Psychology

Entrepreneur and Un-entrepreneur characteristics

I’m a fan of Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz’s From Poverty to Prosperity: Intangible Assets, Hidden Liabilities and the Lasting Triumph over Scarcity. I wrote about it here. It’s about Economics 2.0, as they call it, one key feature of which is putting the entrepreneur front and center — in contrast to much of traditional […]

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Is everyone selfish? Hannah Arendt quotation

How some political ideologies depend on the self-induced selflessness of their members. Here is Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism speaking of both Nazism and Communism: “How little the masses were driven by the famous instinct for self-preservation … . The fanaticism of members of totalitarian movements, so clearly different in quality from the greatest

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Icky then and icky now — a disciple of Kant on sex

A contemporary Kantian on sex: Why sexual desire is objectifying — and hence morally wrong. (And here is the relevant text from Kant’s lectures on sex.) When I read (ahem) hardcore dualist stuff like this, I always wonder if they and I are talking about the same experience. For example, think about most people’s reaction

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Stephen Hicks, “A Primer on Objective Journalism” [Atlas Intellectuals]

This week of the self-paced course on Objectivity features Stephen Hicks’s primer on Objective Journalism. “Objectivity means being committed to the facts and to using one’s mind as best one can to discover and interpret them. Journalistic objectivity includes being open to all the facts, doing research to discover the facts, verifying claims, and to integrating logically

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Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics” [Atlas Intellectuals]

In this unit of our course on Objectivity we feature Ayn Rand’s Objectivist Ethics. Rand was world-famous as the author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged when a collection of essays entitled The Virtue of Selfishness was published in 1964. In the opening essay, Rand presents a sustained argument for her ethic of rational self-interest. The full course on Objectivity: https://www.atlassociety.org/course/objectivity.

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