Originally Posted by PhilosopherWarrior

You mention More's Utopia..
coincidence..
In my following of words, names, and such I was refreshing my knowledge of Marx. they are alive and well, and organizing their worldwide bid to remake the world for the proletariat.
THEY revere More and that work, and consider it the wellspring of their ideology.
They view that dream as a desirable end.. a perfect society that we can have .. right here on earth..
and all one has to do is to join it root and stem, lock stock and barrell,
and remake your mind to accept the eternal struggle to free the unterclass with violent revolution.
To attain an eternal peaceful Utopia of course.
I'm not ridiculing you Rod, and More is deeper and more insightful than the ever resentful Marx/Lenin/Engel dreams.

The enlightenment brought a lot of new ideas. The new technologies of the press and industries WERE bringing changes that were not properly ( to this day) properly reconciled.
Few of these thinkers were Aristotlian. Many were using flawed premises
( and knew it!) and most acknowledged that the status quo was the greatest of inertias. Marx chose the human as collective perspective ( not surprising, given the dominance in european academia) and focused on his audiences desires resentments and ignorant jealousies.
he used pseudo science, formulated his own philosophy to support a school of social economics and by couching it all as one of the "OldGuard/Classic"
intellectuals he spawned dozens of pseudo-scientific "social" scientists.

Today, in our schools.. from the Ivy league down , now, to grammar school.. Our teachers and professors teach by "dialectics".. They consistently consider every issue from the elements perspective and analyze events and historical periods from changing and radical viewpoints. The pervasive desire by academia to "help" remake society in a more tolerant view..
is identical from school zone to school zone.
The schools of various disciplines have been assimilated into "intra-dependent" curriculums. These academics work to bring ALL science into the same relativist "results-oriented" patterns as their social engineering brethren.
. These are all derivatives and offshoots of the contradictory teachings from Rouseau, Kant, Hegel, and more recently, Dewey, Galbraith, Laurence Tribe.
The contradiction of anarchic individualism, anti-authority willfulness, and unconscious actions by the body-politic
strangely come together in the basic denial of human nature and civilization.
THERE is where Rand and the insight to the "voluntary" and conscious nature
of man is different than ALL other thinkers.
She starts her reasoning from Mans start. What we are percieving and how we conceptualize it. How we percieve and how we conceptualise ( identify anything) IS our first concerns.. She then builds on a consistent frame from THAT beginning. She ( like Aristotle) insists on recognizing things for their essense.. their irreducible primaries..
This is a process of thinking that frequently reexamines that which is already known.
In essence, the scientist as a person.

hmm.. must go I will return..