Posted on 10/20/2014 9:26:39 AM PDT by right-wing agnostic
Which list are you talking about? I’m talking about the comparison of these two...
http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels/
Which do you prefer? Rushdie is a writer of fiction. Midnight’s Children is a modern classic. I don’t see what his personality has to do with anything.
Possibly. Ayn was a devout atheist and the only "morality" she seems to have recognized was a disdain for the collectivists for their parasitical reliance on the productive. In her works, the people she admires can seemingly do no wrong so long as they produced.
Her adulterous affair with one of her acolytes was well known and given her atheism her advocacy of abortion is perfectly understandable. After all we are nothing more than sophisticated animals, aren't we?
One interesting sidelight to Rand is that part of what motivated her was her experience with Soviet rule in her native Russia. Yet it never seems to have occurred to her that the first nation to legalize abortion in the modern age was the Soviet Union under Lenin. Sorry, Objectivists, but there is a philosophical connection between the exploitative ideology of Communism and its attitude toward human life in general.
There was Rand’s repeated claim that she owed no philosophical debt to anyone except Aristotle. It would be more accurate to say that everything in Objectivism is derivative of ideas that thinkers from John Locke to Adam Smith to Friedrich Nietzsche had expressed before.
Nietzsche especially, as we explored in some detail. When your Arisotlean philosophy leads you to the disagreeable conclusion that God, in some form, must exist, and you happen to be a convinced atheist, you either become an agnostic or you attempt to move Godhead to a human figure. The latter is precisely what Rand did, very openly: her "unmoving movers" were her philosophically perfect ubermenschen, as she presents in the chapter by that name. It's a really creative juxtaposition but it suffers from the defect that it doesn't really answer, as Aristotle did, the source of the laws of the universe, and it was, after all, a basic tenet of Objectivism that those laws existed and that human intelligence existed to discover and utilize them.
That’s a heroic vision of a blue-collar worker doing his job. There are many others. Critics often accuse Rand of portraying a few geniuses as the only people worth valuing. That’s not what I took away from her. I saw her celebrating people who did their work well and condemning people who settled for less, in great endeavors or small; celebrating those who took responsibility for their lives, and condemning those who did not.
Yes again, and she was, after all, the originator of the debatable maxim "There are no lousy jobs, only lousy workers." An example of this is the way she celebrates the abilities of her ubermenschen to survive in the Gulch: farmer, grocer, fishmonger. How she admires Hugh Akston's abilities as a short-order cook, Quentin Daniels' skill as a janitor.
And yet she leaves the remarkably skilled but decidedly second-echelon Eddie Willers abandoned in the dirt in Arizona. He has earned his place at the table in Valhalla but will apparently never reach it. It seemed rather jarring to me, even un-Randian, but it fit her dramatic narrative even in its seeming inconsistency. We devote some attention in the book to that, as well.
Fascinating, complicated woman. She did not live her philosophy, no - one wonders if anyone could. I'm not sure it's really all that important.
In one of the last lines of the third “Atlas” movie, Galt announces they are going to rescue Eddie and take him to the Gulch. At least the moviemakers corrected Rand’s abandonment of Eddie.
Thanks for the ping. A most interesting article.
For me, the book had more meaning than Ayn’s real life “sins.” That she grew up in Russia and translated her experiences into blockbuster, prophetic novels was good enough for me. The message was more important than the messenger.
I just wish that all of us who read and so much enjoyed Atlas Shrugged could have prevailed in the latter part of the 20th Centrury and kept the damn LIEberals at bay.
Instead, the LIEberals used Atlas Shrugged as a blueprint to wreck America.
We have been paying that price for far too long, and my sense of it is that perhaps, just perhaps, LIEberals are about to get a huge wake up call!
Let me respectfully disagree. Most Leftists who read the book greet its message with revulsion. They find the philosophy of Rand to be a violation of everything in which they believe. They also cannot help but notice that the statists get their asses handed to them at the end of the book. I don't think they're using it as a blueprint.
What Rand did was show just how socialism proceeds to destroy the machinery of a society. In that sense, she was a prophetess, although certainly not a religious one.
Good thing his parents didn't exercise the right to choose advocated by Rand.
Do you have a link to her recommendation that blind children be aborted or do you simply enjoy libel?
Murray hasn’t a clue about Objectivism. I don’t waste time with his stuff.
In deference to your worship of Rand, I won't ask you to do something against your self-interest, otherwise, I would ask you to point out where exactly I stated Rand specifically recommended blind children should be aborted. I only referenced Rand's advocacy of abortion as an unfettered right, which includes the abortion of the blind, the healthy, Down's children, whites, blacks, etc.
