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On Reading ‘Atlas Shrugged’
This post is a refutation of objectivism as presented in Atlas Shrugged. Paradoxically, the problem with doing so is not that the question is too hard but too easy. It’s simple to say that Rand writes bad characters and ponderous speeches and dismiss the lot of it out of hand. There are two problems with that approach. The first is that it convinces nobody. If you do find her ideas compelling then easy mockery does nothing to expose their flaws. The second is that Rand actually had a number of excellent observations, ideas that shouldn’t be discarded even if she’s a lousy writer (and the writing isn’t all lousy either). What follows is an honest attempt to understand and refute the philosophy of objectivism. We’ll start by looking at Rand’s best ideas.
What Rand Does Well
Rand herself lived through the Bolshevik revolution, and escaped to America only by “going Galt” in that she wrote off everything she had in the Soviet Union and made it here with only what she could carry. That’s entirely to her credit, as is her subsequent prosperity in The Land of the Free. Having lived through that part of history she has an amazing grasp on the arguments of the communists, their appeals to a sort of morality, and the fatal flaws that doom the prospect of a socialist utopia. Indeed, she often seems to have a prescient vision of how society has progressed. This is not because she’s accurately predicted the advancement of mankind’s morality, but because mankind’s morality doesn’t advance. All these things she describes were problems in her day, are problems in our day, and will be with us until the Lord returns in glory.
Weaponized Compassion
The woke reformer is attempting to immanentize the eschaton much like the communist idealist of Rand’s day. The communist urges us to have compassion for the working man; the woke evangelist urges us to remember the suffering of those who are discriminated against. In both cases, they demand that we break our eggs to make their omelet, and as with the communists I’m not holding my breath waiting for that woke omelet to appear.
Rand’s industrialists are often condemned for their lack of human feeling. “Human feeling” is defined as love for a broad and unspecified general public, which as a practical principle means the industrialists pay out now, and instead of some general public reaping the benefit, the profits redound to the sort of people with political pull. Life for the common man gets worse. Maybe asking for pronouns will benefit some trans person somewhere by making them feel less excluded. I have my doubts. In the short term, there are diversity consultants pulling down good money for insisting that we all do so, and the common man suffers because actual communication becomes harder. But we can’t possibly fail to tack to the ever-shifting winds of what constitutes acceptable discourse; that wouldn’t be nice.
Early on in the book Hank Rearden gives ten thousand dollars to his brother’s charity. This fails to make his brother happy. The Rearden sibling genuinely isn’t concerned with money; he’s also entirely unconcerned with the putative objectives of his charity. What he wants, what he really wants, is Hank Rearden to acknowledge his moral superiority in being so unconcerned with money. He isn’t though; like the Pharisee loudly counting out his donation in the temple he’s not unconcerned with money, he’s buying something intangible. Dealing in the trade of cash for status does not make a man moral.
Brother Rearden, the diversity consultant, and the communist organizer, they’re all crying tears for the plight of someone. But they’re not actually helping that someone, they’re achieving some other goal. That isn’t compassion, that’s weaponized compassion. Crocodile tears should be met only with contempt.
Making Your Own Luck
The looters always say that “nobody ever gave them a chance.” Well, they’re given the chance. Phil Larkin gets his chance when the law forbids Hank Rearden to own his own ore mines. Phil Larkin squanders the chance he’s given. Dagny Taggart, despite bearing the family name, starts at the bottom of Taggart Transcontinental and works her way up to Operating Vice President.[1] She would have had a chance given to her if she had insisted on the prerogatives of the family name. She didn’t need anyone to hand her a chance. There are such things in this world as lucky breaks and good men doomed to failure by misfortune rather than laziness and stupidity, however, sitting back and worrying about bad luck never gets you anywhere. You do what you can with what you have, which gives you the opportunity to mitigate bad luck and capitalize on any good fortune that turns up. Giving a man a chance only does him any good if he’s willing to use that chance.
This is, it should be noted, a hard doctrine to live by. If your fortunes are guided by the stars and your job hunting turns out wrong, oh well, that’s life, what can you do? If on the other hand there’s no luck at all, then it must be that your failure to get a job hinged on decisions you made wrong, effort that you could have put in, things you should have done. Living under that rule set will get you better results in life (because it will spur you on to evaluate mistakes and improve your efforts going forward) but it will drive you crazy if you take responsibility for factors you can’t influence. I use the example of job hunting deliberately; many important factors involved are beyond your control. Like, for example, the unstated objectives of the hiring committee.
