Translation: a lot of people didn’t fall over themselves with fawning praise for her insights.
To Sam Stone my point about her being embraced by the GOP as being a hilarious example of cognitive dissonance is entirely owing to her atheism and explicit anti-Christian attitude.
Ayn Rand for dummies: take anything Jesus reportedly said. Reverse or fundamentally subvert it. Instant Rand. It works remarkably well.
I really should add that I don’t think Rand was fundamentally evil or anything like that. She was clearly a remarkable and brilliant woman in her way. But people who have no business doing so like to try to selectively and misleadingly glean nuggets from her to support their own agendas. I present some of the current GOP fawning as a prime example.
Please pardon a self serving question, but because I actually prefer to be corrected than to be wrong (well, on most things)- could somebody who has studied Rand in depth please tell me how accurate my description (post 43) is or is not.
But it isn’t an either/or proposition (collectivism vs. capitalism). She uses communism as a fear mongering cudgel without addressing alternatives economic systems (mixed economy). IMHO, a mixed economy does the best job of ensuring everyone’s individual rights are preserved. I am most certainly not saying it is perfect but when you have a population who are all to willing to game the system, an invisible hand is often more of a hindrance to individual freedoms than a help (witness the problems with the current economy).
Objectivism can only exist in a vacuum.
Again, objectivism’s fatal flaw is that it overestimates the true nature of man. IMHO, a certain amount government regulations have to exist because of man’s true nature. To see the world in black and white (collectivism vs. laissez-faire/aller/passer capitalism) without even considering the gray (mixed economy) and the reasons behind the gray creates a false dilemma. A philosophy rooted in a false dilemma is not workable.
I suppose you could argue a philosophy doesn’t have to be workable merely represent an ideal but that makes a mockery of Ayn Rand’s thoughts on function.
Again, the problem of what works on paper often times isn’t workable in reality.
Behold, Rising Mildew:
I’ve often wondered whether Ayn Rand was just a brilliant marketer, deliberately peddling a snake oil philosophy. John Galt, is nothing if not a Mary Sue for all mankind. I tend to discount it, her books, both fiction and non-fiction, are too earnest, detailed and pedantic. That said, most people just extrapolate “Greed is Good” from Ayn Rand’s works. It would be a spectacular joke if she did this deliberately, knowing the kind of appeal this would have for many (mediocre) people.
No, I think she really believed in what she was selling, and was a snake-oil peddler, and was not intellectually honest (I certainly would not say she was not intelligent) enough to perceive the difference/conflict.
Seriously. This a DEBATE forum. You need to back up your assertions. If you can’t provide a citation, at least explain what you mean. Or be ignored, your choice.
Exactly! That is why I am so shocked most people here seem to think she was some kind of philosopher.
Also, like Knorf pointed out earlier, apparently when you criticise the almighty rant, you are misrepresenting her genius. Strange. In both respects she is like a religion. She gives you a set of values that are clear, easy to understand and not negotiable, which makes one feel good because well, certainty is a nice belief to have, right? Question the magic words and you’re accused (of misunderstanding or misrepresenting) rather than answered. Funny because misrepresenting the world is all she ever did. Ayn rant is shallow philosophy for dummies.
Sam Stone: No, I have not read her epistemology. If you did, can you tell me if she ever became more sophisticated about the whole thing? I expect she did, with that number of pages. Does she allow for “grey”? And obviously a table or a rock or the moon exist wether I believe in them or not, but how does that work for more complicated things? You can understand, I hope, that I am not immediately impressed by the rather obvious statement that the world around me exists independently of myself.
But I read one of her books and I found it immoral and reprehensible. So I think I’ll pass on the rest of her work.
Nzinga, since you insist on reading a book you don’t understand, perhaps you should explain more clearly where the difficulty lies. Unless you just started this topic for the discussion. But I can’t immediately think of a passage that was actually difficult. If you’re forcing to read it because you feel it will make you better, than you’re, as they say, labouring under a misapprehension. Like Otto said. But keep on reading if you want to know how it ends.
Plot left out, AS has a very simple message. There are 3 kinds of people. Normal people, brilliant AND honest capitalists, and socialist scavengers. (It seems to me she has an axe to grind with socialism, especially in the light of her ratting on colleagues in the days of mccarty. Anyway, on the book.) The brilliant and honest capitalists are all rich because they are brilliant, work hard, and deserved to be rich. Scavengers are socialists and socialists are scavengers. When she says socialist she means communist. The socialists use the state to steal everything from the brilliant but completely honest capitalists in the name of equality. The normal people are f***ed.
