Rob Quinn, November 5 at 10:33 am #

If you haven’t actually studied her work then you certainly shouldn’t be asserting opinions about it.

******************************************

Quinn is actually spot-on correct.  While Rand clearly was a hero-worshipper, who valued talent and vision, she wrote rather eloquently that those who may not have that talent and vision can STILL be the moral equivalent of her “heroes”.  IOW, to dumb it down “be all you can be”.

She also VERY EXPLICITLY said “there are no dirty jobs.  Just dirty people who don’t want to do them.”

I know it’s easy to confuse her ideal which is that the “heroes” should be allowed to do their thing with the far DIFFERENT concept that those who aren’t “heroes” should be enslaved.

While it’s also clear I do NOT agree with Rand that all regulation is bad (I don’t want raw, hot radioactive sewage spilling into my family’s drinking water), to state that she was in favor of slavery is as absurd as saying MLK was in favor of segregation.

One poster even confused Objectivism as an outgrowth of Libertarianism.  Sorry, but that’s backwards.

People here just make shit up, like FolkTruther saying I worship Rand slavishly and am blindly devoted to her views.  Now it should be BLATANTLY obvious that I am very critical of her views, and see Rand as having ignored critical facts in her analysis, having corrupted it with her own rape fantasies, and, in her personal life being a total hypocrite.

To the FT conspiracy-everywhere mentality (Are you listening TD3?) this means I’m really doing this as some big phony, as a “5th Columnist” and that I REALLY must believe in every word Rand wrote as gospel….like I said, pure bullshit.

Oh well, his mind’s made up—he won’t let himself be confused with anything so mundane as facts and evidence.

Again you ignore most of what I said by failing to address them and I have seen no quotes from you either. How is empathy as a personal characteristic to you? You have yet to comment on that. It is called avoidance. Where the most important thing is left out in your responses. Why is that? I just want to know why you have this point of view in relation to Ms Rand. Why did she support a psychopath? Explain that while you are at it? I am receptive to your answer, sir.

@DieDaily: “She was an elitist who proposed that 99% of INDIVIDUALS should ... be entitled to no free will or self determination…”

That’s the complete opposite of what she wrote.  Nobody has defended individual rights as well as Ayn Rand.

@Night Gaunt and DieDaily:
A real debate about Ayn Rand’s philosophy should include quotes and references.  You should say: “This is where she said X, and this is why X is wrong”.

Otherwise you are just tilting at windmills.

If you haven’t actually studied her work then you certainly shouldn’t be asserting opinions about it.

Rob Quinn I was merely responding to your dismissal of altruism. If you read the article you saw that Ms Rand extolled the “freedoms” of being a psychopath. Does that bother you? Also her need to be worshiped and have a personality cult of herself surrounded by acholytes. I have found that psychopaths are very good at advertising that they find it a weakness and promote others who are normal or damaged to follow in that same tract of behavior. Did I call you a psychopath? If it fits then yes. If not then you are fine. But I would have a look at your empathy chip to see if it is on and functioning. [A nod to Data on ST:TNG.] You see I have a personality disorder that makes it very hard to be sociable and have a problem with dispassion so my empathy chip isn’t functioning well itself. But I recognized it and want it to improve. How about you?

I found it interesting that instead of telling me about in more detail how you treat empathy you say I personally insulted you. That tells me much about you as well. Hyper individualism is a danger too since we need to work together. Social atomitism would wreck our civilization. Lone wolves don’t last very long if they can’t get into a pack. Harmony and mutual aid are better forms of survival tactics than predation as Libertarians and their friends the Republicans. At least in the economic realm.

I study all the time so this is good mental exercise for me. I am doing the same with DaveZx3 on religion and evolution on another forum.