The Cowardice of the Committee
You can see this from the first chapter, from the first time that Jim Taggart says “Nobody could blame me for…”. A man who sets out to solve a problem may or may not solve the problem. A man who sets out to insure himself against any possible downside might accomplish that, but if he solves the problem it’s purely a matter of accident. Don’t make that decision yourself; get a committee to decide it. Spread any possible blame around. Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. If your idea fails you’re screwed, but if everyone agreed to a solution that didn’t work then you’re in the clear. There are several problems with this approach. It wastes time. By securing risk with a committee to blame you’re also preventing yourself from taking any risks which are too scary for the committee. Worst of all a committee focused on limiting short-term losses may doom you to long-term catastrophe by forestalling any options that would offer long-term benefits at the expense of immediate risk.
The book illustrates this with the rebuilding of the Rio Norte line. The only way Dagny can get permission from Jim Taggart to do it right is if she assumes all the risk for herself. Jim wants to use steel rails because they’ve always used steel rails, and nobody could blame them if it turns out that Rearden Metal would have done the job better. If he had used steel rails that section of track wouldn’t have been able to handle the Colorado traffic, and the result would have been much the same as if the bridge of Rearden Metal had collapsed. Nobody would have blamed Jim; he wouldn’t have lost his corporate presidency. It still would have been his fault, for surrendering his judgment to the opinion of a committee instead of doing the job right.
Jim sneers at Dagny that she’s just gotten lucky, while ignoring all the labor, all the intelligence, and the courage to defy public opinion to produce that luck. Jim will never get so lucky himself because he’s secured himself against that chance.
The Aristocracy of Pull
I’m going to start here with a quotation from the eponymous chapter. It’s one of the best moments in the book.
“We are at the dawning of a new age” said James Taggart, from above the rim of his champagne glass. “We are breaking up the vicious tyranny of economic power. We have set men free from the rule of the dollar. We will release our spiritual aims from dependence on the owners of material means. We will liberate our culture from the stranglehold of the profit-chasers. We will build a society dedicated to higher ideals, and we will replace the aristocracy of money with —”
“The aristocracy of pull,” said a voice beyond the group.
When you lose an agreed-upon measure of social worth (which is what money and prices boil down to) then someone still does the measuring, and suddenly the person who decides on that measure becomes very important to your livelihood indeed. Despite the protestations of fairness and equality, the process doesn’t get any more fair or equal. When the slaves depose their masters the most likely result isn’t freedom; it’s a new set of masters. Money, as Francisco d’Anconia (the mentioned voice) reminds us, allows men to make agreements, not merely live by theft and the sword.[2]
Jim Taggart, through his significant political pull, gets railroad bonds frozen. He no longer has to pay out to his investors. This is great news for Jim, and terrible for people who were relying on those investments. Not to worry says the government, those who have special need can get their bonds defrozen and those defrozen bonds can be cashed in. There springs into existence a bureaucracy to determine “special need”, and a class of defreezers who are adept at navigating that bureaucracy. Seem plausible to you? Tell me, was your job considered essential during the pandemic? In the general case, how closely do you think the groups of people who need welfare and the people who are adept at filling out the paperwork for it match? Again I refer you to Rand’s experience with the Bolshevik Revolution and what followed.
There’s one more danger to the Aristocracy of Pull. Those that live by the sword die by the sword. When the government needs a favor out of Jim Taggart they can extort it by threatening to defreeze all the railroad bonds. If Taggart had dealt honestly with his investors at the beginning he could have told the G-man to get bent. By using regulations to fleece his investors he gave the government the ability to use those self-same regulations to fleece him.
The Tyranny of Need
If your house burns down you can collect insurance money. The devious mind immediately asks “what if the money I collect is worth more than the house I burn?” That’s how you get insurance fraud. A charitable man gives a fish to a man who needs to eat. The man immediately considers “if I always need to eat, then he must always give me fish, and I’ll never have to work again.” That plan is fraudulent as well.
Charity, true charity, must always be done for the good of the recipient, including the moral good that refuses to let them become parasites depending only on charity. You can find this as far back as the Old Testament law which forbade the Israelites to go over their harvested field again and glean every last grain of, er, grain. This allows the widow and the orphan both charity to eat and the necessity of working to earn that charity. They have to go out and harvest that grain themselves. It also neatly prevents the taxes on the landowners from getting so large as to bankrupt them, leaving Atlas with a burden light enough that he’d never need to shrug. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
There are more excellent ideas that Rand has had, accurate descriptions of human venality and the horrors that ensue. The decline and fall of the Twentieth Century Motor company. The moralist’s need to propagandize. Her refusal to ignore the sacrificed individual for the sake of expedience. The dangers of people insisting that reality conform to their righteous outrage. I’m certainly leaving more out. I’ll just touch on one last point before moving on to the second half of the post.
