Its kinda amazing but this article contains the primary thesis-es of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. This brings up some important questions that I think its worth pondering. Namely, that government creates crimes to control people, ("There is no way to rule an honest man. The only power government has is over criminals. Thus we create more and more laws until every man is a criminal.") ...and that this control relies on people accepting the easier way out, rather than standing up for their rights. (In Atlas, the alternatives offered the strikers were always easier than striking.) At the end…
Note: please read this all the way through before down/up voting. I'm not defending any actors here, I'm just trying to present an "all sides considered" view of the situation. I think there's a fair amount of "projecting" going on here. More and more, I see the intellectual property discussion being couched in the language of "looters, moochers, and parasites" (aptly borrowing from Ayn Rand). It's undeniable that the RIAA/MPAA are leveraging government to protect their business model (Randian looter behavior), but how you perceive this action has a lot to do with which side of the fence…
There are several problems with Ayn Rand. One is that her ideas were not particularly original, and not particularly well-expressed. Self-centered philosophies are far from new, and actually are pretty well-trod ground, but her work does little to address already-existing critiques and, as literature, is not particularly good (her characters tend to be one-dimensional, plots lack good development/tension/resolution, etc.). Another is that she has become a frankly cult-like figure, with people approaching her work the wrong way around: rather than "this statement is correct, and Ayn Rand…
Objectivism was still a cult, and one had to agree 100% with Rand, or be excommunicated. Objectivism ultimately became what is called "the unlikiest cult." Disagreeing with Rand was tantamount to heresy - much like disagreeing with L. Ron Hubbard is considered heresy in Scientology. > The cultic flaw in Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism is not in the use of reason, or in the emphasis on individuality, or in the belief that humans are self motivated, or in the conviction that capitalism is the ideal system. The fallacy in Objectivism is the belief that absolute knowledge and final…
Thanks for the well-reasoned response; always happy to talk about this stuff. My main concern with that style of thinking in general is that, while it is good at finding principles, it is less good at finding cases where those principles do not apply. For example, one important idea from Objectivism is the principle that "there can be no conflict of interest between honest men". This is clearly usually true, and classical economics does a great job at explaining why, but there are also cases where it's false. For example, if I am a monopolist selling pharmaceuticals for $1000 when their…
You are raising good points and I have (I think) good answers. I guess fundamentally, my over-arching answer is that abstractions like "there can be no conflict of interest between honest men" and "do not initiate force" are not useful to anyone who has not personally induced them from reality. Only when you have done that can you see precisely why it's a valid abstraction and understand what the delimited context is. Of course, by that point, the abstraction isn't really "useful," except as a mental shortcut or as a summary to tell someone else (which is likely to confuse them, unless they…
If you wanted to relate to the topic in the article you should have said Anthem. It gets most of Rand's ideas on collectivism into digestible form (which is surprising, considering Rand might be one of the most long-winded writers I've read). I made it through that one, Atlas Shrugged, started on The Virtue of Selfishness and decided I'd had enough. While Anthem is easy enough, I couldn't suspend disbelief for Atlas Shrugged, and it just would not end. After reading it, I had no desire to read the Fountainhead...as I wasn't sure what else Rand could write that wasn't both new and…
Many philosophies, even organized religions, can serve as a guide. If one is looking for a guide, that step of looking already reveals a desire to not just default to either a random walk or wherever you're taken by others; it's that desire more than any particular guide that will serve (or ruin) the individual most. But still, there are lots of alternative guides out there, and many empirically seem at least somewhat useful in various contexts for various people. For some like stoicism I think it's the coherence, or at least the attempt at making a harmonious gestalt of the pieces covering a…
Well, her habit is that whenever she has a theme that she wants to emphasize, instead of demonstrating it, she just says it; either through the narrator's description of things, or through some huge silly speech like Galt's famous monologue at the end of Atlas Shrugged, Francisco talking about the beauty of money, or Dagny's dialogue with James Taggart's wife. That's ridiculous. Either Rand doesn't have the skill or inclination to demonstrate through story the philosophy that she foists upon us, or she doesn't trust her reader to be smart enough to figure it out. Besides that, generally…
I'm not sure that anything in Ayn Rand's novels actually corresponds to the realities of corporate capitalism. I'll take one illustrative example: the discovery of Rearden Metal. In Atlas Shrugged, Rearden Metal is depicted as the product of the lone genius of Hank Rearden, who defied his own corporate scientists and a made a metal that everyone else considered impossible. At the time, Hank Rearden was not a lone inventor working in his garage. He was already a plutocrat, with multiple millions to his name, and a large corporation backing him. Can you actually think of a case in the real…