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Some of this is passionately harsh but don't take it personally ( :

Oh lordy; you can't trust anyone to get Ayn Rand right. I am just sending my latest rant to people who've previously not objected to my essays. I comment on Tim Wise's dishonest attack on Rand. He does not show a nuanced reading of her work at all.

http://www.redroom.com/blog/tim-wise/so ... ve-cultism

"It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation; that the position of the individual ego is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole ... that above all the unity of a nation's spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual...."

"This state of mind, which subordinates the interests of the ego to the conservation of the community, is really the first premise for every truly human culture.... The basic attitude from which such activity arises, we call-to distinguish it from egoism and selfishness-idealism. By this we understand only the individual's capacity to make sacrifices for the community, for his fellow men."

That's Adolf Hitler explaining the ethical philosophy of National Socialism. You now have a president who speaks of duty/service mandating health insurance at the point of a gun. Don't tell me we Rand influenced folks are sociopaths when we are unwilling to threaten people with death at the hands of the police to compel them to accept our ideas about healthcare. Of course; Obama is not some exact second coming of Hitler analogus to the return of Christ yet. The structural and philosophic parallels to be made were true under Bush. They are enduring trends beyond a change in president or party. Our partisan concrete bound "intellectual" discourse has led to liberals who pretend that equating Woodrow Wilson with fascism is heresey and conservatives believing that tyranny is equivalent to Democrats winning. It's not surprising that we deal with Hitler comparisons in the same manner. I can now add Rand to that list.

As usual; Rand's critics grossly simplify her views and rely on strawmans. Rand did not see altruism as equivalent to generosity or charity. She explicitly states this somewhere, but I can't recall the precise source. What she challenged was the mystical tribal religious notion that your degree of virtue was tied to your lack of self. Her critique of service was grounded in the idea that service entails exploitative relationships entailing a servant and a master. She actually believes in the harmony of interests among rational independent equals trading value for value ~ not some genocidal dystopia. Ayn Rand's formal philosophic statements on ethics condemn psychopathology ~ something her critics apparently never read in full.

Rand states that human life is of value to a rational man. What she rejects is the notion of acontextual instrinic duty. The idea that charity should be the major purpose and concern of a human being as a mystical commandant from above or asserted without rational justification. She doesn't imagine a society in which normal conditions are such that people can't be independent happiness seeking equals ~ not servants or means to the ends of others regardless of personal interest or desire.

Rand's conception of selfishness rejects the sacrifice of others to yourself so accusations of sociopathology ring hollow. It's a species of eudamonastic virtue ethics and having a sense of self you actually stand up for. An ethics which rejects human sacrifice as a reality oriented "secular" moral ideal is far more benevolent than some sentimental Christian crap telling us to endure the utmost torture for the sake of people who want to destroy us. I have lived through enough depression in my life to find that moral "ideal" to be anything but emotionally abusive stupidity.

This article simplifies Atlas Shrugged as well. Rand's point was to show that statism makes genuinely human life literally impossible by quashing the free use of our minds ~ our tool of survival as human beings. It's not much different from Aristotle's conception of man as the rational animal. The collapse of society is the consequence of encroaching dictatorship and destruction of infrastructure is designed to deny the dictatorship material . Do you blame people who left the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany? Do you think it's my moral duty to stay here regardless of how craptastic society and government treat me or whether my dream lies in political revolution? What is being dramatized in fictionalform is what happens in a society rejecting reason. It's a basic Enlightenment point not to see faith or raw emotion as "tools of cognition". No one truly living in the modern age is going to jump off a cliff on account of receiving a mystical emotive relevation. Rand is no different from your average atheist or secular humanist here. You can reject emotional repression and still understand that Hitler's speech making you feel good doesn't mean joining the SS is a rational/sane decision.

Fortunately; I am not a blind follower of anyone and don't believe she was without personal flaws or bad moments. I will note that the Branden's recollections of her are disputed and not everyone trusts them. I am not an expert on that subject, so I can't really offer an educated opinion about their veracity.

As Rand gains more spotlight; I feel impelled to make sure portrayals of her are accurate.

A few points I forgot:

1. I quoted Hitler to give you an example of what Rand thought the true essence of altruism was. She traced the term back to its originator Charles Comte. She does not use it interchangeably with generosity or charity like many people seem to do.

http://www.altruists.org/about/altruism/

2. Upon further review; I can see that Tim relies on a link to a fairly well done detailed essay by a Michael Prescott. Michael correctly notes that Rand's later work is less Nietzsche centric but Tim's article could give you the impression Rand believed in charity under no circumstances. I am just going to finish up by quoting her actual words:

"but proclaim their rebellion against self-sacrifice by announcing that they are totally indifferent to anything living and would not lift a finger to help a man or a dog left mangled by a hit-and-run driver..."

