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Genocide Is Painless: The World According to Rand
The end of the world has a long pedigree in western literature, in the modern sense going at back at least to the Martians of H.G. Wells.
The appeal of an apocalypse is easy to see. In dramatic terms, there's nothing worse than the end of the world and, provided the story assumes at least a few survivors, it provides the writer with a more or less blank slate for social satire, adventure, horror or the romance of Starting Civilization Over and presumably Better, according to the writer's idea of what "better" means. And of course, the reader can live the adventure vicariously, assuming himself (I suspect the genre is more popular with men than with women, and with young men especially — how better for a teenaged boy to prove his mettle than to survive and prosper when all around him has been destroyed? How easy it is to imagine oneself a hero without the bothersome constraints of a complex and intellectually demanding society?) to be one of the few survivors, one of the brave, the smart, the strong.
It takes no great insight into human psychology to presume that adolescent power-fantasy lies at the heart of a great part of such stories. Nevertheless, most that I have read at least pay lip-service to the idea that the destruction of civilization, along with billions of human lives, is in fact a tragedy, no matter that the survivors have a great time — feeling "more alive" than ever, as in John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids.
If adolescent male power fantasies are at the heart of the disaster novel genre, there is more than a little irony in the fact that Ayn Rand's shamelessly didactic and very long (at around 645,000 words) novel, Atlas Shrugged, was written by a woman.
Published in 1957 and set at some vague point in the relatively near future, Atlas Shrugged depicts a world falling apart, with the United States as the last country to still hold a vestige of capitalism. But it is a country under seige by corrupt businessmen and union leaders, self-serving government officials and ordinary scum and cowards. Rand pulls no punches in including the vast majority of the human race as being moral and intellectual cowards at best, and active promoters of death and destruction at worst.
Railroad heiress Dagny Taggart is one of the few competent "men" (from the perspective of the early 21st century there is something really archaic in Rand's use of man and men to refer to human beings in general, but since it is her usage, I will follow it here) in a world seething with corruption and malice.
As the novel opens, the economy is in serious decline (Fifth Avenue is teeming with "bums" and, "...not more than every fourth one of the stores was out of business, its windows dark and empty.") and a vague fear stalks the hearts of the few good men remaining. Indeed, within eight years, and despite her heroic efforts to save it again literally impossible odds, Dagny's once vast transcontinental railroad is a single, broken line keeping east and west in touch, the cities are going dark and starvation is spreading across the continent, leaping the oceans like a contagion from the "People's States" (clearly representing Rand's vision of the Soviet Union) that have settled on the rest of world like vampires.
The entire world has been bled dry by "moochers and looters", every government run by self-dealing thugs who promise "the people" everything with one hand while more or less systematically destroying their respective economies with the other.
It is a nightmarish, Catch-22 kind of world, in which successful businessmen are forced to divert their profits to keep open incompetent and even criminal factory's, in which collective "sharing" drives men to sink to the lowest common denominator to avoid being singled out (and forced to work harder) for their success. It is a world of absolute moral and philosophical relativism, in which the dominant ethic is that "no one" can say what is right or wrong (except the increasingly totalitarian State) and in which no one ever accepts responsibility for anything.
And in truth, despite a pulpish quality to the prose and characters devoid of any shades of grey, Rand paints a compelling portrait of a society undergoing a complete collapse — think today's Zimbabwe on a world-wide scale. Her elegiac paens to the vigorous industrialism which built New York's sky-scrapers is affecting and disturbing. Even her brief acknowledgment of the inevitable deaths of hard-working farmers towards the novel's end are moving, despite the fact they (and billions like them around the world) are merely what would now be called "collateral damage".
You see, it isn't just the corrupt and the dissolute, the criminals and the weak-minded followers, who are destroying the world. In the world according the Rand, the end is inevitable, but the Good Guys are giving it quite a push to speed the process along.
In the world according to Rand, the destruction of civilization and the death of billions of men, women and children is not a tragedy. In fact, it is a Good Thing, a necessary cleansing, kind of like's God's need to rid the world of everyone but Noah during the time of the Biblical Flood.
Atlas Shrugged's narrative tension is derived from Dagny's refusal to accept the inevitable. She, and a few other hold-outs, like her one-time lover, the steel magnate and inventor Hank Reardon, are fighting the good fight, or so they believe. Shrugging off crippling taxation and regulations, they struggle on against hopeless odds, consciously determined to save a world the reader soon enough knows is beyond saving.
For the Good Guys — the free thinkers, the industrialists, the few good artists, a few honest workmen (but especially the industrialists) — are all mysteriously vanishing. In the office one day, simply vanished — quite and disappeared — the next. For much of the novel, Dagny is convinced there is a man she calls "the Destroyer" who is ridding the world of the competent and the honest and the able.
And even when she learns the truth, that the Destroyer is one of the Good Guys — indeed, the Greatest of the Good Guys, still she refuses to accept the inevitable, despite having fallen in love with him.
For the Good Guys have gone on strike. The fruit of their labour, of their minds being stolen from them, they have given up the world, they say, left it to its own devices.
Except that they are also doing their best to actively destroy it, of course. The pirate Ragnar Danneskjöld somehow manages to sink just about every trans-oceanic vessel going to or coming from the United States, and Dagny's first lover, Francisco d'Anconia, heir to the world's copper supply, systematically destroys nearly all the copper mines in the world.
