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Ayn Rand

Complexity said:
Not my job - I gave up teaching a decade ago.

Also, Larsen, I suspect that you are too full of yourself to be able to learn much. I doubt very much that your request was sincere.
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Mine is. If I'm going to interrupt my reading list to delve back into a book that's going to take the same time to read as two or three others, I want to know what you've gotten out of it that you keep re-reading it so often. Especially since I found the same fault with "Fountainhead" that several people who dislike it have.

Give me something that convinces me that there's really something there.
 
Hydrogen Cyanide said:
(by the way I skimmed the 50 page speech... it was just so much "blah, blah, blah..."),
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I have to admit to a "shallow reading" of Galt's speech, too. Started reading it, and realized that it was basically just a detailed summary of everything that was repeatedly pounded into your head from page one.

I read Atlas Shrugged for the first time last year. I think that, if Rand were writing straight fiction, not a philisophical novel, she probably could have produced a decent book. Her writing "works" well enough to allow me to tolerate the length of the book.

And tolerate it was about all I could do. There were several things I didn't enjoy. First, I thought that the book expounded on her philosophy to the point of overkill.

Second, the world would collapse if a few hundred people dropped out of society? The United States fall down the slippery Communism slope in a matter of months? I didn't buy it.

Third, and this was most important of all: Galt creates an impossible engine! It was some BS out pulling static electricity out of the air, but it was an engine that was essentially creating power from nothing - it would have been a Zero Point Energy engine if she wrote this book now.

I could buy Reardon Steel, I couldn't stomach Galt's Engine. Nor could I buy the fact that Reardon and Taggert could look at a stripped, junked, and poorly documented prototype and figure out what it might be, considering that it would have been the far leading edge of technology at the time.

I felt betrayed by someone who was supposed to be so concerned with objective reality would make one of the story's major plot lines rely on something that was so clearly impossible.
 
Hydrogen Cyanide said:
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A couple of years ago I read Tobias Wolff's Old School. He has an amusing depiction of what happens when she visits the (fictional) prep school the character attends.
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Ha! I just read that book last week! The Rand part is hilarious, especially all the sycophants that accompany her on her visit to the school. I guess that was supposed to be The Collective.
 
specious_reasons said:
I felt betrayed by someone who was supposed to be so concerned with objective reality would make one of the story's major plot lines rely on something that was so clearly impossible.
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"Fountainhead" didn't, as far as I remember, have any impossible technology in it, but the end, where Roark is found not guilty of blowing up a building he admitted to blowing up, bugged me. He got off because of a long speech he gave, most of which I didn't read, about his reason for blowing it up, which converted the whole jury to his philosophy. I just couldn't buy that a guy could be found not guilty after he so clearly committed the crime, for whatever reason.
 
Meri said:
"Fountainhead" didn't, as far as I remember, have any impossible technology in it, but the end, where Roark is found not guilty of blowing up a building he admitted to blowing up, bugged me. He got off because of a long speech he gave, most of which I didn't read, about his reason for blowing it up, which converted the whole jury to his philosophy. I just couldn't buy that a guy could be found not guilty after he so clearly committed the crime, for whatever reason.
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I saw the movie - I'm assuming that the book doesn't have additional scenes where Roark is sued in civil court and found to be responsible for millions in destroyed property? :)
 
specious_reasons said:
I saw the movie - I'm assuming that the book doesn't have additional scenes where Roark is sued in civil court and found to be responsible for millions in destroyed property? :)
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If it does, I missed them when I was skipped the speech to the jury.:p Or I just don't remember, but I don't think so. It's been a few years.
 
You know, I was ready to dismiss Rand after reading a few things in her 'Romantic Manifesto' but after all this, I'm willing to plow through We the Living and/or Anthem to see how truly screwed up she is. She lost me when she started going on about supermen based solely on capitalistic ideals...of course, it has been eons so I guess I can try again.
 
I think Atlas Shrugged is an excellent book. I don't agree with Rand's overall philosophy one bit. I agree that the book is based on impossible factors. The idea somebody could run 3 miles of railroad and earn their "keep" is absurd. The people in the valley are portrayed as being prosperous because of their ethics but if you had a device that could create free and unlimited energy you would be prosperous too.

Although such delusions are common. Most people in the USA think they are properous because they are a democracy and have free enterprise. When it has FAR more to do with the fact we are sitting on the most prime real estate in the world and have a relatively small population for the area we control.

