Ayn Rand

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Ayn Rand was the author of vast doorstop-sized tomes like Atlas Shrugged and the ripped-off biography The Fountainhead, and other thick, boring books espousing, essentially, libertarian themes and ideology, although preferring the title "Objectivist." Rand also claimed to be a philosopher, although her versions of philosophy were simplistic in nature, and the metaphysical aspects were created by Aristotle thousands of years before. Whether it is a philosophy or Rand's disgusting attempt at making an excuse to satisfy her conscience that being greedy and selfish is alright is ironically subjective.

The Objectivist movement is a movement based on Ayn Rand's personality cult philosophy of objectivism.

Contents

[edit] Biography

Ayn Rand was born as Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum in Russia in 1905, moving to the USA in 1926 where she became, initially, a successful screenwriter. Her novels championed "objectivism", promoting capitalism and the pre-eminence of the individual. A smoker for most of her life, she derided the anti-smoking lobby. She died, predictably enough, from lung cancer in 1982.

While having an acknowledged affair with her closest "pupil," Nathaniel Branden, she found out that besides cheating on his wife with Rand, he was also cheating on Rand with a model. Upon finding this out, despite the hypocrisy of the whole situation, she berated Branden and started throwing things at him. She allegedly declared, "If you have an ounce of moral decency, you'll be impotent for the rest of your life!" She then excommunicated him from the Objectivist cult.

[edit] "Philosophy"

While Rand considered her philosophies to be so well-reasoned as to be completely objective (and even called her philosophy Objectivism), it is generally agreed that what she really created[1] was a highly moralistic personality cult, which was later complete with shunning of dissenters and highly screwed-up sexual politics. [2] Rand summed up her philosophy with the following principles:

  • Metaphysics: Objective Reality
  • Epistemology: Reason
  • Ethics: Self-interest
  • Politics: Laissez Faire Capitalism
  • Aesthetics: Whatever sort of art Ayn Rand happened to like. Does not include Monet.[3]

and with the one-liner "To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason, Purpose, Self-esteem." Detractors feel that Rand considered all those properties to be perfectly expressed in herself. Whatever the case may be, Objectivism is essentially Libertarianism with hangups, usually disguised as pseudologic.

Not every Objectivist is a Rand fanatic, but those that are not are shunned by the mainstream Objectivist movement led by Leonard Peikoff's Ayn Rand Institute.

Most philosophers today would dispute Randroid claims that Rand is a philosopher of any importance. The reason is simple: neither Rand's metaphysics or her epistemology answer many of the probing questions that philosophers might demand of it. Rand's metaphysics boil down to platitudinous pieties: "Existence exists", "Existence is identity", that consciousness is relational, nothing exists without having some properties and the law of identity applies ("A is A"). These are all perfectly fine positions, but they don't seem to go far enough to satisfy the inquiries of even the most minimally trained student: for instance, Rand's view seems to be incompatible with the traditional Aristotelian substance-attribute view of the relationship between particulars and properties - is it? Similarly, 'identity' as it is used by Rand seems to shift meanings often - between the sort of meaning one might use when describing Leibniz's law of the identity of indiscernibles and the day-to-day meaning ('my identity' etc.).

Similarly, for Rand's epsitemology - she claims that "reason" is the foundation of her epistemology. Despite the label, Rand's epistemology is empiricist. The sort of questions which exercise contemporary epistemologists (to pick a few: resolving Gettier problems, weighing up foundationalism and coherentism as a response to the Agrippan trilemma, the closure principle) are given scant attention in Rand.

Rand claims that all of the elements of her philosophy run together - being an Objectivist means accepting all of the five components of the philosophy. Quite what in the (perfectly acceptable if a little unoriginal) metaphysics and epistemology (reality is all there is, don't bother with religion) necessitates acceptance of the ethics and political philosophy, or indeed the aesthetic worship of railway tycoons and large, phallic buildings, is not explained. The existence of many millions of non-Objectivists who hold without too much of a mental struggle either to a broadly naturalistic metaphysics and epistemology but without the Randian ethic, or to a Randian or libertarian ethic and a non-naturalistic metaphysics (perhaps some kind of religion, orthodox or New Agey) seems to suggest that the two halves of Rand's philosophy aren't bound by necessity (this seems rather obvious to anyone with a brain but does bear repeating for the Randians who seem to think that anyone objecting to their politics is automatically rejecting all components of their worldview).