Quin, you miss the entire point and evade nearly
every debating point. Rand was not an individualist
by any stretch of the imagination. She was an elitist
who proposed that 99% of INDIVIDUALS should in fact
be entitled to no free will or self determination
whatsoever. This was extremely, indeed absolutely,
consistently borne out by the iron hand with which
she imposed draconian, bazaar and irrational dictates
upon her “followers”. She was, without knowing it, a
religionist, having declared herself the pope.
Associating Rand in any way with individualism is
patently absurd and there is no evidence for it. You
have not read Rand or studied her life. Either that
or perhaps you share her insecurities and problems
with authority. Rand was arrested in a very early
stage of child development.

You, like Rand did, can in fact put your hands over
your face and exclaim “you can’t see me” but that
does not make it true. Saying “yes I can see you” is
not a Christian stance! To oppose Rand is not to
embrace religion, whereas to follow her DOGMA is a
religious act. Again, an individualist? Not by any
stretch of the imagination…well, except for yours.

“Only psychopaths and their adherents despise and consider [altruism] a weakness to be eradicated.”

Name-calling is a smear, often used to silence evade and destroy real intellectual understanding.  In logic, it’s known as an ad-hominem - a fallacious form of arguing.

It is often used as evidence in understanding the motives and character of the arguer.

Every despot in history has tried to convince the masses of their inherent self-guilt, in order to subjugate them.

When the individual is supreme, then a government cannot control him, oppress him, or wage imperialist wars against him.

Individualism is, in fact, the cure for slavery, the cure for wars, and it is the moral basis of the most productive socio-economic system that man is capable of: laissez-faire capitalism (a system that came close to existing at our country’s founding, but rapidly deteriorated into today’s mixed-economy.)

Altruism isn’t a Christian trait, it is a human one. Only psychopaths and their adherents despise and consider it a weakness to be eradicated. They consider themselves superior for being so. Many a despot would have agreed.

Ayn Rand is the preeminent defender of reason, individualism, and capitalism.

Conservatives and liberals tend to unite against her because they both share the Christian morality of altruism - which is the idea that the self is the standard of evil, and self-sacrifice is your highest moral duty.

OzarkMichael, November 4 at 12:39 pm #

Like i said, the choice is yours. I just didnt expect you to choose reasonable argument in one post and then contradict yourself in the next post.
*************************************************

Huh?  I never said that. I never would say that.  I might QUOTE someone saying that and then refute it, but I wouldn’t say it.

What next for conservatives? After the Ayn Rand love-in, can we expect a Hitler Revival? What’s with her Nietzsche connection? Was she mad about the “super-man,” uber-mensch?

She and Greenspan dated—did this lead to the housing bubble and the 2007 meltdown?

To me,she is one crazy person. Take to her at your own risk!

Re :By WriterOnTheStorm, November 4 at 12:34 pm #

Excellent post.

From a petite capitalist family, Ayn Rand was bitter that her class had been a loser in the Russian Revolution.  In response she came up with a crude, underdeveloped “ideology.”

I would like to know what Rand would have thought if her architect-hero in “The Fountainhead” had his housing development plans altered by a corporate-capitalist bureaucrat (instead of a government bureaucrat).  Would Rand have felt the architect justified in blowing up the housing?

I was Libertarian for a long while, I am now Anarcho-Socialist and follower of “Mutual Aid” of Kropotkin, but I consistently found that they had no interest, or very few of them, of helping others. Selfishness was not only allowed but encouraged but it rarely led to altruism for others. It generally lead to contempt and in fact looked more and more like what the psychopaths in our society look at the world. Me, my, mine and no equal sign in their equation. One can have a less intrusive gov’t and still have more personal autonomy and still have a means to live and have medical coverage for all. A national safety net to live on but still promote Capitalism in a restricted sense I think will work out much better than our present situation which is modern barbarism.

Just knowing a bit about her background makes her views easy to understand.  Not worth researching, and certainly not worth valuing, but a bit easier to understand.