Moreover, abortion is not the only problem I have with Rand. People bow down before her because she understood statism/communism/progressivism. Big deal. Bill Maher gets Islam, but I'm not about to defend his entire worldview because he gets one thing very right.
So, no link
I see no reason to provide proof, documentation or sourcing for something I did not say or write. I get it, that you're a Randian elitist and therefore smarter than everybody else, and can read things that aren't actually there, but really, I made no reference or implication that Rand advocated abortion of the blind, only abortion, period. She was an equal opportunity abortionist and advocated abortion of anybody a mother felt like aborting. Would you like me to post links to that? I'd be happy to, but I suspect you're already familiar with the same.
All I can think of is that Eddie, while competent, smart and dedicated was dedicated to Dagny's interests (or what he believed them to be) ahead of his own. He wasn't living for himself, but another. He ended up stranding himself because he never shrugged and let go of it. His was the futility of riding the doomed train all the way to its bitter end.
News flash:we live in a nation where abortion is legal and Rand had nothing to do with it unless you want to convince yourself that the Supreme Court of 1973 was populated with Ayn Rand fans. She was wrong about some things. Hell, Columbus died thinking he’d been to India. Are you unable to see his value? She had a great deal of great value to say.
One of the clear markers of arrested development is the propensity to let the perfect be the enemy of the good; that’s how we got Obama. Growing up wouldn’t hurt you.
Ahh, the resort to personal insults, refuge of the insecure. I've not denied that Rand drew some correct conclusions. I've already conceded that point, and also conceded that Bill Maher has arrived at some correct, insightful conclusions about islam. Nevertheless, because somebody wanders around in circles, ultimately arriving at the correct destination a certain percentage of the time, does not make them a leader. If Rand is a leader, it's because she managed to accrue a devoted following...same thing could be said about Bill Maher, or for that matter, Obama.
Objectivism begins with a number of flawed premises. In my mind, the most noteworthy of which are atheism and the deprecation of altruism. Of the former, it ultimately leads to nothing but nihilism. Of the latter, all great societies (and great or not, all viable societies) have come into being because persons recognized causes greater than self, and were willing to sacrifice for them. It's an inescapable fact of history, and one Rand glosses over. At its most basic essence, any viable culture, society, nation-state, etc. must have the ability to defend itself. This ability depends upon persons willing to place their lives in jeopardy for the society of a whole. This also relies on leaders and officers ordering persons into situations directly opposed to those person's individual best interests for a "greater good," a notion Rand found repulsive and reprehensible. Even at the micro-level, military history shows that even where soldiers didn't fight for God or country, they were motived to fight for their unit or the soldier next to them, often sacrificing self for the "greater good."
On the macro-level, our nation itself was founded by men willing to pledge their, lives fortune and sacred honor to a declaration of ideas, knowing full well, doing so could, and in many cases would, be their personal undoing. Yes, you can argue they saw it as a risk, much like a business venture, with the hope of a payoff, but the payoff they were hoping for was not only for them as individuals, but for all their fellow colonists.
Suppose Rand had been able to establish a real life Galt's Gulch full of like minded believers. Any disputes between who was "Randier" would be arbitrated by Rand herself, for the Randiest solution to all problems...a veritable objectivist paradise.
Now, suppose that Galt's Gulch came under attack from an hostile entity. Would each person be responsible for defending his and her own property? If so, it would allow the enemy a very easy defeat in detail. Would they organize a defense where other people were expected to defend other people's property? That kind of defeats Rand's dislike for the "greater good." Would the organized defense have officers who could order subordinates into situations directly opposed to the subordinate's personal interest and well being, or would soldiers so ordered be allowed to walk off the job if they found such orders distasteful and against their selfish interests? Finally, if things became desperate, would Rand stand in front of the Army and place herself in mortal peril in defense of her ideas so that Galt's Gulch could survive? If she did, she would be acting in contradiction to her own philosophy through her willingness to sacrifice self for a greater good. If she adhered rigidly to her own philosophy, she would only protect herself and her own property. Would she expect (or order) others to come to her defense? What obligation would they have to do so? Quite the conundrum, and ultimately one that makes Objectivism a utopian pipe dream...granted, it's a pipe dream that we as small government, pro-freedom types generally enjoy, but one that is no more realistic than the pipe dream of marx and engels or any other utopian dreamer.
Let me make your life a bit easer. I don’t give a rats a$$ what you think and care even less what you say. I care a tiny bit about Rand’s reputation and when you simply engaged in a libel, I called you on it. Libel is covered in the decalogue, look it up. Or don’t, I really don’t care.
Lol...what libel did I commit?
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