העורך Editor

PHILOSOPHICAL BRAWL: Ayn Rand vs. Ian McGilchrist, A chair-throwing debate for the ages

Ayn Rand was, as someone once said, the world’s best defender of the left-hemisphere side of the brain. So, I asked Claude to create an alternate-history debate between the two.

Claude notes:

The beautiful irony is they’d both be partially right about each other’s blind spots, but way too invested in their positions to admit it!

Here it is, slightly abridged:

THE GREAT PHILOSOPHICAL BRAWL

Ayn Rand vs. Ian McGilchrist

A chair-throwing debate for the ages

MODERATOR: Welcome to what promises to be the most explosive philosophical debate of—

RAND: (interrupting, slamming fist on podium) Let me be crystal clear from the start: this man’s entire thesis is a betrayal of human consciousness! You want to tell me that reason—MAN’S BASIC TOOL OF SURVIVAL—is somehow deficient? That we need to embrace some mystical “right-brain” nonsense?

MCGILCHRIST: (chuckling, adjusting glasses) Ayn, if I may, you’ve just demonstrated my point perfectly. Your left hemisphere has seized control and is now systematically dismantling a strawman of its own creation—

RAND: DON’T “AYN” ME! (throws water glass) And don’t you DARE patronize me with your pseudo-scientific babble about brain hemispheres! Either something is rational or it isn’t. Either it serves human life or it doesn’t. There is no mystical middle ground!

MCGILCHRIST: (dodging glass, voice rising) This is precisely the problem! You’ve created a tyranny of the explicit, the mechanical, the categorical! Your philosophy reduces human beings to calculating machines when the right hemisphere—the master—knows there’s infinitely more to existence than your narrow, grasping left-brain analysis!

RAND: “The master”? (picks up chair) Listen to yourself! You’re literally advocating for the primacy of the unconscious over consciousness! This is Kant all over again—undermining reason to make room for faith!

MCGILCHRIST: (standing, voice booming) I’m not undermining reason, I’m trying to save it from your mechanistic reductionism! The right hemisphere IS reasonable—it’s the part that grasps context, meaning, the living whole! Your left-brain rationality is like a brilliant clerk who’s murdered his master and thinks he can run the kingdom!

RAND: (hefting chair) So now you’re telling me that my commitment to logic and objective reality is… what… a form of intellectual murder? That I should surrender my mind to intuition and “holistic feeling”?

MCGILCHRIST: (grabbing his own chair) Your “objective reality” is a stripped-down corpse of the real world! You’ve taken the rich, flowing, interconnected cosmos and turned it into a collection of objects to be manipulated for rational self-interest!

RAND: (hurling chair) RATIONAL SELF-INTEREST IS THE ONLY MORAL PURPOSE OF LIFE! Every advance in human civilization came from individuals thinking clearly and acting on their rational judgment—not from mystical “right-brain” contemplation!

MCGILCHRIST: (chair whizzing past his ear) And look where it’s gotten us! A world of atomized individuals, environmental destruction, spiritual emptiness—all because we’ve lost touch with the wisdom that sees the forest, not just the trees you want to chop down for profit!

RAND: (voice reaching fever pitch) THERE IS NO “SPIRITUAL” DIMENSION! There are only facts and the minds that perceive them! Your “holistic wisdom” is just another name for the primordial fog that reason dispels!

MCGILCHRIST: (throwing a book) The fog is in your left hemisphere’s grandiose delusion that it can capture reality in its rigid categories! The right hemisphere knows that truth emerges from relationship, from context, from the spaces between your precious facts!

RAND: Spaces between facts? (laughs maniacally while hurling papers) What’s next—the “wisdom of uncertainty”? The “truth of contradiction”? You’re peddling sophisticated nonsense!

MCGILCHRIST: (flipping table) And you’re peddling sophisticated autism! A world where everything must be explicit, categorized, possessed, controlled! Where mystery and wonder are crimes against your mechanical god of reason!

RAND: (standing on overturned chair) YES! Mystery IS a crime against the human mind! Wonder without understanding is the luxury of savages! Man’s glory is his capacity to KNOW, not to feel vaguely connected to some cosmic blob!

MCGILCHRIST: (shouting over crashes) Knowledge without wisdom! Power without love! Parts without wholes! You’ve created a philosophy for sociopaths!

RAND: (throwing microphone) Better a philosophy for heroes than a prescription for cosmic mush! At least my sociopaths build skyscrapers instead of sitting in lotus position contemplating their navels!

MCGILCHRIST: (as security rushes in) Those skyscrapers are tombstones for a living world your heroes murdered!

RAND: (being dragged away) And your living world is a swamp that would drown human achievement in primitive sentiment!

ROUND 2: THE MOCKERY BEGINS

RAND: (wiping dust off jacket, voice dripping with sarcasm) Oh, let me quote the great Dr. McGilchrist: “The right hemisphere gives sustained, broad, open attention to the world.” (throws book) SUSTAINED ATTENTION TO WHAT? Mystical vibrations?

