I actually enjoy some of Rand’s fiction as a guilty pleasure (not really a fan of Atlas Shrugged, though) and don’t disagree with all her points (though I think she took all of them too far)… and I don’t think she knew anything about kids, and that’s a major weakness in her philosophy (not least because kids are, like, the id of human nature). There’s a bit in Atlas Shrugged where one of the characters (I forget who, but it was one of the authorial mouthpieces) is musing that kids are born rational and it’s only society that makes them irrational. I read that and was like… Ayn. Honey. Have you ever MET any children?? Clearly not!
I often wonder how children fit into Ayn Rand’s ideology. She never had any, choosing to focus on her career and none of the main characters in Atlas Shrugged had any IIRC. I believe most of them actually WERE children at one point in their lives. But it seemed to me they mostly just appeared as fully-formed exceptional people at an early age.
I ponder this as having children forces you to actually have to consider the needs of another human over your own.
I don’t recall John Galt’s engine making it into production and becoming a major factor in society’s development during the course of the story. It mostly serves as a symbol of the potential benefits to mankind if only it would go back to valuing intelligence and excellence.
I don’t know if “utopia” is the goal. I think it’s more about personal freedom, even if some people are worse off because they don’t receive handouts. Most mainstream economic theory does tend to agree that protectionism (i.e tariffs), excessive regulation, bailouts, and welfare tend to create a drag on the economy in terms of unintended consequences and moral hazard.
The again Rand also handwaves topics like worker abuses (presuming any worker who didn’t like the way they were treated at Rearden Metal could just find a job elsewhere) or externalities like pollution runoff from Francisco d’Anconia’s copper mine (or any of the other heavy industries for that matter).
I had the same thought, but hesitated to bring it up for fear of being accused of sexism. Thank you for breaking the ice!
To elaborate on the point you responded to (that she didn’t consider the impact of not teaching altruism), it reminds me of extremist, naively-stubborn pacifists who want “throw away the bombs and guns”, while refusing to acknowledge the protection the military provides them. Altruistic acts improved the society Rand lived in. Her philosophy bit the hand that protected her.
Good point.
Samuel Beckett was closer to the mark:
We are all born mad. Some remain so.
When she describes a character helping a special-needs child create an art project in The Fountainhead, the contempt all but oozes off the page:
She was elated on the day when Jackie, the least promising one of the lot, achieved a completed work of imagination. Jackie picked up fistfuls of colored felt scraps and a pot of glue, and carried them to a corner of the room. There was, in the corner, a slanting ledge projecting from the wall - plastered over and painted green - left from Roark’s modeling of the Temple interior that had once controlled the recession of the light at sunset. Catherine walked over to Jackie and saw, spread out on the ledge, the recognizable shape of a dog, brown, with blue spots and five legs. Jackie wore an expression of pride. “Now you see, you see?” Catherine said to her colleages. “Isn’t it wonderful and moving! There’s no telling how far the child will go with the proper encouragement. Think of what happens to their little souls if they are frustrated in their creative instincts! It’s so important not to deny them a change for self-expression. Did you see Jackie’s face?”
Yeah, this. I don’t think she ever really thought through this.
That’s incorrect. If you recall, the “shrugging” part of Atlas Shrugged was when the “producers” withdrew from society to a secret enclave called Galt’s Gulch, resulting in the collapse of society (presumably for lack of their superior talents).
Galt’s Gulch couldn’t be found because it was hidden by a “ray screen”. This device, as well as everything else in the Gulch, was powered by Galt’s invention, which literally made electrical energy out of thin air.
Rand couldn’t figure out a way for the “elite producers” to actually self-sustain once they withdrew from society, so she wrote a magical machine that produced infinite energy from nothing. The central conceit of Atlas Shrugged literally depends on magic. It’s all magical thinking.
It was a convenient plot device, but both before and after 1945 people of the time thought that some clever genius could find a way to release clean cheap limitless atomic energy.
But it really reveals the whole “details schmetails” aspect of this worldview. The central conceit of (arguably) a founding text of the “objective reality” worldview is fully dependent upon waving away actual objective physical reality.
And I don’t mean in some niggling sense like being overly strict about bending the laws of physics as a crutch for some interesting worldbuilding either. That works in any fictitional world except this one. In Objectivism the biggest prohibition is to deny objective reality in service of some higher message, but it can’t seem to portray this principle without violating it. It’s endlessly amusing.
As David Bentley Hart has noted, the widespread lack of respect among actual philosophers is less because Rand’s philosophy, or pseudophilosophy, is not opaque than because it’s ill-informed:
The core assertion of Objectivism is to say that there’s a tiny wealthy elite that is responsible for building and sustaining society; the “Atlas” which is holding up the world. While the rest of us are parasites. It’s basically the opposite of reality, thus the need for a magical device to explain how a bunch of the “elite” could survive without anyone to do the real work.
When of course, it’s the opposite that would happen.
I try to keep in good faith IRT others’ religious and philosophical convictions: that they’re not just looking for simple answers but rather listening for the right questions to be asked.
So honest question here: what does Ayn Rand have to offer that John Stuart Mill hadn’t already addressed, (and IMHO, much better)?
Yeah, this is the part where I disagree, hard. Any model of knowledge acquisition or being-in-the-world that doesn’t include intuition and imagination as valid methodologies is just flat-out wrong, IMO.