The Consent of the Victim
This is an interesting point and one that I’m not sure I understand correctly. Hank Rearden goes on trial for breaking the laws concerning how much of his new Rearden Metal he’s allowed to sell to each customer. Rather than throw himself on the mercy of the court as they expected he denies their right to sanction his actions. They finally hand him a suspended sentence. By denying the judges had any moral right to condemn his actions he rubbed their noses in the fundamental injustice of the prosecution, and caused them to balk.
I have no doubt that this is a useful strategy some of the time. A Twitter mob feeds on the apologies of its victims because those apologies reinforce the mob’s conviction that it’s acting correctly to begin with. That only works when they believe they’re in the right. If a medieval brigand stopped you to relieve you of your coin purse he wouldn’t first demand that you tell him that he’s doing the right thing. He doesn’t care about your blessings or your curses.
Still, I’m filing this in the section on things that Rand has got right because I’m unsure how to evaluate it just yet. The trouble is that this only applies so long as the moralist oppressor believes (however incorrectly) that he’s doing the right thing. The woke moralist, asking you to try to be less white, may be stymied by you refusing to accept his premises. The woke brigand knows he’s in it for the loot, and he’ll use the woke cant to deprive you of your wallet unconcerned with how you may feel about it. The woke moralist may be confounded with the question “how is it, if I’m benefiting from systemic power structures, that in this instance I’m standing in front of you awaiting your justice?” To the woke brigand the question is irrelevant; he has to actually care about justice before an appeal to justice has any meaning.
After Rearden’s defense Francisco d’Anconia tells him that, three generations ago such a speech might have done something. Three generations before justice might have been the question on trial; if society had really degraded to the point which Rand is describing I can’t help but feel that the brigands would have taken over entirely and that Rearden wouldn’t have gotten off so lightly. Still, I’m marking the consent of the victim in Rand’s favor; it’s a useful concept for understanding that kind of villainy.
What Rand Doesn’t Cover
You can see the spots where Rand’s theory has trouble by looking for all the things that she didn’t find space for in a thousand pages of Atlas Shrugged. Building directly over the previous point you never see a brigand who steals through sheer force of arms rather than by pious platitude and government edict. A couple of times, Rand makes the point that her industrialists, being men of reason, must necessarily defeat the mob should it come to violence. This is silly, and that silliness is abundantly on display when Rand includes an actual combat sequence late in the book. The industrialist shoots a guard because the guard couldn’t decide whether to shoot the intruder or lay down his arms. A realistic guard would have shot the intruder, or made a personal value calculation and dropped his weapon. You may speak of vices inherent to the military mindset, but indecision isn’t one of them. Rearden, while still in thrall to the looter’s creed, made plenty of steel. Should we assume then that soldiers couldn’t win battles because of their adherence to a flawed socioeconomic doctrine? (I mean, it took down Ivan Drago in Rocky IV.) But I’m straying from my point.
There’s exactly one point where someone does something genuinely disinterested to help another person. An unnamed reporter helps Cheryl on her wedding day. This is mostly by accident; Rand needed someone for Cheryl to talk to in order to express Cheryl’s joy. A hard-bitten gossip columnist who can see the sorrow to come takes pity on the foolish girl and offers her some small aid. In this Rand falls into the temptation of writing a believable character and betrays her thesis. This reporter was neither living by the looter’s creed nor acting in an industrialist’s self-interest. What then was her motivation?
Rearden’s Remorse
When Rearden first cheated on his wife he breaks his word. Rearden values his word highly, he’ll tell you himself, and the character demonstrates that throughout the book. No matter the difficulties inherent in fulfilling a contract Rearden pulls through. But he never repents for breaking his wedding vow. There’s a sense where his marriage to Lillian was dissolved when Lillian scorned his achievement and traded off the bracelet of Rearden metal for a soon-forgotten diamond. But that’s not good enough; Rearden spends the rest of the book moving mountains to ensure that he makes his business commitments despite the heavier and heavier burdens they place on his Atlas shoulders. Rand correctly excoriates the “I can’t be blamed for circumstances beyond my control” attitude in fulfilling business contracts, but apparently not in wedding contracts. Why then does Rearden ignore his wedding vows?
