati Roy Capitalism A Ghost Story (epub
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Capitalizing on Crisis Greta R. Krippner
Anthem Large Print Edition Ayn Rand

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.” (Whose resources?)If capitalism is to be understood, it is this tribal premise that has to be checked—and challenged.Mankind is not an entity, an organism, or a coral bush.The entity involved in production and trade is man.It is with the study of man—not of the loose aggregate known as a “community”—that any science of the humanities has to begin.This issue represents one of the epistemological differences between the humanities and the physical sciences, one of the causes of the former’s well-earned inferiority complex in regard to the latter.A physical science would not permit itself (not yet, at least) to ignore or bypass the nature of its subject.Such an attempt would mean: a science of astronomy that gazed at the sky, but refused to study individual stars, planets, and satellites—or a science of medicine that studied disease, without any knowledge or criterion of health, and took, as its basic subject of study, a hospital as a whole, never focusing on individual patients.A great deal may be learned about society by studying man; but this process cannot be reversed: nothing can be learned about man by studying society—by studying the inter-relationships of entities one has never identified or defined.Yet that is the methodology adopted by most political economists.Their attitude, in effect, amounts to the unstated, implicit postulate: “Man is that which fits economic equations.” Since he obviously does not, this leads to the curious fact that in spite of the practical nature of their science, political economists are oddly unable to relate their abstractions to the concretes of actual existence.It leads also to a baffling sort of double standard or double perspective in their way of viewing men and events: if they observe a shoemaker, they find no difficulty in concluding that he is working in order to make a living; but as political economists, on the tribal premise, they declare that his purpose (and duty) is to provide society with shoes.If they observe a panhandler on a street corner, they identify him as a bum; in political economy, he becomes “a sovereign consumer.” If they hear the communist doctrine that all property should belong to the state, they reject it emphatically and feel, sincerely, that they would fight communism to the death; but in political economy, they speak of the government’s duty to effect “a fair redistribution of wealth,” and they speak of businessmen as the best, most efficient trustees of the nation’s “natural resources.”This is what a basic premise (and philosophical negligence) will do; this is what the tribal premise has done.To reject that premise and begin at the beginning—in one’s approach to political economy and to the evaluation of various social systems—one must begin by identifying man’s nature, i.e., those essential characteristics which distinguish him from all other living species.Man’s essential characteristic is his rational faculty.Man’s mind is his basic means of survival—his only means of gaining knowledge.Man cannot survive, as animals do, by the guidance of mere percepts.He cannot provide for his simplest physical needs without a process of thought.He needs a process of thought to discover how to plant and grow his food or how to make weapons for hunting.His percepts might lead him to a cave, if one is available—but to build the simplest shelter, he needs a process of thought.No percepts and no “instincts” will tell him how to light a fire, how to weave cloth, how to forge tools, how to make a wheel, how to make an airplane, how to perform an appendectomy, how to produce an electric light bulb or an electronic tube or a cyclotron or a box of matches.Yet his life depends on such knowledge—and only a volitional act of his consciousness, a process of thought, can provide it.2A process of thought is an enormously complex process of identification and integration, which only an individual mind can perform.There is no such thing as a collective brain.Men can learn from one another, but learning requires a process of thought on the part of every individual student.Men can cooperate in the discovery of new knowledge, but such cooperation requires the independent exercise of his rational faculty by every individual scientist.Man is the only living species that can transmit and expand his store of knowledge from generation to generation; but such transmission requires a process of thought on the part of the individual recipients.As witness, the breakdowns of civilization, the dark ages in the history of mankind’s progress, when the accumulated knowledge of centuries vanished from the lives of men who were unable, unwilling, or forbidden to think.In order to sustain its life, every living species has to follow a certain course of action required by its nature [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]