Atlas Shrugged: A Book Report.

[OrlandoGator]

In the spirit of "know your enemy," I just finished reading this...ahem...book this evening. The following is what I learned:

* If you have any goals in life that do not involve maximization of profit, you are a liability and unworthy of the oxygen in the atmosphere.
* Nobody is underprivileged. Everyone chooses exactly what they want to do with their lives and we all have equal opportunity. Those who do not make lots of money are bums.
* People who want to help others are essentially gnats who are impeding the progress of the human race and should be destroyed.

Am I missing anything? Holy shit...was Ayn Rand a hateful, angry person or what?

This is the manifesto for the neocons. You should all read it, then read Mein Kampf. Very educational.

[TrogL]

1. Everything is black and white

and must be taken to the greatest possible extreme, else it's not worth doing.

Workers should be happy to be poor and take pride in the big boss' limousine.

[PassingFair]

2. In case anyone missed this "praise" for America, The Book

"This is similar to my works in that anyone who reads it is sure to be an asshole for at least a month afterward."
--Ayn Rand

(On the back cover of Jon Stewart's America)

:rofl:

[OrlandoGator]

4. I remember that...then as I was reading AS thought "damn, it's true"

More than anything, I'm pissed off at everyone who has ever called this book a "classic" or a "must read." Because it's not even very well-written.

[ComerPerro]

38. LMAO

I forgot about that.

[punpirate]

3. Thank you, no...

... reading it once was enough. I actually had to study this in high school. I now have the tendency to laugh out loud at the mere mention of Rand's name.

[reprehensor]

5. You forgot some points...

Trains are fun!

If at first you don't succeed, don't succeed again!

Creative writing is for chumps!

Those clicking noises? It is your brain shutting down all unnecessary thought activities as you read Rand. After one hour of Rand, the only working synapses are those powering eyeballs and short term memory.

-------------------------

[The Traveler]

6. No philosopher

who has successfully navigated puberty regards Rand seriously. Guys like Grover Norquist, however, still masturbate after re-reading a chapter.

[OrlandoGator]

7. For me, the ultimate irony was...

...a writer telling the world that artists and other "non-productive" people are a waste. It's as if these people have no batteries in their hypocrisy detectors.

[pop goes the weasel]

8. Bob the Angry Flower sums it up best

Go looksee. Then go look at the rest of Stephen Notley's stuff.

[CrispyQ]

9. Please consider posting your review at the Non-fiction book forum

located here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topics&forum=209

Thanks for your review. My boosh-bot mother is a Rand fan & I frequently wonder where the woman who raised me has gone to.


Also, please post any reviews for other books you have read & consider participating in the Non-fiction Book Club, found in the same forum.

:hi:

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

10. Thanks for "taking one for the team". Maybe I'll spend a few hours with

this one sometime, but I'm not super motivated to.

[pisle]

11. Ayn Rand: Wacky "American Dream" victim

She had some good points, but they don't translate to the reality of a "SOCIETY" in which there are a multitude of environments in which humans are raised in. She bought into the whole American Dream delusion that was being aired on the first Tvs and all that.

Her basic premise (that if you are selfish and do the best you can for yourself, humanity will benefit from your selfishness) could be seen as true at a really basic level, but it doesn't help us in understanding how to deal with injustice, which is prevelent to the point of cancelling out her basic philosophy.

So, I say that she had some good ideas, but was disconnected from the realities that the majority of citizens have to navigate through (specially in modern day America).

Leave it to greedy self-righteous Republicans to glom on to her most basic ideals and form them to their unreasonable absolutism.

Ayn Rand? Uh, whatever ... I took away some interesting points of interest, but never believed that she was some kind of profit for a democaratic society.

[sweetheart]

12. And that an elite super genetic subset

of humanity, the john gaults of the world are all that matter really.

And if those enlightened few pull the plug on the charade the
whole thing comes crashing down. And maybe that part is kinda true.

[Taxloss]

13. This thread needs an official artist!

http://www.cordair.com/Larsen/index.htm

(Thanks, Metafilter!)

