As I wrote that, it occurred to me why I enjoyed The Fountainhead more than Atlas Shrugged. The Fountainhead focusses much more on personal virtues - virtues that I admire - while Atlas Shrugged magnifies those same virtues and places them on a larger stage. The intense magnification makes the virtues appear grotesque.
I’d have a very different opinion of Ayn Rand if I had stopped reading at The Fountainhead.
A.Selene, there have been posts in this thread where posters have said, “It’s not like she’s saying you can’t give to others…she is saying no one should be forced to!”
But the question I had was, is she saying that those that can help others, but choose not to…is she saying they can still be considered morally upright?
Adult night classes for what, exactly? I am all over the place with my interests. The level of science that I wish I knew…I would have to start with 8th grade math to even get started. I have a fulfilled life, with a lot on my plate. I am not about to go to night school unless there is something that rivets me , and I can’t get satisfaction any other kind of way. And I have taken night classes before; got my associates that way.
This may be the first kind of thread I have made like this, but my respect for certain dopers’ knowledge has compelled me at least one other time to ask for help sorting out some of the deeper things I have struggled with, intellectually. Although, the last time it happened, it was in the form of a private email to 5-4-fighting, instead of an actual thread. And I appreciated his insight a great deal. After all, he could have said, “Stop trying to deal with shit you clearly don’t understand!”
I have a habit of ‘divin’ into oceans with nothing but waterwings’, as my husband likes to tease me. I really love topics that most people have taken a lot of time and energy to study seriously. I haven’t made the sacrifices some have made to gain knowledge, but I have every right to request crib sheets, if someone is willing. Ususally someone is. I adore art but have no real training, and haven’t invested as much to the study of it as I could. So I am happy for Sister Wendy who is willing to ‘break it down’ for me. I have no delusions that I will ever have the same understanding as one that studied art for years. I just like to try to appreciate it from my own ability to grasp it.
Where I come from, a lot of people are very smart, and have very high…levels of understanding, I guess you could say. But most of us were not educated, and we came from undereducated parents. So we would ‘build’…which really was our way of saying that we are going to discuss higher ideas, like science and philosophy, even though we didn’t have any formal education on these things. We would try to build our understanding by sharing our ideas and learning from eachother, sharing our knowledge, and what we read.
Ayn Rand is interesting, because her philosophy seems to me to be pretty close to something I learned when I was a young-blood in the ghetto, ‘buildin’ in the cypher’ as we called it. We used to talk about something we called ‘Self Saviour’. It was a part of our little slang. Instead of using the letter ‘S’ we would say ‘self’ or ‘self, savior’, which was there to express the idea of…well, I guess of objectivity, in a way. This was actually kind of contraversial where I came from, because most of us young people were from families that taught us that the Lawd Jesus was the way, and that if someone took our coat we should give them our cloaks also.
So, we felt all edgy for having these kinds of ideas. Even though this thread kind of went off track a bit of where I was hoping to see it go…I really did gain a ton of understanding from those that were willing to really trying to help.
They most certainly can. Rand is arguing that there is no moral imperative to help others, while other philosophies and most religions would disagree. As I understand it, and IANAO, things that are “wrong” in this view are actions with actively hurt someone: theft, murder, abuse, fraud, etc. Choosing not to help someone, for whatever reason, is not a morally deficient choice.
It depends on their motives. It is often, not always, in your own “enlightened self-interest” to extend charity to others.
There is a passage in Atlas Shrugged where the female protagonist shows up in the retreat community with nothing to offer, and one of the male characters explains this to her. I don’t have a copy of the book nearby, but if you do, IIRC it is about two thirds of the way in. About page 1126, in other words. 
That is one of the things the SDMB is good for. ISTM that the signal to noise ratio is higher on the subject of Rand than for a normal subject, but ignore the rantings and you can actually learn something.
Regards,
Shodan
Nzinga, did you look at those interviews I linked to? In one of the two with Donohue (the first one, I believe, but I’m not sure) she explained her thinking with regard to helping others. She thought that it was fine to help others, as long as one didn’t sacrifice taking care of his own needs in order to do so. She also thought it was wrong for a person to feel that they ‘had’ to help others; that altruism should come from within and should be applied only when one could afford to do so without putting the other person’s best interests ahead of their own.
An example might be something I saw when on TV recently where a policewoman had to roust a guy who was sleeping on private property. The guy was good-natured and agreeable and the cop asked when he had eaten last. The answer was three days, and so she gave him the sandwich she had brought for lunch from her car. She explained as she was driving away that she had a home and plenty of food and that she could easily afford to do without the sandwich.