As a repudiation of wishful thinking or of confusing “ought” with “is”, it’s a useful observation.
And that’s about the only non-stupid part of Rand’s work. The fact it’s also blindingly obvious makes “non-stupid” even fainter praise than usual.
But yeah, as a repudiation of imagination or what we call intuition, which is really generalizing from experience in a subconscious way, it’s utterly dirt-stupid.
Well, no, that’s not the core assertion.
Galt’s Gulch wasn’t some high tech utopian “White Man’s Wakanda” or even a particularly luxurious gated community IIRC. As I recall it was just a normal typical Middle-American style town they had created. The point was that the Strikers were content to just live simple lives on their own terms rather than run giant world-changing corporations that could be nationalized or have their wealth redistributed at the whim of some corrupt government official.
Of course that’s the flaw with our current group of tech bros and venture capitalists when they try and create their own “Galt’s Gulch”. They don’t want to escape the world and deprive it of their “genius”. They want to build a high tech luxury resort for the super wealthy and then wonder why they can’t find inexpensive servants willing to move to the middle of the desert.
Atlas Shrugged is basically a thousand page retelling of The Village Wine parable. Basically a cautionary tale about creating a system where people take more out of it than they put in.
It wasn’t that everyone who wasn’t one of the captains of industry was a parasite. It was that there were so many parasites who only took out of the system without putting anything back that the economy no longer worked. Competent people who actually wanted to work couldn’t find jobs because they were filled by idiot political appointees.
My main complaint with Atlas Shrugged is that Rand’s world seems joyless. I mean unless your only source of joy is inventing alloys and machines, running copper mines, or transcontinental railroad operations. No one has hobbies or non-business friends/relationships or other interests or even children or family members who aren’t idiots. And Rand never seems to explore what happens if those outside interest come into conflict with business needs. Like what happens if Rearden’s head of engineering needs time off to take care of a sick child or something? Or for that matter, how does a two-income couple even take care of children? Or is it assumed Rearden and Taggart and the others are generous enough employers that their employees can all afford childcare?
Maybe that was Rand’s point was that society wouldn’t have iPhones, mass-produced automobiles, electricity, and whatnot without workaholic assholes like Steve Jobs, Henry Ford, and Thomas Edison.
Hmmm, except for somehow also building the best airplanes in the world and hand-machining the best tractors in the world and farming and fishing and making roads and shop windows and mining machinery and store counters and minting machinery and so on and so on and so on.
Rand had a completely unrealistic view of what it actually takes, materially, to build and run even a non-ostentatious community of any reasonable size. She was an urban-raised screenwriter and novelist who AFAICT never lived outside a city and never had real-world experience with any kind of subsistence or industrial occupation.
It was certainly Rand’s position that such workaholic assholes were the only people who deserved any credit or recompense for such developments. However, she was chronically ill-informed and unreflective about how such developments came about. Workaholic assholes tend to be the ones who concentrate on accruing large amounts of market control and personal profit out of the developments they’re involved in, so they end up being popularly considered the important, nay, essential, figures in the story.
But this is more about humanity’s fondness for triumphal stories about an individual hero than about historical reality. Think about all the important aspects of modern society that you don’t automatically associate with the legend of some world-changing individual workaholic asshole, such as gas stoves, reinforced concrete, and whatnot. They still matter quite a bit.
Ayn Rand hated the concept of prosperity and progress being ultimately rooted in the communal participation of all sorts of people of varying degrees of intelligence and ability and initiative, which is understandable given her negative early experiences in the Soviet Union, but which permanently impaired her ability to perceive how the complicated realities of modern society actually work.
It’s been awhile since I read the book. I don’t really remember if they were hand crafting all this high quality stuff themselves in their little enclave. Agreed that would be highly unrealistic.
Well, someone had to invent that stuff. James Sharp patented his gas stove in England back in 1826 and opened a factory a few years later to sell them. Joseph Monier experimented with a technique for reinforced concrete to make flowerpots, then came up with a whole bunch of uses for it.
That’s the whole point I think. To create a society where any smart person can think up a better technique for cooking or building bridges or whatever and it doesn’t have to be planned by some central governing board.
Rand didn’t hate the concept of prosperity being rooted in people of varying degrees of intelligence and ability and initiative. She just believed that their prosperity should be a reflection of those attributes. Most people aren’t going to get rich but they can earn a decent living working hard for a competent company.
Typically not the person who made money from it, and often not the person who got the credit however.
I have read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. I was in fact a college student and liked them, making me the stereotype I guess. The preachy parts I skipped through, Galt’s speech is like 90 pages. Yeesh. Never read any fiction.
So I know who she is and roughly what her “philosophy” is.
I have always wondered why an obscure right winger gets so much discussion in political circles. The 2 books sold pretty well, but I took them like a Tom Clancy novel. And they were like 75 years ago.
I think Ayn Rand, and the debate surrounding her, is a Litmus test for people’s world view. Are people on welfare lazy stupid “looters” or are they hard working honest people who ran into some bad financial situation, through no fault of their own.
Where you stand on the welfare issue, and there is plenty of room in between the two viewpoints, usually corresponds to your view of Ayn Rand.
But honestly I don’t think 95% of Americans have ever heard of her.