CapitalistImperialistPig

Via Marginal Revolution Charles Murray, ostensibly reviewing two new biographies of Ayn Rand: In 1991, the book-of-the-month club conducted a survey asking people what book had most influenced their lives. The Bible ranked number one and Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged was number two. In 1998, the Modern Library released two lists of the top 100 books of the 20th century. One was compiled from the votes of the Modern Library's Board, consisting of luminaries such as Joyce Carol Oates, Maya Angelou, Edmund Morris, and Salman Rushdie. The two top-ranked books on the Board's list were Ulysses and The Great Gatsby. The other list was based on more than 200,000 votes cast online by anyone who wanted to vote. The top two on that list were Atlas Shrugged (1957) and The Fountainhead (1943). The two novels have had six-figure annual sales for decades, running at a combined 300,000 copies annually during the past ten years. In 2009, Atlas Shrugged alone sold a record 500,000 copies and Ran...

The great thing about reviewing a biography is that you get your chance to take your shots not only at the biography but the subject as well. Adam Kirsch makes good use of the latter opportunity in his New York Times review of Anne Heller's new biography of Ayn Rand. Like Heller (and unlike YHC) he is no mad dog Rand hater. He starts with a few notes about her continuing appeal to a certain strain of conservatives: A specter is haunting the Republican Party — the specter of John Galt. In Ayn Rand’s libertarian epic “Atlas Shrugged,” Galt, an inventor disgusted by creeping American collectivism, leads the country’s capitalists on a retributive strike. “We have granted you everything you demanded of us, we who had always been the givers, but have only now understood it,” Galt lectures the “looters” and “moochers” who make up the populace. “We have no demands to present you, no terms to bargain about, no compromise to reach. You have nothing to offer us. We do not need you.” “Atla...

The number one most popular New York Times article at the moment is It’s Not You, It’s Your Books by Rachel Donadio. Some years ago, I was awakened early one morning by a phone call from a friend. She had just broken up with a boyfriend she still loved and was desperate to justify her decision. “Can you believe it!” she shouted into the phone. “He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!” We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. At least since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility. These days, thanks to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, listing your favorite books and authors is a crucial, if risky, part of self-branding. When it comes to online dating, even casual references can turn into dea...

Compulsory labor conscription is now practiced or advocated in every country on Earth..............Ayn Rand And, I would add, in every civilization that ever existed. I, at any rate, can't think of any obvious exceptions. There were pretty dramatic differences in scale and scope, to be sure. A couple of fundamental circumstances constrain the nature and character of human interactions: the struggle for existence, and the need for cooperation. Every mammal is dependent for some period of infancy, but many live almost totally independently for much of their lives. Humans aren't like that. We are obligatory social animals, and lone individuals can't compete against a band or tribe. Once men adopted agriculture, higher forms of society developed and with them came obligatory cooperation, with societies unwilling to adopt such being killed out by those that did. Such enforced cooperation doesn't sit well with human nature, so it was almost always limited in scope. The dystop...

Recent hurricanes, the incredible shrinking airline coach seat, and, especially the recent Equifax data breach, have reminded me of how important I believe government regulation to be. Which gives me yet another excuse to bash libertarianism. I believe that I first encountered libertarians in high school, and I reacted with an instant hostility which has neither evaporated nor abated in the succeeding sixty years, though reading Ayn Rand certainly refreshed my immune reaction. I have sometimes tried to comprehend the deep roots of this distaste, with only modest success. I consider myself a liberal, more classical than modern, so I share some values with the libertarians, but certainly not all. In the Bible, after Cain had whacked his brother Abel, God asked him, perhaps rhetorically, "where is your brother?" Cain replied, "Am I my brother's keeper?" That question, or rather its answer, is the central difference between liberals and libertarians. To put ...

Provoked again by Wolfgang, I have dipped a bit more into Nietzsche, including the rather nice Wikipedia article, which among many other things discusses his unconvincing claims of descent from Polish Noblemen of the name Nitsky and variants of the spelling of the family name, none of which seem to include my default. Rand was an early fan of Nietzsche, but later denied his influence on her thinking. The central notions she borrowed from him were those of the Superman as articulated in Beyond Good and Evil and Toward a Genealogy of Morals . Rand, like Nietzsche rejected Christianity and its "Slave Morality" which they thought sought to drag the "superior man" down to the level of the crowd, and worshipped an ideal man who was untouched by the opinions of others - who lacked, if I may borrow from Jefferson, "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind." Ayn Rand probably went rather further in modeling her hero for The Fountainhead on a psychopathic mur...

Via Andrew Sullivan : "Love should be treated like a business deal, but every business deal has its own terms and its own currency. And in love, the currency is virtue. You love people not for what you do for them or what they do for you. You love them for the values, the virtues, which they have achieved in their own character,” - Ayn Rand. This is Rand the clueless dogmatist in pure form - that is to say, not 100% wrong but reality twisted until it's deeply and fundamentally wrong. Part of Rand's problem was that she didn't believe in instincts, and love is among the more fundamental human instincts. Certainly love has something in common with admiration - the actual name of the emotion she attempts to describe, but love is probably more likely to be the cause of admiration than the result. The core problem, I think, is that love is fundamentally a matter of empathy, a human characteristic that Rand despised and plausibly lacked. The triggers for romantic love ar...

