The Suffering of Moral Saints by Aaron Smith

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[stephaniebond]

Great piece, Aaron! Thank you. (Nice reading, too.)

[eduardorpg]

I deeply love listening to Aaron Smith's voice. It's so soothing.

Also: I've been taking objectivism seriously since 2021, and there are still ideas from Rand that I feel alien, becase I was raised a Catholic, and I was raised with really altruistic values. I pretty much started feeling guilty of being happy.

The fact that my own happiness is the purpose of my life, to value my own judgment, and that the world is a benevolent place are ideas that were difficult for me to accept.

I still don't fully accept the belief that the universe is a benevolent place. I still struggle to have Ayn Rand's optimistic worldview. It's a wolrdview that's alien to me.

[RogerFusselman]

It's pretty bad when your ethical system cannot be fully practiced, and when you have to break it in order to live. That's part of the reason why altruism leads people into corners, wondering essentially where their values end and their masters' values begin.

[voluntaryist]

"Seek and ye shall find"? If that means, ask questions you feel compelled to ask, without fear or self-censorship, be open with others, honest with yourself, then the more one searches, the more one grows, learns, expands the context of their knowledge. Does this provide joy? A sense of progress? A goal in itself? I can't speak for others, but it's the life I chose.

[SpacePatrollerLaser]

This explains why "do-gooder" is a term of contempt and why Altruism is NOT a morality but something bordering on, if not actually being, psychosis. Given the nature of integrity that I understad it to be; recognition of the fact that 1+1 ALWAYS and FOREVER =2, then we can see that Altruism can ONLY be destructive. Becuase to knowingly violate one's moral code is an act of hypocrisy which invalidates either the actor or the code and why, to lessen the effect of this, the churches have come up with "God covers the sin". But what good is that to a person who, understanks the crucial role of morality in life and takes it seriously? There are so many results of what was described here, and ALL of them BAD, if not psychotic then just plain evil that it makes my head spin trying to sort them out, which is quite an accomplishment, and would require FAR mor space than is reasonable to use here to sort out, list and analyze. What of the actual harm that did to the girls who married these lunatics? Then there is the harm to oneself caused by isolation and NOBODY likes a "do-gooder" or wants to be around them. There are two things at work there. There is a certain kind of psychological, almost Lovecraftian/Kafka-esque, horror generated by such persons, and there is the terror that one feels upon learning, if one accepts Altruism, that one is not up to living a moral life. Even if you are an Objectivist, there is still the horror and a certain amount of fiear that such creatures exist almost like Zombies (in the modern sense) and the effect that this has on normal empathy and compassion (which Altruism has given a bad name by associating it with maudlin and mawkish drek). It makes me want to run like hell out of there before I heave my guts out

There is a danger for Stephanie. She could fall into Hedonism or Solipsism or just plain become a self-absorbed dweebette. At least when I hit rock bottom, I still retained some understanding of the value of logic and was able to rebuild myself

[science]

Religion, the worst thing in human history.