"...Good grief, she's back. She died in 1982, but someone neglected to drive a stake through her heart. A passion for the prose and philosophy of Ayn Rand tells us a great deal about an individual, none of it good. There are few surer signs of a poor reader, a poor thinker and an unpleasant person than a well-thumbed copy of Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead..."
Gary Weiss, long time Wall Street reporter and author, has written a new book, due out this week from St. Martin's Press, on the rising influence of Ayn Rand in modern politics. Titled Ayn Rand Nation: The Hidden Struggle for America's Soul, the book removes the propaganda mask that has been so adroitly affixed to Alan Greenspan's page-boy coiffed goddess of laissez-faire capitalism and the Tea Party's mother ship...
Rand, and her supporters, including Alan Greenspan, viewed altruism as evil: altruism is evil, selfishness is good. And tens of millions of dollars of corporate money is backing that philosophy today in America, no doubt to give obscenely paid CEOs a sip of Rand's guilt-free narcissism while stoking the fires for more deregulation of a country just crawling back from the crippling effects of deregulation. This is the mindless irrationality of Rand's brand of rationality.
According to Weiss, Ayn Rand built her Objectivist philosophy that permeates today's Tea Party around individual self interest and eliminating government run social welfare programs, but she herself was on Medicare and Social Security.
Even after the attack at Pearl Harbor, Rand was against the U.S. entering World War II. She viewed government force as evil, but her own followers were regularly purged, shunned and vilified. She was an atheist, as are all true Objectivists, according to the grande dame of radical capitalism.
Alan Greenspan, the man who chaired the Federal Reserve Board for 18 years, guiding U.S. monetary policy under four presidents, was a member of Rand's Collective in New York City, which Weiss likens to a cult: "For much of its existence the Collective was for all intents and purposes a cult. It had an unquestioned leader, it demanded absolute loyalty, it intruded into the personal lives of its members, it had its own rote expressions and catchphrases, it expelled transgressors for deviation from accepted norms, and expellees were ‘fair game' for vicious personal attacks."...
This topic has been dead for four days, so perhaps no one is interested particularly, but I'd like to say that I find Objectivism extremely worrying.
With "Atlas Shrugged" in 6th place on Amazon's top ten, and Objectivism very much a cult of personaIity I think it is naive to :
dismiss them as irrelevant
pretend that Ayn Rand's personality is irrelevant
These people are absolutist "thinkers", in the sense that Ayn Rand was absolutely right in all she thought, said and wrote. There is the same kind dogmatic subtext among a great many Objectivists as you see among Maoists, Stalinists, Scientologists, White Supremacists and Fundamentalist Muslims and Christians.
They know the whole truth, all the truth and nothing but the truth, along the lines of: There is only one value (you yourself) and Ayn Rand is its prophet (profit?).
Because that is more or less "received truth" for them they dismiss any fact about the real world that might cast doubt on it as leftist or mystical propaganda.
"Being a libertarian who never went through a Rand phase the weekend ATLAS opens is a bit like being the only Jew on your block at Christmas." —Jesse Walker
But Tea Party types often use a person's personal life as a cudgel on their professional or political life.
And I don't think Hunter S. Thompson lived as a hypocrite. Nor Henry Miller, William Burroughs, Allan Ginsberg, blah blah blah.
Sorry, your first sentence lost me there. Not sure where that came from. I'm sure somebody, somewhere, somehow associated with the Tea Party movement said something disparaging about somebody's personal life, but that hasn't been central to it.
The things you criticized Rand for were not examples of hypocrisy. Her manifestos didn't condemn extramarital affairs, as far as I know she never condemned drug use, and she had a rather more nuanced view of government aid than her critics have charged. In fact, as far as amphetamine use goes it was pretty widely prescribed and wasn't the scandal it would be today. Hell, my mom—respectable suburban housewife that she was—was addicted to Benzedrine in the early '60s.
She didn't commit fraud to draw Social Security or Medicare. That charge was based on her using the name Ann O'Connor to do so...which happened to be her legal name. Ayn Rand was a pseudonym. Here's a pretty thorough debunking of these charges.
But I really don't intend to defend Ayn Rand as a person. She was in many ways pretty despicable, and a I didn't like her fiction at all, but if you want to engage the Tea Party movement attack it for something real, something relevant. Not gossip-page trash talk.
