IKEA, ABBA and Volvo.
Oh, and meatballs.
And I acknowledged those openly and without cavil.
You have no grounds to accuse me of deliberate dishonesty, and I certainly make no pretensions of infallibility.
I actually have read the work in question, enjoyed it as dramatic fiction, and reject the moral principles it espouses as shallow and foolish.
Ayn Rand isn’t taught in schools because she doesn’t have anything of value to offer. Even Plato, whose Republic has about as many flaws, is taught in schools, because it has one or two real insights into the nature of knowledge and morals.
Rand has nothing to teach us.
And, yes, that’s my opinion, not a proven fact engraved on stone tablets handed down from heaven.
kaylasdad99coughs up a double-lungful of granite dust, puts down his chisel, and gestures toward a three-inch stack of orders for bespoke engraved tablets
I’M WORKIN’ AS FAST AS I CAN! HAVE A LITTLE PATIENCE, ALREADY! :mad:
Sorry, Trinopus, I had to go with a subcontractor. Regulations, red tape, you know how it is.
kaylasdad99, quit shirking and get back to work!
Pg. 252 of Atlas Shrugged
Pg. 98 of Atlas Shrugged
Pg. 105 of Atlas Shrugged
I can’t say I hate Rand, but there’s plenty of room for contempt at her writing the horribly rapey, misogynistic, and abusive relationships between Francisco d’Anconia and Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden and Dagny Taggart. That’s some messed-up shit.
But she WANTED to be raped, remember? :dubious:
(It was even worse in The Fountainhead!)
Grin! The fact is, I would love to have engraved stone tablets for one purpose or another – but commemorating my opinions on Ayn Rand wouldn’t be very high on the list!
(A serious “Ten Commandments” tablet would be so cool!)
(Yes, yes, a Mel Brooks-style 15 Commandments would also be keen!)
As long as you’re aware that yours is an opinion based on a flawed understanding of what she’s saying, we have no quarrel. I don’t think she should be taught in schools either, but her core message is one that promotes individual happiness, achieved through productive work and interactions with other people that are based on mutual consent. If you find that immoral, well, what can I say.
I reject your characterisation of those relationships as abusive or misogynistic based on the passages you quote. There is no pattern of abusiveness in those relationships. Dagny does not fear the people she chooses to sleep with, or put up with recurring abuse. She is portrayed as a strong woman, financially and romantically independent, vice president of one of the largest companies in the world, in a book that came out in the 1950s. Yes, Ayn Rand seems to have a desire for her female characters to be dominated in the bedroom, perhaps even with some pain thrown in. And while I personally don’t enjoy that kind of thing, it falls well within the range of socially acceptable bounds of human sexuality. Apparently there’s even someone who sold millions of books recently focusing on just that. I find it insufficient cause for contempt.
Some women just rape easy, you know what I mean?
Not quite. I had some details of the plot of the story wrong, and I also admit I wasn’t up on her personal code-words that use everyday English words in non-standard ways.
Her message is still flawed, especially her introduction of the “anti-life principle” in Atlas Shrugged. Lenin’s communism was definitely supportive and valuative of life (although Stalin’s, not so much.) Modern moderate socialism is very highly supportive of life, and has led to the world’s highest levels of health care, longevity, wealth, and education.
The devil lies in those details. And those personal code words were expounded upon at length in the book whose message you’re condemning, clearly without bothering to understand it first. I agree there are flaws in her thinking, critically so, but the flaws that you believe exist and criticise her for are strawmen. There is nobody in this thread who is saying that her ideas were perfect. panache45, John Mace all agree there are serious holes in her thinking, but they know what they are.
Rand does not say that it claims to be anti life. Rand claims it is anti life. And I think it is one of the few settled questions in human development and economics that state ownership and control of production along the lines of what Lenin introduced in the Soviet Union is bad for human beings.
It’s nice to learn you have your own personal code words, along with some confusion of correlation and causation. What the Nordic states or Europe has is not moderate socialism, nor is there any evidence that the social safety nets that they have been able to put in place have led to their wealth and prosperity, instead of being a consequence of their wealth and prosperity, as is far more likely. Surely you agree that Europe(and its colonies that are today ‘the west’) was well on its way to being the wealthiest region in the world well before what you call ‘modern moderate socialism’ came about?
This isn’t my own personal code, you know: it’s pretty much the standard definition of the term. Most European nations have “socialized medicine,” for example.
What the current system does reduces the harm done by unregulated capitalism; that’s why such things as child-labor laws came in to effect. National health care systems keep people alive, whereas for-profit health care restricts people’s ability to get needed care. Universal health care is pretty much the exact opposite of an “anti-life principle.”
