Rand was a decades-long meth addict, so take that for however it might have induced a degree of mania in her thinking.
Rand saw collectivism at its near-worst (even Lenin was better than Mao). The rest of her life was a reaction against those would reduce humanity to a Borg Collective hive species– Homo Alvearius. Yes, insane totalitarian collectivism is bad.
Rand was almost as skeptical of neoliberalism. She pointed out that if you have to be unselfish and generous and loving towards others OR ELSE, then it is not in any moral sense charity: it’s an obligation; a tax.
Ironically, Rand responded to the grandiose claim of Marxism/Leninism to be an all-encompassing theory of the nature of human society and civilization which was self-evidently correct and brooked no possible dissent, by formulating a theory of the nature of human society and civilization which claimed to be self-evidently correct and brooked no possible dissent.
I’m not really sure I see the terms of debate here, but I’ll give it a go, as I see it.
The flaw of most libertarian philosophy is that it consciously ignores away the details of history and society, and assumes that the world is set up something like a game board where everyone has a fair starting position and set of resources.
This guarantees that nobody can owe anyone anything other than whatever agreements they negotiate, because everyone had the same opportunities and abilities, so whatever they have or don’t have is a skill issue.
Right at the outset we see this is a problem, because the world isn’t like that. Because of the effects of history, some people are born on third base, others at the bottom of the batting order. This inequality might be a tolerable thing if that’s as far as it went, but the problem is the people born to advantage can’t seem to resist using it to take whatever the less-advantaged people have. This has to be policed or else we end up back in an era of feudalism.
As far as things like common infrastructure, that’s more than I have time to get into, but just like managing the balance of power, there are other shared responsibilities that private industry either won’t undertake, or they’ll do it in a way tilted toward their own interests. This is important for things that everyone uses but can’t easily be torn up and redone because it didn’t work very well the first time. There are common functions that are just better handled by a shared government.
The fantasy of libertarian societies isn’t whether they can exist or not, it’s whether they can exist at a scale that matters. My answer is that if that were possible, then it would’ve already happened. The fact that it hasn’t happened shows that it’s not something that emerges naturally.
The obstacles in assembling the land and capital for a new society demonstrate exactly why equality and rent-seeking are things that need to be managed. The people who gain control first have a perpetual advantage. Those who would create a libertarian society should appreciate this better than anyone, but it’s the one thing their philosophy requires them to reject, so in reality they end up either being effectively Republicans or aimlessly batting around microstate fantasies on message boards.
The biggest problem with a stateless society (which may or may not be congruent with a libertarian society) is how does it defend itself against the armies of a state? That’s really the prime question: if it somehow can, the details will sort themselves out, and if it can’t then the whole question is moot. Some people think that such pre-Bronze Age settlements as Göbekli Tepe and Çatalhöyük offer evidence for nascent stateless civilizations existing before they were annihilated by the rise of states and organized state armies.
Really? I think 90% of the people I hear saying her name pronounce it correctly. Shrug.
[/quote]I’ve never heard it pronounced incorrectly. Of course I don’t hear the name spoken very often with the crowds I hang around.
Can such a society even exist for any length of time once the population gets much bigger than a village? As has been discussed in another thread about whether the ‘state’ has a monopoly on violence, it seems to be an unfortunate fact that it’s easier to steal your necessities then to work to produce them.
Warlords seem to breed like bacteria in environments without some central authority, especially given the easy availability of automatic weapons since WWII.
And really this is it. A society of altruistic saints wouldn’t need a government at all; at most a tradition of rules for sorting out misunderstandings. A society (if you could call it that) of ruthlessly selfish savages would get the Darkseid-level iron fisted despotism it deserved.
I deliberately pronounce it “Ann” because “Ayn Rand” is a pseudonym for Alisa Rosenbaum.
This may be slightly problematic. Some quantum theorists suggest that reality exists because we observe it (which is something of a misinterpretation/oversimplification of the actual hypotheses) so “objective reality” may not be a valid concept. Just as I prate on about how the past that matters is not what actually happened but the past that we believe happened, and so it is not set-in-stone but dynamic because our understanding of what happened keeps changing.