Ayn Rand, whose real name was Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum, was born to a wealthy Jewish family. Her father lost his pharmacy to Bolsheviks. Her beliefs are not surprising, considering her circumstances.
The crazy thing is, by her reasoning, the Bolsheviks were merely following their noblest calling: taking everything away from the less powerful.
the difference being that even though HST recognized that he was a character, he lived by the ideals he professed. Rand, well not so much, more of a "do as I say, not as I do". And when you are professing to propose a system by which an entire nation should live and govern itself, being hypocritical has some obvious problems. I've had lunch at the bar with HST, we talked football and hockey, he'd be welcome at my house.
Thought I'd bump this thread. Apparently the Tea Party has discovered the works of Ayn Rand. I want to see how they defend a narcissistic, adultering speed freak who committed fraud to receive Medicare payments. This should be interesting.
Ayn Rand is not her work. It's possible to read something by—even draw inspiration from—someone you don't like.
I don't think I'd want Hunter Thompson in my house but he's welcome on my bookshelf.
the difference being that even though HST recognized that he was a character, he lived by the ideals he professed. Rand, well not so much, more of a "do as I say, not as I do". And when you are professing to propose a system by which an entire nation should live and govern itself, being hypocritical has some obvious problems. I've had lunch at the bar with HST, we talked football and hockey, he'd be welcome at my house.
Ayn Rand, whose real name was Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum, was born to a wealthy Jewish family. Her father lost his pharmacy to Bolsheviks. Her beliefs are not surprising, considering her circumstances.
First, I'm not a tea partier - or even a Republican. I read Rand as a youngster and appreciated aspects of it. I also love the music of Richard Wagner. Wagner was a lazy, narcissistic, philandering, racist POS - but he wrote some awesome music.
If I chose to ignore people's work based on some self-imposed moral standard about their personal lives, I'd be ignoring a lot of important stuff.
Just sayin'.
But does the music of Wagner say it's not just okay, but necessary, to be selfish in the extreme? Sure, plenty of creative people were, and are, not exactly role models in their personal lives. But Ayn Rand took her twisted beliefs and put them in to action in her personal life, putting herself above everything and everyone else. Her personal life is a reflection of her work: utter and complete narcissism. She considered virtually everyone beneath contempt, not worthy of drawing breath. Until of course, she actually NEEDED assistance from us expendables, then she gladly took our money to save her own hide. She is just pathetic.
Thought I'd bump this thread. Apparently the Tea Party has discovered the works of Ayn Rand. I want to see how they defend a narcissistic, adultering speed freak who committed fraud to receive Medicare payments. This should be interesting.
Ayn Rand is not her work. It's possible to read something by—even draw inspiration from—someone you don't like.
I don't think I'd want Hunter Thompson in my house but he's welcome on my bookshelf.
But Tea Party types often use a person's personal life as a cudgel on their professional or political life.
And I don't think Hunter S. Thompson lived as a hypocrite. Nor Henry Miller, William Burroughs, Allan Ginsberg, blah blah blah.
Thought I'd bump this thread. Apparently the Tea Party has discovered the works of Ayn Rand. I want to see how they defend a narcissistic, adultering speed freak who committed fraud to receive Medicare payments. This should be interesting.
First, I'm not a tea partier - or even a Republican. I read Rand as a youngster and appreciated aspects of it. I also love the music of Richard Wagner. Wagner was a lazy, narcissistic, philandering, racist POS - but he wrote some awesome music.
If I chose to ignore people's work based on some self-imposed moral standard about their personal lives, I'd be ignoring a lot of important stuff.
Thought I'd bump this thread. Apparently the Tea Party has discovered the works of Ayn Rand. I want to see how they defend a narcissistic, adultering speed freak who committed fraud to receive Medicare payments. This should be interesting.
Ayn Rand is not her work. It's possible to read something by—even draw inspiration from—someone you don't like.
I don't think I'd want Hunter Thompson in my house but he's welcome on my bookshelf.
Thought I'd bump this thread. Apparently the Tea Party has discovered the works of Ayn Rand. I want to see how they defend a narcissistic, adultering speed freak who committed fraud to receive Medicare payments. This should be interesting.