After their first night together Rearden makes a post-coital speech damning himself for living by his basest desires. Late in the book he repents of that, redeeming the thought by denying the distinction between mind and body. This is half correct. Rearden’s admiration for Dagny, her character, and her achievement comes from the higher things of the mind, and expresses itself in the lower bodily lusts. Physical desire can be generated by a spiritual admiration. The half that’s wrong is the assumption that there’s no other source of desire. The body wants to get drunk; the mind is concerned about the hangover. There is an old Christian heresy that the mind, the spiritual is inherently good and the physical, the body, is inherently evil. Rand rightly rejects this. The opposite assumption which she takes up, that there can be no conflict between the mind and the body, is foolish. Go ahead and eat that entire cake like you want to to find out why.
The Abolition of Managers
Objectivism seems to be a celebration of man’s will, a philosophy built around the notion that achievement is the measure of greatness. Those who dare, who risk, who rely upon their own judgment and who achieve mighty things are to be celebrated. That’s a fine thing, but lurking under that lies the question of what, exactly, they should choose to achieve. A young Francisco d’Anconia wants to outdo all his ancestors in making money with d’Anconia Copper. Hank Rearden spends ten long years perfecting Rearden metal, and intends to make great gobs of money with it. A government man comes by asking to buy the secret; Rearden refuses to sell. “Because it’s mine.” If money honestly earned is the measure of achievement then didn’t Rearden earn whatever he could squeeze out of the public fisc for that metal?[3] He earned it. Lurking under the iron logic of the industrialists we find the Conditioners C.S. Lewis described in The Abolition of Man. Being ruled only by logic they have enslaved themselves to their postulates, postulates grounded only in whim. You cannot argue with Rearden’s “Because it is mine” any more than you could with a toddler refusing to share his chocolate milk with his sister.
This also arises out of Rand’s attempt to harmonize the desires of the mind with the desires of the body. If there can be no conflict between mind and body then there can be no control exerted over irrational, animalistic impulses. Those impulses must necessarily be of the same stuff as the rest of the being. Hank Rearden must desire Dagny Taggart physically because he admires her achievement so. One is left to wonder if he also feels a sexual attraction towards Ken Danagger who does so well at mining coal. But leave that cheap shot aside; the assumption that our basest desires are of the same stuff as our noblest impulses leaves you no reason to prefer the one to the other.
It’s also a pretty lousy description of how people actually act. Isn’t philosophy supposed to describe real people, and be applicable to real problems?[4] This isn’t the only spot where objectivism fails to deliver, and I’ll get to that in a moment. First, a couple of quick quotes about ignoring reality from John Galt’s speech:
[Y]ours is the responsibility of judgement and nothing can help you escape it — no pinch hitter can live your life — that the vilest form of self abasement and self destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle man between your consciousness and your existence.”
And again:
[L]ike a judge impervious to public opinion he may not sacrifice his convictions to the wishes of others, be it the whole of mankind shouting pleas or threats against him.
Or more succinctly, from John Galt in his Gulch:
Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatsoever.
Then, his statement about the nature of guilt:
It is not any crime that you’ve committed that infects your soul with permanent guilt, it is none of your failures, errors or flaws, but the blank-out by which you attempt to evade them — it is not any sort of Original Sin or unknown prenatal deficiency, but the knowledge and fact of your basic default, of suspending your mind, of refusing to think. Fear and guilt are your chronic emotions, and they are real, but they don’t come from the superficial reasons you invent to disguise their cause, not from your ‘selfishness’, weakness or ignorance, but from a real and basic threat to your existence; fear because you have abandoned your weapon of survival, guilt because you know you have done it voluntarily.
I do not so submit the responsibility of judgment to another, and that another includes John Galt. The way you describe guilt Mr. Galt, it simply isn’t so. Forget original sin, forget self-deception; I have personally done evil, I have done it knowingly, and with bad intent. I have then felt guilty about it afterward. I have wished that I hadn’t done so, wished to make up the damage. What Galt is describing isn’t how guilt works. Rand is reasoning about sin like she refuses to reason about humanity; she’s taking the general case and ignoring the particular. A little boy who pushes a little girl down and steals her dolly is sinning, and he should feel guilty for it. This isn’t a failure of reason, a crime against survival, it’s causing hurt for hurt’s sake.
