“Subtle” isn’t the same thing as “coherent” or “consistent.”
I’m all for the “Death of the Author” (or at least I was, until I saw what Ryan Murphy did to Edgar Allan Poe), but I’d expect a philosopher like Rand, even when using fiction to illustrate their philosophy, to leave no grounds for misinterpretation. Metaphysics? Sure, leave it open to go all over the place. George Bernard Shaw: was he saying that it’s okay to be an asshole, or was he saying we should remove the social constraints on being an asshole so the rest of us could recognize who was really working at being on vs who just happened into it by prevailing custom? But Objective Reality kind of demands it right there on the label.
That’s what I’m saying. Atlas Shrugged is remarkably consistent:
- Free market good
- Protectionism bad
- Meritocracy good
- Socialized services bad
- Private ownership good
- Corporate welfare, subsidies, political favoritism bad
- Fact based decision-making good
- Decisions based on sentimentality or guilt bad
Rand’s philosophy may not be workable in theory or application but I think it’s pretty clear what her ideals were.
Sure, if you shove all its inconsistencies out of sight behind vaguely defined general concepts. For example:
For totally unrealistic caricatures of what constitutes “free markets”, perhaps. We’ve discussed above how clueless Rand was about the practical operation of an actual industrial society, even on a scale as small as an average middle-class small town.
(ETA: And Rand was actually anti-free market in her disdain for “profiteering” capitalists (including Cecil B. DeMille) who in her opinion prioritized profit over the integrity of their artistic vision or commitment to quality or whatever. Hello, that’s fundamentally what markets do, they incentivize the prioritization of profit!)
For Rand’s own bizarre ideas of “merit” and “favoritism” and so forth. For example, if one of her designated “good” characters approves of something about another character, then anything that the former does for the latter’s advantage is automatically defined to be “meritocratic”. When one of her “bad” characters supports another “bad” character, that’s “favoritism”. Rand’s supposed meritocracy is basically a form of soft cronyism, upheld by rigid racial and class assumptions about what sort of people can be “meritorious”.
Again, all of this is based on Rand’s own highly subjective views of what qualifies as “objective fact” versus “sentimentality”, about which, as has been noted in this thread, she was notoriously inconsistent.
These fortune-cookie summaries don’t add up to any kind of clear or coherent actual philosophy: as soon as you start probing what they might mean in practice, they fall apart. Which is why, as I said, Rand’s writings are open to such diverse interpretations.
Thanks @Kimstu. You beat me to it.
Rand had some very nice-sounding sound bites. So did Rush Limbaugh. And just like Rush, she’d windbag for hours (via her books) where / while nobody else was permitted to offer a different viewpoint.
So her narrative all seemed to hang together. Until you actually approached it critically, not just beguiled by the long drone of seductively consistent statements repeated over and over until they became “fact” in the audience’s mind.
I think ultimately Ayn Rand idolized some fairly simplistic views about free markets and meritocracy from the POC of an artist who hated Communism but never really built or ran anything besides her weird little cult.
There are some good ideas in there but like any ideas, one needs to take them with a grain of salt and understand where they may not be applicable.
In Random House publisher Bennett Cerf’s autobiography, he talked about his relationship with her. His was the only house willing to publish her books. He considered her opinions appalling, but believed she deserved to be heard.
He also said she was an exceptionally brilliant debater. Which made me wonder whether that skill protected her from ever having to examine or question her views.
When Joe Frazier was heavyweight champion, he formed a soul-funk group that recorded and toured. The consensus was that he wasn’t very good. There was a joke:
Q: “Who ever told him he could sing?”
A: “Who’s gonna tell him he can’t?”
An ironic typo when taking about Rand.
This morning my wife and I picked up a bunch of old books one of our neighbors was giving away for FREE. Among them was Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.
So obviously they either never read them or didn’t get the core concept!
Maybe rooting for The Takers. I like an underdog also.
Ha! Perhaps they were selling them for the lowest price they would accept, $0. (“We won’t tell our neighbors that we would pay THEM for taking these books!”)
Again, at risk of beating a dead horse, believing that the “Takers” are the underdog in Rand’s story or somehow algins with progressive liberal values or the working classes at all shows a profound lack of understanding of her philosophy. Providing for the poor and underprivileged was simply a pretense for implementing self-serving policies.
In any event, they had quite a stack of books from different authors - Rand, Malcom Gladwell, Michael Lewis, Tom Wolfe, Stephen King, Isaac Asimov…ideologically they were apparently all over the place.
This is a pretty typical example of Randian word-game wankery. Their only complaint here, in their mind, is that the term “rent-seeking” unfairly tarnishes the noble concept of “economic rents”.
Anyone who has had more than a freshman-level education in economics simply learns to live with it, like an astronomer learns to live with the fact that a “planetary nebula” has nothing to do with planets, or that “gravity waves” and gravitational waves are entirely different phenomena.
This is mostly about economic dilettantes wanting to seem sophisticated by picking a semantic argument. But it’s also about the fact that Rand was perfectly fine with certain forms of rent-seeking, namely in the form of natural monopolies. i.e. if I’m the first to secure rail rights over the only usable mountain pass in the area, and I can extract whatever tariff I want simply because I got there first, and I resist all efforts to regulate that imbalance, that’s definitely a form of rent-seeking, but Rand elided completely over it.
Moreover, Rand collected social security, as is everyone’s right, so it’s kind of rich for the “Ayn Rand Institute to hold up social security as a form of rent-seeking.
This is just further demonstration of the fact that Randian “philosophy” is mostly about playing word games to legitimize her preferences and discredit others.
I read Ayn Rand as an impressionable late teenager - apparently her market.
Even then, her philosophy did not make much sense. I was studying psychology with side classes in philosophy etc. But I was also doing a fair amount of LSD and marijuana… very anti-establishment. Her writing just seemed old-fashioned, not very fluent and her posits unconvincing
This is the truth.
So your argument is you didn’t agree with her philosophy because it didn’t align with your views as a nihilistic teenage habitual drug user enrolled in a degree program with traditionally high levels of unemployment?
I was a fair bit older when I read Atlas Shrugged but I think maybe her philosophy maybe resonates with me a bit more as a graduate of relative elite engineering and business school programs.
Not that I don’t agree that there are flaws and inconsistencies in her philosophy. Perhaps the biggest one is in how easily it can be twisted by wealthy people to create a sort of tautology in their their vast wealth is evidence of their superior morality and work ethic justifying their vast wealth (regardless of how it was obtained).
It’s the nihilistic teenage habitual drug user enrolled in a degree program with traditionally high levels of unemployment who are the one heard saying “b-b-but True Communism has never really been tried!” (Ignoring Mennonites, Hutterites, etc.)
So it’s only fair someone should get to proclaim “b-b-but True Capitalism has never really been tried!”
Yes, and I have no shame in admitting that.
I mean, of the two, I know which opinion I’d put more stock in.
That was a pretty cringy humble brag.
I genuinely don’t get any anyone would choose the Randian option over communism. I mean they are both completely naive unrealistic ways to run a society that are going to be catastrophic in practice.
But at least the communist unrealistic fantasy sounds nice. A society free of poverty and oppression where everyone gets what they need, what’s not to like? The Randian perfect society, is based on all powerful captains of industry free of all grasping government theft, somehow magically managing to maintain all the things, like law and order, electricity, water, sewage, roads, etc, they need to be captains of industry. Even if it did somehow magically work it sounds awful for everyone who’s not a Captain of industry