Interesting article on Ayn Rand

[Ian Osborne]

There's a very interesting essay on Ayn Rand and how her background forged her philosophy Here. What's everyone think of it?

 

[casebro]

Atlas shrugged.

 

[marksman]

It tells me a lot more about the author than it does about Rand, and I don't like Rand.

 

[calebprime]

I've never read Rand, but I enjoyed reading the article about her.

@marksman: Why do you say that it tells you more about the author than it does about Rand? It was opinionated, but it wasn't self-referential.

 

[Magyar]

She really is the icon (as in the symbol and not a good one at that) of the over educated, yet intellectually lazy "conservative".
On the surface her ideas are great but there is simply no meat there.
About the best there is to say about this woman is that she is a great introductory vehicle for critical thinking when your about 15 or 16. But if you are past puberty and you still think that she has anything more then bumper sticker cartoon character dept to say about ANYTHING - well then that says a lot more about your journey of discovery into the land of philosophy to put it kindly.

 

[mhaze]

There's a very interesting essay on Ayn Rand and how her background forged her philosophy Here. What's everyone think of it?

I got about this far....

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.

​

Wait, that's the first paragraph. I didn't get very far, I guess. Well, that's Slate for you. Got any really cool stuff?

 

[daenku32]

You missed the best part:

As Burns explains, Rand's philosophy "taught that sex was never physical; it was always inspired by a deeper recognition of shared values, a sense that the other embodied the highest human achievement." So to be sexually rejected by Branden meant he was rejecting her ideas, her philosophy, her entire person. She screamed: "You have rejected me? You have dared to reject me? Me, your highest value?"

 

[Puppycow]

I liked this recent movie review/Op-Ed by conservative Michael Gerson. (More the latter than the former. He's not a movie critic.)

I don't usually agree with Gerson, but I think he's spot-on when it comes to Rand.

Ayn Rand's adult-onset adolescence

Atlas Shrugged," the movie adapted from Ayn Rand's 1957 novel by the same name, is a triumph of cinematic irony. A work that lectures us endlessly on the moral superiority of heroic achievement is itself a model of mediocrity. In this, the film perfectly reflects both the novel and the mind behind it.
. . .
All of the characters are ideological puppets. Visionary, comely capitalists are assaulted by sniveling government planners, smirking lobbyists, nagging wives, rented scientists and cynical humanitarians. When characters begin disappearing -- on strike against the servility and inferiority of the masses -- one does not question their wisdom in leaving the movie.

None of the characters expresses a hint of sympathetic human emotion -- which is precisely the point.

Because sympathy is bad and selfishness is good. That's what her philosophy boils down to.

 

[Joey McGee]

Her secretary, Barbara Weiss, said: "I came to look on her as a killer of people."

Yep. This is why friends don't let friends read Ayn Rand.

She fell in love with a young follower called Nathaniel Branden and had a decades-long affair with him. He became the cult's No. 2, and she named him as her "intellectual heir"

Someone who went on to become one of the biggest douche bags of all time, spouting positive thinking/self-esteem woo to everyone who would listen, even getting some sway with the government until they proved he was absolutely full of ****. Let's watch him get skewered, no, spiritually murdered on Penn & Teller's BS

 

[leftysergeant]

Because sympathy is bad and selfishness is good. That's what her philosophy boils down to.

Rand's "superman" is actually a lower animal. Of all animals, only humans are known to share food with the disabled, although I have heard second-hand of bonobos occassionally doing so. (When bonobos share food, it is usually an attempt to get laid.) The act of food-sharing was clearly a successful behavioral adaptation, thus making the hominin line more fit for survival.

The Randian superman does not really give a rat's about anybody's survival but his own.

Her superman is subhuman.

Not going to sell my soul to such a cult.

 

[Walter Ego]

I got about this far....

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.

​

Wait, that's the first paragraph. I didn't get very far, I guess. Well, that's Slate for you. Got any really cool stuff?

Actually, allowing for hyperbole, that paragraph is a pretty accurate summation of Rand and her philosophy.

For a somewhat more subtle approach from a paleoconservative perspective, check out Whittaker Chambers' (yes that Whittaker Chambers) droll review of Atlas Shrugs, entitled Big Sister Is Watching You, from the National Review of December 28, 1957.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/222482

Some excerpts:

The news about this book seems to me to be that any ordinarily sensible head could possibly take it seriously, and that, apparently, a good many do. Somebody has called it: “Excruciatingly awful.” I find it a remarkably silly book. It is certainly a bumptious one. Its story is preposterous. It reports the final stages of a final conflict (locale: chiefly the United States, some indefinite years hence) between the harried ranks of free enterprise and the “looters.” These are proponents of proscriptive taxes, government ownership, Labor, etc. etc. The mischief here is that the author, dodging into fiction, nevertheless counts on your reading it as political reality. “This,” she is saying in effect, “is how things really are. These are the real issues, the real sides. Only your blindness keeps you from seeing it, which, happily, I have come to rescue you from.”

Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal. In addition, the mind which finds this tone natural to it shares other characteristics of its type. 1) It consistently mistakes raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before it. 2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked. There are ways of dealing with such wickedness, and, in fact, right reason itself enjoins them. From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: “To a gas chamber — go!”