The invocation of self-deception doesn’t help her case either. Rand could say that in a Freudian sense I’m repressing the true causes of my guilt, or that I’m experiencing a false consciousness as a Marxist Leninist might, except that Ayn Rand of all people can’t. Never mind the revulsion she’d feel at siding with the commies, her philosophy doesn’t permit me to ignore the world by submitting my judgment to another. How can I then accept her definition of guilt if my own judgment tells me that it’s wrong? If I were to be an objectivist it would only be by violating the tenets of objectivism. Contradictions can’t exist.
This simple feeling of remorse is missing from the text. Rearden cheated on his wife. Never mind that his wife was an awful human being; the tenets of his own code of morality forbid him to break his word, but he never repented of that. He faced cosmic justice for lying about his affair but never for having the affair to begin with. There are characters who feel guilty; Dr. Stadler and Jim Taggart are ultimately broken by confronting the end result of their personal philosophies, but there’s no Raskolnikov to feel remorse over a crime he committed, no murderer listening to a heartbeat under his floorboards, no one so much as kicking a dog and saying “Gee I wish I hadn’t done that.” Any regret is expressed over what is ultimately an error of knowledge, not a moral error.
I can’t imagine that Rand hasn’t ever had this problem herself. Either she’s — in a technical sense — psychopathic, or she’s suppressing the postulate because it leads to contradictions that invalidate her philosophy. One may only regard compassion as merely a duplicitous wallet grab if one has never needed compassion to begin with.
This unexpectedly brings us all the way back to the opening of this essay, and explains the spots where Rand’s writing loses its adeptness. She uses perfect Mary Sue characters because admitting to any flaw in them offers an implicit refutation of her philosophy. The fight scene at the end is so laughable because she can’t bear to admit to the merest scrap of excellence in anyone who isn’t in her industrialist class. The society in Galt’s Gulch rings false because we know that it’d collapse in a hundred ways the minute the author dictating events looked away. You cannot admit to morally ambiguous characters because doing so disrupts the dualism of the philosophy Rand is trying to present.
In the end, this is where I get off of the train. Rand has made a lot of interesting and useful observations, but she fails to stitch them together into a cohesive philosophy. To get there she has to cheat, gluing things together with uncertain materials. Having spotted the shoddy construction her end philosophy is ultimately not persuasive.
[1] Dagny’s rise through the ranks at Taggart Transcontinental is a little too smooth to be plausible. She’s never denied an intermediate job because the guy in it can’t be fired for incompetence because he’s got connections. Nobody ever resents her rise and stymies her out of bureaucratic spite. I’m willing to give this a pass; Dagny needed to be at the top so that this story could be told.
[2] Money isn’t the only institution that does this. The law ought to as well. It often doesn’t and doesn’t in Rand’s novel, but that’s the fault of the men gaming the system, not the system itself. The judge who rules in favor of a poor man because he hates a rich man is just as corrupt as the judge who takes the rich man’s bribe. Similarly, the government that taxes your money away and offers a fraction of it back to you isn’t doing you any favors even though money ought to be a neutral medium of exchange.
[3] All good conservatives are fidgeting in their seats at this argument. The government has no money of its own; only money that is taken from the taxpayers. Rearden would be selling his metal for money, a part of which was first taken from him. I want to acknowledge the point but move on; Rearden didn’t turn down the sale because selling to the government was illegitimate.
[4] You can stop laughing any time, you know.
Published in Culture
I think you completely misunderstand Eddie Willers. He does survive, and you dismiss his inclusion incorrectly.
If I worked for Elon Musk, who is the closest to an objectivist ideal man alive today, I would be an Eddie Willers. I admire SpaceX and Tesla, etc., and I would very much like to work there and help build them up, but I can’t in any way imagine that I have the talent to do what Elon Musk does.
Eddie Willers is the common man unable to build transcontinental railroads or invent a new metal, but who can see good. He is honest and understands what he is and what he can do. He doesn’t have jealousy for anyone who succeeds by merit.
Ayn Rand does not say that every man must be great. That’s absurd. But those of us that aren’t great can still be honest, can still contribute, can still enjoy the benefits of supporting freedoms that allow great men to do great things.
I like Nietzsche. (Been doing some Nietzsche lately on the The Philosophers in Their Own Words playlist.) I like his efforts to articulate a consistent atheistic naturalism.
He probably does a better job drawing conclusions from materialism than Marx.
Not that I’ve ever read Rand. But closer to Nietzsche than to Marx, right?
All the above is: FWIW.
I was only semi-joking earlier about Zack Snyder. But he has said that he wants to make a Fountainhead movie, though I assume he had to abandon it for lots of reasons. I do legitimately think Rand’s stories work for Snyder’s character style. Because god knows Zack Snyder does not care about normal people in his movies. Like at all.
