Intellectual “drift”??? You’re supposed to drift as you learn new things & have new experiences. And he was “expelled”???
These people were much creepier than I imagined. I had always focused on their philosophy rather than their lives when discussing them. What a mistake that was. “Physician, heal thyself” was never more applicable.
Murray Rothbard, another expelled member, wrote this article about the circle around Ayn Rand back in the seventies. I’m sure he had an axe to grind etc but it’s fascinating reading all the same, showing an extreme disconnect between philosophy and practice.
Not get too psychoanalytical, but she experienced first hand the triumph of the political application of the social engineering theories of Marxism and Bolshevism forcefully imposed on society, and perhaps she fought back with the adoption and creation of equally theoretical philosophical social theories of her own from her experiences in the US. IE, the dialog of Ayn Rand is between Libertarianism (Capitalism) vs. Authoritarianism (Socialism). As long as you recognize her books in their “historical political” context, and not as a lighthouse of eternal social relevance, she’s somewhat more palatable.
Of course, following the link above, it’s also not too surprising she adopted many of the early Marxist organizational techniques following in anti-Lenin footsteps.
Ditto on that. I’m reluctant to get into this thread too much because I actually like reading Rand’s stuff but this point is important enough to warrant a reminder. Rand was very much a product of her time. Think of her writing as an equal and opposite reaction to stuff like “The Communist Manifesto”. Very showy and very dramatic, but ultimately also very shallow.
Matt Gallant’s summary is something I can get behind as well. The Randites do like to think that theirs is a philosophy that can be logically established from first principles. They’re wrong in that. Like everything else, it’s an arbitrary set of values and worldviews. In my case, it so happens that I do tend to be sympathetic to this worldview but I don’t pretend that this is because I’m more rational or smarter than any other person. They’re just value systems that I happen to have for whatever reasons, upbringing, life experience, genetic quirk, education etc.
It’s striking how much Objectivist Psychotherapy resemble Scientology’s auditing. It’s not surprising though, given they are both cults. Heh.
Hehehehe… no kiddin’ Mordrak.
Rand’s ideas are very clearly a response to Marxism. It’s flawed, but it makes some excellent points. So I’m gonna echo the sentiment that Rand’s ideas are palatable (even fitting) when they’re viewed in their historical context.
But i think her philosophical shallowness is i think more one of her contrasting weaknesses compared to Marxism. Like so many other Russian intelligentsia, ex-pat or no, they raged in their own impotent way, still somewhat in the Russian quasi-mystical literary spirit born in Pushkin, Gogol and Tolstoy, against the birth of Bolshevism and it’s Tree of Unknowledge, the censorship and liquidation of the intellectual classes from which Lenin and Russian Marxism was born, and from whom the Soviet leadership feared the only true rebellion against their authority could be fomented.
Marxism, by contrast, is a profound recitation of industrial age injustices, combined with an innovative ex post facto revisionism of history and a completely imaginary, fanciful and utterly unscientific solution to economic organization; born during a time when authoritarian European regimes were replanted and sustained after the sweeping excesses of Napoleonic “republicanism” swept away the last remnants of the medieval national organization, in the name of maintaining peace and social order, combined with the vast tribulations and injustices inflicted on a hapless populace by Industrialization and the disenfranchisement of agrarian society as the basis of national wealth.
Marxism was born in this time of intellectual turmoil amidst the relative safety and affluence of the international upper classes of the late 19th century. Objectivism and Libertarianism by contrast, were facing an uphill battle in the intellectual currents of the time as the United States took it’s position as the preeminent superpower by the slow but steady expansion of the military-industrial State. And even so, Marxism only became profoundly influential historically when the vast organizational skills of Lenin were put in it’s service and, eventually, the Bolsheviks seized power. Otherwise Marxism might be just another 19th Century philosopher whose relevance was considered to have been made obsolete soon after the industrial age had passed.
If Rand is suddenly gaining a resurgence, she’ll still be consigned to the sidelines of intellectual history unless, because of the recent crises or crises yet unforetold, Libertarian and/or Objectivist ideologues reject the economic/political organization of the West and gain real political power. But even if they do, unlike Marx, she offers even less in the way of guidance of practice over theory.
I don’t feel qualified to judge whether one philosophy is less intellectually sound than the other, but yeah, even I do tend to think of Marx as a scholar while Rand was an entertainer at heart. She did get her start in Hollywood and seemed undereducated about the history of philosophy in general.
In any case, I’ve always thought of Rand’s stuff as something that might be personally inspiring, a kind of wake up call for a certain ideas that one might not otherwise have a chance to encounter in some communities. But actually trying to use them as a guide to government policy would just be silly. Her magnum opus after all is simply a novel.
Heh, if we are going to get into psychoanalysis of Rand, there’s the rape scene in Fountainhead at the hands of a ruff tuff stonemason. Which the woman enjoys. Hmm.
A is A. There is right and there is wrong.
That may the silliest thing I’ve read today.
I always took this as a bit of a jab at Atlas Shrugged
I always thought that was broader jab at all people who mentally categorize the people of the world into worthy and unworthy, or useful and useless.
“the the silliest”?
There, I’ve edited it. And it’s still a silly, pretentious, insubstantial appearance-of-smart statement.
Wow, P&R really is the hangout of the best and brightest.
And here I thought it was just an endless circle-jerk of the same self-satisfied twits reaffirming their insular worldview to each other.
You clicked, didn’t you?
I clicked, but nothing happened … I don’t think I have a mouse.