Does Ayn Rand piss you off?

[duonganh]

Recently I finished We the Living which I choose to read out of my love for Russian history not because it was wrote by Ayn Rand but what I don't seem to get is why people are so polarized over her other works. I've read Anthem which from what I've seen in some reviews is a microcosm of her larger works so of course I can't say I've read her two main novels but what I don't understand is how her work or at least her philosphy expressed through her work makes readers love or hate her. Other authors and yes maybe to a lesser extent express their own personal philosophy through their works but they don't get nearly the same reaction.

I don't want to get anyone going by comparing her to better authors but for example an atheist can appreciate the Brothers Karamazov and not mind the sections featuring the Elder Zosima but say someone who is not in complete agreement with Rand reads a one hundred page dystopian novella she wrote gets completely irriated, why?

[Ecurb]

I think Ayn Rand irritates people as a cult figure more than as a novelist. Decades after her death, Ayn Rand's cult still exists (although its influence has waned). Paul Ryan -- speaker of the House -- recently lauded her philosophy and influence. In addition, by naming her philosophy "Objectivism", Rand tried to suggest that it was somehow more objective than other world views. It isn't. Compare this to "Scientology". Scientology is no more scientific than Objectivism is objective, and if some adherents considered L. Ron Hubbard to be a great novelist, his novels would doubtless meet with some of the same objections as Rand's.

Rand's philosophy is essentially narcissistic and egotistic. Her novels appeal to young readers (teenagers are often narcissistic and egotistic). But it is the fact that many readers still consider her a serious novelist and philosopher that irritates others. If fans of "The Di Vinci Code" took the historical theories of that novel seriously, it would met with some of the same objections.

[kev67]

I sometimes wonder whether I should read some Ayn Rand to balance my left-leaning social novels and economics books. However her books are rather long.

[YesNo]

I watched the movies (Atlas Shrugged?) and did not particularly like the movies. The philosophical ideas made sense in the context they were presented, but I didn't like the story nor the way the movies presented it.

I have seen Rand's books in a left-wing bookstore under the heading "Know Thy Enemy" which I thought was ridiculous, but the bookstore probably needed to make some sales besides selling coffee.

Rand doesn't seem to be aware of socionomics ideas, that is a view of politics and economics in terms of Elliott Waves. That would be a reason for me to ignore her writing, which implies neither love or hate.

[Red Terror]

Prominent Literary critic Harold Bloom, Ph.D. (Yale) notes:


“Ayn Rand was a writer of no value whatsoever, whether aesthetic or intellectual. The Tea Party deserves her, but the rest of us do not. It is not less than obscene that any educational institution that relies even in part on public funds should ask students to consider her work. We are threatened these days by vicious mindlessness and this is one of its manifestations.”

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/27/ayn-rand-the-tea-partys-miscast-matriarch/

February 27, 2012


"Ayn Rand: The Tea Party’s Miscast Matriarch"


by Pam Martens

Prominent literary critic Harold Bloom lambasts the Tea Party true believers as a bunch of modern day Nazis. He also castigates Ayn Rand whose "moral" philosophy is that of a 5-year old child. In any case the Tea Party's best days are behind them.


Quotes & Highlights:



One must read, try to possess by memory, and be possessed by the very best that has been imagined, cognitively apprehended and expressed powerfully. Thinking clearly and well is based upon memory. Unless you have read and absorbed the best that can be read and absorbed, you will not think clearly or well, and democracy will not survive.


We have this horrible contemporary phenomenon in the Tea Party – a real menace not only to America but to the world. Because if it goes on like this, they will destroy our economy and they will destroy America. They have no democratic vision, and I don't mean with a capital “D”, I mean with a small “d”. They frighten me. They're like the early followers of Adolf Hitler, and I'm willing to be quoted on that. They are a sickening phenomenon. That is because they have not read deeply and widely enough. But then maybe they’re not to blame, because American education – even in elite universities – has become a scandal in my opinion. It has committed suicide.


http://fivebooks.com/interview/harold-bloom-on-literary-criticism/?utm_expid=30175549-0.sAau5xAZR_uQq_U9zw1Xgw.0&utm_referrer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.revleft.com%2Fvb%2Ft hreads%2F195712-Yale-Literary-Professor-Condemns-The-Illiterate-Tea-Party


