Ayn Rand: Goddess of the Great Recession

Christianity Today | 8/28/2010 | Garry Moore

[Mojave]

This past spring, the Financial Industry Inquiry Commission held hearings on the world's recent financial crisis. The star witness was Alan Greenspan. The Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan translated Greenspan's typically elusive testimony this way: "I didn't do anything wrong, and neither did Ayn Rand by the way, but next time you might try more regulation."

There were obviously many reasons for the Great Recession. But I believe Noonan got to the root of one particular evil.

Fortune magazine once labeled Greenspan "America's most famous libertarian, an Ayn Rand acolyte." (While Rand formally rejected libertarianism, libertarians nonetheless admire her.) But today, both libertarians and Randians are disassociating themselves from Greenspan as quickly as Wall Street.

[higgmeister]

I did not follow your link but I get the gist of it. Let me see now, a Hollywood screen writer thought of writing a story about a wanton vicious killer. What a shock!

She also said, "The first thing that impresses me about the case is the ferocious rage of a whole society against one man. No matter what the man did, there is always something loathsome in the 'virtuous' indignation and mass-hatred of the 'majority.'... It is repulsive to see all these beings with worse sins and crimes in their own lives, virtuously condemning a criminal..."

It reminds me of the unreasoned attack seen today against Ayn Rand.

[Mojave]

It reminds me of the unreasoned attack seen today against Ayn Rand.

Right. How dare those "average" people condemn the man who rejected their morality and cut a twelve year old girl into pieces. They should have admired his heroic independent nature, like Ayn did.

[higgmeister]

I was thinking of, "... there is always something loathsome in the 'virtuous' indignation and mass-hatred of the 'majority.'" Considering only eight percent of our adult population have read Ayn Rand's major work, the mass repudiation is way out of proportion.

I refuse think it is necessary to defend a 23 year old Hollywood Writer that only emigrated to the United States less than two years before, for a murderer causing her to think of an idea for a book. Her actual words were "A Hickman with a purpose. And without the degeneracy. It is more exact to say that the model is not Hickman, but what Hickman suggested to me."

"And without the degeneracy" means with no wanton killing. You have no clue how her concept for that story would have turned out. She never said that a murderer should not be punished for his crime.

Do you judge Mark Twain harshly for the dark and cynical writings after he had become a bankrupt and sad old man?   No, you just don't read those works, and he is still the Greatest American Writer to date.

I will only note further, that other Great Men and Women of History seem to be constantly pilloried and sniped at by the current "nattering nabobs of negativism."

[higgmeister]

If self interest trumps the interests of others, that doesn't follow. In Ayn's pretense of reason, A is simultaneously A and not A.

Rational Self interest is different from your perceived Irrational Self interest. If you think A is not A then you are not rational.

When one speaks of man's right to exist for his own sake, for his own rational self-interest, most people assume automatically that this means his right to sacrifice others. Such an assumption is a confession of their own belief that to injure, enslave, rob or murder others is in man's self-interest—which he must selflessly renounce. The idea that man's self-interest can be served only by a non-sacrificial relationship with others has never occurred to those humanitarian apostles of unselfishness, who proclaim their desire to achieve the brotherhood of men. And it will not occur to them, or to anyone, so long as the concept “rational” is omitted from the context of “values,” “desires,” “self-interest” and ethics.

“The Objectivist Ethics,” The Virtue of Selfishness, 30.

You have to think to understand.

[Mojave]

I refuse think it is necessary to defend a 23 year old Hollywood Writer

Her embrace of evil was lifelong.

[Mojave]

If you think A is not A then you are not rational.

And in Ayn's pretense of reason, A is simultaneously A and not A, as your quotation illustrates.