I got sucked into an installment of Donald Trump's show "The Apprentice" on CNBC last night. In that installment, Bradford, a star member of the losing team who had been granted an exemption from getting fired, was so convinced that he did well that he volunteered to waive his exemption. Trump called Bradford's bluff and fired him. Trump basically said that even though he thought Bradford was the best of the bunch, his decision to offer up his neck to the chopping block, to allow himself to risk "taking the fall" for his poorly-performing teammates, was flat out ridiculous--in the context of staying on the show and perhaps winning would yield immense reward; in the context of what if this were a real corporation, it could be a threat to the corporation and Bradford's own livelihood.
Then today, I was perusing Dr. Leonard Peikoff's essay Fact vs. Value and came across this:
...An employee comes up, say, with a stupid suggestion, which flies in the face of the facts. The boss inevitably thinks not just "false," but "bad." Which latter means: the man must have been out-of-focus, plus: look at the grief his idea would cause in practice. Such an idea, the boss has to feel, cannot be tolerated. No rational man can tolerate—i.e., abide, stand, or put up with—that which he sees to be false, not in his own life, mind or actions, not when he has any alternative in the matter. Since dedication to reality is the essence of the moral and of the practical, the false qua false is precisely the intolerable. (In what form a boss should express his intolerance to his employee depends on the full context.)
I never thought of Donald Trump as an Objectivist...Perhaps someone better versed in Rand's philosophy can enlighten me as to whether Trump's judgment of Bradford's actions was textbook-Objectivist?
