Ayn Rand's Stage Orange Witchdoctory

By Leo Gura - April 25, 2019

“While scientists were performing astounding feats of disciplined reason [during the Enlightenment], breaking down the barriers of the ‘unknowable’ in every field of knowledge, charting the course of light rays in space or the course of blood in the capillaries of man’s body — what philosophy was offering them, as interpretation of and guidance for their achievements was the plain Witchdoctory of Hegel, who proclaimed that matter does not exist at all, that everything is Idea (not somebody’s idea, just Idea), and that this Idea operates by the dialectical process of a new ‘super-logic‘ which proves that contradictions are the law of reality, that A is non-A, and that omniscience about the physical universe (including electricity, gravitation, the solar system, etc.) is to be derived, not from the observation of facts, but from the contemplation of that Idea’s triple somersaults inside his, Hegel’s, mind. This was offered as a philosophy of reason.”

— Ayn Rand

And she was precisely wrong!

It takes skill and effort to be this wrong. The skill of a devil.

Stage Orange materialism/rationalism underestimates idealism/mysticism by assuming it to be philosophical mental-masturbation with no real-world consequences, when of course the truth is that materialism/rationalism is itself thoroughly deluded because it fails to take into account higher states of consciousness, which, if achieved, will erase the illusion of a material or rational world altogether.

Here Ayn Rand demonstrates the pre/trans fallacy: confusing Hegel‘s trans-rational explanations of the Absolute with pre-rational myth, fundamentalist religion, and soft thinking. In truth, Ayn Rand’s dualistic logic was closer to myth than Hegel’s.

The great irony is that materialism and rationalism turn out to be Witchdoctory — the very thing they accused philosophy and religion of being! Such is the counter-intuitive nature of the mind. To a devil like Ayn Rand, black is white, up is down, light is dark, and Absolute Truth is fiction. I’ve noticed that people who make vehement appeal to “reason” (like Ayn Rand or Sam Harris) turn out to be some of the greatest devils because they assume that reason is somehow a guarantor of truth, when in fact reason does the bidding of the ego. You cannot get to Absolute Truth through reason. Which totally shocks stage Orange rationalists, because they always held in blind faith that you could. A rationalist is just someone who replaces fundamentalist religious faith in the inerrancy of The Bible or Koran with a fundamentalist faith in the inerrancy of reason.

Hegel was a spiritual genius. He was the Western/German version of Nagarjuna or The Buddha. But his words fell on deaf ears and got confined to history books or philosophy lectures.

Interestingly, when you start to research Western intellectual tradition you find a strong thread of idealism running all throughout which few Westerners today know about or take seriously. This gives a false impression that the West has always been materialist and anti-mystical, and that science has always been a materialist enterprise. Not true. This is an artificial narrative constructed by materialists to relieve themselves of the responsibility of taking idealist notions seriously. Many of the West’s greatest scientists, thinkers, and visionaires were idealists, and for good reason. Because the more intelligent you become, the more idealism becomes unavoidable. Realist scientists and thinkers are 2nd rate intellects. They are good at technical analysis but they lack the holistic visionary aspect of the intellect, which is the most important aspect.

The intellect has two functions: analysis and synthesis, or division and unification. The intellect can be used to carve up reality or stitch it together. Modern academic and Western intellectual culture is overly biased towards analysis at the expense of synthesis, vision-logic, unification, and big picture thinking. Our schools teach kids how to carve up reality but not how to stitch it together. As a result our science and our society is overly-autistic and disconnected from our humanity and our divinity. Modern science lacks heart and vision. Which doesn’t mean that science is bad or all-wrong, it just means that modern science is highly partial, and that there is a higher version of science yet to be actualized. Science and reason are not to be abandoned but expanded.

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