Can you see where the real world doesn’t quite work like that? Laissez-faire capitalism was actually pretty rampant in the 19th century, and it never went like that. But the historical facts, of course, irrelevent and quickly forgotten in the process. Probably the 19th century industrialists were all of them not the proper kind and maybe laissez-faire has never been tried in its true form. But that’s exactly the kind of argument that some people still use when they claim communism is a good idea (which it isn’t). When you ignore or distort evidence around you that contradicts your theory, something is wrong.
Many countries in Europe, by the way, have been social democratic for decades. Often the railroads were owned by the government. Some countries privatised the railroads around the 80s, and strangely enough, in a stunning reversal of AS, trains became less reliable and more expensive.
Personally, I think it’s a huge lie to dare to suggest everything will be alright if we just let the market run its course. Alright, I haven’t read any of her biographies but I really think her family being driven out of soviet Russia determined her opinion too much. I don’t think she ever let go of the idea that all altruism is evil, wether it is jesus or the government or socialism. It all reminds me a bit of this wacky theory: http://www.iamlost.com/features/smurfs/commies.shtml
In any case she would have turned out a different person if she hadn’t had had to live through the Russian revolution. Also, even brilliant people do not always know how the world works, especially if it involves other persons who are not brilliant like them. So I’m not ruling out she was very intelligent or persuasive. I’m just saying that her ideas aren’t the truth and the answer to everything (because we all know the answer to that is 42).
Here you go. Objective in this context means: existing independent of the mind. “Objectivism” is the label she gave her beliefs. (“Objectivist” can also be a broader philosophical label given to all metaphysically objective worldviews, which is to say, the belief that reality exists independent of the mind.) Randism is certainly objective in this sense, as has already been pointed out, most notably in Sam Stone’s primer from post 19.
Now here’s the part that shouldn’t be tricky, and yet apparently is: None of the other tenets of Randism is objective in any way. They all depend on the compilation of subjectively chosen axioms. These other axioms are not dependent on her initial axiom of objective reality. They are chosen independently, based entirely on her subjective personal preferences. Every last one of them. So now we have a worldview labelled “Objectivism” that is, except for its initial set-up, entirely subjective all the way down. And thus every conclusion drawn from this worldview is, similarly, entirely subjective. I want to make clear: This is not a flaw in the system. Nearly every practical ethical/aesthetic system I know of depends on similar subjective choices. And yet we’re stuck with the name she chose, a name that is utterly out of the place given her other tenets.
This is not some grand revelation. Anyone familiar with her philosophy should already know this if they have two brain cells to rub together.
Of course, I can’t claim to read her mind. She might not have been ignorant about what “objective” actually means. It could’ve been intentional mis-labelling. She might’ve deliberately tagged her highly esoteric and subjective philosophy with “Objectivism” because she was deceitful instead of ignorant. That’s certainly possible. But I don’t consider that an improvement on the situation. I’m going to assume, out of kindness, that she was simply ignorant instead of mendacious.
Her body of work backs up this belief. She seemed too damn sincere with her archetypical characters to have intended deceit. So when that pirate what’s-his-face is stealing money in Atlas Shrugged (I can’t give a page number because I neither have nor want a copy of the book), he claims that the gold has “objective value”, not because Rand is lying about what objective value is, but more likely because her understanding of “objective” is so skewed and false that she is incapable of realizing that gold is not actually a supernaturally objective unit of account shat by magically objective unicorns. It’s just gold, and it’s value is ultimately dependent on the people’s subjective preferences, just the same as any other measure of value. (Small digression: An economy as small as the one in that hidden valley would’ve been experiencing massive inflation with such large influxes of gold, but of course, there was no reason for Rand to have understood economics any better than she did philosophical terminology. And hey, it is just a novel.) Likewise, when she went around screaming that other people were “evil”, she might’ve been applying her own criteria of “evil” objectively, but of course, she did not develop those criteria objectively. Naturally, her entire ethics were replete with such fully subjective views, which she placed under the umbrella of an objective (Objectivist) label.
What I wrote was true: The first key to understanding Randism is to realize that she didn’t actually know what the word “objective” means. If you walk into her ideas thinking that you’re going to get a true objective philosophical worldview, you’re shit out of luck. The first key is realizing that she doesn’t know what “objective” is (or is intentionally using a made-up definition, which does not help her case). It can help save some time to realize that before you wade in, just as it can help when reading Marx (an excellent comparison, BTW) to realize that he was silly enough to take Hegel seriously, which led him to the idea of historical inevitability.
