Well, he is in pretty good company...
http://www.lyricsmania.com/cygnus_x-1_book_ii:_hemispheres_lyrics_rush.html
The thing that I thought was hilarious about Rand’s examples is that the Apollo Program was a government funded initiative that required a lot of private sector R&D and innovation to be successful. Woodstock, on the other hand, was started as a private money making effort that ended up needing a bunch of government intervention to actually pull off without a lot more problems than it ended up having.
It somewhat spoiled many of her basic premises about the theuniversal benefits of private sector efforts vs. the universal evils of government action.
“Plagiarize much?”
Ouch! That’s gonna leave a mark.
Sir, I wrote this off the cuff this morning and cited my major source Persig, but I was aware of those 2 events and their significance long before I read Rand’s essay and “Zen and The Art of...” 25 years ago in college. I never stated it was my original work but I suppose I am so familiar with theirs that I have internalized it.I don’t even think it was an original idea of Rand’s. In Rome it was the Stoics vs the Epicurians. She was just very prescient in her cultural analysis. My post is more like a B grade sophomore philosophy essay posted here for others to enjoy and your comment is completely unnecessary and rather petty.
Why would someone be so sloppy in misunderstanding and misapplying “plagiarism” to try to insult or belittle a well-intentioned post?
(It’s not plagiarism, not remotely. It’s paraphrasing and borrowing, at worst. The added details which were not included in Rand’s discussion were also interesting.)
Was Ayn Rand “plagiarizing” The Ant And The Grasshopper of Aesop’s Fables?
I’m not sure why Apollo and Dionysus is not explicitly connected to The Ant and The Grasshopper for this timeless cultural schism (I was very happy to see the reference to Rush’s “Hemispheres” which is arguably the best retelling of the classic cultural and philosophical conflict, ever.)
See the Wikipedia article for how varied and voluminous the retellings of this ancient conflict are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ant_and_the_Grasshopper