Ayn Rand -- conservative or liberal?

[neverborn]

I had always heard Rand's writing was ultra-conservative. A friend recommended that I read Rand, and responded in kind. My friend said she has no idea what I'm talking about, that Rand is very liberal and very feminist.

Eh?!

:shrug:

[ALago1]

1. She's hardcore libertarian

Unwavering faith in the free market, coupled with liberal social values.

[terrya]

3. Alan Greenspan was once a disciple of Ayn Rand.

I agree with you. Rand was libertarian.

[ALago1]

5. I know!

Kind of ironic considering he once wrote an essay condemning central banks.

[Nikia]

6. She seemed Liberatarian to me

My reading of her philosophy says that each individual should be left to do whatever he or she thinks best as long as that does not impede the rights of another. I thought that was Liberatarian. I read somewhere though that she did not consider herself Liberatarian and thought that Liberatariansim was irresposible.

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

25. Nice in theory but the nature of competition is to devour competition

thereby concentrating wealth which is why controls are necessary in order to keep the non-ruling class content with capitalism.

But since you bring up liberty..this is one of my all time favorite flash films...for those that happen across this thread...I tend to favor the approach of John Locke that some people really do need to be saved from themselves from time to time and within reason...especially where we are considering drug addiction although I am for complete decriminalization of drugs.

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/liberty.php

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

7. This is what I can't seem to get past when we debate libertarian

philosphy. How can one be socially liberal and a free marketeer in REALITY? A free market system is a capitalist system. A capitalist system MANDATES that for wages to avoid being inflated and the labor pool to remain in play that a certain percentage of people be unemployed at any given moment. If they aren't, labor costs increase due to supply and demand. Therefore, if one is a free marketeer, then to argue against the social programs that take care of those mandated to be unemployed by denying services such as medicare and rejecting social security as a state run program is to give to the wealthy and let the poor fend for themselves or depend on "charity" to care for them as though "charity" is more autonomous than a safety net (which it isn't) There's just nothing socially liberal about that in my book.

[leftistagitator]

18. Socially liberal for Libertarians

Means the government doesn't tell you what you do with your life. They don't believe in the drug war, antigay politics, and stuff like that because they are anti-government period. It gets wierd, no enviromental standards, the personal right to own nuclear weapons, purely toll based roadways, and absolutely no social saftey nets are just some of the extreme positions they hold.

[ALago1]

19. I know exactly what you mean.

What most libertarians say when I bring up similar arguments is that: if government was completely eliminated and private enterprise was free to pursue its personal interests, fluctuations in the business cycle wouldn't occur.

Yeah that doesn't happen in reality. At some eventual point in an economy's procession through a business cycle, the level of personal savings wouldn't equate with the level of investment due to a lack of demand for new products or uncertainty of the future. This is how an economy goes into equilibrium and it is inevitible.

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

22. But that isn't possible in a global economy..we wouldn't be able to

compete..if we aren't subsidizing certain businesses (not that I defend MOST instances where we do) and another state (read nation ) was..then that business would have an unfair advantage over our business and if business were free in an unfettered manner to go where they pleased...they would go ...as they do now...(thanks to the FUCKING CATO INSTITUTE) where they could save money and get things cheaper...if one wants to see LIBERTARIANISM in action...it's currently being played mostly by multi-national corporations which can do what they damn well please...BUY the policy if they can't ...only provide employment for a very SMALL portion of the planet's people while being the controlling party for themajority of theplanet's wealth.

It ain't working

Hell the people who have benefitted from the WOD ARE the same companies that have benefited from libertarian FISCAL policy...interesting the way that one pans out.

To me, Libertarianism is MUCH like a religion..complete with all the logical fallacies.

[skooooo]

2. ack!!! Make the evil name go away!!!!

[Syncronaut Seven]

15. As kooky as Rand was

Atlas Shrugged was a great book, very entertaining. Long.

[leftyandproud]

39. I agree

she is a great writer...she just happens to be WRONG philisphically...She is basically THE anti-Marx...taking a 100% polar opposite stand on economic issues with the communist party...no room for compromise.

[mitchum]

41. She was a TERRIBLE writer...

that is why she is not taught in literature programs (just as her terrible philosophy is the reason that she is not covered in philosophy departments)

[leftyandproud]

43. you obviously..

didn't read her stuff...If you come into a book knowing what she believes, you will hate every minute of it...but if you had no idea who she was before you read Atlas Shrugged, you would consider it a masterpiece of fiction

[gold_bug]

44. I agree with mitchum and I've read Rand's fiction.

It doesn't matter if you understand the basics of her philosophy or not, Rand's fiction remains prosy and dreary. Her novels are inhabited by ridiculous cardboard characters engaged in a silly epic battle of builders vs. destroyers/looters which is several dimensions removed from any semblance of reality.

