Her views were kind of brutish in this regard, but not quite in the "Fuck you. I got mine" selfishness she has a reputation for among both critics and fans who tend to use her more as a name-drop.
Her views are a little wonky this this regard. She thought that people acting out of self-interest with an eye towards reciprocity would cause them to care, or at least care in the ways precisely matched her personal intuitions for what kindness looks like.
This ranges from new age expressions to fundamentalist Christian ones, and one example of this are Christians who believe that God's favor or lack thereof based on Americans' collective faith in him is shown in the material fortunes of America.
America is more individualist than many other societies, but it's a huge country and there are lots of kinds of people and communities and subcultures within it. This includes people who think that thought shapes reality in a collective way.
You really can't understand Christian nationalists without knowing that a good number of them think American prosperity is secured or abandoned in proportion to its faith in their faith. That makes them especially dangerous because they think our wealth isn't consequent to secular decision-making.
There are deeply communal manifestations of this behavior both in the self-help/motivational genre and in other cultural expressions such as religious worship. Not every prosperity gospel thinker sees that in terms of the individual. Some think it applies to communities or even nations.
The existence of this thinking and people's recognition that it can be exploited for their own ends long predates capitalism and can just as easily exist in non-capitalist systems now and in the future. American culture might shape how it manifests here, but it's rooted in human psychology.
What power of positive thinking hucksters are exploiting is similar to what goes on in someone's head when they engage in petitionary prayer except instead of beseeching a god for favor they are tapping into the universe qua the aggregate of all things. (Except, of coruse, when they're asking a god)
At the time this was a huge fad, I wasn't sure if I should be more annoyed because The Secret was an especially dumb version of it or just view it as a notable example of a much deeper and long-standing problem with the selling of this snake oil. I'm still not sure.
The basic gist of what The Secret was selling is all over the self-help genre. It's an especially overt, crude version of the core pitch, but so much of this whole giant segment of book market is just iterations of the same basic idea.
I am saying the driver of a culture that believes affirmational thinking produces results isn't "capitalism" so much as "human desire." I think your theory that capitalism produces this kind of superstition or even the American versions of it is extremely underbaked.
Non-capitalist systems also involve people wanting things, and the core appeal of this is you can have what you desire. "Capitalism" isn't a fancy name for the existence of human desires in a world of limited resources.
She had a problem with seeing the successful as being that way either through personal genius and gumption or through nefarious rent-seeking, but that's different than thinking if you want something enough, you can make it reality.
Rand didn't believe in manifesting your desires through affirmational thinking. She definitely believed in earning accomplishments through work and talent where some people would simply fail no matter how much they wanted not to. She despised wishful thinking.
One of the frustrating aspects of the recent DEI panic about HR department training materials that focused on pushing sketchy examples of social justice advocacy was absolutely no critical eye being given to a much larger problem with HR judgment in what sorts of materials become fads.
Books and motivational speakers who all sell some variatio of "if you think about/want something enough or in the right way, then it can be yours" aren't just locked in the self-help genre. They are all over human resources departments.
Less flippantly, it probably is a serious problem that the c-suites of major financial firms are filled with flesh and blood people with conservative politics and information sources subject to the same biases everyone else with those preferences tends to have.
No. Not every authoritarian leader has Trump's mental health challenges, though it is true that concentrating authority to launch a first strike nuclear assault in a few people who can become severely mentally ill is one of the risks of having a MAD system on hair trigger.
Because Trump is an erratic person with a personality disorder who is surrounded by people with delusional self-confidence in themselves being the protagonists of history. "Who is gonna stop us?!" has already gotten us deep into blundersville.
They do, but you don't want people with authority to launch to refuse that order out of personal fear of their lives, so people are selected and trained to be courageous in carrying out that order. The system only works if people do not hesitate to fire when properly ordered.
The President ordering a nuclear first strike isn’t illegal per se and the people in the chain of carrying out that decision are trained and selected for their capacity to carry out that order knowing full well what doing so means.
I mean, in that scenario they might be "punished" by dying in a nuclear holocaust or having to try to survive the wreckage after it occurs. Iran might not be able to fire back, but once nukes are in the air, other countries that can have to make some quick decisions we don't control.
Yeah, I was writing a follow-up to this that hints at the same thing. The concern I have here is if he thinks is popularity is done for, then that's the main thing I'd imagine holding him back in a decision being removed. He does care about being perceived as great in the end.
The big thing that would keep him back is grandiose fantasies about being remembered as the greatest person who ever lived by worshipful generations, but if that's looking grim to him, it's not hard to see him just aggressively lashing out. This is what happens with typical NPD on a smaller scale.
What consequences? If he thinks he's dying soon anyway, he might not care about any of the consequences that come to mind.
The order to launch nuclear weapons doesn't go through a lot of military command. The whole system is designed to be quick and with strict obedience to ensure rapid mutually assured destruction is viable.
"If you do this, we'll hit you a million-bajillion times harder" rhetoric feels empty, but it does nag at the back of my mind that he really only has one or two horrible options to make good on that kind of threat given what we've already done.
We're now some time beyond when everyone liked to talk about moral hazard, but you also have to remember that some of the participants believe catastrophic losses with be socialized because their experience tells them they probably will be.
I don't think Temple Grandin is simply not thinking much because verbalization is reduced or secondary in her phenomenological experience. Nor do I think this is necessarily true of people with similar differences who have not developed her communication skills.
The fascist tendency to start wars until they start one they can't finish isn't looking great at the moment.
