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 ...
Other than Christ, who do we hold up that is morally pure?
At least twice. I've learned over my history to never trust what I am told to believe about something but instead, validate that through personal study. I am told over and over that Islam is a "religion of peace", so in order to validate what others have told me, I studied it. Guess what, what others told me was BS.
He shoots.. he scores..
One of the flaws when people study Objectivism is they think it is a political philosophy. It is something more fundamental than that. It is a personal philosophy that impacts how one in politics works. At that, I believe Rand would argue that saying it is political would be its antithesis as it is solely individual. Her flaws that the OP points out, are an interesting point of her philosophy because, she her philosophy doesn't say those flaws are positive attributes, but simply choices she was free to make- and in making those choices, she accepts the consequences of them. One can't be free to choose Christ, or reject Him, if one first isn't truly free.
After reading it, I can understand why the Germans were surprised at what Hitler did; nobody would read that thing for pleasure or for information about a candidate unless you had an overpowering external motive, which Germans didn’t have in 1932.
It’s pretty much all but unreadable. Almost anyone reading it casually would give up long, long before getting to Volume 1, Chapter 10. Let alone Chapter 11, “Nation and Race.” IMHO, most people would bail out by the middle of chapter 1, with the remainder quitting about a third of the way into chapter 2.
Fish in a barrel.
Now think about that analogy for a minute. Your next post, #124, is the perfect light to do that in.
Actually, you're drawing the wrong conclusion about her conclusions on this. What you said in your statement is not exactly what she railed against. What she was against was the helping of other people who had no value of any kind to offer in return and it was up to the helper to determine what is of value to be returned by the person being helped.
For example, you've worked hard your whole life trying to build a life for yourself and support your family and two men come to you asking for help. The first man put himself through college, is raising a family, and was leading a productive life but happened to lose his job due to downsizing or outsourcing by his company, i.e. a normal man. The second man, throughout the course of his life, never sought to better himself and sat around all day whining about how unfair life is and how "the man" is keeping him down, i.e. a hippy. Think about it, who would you help? The man who would appreciate being helped and would work all the harder to not end up in that situation again or the man who would likely squander your "help" and move on to feed off the next person to offer him "help"?
The values she spoke about were not exclusively monetary values, but values of the appreciation of other peoples' values. People take her philosophy out of context too often without actually reading and fully comprehending the full meaning behind her work...
Where she succeeded was articulating where collectivist liberalism would end up if allowed to grow unchecked, and IMO therin lies the broad appeal of her book today.
Where she failed was in realizing that just about any unchecked ideology could become just as potent a destroyer, such as the corporate fascism currently hoovering billions from taxpayers. As you noted, any ideology without a sound moral basis is very prone to excess and failure in the end.
Objectivists can be just as stubbornly ideological as anyone else, unwilling to confront facts and history that presents a challenge to their point of view. I think TE Lawrence said it well, about the challenge of doubt to ideologues (in this case, Muslims):
In the very outset, at the first meeting with them, was found a universal clearness or hardness of belief, almost mathematical in its limitation, and repellent in its unsympathetic form. Semites had no half-tones in their register of vision. They were a people of primary colours, or rather of black and white, who saw the world always in contour. They were a dogmatic people, despising doubt, our modern crown of thorns. They did not understand our metaphysical difficulties, our introspective questionings. They knew only truth and untruth, belief and unbelief, without our hesitating retinue of finer shades.
This people was black and white, not only in vision, but by inmost furnishing: black and white not merely in clarity, but in apposition. Their thoughts were at ease only in extremes. They inhabited superlatives by choice. Sometimes inconsistents seemed to possess them at once in joint sway; but they never compromised: they pursued the logic of several incompatible opinions to absurd ends, without perceiving the incongruity. With cool head and tranquil judgment, imperturbably unconscious of the flight, they oscillated from asymptote to asymptote.
She may have chronicled the most boring speech ever in her Galt radio address, and some other things she championed were kind of odd. Milton Friedman was a much better proponent of the virtues of the free market.
Absolutely right.
What Rand did have going for her in my opinion is a truly wicked ability to spot the falsehoods in many of the liberal nostrums of the day and in ours as well, and to place them in the mouths of her villains in words that are unerringly accurate. That may explain the heat on the part of the Slate authors. Somebody's ox got gored. That's just a guess but I'd bet it's a good one.
But as far as Rand being in any way the ideological root of the Tea Party movement, I just don't see it. There really isn't anything much Objectivist about that movement, no Aristotle, no bleatings about money being a measure of virtue instead of merely a medium. Not Objectivist at all as I understand the term. There's a great deal of rebellion against the stifling hand of political correctness, as there is in Rand's characters as well, but that's an awfully peripheral relationship. The roots bear little resemblance. IMHO, of course.
I especially love “Christians” that try to resolve their adoration of Rand...
I know what you mean. It’s like those Christians that admire that mudering lying wife stealer David. Despicable, but apparently the kind of Person their God holds up as an example.
They make my heart ache.
Hank
“Rand was clearly mentally ill.”
Wow, she must really have gotten to you. One thing about guilt, it turns people into idiots.
Hank
I think there is some commonality between Rand's views of the endgame of liberalism and what we are seeing now, just as some business owners talk about going Galt if the Dem agenda passes. But otherwise there is little in the way of shared beliefs between Objectivism and the Tea Party movement. But to a liberal, all us right-wing nutcases look the same.
Yes, I’d agree with that. The real similarities are in what I think are her best characters, her villains. When you have a head of state appointing czars to run the government like Mr. Thompson - or was his name 0bama? - when you have that similarity to everyday events you don’t have to like Rand to feel a little uneasy about the whole thing. If the progressives don’t like the book maybe they ought to stop acting it out in the real world.
Try separating the message and messenger. Ezekiel was a stone cold nutter, but he was also a divine inspired prophet too.
I’ve actually read Atlas Shrugged. The theme is that society is held up by a few consciencious people who work like elephants to hold the mechanics of society and commerce together.
The others tend, from one degree to another, to ride on that person’s back. I saw this in the military, to be sure. A couple of guys in the commo shack that knew their business, and the rest that faked it until actually forced by circumstance to learn it.
Rand created a scenario in which these ‘pillars’ that were holding up society disappeared suddenly one-by-one, as if off the face of the earth. In not too long, society starts to fall apart.
The point is valid, and timeless. Lots of tortured genius out there, beset by addiction and madness. These afflictions of the soul, body, and mind don’t diminish the contribution. Van Gogh is probably the poster child for this in fine art. Poe in poetry.
Go cry quietly to yourself. You’re taking a page from a tired playbook - if you can’t assail the message, then assail the messenger. It’s alinskyesque.
Ty Cobb was an asshole. He was also a great baseball player. It’s a too-common tale.
I don’t worship Rand, but her message is on point. For what its worth, Hitler was a genius too, and there’s a ton to be learned from how he took a broken nation and turned it into one of the most lethal killing machines ever. He was a sick, evil genius, but there you go. The damage he did was incalculable, but there are lessons to be learned in how he pulled it off that you ignore with great peril.
I haven’t read all of Rand’s work, but have read Atlas Shrugged, and the author of the article misrepresents her implied philosophies there, as well, IIRC, the circumstances of the train wreck in the novel.
I don’t know much of Rand’s personal life, so she may have been an emotional train wreck, herself. There are parts of her writings with which I agree, and parts with which I disagree. The author writes with a bile that makes him less persuasive.
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