Missing the Point of Atlas Shrugged

[TOOLZ]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-wellington-ennis/missing-the-point-of-emat_b_185695.html

[HeresyLives]

1. Best review I ever read on it!

'The danger is that through reading this novel, many people become so empathetic to the heroic geniuses that they begin to believe that they are themselves geniuses.'

[TOOLZ]

2. you rock! :) n/t

:yourock:

[Believing Is Art]

7. That's kinda the point of using it

The Randian crowd wants people to believe they're "Atlases" whether they really are or not. If you're successful - you deserve it. If you're not - it's only because the government got in the way of your talent. Ego-stroking helps get votes.

[pansypoo53219]

3. before i knew what it was,

i tried reading it. i read a lot of crap back then, i READ very dry old stuff. i gave up on the 1st page. it SUUUUUUUCKED.

[glitch]

4. I read it all the way through - it has helped me spot malignant narcissists ever since.

Worth the suckage, in the long run.

[RandomThoughts]

5. Many people have made the argument that geniuses should lead.

And many people claim to be smart. But a genius without a conscious or without compassion, can lead things in a direction that most would consider to be bad ends.

So it is not the intelligence that is first, it is the character and compassion of a person.

Would you rather have an average person with heart, passion, and love for the people he has charge over, or just rely on the smarts, and possibly get a really smart person that just wants to subjugate, steal, or glorify themselves for their own means?

Genius is good in a leader, but without the higher characteristics of spirit of love, humility, service and selflessness, it becomes as equally bad, as it could have been good.

[LongTomH]

21. Amen, Brother!

You make very good points. This is another time that I wish I could 'recommend' a reply to an OP.

[xchrom]

6. this is something peculiar to Randians --

''The danger is that through reading this novel, many people become so empathetic to the heroic geniuses that they begin to believe that they are themselves geniuses.''

[silverweb]

13. I know someone like that.

A successful small business owner who struts around like he thinks he's Bill Gates, lives/breathes Randian/Libertarian idealogy, and has been poking/prodding for a "debate" for years now.

[bemildred]

8. Look, she is a lousy writer, and her "thinking" is reactionary drool.

Geniuses do not go on strike anymore than they care for power, prestige and money. And mere technical competence to make things work is not genius. That in itself is not easy, as the news shows us every day, but it is a long way from genius.

[burning rain]

16. I can forgive someone for going ga-ga over Rand if they're under 21;......

if they're older something is obviously wrong.

[bemildred]

17. Gore Vidal -- Comment, July 1961

---

Now, before I’m investigated for having taken the un-American stand that sex is a minor department of morality, let me try to show what I think is morally important. Ayn Rand is a rhetorician who writes novels I have never been able to read. She has just published a book, For the New Intellectual, subtitled The Philosophy of Ayn Rand; it is a collection of pensées and arias from her novels and it must be read to be believed. Herewith, a few excerpts from the Rand collection.

• “It was the morality of altruism that undercut American and is now destroying her.”

• “Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they are philosophical opposites; they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society. Today, the conflict has reached its ultimate climax; the choice is clear-cut: either a new morality of rational self-interest, with its consequence of freedom…or the primordial morality of altruism with its consequences of slavery, etc.”

• Then from one of her arias for heldentenor: “I am done with the monster of ‘we,’ the word of serfdom, of plunder, of misery, falsehood and shame. And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: ‘I.’”

• “The first right on earth is the right of the ego. Man’s first duty is to himself.”

• “To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men.”

• “The creed of sacrifice is a morality for the immoral….”

This odd little woman is attempting to give a moral sanction to greed and self interest, and to pull it off she must at times indulge in purest Orwellian newspeak of the “freedom is slavery” sort. What interests me most about her is not the absurdity of her “philosophy,” but the size of her audience (in my campaign for the House she was the one writer people knew and talked about). She has a great attraction for simple people who are puzzled by organized society, who object to paying taxes, who dislike the “welfare” state, who feel guilt at the thought of the suffering of others but who would like to harden their hearts. For them, she has an enticing prescription: altruism is the root of all evil, self-interest is the only good, and if you’re dumb or incompetent that’s your lookout.

http://www.esquire.com/features/gore-vidal-archive/comment-0761

[burning rain]

18. Like that. Also, of course, Whittaker Chambers nailed her....

from the right.

