It’s bitterly ironic that the Bolsheviks that Rand railed against for the rest of her life followed the same intellectual absolutism.
While we’re bashing libertarianism:
“Libertarians are like house cats, they’re convinced of their fierce independence while dependent on a system they don’t appreciate or understand.”
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”
I would say that libertarianism is a wholly extremist political philosophy, but honestly the demographically tiny but highly influential empirical end of it is more reasonable. Much of Milton Friedman’s libertarianism hasn’t aged well, but it’s aged better than Ayn Rand’s.
George Shultz:
Everybody loves to argue with Milton, particularly when he isn’t there.
He’s a good arguer, and he gives a good account of himself, and he epitomizes the values in the Chicago School, but also the very serious mass of efforts to test ideas. So his Monetary History of the United States is a massive examination in empirical terms of what actually happened when he [tested] his ideas about the significance of monetary policy. So it isn’t just ideas, it’s testing the ideas and seeing if they hold up under examination.
What separates the iconoclastic from the crackpot is a willingness to observe reality and test one’s ideas.
Again though, this is ignoring the schizophrenia of libertarianism conflating itself with the philosophy of Ayn Rand, who utterly despised them. It takes a special kind of nuts to hold up someone as the basis of your philosophical belief system when that person openly despised them during the 11 years that their lifetimes interconnected, and still continue to do so for the next 45 years after Rands death.
I mean to Rand calling someone or something religionist or anarchist was as bad as Republicans calling something socialist or communist.
Not too defend Rand or the Libertarians, but I actually consider that legitimate - if a doctrine is good, it should stand independently of its creator and their own personal beliefs. I mean, Werner Von Braun was a Nazi, but that doesn’t mean his rockets didn’t work.
Where did Rand stand on government? IMHO, a narrow focus on economics overlooks the elephant in the room: that government enforces contracts, upholds property rights, carries out forced redistribution of profits via taxes, and as I mentioned upthread enforces laws against murder that work to the great advantage of the greed bastards. I can’t see any sort of libertarianism working except in an anarchist or minarchist setting.
Horseshoe Theory strikes again.
Meh not sure about that. Politics is very different to rocketry. Political philosophy is not objective enough conceptually that you can completely separate the philosophy and the people who came up with it. IMO It’s pretty telling that the one high profile name associated with the origin of Libertarianism hated Libertarianism (Rand is the only foundational figure of Libertarianism and I had no idea she hated them, that’s hilarious)
Yeah, it’d be more akin to a neo-Nazi organization proclaiming the basis of their philosophy to be Marxist-Leninism. It’s schizophrenic, and absurd that Libertarians claim Rand was a foundational figure, made even more absurd by the fact that Rand’s flat-out despising them isn’t well know. I’m not surprised in the least that @griffin1977 didn’t know this, I couldn’t tell you the number of people identifying as libertarians over the years that I’ve interacted with who were completely unaware that their ‘foundational figure’ Rand despised them and everything they stood for.
How about an African American who recognizes the importance of Thomas Jefferson’s ideas in the founding of our country, while also understanding that Jefferson didn’t think they applied to Africans?
Actually that’s a good example of what I mean the fact so many of the founding fathers, even the ones theoretically opposed to slavery, actually owned slaves, is absolutely a valid criticism of the political system and political philosophy they created. You can’t completely separate the political system which was allegedly based on all men being created equal from the people who created it who actually owned men who they considered so unequal as to be property.
Unlike say Newtons Laws whose veracity is not even slightly affected by the fact Issac Newton had some utterly bonkers beliefs.
The thing is, I’m not sure that the blame for racism and inequality can be laid at the doorstep of the Founders’ political philosophy; or even the hypocritical failure to apply that philosophy consistently. Southern whites at the time apparently sincerely believed that Africans weren’t “men”; or at least, the same kind of man that white men were. That Africans were closer to what we’d now call Homo Erectus or australopithecines. Before modern evolutionary theory there were even proponents of Pre-Adamite - Wikipedia theories.
Now of course that’s a bigoted, ignorant and self-serving belief, but I don’t think its origins lie in political philosophy, so neither would a rebuttal to those beliefs.
But going back to Alessan’s original point, a person can recognize that Jefferson’s views on democracy and personal freedom are important, valuable ideas, while his views on race were incredible fucked up. Likewise, a person could consider Rand’s views on Libertarians incorrect, while thinking that she made really good points about… I dunno, spitting on poor people, or something.
The reason Ayn Rand hated libertarians had nothing to do with political philosophy. “Objectivists” and libertarians are identical politically. She hated them because they failed to bend the knee and worship her.
Would she really waste her valuable saliva in such a manner?
I know little about Rand’s work; how does the above jibe with her philosophy? Are ideas supposed to exist and be perpetuated independent of who comes up with them (in which case the Libertarians owe her nothing), or having shared her brilliance with the world is that supposed to guarantee the world gives her deference and gratitude in perpetuity (in which case boo-fucking-hoo that she didn’t get her rewards)?
In Rand’s mind, if you used reason and independent thought, you would inevitably reach the conclusion that Ayn Rand was the greatest thinker in all history. If you failed to reach this conclusion, you, like the libertarians, are irrational and possibly evil.
She was not a philosopher at all. She was a charismatic cult leader. Read the article @Icerigger linked to above.
I sometimes wonder what might have happened if Rand had been forcibly withdrawn from meth.
Okay, but if Rand’s ideas could be derived directly by reason and independent thought alone, then they are obvious to some degree, and Rand deserves no special credit for expressing them. Heck, maybe the Libertarians came up with their governing philosophy independent of Rand, and only discovered their similarities afterwards.
I guess I’m saying that Rand insistence on on receiving credit for her ideas contradicts her belief that they are objectively true. When an apple falls from a tree, I don’t have to thank Isaac Newton for making it possible.
Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.
I have Icerigger’s link open in another tab, but haven’t read it yet.
I don’t know what more to say. Ayn Rand was a hypocrite and a liar. The world is full of people who espouse a belief and violate the tenets of that belief every minute. See religions, major. Ayn Rand was a shitty grifter who happened to be able to write a decent potboiler at a time when they were popular.
I think that her main attraction is that she developed a philosophy that preached that far from being, evil, greed, sociopathy and narcissism were the ultimate virtues, so all the greedy, sociopathic, narcissists out there became instant devotees.