It most certainly is your own personal code. Moderate(or extreme) socialism and ‘socialised medicine’ are not at all the same thing. It is characteristic of the kind of misunderstanding that you have been making. Let me Wiki that for you.
In fairness, would Rand have suggested that taxation for socialised medicine is ok? Probably not. In fairness to her, is socialised medicine unambiguously better for society? We don’t know. (America’s healthcare system being a disaster and Europe’s not is not evidence that it is, btw. It’s just evidence that socialised medicine is better than the bizarre government caused, insurance-led system America has)
In fairness to you again, even if it were shown to be unambiguously better would she then advocate taxation? Probably not, since she was against all forms of taxation. But it’s quite possible that you could convince an objectivist of it, and have it included in the ‘proper role of government’ which currently they hold to be law and order and defence, and those to be funded by voluntary payment. Flawed, but not contemptible. But even then Rand does not advocate revolution, or a change in laws to have her way imposed on others. No, she advocated advocacy, holding that her ideas would not work until a majority of people thought as she did. If a large majority did, then her ideas might even work.
Hogwash. Socialized medicine, public schools, public highways, public fire departments are all instances of socialism. It isn’t only a word that denotes the entire economic system, but also reflects the collective funding of projects.
And…it doesn’t matter anyway. It isn’t relevant to Rand’s ideas. She doesn’t have anything useful to offer us, and that’s why she’s not taught in schools.
See the Great Debates thread regarding the Gold Standard – which Rand supported, at least in AS. Her economic notions weren’t totally bankrupt: D’Anconia’s famous “Money” speech was reasonable. But it was also obvious. There wasn’t anything new in it. Wherever she started to make declarations, she choked up and made herself ridiculous. The gold standard is just one example.
This thread has shown that, for Rand even to be minimally sensible, her writing has to be re-interpreted and words re-defined. Selfishness, altruism, charity, sacrifice: none of these has the usual dictionary meaning in the Randverse. You have to comprehend what she says through the filter of what someone else says she really meant.
There is no “there” there. And that’s the answer to the question in the OP. Rand isn’t taught in schools, not so much for the reason that Creationism isn’t taught in schools, but for the reason that The Time-Cube isn’t taught in schools.
No, they are not, (and they especially were not at Rand’s time) unless it is to be, what was it, interpreted through the filter of what someone else says socialism really means 
This, on the other hand, is bordering on the dishonest, and I expect better from you. Yes, selfishness, altruism and sacrifice do not have their ‘usual’ meanings in Randverse, but that is precisely because a large part of what she’s doing is attempting to reassign the value judgements we associate with these words. None of what I’ve been saying is coming to you through the filter of ‘what she really meant’. No, if you had bothered to try and comprehend what she was saying, she explicitly, and at great length lays out her meanings for these words and provides a lot of context - thousands of pages worth in fact. If you ignore that, then, as I said, you have built up a strawman which you can knock down and feel morally superior while doing so, but you’re tilting at windmills.
I am not sensing much future for this conversation.
So, you agree with what I said, at the same time you say it borders on the dishonest?
And that’s one of the reasons her work isn’t taught in schools. It’s childishly polemic. It depends on the construction of a “jargon” that circumvents communication rather than enhancing it.
She’s a bad rhetoritician, because she’s unwilling to enter into a clear and cogent discussion of issues. She would rather engage in manipulation of language than in an honest meeting of minds.
I was not happy with the chapter on Ayn Rand in Michael Shermer’s book “Why People Believe Weird Things.” It was too heavily based on Rand’s own personal issues – her paranoia, her cult of dependency, the mindlessness of many of her followers – and not enough on the actual failings of her philosophy. I wish that more exposes of Rand’s ideas were more focused on those ideas.
In much the same way, I am not happy with this link, entitled Top 10 Reasons Ayn Rand was Dead Wrong. Nearly half of the ten reasons are ad hominem arguments of one form or another.
(The two key reasons in this list are: “Rand’s philosophy is devoid of gratitude” and “Every man does NOT exist for his own sake.” We all owe much to those who have gone before us, who built our society and created the institutions that allow us to succeed. And we all, to some degree, depend on each other. We are a society, not a collection of loners.)
Really? Let’s just take one of these and run with it. How does one need to change the dictionary definition of “altruism” to make Rand minimally sensible?
Emphasis added.
99% of high school kids nowadays wouldn’t make it past the first 10 pages of *Atlas Shrugged * let alone discuss it and write essays about it.
We could create a shorter version for twitter.
But like I said earlier, we read The Fountainhead in my senior honors English class. I suspect you’d find a few still doing that. Kids still do read books in High School, don’t they?