Ayn Rand's theories work beautifully in the clone plant where everyone is created absolutely equal with the same background, gender and racial makeup.

Actually ... they wouldn't even work then. Maybe for the Borg.

[laureloak]

14. The message I got was...

A person must nurture himself FIRST before he can give to others.

The opposite would be a "people pleaser" who lives to please others and neglects himself - a surefire step towards mental illness, IMO.

That's basically what I remember from having read Rand MANY years ago. I really need to revisit it...but who has the time?

[pisle]

16. Actually, that's what I got, too

But, then it was never presented in the context of today's corporate greed when I read it.

The other thing I got from her was that the "people pleaser" neglect did lead to a certain mental illness -- we've all witnessed it. I also got that generosity was different from "sacrifice" ... in that when you sacrifice, it implies that you are owed something for your trouble. Generosity comes from the ability and power to contribute to something you believe in, whereas sacrifice is more of a martyrdom. The Dobsons of the world will preach forever about sacrifice ... it's generosity they don't understand.

Other than that ... yeah, no time to go back and read any of that stuff. It's all pretty basic.

Ayn Rand loved the romantic heroes ... the James Bonds and the Hunchbacks of Notre Dame.

[johnfunk]

15. Alissa Zinovievna "Ayn Rand" Rosenbaum: Resented her Jewish roots,...

... embraced proto-fascist, ultra-materialistic drivel which she repackaged as "objectivism."

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

18. She grew up in Russia didn't she? During the Russian revolution?

I seem to recall that she resented the loss of her family's wealth when communism first took hold in Russia and she then came to the United States. I think she reacted to one form of extremism by promoting the other extreme.

[rwenos]

29. Read "We the Living"

You'll recognize Stalinist Russia as the place Kira escapes from.

Rand may not have been a White Russian, but she was clearly sympathetic to the "ancien regime."

What a cold-blooded bitch of a writer she was. "The Fountainhead" is at least a passably readable novel.

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

41. If one only wants to devote a couple of hours to her instead. "Anthem".

[Kazak]

17. Who is John Galt? Or,...

As The Stomach Churns for political conservatives. :eyes:

[Neil Lisst]

24. Yeah, who is John Galt, and more importantly ...

When was the last time you gave a shit about a rightwing dweeb who had personal problems?

http://www.webcomicsnation.com/neillisst/

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

19. Which one was made into a movie? "The Fountainhead"? Or this one?

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

20. The Fountainhead was made into a movie

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041386/

I've seen it a couple of times on Turner Classic Movies, with Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal. I've watched it because I like Gary Cooper, although I found the character motivations a bit strange. Ayn Rand apparently also wrote the screenplay based on her novel. Here's what one commentator at imdb wrote about the film:

"Of all Ayn Rand's uproarious satirical novels, "The Fountainhead" is the best. The book targets every political stripe, leaving its readers breathless from laughter. In the movie script, where she condenses the novel's first half into a few seconds of windblown calendar pages, she concentrates on right-wing architects, suicidal media moguls, and foolish rich girls who think they've discovered philosophy. Revealing her bizarre characters as cardboard cutouts who would fit right into any of Woody Allen's crowd scenes, Rand paints a vivid portrait of the emptiness of riches. In a script packed with double entendres, she quickly gets her audience rolling in the aisles, while skillfully propagating her singular message of Objectionable Social Nihilism."

[sweetheart]

42. I liked the sex scene

In the book too, it obviously made ayn rand hot the illusion she painted,
rourke cutting stone in the quarry and sally sue the girl wantin' some
time with him. I'd wager if it was remade as a XXX feature it would be
really popular, the shagging in teh quarry. ;-O

[whoneedstickets]

21. Rand and the Neocons... a rant

I don't want to seem to be disagreeing with your assessment of Rand's work. It is tripe. However, to call it a neo-con work is a bit inaccurate. Rand is a radical libertarian who can't comprehend any set of human relations as other than as an exchange 'contract. She is the ultimate narcissistic individualist.