So, she was able to offer the sandwich from the position of having her own needs satisfied (a home and plenty of food) and she did it from an internal desire to help rather than from a feeling the outside world had put upon her that she needed to help feed homeless people.
So in this rather minor example, the policewoman acted in accordance with Rand’s belief in the proper way to apply altruism. I also think on a much grander scale the same could be said of Bill and Melinda Gates. They can afford the billions they are spending to try to help others, and they are doing it because they want to and not because they feel that they have to.
Sorry, SA. I have been trying to keep up with the links, but some are blocked here at work, and I have been following this thread mostly from work, where I can only give it a part of the attention I want to. Thanks for summerizing here.
Sure, no problem. (And btw, the interviews I linked to are on Youtube as opposed to being printed versions, so there is sound as well and probably NSFW.)
Did you bother to read the citations I provided? Nothing in them suggested that they were limited to the US alone.
Again, it would be great to see some actual figures to support your claims, because even if you take the Ayn Rand institute at their word, the numbers you assert are completely ludicrous. They say that since the book was published in 1957, 6 million copies have been sold.
500,000 copies annually would yield 25 million copies sold since its publication, so that is highly doubtful.
Also, the Ayn Rand institute might have something to gain from inflating its numbers. The figures from the CATO site, extrapolated out, would yield about 15 to 20K copies annually, but that is from a period of time that they describe as higher than the previous year.
Do you believe that it is the largest selling book in the world?
I don’t even think it’s in the top 10. Probably not even in the top 20. IIRC, the Bible is number 1, followed closely by the Koran.
-XT
They aren’t really my claims and I’m not all that interested one way or the other. It was just a comment that Buckley made on Charlie Rose’s show that I thought was interesting and since it seemed germane I posted it here. It doesn’t really matter much to me whether it’s right or wrong though, and as such, no, I haven’t read your cites.
So then your post in response to mine, with a question about whether I was citing US figures, and offering a contrary figure was what then? A half-hearted feint?
Why do Randians need to inflate her sales figures anyway? Isn’t an appeal to populism as support for Rand or Objectivism contrary to Objectivism anyway? Shouldn’t A=A? Shouldn’t the merits of her work stand or fall on their own, whether they are popular or not?
No, it was just something that occurred to me as a possible explanation for the discrepancy. I looked at msmith537’s cite and started to say the same thing then but let it slide because the conversation had moved on and I didn’t think it was that important. Your post brought it back up again and so I said what I would have said to him/her. It really doesn’t matter to me one way or the other. You aren’t winning any sort of victory here so get off your high horse, mmkay?
I’m sure they should, and I’m sure she would be the first to say so.
I stand corrected. I had heard that meme “hundreds of thousands sold every year” and accepted it at face value. Seems about one hundred thousand a year on average is more accurate.
Yes, but only if the Ayn Rand Institute is to be fully believed. But that doesn’t accord with the CATO cited figures, if I read them right.
I don’t think you did. Cato is only charting the mass-market paperback. The chart does not include the trade paperback (the best-selling edition on Amazon.com) as well as any other paper-back editions or hardcovers kicking around. So the total monthly sales must be significantly more than the numbers quoted at Cato.
Hm, chairman mao seems to be doing well, especially for a mass murderer.
If I can be forgiven for being blatantly and arrogantly European about this, I wonder how much influence she holds outside the USA. There are some things about the US that keep surprising the rest of the world, and this may be one of them. Sure, I knew a few people who have read one or more of her books, but I have yet to meet a European convert. Perhaps Europeans are used to living in social democracies and know that it works well enough and will not, in fact, inevitably spiral down to communism and destruction. (/end arrogant European mode)
Bear in mind that the claim is often that it’s the best selling novel, not the best selling book.
Ah, that helps to clarify a bit. However, they note that the mass-market paperback is the best selling version of the book. That would mean that all other versions have to be selling at less than 1,000 per month on average. So, unless there are 50 other versions of the book being sold, I don’t see how we get to 100K.
I just don’t think the book is as popular as Rand enthusiasts would wish.
Of course it’s not. 
SA’s quote says “novel” not “book”. Even if “the Fannie Farmer Cook Book” outsells “Atlas Shrugged”, as between the two it’s the better-selling novel.
I suspect, however, that there are a number of works of fiction (“novels” in any common sense) that have outsold “Atlas Shrugged”.