Reality is a non-simple thing that cannot be understood in objective, mechanistic terms such as we can make sense of.
One point to the “stateless utopia” that is overlooked is that, for stability, the state must establish the terms of trade (currency) and title. We assume that Tybalt Coune owns all that stuff because the state issued documents supporting his claims to it. This is a thing that the glibertarians elide when arguing in favor of minimal government. The cost of defending one’s property without support of the state might exceed its worth as the holdings get large.
As for “rational self-interest”, one could argue that it is rational to invest a portion of one’s profits into stabilizing the society in which one’s enterprises operate. Most really wealthy people seem to be so focused on expanding the bottom line that they refuse to devote any brain cells to the holistic view, that in order to be rich and comfortable, one must also attend to those less well-off, to forestall assault upon one’s empire. Hence, the task of keeping the non-wealthy in reasonable check gets delegated to the state.
Agree with the first, but the second is a bit Platonic. You need reason AND observation and experiment. Armchair theory is worth nothing.
Also none of this forces any type of social or economic system. ‘An Is does not imply an Ought’, as Hume observed.
And it has to be said that she was a lousy, clunky, fiction writer and her heros were nasty and unlikeable. If she’d stuck to exploring the implications of the first tenet, I’d have a lot more respect for her.
If one gets to pick one’s own “rational” principles and values, I’m not sure I’d call adhering to them “integrity”. I’m pretty sure you need some honesty and maybe a smidge of morality in there somewhere. Mike Johnson follows Mike Johnson’s principles (hold onto power at all costs) and values (things to ignore if they interfere with power grabbing) pretty universally, but I certainly wouldn’t count that as integrity.
I assume it means each individual acts in their own interests, based on the information they have available. It is way seeking an objective truth to reality is such a high priority.
Her definition of altruism may be different from yours. She regarded it as not the same as charity, but as self-sacrifice, against one’s own welfare. Your quote from Playboy was about charity. Your paragraph that I quoted also mentioned “charitable works.” If you bear in mind the distinction between charity and altruism, you will understand her opinions better.
What exactly is your objection to her choosing a pen name for herself?
Observation and experiment without reason are useless. The epistemological distinction she is making is between reason on the one hand, and emotion or mystical insight on the other hand, to interpret ones observations (and experiments, if any).
What Ayn Rand never seemed to consider is the impact there’d be if we quit trying to teach altruism to kids, in favor of self interest. People are born selfish, nobody needs to be taught it.
In Randitaria, there’d be no great schoolteachers–they’d all go into better-paying fields. No one would want to serve their country. (Chuck Yeager would have been some billionaire’s private pilot). Or doctors and nurses who alleviate suffering, for low wages, in poor communities.
I know, I know, she never said you couldn’t do those things. But by telling people to be selfish, they would be less inclined to. I personally doubt I would have amounted to much if I’d been taught to think only of my happiness and well-being. Prisons are full of people like that.
I feel that I’ve understood Ayn Rand more from learning about her life than by reading her impenetrable writings. I used to at least admire her for her courage to embrace her atheism while seeking kinship with the right during the Cold War. I later concluded that that was a reaction to the anti-Semitism her family experienced at the hands of pre-Bolshevic Orthodox Russians. I also wonder if her opposition to “the collective” is another reaction to post-Bolshevic Russia.
Which might explain her implicit declaration that she was so “objective”?
Insurance is an area where rational self interest leads to a breakdown in the free market. It is in my self interest to join a pool of people to pay for rare disasters, bad stuff that could but probably won’t happen. Once I have a claim, I have no reason to care what the cost of repairs will be. The insurance is paying for it, not me.
She wrote what she wrote, and throwing this kind of “analysis” at it is just anti-fan wanking. She may have been and done all those things, but it says nothing about her stated philosophy. And among philosophers, her writings are the least opaque I can remember coming across (which subjects her to quite some lack of respect in the academic community). You can believe what you want about what her philosophy is, of course, but I don’t think you can justify it on this basis.
