Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Ayn Rand Objectively Wrong

There are certain books which supposedly need to be read early on in life in order to appreciate them. Mostly this is due to the mind of the reader being immature enough to be warped by the unhelpful, improper or evil message of the book or thought process.
"Give me a child for his first seven years and I will give you the man" ~ Jesuit Maxim.
Of course, when the Jesuits were allowed to brainwash and indoctrinate the boy early on he'd retain their warped teachings all his life.

So I never got around to Ayn Rand's two works until my mid-twenties. And having trudged through the long hard slog of Atlas Shrugged the most pertinent fact about the book, to me, was which character I most readily identified with.

I know I am not a Ragnar Danneskjöld super engineer able of crafting a Super Stealth Ship, or have the chess mastery of Francisco d'Anconia to undercut and play a 20 year deep Global Game of Intrigue, or possess the Hank Reardon intellect to invent an entirely new alloy, or the comic book super powers of John Galt himself so I identified with Dagny Taggart's loyal assistant, Eddie Willers.

Eddie represents the common man in Rand's book and philosophical worldview. And it clearly shows that Rand views the mass of humanity as dogs, hard-working enduring and loyal creatures but not possessing many other positive traits and with the ability to be turned to good or evil by how they are treated. Dagny Taggart was obviously Ayn Rand herself.

And how does Dagny (Rand) treat her loyal assistant, the common man, as the "evil" society crumbles? She leaves him to fucking die on the train tracks! Because that is what Objectivism holds the mass of humanity is nothing and the few brilliant beautiful people are everything. And even amongst the select few there exist a pecking order. Amongst the elect there are some even more Objectively Superior and those people need to be allowed special privileges.

A majority of the reason Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged was because of her desire to justify her sexual mores. I don't care, fuck whomever you want to fuck, but for Rand to rationally indulge in her sexual proclivities she had to wrap it in the aura of her Philosophical Magisterium as part and parcel of the Whole Objectivist Truth. In the novel, Hank Reardon and Dagny become lovers because they seek refuge from the "evil" society in each other's arms; having not fled to Galt's Gulch. Well, when Dagny's plane crashes, Reardon flys around trying to spot the wreckage. But after The Strike and upon being reunited with Dagny the two happily parts ways as if nothing ever happened between them because Dagnay has moved on to ride Galt's mega-phallus???

In her writings Rand often berates altruism and several philosophers (most noticeably Immanuel Kant) as evil and teaching an anti-human thought system. Because it undercuts and destroys the Individual, who is everything. Well, it is Rand's Objectivism which is truly anti-human. Objectivism goes: Reason is the highest, the individual is everything, reality exists A is A, yet Rand doesn't respect and in fact hates most common individuals. No Individual, even Randian Super Heroes, exists or succeeds ex nihlo.

I believe myself to be fairly intelligent and not given to evil but not having the spark of Randian superiority so to Rand I'm common. And that's when Rand's Objectivism shows it's true anti-human streak. The commons are nothing but potential parasites and therefore unreasonable, not grounded in reality, irredeemable and not worth saving. The Common Man is nobody special to Rand.
I'm Nobody. Nobody Special. Not like you.
Everybody is Special. Everybody. Everybody is a Hero, a Lover, a Fool, a Villain. Everybody. ~ Evey and V, V for Vendetta, Alan Moore and David Lloyd.

7 comments:

TAO said...

Ah, one of only a handful of people who have TRULY read Ayn Rand!

If you don't have looks you got to have another gimmick to get young guys in bed...

Having your own philosophy sure helps!

I have spent the last 31 years trying to find a person who truly believes and lives as Ayn Rand says they should...

I'll let you know when I spot one...

Joe "Truth 101" Kelly said...

I hate Ayn Rand and her stinking book Gene. I didn't understand it when I wa sforced to read it. And I lived a great life without remembering anything about her or that freaking long winded defense of wealth.

TAO said...

Just remember this, at the time she was married to the Chairman of Pepsi (which was an struggling upstart company) and sleeping with Alan Greenspan...

Who was one of many...

If you actually read her and THINK about what she says, rather than what you are told to think...

You realize that her fantasy never existed and was incapable of existing...

In 1990 I gave a copy of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead to a businessman I know, and he turned around after reading them and gave out 25 copies of those two books to everyone he knew for Christmas...

I have spent the last 15 years giving him example after example of how he IS NOT a character in one of those books...

Then he calls me up in 2005 and tells me about his new project: A gated community in Western Kentucky....

He told me he was going to name it after me!

He called it, "The Fountainhead Estates"

...in four years he has sold one lot...to himself! So now the biggest MOOCHER I have ever known in my life lives in The Fountainhead...

Poetic justice if I ever saw it...

Grung_e_Gene said...

TRUTH and TAO;

I have nothing to add at this time, but I'd thought I would acknowledge your comments.

Joe "Truth 101" Kelly said...

The Rise and Fall of The Third Reich was another brutal read.

Les Carpenter said...

Read Atlas when I was 16. Re read it when I was 40. Again when I was 52. Will probably read it again before I die. It was that good and spot on.

Also have read almost all she published over 40 years.

She was not a fan of aristocracy as some might believe. Nor did she believe you needed to be a super genius to be of value. You merely had to engage in honest productive work. The brilliant and the risk takers she believed had a right to retain their wealth and in so doing create more jobs thus improving society overall.

Rand actually saw the middle class as the future of this nation.

To bad to few people actually take the time to STUDY her entire body of work. While there are things to question there is also a lot of real intellectual value in her phikosophy.

Grung_e_Gene said...

Rational,

AS is worth something for it's ability to foment discussion but I think my conclusions are supported by the work itself. The average man is left to die and her brilliant people possess comic book super powers which are unbelievable and their gifts come to them ex nihlo as I pointed out.

The 3 main heroes appear to have all their super knowledge a priori no K-12 teachers, no one to show them how to tie a sheepshank, who picked their arugla who slaughtered their cattle? Who squeezed their oranges for juice?

That's Rand's big blind spot. There are thousands of people who work "Dirty Jobs" out of sight whom she causally ignores because their aren't able to sit in her Ivory Tower of Pure Reason