ITW said: Both Bush and Barney Frank and the “Liberals” are/were owned and controlled by big Money and did the bidding of Wall St. money changers and that is where the blame should be directed.
Conservatives, Liberals, left and right is all theatrics and bullshitting and Wall St. owns and control the place.

This was a good answer. That would have been a good finish. Except you werent finished. Because right away you followed up with a post that goes back to the MSNBC noise machine. I respect you as well, and that was disappointing.

Like i said, the choice is yours. I just didnt expect you to choose reasonable argument in one post and then contradict yourself in the next post.

Objectivism could be described as Libertarianism on steroids. But it was quickly co-opted by capitalists,
and became associated with old-fashioned elitism all dressed up in the latest fashion of that day - Social
Darwinism. It appealed to wealthy Americans who were looking for a way to justify their mostly
exploitation-based profits. And it also had it’s followers among working class patriots, who clung to the
romantic myth of America as an aspiring meritocracy - a juste society in which each individual gets in
precise measure to his/her give. Traces of these ideas are encoded into the American psyche, explaining
in part our tendency to treat foreign countries as our international plebs.

Americans are quick to embrace such intellectual contortions, because failing to do so would force us to
come face to face with the fundamental injustice of capitalism, and the implied immorality of capitalism’s
most celebrated practitioners. Just lately, it seems we’ve had a head on collision with that injustice, and
it’s given everyone a five-aspirin headache. So it’s no surprise that some are still trying to bring a few
mummified philosophies back to life. Apparently, Greenspan’s admission that he, and by extension Rand,
were dead wrong, is not enough to stop this ideological runaway train. What’s next, a revival of
Feudalism?

A more evolved society would recognize that the extremes on both ends of the social spectrum must be
curtailed, and not just that of the poor. Extreme wealth leads to socio-pathologies that should be
prevented - not for the sake of the nation’s poor, but for the sake of that individual. It is not impossible
to imagine a future society which will regard Objectivism as barbaric - as primitive to them as feudalism
is to us.

OM:

Please stop listening to Fox Noise and do your homework.  Barney Frank is simply a talking point to distract people from the real causes of the recession, which include Phil Gram’s sneaking special legislation into a bill at midnight in 1999 (when the GOP had both Houses) that allowed the ENTIRE Enron scandal to happen.  Wasn’t Wendy Gram on Enron’s board at that time, too?

By the time the Fanny/Freddie scandal hit it was only one of many issues, but GOPers like you hooked on to it as the ONE thing you could attack Dems with.  This somehow, in right-wing thinking, became THE cause of the collapse, ignoring the sub-prime crisis that preceded it, the HUGE draining of the credit markets by the GOP’s deficit spending insanity, and the total removal of ALL controls on lenders—by the GOP.  In 2006, when the sub-prime crisis hit, the wiser heads said “this is only the beginning”...and they were right.  Who controlled the US government in 2006? The GOP. They had the White House, the House and the Senate….and they did NOTHING!

OM: I respect you as a person, and frequently I respect your arguments, but please, PLEASE don’t toss that “Barney Frank” GOP straw-man argument at me. You are far too smart for that.

OzarkMichael wrote:
“Its easy for you to blame Bush and the “neo-cons”, but I can easily push it back at you and blame Barney Frank and the Liberals.

ITW, we are better than that, arent we”
____________________________________________________

Both Bush and Barney Frank and the “Liberals” are/were owned and controlled by big Money and did the bidding of Wall St. money changers and that is where the blame should be directed.
Conservatives, Liberals, left and right is all theatrics and bullshitting and Wall St. owns and control the place.

“But the idea that YOU are responsible for you, ultimately, that life is for living joyously, and that YOU are capable of being a rational being are precious.”—Inherit-the-wind

Too bad it was mixed with the poison of egocentrism, monomaniacal power trips and utter unfettered greed is good which is still held in high esteem. Without altruism and humanism it becomes as despotic as any that ever existed of any political stripe and type.

