Hmm, what about what Anthony Sutton says - that it was the West that did much of the industrial set up work in Russia ?
Not my field so I couldn’t say either way, it’s a period of history I really need to get into. He may be simply biased towards capitalism, but what if he’s right ?
Even if I were to concede the ignorance of the writings of a particular philosopher, that is in no way relevant to understanding the fundamental nature of existence.
In order to know a subject it’s not necessary to know everything that others have written on that subject.
I detect a little second-handedness in your thinking.
For one thing, many more people than the ‘Atlases’ withdrew from productive life. Atlas Shrugged makes this point. She focuses on her primary characters because, y’know, story. I totally do believe that if people are not incentivised per their selfish interests, the world will quickly not get along. As to whether the Atlases could have a workable society? Sure, why not? Especially as they are portrayed in the book, nearly all of them are self made millionaire types, all having worked their way up from the bottom, even the heirs. It’s entirely possible that they could set up a greenfield society. And if she’s cutting a few corners(law and order, public goods etc) in the representation of their society, hey, Galt’s speech wasn’t going to fit itself into the book 
There’s an interesting “shrug” going on right now, in the organized boycott among a number of top-level entertainers, who promise to stop performing in U.S. states that have “stand your ground” laws.
Will it be effective? Or will this simply open up a market for second-tier entertainers? Can an “Atlas Shrugged” style strike of this nature succeed? Will TicketMaster suffer million-dollar losses? Will big theaters and stages and stadiums take a massive hit?
My feeling is that it will be all but imperceptible. “Atlas” is really more of a “Hydra” – or an army. It can take a lot of losses before significantly affecting performance.
It is if you’re a philosopher. That’s how you avoid re-inventing the wheel, and, worse, making it square.
That’s the problem. Too many chiefs, not enough Indians. People like that might say they’re committed to a society of autonomous equals, but they are exactly the kind of people who both want and expect to be boss and will make trouble if they’re not. Self-made millionaires are not much different from career politicians in that regard, except that experience has made politicians more realistic about the fact that there’s only so much room at the top.
It would be like that experiment in Huxle’s Brave New World:
My counter would be saying these chiefs have done their bit as Indians, and gone back to that stage in life willingly, for the sake of ideals that they hold dear and for which they have given up a great deal, usually after a great deal of reflection. They would be doing their very best to try and make this valley work. Nor are they doing drudge work as employees of any one else. They are entrepreneurs in the valley too. And her characters are happy there, and the way she has written them, they would be. I DO think that her work is internally consistent, at the very least.
But in a work of fiction, there’s not much point second guessing the author is there? She’s using the valley to provide a glimpse of a potentially different system where individual rights are respected to a greater degree. She hasn’t laid out that system in great detail. Would Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Sam Walton and twenty other ‘Atlases’ from our world go away to a valley to try and do this and succeed? Probably not, and I’m not saying at any point that Ayn Rand is infallible or her ideas should be adopted in whole cloth. I’m just saying that there’s far more plausibility and good in there than fantasy and evil, and that a lot of the criticism I see seems misinformed and out of all proportion to her actual ideas.
Well, I daresay her disciples are mostly to blame for that. Not that they haven’t read her, but . . . they don’t make anyone who has met them want to.
I dunno. I suppose I haven’t met too many/any ‘disciples’. Fundamentalists of any stripe are usually unpleasant. But at the core, her ideas are pretty positive messages - individual happiness, non-initiation of violence, not depending on nor imposing yourself on others. I find I can get behind most of them quite easily.
I agree that the people who like Rand seem to misunderstand her as much as those who don’t. But that is no excuse for those who don’t like her to keep on misunderstanding her. I struggled with her stuff for a long time, because I honestly thought it must be more difficult than it seems. But, no, she really seems to lay things out quite plain, so I don’t understand why people keep insisting things like, “her philosophy is about being greedy and not giving to the needy.”
Rand’s fiction isn’t anything so profound that it warrants real scholarly study or talk of intellectual grappling.
As a writer, her prose is better than workman-like, and can be pretty decent. But the most interesting aspect about her work is the moral allegories she uses to explore her views, which are unfortunately robbed of their full potency by being over-worked with cartoonish characters, implausible situations and the inescapable presence of Rand’s acute dogmatism.
As for her philosophy, it’s pretty much garbage in terms of meeting any sophisticated definition of moral philosophy or epistemology. Skip it and read someone like Nozick if you’re interested in libertarianism. Objectivism is a joke that people who haven’t studied philosophy mistake for philosophy.
The problem with her philosophy is that she is right about humans being altruistic for selfish reasons. But that’s the entire reason why we promote altruism as a virtue. Doing what we think is virtuous makes us feel good. And that good feeling is why we are altruistic in the first place. Take that away, and would just be greedy bastards who ignored the less fortunate.
The point is that it doesn’t matter what she says. What she actually wound up supporting, if you take her thoughts to their natural conclusions, is exactly how we sum them up. The fact that she honestly thought she was helping out the unfortunate is irrelevant because her ideas self-evidently don’t.
And that’s why people are dismissive of her. We don’t have any desire to get to know the intricacies of a philosophy that can be so easily dismantled.
An example I alluded to earlier in this thread is the “train in the tunnel” disaster. The good part of this chapter is that it is a superb exploration of how industrial accidents happen. It’s almost an exact fore-telling of the Chernobyl disaster.
But that bad part of this chapter is that, at the end, when she lists the identities of the people killed in the accident…not a single one of them is an innocent bystander. Instead, Rand goes out of her way to identify each one of them as a stooge, oppressor, or “bad guy” in one way or another.
Apparently, in her world, an accident could never kill a little boy on his first vacation trip, or a hard-working stenographer seeking employment in another city. It could only happen to a government worker looking for someone to regulate, or other wicked people per Rand’s morality.
This cartoonish ending ruins what is otherwise a very insightful chapter.
:rolleyes: All this oh-so-intelligent critique of Ayn Rand’s philosophy and only one mention of “enlightened self interest”. And that didn’t happen until Post 91. Unbelievable.
Rand’s philosophy is not enlightened self-interest. It is rational self-interest.
Which was referred to in the OP and mentioned flat out on page one.
Oh, so sorry! You used a gold-fringed flag and didn’t say “Accepted for Services.” Jail time for you.
Seriously, how silly is it to demand we use a specific phrase in our discussion? Is it some law somewhere?
Didn’t Rand emphasize freedom? I guess it doesn’t apply to discussions of her work.
If you’re going to flounce into a thread-tail denouncing participants as know-nothings for failing to engage with Rand because a specific phrase “enlightened self-interest” has not been mentioned, it’s pretty damn important you understand that phrase and its import. Rand’s philosophy is NOT enlightened self-interest. That’s not what it means. It’s irrelevant that nobody is talking about enlightened self-interest, so the interjection was worse than useless.
:dubious: Others have pointed it out, but I will too, since I’ve brought it up on page 1 of the thread, and referenced the concept multiple times. Post #38 mentions “rational self-interest”. And this thread really is a far more intelligent and civilised discussion of Rand than any I’ve seen on this board. I think we have Nzinga to thank for that, in not allowing the sort of bullying that is common in discussions of Rand and was attempted here. Although OP, you’ve kinda backed off from the thread. Not going in a direction that interests you?