But it does work. You have to remember that Atlas Shrugged is a novel, and as such it has elements that are meant to make a plot and not a treatise. It’s often described as her treatise of Objectivism, but it’s still a novel.
Also, Ayn Rand is not perfect, no matter how much she might have thought she was perfect. Her cuckolding of her husband is quite shameful, and the manner in which she did it is quite unseemly.
But Rand’s ideas survive petty criticisms such as in the original post here because fundamentally her thesis is correct. Altruism, self-sacrifice, and denial of reality are among the great evils of humanity and our civilization. We can see this everyday in our current world where the progressives weaponize misguided desires not to offend others, or fears of being perceived as being selfish or greedy to keep our own property.
These are the fundamental philosophical problems in our culture. She attacks them head on, and many people recoil against their life’s views being challenged. Many will never accept a challenge to their world view, and will pick at this or that problem with her books and philosophy. Are there problems? Absolutely. But does she get a lot of things right? Yes, and that angers people and makes them afraid. They are afraid to admit that religion is at its root evil. They are afraid to see that collectivism and altrusim at their root are evil.
To truly see our culture and how its premises are flawed, I find it useful to study pre-christian societies. What were their beliefs? What were their values? I find the classical Greeks most useful and interesting. You can see many things the Greeks did that we still do, but you can also see many things they don’t do that we now do. For instance, the Greeks saw their gods as powerful, but not perfect. In fact, from what I can see, the Greek gods demonstrate what people would be like were they not constrained by mortality: They’d be vain, petty, bickering busy bodies, interfering in the lives of men who by their mortality are forced to have morals and responsibilities.
Ayn Rand is rejected because she rejects our cultural philosophy, not because her views are wrong but because most people aren’t able to see the flaws that we are steeped in. A fish doesn’t know he’s wet, and can’t tell that water in the next lake it cleaner.
Ayn Rand’s Objectivism is not a perfect system, and her books are not a perfect reflection of Objectivism. Atlas Shrugged is an attempt to shock the fish out of their dirty lake, and see their wetness. She presents a renewed way to understand existence more realistically.
Your assertion is facile and unsupported. Atheism does not lead to communism any more than religion does. Communists eliminate religion only for the purpose of supplanting it with their own version of baseless beliefs. They exploit the human tendency to believe in mystical forces. Communists embraced mystical Lysenkoism. Atheist capitalists didn’t.
Then he would do a terrible job with Rand’s works.
There is really nothing wrong with the immanetizing of the eschaton – (wow, I had to look up both words) – as long as the society does not allow for that moral struggle to be codified inside its laws, such that the tiniest vice is perceived as being as important to remedy as the largest flaw.
Of course, that is exactly what occurs inside a communist society.
It also has occurred inside our society as well. These days, much of what passes for a health policy is not driven by the needs of the patient to be offered the most practical method of care, but by a need for the practitioner and/or the clinic and hospital to remain as free as possible from liability. So the overall good, the health of the patient, has been supplanted by the main principal who desires to be totally free from liability.
The same thing has occurred inside our environmental and consumer laws. While it made sense back in the early 20th Century’s days of tainted canned meat being sold to the US Army for a governmental agency to insist on inspection, things have really gotten out of hand.
I read with great dismay about a band of annual picnickers who had their entire store of pot luck foods taken away from them by local health officials, since the picnic was seen by officialdom as a public venue and the food being offered was coming from private kitchens and gardens, none of which had been inspected. (This happened in Nevada circa 2014.)
It’s easy to see people who, claiming to be good, are actually bad. It’s not always easy to see why that is, and what makes them bad. I’ll give Rand a great deal of credit for that. I brought up trans pronouns near the top of the post because I don’t think it would have taken Rand more than a moment to see through that scam. I’ve no doubt that I’ll be able to see at a glance how a number of other scams work, scams dependent on weaponized compassion and such. In that sense I’ll be better for having read this book. It is a much, much harder task to start with those two insights and develop a coherent philosophy of what is the good, to demonstrate to man a better way to live his life.
But yeah, having read other’s takedowns of Soviet thought and propaganda helps me to understand where Rand is coming from when she does the same. When Stadler’s superweapon is unveiled a speaker declares that the existence of such a weapon ought to be of great comfort to the mothers of America, as no one would dare to invade a country who had such a weapon at their disposal. Knowing that that’s exactly the kind of bull plop you’d find on the pages of Pravda helps you understand that line, and why it’s there.