Done at last and somehow I feel that I ought to have something to say about the whole thing.  I undertook this to try to find out why so many people seem to find this book so inspirational.  I guess that I've said enough about why I don't like it .  There are a few sentiments expressed in the book that I can applaud: having a purpose and a goal, for example(like *finish*this*damn*book*, perhaps). So why did I invest a large part of my free time over the past few weeks in these 2/3 of a million words?  I had read some Rand before and was pretty confident that I wouldn't like this one or learn much from it.  I blame Bobby Fisher. I have been fascinated by his peculiar tragedy for nearly half a century.  What caused this brilliant individual to launch into a succession of progressively more self-destrustive acts even as he reached a peak of success?  Frank Brady's excellent book, Endgame: Bobby Fisher's Remarkable Rise and Fall , gave me a theory...

From the comments:  Arun finds a great Maureen Dowd column on Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged. I would take exception to one of her paragraphs, though: She wrote about Nietzschean superheroes who made things. She died before capitalism evolved into a vampire casino where you could bet against investments you sold to your clients, and make money off something you didn’t own or that existed only on paper. No, Capitalism was always like that - think about the South Seas bubble of Isaac Newton's time. Most of Rand's villains were also capitalists - crony capitalists in bed with the government of the type that populated the Bush administration and did anyone mention Goldman-Sachs? The stuff that Rand failed to see was always there.

WB has speculated that his dog is a psychopath .  I have my doubts.  Dogs are social animals, and have the shame instinct, and desire for approval.  Cats - not so much.  The characteristics that mark off the psychopath intersect heavily with the difference between the normal person and the solitary beast of prey - the instincts that make man a social animal. Ayn Rand's early journals show an infatuation with William Edward Hickman, one of the most famous persons of 1928.  She described her hero based on Hickman: Other people have no right [to exist], no hold, no interest or influence on him. And this is not affected or chosen -- it's inborn, absolute, it can't be changed, he has 'no organ' to be otherwise. In this respect, he has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel 'other people.' Ah yes, the Nietzschean Superguy, once again - the "blond beast" of prey. So why did Rand celebrate Hickman?  In her words: It...

Johann Hari's non-review of two recent books on Ayn Rand takes a look at some of the nasty and calamitous aspects of her life and thought. Ayn Rand is one of America's great mysteries. She was an amphetamine-addicted author of sub-Dan Brown potboilers, who in her spare time wrote lavish torrents of praise for serial killers and the Bernie Madoff-style embezzlers of her day. She opposed democracy on the grounds that "the masses"—her readers—were "lice" and "parasites" who scarcely deserved to live. Yet she remains one of the most popular writers in the United States, still selling 800,000 books a year from beyond the grave. She regularly tops any list of books that Americans say have most influenced them. Since the great crash of 2008, her writing has had another Benzedrine rush, as Rush Limbaugh hails her as a prophetess. With her assertions that government is "evil" and selfishness is "the only virtue," she is the ...

Answer: A megalomaniacal psychopath whose ambition is to destroy civilization as constituted. He is also the fictional hero of Ayn Rand's gigantic word brick, Atlas Shrugged . His ambitions are aided by his considerable magical powers which allow him to conjure amazing inventions out thin air. Of course the author attributes the inventions not to magic but to super-intelligence, an intelligence entirely belied by his idiotic philosophical monologues. I like to think of him as a sort of motor-mouth Lord Voldemort. His psychopathic character is perhaps unsurprising when you consider that Rand based some of her heroes on a notorious child murderer who delivered his victim's body parts to the parents. Of course she claims she didn't admire his deeds, just his attitude. It is more than a bit bothersome to me that this novel and author are bible to many of the Republican big shots, including Rand Paul, who had all his staffers read AS. The novel is also immensely popula...

Tyler Cowen's 100th birthday retrospective (2005) on Ayn Rand is about what one would expect: he begins with some incisive observations but somehow manages to muddle through to silly conclusions. His best non sequitur: The true take-away message is a reaffirmation of how the enormous productive powers of capitalism -- the greatest force for human good ever achieved -- rely on the driving human desire to be excellent. There are a few competitors for the role of "greatest force for human good" I should think. Let's start with technology, art, science, agriculture, trade, government, law and education - most of which look to be essential enabling institutions for capitalism. The "driving human desire to be excellent" is one of those phrases (redolent perhaps of "the lilt of a driving dream") that I can' seem to get to play any rhetorical role beyond self-satire. The pursuit of excellence may well be relevant to art and sport, but it looks a l...

The 1930's and 1940's, with depression sandwiched between war, rumor of war, and war again, were fertile ground for dystopic visions. The rise of sinister incarnations in Communism and Facism provided a collectivist theme for those visions. Ayn Rand's Anthem had the same collectivist inspired theme as Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984 , and a publication date between them, but can't otherwise bear comparison to Huxley's richly prophetic vision or Orwell's nightmare masterpiece. Anthem is a slight fairy tale, set in a grey future where the ultimate villain is the first person plural pronoun. Where technology has been set to sinister purpose in 1984 and become relentlessly dehumanizing in BNW , in Anthem it has nearly disappeared. Not to worry though: the hero, working alone (in an abandoned sewer) in his spare time, outdoes those ubiquitous local housewifes of the internet ad who earn a fortune with their computers. In a few short...

