Dissecting Ayn Rand

[snuffbox 0]

A) Ayn Rand was an author and totalitarian philosopher, not an economist.

 

B) Don't lump Glen Beck in with libertarians. He loves the Iraq War (and all the deficit spending that goes along with it), the war on drugs, and pines for a multi-billion dollar wall between Mexico and the US. Neocons and libertarians are not the same, no matter how disingenuously the neocon panders to libertarians when they go on his program.

[Crimson G 0]

A) Ayn Rand was an author and totalitarian philosopher, not an economist.

 

I'm pretty sure Objectivism is about as far away from totalitarian as you can get. Maybe you mean another word here? Atlas Shrugged is often listed as one of the finest pieces of fiction dealing with economics. I don't think she, or people like Yaron Brook who's been everywhere discussing this on TV, are naive or unpracticed in the field of economics.

 

B) Don't lump Glen Beck in with libertarians. He loves the Iraq War (and all the deficit spending that goes along with it), the war on drugs, and pines for a multi-billion dollar wall between Mexico and the US. Neocons and libertarians are not the same, no matter how disingenuously the neocon panders to libertarians when they go on his program.

 

Glen Beck is certainly no libertarian, but he's definitely had quite a few libertarians on his program lately, and he's been buying into more and more of the philosophy as this recession progresses. Obviously he still has his pet interests (and god knows he loves our defense spending), but he's far more libertarian than someone like, say, Sean Hannity. I only "lumped" Beck in with that category since he addresses these points daily in his TV show, radio program, and newsletters, and gives these people a platform to allow their voice to be heard. I don't believe he's leading the charge.

[Guest Czech please!]

Objectivism always just kinda struck me as libertarianism for weird people.

 

finest pieces of fiction dealing with economics.

Fictionomics?

[PUT THAT DICK IN MY MOUTH! 0]

Ayn Rand was a hack "philosopher" and an absolutely dreadful writer.

[Guest Vitamin X]

I swear to god, what is it about Glenn Beck that fries people's brains as much as it does? Ayn Rand? Good lord.

[Big Ol' Smitty 0]

Ayn Rand was a hack "philosopher" and an absolutely dreadful writer.

 

I don't consider myself enough of an authority on philosophy to call Rand a bad philosopher. But I do think it's odd that she still has followers when she wasn't for free markets, but for Gilded Age Standard Oil style monopolistic capitalism.

 

But I can easily agree with you that her writing was nearly unreadable. The Fountainhead was one of the only books that I just couldn't make it through during my undergraduate years. You get her point by like page 5 and it just goes on. "Okay, okay, you named your character so as to have 'Hard Roar' in his name--I get it."

[snuffbox 0]

Ayn Rand was absolutely a totalitarian. I'm guessing that, based on the fact that t doesn't appear that anyone else here has actually read anything by her or looked into her career, none of you know how her Objectivism works. To follow her philosophy, she laid down the law that one must follow every single tenet of that philososphy or they could not consider themselves "Objectivists.' There have been numerous examples of excommunications (both during her life and since her death by her 'intellectual heirs') and strongarming of her former colleagues over the most mundane differences of opinion. There has long been confusion as to why she's never been taken seriously as a philosopher or why Objectivism has never really caught on: It is because of the above.

 

As far as her novels go, if you favor dependence over her thesis of selfishness, it will probably be impossible to get through either of her big novels. For one thing, they're very big and, for another, you would be confronted by a life thesis the stark opposite of your own on every single page, probably every paragraph.

[Big Ol' Smitty 0]

It wasn't so much that as her really, really shitty prose.

[snuffbox 0]

Disagreed. No offense, but I don't think my literary tastes are anywhere below you're own (we'll just say we're equals!) I am a fan of both of her big novels. But, I wholly agree with the idea of selfishness. It makes it a lot easier to read a thousand pages that are lined with a particular philosophy if your apt to agree with that going in. If it is foreign or disagreeable, you're probably going to find yourself looking for a way out very quickly. I don't mean this as an indictment of anybody that doesn't like Rand's writing. I can see exactly where you're coming from. But it's not that her prose is shitty.

[Big Ol' Smitty 0]

I'm no literary critic by any means, but I'm pretty sure that most people who are fans of Rand's work are so because of the philosophy, not because of the cheesily melodramatic prose and one-dimensional characters.

 

My favorite book is The Stranger, but not because I think Camus is the really greatest writer ever.

[PUT THAT DICK IN MY MOUTH! 0]

But it's not that her prose is shitty.

 

Except it is. Her novels are utterly without literary merit. Were it not for their supposed "philosophic" underpinnings they'd have been consigned to the trash heap of literary history ages ago. Her writing is mind-numbingly simplistic and to describe her characters and plots as "paper thin" would be to give them too much credit. If you agree with her philosophy, that's fine, but to try and pass her novels off as anything more than the most rudimentary hackwork is ridiculous. There's a reason she's not studied in English Departments, and it has nothing to do with ideological bias.

[Mik 0]

I attempted Atlas Shrugged approximately 7 or 8 times. I never got more than 100 pages in. Very difficult to read. That's all I really have to add about Ayn Rand.