MCGILCHRIST: (ducking, then standing with theatrical flourish) And here’s Miss Rand: “The concept of man as a heroic being!” (mimics dramatic pose) Yes, so heroic to strip-mine reality for profit while calling it virtue!

RAND: (voice rising to operatic heights) “The left hemisphere… has a narrow, sharply focused attention to detail!” Well EXCUSE ME for focusing on details like REALITY and FACTS instead of your precious “betweenness”!

POST-FIGHT INTERVIEWS

INTERVIEWER: Ayn, your thoughts on tonight’s debate?

RAND: (ice pack on forehead, still furious) That wasn’t a debate, it was an assault on human consciousness! McGilchrist represents everything that’s wrong with modern intellectual life—the elevation of the primitive over the civilized, the mystical over the rational, the collective over the individual!

INTERVIEWER: But don’t you think he raised some valid points about—

RAND: (cutting off) VALID POINTS? He spent two hours advocating for the primacy of the unconscious! This is Kant’s legacy—destroy reason to make room for feeling! I’d rather debate a sincere mystic than a sophisticated one!

INTERVIEWER: Ian, your response to tonight’s… altercation?

MCGILCHRIST: (adjusting torn shirt, surprisingly calm) Well, you see, this is exactly what I mean about left hemisphere dominance. Ayn couldn’t hear a single word I said because her left hemisphere was too busy categorizing everything as either “rational” or “mystical.” She’s created a false dichotomy and then declared victory!

INTERVIEWER: The audience seemed quite… engaged.

MCGILCHRIST: (chuckling) The right hemisphere loves a good story, doesn’t it? Even when it’s about its own suppression.

INTERVIEWER: Any final thoughts?

MCGILCHRIST: Ayn thinks she’s defending reason, but she’s actually defending a very particular, mechanistic version of it. True reason includes wisdom, context, relationship—everything her philosophy systematically excludes.

RAND: (shouting from across the room) I CAN HEAR YOU! AND YOU’RE STILL WRONG!

MCGILCHRIST: (to camera) Case in point.

‘In Time, We Come To Find the World Is Worth Believing In’

Q&A with Nick Cave:

Following the last few years I’m feeling empty and more cynical than ever. I’m losing faith in other people, and I’m scared to pass these feelings to my little son. Do you still believe in Us (human beings)?

VALERIO, STOCKHOLM (AND ROME), SWEDEN (AND ITALY)

Answer:

Dear Valerio,

You are right to be worried about your growing feelings of cynicism and you need to take action to protect yourself and those around you, especially your child. Cynicism is not a neutral position — and although it asks almost nothing of us, it is highly infectious and unbelievably destructive. In my view, it is the most common and easy of evils.

I know this because much of my early life was spent holding the world and the people in it in contempt. It was a position both seductive and indulgent. The truth is, I was young and had no idea what was coming down the line. I lacked the knowledge, the foresight, the self-awareness. I just didn’t know. It took a devastation to teach me the preciousness of life and the essential goodness of people. It took a devastation to reveal the precariousness of the world, of its very soul, to understand that it was crying out for help. It took a devastation to understand the idea of mortal value, and it took a devastation to find hope.

Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position either. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like, Valerio, such as reading to your little boy, or showing him a thing you love, or singing him a song, or putting on his shoes, keeps the devil down in the hole. It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending. It says the world is worth believing in. In time, we come to find that it is so.

Love, Nick

Read it here…

Dying Waiting for the ER? Just Say You Want a Measles Shot…

Rabbi Chananya Weissman quotes a government propaganda campaign for a measles vaccine (same as was done for the Corona shots):

“Due to an increase in morbidity, the response to give vaccinations has been increased and reception hours at baby clinics and health clinics have been expanded, and it is possible to arrive without an appointment.”

Rabbi Weissman trenchantly comments:

If you need an MRI in Israel, you will probably have to wait months. If you need to see a medical specialist, the same is generally true as well. When your appointment finally arrives, you must show up early, and then expect to wait an hour or more anyway, and there is nothing you can do about it.

If you have a stroke and go to the emergency room, you might wait 9 hours or more for them to find you a bed and take care of you, while you languish among all the other people screaming in pain and begging for help. (I experienced this personally with someone close to me who had a stroke, which they confirmed on arrival, but only received care 9 hours later after I called the management and threatened to call every donor named on the wall and report what’s going on — they magically found him a bed shortly thereafter).

But if you want a measles shot, just walk right in unannounced and they will be HAPPY to stop everything and inject you or your child. Go right to the front of the line.

Because they care about you and your health. That’s their top priority.

Maybe ER patients should say they want a measles shot, and by the way, can you do something about the stroke, too…

Read the rest here…

Exactly! And I’m writing down the tip about invoking the hospital’s donors.