Look. It’s because Ayn Rand’s pseudo-philosophy is fucking stupid nonsense. And she was a crap writer. That’s all. [/thread]
Ayn Rand largely appeals to two classes of people: Eighteen-year-olds who think she’s the greatest thing since sliced bread because they don’t yet have the life experience to know she’s full of shit; and people like Paul Ryan, who rely on objectivism to justify their own moral and ethical bankruptcy.
This is the crux of what I find objectionable (heh heh) about her. I contend that in any society that wants altruism to exist, children have to be taught it. Nobody needs to be taught selfishness - people are selfish by nature.
In Rand’s world, there’d be no teachers working for the modest rewards that universal education relegates to teaching. Instead, the top few teachers would get big bucks teaching the Rockefellers’ and Duponts’ kids, while society remained largely illiterate. There’d be no war heroes (who, let’s face it, are working for chump change) - but we’d have plenty of highly paid mercenaries working for the highest bidder.
Rand benefitted from people who lived altruistically,* ignoring the fact that someone taught them to be that way.* And the uber-teachers and mercenaries I’ve described above are just the “success stories”. What do you think most people raised to embrace the self over others would turn out like?
Teaching kids to reject altruism is about as necessary (and does as much good) as telling them to eat their dessert first, while they’re still hungry.
Davidmich: There are several people here who agree with Rand, at least in some issues if not totally. But it takes a bit of courage to defend her against this kind of lynch mob. There is a lot of validity in her philosophy, even if the totality falls short.
I knew Ayn Rand, for about 18 months back in the '60s. She had the most brilliant mind I’ve ever encountered, like a bright beacon in the darkness . . . even when her ideas were obviously wrong. But on some occasions she said things that even a knee-jerk Objectivist would find offensive (like that Native Americans quote).
I cannot defend her, mainly because I’m no longer an Objectivist (if anything, I’m a “recovering” Objectivist). But I can correct facts about her when they arise. But not within a lynch mob such as this.
My favorite novel is still *The Fountainhead. *There is nothing wrong with it, neither in substance nor style.
Oh, and don’t judge her by her so-called supporters, especially the likes of people like Paul Ryan.
So…be wary of her supporters, and don’t listen to her detractors? And her views are defensible, but not to this lot, who expect you to back up your opinions/just want to pile on?
Okay then!
Speaking of those whom dear old Ferdinand Lundberg called the super-rich, today’s Guardian details a fundraiser to get the Tories re-elected.
The 449 attendees at last year’s Thameside event on 24 June had a combined wealth in excess of £11bn, with elite diners sitting at tables costing up to £12,000 each to rub shoulders with David Cameron, Theresa May, Philip Hammond and Boris Johnson, as well as the secretaries of state for health, transport, culture and justice.
Six billionaires and 15 people with a personal wealth above £100m were present at the closed event at Old Billingsgate Market, including 73 financiers, 47 retail and property tycoons, 10 in oil, gas and mining and 19 working in public affairs and PR, documents seen by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the Guardian reveal.
In a perfect world a sonorous old-fashioned voice-over would intone: “…And within a year, half of these men were living on the street, scrabbling for pennies in the gutter, destitute but still rejecting soul-destroying charity, relying on the Randian prescriptions to recover their vanished glories…” — not, you understand as retributive justice, since that’s morally dodgy and unpleasantly vengeful; but just for fun.
But as heroes go, these ginks qualify for the Rand definition.
However, Taylor Schilling is very pretty. I regret that disgust would prevent my watching her portrayal of Dagny Whatsherface.
I’ve never understood the visceral dislike for Ayn Rand’s books that people on this board exhibit. I’ve participated in multiple threads on the topic, and the quality of argument offered up in support of that dislike has been incredibly poor. It consists largely of invective based on a misunderstanding of her books and her message, or is based on her personally. Some people even declare that they haven’t read her books, or need not read her books, but feel they are qualified to pass judgement nonetheless.
Here are examples such debates -
IMO, Rand was primarily reacting to/against communism in her writings. She recognised and laid out brilliantly the effects of distorted incentives on society. Atlas Shrugged, published in the 1950’s, is a great description of the dysfunction that is inherent in socialist/communist economies, a fact which would not become empirically established for another 20-30 years. There were significant flaws in her work, like her premise that man is or should be a rational being, but there are very few on this board who understand what they actually are(hint - it’s not that she advocates ‘selfishness’).
I read* Atlas Shrugged* & the Fountainhead in high school. The guys in the AV club considered those paperbacks as high in status as their extra-big sliderules. (Yup, I’m old.) Didn’t much care for either. Although the movie of the Fountainhead remains a camp classic!
