Optimal thought and optimal fitness through reason, logic, science, passion, and wisdom.
Against Racism
Against Racism

Against Racism

An excerpt from a great analysis and condemnation of racism:
Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage—the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.

Racism claims that the content of a man’s mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man’s convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control. This is the caveman’s version of the doctrine of innate ideas—or of inherited knowledge—which has been thoroughly refuted by philosophy and science. Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men.

Like every form of determinism, racism invalidates the specific attribute which distinguishes man from all other living species: his rational faculty. Racism negates two aspects of man’s life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination.

From “Racism” by Ayn Rand, as quoted by Thomas Bowden in “How Would Ayn Rand Have Commented On Last Week’s Supreme Court Race Ruling?” (Forbes.com, 7-1-2013)

Amen.

Rand defines terms and uses them correctly. She does not misuse the concept of racism as so many do today in this time of conceptual corruption.

Racism is evil, and so is the corruption of language because it blinds people to important distinctions — like freedom vs. oppression or lie vs. mistake or racism vs. cultural difference or capitalism vs. cronyism — and leaves us all captive.

When language is wholesale corrupt, there is no heroic, holy Underground Railroad or Schindler’s List.

When some evil, power-lusting people want to control others, they form a totalitarian government and enforce censorship and they try to control thought by outlawing some language. They go after some expressions of thought with a lot more fury and concern than they go after any other type of difference from what they want.

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