Why Ayn Rand is worshipped

[citizen blues]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jesse-larner/the-sinister-folly-of-ayn_b_73562.html
[link:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jesse-larner/the-sinister-folly-of-ayn_b_73562.html|

Whether modern libertarians and conservatives choose to acknowledge Rand or not, she has greatly influenced the most romantic and shallow type of libertarianism,....In her insistence that she owed nothing to the state, nothing to any human being other than herself, Rand epitomized the kind of childishness shown by libertarians who insist that they have every legal and moral right to own as many guns as they please, pay no taxes, educate their children at home, and live free of any law except those governing, in the most direct manner, their own security and that of their neighbors....

-snip-

Obviously, human happiness is not served by putting the rights of the group above the rights of the individual; that has been tried, with disastrous results. What I am saying is that both social and individual rights are important and must be respected. The challenge of good government is to find workable compromises and means of arriving at these compromises that most members of a society will accept as legitimate. That's a lot harder to do than merely taking a doctrinaire stand: "Society is everything, the individual is nothing"; "The individual is everything, society is nothing

Ayn Rand, in her ignorance and sentimentality, glorified the individual above all other values. I am thinking of her ridiculous and cruel essays in The Romantic Manifesto. Poor thing, she never realized how much she had in common with other fascists - and I use that word not in the careless colloquial sense, but very advisedly. The Nazis were also a highly romantic movement, with a very romantic view of the exalted individual, the Superman who imposed his will on the world and re-shaped it to fit his vision, who never backed down and never compromised because he answered to a higher authority: himself. Strength was virtue, virtue strength, weakness and hesitation and ambiguity despised. A Brave New World was going to be created, along strictly scientific and unsentimental lines. Huge machines would be used in this goal, society would be mechanized, vast fields of accomplishment would be open to those leaders who had the courage and the creativity to seize the moment; all others would be at the disposal of these leaders. The success of these men, the extent to which they could remake the world and the material gains they could produce, would be their moral justification, the only one they needed.

Sound familiar? It's not an attractive model because it's not a human one. I find Rand's and Hitler's idea of the Romantic individual repugnant for the same reason; it is the same Romantic individual. It's no accident that the only group in Europe that takes Rand seriously at all is the neo-Nazis.

[Fridays Child]

1. k/r

[freshwest]

2. K & R

Thanks for posting this one...

[CarmanK]

3. Read her work in college, wasn't impressed. Her ideas so unrealistic and self-centered.

[spike91nz]

4. Great Post Thank You. Some additional thoughts

Your posting is very appreciated. There is more to the argument against Rand's position than a disinclination toward the romance of individualism. Her's is a position which is simply incoherent in its assumption that identity can be considered independent of its context. We are the person that we become by virtue of the society, where the interaction with others and with the cultural history is defining of who we are, and how the identity we come to be situated within, functions in the workings of the world. A failure of the assumption that identity can be independent of context, is that it can not be a thing of romantic indulgence except by virtue of the community it wishes to deny as relevant. A human, left alone on an island shortly after birth, will not become a person, (and may be arguably less than human), though completely filling the form of Rand's individualism, free of the constraints of others.

We survived by virtue of our capacity for cooperation. Individually, we are weak and vulnerable. In a competition with the saber toothed tiger, individually we are dinner. Together, we can hunt the tiger and he will be on the menu. It is our cooperative capacity that is more responsible for the survival of the species than the alternative romantic narrative of rugged individualism. The mythology of individualism is a narrative that served the rise of industrialism and the breaking the hold of religious dogmatism, but it can not be sustained as a coherent philosophy, nor as a claim to any factual understanding of the evolution of the species.

Your position is stronger than a simple rejection of an adolescent and romantic idealism of the self.

[Esse Quam Videri]

5. Very well put

[just1voice]

6. Excellent article

Here's a quote from it that accurately describes the entire GOPig political party:

"Today there is a very small minority of economists who take her ideas seriously. There are virtually no biologists, anthropologists, sociologists, ethologists, geneticists or evolutionary theorists who do. Her ideas about the individual simply do not fit the objective research about how our species behaves and prospers."

[AsahinaKimi]

7. I wonder if the GOP

Plans to build a Golden Statue of her? They way they talk, you would think she was their GODDESS.

[Hydra]

9. There's that Golden Bull(Calf) on Wall St.

They may as well put her out there as their angel, blowing her trumpet of hate

[MrScorpio]

8. Ayn Rand is nothing more than self-confirming fodder for selfish assholes nt

[Mnemosyne]

10. Hear, hear, MrS. nt

[moondust]

11. Her early popularity

was probably partly due to her anti-collectivist message at a time when communism was gaining strength in her homeland and being discussed elsewhere. No doubt the big western capitalists/industrialists loved and promoted this "survivor of communism" for making them feel good and superior about themselves and spreading the anti-communist message.

"The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand. And the fight we are in here—make no mistake about it—is a fight of individualism versus collectivism."-- Paul Ryan

[BlueinOhio]

12. USSR

I believe she was sent here as secret weapon of mass destruction. A time bomb that would destroy this country with inane ramblings.

[MrScorpio]

13. Ayn Rand's Uncyclopedia Page

http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Ayn_Rand

Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand (born Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum, February 2 [O.S. January 20] 1905 - March 6, 1982) was a Russian-born philosopher and individualist, founder of the school of objectivism. Objectivism is a popular political philosophy in the American classical liberal tradition.

Ayn Rand herself is a controversial figure, being the only known example in history of someone who was completely self-made.

She didn't need anybody at all.

Ever.

For anything.

Early Life

Ayn Rand gave birth to herself in Czarian Russia, just to show that she was tough enough. Born at the age of zero, Ayn immediately set about teaching herself Russian-- considered a difficult task at any age. At first, Ayn subsisted on milk stolen from local cattle before moving on to directly killing them. The local farmers referred to her as "el asesino pequeños," the "cattle hacker." Or something.

Ayn was known for her ability to make her own clothes from raw materials. At the age of 2, she was able to not only make the blanket she was coddled in, but to coddle herself: the beginning of a destructive life-long habit. Living far away from civilization, Ayn began her tutelage under Ayn Rand, the Russian-born philosopher and individualist, founder of the school of objectivism.

Ayn's solitary life came to an end when she was forced by the new communist government to share her individuality with the state. Ayn did not like this.
She did not like this at all. And by "this" I mean sharing.

Sharing is something learned by the time a normal child enters kindergarten.

Ayn was granted a visa in 1925 to visit her relatives in Chicago and never returned to Russia. The "flying contraption" she created over that weekend out of sticks, held together by borscht, to fly the 10,000+ miles was the prototype used for our stealth bombers today.

[deutsey]

14. That's great

[kctim]

15. Our nation

was founded on the principles of limited government and individualism. Rand preached about it and made money.

Most people don't know anything more about her than that.