Why the hate on Ayn Rand?

Dinwar said:
As I said, her discussions on politics show that it's false. Specifically, she states that a group has the right to break away from a nation in order to form a society that is more free than the nation it split from (I think it's in her essay Global Balkanization). This establishes the use of force against people who are violating the rights of others (remember, from Rand's perspective a nation cannot have rights forbidden to the individual). It therefore follows that you have the right to stop a child abuser, specifically because the abuser violated the rights of that child. You are not necessarily obligated to do so, but you are not forbidden to do so by O'ist philosophy either.

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Can you provide links please to where she expounded on this? (Remember we are discussing Ayn Rand and what she said - not what others either when she was alive or later on have said about "objectivism".)

Plus of course if you have accurately summarised her views what you are saying is that when her ideology failed to come up with the right answer (right being defined as her opinion as to what was right) she was happy to introduce contradictions into her ideology.

Please go back and read the Nancy Kress link I provided as you seem to have misunderstood what she was saying - her point was that if you follow through on her (Rand) ideas you have to conclude that as an individual I have no obligation, no right to do anything for anyone else, even if their rights are being abused by someone else, and in fact interfering in such a manner is "immoral".
 
Lucian said:
What girl does Beowulf get exactly? Lots of medieval heroes have major flaws: Sir Goody-Two-Shoes Galahad isn't the hero of Le Morte D'Arthur; his adulterous father is. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain commits a minor but significant sin, for which he berates himself. The most entertaining saga heroes are homicidal psychopaths (okay, that's an exaggeration, but seriously, don't piss them off).
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Marvel Comics makes its living on this model of heroism.
 
Darat said:
I'm going to disagree with you because I think you've got it back to front. What we find is that when people group together they tend to act to in ways that benefit the group as well as the individuals in the groups; yes there is much argument about how that can be best achieved but the fundamental "objective" behaviour of humans is to form social groups.
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The tribal mentality is strong. Just look at the Politics or Religion subforums.
 
Lucian said:
What girl does Beowulf get exactly? Lots of medieval heroes have major flaws: Sir Goody-Two-Shoes Galahad isn't the hero of Le Morte D'Arthur; his adulterous father is. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain commits a minor but significant sin, for which he berates himself. The most entertaining saga heroes are homicidal psychopaths (okay, that's an exaggeration, but seriously, don't piss them off).
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At the risk of derailing the thread -- though maybe not entirely, given the ongoing discussion about flaws vs qualities -- I feel that the distinction between hero and protagonist is based on misunderstanding precisely that. We look back at ancient heroes or medieval heroes in the sagas, and think "man, look how many flaws they had", but actually those were their qualities by the standards of the time.

Being a homicidal maniac in the sagas wasn't some character flaw to overcome, but really a quality to emulate. Their whole religion was based on an Asgard that had no flipping use for nice people, it just needed tough mercenaries. And a culture where going and plundering and killing was something lionized, not a character flaw.

ETA: as an example, take St Olav, the only saint whose cross has an axe in each hand, so to speak. The guy isn't a saint in spite of being a brutal warlord, he's a sait _because_ he was a brutal warlord for Christ and converted Norway at sword point. And I mean really not just by threat of force, but actually crushed the armies of any nobles who were not that thrilled about the new religion. That wasn't a character flaw, it was what he's canonized for.
 
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HansMustermann said:
At the risk of derailing the thread -- though maybe not entirely, given the ongoing discussion about flaws vs qualities -- I feel that the distinction between hero and protagonist is based on misunderstanding precisely that. We look back at ancient heroes or medieval heroes in the sagas, and think "man, look how many flaws they had", but actually those were their qualities by the standards of the time.

Being a homicidal maniac in the sagas wasn't some character flaw to overcome, but really a quality to emulate. Their whole religion was based on an Asgard that had no flipping use for nice people, it just needed tough mercenaries. And a culture where going and plundering and killing was something lionized, not a character flaw.

ETA: as an example, take St Olav, the only saint whose cross has an axe in each hand, so to speak. The guy isn't a saint in spite of being a brutal warlord, he's a sait _because_ he was a brutal warlord for Christ and converted Norway at sword point. And I mean really not just by threat of force, but actually crushed the armies of any nobles who were not that thrilled about the new religion. That wasn't a character flaw, it was what he's canonized for.
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This is a great point. And the medieval heroes were civilized compared to those that came before. Gilgamesh and Enkidu or Heracles went around raping, pillaging, murdering, and basically behaving like monsters.

Even Odysseus, who was supposed to be the first modern hero, using his mind instead of sheer brutality, had his share of, er, questionable moments.

People fail to realize how absolutely vile and bloody most of human history was. We think of the 20th century as the bloodiest, but that's just because there were more people. If wars in the 20th century had the fatality rates of those in the Middle Ages, the body count would be astonishingly higher.
 
Dinwar said:
Not necessarily. This is the modern view; other cultures have had different views. For example, in the Middle Ages Aragorn would have been held up as the hero of LOTR. In the Middle Ages, it's the noble that gets the girl (read El Cid or Beowolf for examples). Tolkein's Silimarilion is much more along those lines.
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Sorry to be the one to break this to you, but El Cid dies ;-)
 
TraneWreck said:
This is a great point. And the medieval heroes were civilized compared to those that came before. Gilgamesh and Enkidu or Heracles went around raping, pillaging, murdering, and basically behaving like monsters.
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A great point, but ultimately irrelevant. No one, not even a Randroid, holds Gilgamesh up as a moral paragon to be emulated.

