Ping
(If you want on or off this list please freepmail me.)
Hank
"Rand is presented as a seriously psychologically disturbed individual whose very philosophy was not only flawed but dangerous. "
read her book "the new left" and you'll see why the left attacks her.
she had them figured out in the 60s.
I'm reading Atlas Shrugged right now. Pretty good so far.
Ayn Rand was a great mind. Alas, even great minds can be flakes.
The Brandens were only two of many, many purged from the Collective. Tibor Machan, David Kelly, just to name a couple. If she had lived long enough, I dare say Leonard Piekoff may have crossed her eventually.
Ayn Rand certainly did have an incredibly brilliant mind. It was fascinating for me to hear her speak at the Ford Hall Forum and other venues back in the sixties. But she could also be arrogant and impatient and short-tempered. I remember times when someone would ask an innocent (or perhaps merely ignorant) question, and she would suddenly and viciously attack the questioner and speculate on the person's psychological and philosophical flaws as a human being. It wasn't pretty. Other times she could be gracious and relatively charming.
So read her books and remember the good and accept that there was also some bad. The former heavily outweighed the latter.
I used to be such a fan of Objectivism. Now I'm interested in (though not committed to) the opposite - total Subjectivism. Not as a product of relativism, but instead as an observation that it's the natural state of things, no matter what. Even objectivists must operate within their own reference frame.
The questions I can't ignore are - why ignore that which you know? Yes, they are biases, and so....? You should use all the information you have to make good choices. Why throw out certain facts?
What's the difference between loyalty and favoritism, for example, if I'm going to embrace my wife, even when I KNOW she's wrong? No Objectivist can expect to fulfill the requirements of a marriage contract, where some blind loyalty need exist (and I wouldn't have it another way, nor would she).
I'm still a big fan of Ayn Rand for her take on social structure and the simple philosophy that "I own that which I own"... roughly equivalent to her 'a is a' assertion (though that's debatable in some respects. Two apples are two different apples, and so all things are different as the space and time they occupy helps define them, in my opinion; a is NOT a - they are two different "a"'s).
I'm about half way thru The Fountainhead,and the Branden's sound like some of her characters.I've ck'd out AR on the net,but this(the Branden's)is news to me.What luck,she befriended a couple of sociopaths.
ping the Ayn Rand list?
Yea, over dramatized, myopic and dark. After studying Objectivism casually for 5 years, it was a downer to log onto HPO and see the best of them eating each other alive over minutia.
I suppose it’s inevitable that such a great and destabilizing power as Objectivist ideas would shake the personal lives of its pioneers, but I’d rather see people use the philosophy to our advantage and get our drama externally.
Your post has nothing to do with philosophy. It does have something to do with weak minds and the vice of idolatry.
Notice how this article doesn't mention any specifics. No counterarguments, nothing. It just smears the Brandens and fawns over Rand.
Ping
I liked Thomas Jefferson better. Ayn Rand wrote about the life. Jefferson lived it.
bump
Ayn Rand is one of my favorites and I believe she had class.
Bump for later.
I imagine a character assassination taking place in molasses.
But perhaps he meant "vicious"...
It would be great to get Mel Gibson to produce and direct a remake of the movie based on Ayn Rand's novel "The Fountainhead". There is a scene where the architect Howard Roark gives a speech in his own defense at his trial. There is so much in that speech that is a direct indictment of all the leftist PC mumbo jumbo that is accepted without question in the media and by people in general today. The speech is long but it is so beautiful in its reason and logic. I think that speech alone is so powerful that I want to see the movie made just so that people get the context of and then the blast of that speech. Mel has the values and instincts that would do justice to it on film.