The neo-cons, in contrast, find their intellectual roots in the works of Leo Strauss and Alan Bloom. Strauss was a radical anti-individualist who decried the sixties assault on the traditional sources of authority. He railed against the social science of behavioralism which advanced 'methodological individualism' and an ontology that embraced the atomization of society. Strauss saw these intellectual movements as a natural outgrowths of the enlightenment (see Rousseau for a seminal critique) which emphasized modern man over the traditional community.

Following the moderns, of course, came the post-moderns (Nietzsche in particular) who recognized that while science and industry had torn down the old social orders of feudalism and the church, it had also revealed that any claim to truth through authority was ultimately specious (ergo: God is dead).

Strauss realized that philosophers, like Plato, had long recognized the inherently fallacious nature of any truth claims. Plato saw, ages ago, that there was no real 'Truth' or 'Morality' to speak of, but until Machiavelli, no one had had been foolish (or brave?) enough to openly reveal the socially constructed fiction of our notions of 'Good and Evil'. Machiavelli argued that there was no morality, there was only power!!!

Plato was way ahead of this and suggested that persons who knew, the elite, must propagate a 'Noble Lie' on the masses since the latter couldn't be trusted to make virtuous choices in the face of a world without moral foundations. Religion, is a large part of this lie in both its spiritual and statist forms. Neo-cons love organized religion as much as overblown patriotism because both insist that the individual subordinate his/her interests to the 'common good' (which of course they define!)

So, the neo-cons are actually very anti-individualist. They want to discredit the intellectual forces of the enlightenment and modernity which lie at the root of the concept (ergo their tacit support of attacks on Darwin). Notions of 'objective fact', falsification, scientific cumulation and the primacy of evidence over ideas must be subjugated to a world in which the role of government is to advance virtue in the citizenry through the social construction of symbolic regimes.

Yes! The Straussians accept the social construction of the world and argue that the power of government should be used to aggressively construct a world where the 'Noble Lie' can be told without fear of opposing voices.

It's all quite fascist, and not very libertarian.

Now, here is the irony and the part where I start to piss off some DUers. You see, the left has been complicit in this process. Some of the most effective attacks on the enlightenment and modernity came not from the right but from the radical left. Feminists in particular took great joy in arguing that science was essentially a masculine epistemology that denied the value of 'alternative forms of knowledge creation' like intuition. We still see this sort of crap advanced by aboriginal activists, anti-capitalist environmentalists and race theorist who want to examine 'discursive practices' and similar post-modern mumbo-jumbo.

So, the left opened the door by trashing the scientific method, weakening its hegemonic grip on knowledge creation and its authority over 'fact' and the neo-cons marched through.

However, don't despair. I think these developments present an opportunity for the left and the Democratic party to reclaim the realm of science and the enlightenment! The right seem to be rapidly abandoning a world of reason for their fictional worlds. Its time we reclaimed the real one.

[karlrschneider]

22. I like your style.

And welcome to DU, but I'm not sure your most excellent exposition will resonate with sufficient numbers to be all that effective. DUers are generally pretty bright and most will grasp the gist of your discourse but it's a certainty that no lurking Freepers will manage to.
:D
:toast:

[whoneedstickets]

25. Thanks!

I had to get that off my chest. To me it is a case of 'know thy enemy' because through that knowledge he can be defeated. The Ron Pauls are not the Paul Wolfowitzes. Although I have at times played with post-modernism, I'm now a radical convert to the enlightenment.

Moreover, I think these ideas--entrenched in our primary founding documents--still resonate with the public (freedom, individualism, reason, checks on authority). We pass up a golden opportunity if we fail to seize this intellectual ground for our own.

[karlrschneider]

28. So true. And we need to seize the chance to point out to the unwashed

masses how much they're operating against their own best interests. (That's a meme even the most ardent wingnut can appreciate if it's properly presented!)