We live, too, in the age of the Tea Party, a movement that cherishes stupidity and zealotry and hates thinking, reading, and teaching. If these people had their way, we’d be done with teaching. It shows the weak-mindedness that has descended upon America, the proclivity for nonsense and political hatred, the disrespect for literature, history, and serious thinking. There is only one remedy to the current predicament, and that is to encourage people to think independently. And that, in turn, begins with reading. People need to remember the best that has been said and thought in the past. That is the starting point, and that is the path, out of our current appalling situation.


http://harpers.org/blog/2011/08/the-anatomy-of-influence-six-questions-for-harold-bloom/


“It all started with that absolute dreadful creature Ronald Reagan,” he continues. “It was Reagan who came along and persuaded the whole nation that it was all right to be selfish, that it was an American virtue to be selfish. And all of these Tea Party-ites wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t been for Reagan as their trailblazer. Incredible, the cigar-store Indian George W. Bush…the worst president in American history. The more-than-outrageous, the insufferable Donald Trump in today’s newspaper describes Obama as the worst president in American history. I’ll tell you what’s scary. Just one step beyond, and it will be early Nazi Germany. If the Tea Party, which already has a huge majority in the House, should also capture the Senate, you might start seeing sanctioned violence.” He also decries that group’s “racism, endless racism,” noting members of it have depicted the President of the United States as a chimpanzee.


http://wwd.com/eye/people/the-full-bloom-3592315/

Here is Bloom's quote as it appears on freedomfest.com:

“It is scary to reread the final volume of Gibbon these days because the fate of the Roman Empire seems to continue even now. We have approached bankruptcy, foreign wars we cannot pay for, and defrauded our urban and rural poor. We have no Emerson or Whitman among us.”


The full quotation includes sentiments at odds with libertarian and Tea Party views. Bloom is particularly angered by the exclusion of a mention of George W. Bush and his views on "plutocracy, oligarchy, and mounting theocracy" -- which is what he says libertarians are all about (italics ours to show excised text):


"It is scary to reread the final volume of Gibbon these days because the fate of the Roman Empire seems an outline that the imperial presidency of George W. Bush retraced and that continues even now. We have approached bankruptcy, fought wars we cannot pay for, and defrauded our urban and rural poor. Our troops include felons, and mercenaries of many nations are among our ‘contractors,’ fighting on their own rules or none at all. Dark influences from the American past congregate among us still. If we are a democracy, what are we to make of the palpable elements of plutocracy, oligarchy, and mounting theocracy that rule our state? How do we address the self-inflicted catastrophes that devastate our natural environment? So large is our malaise that no single writer can encompass it. We have no Emerson or Whitman among us.”

Those are not the words of a man who believes free markets, no taxes and deregulation can save us. Bloom says he is "absolutely outraged by what they've done with that quotation. I'm a lifelong liberal. These people in my view are liars, cultural illiterates and in fact fascists. The Tea Party is simply the American fascist party. I can't think of two people I despise more than Rand Paul and Grover Norquist."

http://www.alternet.org/story/73720/harold_bloom%3A_'what_we_are_seeing_is_the_fall_of _america'


This is where the real danger lies, he says:

"Democracy, whether in Sweden or the United States, depends on the voter's capacity to think. If you have read the best of what has been thought and said, then your cognition and understanding is on a much higher level than if you have read Harry Potter or Stephen King. So what this decline into half-literature and mediocre media really means is de facto a self-destruction of democracy."

[duke-one]

Yeah; everyone else is a Nazi unless they think the way you want them to. Dissent not allowed. I like Ayn Rand's major works, fantasy to be sure but exciting and worth the time to read. Also worth noting; no pile of dead bodies from her ideas unlike Lenin etc. KDM

[Red Terror]

Yeah; everyone else is a Nazi unless they think the way you want them to. Dissent not allowed. I like Ayn Rand's major works, fantasy to be sure but exciting and worth the time to read. Also worth noting; no pile of dead bodies from her ideas unlike Lenin etc. KDM

Piles of dead bodies by Lenin, huh? During the 1st year of the Russian Revolution Russia was invaded by 14 foreign armies including the USA, UK, France, Japan et al and it was in the middle of a civil war. If you were the leader of Russia you would have presided over peace and idyllic era of good feelings, huh???

[duke-one]

Even without outside interference, many dead, and not to ever be forgotten quite a few dead under Stalin (as in millions). Too bad the Bolsheviks won. Rand grew up under the reds and of course that greatly affected her.

[Red Terror]

Even without outside interference, many dead, and not to ever be forgotten quite a few dead under Stalin (as in millions). Too bad the Bolsheviks won. Rand grew up under the reds and of course that greatly affected her.

