Atlas Shrugged popped up in a trend, reminding me of the remarkable level of vitriol against it. It is obviously grinding an anti-collectivist axe, and it can fairly be called cartoonish, but if you can't see its archetypes in the world around you, you aren't paying attention.
I can easily understand people not liking the book, but the level of loathing that some show for it is odd, as if someone could go off on a rant and redline judge everyone who enjoyed the movie Wall Street as obviously terrible people.
https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1478389565094256642
[Kung Fu Monkey -- Ephemera, blog post, March 19, 2009]”
The archetype of a glorious manager who goes on strike which makes everybody very very sorry they ever doubted them isn't one that I'm super familiar with.
I wonder if Carmack has ever looked at a graph of US wealth inequality.
Or played Bioshock.
Atlas is a punchline for a reason.
My favorite short book (non-fiction) covering from the last days the Tsars through the remainder of the Soviet period (the period that shaped Ayn) is A History of the Soviet Union from the Beginning to the End, by Peter Kenez.
If you see those archetypes around you then you seriously need to learn some empathy which Rand clearly lacked. Let me sum up the book: "There are people who are so smart, if they left the world would collapse and everyone will die. Let's do that."
The ego of thinking that the whole world depends on you and your big brain is something a lot of people in tech need to grow out of. It's toxic and so is Rand.
I had a similar reaction when I read Battlefield Earth a few years ago. It struck me as an overly-long, painfully generic scifi novel. It wasn't unique enough on any level to justify either love or hate.
Sure, you may not like grammar or the wordiness or the characters but the ideas - those are what you’re reacting to.
Now, a question to HN: who here actually read Lenin, and works of his original party mates?
A picture far from a hippie paradise they draw. The Strong subjugate the Weak through natural right, and those weak are not your poor workers, but your idle intellectuals, nobility, aristocrats, social democrats, and much of white collar workforce, which would've included you.
Muscular proletarians band together to build a dictatorial regime, and go crushing "weakling classes" just because they can.
I agree her abhorrent message was "the strong subjugate the weak through natural right", but Ayn Rand very clearly believed that poor workers were the weak and rich white-collar businessmen were the strong that deserved to subjugate them. That's completely different than Lenin's view. There are many flavors of asshole and just because both Rand and Lenin were assholes does not mean they saw eye to eye at all.
The ideas espoused by Ayn Rand are absolutely unconscionable and I'd argue anyone who doesn't see the "Atlas Shrugged" effect, where impressionable readers tend to become hyper-assholes for months (or the rest of their lives) after reading it, they are paying less attention than those who don't notice all the John Galts around them. Of course that upper-middle-class white male whose parents are paying for his college tuition is a John Galt, and of course all those Hispanic sons of migrant workers are stupid dirty lazy nobodies who should worship him. Aren't you paying attention!?
This is yet another case of yet another rich person saying we should all be deeply grateful they're bestowing their diving Jobs upon us and we should all worship them and not get angry when they don't pay taxes.
Conversely, my favorite people have called her "one of the most evil figures of modern intellectual history", and the like.
And she was clearly a massive, massive hypocrite.
[Babe / Charlotte’s Web]
Ingenious farmers find new ways to market their farms and products with innovative marketing.
[Snow White]
Seven dwarves give room and board in exchange for house keeping. They save her from a dangerous, overreaching government. It later translates into future potential political favors.
[Beauty and the Beast]
A woman rightfully chooses a man with more resources.
[Up]
Politically persecuted man overcomes adversity and claims a flying fortress of intelligent dogs.
[The Muppets Take Manhattan]
A capitalist Cinderella story with puppets minus the fairy tale magic.
Although, in general Im puzzled by the cliche portrayal of A.R.'s views as somewhat cold or inhumane. Though I did not read all her essays and works, Im familiar with the several ones which warrant no such trivialized characterization. On the contrary, she explicitly and implicitly said that "...reason and emotions are not contradictory or in opposition. It is only when we do not understand our emotions that such dichotomy appears". Any thinking individual can sign his name under this. And, that is why we have psychiatry industry, billion dollar self-help book industry, etc. On the other hand we have also recreational drugs and alcohol abuse, etc -- which is the point in case, when emotions take over faculty of reason to govern our decisions/life that ... destruction, destruction, destruction...
The Ayn Rand school for tots joke from the Simpsons is a million times funnier and incisive imo as it targets this weakness of her philosophy and it's just a throwaway joke.
That sentence misses the very definition of philosophy and its purpose. It is true that Ayn Rand never had children and didn't talk much about parenting (although she did in various Q&A and also spoke about education - was very fond of Montessori for example), but that doesn't mean that Objectivism, which is Ayn Rand's philosophy, has no value to a parent or child.
Ayn Rand offered Objectivism as a philosophy for an individual human being, to aid in living in the natural world as a human. It is a comprehensive world view that speaks to the nature of reality, the nature of human beings, our relationship to reality as well as ethics, politics and aesthetics.
An individual's choice to raise children is personal and individual and Objectivism would argue that it is a moral choice to become a parent if you value raising children of your own, can afford to do so and are willing to accept the enormous life-long commitment and responsibility that doing so entails. A child's relationship to their parents, what rights children have and what a parent's responsibility is to their children are all things that Ayn Rand actually did speak about during her life, but the one thing I will grant you is that the fictional characters in her books were mostly childless and that probably had a lot to do with the fact that she herself was childless and so it wasn't something she felt moved to really talk about through her writings.
As for "need to raise them if you want a society to continue,"...
Objectivism certainly has a lot to say about an individual's relationship to "society", the very definition of "society" (an abstract concept referring broadly to a group of individuals) and it rejected the philosophical notion of "duty", not to be confused with "responsibility." Individuals have responsibilities, which they accept willingly. A parent, for example, has a responsibility to their children. Pet owners have responsibilities to their pets. People enter into contracts and relationships, make promises to one another and agree to work together collaboratively. All speaking to responsibilities. A duty, on the other hand, refers to an obligation imposed at birth to which someone has no ability to opt out. The duty to have children, for example. "If you want society a continue..." Objectivists would say "If you want children and a family and are prepared to accept the responsibility then do it for yourself. But don't take such a major life decision lightly, and you don't have a 'duty' to do so."
As a leftist, it is quite easy to critique her ideas in good faith: she disdains anyone who doesn't confirm to her idea of "productive", abhors the poor, and deifies the upper class as being the ultimate model of humanity. And that's not even being reductive.