Now, lest you think that "to a gas chamber" line is a bit much, consider the infamous train wreck section of Rand's novel. Rand did indeed believe that the common masses (or "looters" as she characterizes them) were parasites unworthy of life.

A railway worker in Atlas Shrugged decides to "punish" the wicked socialist government by derailing a train and Rand implies the passengers had it coming. She runs through the politics of the train crash victims, implying they were accessories to the socialist government that is being justly punished:

The man in Bedroom A, Car No One, was a professor of sociology who taught that individual ability is of no consequence, that everything is achieved collectively, that it's the masses that count, not men... The woman in Roomette 10, Car No 3, was an elderly school teacher who who spent her life turning class after class of helpless schoolchildren into miserable cowards, by teaching them that the will of the majority is the only standard of good and evil, that they must not assert their personalities, but do as others were doing... There was not a man aboard the train who did not share one or more of their ideas.

And so on, endlessly through over a dozen "deserving" victims.

 

[marksman]

@marksman: Why do you say that it tells you more about the author than it does about Rand? It was opinionated, but it wasn't self-referential.

Because there's a universe of opinions one might have about Ayn Rand. The specific subset that the author possesses says a lot about the author, and much less about the subject.

If I hadn't already read biographies of Ayn Rand, from both supporters and detractors, the article may have given me some information. But this one didn't. He selected those factoids about Rand that supported his conclusion and ignored any contrary factoids. That tells me a whole lot more about him than about Rand.

 

[Walter Ego]

Because there's a universe of opinions one might have about Ayn Rand. The specific subset that the author possesses says a lot about the author, and much less about the subject.

If I hadn't already read biographies of Ayn Rand, from both supporters and detractors, the article may have given me some information. But this one didn't. He selected those factoids about Rand that supported his conclusion and ignored any contrary factoids. That tells me a whole lot more about him than about Rand.

What did the Slate writer say about Rand that wasn't true? If you've read the biographical material about Rand you'd know that he was accurate though hyperbolic in his description.

Rand was an amphetamine addict. Her novels were potboilers. In her journals she did idolize a serial killer and consider making him the hero of his first novel. She did believe the masses were parasites worthy of death. What 'contrary factoids' did the author ignore?

 

[Skeptic]

Well, yes, but the "factoid" that she thinks a train full of innocent folks had it coming to die horribly because they didn't recognize her genius is a rather big "factoid". I mean, I'm sure -- say -- Charley Manson has good points, besides that annoying "factoid" about those murders.

 

[Walter Ego]

Well, yes, but the "factoid" that she thinks a train full of innocent folks had it coming to die horribly because they didn't recognize her genius is a rather big "factoid". I mean, I'm sure -- say -- Charley Manson has good points, besides that annoying "factoid" about those murders.

A "factoid" is

a questionable or spurious—unverified, incorrect, or fabricated—statement presented as a fact, but with no veracity. The word can also be used to describe a particularly insignificant or novel fact, in the absence of much relevant context. The word is defined by the Compact Oxford English Dictionary as "an item of unreliable information that is repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factoid

The train incident is from Rand's Atlas Shrugged and, if you read it, it's clear in context that Rand did indeed think those collectivist "looters" on the train were guilty and did deserve their fate. That makes it a fact not a factoid as is the fact she was addicted to amphetamines and as is the fact she idolized a serial killer in her private journals.

The train episode was discussed at length on this thread on Social Issues & Current Events beginning at post #32.

 

[TragicMonkey]

The most interesting thing about Ayn Rand was her haircut.


And it wasn't interesting in a flattering way, either.

 

[marksman]

What did the Slate writer say about Rand that wasn't true?

I didn't say it wasn't true. I said it was selective.

What 'contrary factoids' did the author ignore?

As an example, when he discusses the fact that one of her proteges, Alan Greenspan, became Federal Reserve Chairman, he neglects to mention that he repeatedly broke from her philosophy in his tenure, actively manipulating and regulating markets and in the 1990's blaming economic woes on unfettered greed, a complaint that is like a steak through the hard of any Randroid.

He oversimplifies and in doing so, he smooths over any ruffles that might detract from his story. He wants to tar Rand with Greenspan's errors, so he has to make them appear to be in lockstep, when the truth is more complex.

Of course, it's a short article. He has to generalize. But it's the specific of where he chooses to generalize that illustrate the story he wants to tell. It does not necessarily offer an accurate description of an individual.

And this is true of any biography. People are complicated and nuanced. Even someone as radicalized and extreme as Ayn Rand. If you don't know much about Ayn Rand, this bio will probably tell you more info. If you don't know or care much about Ayn Rand and you like the story he wants to tell, it's probably all you need to know about her.

I went through by Objectivist phase in college. I got over it. Way over it. But it's during that phase I learned to be skeptical. (It is both something I got from Objectivism... and it's also why I rejected Objectivism.) So color me skeptical about this article.

 

[Madalch]

...that is like a steak through the hard....

Now there's a mental image I'll have trouble getting rid of.

 

[I Am The Scum]

Issues with the article aside, I'm pretty sure there's one thing we can all agree on: Objectivism is for jerks.

 

[dudalb]

I note that the film of Atlas Shrugged is vanishing and probably won't leave a trace.