Atlas Shrugged is a novel. Not a fairy tale, not a fable, not an epic poem, not a comic book. It's structured as such and plays by the rules of the modern novel. The protagonists are supposed to be human, with human failings, and they achieve "heroism" by overcoming those failings.

(And in more detail, of course, no one in Atlas Shrugged is an "antihero," either. Just being a dick isn't enough to make you an antihero. Sometimes you're just a dick.)

Because of this, we can look specifically at what kind of development Rearden and the other "heroes" of Rand's novels are forced to undergo, and what "weaknesses" they have to overcome. This gives us a very clear example of what Rand considered to be weaknesses (because they're everything that Rearden had to abandon during his quest for heroism) and the corresponding virtues that he had to acquire.

And the list ends up including gems like "being a sociopath is a virtue" and "caring for others is a weakness." In Rand's explicitly expressed opinion.

Which is one of the major reasons why Rand fails.

It doesn't make sense to say "Well, Beowulf was also a dick," because Beowulf wasn't a character in a novel. He wasn't supposed to overcome his own weaknesses of character, but was supposed to kick monstrous ass. And to the extent that his traits helped him to do that, that's generally a sign that the author considered those traits to be virtues in and of themselves, and another reason why we reject Beowulf as a modern guide to life.

If the best defense of Atlas Shrugged one can offer is that Rand's heros have the moral sophistication of 9th century Germanic barbarians,.... that's a pretty good sign that she's not a very good 20th century ethicist, or a writer to be taken at all seriously.
 
Relax, doc. Nobody said that it's relevant for modern day morals, nor that it makes Rand any better. I did say it's a bit of a derail, didn't I? :p
 
drkitten said:
A great point, but ultimately irrelevant. No one, not even a Randroid, holds Gilgamesh up as a moral paragon to be emulated.

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If the best defense of Atlas Shrugged one can offer is that Rand's heros have the moral sophistication of 9th century Germanic barbarians,.... that's a pretty good sign that she's not a very good 20th century ethicist, or a writer to be taken at all seriously.
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I don't disagree, neither was I defending Rand. I was just pointing out that many heroes of the past would be considered villians or monsters today.

In fact, that's pretty much how I view Rand's heroes.

It just always amuses me that thousands of years ago people were sitting around campfires telling stories of the great hero Gilgamesh who raped a priestess non-stop for seven days. Then we have Rand writing a book where the hero is a rapist. I think that places the quality of her views in the proper philosophical light: they're primitive.
 
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This time I'll have to take doc's side, though. Rand's heroes were already monsters at the time they were written, and modeled after people considered mosters at the time. It's not quite the same as for Gilgamesh or Hercules.

According to her own notes, one character for example is modeled after none other than William Edward Hickman, whom she apparently greatly admired. The problem is when you look up who the heck was William Edward Hickman. That guy was a serial killer, and his final deed and the one that got him caught was this: he kidnapped a little girl, then sent ransom notes to her father, in very cruel tones and signed with names like "Death" or "Fate". When her father delivered the ransom money, thinking he can see the girl in the car next to Hickman, the girl was kicked out of the car... dead. The killer had severed both her legs, gutted her like sardine, strewed her internal organs all over the town, stuffed her hollow torso with towels, and basically stapled her eyelids so the eyes stay open at the money exchange.

That's the kind of man she admired.

A quote from him, namely, "What is good for me is right," appears in Rand's journal with the comment, "The best and strongest expression of a real man's psychology I have heard." I guess that is, if your idea of a real man is a complete sociopath.

Furthermore she seemed to think that people only hate Hickman for being independent, not for, you know, a dozen murders including gutting a little girl. That they're not really punishing the crime, they're just after him for not being a sheep like prescribed by those artificial nonsense morals.

She found the public hatred for Hickman something irrational and disgusting, and seems to find it appalling that all those people with worse sins and crimes in their life than that, are so self-righteously condemning him. You know, worse sins and crimes than a dozen murders, including gutting a little girl and stuffing her corpse.

A bit later she blames society for basically not offering him anything better to do than gut and dismember a little girl. I mean what was the poor guy supposed to do? Get a boring job and a boring wife and all that? No, really.

Various of her characters, including at least one actually modeled after an idealized version of Hickman, are described of having a wonderful mind who was born without even the organ to understand why other people should matter at all. It's what nowadays we call a sociopath.

Of the idea that appeared earlier, that you should only help those who share your values... well, let's just say that the version in Rand's journal is a bit harsher than that. The moment you start acting or thinking in some way she considers irrational (and apparently her irrational is very easy to qualify for: you just need to be a normal human being), you become not only unworthy of help but unworthy even of survival. Seems a bit harsh to me.

Anyway, I dare say that that kind of character was already not something to be admired. The only ones admiring such characters were Ayn Rand herself and the small cult of psychopathy who found their justifications in her work.
 
HansMustermann said:
This time I'll have to take doc's side, though. Rand's heroes were already monsters at the time they were written, and modeled after people considered mosters at the time. It's not quite the same as for Gilgamesh or Hercules.

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Anyway, I dare say that that kind of character was already not something to be admired. The only ones admiring such characters were Ayn Rand herself and the small cult of psychopathy who found their justifications in her work.
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I don't think we're disagreeing, or at least I don't disagree with anything you or doc has said.

Rand's philosophy is almost a hybrid of Machiavilli and Dostoevsky's misinterpretaion of Niezsche's Ubermensch: it's a might makes right theory, but what's more, it's the MORALIZATION of that position.

We could argue that it's a fact about the world that people in power can do terrible things and get away with it, but Rand thinks this is natural and good.

Thus, the idea that all restraint on such behavior should be removed and the Galt's, the ubermensches, should just be allowed to run wild.
 
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