The American civil war had no outside interference and yet 600,000 dead and the blacks in the post-bellum south lived under conditions similar to slavery for many decades. Needless to say, communism took root in Russia in the middle of W.W.I. when the "advanced capitalist nations" of the world fought each other over colonies, loot, plunder, and rapine.


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_intervention_in_the_Russian_Civil_War

[duke-one]

1) There was outside interference in our civil war, France and Spain in some ways, not sure of the details. 2) USSR did not "loot, plunder etc? Ask Eastern European countries. 3) Stalin was partners with Hitler at the beginning of WW2 gleefully dividing up Poland & it's neighbours, murdering anyone in the way. Nice, no? The USSR would have gone away without US support after that relationship turned around.

[YesNo]

If Rand was reacting to Soviet communism that she personally experienced that might explain some of her views. However, I still think a perspective using Elliott Waves is the only one worth spending time on. Socionomically I expect negative social mood changes to occur once the market top is in which would not be good for either communism or capitalism.

[Red Terror]

1) There was outside interference in our civil war, France and Spain in some ways, not sure of the details. 2) USSR did not "loot, plunder etc? Ask Eastern European countries. 3) Stalin was partners with Hitler at the beginning of WW2 gleefully dividing up Poland & it's neighbours, murdering anyone in the way. Nice, no? The USSR would have gone away without US support after that relationship turned around.

1) You say there was "outside interference" in our civil war but claim to be "not sure of the details" --- that does not look like convincing evidence to me!
The truth is there was no outside interference in our civil war. Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward bluntly told the British and the Europeans to stay away. Besides the abolitionist movement in Britain was too powerful to allow British government to support the Confederacy. France under Napoleon III did intervene in Mexico, a foreign country, which has never been part of the United States.

2) USSR did not loot and plunder Eastern Europe. Eastern Germany -- the smaller, poorer part of Germany which was occupied by the Soviets was forced to pay reparations for all the Soviet death and destruction. Very little was spirited away as most of East Germany was destroyed. As a matter of fact, before the war ended an agreement was made between the allies that the USSR would receive reparations from West Germany too but this was not allowed. Very little reparations came from West Germany to the Soviet Union. It was the USA, Britain, and France which plundered West Germany and spirited away war criminals like Klaus Barbie and Reinhard Gehlen, the former of which into Latin America so he could make that part of the world safe for those who own it. In fact, the communists left the nations of Eastern Europe in a better condition than they found them. The only democracy in Eastern Europe was Czechoslovakia. All the others were tyrannies and fascists.

3) Stalin, as bad as he was, was not a partner with Hitler. He had been trying to get the nations of Europe to side with him in trying to contain Hitler but those nations rebuffed all his efforts at containment. In desperation he signed a non-aggression treaty with Hitler. And part of Poland had been part of Russia in years past. I ask you this when Reagan signed a treaty with Gorbachev does that mean he is a partner with Gorbachev???

You need to read Killing Hope by William Blum, The Sword and the Dollar by Michael Parenti and, for good measure, Blackshirts and Reds also by Parenti.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhard_Gehlen


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Barbie

This film won the 1988 Academy Award for Best Documentary as well as the FIPRESCI Award at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%B4tel_Terminus:_The_Life_and_Times_of_Klaus_B arbie

__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ ______________________________________________

Of course it is not possible for the people of an un-bombed, un-invaded nation really to understand what happened to the Russians. The Nazis and their allies occupied Soviet territory in which 88,000,000 people had lived. They destroyed, completely or partially, fifteen large cities, 1,710 towns, and 70,000 villages. They burned or demolished 6,000,000 buildings and deprived 25,000,000 people of shelter.

They demolished 31,850 industrial enterprises, 65,000 kilometers of railway track and 4,100 railway stations; 36,000 postal, telegraph and telephone offices; 56,000 miles of main highway, 90,000 bridges and 10,000 power stations. The Germans ruined 1,135 coal mines and 3,000 oil wells, carrying off to Germany 14,000 steam boilers, 1,400 turbines and 11,300 electric generators.

Any reflection on these figures by American city dwellers will undermine the idea that Russia can have no motive in the world except aggression. Farm people, too, will see another possibility when they think of the meaning of 98,000 collective farms and 2,890 machine and tractor stations sacked and the following numbers of livestock slaughtered by the Germans or carried away by them: 7,000,000 horses, 17,000,000 cattle, 20,000,000 hogs, 27,000,000 sheep and goats, 110,000,000 poultry. What would the American countryside be like if this kind of scourge had passed over it? And what feelings would be left behind?

