Atlas Shrugged

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26 Dec 2010, 3:51 am

Okay so I'm new to the site and thought I would start a discussion. I want to know what Everyone's thoughts are on the author and philospher Ayn Rand. She's author of Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, We the living and Anthem. I don't fully support her ideaology just found her works to be very relatable when I was in high school. Since Aspies are sterotyped as logical and non-empathic, does anyone else enjoy her work?

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26 Dec 2010, 4:05 am

While I generally don't read her novels, I read part of Atlas Shrugged. While I liked the precise and highly reflective style of Rand's novel, I found the value judgements and philosophical conclusions laughably simplistic.

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JasonGone
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26 Dec 2010, 4:39 am

i never picked up fountainhead and after reading half of atlas shrugged, i didn't want to finish it. i felt like they were far too pushy. as if i were being told what to think.
that being said, i really enjoyed we the living. i think it was because it was the first novel written by a young person who grew up in an entirely strange world, and where that environment took their mind, personality, and thoughts. that book asks the questions that objectavism was supposedly answering; but, again i don't want to be told what to think. and i really believe it's a question whose conclusions should be born by one's self.
plus i am a sucker for a good dystopian story, and post revolutionary russia feels pretty close.

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ruveyn
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26 Dec 2010, 6:39 am

I find Rand's criticism of collectivism on point. However the philosophic system she offers to combat the problem is highly dificient. The Objectivist criticism of moder physics, for instance, is ludicrous. Rand was philosophically in the tradition of Aristotle. While Aristotle's moral philosophy may have some merit, his metaphysics and physics are totally unequal to the task of understanding the natural world.

Also Rand's conclusion that there is an absolute morality or ethical system is just plain wrong. There are no moral facts. No moral code or moral values follow from physical laws. Morality is doxa, not logos.

Even so, I enjoyed Atlas Shrugged as alternative time line fiction. What If. What if all the productive people went on strike. Interesting question.

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26 Dec 2010, 8:03 am

Idiotchief wrote:

I don't. I read Atlas Shrugged for a bet, and I finished it. It was one of the least enjoyable books I have ever read voluntarily, dry, ideologically extreme, and with almost no interesting characters. The most interesting character was Francisco D'Anconia because you could never guess his true motives. Most of the so-called heroes were almost as bad as the villains. Dagny Taggart was frankly a b***h, and only her honesty and shamelessness about herself made her any better than her brother. John Galt I would consider a villain protagonist, who doesn't seem to give a flying one about the collateral damage his strike is causing. Rand's definition of altruism as she sees it is twisted and abhorrent, not to mention missing the point entirely, and if her heroes are anything like her, well, yeucch.

Ayn Rand, in my opinion, is the worst example of female authorship to ever grace literature. A novel's purpose is to entertain, first and foremost, not ram ideology down people's throats with all the subtlety of an intubation sans anaesthetic. Even Stephanie bloody Meyer has some idea of how to write entertainment, even if it is only mediocre entertainment. If Atlas Shrugged was a movie, it should have been riffed by Mystery Science Theater 3000.

In fact, one day, that is what I wholly intend to do. I have a copy of Atlas Shrugged, ready to annotate with riffs on the...how else can I describe it but intellectual idiocy? This may seem like an oxymoron or a contradiction (and I know how much Objectivists hate those), but while she raises good points, she also takes them in the wrong direction entirely.

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ruveyn
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26 Dec 2010, 1:05 pm

Quatermass wrote:

A novel's purpose is to entertain, first and foremost, not ram ideology down people's throats with all the subtlety of an intubation sans anaesthetic. Even Stephanie bloody Meyer has some idea of how to write entertainment, even if it is only mediocre entertainment. If Atlas Shrugged was a movie, it should have been riffed by Mystery Science Theater 3000.

.

Ayn Rand saw her novel as a way of articulating her philosophy, not as entertainment. There was nothing entertaining about Ayn Rand. She was Dead Serious in every aspect of her life.

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26 Dec 2010, 1:18 pm

I started reading Atlas Shrugged, found it to be exceedingly dull, and stopped reading it.

I know of some people who consider it to be the most titillating book ever.

Basically the same people who consider Rush Limbaugh to be a treasure of enlightened thought.

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26 Dec 2010, 1:20 pm

Heard of it back in the day from people who would hardly motivate me to read anything.

From what I have heard she is not for me.

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26 Dec 2010, 1:22 pm

A conservative critic said of this, that every page cried out "To a gas chamber, go!"

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26 Dec 2010, 2:01 pm

xenon13 wrote:

A conservative critic said of this, that every page cried out "To a gas chamber, go!"

That was Whitaker Chambers in National Review, and it was a totally unjustified generalization.

At no time did Rand ever preach mass extermination. What she did postulate in Atlas Shrugged was the productive people going on strike until unjust laws that penalized their productivity were removed. If people died as a result of a boycott the blame should be placed on those who made unjust laws, not the victims of the unjust laws.

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26 Dec 2010, 2:41 pm

I'd say that Ayn Rand's ideals are definitely not in the interest of "aspies" or people with disabilities as a whole. It might apply well to a small minority who are able to make their special interest into a lucrative career, but that's more of an exception than a rule in the cutthroat world of modern capitalism where office politics and social hierarchy dominate the corporate culture. Contrary to the claims of wide-eyed libertarian idealists, capitalism is only as just and only as merit based as our corrupt human nature will allow. Defects in human nature cause dysfunctionalism in corporate culture that are just as bad or worse than the dysfunctionalism in government bureaucracies.

