Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand is mystical with her Platonic use of “reason”

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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.

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Atlas Falls Cycle, Book Reviews, Writing

A few thoughts on corruption and neocon economics

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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.

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Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand really stinks as a philosophy of history, as she ignores violence

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Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand

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.

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Ayn Rand

The Neocon Problem of Violence

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firearm-409000_640Ayn Rand has a problem with violence. I think that all anarcho-capitalist ideologies (of which Objectivism is certainly one) have the problem of violence.

To the extent that anarcho-capitalists defend violence, they do so for purposes of individual and collective self-defense. But that’s not what I’m talking about, here. I’m talking about aggression, particularly violence as an adjunct of theft. I’m talking about, quite literally, legalized banditry.

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Ayn Rand, Book Reviews

Starting Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right

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I’ve started the book Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns, which is a bio of Ayn Rand. The book focuses on her intellectual influence rather than her artistic influence because, as Burns notes, Rand’s artistic influence is non-existent. Mostly, the people who like her books don’t read for pleasure but as a political exercise.

Burns uses new papers largely unavailable to previous researchers to write the book, and she attempts neutrality. As a researcher who is looking to contextualize Rand’s work into Rand’s life, neutrality is desirable. But, in the end, I have trouble getting behind it.

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TV

The dudes making Stranger Things CLEARLY know nothing about ADVANCED Dungeons & Dragons

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I very nearly stopped watching the Netflix show, Stranger Things, in the first three minutes, even though it is the kind of show I like. Government conspiracy horror? Yes, sir and/or ma’am, I’m your guy!

But it started in 1983 and some kids were playing ADVANCED D&D. So, like, the party is attacked by troglodytes and then “the” Demogorgon shows up. Demogorgon is a proper name, fools! And there’s no adventure where the party fights the very low level troglodytes AND DEMOGORGON. Trogs are, like, less than one HD, and Demogorgon is the baddest mo’ fo’ in the AD&D Monster Manual! PLUS, the mini of Demogorgon is CLEARLY a WOTC Aspect of Demogorgon mini from much later than 1983.

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Short Stories, Writing

Wendy’s starts to get rid of humans, Kit Bradley predicts it . . . to his chagrin

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One of my predictions is about to come true: the burger chain, Wendy’s, wants to get rid of it’s human workforce. Apparently, they’ve crunched the numbers and think that paying humans is too costly.

I wrote a story, Robo-Burger, about a burger chain that was purely automated. In the story, the automated burger joint was the tipping point to a revolution.

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Atlas Falls Cycle, Ayn Rand, Writing

Starting some critique about Ayn Rand, oh, yeah, bab-ee, it’s AWN!

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One of the central problems, I feel, with Ayn Rand’s work in general, and Atlas Shrugged in particular, is that she was a very black-and-white thinker.

To her, any “governmental coercion” equals the Stalinist USSR.

Of course, I have hindsight she doesn’t have, but it is also my experience that Objectivist-inspired neocons have a convenient and peculiar way of historical interpretation.

So, after World War II, the United States was as close to a socialist democratic republic that we’d ever get, from the New Deal to the Marshall Plan, Keynesian economics held sway. The highest tax rate was around 95% both here and abroad.

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Uncategorized

First post, new project

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Starting a blog feels weird.  I know I should have one, as an indie writer, but how to start?  Like with all writing, I decided to start by starting, even though the odds of anyone reading this are low.

I am starting the research for a new project, whose working title is Atlas Stumbled.  It is a satirical, unauthorized sequel to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.  In the process of doing research, I often find much to discuss (or about which to rant), so that’ll be good feeder material for the blog!