Ayn Rand

[novella]

I've posted a couple of times on Ayn Rand. Here's one copied from an earlier thread. (I feel like Julia Child, "and here's one I made earlier"). Feeling lazy this morning:



I read it [Atlas Shruggeed], as well as The Fountainhead, a long time ago and thought The Fountainhead made a lot more sense. Then I went to re-read that later and thought it was quite bombastic.

I think Rand's writing is such that younger people can find it full of big ideas and strong convictions, which can be very appealing at a certain age, but the fictional aspects don't hold up that well. The characters are often one-dimensional and endlessly spout on about their (or Rand's) philosophy or another point of view to just bounce her ideas off.

But, I would say of the two, The Fountainhead was for me a better read overall and the architect Rourke a pretty well-drawn character.

One thing that I find dated is Rand's butch attitude toward gender, i.e., only her kind of female is "legitimate."

 

[Idril Silmaure]

I've been interested in Ayn Rand for a long time - my mum is a fan and so are some friends. But I haven't read any of her works yet. Could anyone advise any particular book of hers to read and what her books are about? Are they fiction or just philosophy books?

 

[WoundedThorns]

I liked it when she was telling the story, but at other times I felt she was going on and on.

i agree. sometimes she needs to just cut to the point

 

[SFG75]

i agree. sometimes she needs to just cut to the point

I haven't quite found that to be the case. If anybody, Steinbeck is egregiously guilty of that-going on continuously about some inane detail of farm life or what have you, while Rand's writing is about the point. If she continues on a minor detail, it's usually to highlight the ludicrous thinking of some of the characters in her book. Take the "party" in Atlas Shrugged where the family sits down to enjoy one another's company. The parasitic brother of the iron entrepeneur is a great case in point. He's unemployed, has a social conscience, but has to rely on a hand-out from the entrepeneur, it all relates to the larger point of her works IMHO. But, different strokes for different folks-I'm sure some people love Steinbeck and would be shocked by some of my statements about him.

 

[WoundedThorns]

i never got past the first 10 chapters of The Fountainhead. i've had an urge to pick it up again recently, but i'm have about 7 or 8 or so library books to read =P

 

[Zolipara]

I havent actually read any of her books, but i've come across her philosophy on many occasions. I havent studied it closely, but from what i have read it dont feel like her concepts add up. I have problems accepting the concept of an objective reality and the objectivists ethics seems more like a badly thought out addition to the rest of her philosophy. But my biggest problem is probably that it all feels so selfish. Its like a cult for egoists. The cult-like properties is enhanced by the tendency to label other philosophies as "inherently evil". If your ideas are different from Ayn Rand, and for instance think communism might be a good idea, you are not just different but "evil". Others might say communism is a bad idea, but it takes a objectivist to label it as "evil". This black and white mentality probably makes her ideas appeal to younger people as novella said.

 

[SFG75]

I havent actually read any of her books, but i've come across her philosophy on many occasions. I havent studied it closely, but from what i have read it dont feel like her concepts add up. I have problems accepting the concept of an objective reality and the objectivists ethics seems more like a badly thought out addition to the rest of her philosophy. But my biggest problem is probably that it all feels so selfish. Its like a cult for egoists. The cult-like properties is enhanced by the tendency to label other philosophies as "inherently evil". If your ideas are different from Ayn Rand, and for instance think communism might be a good idea, you are not just different but "evil". Others might say communism is a bad idea, but it takes a objectivist to label it as "evil". This black and white mentality probably makes her ideas appeal to younger people as novella said.

Good point-when anyone proclaims absolute truth, that is an awfully high perch to speak from in regards to anything. Science is science and strives for full knowledge and understanding, philosophy isn't quite like that IMHO. I'm not so certain that I buy the whole "you serve the world when you serve your own selfish desires" theory. A man wanting to become wealthy through finding a cure to AIDS or cancer sounds intriguing, but there are countless others who swindle the company's accounts or who climb the ladder through getting rid of those before their path. For every good example that could be cited, I could think of about five reasons as to how "egoism" is destructive.

 

[Sitaram]

I have used the TBF search engine to find this Ayn Rand thread, so that I may post an interesting observation regarding her popularity in India. I have been spending quite a bit of time at myspace.com using their search engines to find people who might possibly share my interests. I am able to target my search to a particular country, a religion and an age range. It is also possible to specify level of education.