And then poor misunderstood Nietzsche is dragged into the conversation. The skimmers who read at face value and find some things that they think fit their powerful egos and lusts take as in a cafeteria even if it isn’t what the meaning was originally. Why? Because Nietzsche is a writer of depth not just surface and uses ironic and counter factual meanings to impart deeper and more relevant information on the human condition and how to overcome its faults. Especially among those who think themselves superior by their cold cruelties and extravagances of violence and subjugation of others who are not like them as superior acts. Ayn Rand is one of them which is why she extolled the characteristics of psychopaths as her view of a superior person. Not surprising considering such remorseless people consider themselves as such over we who feel empathy for others. Her’s is the “Master Morality” to the Nth degree. A broad grouping identified as “Authoritarians ” or ” Regressives” in their actions in all things.

I doubt if Ms Rand read this and took it to her cold dark heart;
        “When the exceptional human
            being treats the mediocre
            more tenderly than himself
            & his peers, this is not mere
            courtesy of the heart—it is
            simply his duty.”

Of course one would rather be a Master of ones self rather than a Slave to others but one must also not be arrogant nor immured to the plight of others or their feelings. He wanted the best of both characteristics. For slaves they looked after one another and had a care as a group as the few things they had some control over. But humans are mixtures of the two which produces contradictions. How can Humans do this? Not very well which is why Nietzsche had the idea that humanity is still forming and hasn’t yet finished its evolution. That a final product that can have the qualities of the Master without barbarian cruelties and still retain the best aspects of Slaves without being one. Where one can be “good” and “strong” in the same person can exist. Where slaves need not be and therefor their morality isn’t used simply for survival in harsh conditions. As he speaks in “Beyond Good and Evil.”

I dare say that Ayn Rand liked the idea of “Master Morality” of the “noble classes” as the tawny lions roaring and killing. Whose urgings pushed them into the primal forests to give in to their cravings to kill and bloodlet from time to time. To him vanity is an atavism and makes a slave of ones baser self. To Ayn Rand if was a virtue to stroke to the heights of Olympia. If you have superior skills then crow till the cows come home. Modesty is a secular sin in need of quashing. Look on YouTube to find many of her interviews from the 1950’s to the 1980’s, they are very interesting.

ITW said: 2) But Rand thought it would be liberals raping the system that would bring this about.  She never IMAGINED it would be her beloved conservative anti-government neo-cons who would bring it about. Incredible blindness.

Perhaps it was incredible foresight. A few years ago Barney Frank blocked investigation of how the liberals were raping the system to the tune of a trillion dollars(that would be their loan programs though Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac… funny how it would cost about that much to patch the hole later!)

Barney Frank and his colleagues disregarded George Bush’s attempt to warn the country about the impending collapse, and the liberalss scored political points by attributing it to a grudge Bush had against poor people. Very effective if I remember correctly.

The Liberals on the committee were very upset with Bush and wanted the regulators to just go away. Remember?

Its easy for you to blame Bush and the “neo-cons”, but I can easily push it back at you and blame Barney Frank and the Liberals.

ITW, we are better than that, arent we?

Or not.

Up to you.

Yeah, the idea that REASON is Man’s competitive edge in this world is definitely sick and demented.  How DARE Rand argue that without REASON, no buildings would be built, no inventions would be invented, no seeds would be planted, no problems would be solved.

What’s amazing is that Carl Sagan’s greatest philosophic work “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark” is virtually IDENTICAL to Rand’s celebration of the human mind’s ability to reason as the source of ALL (with no exeception) advancements of our society from hunter-gatherers, to builders of sky-scrapers and moon-shots.

Rand, like her intellectual off-spring, the Vulcan, Mr. Spock, argued against emotion and “feelings” as a source of decisions, but rather that only intellectual reasoning should be used.

Such a sin! Such a crime!

Yet the nutty “left” (like Folktruther) never actually READ what she says—they just denounce it.