"(The characters in The Fountainhead) have this kind of sticky, gooey, pulpy, drama happening for them... (but) Atlas doesn't even have that, so I think (for readers) it's like a third or fourth removal of a mental response on a low level."
--Mary Gaitskill

"From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: 'To a gas chamber -- go!' "
--Whittaker Chambers, 1957

[Syncronaut Seven]

54. ooh hostile

You didn't actually read A.S. did you? Remember it WAS a work of Fiction.

Fountainhead was kind of melodramatic with lots of self indulgent wallowing. It was fun to read if only for the naked anti-Marx propaganda.

Still, I found Atlas Shrugged to be one of the most enthralling novels of the 20th century. Depending on how old you are your parents probably read this one.

[mitchum]

45. I picked it up at the age of !4 with no knowledge of her...

and even at that age, I recognized it as turgid tripe. Unfortunately, I waded through all the rest of her work. The same result. There is not a single literary critic or scholar (or even lover of great writing) who considers any of her works to be masterpieces. You're an odd duck. I have never met anyone outside of her cult who considers her to be even a marginally talented novelist. Oh well, there's no accounting for taste.

[minkyboodle]

47. I've read the Fountainhead

and let me put this in context, a girlfriend recommended it to me so lets say that I had every motivation to like it and still I ended up arguing with her about it. It seems so cookie cutter and false to me that I couldn't ever really take it seriously.

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

4. Ayn Rand was a spoiled selfish rich girl so displaced by the Bolshevik

revolution that she had to invent a philosophy to cope with her loss. Her philosophy largely is rooted in conservatism and the "Objectivists" preach it...she believed the ruling class was largely benevolent if left unencumbered by government.

Alan Greenspan was one of her disciples..if you've heard him speak has a liberal ideal ever dropped from his lips?

[bigbillhaywood]

8. Good analysis! n/t

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

10. I fail to see how one can even pretend to be objectivist when every piece

of information they consume is filtered by their own very non-objective mind. I think it's a myth...one that fools the believer.

[MisterP]

29. the more someone screams "objective! sane! rational! reasonable!"

the faster I count my silverware.
That's why I tend to disbelieve the rhinestone-studded pedants that scream "I'm a debunker" out the window every morning

[ThatPoetGuy]

9. A powerful emetic...

Read her book For the New Intellectual if you ever need to :puke: .

In brief:

YOU are smarter than other people, which means that YOU are better than they are! Poor people are not like YOU. They are lazy, they are stupid, they have earned their suffering. YOU are the NEW intellectual; YOU should not care what happens to those lazy, weak, stupid, poor people.

Rand is not a conservative; she is an even lower form of life.

[terrya]

11. That fits in with this administration, eh?

[Feanorcurufinwe]

12. "The Virtue of Selfishness"

not exactly a liberal ideal.


Feminist? If feminism means submitting to a powerful man, yes.

[chelsea0011]

13. Individual over the collective.

Her philosophy askes the question. If someone is falling in front of a train, should you risk your life trying to save them? She thinks one is only morally bound to save them if you "love" that person being either friendship or family. If it is a stranger and you are uncertain if harm will come to you, you have no moral obligation to attempt to save them. They are basically nothing and unconnected to you.

[Emboldened Chimp]

14. Pretentious Gasbag

[UTUSN]

21. LOL-----------But

I also thought of her as a raging wingnut, but now agree with the posters who pegged her as Libertarian, and now I see her closer to those PESKY CLASSICISTS (without the overt antiquities overtones)------NIEZSCHE, Leo STRAUSS, and now PAGLIA and Victor Davis HANSON. What old Libs used to call "selfishness" in the old wingnuts, might now be seen as values unshaded by Christianity-------PRIDE (GLOATING), winning (DOMINANCE), etc.

Otoh, "Pretentious Gasbag" works for me.

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

23. Hahahaha! With an accent

There is a great interview somewhere online with Tom Snyder and Ayn Rand back during the seventies from one of his late night shows..I came across it yesterday while posting to another thread....gasbag was the puuuurfect term.

And fucking boring writer too...I suffered through all her books in college.....

[Nikia]

16. Something I found weird about Objectivists

When I was a freshmen, I checked out the Objectivist club as one off many clubs that checked out. What I found odd was that they preached the superiority of reason and individuality. When they were asked tough questions though, they quoted Ayn Rand's words like they were religious scripture. They didn't use any of their own reasoning.

[chaska]

17. I highly recommend the movie 'The Fountainhead'. which....

is the name of one of her books. She wrote the screenplay for the movie, which stars Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal (1949). It is, at times, extremely heavy handed and at other times truly comical (unintentionally). It is, at all times, genuinely entertaining. I don't want to say it's bad, but I can't say it's quite good either, but it does provide a great look into her extremely thinly veiled "philosophy", and is well worth watching.