The Virtue of Selfishness Pg 50

Here is Rand rejecting what she sees as altruism's false dichotomy between self-sacrifice and sociopathology. One of the frequent errors of her critics is to adopt conventional definitions of selfishness and altruism. The error arises from the false belief that selfish individualism must be asocial ~ as if egoists have nothing to gain from others or fighting for their values via work within the polity.

He really mangles Atlas Shrugged and reduces the complexity of its characters to "genocidal pompus assholes".

As if the hero characters don't strive to run their businesses in an increasingly statist context. They don't just wake up and say "hey; let's kill off humanity today by leaving". It just amazes me that people continue to criticize Rand with such shameless lack of nuance. You should criticze what she really said and intended to convey ~ not the version of it your preconceived notions point you towards.

Aw man, I know exactly where you're coming from.

For some reason the professor in my philosophy class has this huge hate on for Rand.

And apparently my classmate's understanding of Rand is "She believed you should never help anyone at all and just be an asshole." (That's almost an exact quote.)

I've got plenty of my own problems with Rand, but for the love of Satan, show some understanding of what she actually wrote if you're going to criticize.

I think the problem cuts both ways - a failure of people to interpret Rand properly, and a failure of Rand to use language that isn't largely going to be misunderstood in the first place. Rand couldn't have reasonably expected everyone to define their terms in the way that she did. Relative to the popular definitions, she was inventing her own lexicon.

Ayn Rand eh, *breathes in*......

Alright, I'll say straight out (and this should be fairly obvious anyway), I despise Rand. I don't see what the attraction to her is, most of the decent things she said were said by better thinkers elsewhere and without Rand's totally unrealistic and frankly wooden characters, the rest of it seems to be, 'Don't hate on the capitalist pigs, they're better than you', and 'A is A' 'Existence exists', I mean seriously, two thousand years of western philosophy and Rand tells us that things are what they are, well fucking done Ayn

/hostilesocialist

Now I've got that out of my system can someone please attempt to prove me wrong? I actually liked Rand when I first started reading about philosophy and politics, but the more I read the more I drifted away from Objectivism until I eventually rejected the whole thing outright.

Zanthorus wrote:Now I've got that out of my system can someone please attempt to prove me wrong? I actually liked Rand when I first started reading about philosophy and politics, but the more I read the more I drifted away from Objectivism until I eventually rejected the whole thing outright.

I don't know of many Randians (I'll avoid the derogatory 'Randroid') around here other then LLL. I'm certainly not qualified to say much. There are some left-libertarians who have put a positive spin on her while still ultimately rejecting her version of libertarianism as not "the most philosophically defensible".

This is what I think of when I think of Ayn Rand's writing.

Now I've got that out of my system can someone please attempt to prove me wrong?

You are right in that she's hardly an original thinker, although she was not bad at self-promotion =P

I do appreciate her way of speaking her mind and telling people to go to hell. That doesn't mean I agree with all of her positions, but I do find her individualist stance appealing.

Ayn Rand wrote:There is a special reason why you, the future leaders of the United States Army, need to be philosophically armed today. You are the target of a special attack by the Kantian-Hegelian-collectivist establishment that dominates our cultural institutions at present. You are the army of the last semi-free country left on earth, yet you are accused of being a tool of imperialism — and "imperialism" is the name given to the foreign policy of this country, which has never engaged in military conquest and has never profited from the two world wars, which she did not initiate, but entered and won. (It was, incidentally, a foolishly overgenerous policy, which made this country waste her wealth on helping both her allies and her former enemies.) Something called "the military-industrial complex" — which is a myth or worse — is being blamed for all of this country's troubles. Bloody college hoodlums scream demands that R.O.T.C. units be banned from college campuses. Our defense budget is being attacked, denounced and undercut by people who claim that financial priority should be given to ecological rose gardens and to classes in esthetic self-expression for the residents of the slums.

Fuck.

Well, yes, that's the worst of Rand and she might be burning in hell for having said it.

Brainpolice is pretty much spot on here, all Rand did was dishonestly manipulate language. She begins by saying she's for "rational self interest"...well okay, that could mean anything. That doesn't say anything about profits or being a wealthy industrialist or having "an angular face" or anything like that. Your happiness could lie in being the best physicist you can be. Or the best care giver. Or gardener. Whatever.