I’ve never read much of Nietzsche, so I can’t compare or contrast them effectively. I recall that Rand didn’t think highly of him at all. I suspect I wouldn’t either, which is why I never bothered to read him. My understanding is that Rand believed that the movement of mostly 19th and early 20th century German philosophers were horrible and their errors made Nazi Germany and Leninist communism possible by teaching people that they are subordinate to the state and owed an allegiance to society. Rand rejected those sentiments.
My opinion is that philosophy is the most important area of human study, and it should NEVER be left to people who call themselves philosophers. I have yet to read one that didn’t have severe flaws. Aristotle thought what we name something defines what it is. Plato thought societies can be perfected by philosophers being in charge. Descartes was a complete bozo whenever he departed from mathematics (“I think, therefore I am” and his entire “Meditations on First Philosophy” is moronic).
Philosophy is important, but not all that difficult. Philosophers have tried to have a “great conversation” over the millenia and seem to want to make everything more and more obscure as they write in a form of intellectual onanism.
A is A. Right and wrong are absolutes. Wanting something to be true, even if perceived as a positive thing, does not make it true. I exist for the benefit of no one but myself, but I can value others and appreciate their prosperity even if I don’t prosper.
Long before I had any inkling I would ever leave the ranks of the “Progressives,” I was given a book of essays written by Ayn Rand. The essay that appealed the most to me was her essay on education.
Much of what she stated in the essay is contained in this interview of the author back in 1964. The basic thoughts she held about education are covered in the first ten minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PKAATQmW1Y
It’s a sound first approximation. I think it gets into tautological territory when you try to universalize it. The mother who dies saving her kids values her kids’ lives more than her own. You can phrase that as self interest; that she’s evaluated the happiness she gets from her kids being safe higher than the happiness she gets from extending her own lifespan, but I think that fails the definition; her kids are not her self.
A decade and a half back I tried reading We the Living, which one I picked primarily because it was the thinnest of Rand’s books on the library shelf. I dropped it about a hundred pages in when I realized that the main plot was a love triangle, and I hated all the characters. I was expecting much the same when I finally picked up Atlas Shrugged, and was pleased that I didn’t end up disliking the characters or the overall plot.
How about the self interest of simple biological imperative? Perpetuate your line.
Didn’t see ’em, and I probably won’t. I don’t sit down to watch many movies these days, and these aren’t high on my list of ones I’d want to go out and see.
I’ve never read it, but I expect the movies are superior in one respect: Galt’s monologue was only about five minutes.
One doesn’t “go out” to see movies much any more, especially movies that first came out at least 7 years ago (Part III).
Well, not only to them–I agree on that at least.
First I’ve heard of it.
Not really.
An interesting conclusion, to be sure. Do you have a premise for it?
Largely correct.
Fair enough, but I do think that you can have that value and it’s not included in what I would call altruism, though others might. Altruism, as least as understood by Rand, would be closer to sacrificing yourself or your property to something because it doesn’t have value to you.
oooh, ooooh … make him do the logic. I wanna see him do the logic!
I did do the proof in college. Descartes drafted several “proofs” that god exists in Meditations on First Philosophy. Each proof was logically flawed in an obvious way. I can’t be bothered to dig it out, I don’t think I kept it, either, but the refutation of his “proofs” of god’s existence is absurdly easy, and if they were correct they would have been trumpeted everywhere since. I concluded that if Descarte, who clearly knows math and logic, were so dissembling as to present these “proofs” as serious, then we should be very wary to accept his word on anything. If you want to believe in a god, that’s on you and you have the right to think as you wish, but no one should, and no one has taken his proofs to be correct.
Also, as you read his Meditations on First Philosophy and Principles of Philosophy, you might get the distinct impression that he’s been living large off the Tsar’s sponsorship and that he had to write something, anything, to pay for his keep. As he contemplates whether we can know anything, he concludes that we can’t know anything. That absurd conclusion being unsatisfactory, he decides to just do whatever he wanted and posited “cogito ergo sum.”
I don’t know about you, René, but I exist whether you want to make me an unprovable assumption or not. If you want “proof,” I’ll gladly poke you with a stick.
We don’t exist because we think. We exist, whether we perceive anything. A table doesn’t think, it is. Rene got famous with that cutesy quote of nonsense, but to anyone thinking for themselves, it quickly is revealed as stupid. Philosophy is too important to be abandoned or left in the care of self-important “philosophers.”
Well, that’s fine. There are problems with some of his arguments for sure. Even if the arguments themselves worked, there’d still be the issue of the Cartesian Circle.