[Rabrrrrrr]

26. Is that the one about the architect?

[mitchum]

36. The quarry scene is a camp classic!

[gold_bug]

20. a feminist?

"For a woman qua woman, the essence of femininity is hero-worship -- the desire to look up to man."
--Ayn Rand, "The Objectivist," Dec. 1968 - "An Answer to Readers (About a Woman President)"

It seems to me that her essay on "Woman President" posits women as being inherently inferior to me, not because they are objectively inferior but because they all truly believe themselves to be inferior, therefore, are inferior. Or something like that, Rand's reasoning is almost always twisted in that manner.

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

24. Thanks for finding that..I knew there was a post I wanted to come

back to...yeah convoluted...just like life today after living through her economic policies (mostly) put into action since Reagan.

[tigereye]

57. seem to me that she saw herself as one of that

amazing elite who were destined, no, preordained to run things. As if she were the only woman with the intellectual ( snort) power to do so. Not very feminist to me. However, there are some of her books - Utopia?- that seem to have a softer tone. I don't remember though, it has been a long time since I was obsessed with her books. I have no idea why, now. :)

so I guess elitist would be a pretty good description

[JVS]

27. Your friend is wrong. Next issue.

[Feanorcurufinwe]

28. The real question is: how do you pronounce 'Ayn'?

[JVS]

30. I pronounce it like Ann, but some have corrected me...

and said it is pronounced as the word "Ein" Finnish name evidently

My response is that if you are going to change your name from Alissa Rosenbaum while moving to the US you should be more careful to either choose a spelling that will work better in your new country or not choose your name from a language as uncommonly known around the world as Finnish.

[mitchum]

It's pronounced "Alice Rosenbaum" (since that is her real name)

I swear to God, she just never out grew that annoying pretentious teenage girl stage, did she?

[TuringBot Vers 2.0]

31. Illogical raving lunatic.

Scanned her book once, hard to process.

[Spider Jerusalem]

32. Psychopathic reactionary.

Her well-to-do bourgeois family lost everything in the Russian Revolution and was forced to flee. Her philosophy is one of reaction against everything represented by Communism or Socialism. That's it's whole raison d'etre. The woman was, throughout her life, in need of serious psychoanalysis.

[Hong Kong Cavalier]

33. She was plagarized by that hack fantasy writer Terry Goodkind

Apparently his sixth book in the "Sword Of Truth" series (bleech) is Rand's "The Fountainhead" taken almost scene for scene.
But I've never read Rand's works myself. I find her "minemineminegimmegimmegimme!" philosophy to be repulsive.

[DoNotRefill]

34. I read several thousand pages of her work....

and of it, there were three paragraphs that were good, the rest was tripe of the highest order.

[mitchum]

35. Tone deaf selfish loon

terrible novelist
terrible philosopher
terrible human being

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[Jack Rabbit]

38. Objectivism defined

A moralistic justification of greed and selfishness based on a poor reading of Aristotle.

[JohnLocke]

40. Pompous psycho.

[EstimatedProphet]

42. And not only that, she was a lousy philosopher!

Objectivism is full of strawmen. Rand would misquote someone and then criticize them on the misquote. Very sloppy. Here's an example:
http://home.att.net/~sandgryan/writings/emerson.html

[Fenris]

46. One of the few generally discredited philosophers

"The Virtue of Selfishness" is a laugh riot.

[minkyboodle]

48. My sixth Sense is: I see Objectivists

check out the Op Eds on http://www.aynrand.org if you want to see how truly wacky the whole group is. I recommend any on environmentalism, multiculturalism or Columbus Day. See what your friend thinks of some of those op eds.

[PurityOfEssence]

49. Scribbletarian

Hero worshipping Social Darwinist.

[mitchum]

50. LOL!!!

"Scribbletarian" That is perfect :)

[BurtWorm]

51. She hated communists, existentialists, Buddhists, and "barefoot savages."

I'd call her arch conservative.

[geniph]

52. Every library copy of The Fountainhead in the entire world

opens of its own accord to the rape scene. I think that's the only scene most people are able to actually get through.

[Fenris]

53. LOL. FINALLY the plot begins to move!

Oh wait, no.

[southpaw]

55. Rand... how my opinion has changed over the years...

I used to think she was a bold and daring philosopher... I was inspired by Howard Roark, John Galt, Hank Rearden, Dagney Taggart, Dominique Francon...

Then I started to look past these monolithic icons of 'rugged individualism' and see the selfishness, greed and lack of compassion that seemed to define all of them. I tried to imagine the libertarian utopia of "Atlas Shrugged" and just couldn't seem to make it work...

I now see Rand as a total crackpot... a person whose view of communism was a reactionary one that precluded any semblance of objectivity (ironic, ain't it...)

She was very freeperish in the sense that her mind was made up on issues of economic justice and would hear no arguments to the contrary...

[MikeG]

56. Worm Food.