Rand doesn’t write all that well, but I can see offering the books as alternate reading in high school. There’s damn little room on a high school curriculum for philosophy, and her work wouldn’t qualify.
Nearly all those guys put away their sliderules…
Let’s say that you want to create a philosophy class for high schoolers. Now, there’s a number of ways to do this. You can take a general approach from Intro Philosophy taught at the college level and try to make it a historical survey course. You can concentrate on the more modern philosophers–say from the Enlightenment on. Hell, you could make it just an overview of philosophers who most influenced the 20th (and 21st) century.
So say we’re going with an overview of Western philosophy, starting from the Greeks up until some point today. The best way to do this, of course, is by having the students read the primary texts and discuss the ideas within those texts. This might work at the college level, or as an advanced high school course (I mentioned studying philosophy in high school in a Great Books style format), but it will not work as a general course. So you can do what I was given when I was taught an introduction to philosophy in eighth grade and assign an interpretative text, either as a textbook or as a novel form like Sophie’s World. We got Sophie’s World. This would have been sometime in 1996-1997, so the novel was still new and only recently translated from the Norwegian. It’s approximately 500 pages long and stops with Sartre and I guarantee it was more engaging than yet another heavy textbook.
So maybe Rand fits in somewhere, especially with an emphasis on the 20th century. You almost have to have some knowledge of Rand these days to understand Republican politics. But there’s a lot of other ideas you have to understand to understand today’s politics. Just to understand the Republicans these days I’d put premillenial dispensationalism high on the list, as well as the prosperity gospel, supply-side economics, and, yes, Objectivism. But these are not really intro-level discussions and really, the best you can hope for in high school would be a survey of the history of Western philosophy. With so much to talk about, I really don’t know why Rand should be jammed in there for the reasons mentioned previously in this thread.
There’s also the fact that her supposed principles is a group of statements that are either tautology, unsupported, meaningless, self-contradictory, etcetera.
“A is A” for example is a tautology means whatever she wants it to mean. It has no rational application.
Her statement about the use of force is hypocritical because the one right she values is property, and the use of force is inherent in the idea of property.
Her philosophy overall also amounts to a tautology akin to Christian prosperity theology — people who are financially successful deserve it because they are virtuous; we know they are virtuous because they are successful.
Great, now every time I close my eye’s I hear Cartman singing
Ayn Rand’s a bitch she’s a big fat bitch
she’s the biggest bitch in the whole wide world
she’s a stupid bitch if there ever was a bitch
she’s a bitch to all the boys and girls!
You left out a word: “…stupid eighteen-year-olds…”
Rand and her followers/acolytes/believers are at their core everything Rand didn’t believe man should be. They are irrational, ignorant, stupid and arrogant beyond measure, with zero evidence to support such arrogance.
I kind of suspect that Rand is hated so widely on the Dope for a simple reason.
Objectivists debate just as stubbornly as liberals.
Regards,
Shodan
And here I was just wondering what a vapid, partisan hack would have to contribute…
Ayn Rand isn’t banned in most schools; I’m pretty sure The Fountainhead was in my HS library.
… therefore, be a huge asshole to everyone.
I think that the behavior of people who attrbute that behavior to her influence is a more useful way of judging her merit that the ostensible pure unalloyed form of those ideas. If 90 percent of people who read The Fern And The I-Beam take up pimping out schoolchildren shortly thereafter, and say that the book inspired them, the actual contents of the book, while important to the discussion, are of limited relevance.
As a libertarian you would like the government to indoctrinate the youth of the nation into your belief system?
You ought to teach The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell. Good as both literature and fiction-as-philosophy.
It’s a dead end. Okay, A is A. Now what? It doesn’t address transformations. What about 2 + 2 and 4? Can you use the word “is” here?
Rand went on to construct gangling huge oil-derricks of ideas, but they rest on quicksand. She went so far as to conclude that altruism is “anti-life,” but all of the middle steps in this grotesque polysyllogism are based only on her declarations, not on accepted premises or demonstrated conclusions.
She has so very much in common with Karl Marx, it’s almost funny.
That’s hilarious because the original Rand herself comes off much worse than Rand Paul, as bad as he might be.
I enjoyed it enough to read it twice! (I skipped John Galt’s speech, though) I’ve also read The Fountainhead and Anthem. Her prose is objectionable and her philosophies are worse, but they made for some pretty good stories.
You’re correct that she was showing the seemingly inevitable result of communism, but I don’t think she showed anything “brilliantly.” She went so far overboard the whole thing ended up being laughable.
I think many people on this board understand what she was saying just fine. She certainly beats you over the head with it enough.
Aww, did gym class occupy all your intellectual capacity in high school?