But she does this trick of language where she maps "rational self interest" to "selfishness" which denotes something very specific. "Rational self interest" could be taking in orphans and widows (if that's what makes you happy), but "selfishness", in English, means greed, amoral profit seeking, and general lack of concern for the less fortunate -- and that's exactly what she meant by it.

So it's like she's saying "Go forth and maximize your happiness, but if your happiness is something I disagree with, then your not doing it right. You have to have my pathetic, base and amoral form of happiness for it to be valid happiness". It reminds me of vulgar libertarians trying to monopolize the term "free market". For vulgar libertarians free markets have to be organised hierarchically or they aren't really free, thus they dishonestly map together their vision of society and "freedom" as if they are identical (even though mutual aid etc... are equally valid ways to use freedom). In that same way Rand dishonestly usurps the word "happiness".

The weird thing is she thought she was the first rational philosopher to have ever lived (outside Aristotle, who was half rational) because she had discovered this magic idea that self interest is a good idea. But that's nothing original. If you go out and talk to random people on the street you'll probably find most have that philosophy -- it's only their happiness isn't Ayn Rand's happiness (and thank goodness for it). Actually that's my philosophy as well, but I do my best to keep my happiness meaningful -- creativity, knowledge, discovery, sharing, .... -- just "being rich" has no value compared to those higher virtues.

My ideological relationship with Rand's thought is actually fairly complicated, both pro and con. I think that there are a number of points in which she was fairly spot on, and other points in which she greatly faltered. I don't like the tendency of academia, as well as within popular culture, to knee-jerkedly dismiss her wholesale ("not a philosopher, just a writter" - yea, they said that about Neitzsche too). At the same time, I don't like the attitude of most objectivists that I've seen and interacted with, and I think Rand created a closed system of philosophy that impedes the progress that can come about from her own thought as a starting point.

There are a number of general points in which I think Rand makes a lot of sense, even though I might not fully agree with the particulars. Such things include the holistic emphasis on the need for a culture of liberty (which entails a criticism of contemporary libertarianism that is particularly relevant for thick left-libertarians), the desire to save epistemology and metaphysics from the anti-realism and irrationalism that was ushered in around the turn of the century, the formation of a rational system of ethics that reconciles itself with self-interest, and so on.

Some of the problems I have with her philosophy revolve around the particulars of her political philosophy (pro-military, pro-ip, minarchism, anti-communist to the point of absurdity, etc.), the disconnect between her ethics and her politics, her ethic's emphasis on survival at the expense of other considerations, the tendency to create simplistic and sweeping categories to describe everything (including other people's philosophies) that end up getting rather silly ("this work of art is dripping with the malevolent universe premise!"), her implicit psychological assumptions, and the tendency to fetishize American industrialism to a fault (which is probably a psychological reaction to her experience in Russia).

neverfox wrote:

Zanthorus wrote:Now I've got that out of my system can someone please attempt to prove me wrong? I actually liked Rand when I first started reading about philosophy and politics, but the more I read the more I drifted away from Objectivism until I eventually rejected the whole thing outright.

I don't know of many Randians (I'll avoid the derogatory 'Randroid') around here other then LLL. I'm certainly not qualified to say much. There are some left-libertarians who have put a positive spin on her while still ultimately rejecting her version of libertarianism as not "the most philosophically defensible".

This is what I think of when I think of Ayn Rand's writing.

When was I booted out of left-libertarianism? ( :

kolomgorov wrote:Brainpolice is pretty much spot on here, all Rand did was dishonestly manipulate language. She begins by saying she's for "rational self interest"...well okay, that could mean anything. That doesn't say anything about profits or being a wealthy industrialist or having "an angular face" or anything like that. Your happiness could lie in being the best physicist you can be. Or the best care giver. Or gardener. Whatever.

But she does this trick of language where she maps "rational self interest" to "selfishness" which denotes something very specific. "Rational self interest" could be taking in orphans and widows (if that's what makes you happy), but "selfishness", in English, means greed, amoral profit seeking, and general lack of concern for the less fortunate -- and that's exactly what she meant by it.

So it's like she's saying "Go forth and maximize your happiness, but if your happiness is something I disagree with, then your not doing it right. You have to have my pathetic, base and amoral form of happiness for it to be valid happiness". It reminds me of vulgar libertarians trying to monopolize the term "free market". For vulgar libertarians free markets have to be organised hierarchically or they aren't really free, thus they dishonestly map together their vision of society and "freedom" as if they are identical (even though mutual aid etc... are equally valid ways to use freedom). In that same way Rand dishonestly usurps the word "happiness".