I specified Religion = Hindu, Education =Grad/Post-Grad, Age = 30-40. Part of the reasoning behind the age range is to narrow the search so as not to deal with over 100 profiles at a time. I will at some point search other age ranges.

I examined the profiles of approximately one hundred people in India, and notice an unusual number of them list Ayn Rand in their BOOKS profile. When I do searches in other countries, I do not often see Rand listed. I am wondering if some conclusion might be drawn regarding a relationship between Rand's philosophy and India's intellectual climate.

Since I mention myspace.com and the BOOKS section of profiles in this post, I will remark how saddened I am to find so many profiles various countries where it is obvious that the person has either no interest in books, or actually detests the idea of reading a book. There are also provisions in the profile for listing Movies and Music. I can envision some future time where a BOOKS section might disappear entirely and be replaced by some more generic, catch-all OTHER INTERESTS category. If this is in fact an increasing trend, then it is a sad trend indeed, and one that perhaps spells a lot of trouble for human society in the coming centuries. Jefferson was initially thought odd by many peers for his stress on free education for all as a prerequisite for success of any government "by the people."

As I post this now, I feel the inspiration to use the myspace.com search engine by country, by religion, searching on Ayn Rand, to see if some significant pattern might be revealed.

In my blogging and networking there, I often recommend the TBF site. It will be interesting if we see someone join and mention myspace.com as their reason for visiting.

I have been doing this for less than a week, and already I have over 100 contacts in my Friends list. Every time I hit the refresh button on my profile, I see the total membership jump by several new members per minute, for a current membership of 71 million. I do, however notice, as I visit profiles, that some members have not logged in 3 or even six months. So the total membership does not reflect the highly active membership.

My 22 year old step son sighed when I showed him my profile and exclaimed "I must be the only one who isn't on myspace.com." For some reason he has no interest, even though he has been very active with chat and other Internet activities since Junior High.

 

[SFG75]

Interesting comments Sitaram. I did a brief search just typing in "Ayn Rand" and "india" off of google and found some interesting things.

Deccan Herald article

This really affirms your point about her popularity.

A 1991 survey revealed that after the Holy Bible, it was Rand’s books that impacted people most; one cannot but help reflect wryly that coming in after the Bible would not have exactly thrilled the atheist author. The US Postal Service has released two commemorative stamps featuring Rand looking austerely glamourous.

Cultural impact in India.

Closer to home, just about every roadside stall loaded with pirated books has copies of ‘The Fountainhead’ and her magnum opus ‘Atlas Shrugged,’ thus ensuring a wide section of the reading populace gets access to her works in the most economical manner possible. The Canadian rock band Rush has credited her with being their fountainhead of inspiration. There have been films and documentaries, Academy Award- nominated ones, on the life and times of Ayn Rand. The cult endures.

The belief in a nutshell.

Objectivism is a take-no-prisoner system of values which celebrates individualism, reason and self-interest, and rejects the moral code that sacrifice, altruism and religion is good for the soul. Objectivism asks man and woman to live for the sake of himself/herself and not for others, to make his/her work the focal point of life and to develop a set of values; having developed which, never ever to compromise on them. Objectivism propounds a free market over communism; ironically enough, both use the same language when urging people to break free of the shackles.

This is just me on a soapbox here, but I'd argue that India is a perfect fit for her works now. With India's economy booming and acceptance of a more free-market oriented economy, it fits philosophicially with people who desire to improve themselves and who see themselves as potential greater earners, not just some guy on a job for 30 years with no higher aspirations. From what I understand, Indian citizens are very eager to learn english and thriving telemarketing, accounting, and computer help businesses have been set up and continue to thrive through the outsourcing of American labor to India. The individual work-ethic is very admirable and fits in with the American notion of "Puritan work-ethic" to a great degree. The cult of individualism and self-reliance are sure to be very popular there. Being a student of history, it's interesting to note how collectivist communist and socialist movements tend to never do well in that part of the world, let alone the United States.

Here's yet another good link to read:

Liberty institute Ayn Rand student essay contest winners from India

 

[Sitaram]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand

Ayn Rand's mother taught her French and subscribed to a magazine featuring stories for boys, where Rand found her first childhood hero: Cyrus Paltons, an Indian army officer in a Rudyard Kipling-style story by Maurice Champagne, called "The Mysterious Valley". Throughout her youth, she read the novels of Sir Walter Scott, Alexandre Dumas and other Romantic writers, and expressed a passionate enthusiasm toward the Romantic movement as a whole. She discovered Victor Hugo at the age of thirteen, and fell deeply in love with his novels. Later, she cited him as her favorite novelist and the greatest novelist of world literature.


