Kudos to Diana Hsieh for some very well articulated good sense:
If Objectivists don’t nourish and protect...[a] rational culture, then a self-destructive culture of suspicion, hostility, and dogmatism will take its place. Then, any disagreement—even if trivial, even if outside the scope of Objectivism—will become grounds for denouncing someone else as dishonest and attempting to ostracize them. Any connection with a condemned person will be grounds for your condemnation too. People will fear speaking their minds, and some will even forego thinking for themselves.
Like Hsieh, I at times disagree with certain established spokesmen for Objectivism, most notably, in my rejection of Rand’s arguments for intellectual property. But neither Objectivism nor any other rational pursuit will be served by substituting thoughtless obedience, rote memorization, and reactionary ostracism, for rational discussion, open deliberation, and a sense of reasonable proportion. I always thought that this was the root principle of Objectivism, if anything is: that one must never substitute another person’s judgment for one’s own. As Rand herself wrote, “The opposite of moral neutrality is not a blind, arbitrary, self-righteous condemnation of any idea, action or person that does not fit one’s mood, one’s memorized slogans or one’s snap judgment of the moment.... To judge...is a task that requires the most precise, the most exacting, the most ruthelessly objective and rational process of thought..... [O]ne must be prepared to answer ‘Why?’ and to prove one’s case—to oneself and to any rational inquirer.”
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