You can’t carry on an intelligent criticism of Rand here, because of the Folktruthers and TruthDigger3s, who won’t let you.  Rand NEEDS to be criticized to dig out the value in her work.  It is just as stupid to accept it blindly as it is to reject it out of hand.

I’m certain Glen Beck doesn’t have f***in’ clue what Rand was about—and her actions during her life show that she would RAPIDLY have figured him out and rejected him.

Criticism of Greenspan is justified, but not moronic crap passed here. AG did something few like him did: He admitted he was wrong, and not just wrong about an incident, but wrong for YEARS.

I don’t defend Rand categorically.  The woman was a nasty, crazy, egotistical bitch.  She tainted her own philosophy by attempting to fit her own rape fantasies into it.  She over-simplified and exaggerated the power of the free market to act morally in public property.

But the idea that YOU are responsible for you, ultimately, that life is for living joyously, and that YOU are capable of being a rational being are precious.

It is the very soul of darkness to imagine of one’s
self that he is separate and apart from the rest of
humanity. Without exception, the ego that descends
into this pit becomes a center of pain and pestilence
for all. Evil and extreme intelligence are far from
mutually exclusive, but class division and true,
human love are. Thus she lived and died loveless and
alone, a petulant child forever arrested in her
formative years.

The article was brilliant and incisive and I
recommend that everyone follow the link to the
original and read it in full. The comparison with
Hubbard was an odd finale but a good one.

Another heartwarming story about the offspring of a rich Jewish family like that of the Austrian Wittkinstein’s, whose children throughout their lives yearned for self-destruction.  Not that Ayn wanted to destroy herself, she wanted to destroy everybody else.

She is an immensely important figure in US culture because her ideologically insane and cartoonish novels apparently sell-and this is incredible- 800 thousand copies a year, decades after her death.  And she is at least partially defended by dingbats like Inherit, truthdig’s resident neozionist lemming.  It is, I suppose, where Inherit gets his notion that anyone who wants to raise his taxes is anti-semitic.

Ayn, with that realism that she is noted for, argued that all taxes should be voluntary.  And this is indeed the case in some rich enclaves, the rich hating to waste their money on taxes.  Which only benefit the people, who are trying to take away their hard earned, or rather hard inherited, money that they need to hire goons, police and armies to oppress them, and to buy media needed to delude them.

eight hundred thousand books a year, bought by people who don’t read and can’t think.  Amazing.  Not only that, but one of her acolytes, Greenspan, was made head of the Federal Reserve for nearly two decades, and his towering reputation and loony policies was instrumental in causing the current depression.  Although Milton Freemen is slobbered over by economists for his brilliance, and Nobel Prize, it is Ayn Rand, our own Alisa Rosenbaum, that is the poor man’s economic and culural dingbat, helping to form the corrupt and barbaric culture of America.

The central thesis of Ayn and Miltie must be taken on its naked absurdity- if everyone is selfish and does only what’s best for themselves, the good of all will result.  This idiotic insanity is supplimented by Ayn’s native brutality.  She was strongly against rehabilitation of prisoners,for example, arguing that they should be made to suffer as much as possible.  The poetess of Abu Ghraib. 

And although she is dead, buried with a dollar sign tatooed on her ass, she would be gratified to know that America has taken her to heart, and she is still fondly remembered and praised by her readers, and her policies adopted by the US Mafia plutocracy.

The neo-conservatives have appropriated the concept of “Individualism” when in reality,

it has nothing to do with their philosophy, which constantly seeks to control the masses.

The Slate author of this article, Johann Hari, is a writer whose perverse stands confound even the most radical. Check his writings. Praise for pirates? Pity for pedophiles? Thank God I’m not his father. We should send condolences to his parents. His old man seems to be a regular guy, a bus driver, but with a son like Johann I would wear sunglasses and change the family name.
Ayn Rand would recognize him as the Ellsworth Toohey of our day - a columnist with no ability, dedicated to destroying creativity and honesty, tortured by some female rejection years ago, when he half-heartedly entered puberty. - fwdpost.com

Ayn Rand——the poster child for Social Darwinists.

