Posted on 11/03/2009 12:13:51 AM PST by Tempest
Ayn Rand is one of America's great mysteries. She was an amphetamine-addicted author of sub-Dan Brown potboilers, who in her spare time wrote lavish torrents of praise for serial killers and the Bernie Madoff-style embezzlers of her day. She opposed democracy on the grounds that "the masses"—her readers—were "lice" and "parasites" who scarcely deserved to live. Yet she remains one of the most popular writers in the United States, still selling 800,000 books a year from beyond the grave. She regularly tops any list of books that Americans say have most influenced them. Since the great crash of 2008, her writing has had another Benzedrine rush, as Rush Limbaugh hails her as a prophetess. With her assertions that government is "evil" and selfishness is "the only virtue," she is the patron saint of the tea-partiers and the death panel doomsters. So how did this little Russian bomb of pure immorality in a black wig become an American icon?
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
Curious thought.
“Rand was broken by the Bolsheviks as a girl, and she never left their bootprint behind. She believed her philosophy was Bolshevism’s opposite, when in reality it was its twin. Both she and the Soviets insisted a small revolutionary elite in possession of absolute rationality must seize power and impose its vision on a malleable, imbecilic mass. The only difference was that Lenin thought the parasites to be stomped on were the rich, while Rand thought they were the poor.”
The substance of the article.
Dostoevsky and Hemingway are known for their prose and conveying human experience, not their political theory and speculative fiction. I think Rand’s story-telling is better than Slate gives her credit for, but we’re hardly discussing the value of her prose.
In other words, Dostoevsky and Hemingway describe the human condition; Rand makes diagnoses. If I criticize Rand for making false diagnoses, it’s silly to say that Dostoevsky and Hemingway aren’t medical experts, either.
You make your case well, and I agree with much of what you wrote. I suppose its the central contradictions of Rand that make her such a frustrating author. She prizes achievement and independence above all else, yet Eddie literally holds the nation together while Dagny goes off on sexual discovery tours. Yet Eddie is discarded as unimportant, presumably left to starve in the collapsing world around her.
Its that Rand fights fire with fire. She opposes the horrific totalitarianism of Stalin by dreaming of a world where billions starve. Another commenter buys into her notion that they starve because of their own undoing. Not Eddie. Not everyone deemed too expendible for Galt’s utopia (which is strangely like a hippie commune) shares in every fault of the entire world’s. She has the same hate animate her that animated the totalitarians you credit her with opposing.
But she ultimately gets it wrong. Communism isn’t evil because it is concerned with the well-being of the common folk; it’s evil because it’s anthropology is simply wrong. Greed is good, and also omnipresent. Democracy rewards constructive behavior with success. Communism forces greed to be corruption, and so is infinitely corrupt, and so must seek power through brutality and corruption.
Rand didn’t provide an alternative to Stalin, but the mirror image of it. Reagan, Thatcher and John Paul II did. Because they got human nature right.
The left has a lot of room to talk.
What about Margret Sanger? Or Mao, Che, Fidel and the rest?
Singling out those verses and claiming Christ supported slavery is a gross misinterpretation. Healing a servant and recognizing the existence of a relationship between a Master and a servant is not exactly unqualified support of slavery.
BTW, before you go there, being a servant of Christ is something that one does willingly. No one is forced into servitude of Christ.
After reading Atlas Shrugged, I recognized the God-shaped hole in me (something I’m pretty sure Ms. Rand had no intention of displaying) and became an active Christian again. I am now an Anglican priest.
God overrules evil to accomplish good.
Ayn Rand was a great novelist and a staunch advocate of capitalism. But her personal life was reprehensible and her glorification of selfishness as well as her atheism and idolatry were childish at best.
While Rand was a very flawed human being, the attempt the writer makes to equate the personality of the writer with what the person promoted is dishonest. The fact is no matter how disagreeable a person Rand might have been, her ideas about the tyranny of the state against the aspirations of the individual not to be crushed by the state are still valid. I’ve read “The Fountainhead” and started “Atlas Shrugged.” I don’t consider myself an Objectivist (Rand’s political philsophy), but I believe we’d all be better off under a Randist philosophy of governing than an Barack (What’s yours is mine) Obama one.
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The Slate article is perhaps over-the-top in how it represents Rand, the private person, as a strawman for Rand the ideologue.
Her Objectivist philosophy was limited as most doctrinaire ideologies are by their very nature.
I found her novels to be very tedious but useful tools in presenting her world view and outlining what she wanted to present as an ideological path.
Ideology in its true rigid form, is part of the problem with any type, be it Objectivism or Marxism. A very informative article on Ideology can be found here:
http://www.isi.org/books/content/149150chap1.pdf
That article, originally a lecture and essay that became a chapter in “Politic of Prudence” by Russell Kirk, was the first article I posted on FreeRepublic a decade ago — now gone as I recall.
I still think it is one of the best political essays written in conservative thought.
I suggest you check your translations. The original non-PC translation was “slave”, not “servant” in many Bible verses. However, that’s not the case for all uses or verses and I will cheerfully agree that nobody is forced to worship Christ in the US per se.
My point is that if you want to play the WWJD/WWJS game, be prepared to have Bible quotes that undermine your position thrown back at you. And that criticizing a work (or supporting one) without having read and fully understood it is STUPID.
Yep, she had issues. Lot of what she wrote rings true, other stuff well, see the first sentance.
As far as the amphetamines are concerned, I could have used a couple during Galt’s radio speech.
What did she achieve, besides the corruption of souls.
More than you ever will, that's for damned sure.
Blindness or an agenda, my FRiend.
I would rather keep company with somebody like Rand, than a “Christian” statist.
You mean like Time, or Newsweek?
Or Slate?
You read Mein Kampf in the original German?
Honor is due. That is quite a feat.
I see how an OP and an original Slate author have never really studied the core of Rand’s writing or philosophy.
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