Legacy

Rand's novels continue to be widely sold and read. Following her death, continued conflict within the Objectivist movement led to a proliferation of independent organizations, a few of which claim to be her exclusive intellectual heirs. Rand and Objectivism are less well known outside North America, although there are pockets of interest in Europe. Her novels are reported to be popular in India and to be gaining an increasingly wider audience in Africa. Generally, her work has had little effect on academic philosophy; her followers are largely drawn from the non-academic world.

http://www.yazadjal.com/2005/02/02/the-ayn-rand-century/

Today is the 100th birthday of Ayn Rand. I enjoyed all her books, fiction and non-fiction; was a founding member of the New Delhi Ayn Rand club; and well, owe a lot of my learnings in libertarianism to her. I grew up with browsing through her books in my parents library. When my father once saw me thumbing through An Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology with glazed eyes, he pulled out Altas Shrugged, turned to Galt’s speech and insisted I read that first!

There are a lot of tributes on her today, and here are a few excerpts from the best. These pieces are well written, click on the links and read it all.

........


Just playing devil’s advocate here:

Wasn’t much of the skyline of Bombay built in the era of License Raj?

Also — on New York — that skyline is a metaphor for capitalism, to be sure. But it is also almost entirely built with unionized labor.

Great to see all these quotes, but I want to hear more about what you think about why libertarianism is so great, and what it might mean in India.

Liberalization has been great, but the state is still utterly essential when it comes to protecting various minority groups, pushing the reform of backwards social values (things like outlawing dowry and child marriage), regulating business, and about a thousand other things.

Personally, I am in favor of constitutional liberal democracy w/ free markets, along the lines of Fareed Zakaria’s The Future of Freedom. I’m not a big fan of Rand (though I respect her), and I find the more critical take on her centenary in the New York Times to be compelling.

This isn’t a flame — I find your blog quite interesting to read. I guess I’m just looking to hear you explain more about how you envision this working in India.

...



This is a tough thing to argue about, since we’ve never seen a government that acts the way Ayn Rand wants it to act in the quote you give.

I interpret her as saying something to the effect of “all creative force, including especially the idea of government-sponsored social reform, should be put into the private sphere.”

This can work, it seems to me, when the shape of a society is somewhat stable. In India’s case in its early years, the shape of the country itself was a question. How to handle language and ethnic differences? How to handle backwards social values?

The government needed to think creatively in order to reform society in certain ways so that the new country had a chance of staying together. This wasn’t just about enforcing laws in the constitution; this kind of thinking (call it “reformism”) was built into the process of composing the constitution itself.

The Hindu Code Act of 1950 is also an important example of this kind of thinking. It was intrusive of Hindu customs; most Hindu men at the time would have opposed it. (The government was too weak at the time to make the reforms apply to Muslims as well). But the reforms produced what I think were a net good. In liberal (or even libertarian terms), one can say that they helped to ensure the ‘individual rights’ of women.

I often think that the principles of libertarianism (even if it allows the encroachment of a nominal, ‘robot state’ to enforce criminal justice) only have potential to work in societies where people have thrown off the bonds of religion and family.

In India, both are hugely important. And both pull against individual freedoms.

 

[SFG75]

Two excellent points-academic types have never been a big fan of hers. When one thinks of social commentary dealing with economics, it's easy to predict that it will be from a left wing point of view. Upton Sinclair, Emile Zola, John Steinbeck, blah,blah,blah,blah,blah. It's extremely rare to see such works from those on the other end of the spectrum. I don't believe that her works have garnered the respect that they are due simply because of ideological, rather than literary, standards. Don't get me wrong, I believe that The Grapes of Wrath, The Jungle, and other texts are equally valuable and are truly great. At the same time, I hold The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged in the same high regard. In Atlas Shrugged, you have a competent and able Dagny Taggart operating a thriving business while her flunkie brother is concerned about what society thinks and of doing what is right philosphically, but not financially for the company. So, you have inefficient service, giant losses, and other things that are hallmarks of laughingstock nations. Rand's brilliance is in portraying this aggravating and unbelievable reliance people have on thinking they should serve society first, or put the views of others before their own. I mention this proper example not to get political, but rather, to point out that many people have had their leftist ideology repudiated and thus, aren't willing to accept anything Ayn Rand has produced out of purely political bias. It's amusing really-people say they don't like her works, though like certain Dan Brown fans-they won't go into what makes her such works so *bad* other than the fact(unspoken fact mind you) that they don't care for her economic views.