Page 859 and sometimes I get so bored I need to distract myself with a post. I have been collecting some virtues and vices ala Rand. Nietzsche would recognize them: Wisdom of Ayn Rand Good..................................... Evil Selfishness ...........................Altruism Business ...............................Government Mind ...........................,,,......Emotion Ordinary Hood ....................Robin. Hood Sabotage .............................Taxes = Murder = Cannibalism Strength ..............................Weakness Justice .................................Charity Ruthlessness .......................Pity Laissez Faire Capitalism ...Anything Else Certainty ............................Uncertainty Self Righteous Whining (good guys) ..........Self Righteous Whining (bad guys) Greed .................................Need Egocentricity .....................Family Feeling Engineering .......................Science Sex for Dagny ...................Sex for A...

Pamela Paul thinks you should read books you hate. She has done her time in book purgatory hell. My taste for hate reading began with “The Fountainhead,” which I opened in a state of complete ignorance as bonus material for a college class on 20th-century architecture. I knew nothing of Ayn Rand or of objectivism. I thought it was a book about building things. I even showed it off to a French friend, an architect and a die-hard socialist, thinking he’d be impressed. “How could you bring that into our house?” he asked in disgust. “But it’s about architecture,” I replied weakly. Or was it? Within pages, I found myself suffering at the hands of its tyrannical egomaniac of a protagonist, Howard Roark, forever plunging a fist into soil and holding forth. The lead female character, Dominique, who naturally took second place to the godlike Roark, kept striding across rooms in long, column-like gowns. Still, I persisted. A hundred pages later, I was more of a French socialist than I’d ev...

Tyler Cowen has been propagating a most influential books meme . His own choices are so serious and intellectual that one might be tempted to suspect a hint of pretension if it were anybody else. The only thing remotely disreputable on it is Ayn Rand in non novelistic garb, though on a reader's prompt he was forced to admit that Fisher's Sixty Memorable Games belonged there. The comments contain lists from mostly lesser mortals, and a few more get propagated here and here and here . The problem with such lists, if you can call it that, is that we tend to use them to try to show off - even if we are trying to be honest. My guess is that that doesn't make them much less revelealing. Most of Cowen's listers seemed to include some Any Rand in their lists, though some claimed to have outgrown it. I will stick with what the late Paul Samuelson said about Alan Greenspan - "You can take the boy out of the cult, but you can't take the cult out of the boy." ...

I've been reading Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild . Hochschild is a highly regarded sociologist who specializes in close up looks at groups of people who might be unfamiliar to many of us. Here she ventures into the heart of Tea Party country in Lake Charles, Louisiana. She prepped for the trip, she tells us, by rereading Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged , which is something of a Bible for the Tea Party founders. That alone tells me that her pain tolerance is a heck of a lot higher than mine. The area around Lake Charles is densely packed with petrochemical plants and has been devastated by pollution. Some of the nation's most productive rivers and estuaries used to be here, but many of them have now been killed by the deadly flood of chemicals. Hoschschild wanted to get a look into the mind of the Tea Party, and thought the pollution issue, which has devastated many, might be what she calls a "keyhole...

Although I read a fair amount, I have gotten out of the habit of reading novels. I rarely read any contemporary literature, or lately, any novels at all. I thought I might promise myself to attempt ten novels next year. I'm probably most attracted to the classics, so I started surfing the 100 best lists. Modern Library has a list, or rather two lists , one by a panel of supposed experts and the other by the public. The public list is pretty much a joke, as it was obviously hacked by a few flavors of nutcase. Their top ten has four by Ayn Rand and three by L. Ron Hubbard. My skepticism about Hubbard is founded purely on hearsay, but I did force myself a couple of Rand's garbage books. I can't be too thrilled with the choices of the pros, either. Ulysses leads the list and more Joyce follows not far behind. James Joyce was a genius, no doubt, but his attempt to transcend narrative form was a bad idea that didn't work. I've read a number of books, by no me...

It seems plausible that the Ryan pick stunned a lot of Romney's liberal critics, just as it sent right wingers into transports of joy. What I can't get past is Ryan's infatuation with Atlas Shrugged and Ayn Rand. The mostly backstage hero of the book is John Galt, a man with superhuman powers of invention (he generates electricity from the air, and effortlessly extracts oil and gold from some random rocks in a Colorado canyon, as well as inventing an invisibility shield, etc.) Galt's ambition is "to stop the engine of the world." That ambition stems from his dislike of the American system of government, and he carries it out with the ruthless fanaticism of a true sociopath - the billions he will kill in the process are nothing to him. He is also given to endless uni-bomber style blather about his own crackpot philosophy, mostly a really dumb guy's rehash of Nietzsche. His only human trait is stalker's obsession with the heroine, who is clearly inte...