This said the book has many profound things to say about personal responsibility and the nature of the world. I have probably learned more from this single book than any other not because I agree with it all but because I found out how much I can get from somebody who I don't really agree with that much. Most people are afraid of reading something from a point of view they don't like. They don't read it with an open mind. This book has more highlighted passages than any other book I have ever read and I refer back to it often and use quotes from it often too.

"I saw the impertinent malice of mediocrity boastfully holding up its own emptiness as an abyss to be filled by the bodies of it's betters."

Not only is that a beautiful sentence but it has massive depth of meaning. I use it on trolls quite frequently. There are countless other quotes that are equally as good or better. I would highly recommend anybody who hasn't read it in along time to read it again. You will get much more out of it when you are older. If you read it with the right attitude and don't expect it to be the second coming of Aristotle or something.

"Accept the fact you are not omniscient, but playing a zombie will not give you omniscience-that your mind is fallible, but becoming mindless will not make you infallible-that an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error."

Another great quote and one that should be the anthem of all skeptics everywhere.
 
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"I saw the impertinent malice of mediocrity boastfully holding up its own emptiness as an abyss to be filled by the bodies of it's betters."
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"I am better than you, so I can piss on you and have the moral upper hand because of that."

Yeah. Real massive depth of meaning.
 
A few more quotes.

"If we do away with private fortunes we'll have a fairer distribution of wealth." If we do away with genius we will have a fairer distribution of ideas."

"questions of truth do not enter into social issues. No principles have ever had an effect on society." "what then directs men's actions?" "The expediancy of the moment."

"that as man must produce the physical values he needs to sustain life, so he must acquire the values of character that make life worth sustaining. That as man is a being of self made wealth, so is he a being of self made soul. That to live requires a sense of self value, but man who has no automatic values, has no automatic sense of self esteem and must earn it by shaping his soul in the image of his moral ideal."

"you are guilty of intolerance, because you don't treat your desire to live and their desire to kill you as a difference of opinion."

"whenever you rebel against causality, your motive is the fraudulent desire. not to escape it but worse to reverse it. You want unearned love, as if love the effect could give you personal value, the cause. you want unearned admiration, as if admiration the effect could give you virtue the cause. You want unearned wealth, as if wealth the effect could give you ability the cause. You plead for mercy, MERCY, not justice as if unearned forgiveness could wipe out the cause of your plea.

"They did not know and their panic was the last of their struggle to escape the knowledge. That his merciless sense of justice, which had been their only hold on him, which had made him take any punishment and give them the benefit of any doubt, was now turned against them. That the same force that had made him tolerant was now the force that made him ruthless. That the justice which would forgive miles of innocent errors of knowledge, would not forgive a single step taken in conscious evil"

I Love that one.
 
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Vagabond said:
"If we do away with private fortunes we'll have a fairer distribution of wealth." If we do away with genius we will have a fairer distribution of ideas."
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This says to me that the speaker claims that wealth and genius are usefully analogous. Perhaps the evidence is in the context of the page where it appears. But for starters, I don't think that wealth is an innate human property like genius is, so the connection breaks down pretty fast.
 
Vagabond said:
"I saw the impertinent malice of mediocrity boastfully holding up its own emptiness as an abyss to be filled by the bodies of it's betters."
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I'm never even took an English A-level, but that strikes me as remarkably unbeautiful. It's not exactly Raymond Chandler, is it?

It is both difficult to read, and hard to parse for meaning. The imagery is confusing:
  • It requires one to visualise malice as some sort of human entity.
  • But not just malice, the malice of mediocrity. I had never previously considered mediocrity to have a malicious component.
  • Then we must think about it holding up an abyss. An abyss is a just a big hole, a lack of stuff. It's hard to hold a lack of stuff up.
  • The abyss represents emptiness. That's ok, as an abyss is pretty empty, but it doesn't help with the holding up bit.
  • To cap it all, we have think about the malice of mediocrity doing all this boastfully.
  • Oh, and some bodies are going to fall in, too. Malice should take a care not to hold the abyss directly above its head, or all those falling bodies could do some damage.
It reminds me of HP Lovecraft. Although he probably would have used 'abysm'. Probably thrown in a 'gibbous' here and there, too.
 
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