The weird thing is she thought she was the first rational philosopher to have ever lived (outside Aristotle, who was half rational) because she had discovered this magic idea that self interest is a good idea. But that's nothing original. If you go out and talk to random people on the street you'll probably find most have that philosophy -- it's only their happiness isn't Ayn Rand's happiness (and thank goodness for it). Actually that's my philosophy as well, but I do my best to keep my happiness meaningful -- creativity, knowledge, discovery, sharing, .... -- just "being rich" has no value compared to those higher virtues.

Not all wealthy people are portrayed as worthy individuals. Rand appreciates people who raised their standard of living through creative production. You should Google James Taggert from Atlas Shrugged ( :

"creativity, knowledge, discovery, sharing"

With all due respect; I don't get the impression you've read enough of Rand's work. She does respect and promote all of those things ~ she does have ideas about charity.

LLL wrote:When was I booted out of left-libertarianism? ( :

When you killed my father! Prepare to die!

kolomgorov wrote:Brainpolice is pretty much spot on here, all Rand did was dishonestly manipulate language.

I actually have to disagree here. One thing Rand was big on was definitions and defining terms, and in her writing she always made a point of explaining exactly what she meant by the terminology she used. Her definitions of selfish (acting in favor of your self-interest) and altruism (a moral theory that one should primarily act for the benefit of others) were not new or created by her, either.

I think the real problem (not just with Rand) is that many people have preconceived notions of what certain terms mean. It's kind of a psychological issue where, after reading the new definition, they don't really integrate it and continue to think of their previous understanding of the term every time they see it. In other words, even after Rand explains what she means by altruism, they continue to identify it with benevolence and cooperation and interpret her writing as bashing benevolence and cooperation.

Another issue, of course, is people who have simply absorbed the "Rand sucks" meme without having actually read her work, and then quote portions of her articles that are AFTER she defined her terms, so as to remove the context of the very precise definitions she provided beforehand.

XOmniverse wrote:

kolomgorov wrote:Brainpolice is pretty much spot on here, all Rand did was dishonestly manipulate language.

I actually have to disagree here. One thing Rand was big on was definitions and defining terms, and in her writing she always made a point of explaining exactly what she meant by the terminology she used. Her definitions of selfish (acting in favor of your self-interest) and altruism (a moral theory that one should primarily act for the benefit of others) were not new or created by her, either.

I think the real problem (not just with Rand) is that many people have preconceived notions of what certain terms mean. It's kind of a psychological issue where, after reading the new definition, they don't really integrate it and continue to think of their previous understanding of the term every time they see it. In other words, even after Rand explains what she means by altruism, they continue to identify it with benevolence and cooperation and interpret her writing as bashing benevolence and cooperation.

Another issue, of course, is people who have simply absorbed the "Rand sucks" meme without having actually read her work, and then quote portions of her articles that are AFTER she defined her terms, so as to remove the context of the very precise definitions she provided beforehand.

Exactly! Thank you!

: )

Anne Heller liked my Facebook note of this!

Yes

Rand's new biographer. I also apparently know someone who was on the train with Rand on the ride to her last speech.

Feeel so connnected

: )

Ayn Rand radically misinterpreted almost every philosopher she ever commented on, so it's not as though she would have room for complaint.
That being said, people often do misinterpret her, but given that most of her views are either contradictory (moralistic virtue ethics disguised as 'egoism') or simply bizarre (that Kant is somehow responsible for the decline of laissez-faire in America) it's not like it'd be any better if she were properly understood. I can agree with some of Rand's conclusions, but even there her arguments were typically juvenile; her view of epistemology is incredibly naive and her tendency toward 'foundationalism' in philosophy completely misses issues like systemic ignorance and the ontological nature of knowledge and subjectivity. What's more, practically everything she ever claimed was asserted more cogently by someone before her, which isn't so bad in itself, except she claims that it all sprung from her brow full-formed like Athena; and then goes on to (erroneously) attack the very people who developed the very arguments she makes. She doesn't even get Aristotle right.

Ayn Rand is alright as a pulp-fiction novelist. Beyond that she's just a bizarro-Stalinist.

Dammit, Vichy. I was all comfy in my distaste for Ayn Rand and then you come along and diss on her. Now, in my perpetual effort to contradict you, I have to love Ayn Rand.

neverfox wrote:Dammit, Vichy. I was all comfy in my distaste for Ayn Rand and then you come along and diss on her. Now, in my perpetual effort to contradict you, I have to love Ayn Rand.

Contradictio qua contradictio!