The Germans and their satellites were no more tender with Soviet cultural institutions. They looted and destroyed 40,000 hospitals and medical centers, 84,000 schools and colleges, and 43,000 public libraries with 110,000,000 volumes. Some 44,000 theaters were destroyed, and 427 museums. Even the churches did not escape, more than 2,800 being wrecked.

In this country these figures do not burn holes in the page, but in Russia what they represent has been burned so deeply into the minds of the people that generations of safe living would be required even partially to eradicate them. There are between Nashville and Atlanta some people who still feel deeply about what General Sherman did on his march to the sea nearly a hundred years ago. What would our feelings be if the United States had been ravaged, as Russia was, from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, with 15,000,000 people killed, twice as many made homeless, and 60,000,000 treated to every degrading and brutalizing experience that the fascist mind could invent? Only then could we really know how the Russians feel about their security from future attack through East Europe.


The Rule of Fear and Hindsight in World Politics D. F. Fleming

The Western Political Quarterly

Vol. 3, No. 4 (Dec., 1950), pp. 528-537

Published by: University of Utah on behalf of the Western Political Science Association

http://www.jstor.org/stable/442512?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

[Ayurnersub]

I can see why people get irritated or upset with Rand due to her views, but I see it as an different perspective to learn from.

[YesNo]

It occurred to me that I don't really know what views Rand had. What were her controversial views? I've only seen the movie.

[Red Terror]

It occurred to me that I don't really know what views Rand had. What were her controversial views? I've only seen the movie.

Ayn Rand, the selfishness guru who turned the emulation of two-year olds into a philosophy of life. That is her philosophy in a nutshell.

[WyattGwyon]

Some people get pissed with Rand because of the writing: Atlas Shrugged is full of cardboard characters who all believe exactly the same thing and express it in the same way, all echoes of the same boring voice. And they all give long speeches. Droning on and on. The heroine of the tale goes through a series of these men, dumping each as a more philosophically perfect male emerges. Finally she finds the ultimate alpha male hero, who throws her on a sack in a railroad tunnel and gives her the best 20 seconds of sex she has ever had. (Most of Rand's sex scenes are rape fantasies.) And the cliches … geeezuss, the cliches.

Yes/No says:
"I have seen Rand's books in a left-wing bookstore under the heading "Know Thy Enemy" which I thought was ridiculous, but the bookstore probably needed to make some sales besides selling coffee."

One bookstore in Seattle (at least) got it right: They put Atlas Shrugged under science fiction.

[YesNo]

I agree about the cardboard characters. The movie did seem like science fiction with that plane that went into some hidden territory screened by something so the government couldn't find it. I don't remember much of the plot.

She may be a "selfishness guru" and she may have thought of herself like that for all I know. Again, just based on the movies, the message seems to be one of individualism as opposed to a Big Brother collective of individuals. So it would be a capitalism/communism dichotomy. Both capitalism and communism believe in selfish individuals. One side wants to let them do what they want and the other side wants to institutionalize them as consumers and producers.

[ennison]

What a lot of apologistic testes. Too far gone for help there or for discussion. Reminds me why I bggrd off.

[desiresjab]

Not a great writer, but she does seem to be always writing from an organized stance. She knows who she is and what she believes. Superior talent will always out, and eventually she must be forgotten as a minor writer of the era. She sure made some waves until then, for someone without the high talent, that is.

[hellsapoppin]

Even without outside interference, many dead, and not to ever be forgotten quite a few dead under Stalin (as in millions). Too bad the Bolsheviks won. Rand grew up under the reds and of course that greatly affected her.




It should come as no surprise that the Bolsheviks won since their efforts were financed by Republican Wall Street:


https://www.voltairenet.org/IMG/pdf/Sutton_Wall_Street_and_the_bolshevik_revolution-5.pdf



Author Antony Sutton was a conservative.

[hellsapoppin]

Quote: "The heroine of the tale goes through a series of these men, dumping each as a more philosophically perfect male emerges."



Rand was a fornicator who engaged in perverse sex with multiple young men. This drove her husband (a Catholic who would not or could not divorce) to drinking and ultimately took his life. Rand was also a political hypocrite in that while she condemned all forms of welfare, she was a welfare recipient who took government money under her married name so as to hide her political hypocrisy.

