fiction files redux discussion

Ayn Rand is a whore.

In the past few weeks the amount of people I've seen reading Ayn Rand books...it's starting to freak me out. Then I was reading an interview with that old Tennis lesbian Martina Navaratolova (is that correct?) and she said her favourite writer was Ayn Rand...which shocked me...but then I could see why.

I've always found Rand to be a frightening figure...a quite deranged intellectual whose ideas of laissez-faire capitalism and moral philosophy are crazy...so yeah, I'd call her a crazy mad lady. Her extreme sense of individuality...it's like some paranoid polar opposite of what she thought communism destroyed...which, like most things she misunderstood.

It's a bit like all the modernists who misread Neitzsche and wished to create an artistic aristocracy. And all the Russians who debased Marx and Engels' work to justify Stalinism and all those other totalitarian regimes...it breaks my heart that the left is dead...but that's another topic.

She did some early work in Hollywood, I think as a script writer...not sure if anything was ever made...until The Fountainhead movie.

I'd have thought there would be a big interest in Marx again since the economic downturn...maybe everybody is turning to Rand in order to learn how to become a superhuman instead of a super humanist.

Ayn Rand The Virtue of Selfishness A New Concept of Egoism The Romantic Manifesto Philosophy Who Needs It, Library Edition For the New Intellectual The Philosophy of Ayn Rand Capitalism The Unknown Ideal, Library Edition The Virtue of Selfishness

But she's so out dated. I don't understand how her "philosphy" can be even considered in todays world. I would think there are entirely new views on her topics.

Ah, but have you heard about Alan Greenspan's connection to her? That could be the reason for the uptick... but I think something else is afoot.

I think there is an undercurrent of impotence, or maybe I'm just generalizing what I sense here in a major metro city in the U.S. - people feel vulnerable and powerless because of the recent unravelling of and loss of faith in ... say... the world financial system? Whole countries going bankrupt? People losing jobs left and right? Terrorist attacks? The U.S. selling all of its debt to China? What's next?

I sense a whole lot of anxiety around me. Maybe that's because I'm forced to be around CNBC for days at a time.

Ayn Rand's ideas around bootstrapping your way into success, the extreme self-reliance aspect of it, the divorce of intellect from emotion... it's appealing, I have to imagine. It was for me, when I felt as though I had no control over my present or future.

Shel wrote: "Ah, but have you heard about Alan Greenspan's connection to her? That could be the reason for the uptick... but I think something else is afoot.

I think there is an undercurrent of impotence, or ..."

It is alluring and I can see the appeal of it myself...it's just ultimately negative, fanciful, counter-productive on a social level and mis-guided.

Alan Greenspan was one of her acolytes and even has an article in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

Everything I have read about her life says that eventually she had a falling out with her fellow objectivists and that Nathaniel Branden took up its mantle.

It is alluring and I can see the appeal of it myself...it's just ultimately negative, fanciful, counter-productive on a social level and mis-guided.

Not to mention sad. In the sense of how she viewed other human beings. I mean, there are other words for it, but I think it's sad that anyone would believe that living out that set of beliefs as though they were religious tenets themselves would live a lonely existence, indeed.