Ayn Rand in Retrospect

Objectivist Center ^ | 3/5/02 | Dr. Edward L. Hudgins

[NatureGirl]

Thank you. It's always good to see a straightforward explanation of Ayn Rand's principles. I always worry that people just don't get what "sanction of the victim" really means.

And as to her predictions coming true - I don't think that a week will go by, here on FR, where I won't read something that sounds as if it's right out of Atlas Shrugged.

[RightWhale]

something that sounds as if it's right out of Atlas Shrugged.

Including trains running off the tracks and lights going out in California.

[lelio]

She understood first-hand the horrid consequences of evil philosophies and the importance of defending the right ideas for the right reasons.
I was thinking of her this morning when I heard an English commentator on NPR this morning saying that the rift in European - American talks over the middle east can be traced back do our dealings with Russia and the cold war (that was just an example).
Well what happened there? We're the only ones to stand up to the Evil Empire and where are they now? If we left it up to the mealy mouthed europeans we would still have that despot of a country around. We stood up for what is right and damn those social relativists that think communism is fine for certain cultures.

[Japedo]

Ayn Rand & Liberty Ping!!

[Bob]

I don't think that a week will go by, here on FR, where I won't read something that sounds as if it's right out of Atlas Shrugged.

Like a parallel between Tyco CEO Kozlowski's $6000 shower curtain and the boss's bathroom at 20th Century Motors? (I seem to recall that his was cut glass, though) :-)

[NEWwoman]

I read Atlas Shrugged during the time the Clinton admination was pushing Hillary's Health Care Plan.

The book was so prophetic. She had the Clinton "whining of America" pegged.

[lelio]

But Rand maintained that capitalism must be defended first and foremost on moral grounds.
Thankfully some people are catching on to this that previously said "Its the best way to feed all the people." Well a Marxist could claim the same thing and the only way to find out who was right was to try it. Multiple ruined economies and starving people in Russia proved who was right in that argument, but that doesn't stop the leftists from saying "Well Russia didn't have X so it didn't work..."

[Tauzero]

"Many great supporters of liberty such as economists F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman justified the capitalist system because it produces more material goods and services than planned or socialist systems and, to the extent that governments try to control economies, those economies will stagnate or collapse."

Rather than justifying capitalism, what Hayek primarily did was to show that the goals of socialism are epistemologically impossible.

Unfortunately for objectvists, Hayek's epistemology, which is mostly Kantian, no more supports objectivism than it does socialism.

[dubyagee]

Just finished The Fountainhead; getting ready to start We The Living. I'm a Christian, but contrary to many on this forum, I find I am a fan of Ayn Rand's writing. She was very good at getting into the heart of man. The good and the evil.

[lelio]

and there are rarely any black and whites - mostly grays.
Her book and writings were meant to show an ideal, and that's why you don't see grays in there. If you do see any gray activity its usually by someone that doesn't have a moral standing and they pay for it.
Its called fiction for a reason.

[Tauzero]

"Rand was a talentless hack"

I disagree with that part of your assessment, but she was indeed as guilty of The Fatal Conceit as socialists.

[Quietly]

A Christian friend asked me to read and respond to "Anthem." Our combined effort will someday be called "Dirge."

My first response is "If you are God, my dear,that's no excuse not to take out the trash. There's 250 bags out on the porch. Now, since you're so freaking brilliant, invent garbage men."

[IronJack]

If you accept your enemies’ evaluation of you, you accept undeserved blame, and thus give them the power to destroy you.

This is at the root of White Guilt, the subconscious authority that Jesse Jackson uses to shake down America. Through a media-assisted propaganda campaign, he has convinced the middle class that its comfortable position in society is the result of the exploitation of blacks. Believing this nonsense, he can then extort a penance from them in the form of affirmative action, cringing political correctness, or plain old money. Eventually, that guilt will open the door to ascendancy, and black bigots (like John Conyers, Kwesi Mfume, and Julian Bond) will assume positions of authority from which they can undermine white success. All in the name of "equality," mind you.

Rand understood that many of these critics are motivated first and foremost by envy and resentment of the productive people who flourish in the market. Their failings are not intellectual; they’re moral.

Marx's criticism of capital was not based on its failures, but on his own petty alienation from economic success. His disciples have elevated his pathology into holy writ, and legitimized the sickness as a modern-day religion.

[dubyagee]

Life is messy and bloody, and there are rarely any black and whites - mostly grays.

I thought Atlas Shrugged characters were too black and white myself, but The Fountainhead proved to have more diverse characters. Dominique and Gail Wynand were much less perfect that Dagny and Francisco. Howard Roark even slipped once in his ideology, and he was the "hero."

[RJCogburn]

Life is messy and bloody, and there are rarely any black and whites - mostly grays.

Rand said her writing was intended to show "man as he might be and ought to be". She was not interested in showing how the fellow next door lived...lots of writers do that.

As for talentless, I suppose that is in the eye of the beholder as there are few ways to measure talent 'objectively'. She sold a lot of books and still sells hundreds of thousands a year 20 years after her death.

[Libertarianize the GOP]

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[robertpaulsen]

"Atlas Shrugged is Ayn Rand's most popular novel, that ranked number two to the Bible as the most influential book in America by a recent Library of Congress/ Book of the Month Club Reader's poll."
---capitalism.org