[McBickle]

The quick answer is that people do not like because her insistence that if you do not strive to be your absolute best for yourself then you're just taking up space. This really rustles the collectivists jimmies.

Personally I really enjoyed 'Atlas Shrugged' and consider it one of the best fictions written on self-determination and metapolitics. I can't think of any other contemporary authors that had a voice quite like hers. She may have in someway inspired a lot of the economic growth of the 1950s. The more her communist critics slander her the more I like her to be honest.

[Ecurb]

The quick answer is that people do not like because her insistence that if you do not strive to be your absolute best for yourself then you're just taking up space. This really rustles the collectivists jimmies.

Personally I really enjoyed 'Atlas Shrugged' and consider it one of the best fictions written on self-determination and metapolitics. I can't think of any other contemporary authors that had a voice quite like hers. She may have in someway inspired a lot of the economic growth of the 1950s. The more her communist critics slander her the more I like her to be honest.

Hmm. Perhaps the simplistic, ill-mannered, jingoistic, ungrammatical and insulting opinions of Ayn's acolytes are even more annoying than Ayn is. I'm glad McBickle is confident that he knows why LitNetters don't like Rand. That absolves him from reading this thread and allows him to ignore the reasons stated here.

[spikepipsqueak]

Yes. Yes she does.

I first read The Fountainhead at an age when I was uncritical of texts and unknowledgeable of the ideological segregations within politics.

What my young mind took away from it was a man creating things both beautiful and practical under adverse conditions. The circumstances of my upbringing enabled me to gloss over the emotionally perverse personal events which trouble me now, and I was just confused by the sabotage and hatred of the critic character (Lester?) for Howard Ruark.

Second reading, somewhat older, though still confused and annoyed by rhetoric which seemed to suggest a respect for the greatness and engenuity of Man but also seemed to be happy to let people fall by the wayside in adversity and for all that potential to go to waste. This differs from my own perspective, likely due to living in Australia, where such an attitude wasn't popular even amongst the right wing, when I was growing up. The same seems not to be true in the US.

I've loaned my copy to a friend, which means I'll never see it again, but perhaps it's time to reread it on the basis of another 45 years experience and education.

[hellsapoppin]

an extract from wiki which addresses Rand's criticism of Jesus:


''Ayn Rand
Novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand denounced the altruist recipe that Jesus passed down to his pupils, and with it the idea of vicarious redemption. She thought that not even Christians, who think of Jesus in the highest possible terms, shouldn't feel outraged by the notion of sacrificing virtue to vice.[24] Not surprisingly, her understanding of love as a consequence of the rational mind looking after embodied values attributes evil to the ideas Jesus is most famous for. Consider the following excerpt from a 1959 interview conducted by Mike Wallace:

Wallace: Christ, every important moral leader in man's history, has taught us that we should love one another. Why then is this kind of love in your mind immoral?
Rand: It is immoral if it is a love placed above oneself. It is more than immoral, it's impossible. Because when you are asked to love everybody indiscriminately. That is to love people without any standard. To love them regardless of whether they have any value or virtue, you are asked to love nobody.[25]

Notwithstanding disagreements over the value of faith and the existence of an afterlife, Rand saw Jesus' insistence on procuring the eternal happiness of individuals as confirmation of the moral confusion and inconsistency in which much of religious ethics operates, including Christian altruism.[26]

In For the New Intellectual, Rand further accuses Judeo-Christian tenets such as the doctrine of original sin for their conspicuous immorality. "The evils for which they damn him [man] are reason, morality, creativeness, joy — all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man’s fall is designed to explain and condemn. They call it a morality of mercy and a doctrine of love for man." And proceeds to charge religious leaders with fostering a death cult: "No, they say, they do not preach that man is evil, the evil is only that alien object: his body. No, they say, they do not wish to kill him, they only wish to make him lose his body."[27]''



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Jesus#Ayn_Rand




There is a great irony to all this as right wingers proclaim themselves to be "moral Christians" who adhere to and promote Christian {sic} values of the highest morality. As everyone knows, Rand was a materialist, pervert, serial adulterer, welfare receiving spendthrift, and antichrist.

[WyattGwyon]

I heard summaries of the Black Panther movie on NPR a couple days ago. It amused me to find that its setting in a hidden utopia powered by an inexhaustible energy source mirrors the capitalist utopia of Rand's Atlas Shrugged, except hers was in Colorado, not Africa.