You haven’t been here very long, I know, but you should still pay more attention.
An assertion that is self-evident should not require a cite. The OP has not read much of Rand, and so might have been confused by the label “Objectivism”. That would be an understanding confusion for anyone who hadn’t read the books. I meant to make a striking, but fundamentally uncontroversial, point, one which might’ve been helpful to a Rand newbie. But I’ll be delighted to learn if this point actually turns out to be more controversial than I’d anticipated. It will mean that Rand’s readers are just as ignorant as she is, that they haven’t learned anything about the flaws in her thinking even over an entire half century of time to think about it. That would please me. It would square perfectly with my preconceived notions of her fans’ acumen.
That was unnecessarily snotty of me. It is, of course, possible to be a legitimate fan while still recognizing the little oddities that make up her work.
As far as I know (having read only AS) it is a good overview. Again, I would not have used the word philosophy. Otherwise it is more balanced than I would have done it myself.
Except that I am not sure calling her ideas laissez-faire misrepresents her. Surely laissez faire was one of her core values.
While I’m outlining Ayn Rand’s philosophical ineptitude, there’s one more point that must be made about Kant: she was absolutely wrong about Kant’s “subjectivism”. Again, the easiest explanation here is that she simply didn’t understand what “subjective” and “objective” mean, but of course, I’m open to the possibly that the Kant bug up her ass was a deceitful ploy. Kant’s philosophy is not as Rand portrayed it to be, outlined in Sam Stone’s post above. Kant believed in das Ding an sich, the thing in itself, which can be best summarized by the Wikipedia article:
My hasty translation: “The thing in itself is a concept from Immanuel Kant, who characterized it as a being which exists independently of the fact that it is perceived by a subject and thereby becomes an object for this subject.” The thing in itself, in other words, exists independently of our subjective perceptions of it. That’s the basic definition of one of Kant’s most important concepts, and somehow she takes it to mean that Kant believes our perceptions shape reality. That is sheer incompetence on her part. There’s no other way to describe it.
Yeah, there’s a lot of Kant that could be taken as our minds building “reality”–but that’s only reality as we perceive it. Kant does not deny objective reality at all–he merely draws a line between the thing in itself, as it exists independently, and how we perceive that thing subjectively. It’s only her amateur reading of Kant that leads her to decry him for things he didn’t say. She was simply not good with basic philosophical ideas, e.g. what subjective and objective actually mean.
That doesn’t change the fact of her influence, of course, nor the quality of her novels. She’s been dead almost three decades, but she’s still selling like crazy. By any objective standard, her works are classics of American literature. (They still suck ass, in my opinion, but my opinion doesn’t change the reality of her long-standing success.)
There are people who do that, yes, certainly. Not all ayn readers are zealous faithful crusaders for objectivism. Some simply enjoy the books while spotting the fallacies.
Piranha, I really do appreciate your contribution to this thread.
But if you aren’t going to take, in good faith, my reasons for starting it, why keep dropping in to leave posts of hundreds of words?
I mean, you have every right to do so, but watching you try to discourage me from tackling reads that I find difficult by slinging greasy, underhanded accusations my way is cringe inducing…it makes me feel all embarrassed by proxy. Please stop.
To all of those that gave me some very nice break downs, I would like to thank you again. I do much better when my info is broken down nicely for me.
Cite please. As far as I know I was only trying to say that you don’t have to read AS. I mean, why insist? You know, just in case you felt it was an obligatory read in some way. Also, earlier you said about the chapter long monologues:
So that makes me wonder in what way you find it difficult. Is that such a strange question?
I wonder, If I may ask, what that has to do with my ability to understand and comprehend information? I dropped out in the 8th grade and any education I have had since then has been very informal, indeed. I have absolutely zero shame about that. I have furthered my education in some unconventional ways since then, and I am always a student, so I am not easily made to feel bad about my eagerness to learn topics that may be ‘over my head’.
My question in the OP was quite plain. I just wandered into a light hearted, unpretentious forum and asked if anyone would like to break down Rand for me.
If it is beneath you to do so, you are free not to.
ETA: I almost ignored your questions about the book, because I get the feeling they are not geniune, but I do want to clarify that I was stressing that I like when any author goes out of their way to spell out their message…if I find that message too complex for me. I’m actually surprised that I have to clarify that, actually. I made myself so clear in the post!