And BTW, I lived in MN for 2 years...in St. Stephen, a tiny burg but a lot of good decent folks. I moved there in 1992 at exactly the right (wrong) time to vote. As it turned out, my non-vote didn't matter. :D

[AntiFascist]

34. Brilliant summary....

I'm printing this one.

This is all why I wish Gore would seriously consider running again, and why he may have been the greatest threat to the neocons. His appreciation for science is reflected in his style, yet he displays a truely Christian compassion, not the arrogant "conservative" kind, that should appeal to many who are religious. I'm sure he would have upheld values from the Enlightenment, including separation of church and state, and his honesty would have prevented fostering any lies of the "nobility."

[Neil Lisst]

23. Atlas Shrugged proved Ayn Rand is a Morand

The Fountainhead, too, which I also felt an obligation to read, in the name of political completeness.

What a load of crap!!

Ayn Rand pulled this stuff out of her ass, an early 20th century knockoff of Friedrich Nietzsche. Her story is laughable. She's right up there with Mary Baker Eddy and L. Ron Hubbard when it comes to attracting nut cases who fawn after her nonsense.

http://www.webcomicsnation.com/neillisst/

[karlrschneider]

30. LOL, what a cool username. Cogito ergo sum, as it were...

;-)

When I was a callow lad, I was persuaded by my next-door neighbor to attend sunday school at the "Christian Science" church for a few months and became familiar with Ms. Eddy and her 'solutions' for all mere mortals' problems. Without resorting to crass characterizations, what a load of crap. :D

In a way they're the antithesis of most fundies...they're not stupid but they're nuts, as opposed to being both stupid AND nuts. :evilgrin:

[Neil Lisst]

33. karlrschneider, Ayn Rand, Mary Baker Eddy - both crazy

Ayn Rand has a religious following, typically angry white men and boys who feel life has not given them their due. You know, the fertile grounds for growing serial killers and religious zealots.

Mary Baker Eddy was the same way in the first 50 years of her doctrines. Now her Christian Science religion is gasping for air. Of all religions, that one has the very worst services. Oy vey!

Well, back to Ayn Rand, she basically stated GREED IS GOOD, self-interest is everything.

[ComerPerro]

40. We believe in nothing, Lebowski!

[omega minimo]

26. Arrogant fantasy for men who are enabled by wives doing all the gruntwork

:kick:

[charlie]

27. Lol

Pretty succinct. I'll remember that one.

[Hello_Kitty]

31. I just commend you for getting through it.

I could barely make it through 3 chapters. She definitely didn't write for those of us with ADHD. I couldn't take it.

[Ikonoklast]

32. History keeps proving everything that Rand wrote

to be utter tripe and nonsense.
Our success as a specie is in peril until we become a truly co-operative race.
Rugged individualism could be seen as a liability as co-operation on a scale the likes we have never known will be the key to our survival.
Profit would become meaningless. The pursuit of money as a means unto itself would be suicide. Acquisition of material wealth might be construed as a mental illness.

When I first read Rand, I couldn't help stop thinking of what my Dad said once about no matter how high and mighty some people thought they were, if it wasn't for some guy digging a ditch somewhere we'd all just be sitting in our own shit.
Seems that being the guy with the shovel is the most important goal that anyone could aspire to.

[progressivepolitics]

35. I am interested in getting to know the enemy also.

And I have the allies, from the source. My family is mostly very conservative Republican. They are always trying to convert me and give me tons of books.

I just finished reading their latest installment "the right nation". Very informative.

I read two of Rand's books when I was a teenager, and didn't really understand them. But from what I know, from family, is that she is more of an icon to the Libertarian wing of the Repub party. Also the "monetarists". I think that old fart Milton Friedman was one of her devotees as a knee-britcher.

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

36. Um yeah. The fundie branch of Repubs won't be dropping their copies of

"Left Behind" or the latest Ann Coulter or Hannity screed to pick up Ayn Rand, LOL. That's for the one's who like to pretend they are actually intellectual.

[Name removed]

37. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[ComerPerro]

39. If you just finished the book, then check out this thread, post 52

It was in a thread a week ago, where a bunch of us were trashing Ayn Rand.