This is an excellent mostly accurate article.
The most I like about it is its sound explantion why such dementd philosophy, from a tormented and deeply flawed woman, resonated and still resonating with some people.
An obvious indictement to Ayn Rand’s philosophy is that one of her followers and an ardent admirer of her, Allan Greenspan, has dealt almost a mortal blow to the economy by following her “teachings”.

I’ll throw my opinion in the mix.

I don’t know anything about Ayn Rand other than through her fiction and non-fiction.

And on that basis alone, I can confidently say that she was a genius ahead of her time.

She is the 20th century’s preeminent defender of reason as man’s means of survival and an individual’s life as the standard of value.

What she has to say is especially relevant today, as a lifeline to our political and intellectual bankruptcy.

Could there be an article with MORE errors, omissions and deliberate mis-representations on TruthDig than this one?

Here’s a simple one:“She renamed herself Ayn Rand, a name she thought had the hardness and purity of a Hollywood starlet.”
False!  She picked “Ayn” (pronounced “ein”, not “Ann”) because of a connection to Finnish.  She picked “Rand” because she like “Rand” better than “Remington” and her typewriter was a Remington-Rand.  Somehow “Ein” Typewriter doesn’t sound like a starlet anymore.

Rand was a nasty bitch, and a hypocritical one to boot. Her relation with Brandon didn’t last for “decades” but it did last for years.  ALL of her vituperation against can be explained in 3 words: The Woman Scorned.  She was an older woman, something like 20 years older than Brandon, not to mention his wife, (and both were married) who got rejected.

But the WILLFUL mis-interpretation of her philosophy is the most disgusting aspect of this piece.  Much can be debated and challenged legitimately, but not with THIS article as the foundation of that debate.

Here’s a simple thing: Howard Roark is BEGGED to design this low-cost housing complex.  His deal with the begger is two-fold: Roark is to be anonymous AND the begger MUST guarantee the complex is built EXACTLY as he designs it.  For this, Roark will design the WHOLE thing for free.

Roark even reveals he’s long been working on a way to build simple, inexpensive, housing for the working man that allows that man to keep his dignity.

The changes aren’t “minor”, they totally change what he has built and undermine what designed, and designed for free.

Roark, having not been paid (his pay was NO CHANGES from his design), reclaims his property, albeit violently.  I don’t condone the violence, but this is a VERY different picture than the author’s absurd interpretation.

Yeah, Roark rapes the woman. This is disgusting, not heroic, not consistent with the rest of Rand’s philosophy, but this failure is due to Rand’s own sick rape fantasies.  She should have kept them to herself.

Notice that the author ignores two very interesting and almost contradictory points.

1) Rand’s Atlas Shrugged predicts the collapse of the economy almost exactly as it’s happening.  She predicted the lack of rail rolling stock (today the US hasn’t built a new freight car in something like 20 years). She even predicted the economic death of a state—today Michigan, with the dying of car industry, is beyond saving. Incredible foresight.

2) But Rand thought it would be liberals raping the system that would bring this about.  She never IMAGINED it would be her beloved conservative anti-government neo-cons who would bring it about. Incredible blindness.

BTW, the author’s whole thesis founders on Rand’s actions during the McCarthy period.  Initially, Rand was happy and eager to cooperate with HUAC.  But she quickly saw through them to see that they weren’t interested in chasing Communists, they were interested in suppressing dissent and “getting” people they didn’t like.  Rand backed away and wouldn’t support them or their actions ever again.  This just doesn’t fit the author’s picture and negates it.

Brandon’s ex-wife, Barbara, had more reason to hate Rand for what she did to her marriage and life than anyone.  But Brandon’s biography of Rand is far more fact-based, fair and shows both sides of Rand, both the brilliant and the mean, selfish bitch.