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26 Dec 2010, 3:10 pm

Ayn Rand is a truly disgusting human being.

Ayn Rand wrote:

..for healthy children to use handicapped materials. I quite agree with the speaker's indignation. I think it's a monstrous thing — the whole progression of everything they're doing — to feature, or answer, or favor the incompetent, the ret*d, the handicapped, including, you know, the kneeling buses and all kinds of impossible expenses. I do not think that the ret*d should be ~allowed~ to come ~near~ children. Children cannot deal, and should not have to deal, with the very tragic spectacle of a handicapped human being. When they grow up, they may give it some attention, if they're interested, but it should never be presented to them in childhood, and certainly not as an example of something ~they~ have to live down to.

Secondary Source: http://aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspo ... 12308.html

Primary Source: Ayn Rand, The Age of Mediocrity, Q & A Ford Hall Forum, April, 1981

Daniel Barnes wrote:

A Nietzchean contempt for the weak, and for "subhumans" in general is, while less overt, still clearly visible in her later work. For example, her breakthrough novel "The Fountainhead" contains a fascinating episode where the hero, architect Howard Roark, is forced to have his Stoddard Temple of the Human Spirit remodeled by his arch-enemy, Ellsworth Toohey. What is the most awful fate Rand can concoct for this building, the greatest antithesis of her hero's values, ethics, and aesthetics? Perhaps a politician's office? A trade union hall? A branch of the Inland Revenue Service? No, the most vile, disgusting insult Rand can find for Toohey to besmirch the Objectivist Human Spirit with is to make it a home for intellectually handicapped children.

Ayn Rand wrote:

The original shape of the building remained discernable. It was not like a corpse whose fragments had been mercifully scattered; it was like a corpse hacked to peices and reassembled.

In September the tenants of the Home moved in. A small, expert staff was chosen by Toohey. It had been harder to find the children who qualified as inmates. Most of them had to be taken from other institutions. Sixty-five children, their ages ranging from three to fifteen, were picked out by zealous ladies who were full of kindness and so made a point of rejecting those who could be cured and selecting only the hopeless cases. There was a fifteen year old boy who had never learned to speak; a grinning child who could not be taught to read or write; a girl born without a nose, whose father was also her grandfather; a person called "Jackie" of whose age or sex nobody could be certain. They marched into their new home, their eyes staring vacantly, the stare of death before which no world existed...

...Catherine Halsey was put in charge of the children's occupational therapy, and she moved into the Home as a permanent resident. She took up her work with a fierce zeal. She spoke about it insistently to anyone who would listen. Her voice was dry and arbitrary. When she spoke, the movements of her mount hid the two lines that had appeared recently, cut from her nostrils to her chin; people preferred her not to remove her glasses; her eyes were not good to see. She spoke belligerently about her work not being charity, but "human reclamation."

The most important time of her day was the hour assigned to the children's art activities, known as the "Creative Period." There was a special room for the purpose - a room with a view of the distant city skyline - where the children were given materials and encouraged to create freely, under the guidance of Catherine who stood watch over them like an angel presiding at a birth.

She was elated on the day when Jackie, the least promising one of the lot, achieved a completed work of imagination. Jackie picked up fistfuls of colored felt scraps and a pot of glue, and carried them to a corner of the room. There was, in the corner, a slanting ledge projecting from the wall - plastered over and painted green - left from Roark's modeling of the Temple interior that had once controlled the recession of the light at sunset. Catherine walked over to Jackie and saw, spread out on the ledge, the recognizable shape of a dog, brown, with blue spots and five legs. Jackie wore an expression of pride. "Now you see, you see?" Catherine said to her colleages. "Isn't it wonderful and moving! There's no telling how far the child will go with the proper encouragement. Think of what happens to their little souls if they are frustrated in their creative instincts! It's so important not to deny them a change for self-expression. Did you see Jackie's face?"

excepted from The Fountainhead, p397-398

http://aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspo ... -rand.html

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ruveyn
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26 Dec 2010, 4:33 pm

marshall wrote:

With one major exception. Corporations usually do not have armies. Governments do.

ruveyn

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26 Dec 2010, 4:55 pm

Master_Pedant wrote:

Ayn Rand is a truly disgusting human being.

Eh, I've actually wondered about the role of the mentally ret*d within society.

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26 Dec 2010, 5:45 pm

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/T ... le06aht2ly

Quote:

# Whether or not it is a good book is a matter of some contention. It's a bit like The Bible, I think: If you agree with the message, you ignore the Idiot Plot, the irritating characters (of which there are SO MANY,) and the horrible portrayal anyone who disagrees with the author/s gets. When any of it is brought up, you either explain that they're wrong because they disagree, or that it's not meant to be judged by the same standard as other books, which is obviously a viewpoint I disagree with (or you admit, like the above, that you may need a bit of salt to choke it down). If something isn't a good book, it's not a good book, no matter how holy or philosophical it may be to whomever. If only there were some sort of trope for that...

I've read Anthem and this section of text above me(after all it could have been a fluke) and that book are the reasons I am not likely to ever read atlas shrugged. I liked Anthem but not for anything except the thoughts it evoked in my imagination, the quality of the novel itself was negligent.(good concept, bad delivery) In my opinion she should have just written her ideals out as essays and left the fiction writing to better authors.

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26 Dec 2010, 5:55 pm

So i'm getting the general consensus of the of her philosphy and morals is she's a egotistical megolomaniac that while intelligent takes things in the wrong direction?

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