[edit] "Literature"

[edit] Shatlas Rugged

Actually reading this novel has been compared to pushing one's head through a light-year of refrigerated saltwater taffy (sort of like a libertarian Das Kapital).

To save you reading over a thousand pages of turgid prose, here is Atlas Shrugged. No "spoiler" alert is necessary:

  • A dark auburn and lonely handsome 'hero' with no friends, steeped deeply in pseudoscience, invents a perpetual motion machine;
  • When someone mentions "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need," he and his bazilllionaire 'friends' wail like babies, and flee in a huff to live in the mountains; [4]
  • Everything in the rest of the world is grey and like North Korea, but their mountain hideout is a land of colourful plenty;
  • Everyone is miserable except them, as they are busy driving their trains up and down in their incredible mountain hideaway;
  • They have romance-novel sex with other capitalist boors, but cannot commit due to being too busy making money;
  • Everyone else is wrong:
  • They are the only people who are right;
  • All the good, decent, hard working working class folk who are loyal to their CAPITALIST SUPERMEN are left to die or are ignored by them later on;
  • They pop up suddenly in public and punish the grey miserable hordes by lecturing them in interminably boring speeches that go on and on and on for about one hundred pages and have only one point - "You're all fucked, but I'm not, 'cos I've got loads of money, Ha Ha!";
  • The world goes to Hell in a handbasket, except for them, 'cos they're in their seekrit mountain hideout, which can't be seen from the air, so it's, like, seekrit. And they have trains, after all.[5]
  • The reader falls into a deep coma. The survival rate is estimated at 3%-5%.

[edit] The unauthorized biography of America's greatest architect

The Fountainhead is a not-at-all disguised biography of Frank Lloyd Wright. Its message is to stick to your guns if you are a genius architect, and the fools who dissed you and made you build houses will come to their senses, even if the roof leaks terribly or the decks bend. Books that actually admit to being about Frank are better, since they usually include photos and drawings of some of his incredible work. Oh, and will be written better.

[edit] The drooling fans

Generally, the work of Ms. Rand is hugely enjoyed by people with the literary sensitivities of 11 year olds who imagine they have fierce political sophistication. [6] To outsiders they often come off as greedy, callous wankers with economic OCD.

Her fan club is founded on the premise that "A is A". Arguing about Aesthetics in an Armchair while Assuming that "Anarchism is Anathema" is Actually the same As Activism.

[edit] The enemy

Basically, everyone. If you like to lie on a bit late in bed on a Saturday morning, you're a hater. If you like to tip your waiter (in the US anyway), you're a hater. If you've ever paid any kind of tax without wringing your insides at the injustice of the thing, you're a hater. If you haven't created a global multi-national corporation and extracted every last cent of resources, labor and profit from multiple countries, you're a hater. If you don't think children under the age of twelve can do a decent 12 hour day's work and earn their keep, you're a hater. Even if you're a raving lunatic American Evangelical Christian Conservative, you're a hater. (Incidentally, he even believes that if you're not an unmarried man, you're a hater).

[edit] Environmental perspective on her works

Ayn Rand's books are the second greatest (after John Grisham's) single destroyer of the Brazilian rainforest, as vast swaths of trees must be ground down to produce the copious quantities of paper required to print the thousand-page doorstops.

[edit] Medical perspective on her works

In order to fit The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged into mass market paperback editions, some extremely tiny print was used. Attempting to read either of those books in paperback can lead to eyestrain, headaches, and creeping nearsightedness. Some medical experts, however, do recommend using her books as a more natural cure for chronic insomnia.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ↑ At least outside Objectivist circles...
  2. ↑ Skeptical author Michael Shermer, in his book Why People Believe Weird Things (2ed, 2002, Owl Books, ISBN 978-0805070897), devotes a whole chapter to a highly personal and scathing rebuke of Objectivism, which he had once been a believer in. The essay can be found online here: The Unlikeliest Cult in History
  3. ↑ http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=objectivism_essentials
  4. ↑ Incidentally, the 2007 video game BioShock has been described by some reviewers as a repudiation of Rand's conception of a meritocracy of the elite, and a similar arrangement is played for laughs by Douglas Adams in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where Golgafrinchan society is wiped out by an unsanitized telephone after all the "unnecessary" people are loaded into an ark and sent off planet.
  5. ↑ http://www.angryflower.com/atlass.gif
  6. ↑ These people, due to their often-slavish devotion to Objectivist principles, are often called Randroids. Alan Greenspan is known to be one.
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