[Citizen Worker]

9. Greed and selfishness...

I read Atlas Shrugged many years ago and what I remember most
vividly is that Rand elevated greed and selfishness to the
level of virtue.

[tomreedtoon]

10. Ever hear of "George Washington's Dream"?

It was a psychotic legend about how Washington was told that America had to be Christian, or the evil Satanic races of Africa and other benighted places would destroy America. It's been used by the lower levels of right wingers - like about Klan level - to justify themselves.

I heard about this during an unfortunate talk show (which I was videotaping) with a Klansman and a loony right-wing lady. The lady mentioned this. The Klansman seemed shocked for a moment at this lunatic story (perhaps he never cracked a book since high school, so he never heard of it) but he kind of nodded and went along with it.

I've never gotten up the courage and the empty stomach necessary to read Ayn Rand, but from the brief synopsis given in the OP's link, I think she's even less believable than George Washington's Dream.

[fasttense]

11. I never made it to Atlas Shrugged. I started with The Fountainhead

and found it so ridiculous that I never got to Atlas Shrugged.

The only thing I remember from The Fountainhead was that wearing clothes is optional for very selfish rich people.

Luckily the people who were naked in her book were nice looking and young.

[question everything]

22. The only book that I read is "We the Living"

Probably her first, without much of her platform. It was a nice fiction that captivated me - many many years ago.

[silverweb]

12. Terrific article.

I often think that Rand's devotees and I have read an entirely different book, because we took away such different ideas.

The difference in our take is likely (at least in part) due to the fact that I took what made sense to me from one book, Atlas Shrugged -- i.e. personal honor equals ethical behavior, always doing one's best whatever the job, giving value for value and never cheating another, etc.

Her true acolytes, on the other hand, have in addition read all her dogmatic nonfiction stuff (or summaries by other acolytes) that I never read, and have created their own insular echo chamber built on a handful of slogans.

Despite its literary faults and pedantic style, I liked/like Atlas Shrugged and found ideas in it very useful even to a liberal like me.

[MasonJar]

14. I read it so many years ago, but unlike most novels it still lingers there

in my psyche. If the Randians desert, the people will be better off. There will be no one to bailout. Most employee-owned concerns do quite well. How long will it take these rich leeches to spend themselves into coming back? I can certainly understand Ayn Rand's hatred of the perpetrators of the Russian Revolution; at least she had her history on her side, but what of Wall Streeters who take so much and deserve so little.

[burning rain]

15. Ayn Rand would spit in the faces of the mouth-breathing righty lumpens....

who idolize her. She reserved her admiration for a handful of mostly imaginary supercapitalists, and had little but contempt for the rest of humanity, whom she saw as brainless drones with no creative potential, utterly dependent on the supercapitalists for everything.

[ASUliberal]

19. For some reason...

There has been an influx of Randian douchebags in my dorms lately. They are all whiny egotistical douchebags that carry themselves with such a sense of superiority that it makes me want to throw up.

And the worst part is that whenever I react negatively towards them they just take that as them winning...

I'm a socialist and on a certain level I am a full blown communist. But the difference between my radical views and there's is that I understand that I function in reality and therefore something like Marxism is, at this point, nothing more than a pipe dream. But then again I guess another major difference is also that I don't believe the poor are just lazy and all rich people are awesome.

[agincourt]

20. I always thought that Atlas Shrugged,

was the product of a very good writer, who part way through, wasted the book on making it a blow-job for rich people. Somewhere after directive 10-289 and when she started using the phrase "looters" constantly it just got stupid. I was disappointed, because I thought the book could have worked if she hadn't been so arrogant about her philosophy.

[question everything]

23. The irony is that Rand praised individualism

while the right wingers are the ones with the "you are either with us or against us," who are the ones demanding that we all lock step with "god" as defined by them, of course.

In the 90s I lived in Orange County, California, which used to be the bastion of libertarianism. I think that the "Ayn Rand Institute" is there, too. Yet, it was there where all the Homeowner Associations thrive, where some small minded people who managed to be elected to board tell the homeowners what color their garage door should be. And they are proud of this, as it 'preserve the value of the over priced homes."

[provis99]

24. Ayn Rand is the L. Ron Hubbard of political thought

Except that she's a worst writer than Hubbard was (if that's possible).