I can see why she would be more popular in India and Africa. In Africa, you have many nations who have been independent for over thirty years now and they for the most part, have been run into ground by corrupt military juntas, not to mention backward socialist policies that have caused debt, economic malaise, as well as droughts and famine. After putting up with such suffering for so many years, I could see why people would want to give free-market capitalism a shot. South Africa thrives while most countries that share a continent with it do not. Hong Kong thrives while a certain peninsula nation can't feed it's own people. PM me and I'll be happy to explain why.

 

[SFG75]

In relation to the larger issue of India's economic growth, the April 20th edition of the Washington Post has an excellent editorial regarding it.

India is the new China in the eyes of the Bush administration, which has promised to help this once-slumbering Asian giant develop into one of the world's five or six major economic and political powers. That undertaking has instilled a new sense of security in the Indian capital and erased long-standing tensions.

Singh praised "the new thinking" in Washington during our conversation and easily skipped over renewed U.S. arms sales to Pakistan, American pressure for action on Iran and other topics that would have sunk most of his predecessors into bitter grumbling about neo-imperialism

.

 

[collegelife101]

I think my biggest problem with Rand is that politically and economically she is at extremes. This can occassionaly look good on paper, but as many have pointed out... this doesn't work in the real world. Her novels are a nice way to think up all the situations where her theories would prove true, but they don't (and I wouldn't expect them to) take into consideration the situations where here theories wouldn't work. This extreme nature reflects on her characters as well. I read Atlas Shrugged and I found that I was able to classify each character as being in 1 of three groups.
1) For Objectivism
2) For Objectivism but not living by it
3) Against Objectivism
Although the characters move inbetween these groups during the course of the novel, this doesn't make for deep or complex characters.

There are ideas of Rand's that I like and I think could be used beneficially, such as the determination her characters have and their desire to be the best they can be. But when you show every "self-sacraficing" person to be two-faced, cowardly, cruel, and corrupt... you have put yourself out on a limb (the real world) and are currently cutting it off the tree (making unrealistic claims that support an idea that you want applied to the real world).

Some might say I'm missing the point of her literature and the greatness of her prose by complaining about her theories. Well, when you pump your theory into every last line of your prose then they are one in the same.

 

[SFG75]

Angelina Jolie as Dagny Taggert? Brad Pitt starring as well? Looks as if Atlas Shrugged might hit production pretty soon.

 

[Sitaram]

What I heard is that Ang Lee will be the director, and the title will be "Atlas Sh@gged" (but this rumor has not been confirmed).

 

[SFG75]

What I heard is that Ang Lee will be the director, and the title will be "Atlas Sh@gged" (but this rumor has not been confirmed).

LOL-If I remember correctly, Howard Roarke ended up having an affair as his collectivist-weakling of a wife insults him and puts down his business endeavors. Rand herself was famous for the relationship she carried on with one of her followers who was considerably younger than her. I think it was the Pikoff guy, but not certain.

 

[SFG75]

What I heard is that Ang Lee will be the director, and the title will be "Atlas Sh@gged" (but this rumor has not been confirmed).

No, it isn't about two cowboys who buy a mountain and then mine it for every ounce of profit it's worth.

 

[blurricus]

What bugs me about Rand, even though I love her works, is that she is very excessively repetitive. After her short stories, everything is just Atlas Shrugged, but smaller and more condensed (as far as philosophy goes). Then even in Atlas Shrugged, every speech given by Rand's elitist society of geniuses is just a shorter version of the radio broadcast by John Galt.

When I reread Atlas Shrugged, I skipped all of Rand's speeches. They're all the same, but just shortened. If she wasn't dead, I would write her and say "Thanks, we got the point the first time. Any new ideas?"

Her books are excellent though. I also agree that they're powerfully influential. I think it hit the generation of the cold war a lot, since communism was such a thing to hate. I liked the perspective of affecting younger readers a lot since her ideas were so solid (though contradictory at times).

 

[nomadicfollower]

Where should I start reading Rand? I've been wanting to read her for some time, but have been stumped by which book to get.

 

[SFG75]

Where should I start reading Rand? I've been wanting to read her for some time, but have been stumped by which book to get.

I'd recommend readingPhilosophy: Who Needs It? before diving intoAtlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead. After Philosophy, it doesn't matter which one you pick really.