“Those people” aren’t suffering, for one. Like all right wing ideologies, malice is core to Randian philosophy.
Look at Atlas Shrugged; a major appeal to Randian believers is the part where the unworthy suffer as the system collapses because the “elite” have withdrawn themselves. It’s literally what the title is about. If that elite withdrew themselves and the system failed to collapse that would be seen as rendering the whole effort pointless, even if they created a paradise for themselves.
The “cruelty” would be simply the collectivists having to sleep in the bed they made for themselves, without having the producers subsidize the system. Or as the protagonists saw it, refusing to be the willing victims of an abusive system.
No, that’s the fantasy. The reality is that it’s the “collectivists” and the ordinary workers who are the ones who are productive and keep society running. Objectivism is just an attempt by the parasites to tell themselves that they are the important, useful ones. It’s no different than the lies that old-time slave-owners and aristocrats told themselves about how they were the keystone of society and the people under them just worthless scum. It just uses bad secular philosophy instead of theology or racism to base its justifications on.
It’s the Randian “elite” who are parasites, and they can’t stand the fact that if they actually went off and formed their little enclave all that would happen is that the rest of the world would get somewhat more efficient and prosperous while they starved & back-stabbed each other to death.
You were talking about a hypothetical presuming that the scenario in the novel came true. Of course reality is different. In reality the rest of society would be at most inconvenienced by the desertion depicted in the book; so where’s the cruelty?
The real fantasy is that you (the Randian doing the fantasizing) are going to be one of the captains of industry in this fantasy world, not one of the teeming billions slaving away for them without OSHA, minimum wage, or any state safety net of any kind.
That’s the thing, we are talking about the perfect fantasy version of these political systems here. In the communist version you have a just equitable utopia. In the Randian version you have a handful of rich oligarchs and a bunch of poor workers slaving away for them, and that’s if everyone adopts Rands teachings by the letter and everything turns out exactly as she says it will (in practice it would be more like Mad Max)
I recall reading about a poll back in the pre-internet days that said something like 85% of Americans expected to end their careers in the top 10% of earners.
The idea that you’ll (nearly every you) be a winner in the lottery of life was certainly a prevalent part of the American Dream.
And that has served the Rs well by holding that fantasy carrot on the metaphorical stick out in front of the masses all these last decades.
“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
Attributed to John Steinbeck.
And yes; you can go back as far as the Civil War, where one of the common motivations for Confederacy soldiers was the belief that one day they’d have their own bunch of slaves to live off of.
I think the fantasy is true meritocracy where the captains of industry are really the best and brightest and most creative and that society will continue to function properly
The problem with all ideologies is they assume everyone will buy into the ideology and just sort of accept their lot in life.
That is of course true in practice (I challenge you to repeat any Randian rubbish, about captains of industry being indispensable geniuses, with a straight face after hearing anything to that comes out of Elon Musks mouth).
But I wasn’t talking about "in practice*. Even if everything Rand says about meritocracy is true, you end up with a handful of super rich (and yeah super smart and skillful) oligarchs and everyone else is slaving away for them . That’s a shitty world to aspire to, let alone how much more shitty it would be in practice.
Communist ideologies have never assumed this. They assume the rich will not be alive to object to having all their property taken away (the problem, even if you are ok with this morally, is the definition of “rich” goes from Elon Musk to a “kulak” who owns a half an acre of land)
Well communism basically tells anyone with above average ability and creativity to go screw themselves if their skills can’t be used by the state while Rand’s objectivism tells people to go screw themselves if their skills can’t earn them a living.
As I recall, both of these extremes were played out to disastrous results in the Bioshock videogames
The reality is that all these economic, political and monetary systems are all more or less made up bullshit designed to figure out how to get different people with different skillsets to work together on shit many wouldn’t normally want to do, distribute limited resources reasonably efficiently, and not kill each other in the process. We should encourage and reward people who invent things and work harder and provide services for people who are unable to provide for themselves for whatever reason. But the trick is figuring out what people should actually work on and how to compensate them fairly and not abuse their economic power.
Nitpick: @scudsucker’s degree field of psychology does not in fact have “traditionally high levels of unemployment” among its graduates, nor does the degree field of philosophy in which he was also taking courses. As this recent survey of employment rates for various undergraduate degrees notes, philosophy majors in fact have higher employment rates than majors in some STEM fields. Currently the three fields with the highest unemployment levels for undergraduate degree holders are anthropology, physics, and computer engineering.
It’s a widespread urban legend among STEM graduates that humanities degree holders are a bunch of pathetically unemployable losers whose programs of study merely “give them something to think about while they’re driving their taxis” or “flipping burgers” or whatever. But this is more smug ego-stroking for the said STEM graduates than a reflection of actual facts in the job market.
And, as noted, not even really justified by actual employment data.
She assumes competition, not cooperation, as the underlying framework by which all these individualistic individuals interact.
I don’t. I can see some fun in competition if it is competition-for-fun. A good rousing game of hearts. Taking turns throwing darts at the dartboard. But competition with seriously high stakes, with the prospect of destructive life-crushing outcomes for the losers, no and HELL no.
Well off topic, but I turned out to be a very good software engineer, with a focus on user experience… hey! A psych degree IS actually useful in the real world.
I still do drugs. Still an anarchist. Still dont really care about what people think of me, though I thought it polite to let you know.
For the mods: I will not comment again in this thread; it is an absolutely pointless hijack which may be better suited to oblivion, or at best, the pit.
The debate is pointlessly degraded when it involves ad hominem argument. Especially since Ayn Rand was not an economic philosopher; any more than Truman Capote was a criminologist or Gore Vidal was a historian. They may wished they’d been respected as such, but they all were simply authors of books on their own points of view on those topics, for popular consumption.
People who like philosophy do so because it raises ever better questions, not because it offers final answers. People whose own leanings on economic issues lend themselves to Ayn Rand for enjoyment might also lean Neoliberal in the debate between Keynes and Hayek, or even adhere to Milton Friedman’s Chicago school vs Hayek’s Austrian school.
Pretty dry reading in itself, but as the concepts were put into practice in places like Thatcher’s UK or Pinochet’s Chile, there was plenty of human drama to rival any author’s fiction.
