People’s State of Mexico: We just nationalized the railroads!
Dagny Taggert: Told you so.
Railroad Association: We’re going to create regional monopolies, but NOT to jack up our prices and gouge people, but because we are commies!
Disbelieving World: Railroad men are commies?
Ayn Rand: Yes!
Disbelieving World: I have no response to that.
Continue reading Atlas Shrugged EXECUTIVE Summary, Chapter 4
Evil Commie Business Cabal Chorus: Mexico need railroads that go from nothing to nowhere! Because reasons!
Dagny Taggart: I’m so proud that my ancestor didn’t take gubmint money! He never profited through force or fraud . . . except that time he killed a congressman, and that other time he threw a dude down some stairs! He only ever earned his money, though! He didn’t force anything!
Kit Bradley: C’mon! You’re not even making sense inside the same damn paragraph, Ayn!
Ayn Rand: INDUSTRY IS GREAT! Smokestacks, fuck, yeah!
Hank Reardon: Hi, I’m Hank Reardon! I’m thin and tall! I was just sexily brooding while watching metal being poured, and this makes me happy! Yay!
Lillian Reardon: Why weren’t you at dinner? You’d said you’d come.
Hank: You’re pretty, except your eyes are vacant! I was working! Yay! Working makes me happy!
Lillian: You said you’d be here.
Hank: Everyone should be happy because I’m happy! Waaaaaa! I don’t care that I disrespected your efforts and our friends and family by saying one thing and doing another! Waaaa! Can’t you see how much better I am than you! Waaaaa! But now I’m happy because I’m smarter than you! Yay!
Lillian: But you said you’d be here. And I think that psychologists call this a “mixed state” . . .
Hank: Waaaa! Now I’m not happy because you’re all worthless! Waaaa! I’m not responsible for keeping my word to you because you’re worthless! Waaaa! Good thing that soon I’ll meet some thin girl with nice legs and have rough sex with her because our IDEAS love each other! Yay!
Lillian: I’m not sure you know how sex works.
Philip: Who is John Galt?
Dagny Taggert: Hi! I’m Dagny and I have great legs and stormy gray eyes!
James Taggert: I don’t care if the train line fails because we’ve got to HELP PEOPLE. (<- things said by no railroadman in the history of railroadmen)
Dagny: I ordered rails from the OH-SO-DREAMY Hank Reardon! And they’re not steel! They’re REARDON METAL. Despite being an alloy, it’s cheaper than steel and lasts longer!
James: Uh, that’s not what the scientists say.
Dagny: I FEEL that it’s special! And I saw the Reardon Steel reports and no company would EVER lie about their reports, nope, no way, and scientists are eggheads. Who needs ’em?
Bum: Who is John Galt?
One of the interesting things about Objectivism is that its primary method of transmission is novels – particularly Atlas Shrugged, but to a lesser but still serious extent The Fountainhead.
I don’t like philosophical novels. I don’t mind books with philosophy in them, as a sort of undercurrent, but when the characters start preaching platitudes, my eyes glaze over. So, one of my favorite novels is Dune by Frank Herbert, but by the time we get over to God-Emperor of Dune, I’m just bored. Leto’s long, dull as speeches rehashing a primitive Nietzschean fantasy are uninteresting. So, unsurprisingly, I’m also not fond of Atlas Shrugged and its even longer, even more overtly philosophical speeches. But, philosophically, they’re a trick and nothing more.
Continue reading The trick of philosophical novels is that they’re not philosophy
I just started Ayn Rand Nation: The Hidden Struggle for America’s Soul by Gary Weiss. Thankfully, and I must have know this when I ordered it, it isn’t another biography. It’s about how Rand has gained so much influence in the exact areas that I spoke about, with some bitterness, in my review of Goddess of the Market – business and politics.
Ayn Rand Nation literally starts with Weiss wondering about why the assholes who wrecked the economy in 2008 were so damn selfish. He goes on to say, “Hey, who is this old woman with Alan Greenspan and the President?” So, he’s not going to try to do anything “balanced”: his plan is to chart out why Rand’s philosophy of greed and selfishness, an inversion of normal values (he says Western, but they’re not – altruism is as universal a human value as exists), is so powerful in actual government and economics. Not important to politically impotent libertarians, upset that we have driver’s licenses (true thing), but in one of the two major parties, and in all business.
I suspect we’ll get on fine, this book and I.
I just finished reading Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns.
As I started to read it, I said I was concerned about its attempt to “balance”. Balance usually means the author won’t say what is obvious and true in order to placate someone, somewhere. After reading Goddess of the Market, I feel confirmed in this.
In particular, Burns doesn’t really talk about the American “right”. She sometimes touches on how awful they are, but only with the briefest of touches and the lightest of hands. So, she mentions “Birchers” without discussing the John Birch Society at all – specifically it’s brand of racism and sexism, co-founded by Fred C. Koch, the father of arch-conservative and profoundly racist, sexist assholes Charles and David Koch (names that should be familiar to anyone following current Republican politics). Likewise, the nativist, intensely racist America First organization is mentioned only as a libertarian organization.
Indeed, Burns barely touches on Rand’s intersection with conservative Republican thought. Burns, instead, focuses her attention on Rand’s association with libertarians. This has the effect of creating a straw man, since the libertarians aren’t in any positions of power and the Republicans definitely are. Even if you don’t have any ideological opposition to the Republicans, hiding Rand’s effect on Republican economic conservatives (such as Alan Greenspan or Timothy Geithner) is just a filthy lie.
Continue reading General review of my disappointment in Goddess of the Market by Jennifer Burns
Reading Goddess of the Market, it is calling back to my mind a previous reading of The Virtue of Selfishness: I find Objectivism very mystical.
Reason, to the Objectivist, is an ideal of Platonic dimensions. Objectivists are likely to regard this as an insult, given how they view Plato as the founder of “collectivism”.
A major problem that Objectivists is that reason is exceptionally difficult to define. In practice, when people talk about reason, they mean, “That which I prefer.” The preferred Objectivist slant is to render that A = A – reason is what reason is. While that might have flown in Aristotle’s time, nowadays? That’s just a plain old tautology that disguises the fact you don’t know what you’re saying.
Continue reading Ayn Rand is mystical with her Platonic use of “reason”
As Goddess of the Market reminds me, one of the key features of Atlas Shrugged dystopia is “corrupt businessmen” who buy favors from the government.
Corruption in these neocon philosophies has always struck me as interesting because they largely ignore it. Some of it is the inevitable distancing from reality that goes along with almost any philosophical endeavor. But despite the significance of corruption to real economics, as far as I know there is no theory of corruption.
So Objectivism doesn’t actually explain why a businessman would become “corrupt” other than personal venality . . . even though selfishness is a virtue. Some might see this as a contradiction. I certainly do.
Continue reading A few thoughts on corruption and neocon economics
Moving on with reading Goddess of the Market, it’s even hard to read about Ayn Rand.
One of the things that distinguishes Rand is that she has a philosophy of history. As she sees it, individualists are the engines of creation. Thus, the success of the American enterprise (and, indeed, all human success, though she uses the sexist term “man” constantly, ugh) arises from individual risk-takers as exemplified by our frontiersman past.
Wealth does arise from exploitation and violence. Not from a multi-century conquest of a large part of North America and its riches. Not as arising from the genocide of Native Americans to acquire North America. Not from the exploitation of slave labor.
Continue reading Ayn Rand really stinks as a philosophy of history, as she ignores violence