This was posted by DUer Telly Savalas

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=4973593&mesg_id=4975243

Ella turned towards the window, folded her arms,
and said, "Kent, I cannot understand why you read that drivel. If there's anything worse than a bad political philosopher, it's a bad political philosopher who writes bad novels to present her flawed ideas. It's bad enough when she writes nonfiction works that foist assertions and conjecture on the reader and tries to pass it off as 'reason', but when she tries to dress it up in a fictional work with one-dimensional characters and a cheesy plot, it's downright putrid. I'd go so far as to say that her writings dishonor the thousands of years of evolution required for humans to develop language skills.

"The worst element of her 'writing' is how utterly ridiculous the dialogue is. In real life people converse with one another, they don't take turns delivering speeches to one another. If she'd ever spent anytime actually interacting with another human being who wasn't clinically insane, she'd know this and it would be reflected in her writing.

"Furthermore, don't you think she could go to more effort to be a bit more terse? I mean, Jesus Christ, I've seen bumperstickers that are more nuanced than one of her novels, so I don't see why she can't be more succinct in the exposition of her cheap little 'ideas'. Does it really take an 800 page novel to say "guvmint bad, capitalism good"?

"Face it, Kent. She's a second-rate hack that makes Jackie Collins look like Dostoevsky. Put that shit down and do something a bit more intellectually engaging. For instance, there's a Dukes of Hazzard marathon on the country network. Try watching that instead."

Kent set the book on the table and glanced up at Ella.

"Ella," he said, "I see your collectivist friends have poisoned your mind with these bizarre ideas about word economy and multi-dimensional characters. Such things are only devices to enslave the Individualist. Every word the Individualist says is a gift to the universe, so the universe benefits the more he speaks. Hence all this silliness about being brief when trying to make a point does not apply to the Individualist.

"Let's be clear, Ella, that when I say the Individualist gives a gift to the world by expressing his thoughts, it is not altruism that motivates the giving of this gift. No. No. No. Altruism is an evil sentiment that only results in atrocities like child labor laws and homeless people being fed. Thus the Individualist is ego-driven. By satisfying my own desires and showing complete contempt for the needs of others, I make the laissez-faire capitalist system work as it should and the benefits rain down on everyone. Although many economists prefer to use the term 'trickle down.'

"For instance, when I enriched your life last week by giving you a 45 minute lecture on the necessity of abolishing the capital gains tax, I didn't do it because I wanted to please you. Rather I did it because I love the sound of my own voice. The fact that you were enlightened by my observations is only secondary. Nevertheless it demonstrates my point about how being selfish is superior to being altruistic. Had I been altruistic and payed heed to you wish for me to...what was that phrase you used repeatedly? 'Shut the fuck up', I believe it was? Well, had I done that, then you'd have spent the rest of your life unaware of the great thoughts that course through my mind on an hourly basis.

"Yes, Ella. It amazes me how unwilling the collectivist mind is to accept the truth. Why wasn't it just last week when you were claiming that society should chain down the Individual by using some of his resources to aid victims of Hurricane Katrina? After I was able to overcome my feeling of horror and disgust that you would suggest denying the Individual his Freedom, I successfully rebutted your point by observing that A equals A, therefore it logically follows that the so called victims should fend for themselves and not depend on the altruism of collectivists. Rather than daring to challenge this impenetrable logic, you simply dismissed my comments by calling me an asshole. Were I a petty collectivist, I might have taken offense at that remark. However, I am a noble Individual and know that your hurtful words were motivated by your envy of my superior intellect. For it is individuals such as I who propel society forward.

"Um...the Individual's freedom should be regarded as...um...Egoism is the one true...um...er...what was it we were talking about, Ella?"

[Jose Diablo]

43. As for sex

A few scenes of rape, and the woman loved it. That Ayn Ryan is one weird broad.

You think she hung-out with Bolton?

[JohnnyBoots]

44. I couldn't get through the first 100 pages, thought it was rubbish.