(Blah, blah, blah. I beat up Descartes too. Here. And here. Blah, blah, blah.)
[Sigh.]
You think there is anyone who accepts Descartes’ word on anything? You think even Descartes would recommend that?
You think a person who made one or more mistakes couldn’t possibly have also gotten something else right?
That’s how philosophy works. Sheesh. That’s how life works. That’s how politicians work. That’s how my parents worked. My kids will probably say that about me.
At the end of the Discourse, he actually asks for money to do more scientific experiments!
Yeah, this shows you don’t understand what he’s up to at all. Just to start somewhere, Descartes never says we cannot know anything. And, to continue somewhere, the point of cogito, ergo sum is not that thinking makes existence; it’s that thinking proves existence.
Where Martin Luther King Jr meets Ayn Rand:
“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity” Martin Luther King, Jr.
But it doesn’t “prove” existence by his own terms. He takes it as an assumption, not a proof. He reaches beyond what he thinks can be reliably proven and just makes this assumption. It’s unnecessary and illogical.
I see from your videos that you agree completely with me on my assessment of Descarte’s assumptions. I guess where we differ is I don’t suffer a fool’s bad logic as a basis for any philosophy. If he has to lie to himself to build assumptions for his philosophical framework, then why should we grant anything to the rest of his philosophy?
Philosophers have been trying for a very long time to make their understanding of the universe complicated without knowing why it is complicated. It is intellectual onanism that we have grown to no longer need. Metaphysics and ontology have long been supplanted by physics and we need not invent assumptions and false proofs to proceed with our understanding of existence. I don’t think for a minute that modern physicists have even remotely begun to understand existence, but their approach is at least more viable than dreamy philosophers who seem preoccupied with the occult or with the idea that we can’t know if we exist.
We have no need to ponder whether we exist. We know we do and always have known. I equate “cogito ergo sum” and that philosophical discussion with shamans and priests from thousands of years ago trying to categorize matter into earth, wind, fire, and water; or perhaps phlegmatic, choleric, sanguine and melancholic. We are past that type of primitivism and the only people interested in a philosophic debate about the nature of existence are philosophers.
We exist, and the proof is in the stars, light waves, particles, atoms, etc.
What philosophy is still useful in is helping to come to a proper understanding of right and wrong, but that appears from what I’ve seen (perhaps I’m wrong) to be of little interest and has been abandoned to priests and other shamans.
One philosopher, who is unique, but I admit is not intellectually on par with the likes of Aristotle or perhaps even Descartes, that does address ethics squarely, is Ayn Rand. She has introduced a modern look at ethics that escapes from the shamans and priests and recognizes that there are objective ways to determine morality without reference to magic. Her attempts need more rigorous treatment, but it’s a good start.
I’m lost. I have no idea what objection to Descartes you’re making here.
Oh, good. That looks promising. (But I wouldn’t dare comment further without knowing more of what you think.)
No one I have ever heard of–other than Descartes–used his foundations for knowledge as the basis for any philosophy.
Why should we grant anything to the rest of his philosophy? Because the rest of his philosophy is sometimes correct. Why else?
[Sigh.]
No objection there! Had I world enough and time, I would like to study it carefully myself.
That’s good. So why did Descartes? It kind of makes him look like he wasted his time . . . :)
Because–despite being a genius (or . . . because he was a genius)–he made a rookie mistake while doing something grand.
Fair enough.
Good.
Skyler you make an interesting argument.
But philosophy does entrain the mind to consider things in a way that wires the individual’s brain to creatively critically consider the various avenues a problem’s solution might entail. I don’t think the problem in our society is that we are too philosophical, but rather that we as students are taught to notice who is the top authority in any given field, & never concern ourselves with how that person arrived at his knowledge and is that knowledge correct or flawed?
Insofar as she’s diagnosing the ill of people using a feigned altruism to gain power over others she’s correct. But she appears to go further than that, to claim that there exists no such thing as real altruism, no genuinely selfless acts. That just isn’t so. The only way to sustain that position is to either expand the definition of self-interest such that in includes any possible value calculation that a man might make, or to accuse one and all of having hidden motivations. Speaking of which;
This is why I quoted all that about not submitting one’s judgement to another in the post. You want to tell me that I’m only holding to religion because I’m afraid to admit that it’s false, then you have to demonstrate to me that the fear exists and that the religion is false, otherwise you’re just another prophet looking for a flock to shear. A mystic appealing to mysteries buried deep in the psyche which we can’t see but you insist are there.