The Good Guys know the end is coming and they have no intention of allowing the world to die a natural death.
And so it goes. Civilization — and billions of people — perish. This is Rand's idea of a happy ending, a slaughter so vast it makes the Holocaust seem like a stubbed toe along history long march to the bottom. The novel ends with the a scene that comes as close as Rand can manage to humour — Dagny is planning to rebuild her railroad and Hand Rearden jokes that she, "...will probably try to take the shirt off my back with the freight rates she's going to charge, but — I'll be able to meet them."
Were this not an influential book, I wouldn't bother with it. The world is full of theoreticians and philosophers whose ideas for Utopia would (or would seem to) work just fine were it not for the unfortunate complication of people.
The early Soviets were convinced they could create a "new man", if only society's walls were built anew and so sorry about the 20 million people who were collateral damage of the great dream; the Chinese Great Leap Forward would make farmers of philosophers and neo-cons everywhere really seem to believe that wealth will "trickle down" if only business is "unshackled" from "excessive" regulation and taxation (somehow, they forget that it is easier in the short run to make money by buying companies rather than building them, by lending money in ponzi-schemes based on the fantasy of infinite housing-price increases rather than cautious appraisal of risk).
And Rand? Well Rand seems to believe that most of the human race is garbage in need of disposal. Once that job has been done, then comes the millenium!
As I said, I wouldn't be talking about this book were it not taken seriously. Not just by the tin-hat brigade or or survivalists jealously guarding their ten-year supplies of canned good in remote parts of North America, but by people like Alan Greespan and Clarence Thomas, along with Libertarian and neo-conservative think-tanks.
Like many philosophies, Rand's objectivism has a seductive simplicity at its base. Appealing to the common desire (particularly among the young) to be, and the feeling that one is, special, Objectivism posits first, that what we see is what is — "A equals A" or "existence exists".
As someone who spent far too many drunken nights arguing with people who thrilled to the impossibility of proving that even other people exist, Rand's impatient sweeping away of just about all metaphysics holds a definite appeal to me. If the coffee-table on which I bark my shin hurts my shin, I am quite happy to grant it reality and go one to other things.
That she further goes on to dismiss feeling as a legitimate form of knowing the world also appeals to a materialist like myself. Though I cannot prove it to a logical certainty (and don't have any interest in trying), I believe in an objective reality — or at least, act as if I do and believe that so do most people, most of the time. (There's that table and there's that shin again.)
All of which is pretty basic stuff and not really objectionable, except on rigorously philosophical grounds. Where Rand gets strange, and from once springs her novel's monstrous conceit, is the utter extreme to which she takes her major concept, that of rational egoism or rational self-interest.
In the world according to Rand, "...it is both irrational and immoral to act against one's self-interest." Charity and altruism are questionable qualities at best; "enforced" (as by taxation, for instance), they are inevitably "evil".
Rational self-interest means that it is moral for a productive man to keep all that he has created, only dealing with others in voluntary mutual trade. In the world according to Rand, taxation and government — any form of collectivism, with the notable exception of the military, to protect the nation against foreign aggression (to her credit, Rand explicitly denies that any form of first strike can be moral, though her novel's heroes certainly contradict that claim as they hurry along the cleansing apocalypse to rid the world of the "moochers" and the "looters"), and the police and the courts, to protect men's property rights. Property rights being the basis of all other liberties.
To Ayn Rand, any other form of collective action seems to be a form of theft, of extortion. If a man has an idea for a factory, and the money to build it, he can "trade" with individual men for their labour, but let there be no doubt that trade is a one-time thing. His idea is what created the value of the factory, and what Marx would call the "labour-value" is worth no more and no less than what the market will bear. That market being, of course, entirely free of labour unions or anything else which might serve to alter the value-balance.
At first glance, the idea even seems to make a fair amount of sense. In theory, I'd say it does make a fair amount of sense.
But like the totalitarians she so detested, Rand's theory very quickly leads to power-imbalances that would quickly see the entire world reduced to a rich-poor ratio that would make the slums of Mexico City seem a marvel of social and economic equality. The man who "builds" one factory and makes a successful go of it, will soon build another, and another. Before long he will will offer his competitors offers they "can't refuse" and find himself with a monopoly in his field and a strangle-hold on his labour-force.
Yes, someone else might come along and build a better factory, but nine times out of ten, the first man will buy it before it becomes a serious competitor. In the real world, Rand's vision would soon become a nightmare.
In the real world, the vicious competition for jobs at ever-decreasing wages would breed crime and despair, and the factory-owner would find himself paying ever-higher taxes to keep his economic slaves in line or in prison. In the real world, he would retreat from the decaying streets of the city first to "gated communities" and then into armed compounds, while the market for his products grew ever-smaller.
In the real world, it wouldn't be long at all before another holocaust was necessary, to cleanse the world yet again of the losers in her social-Darwinian Utopia.
In the real world, human beings are so much more complex than Rand's simplistic models (like so many other simplistic models of human nature) would have us believe. For a start, and whether you like it or not, human beings are not purely homo economicus, we are not (not only) rational actors in the tales of our lives.
In real world, most of us consider purely rational actors to be psychopaths, or robots at best.
In the real world we all do things that don't "make sense". We gamble when the odds are against, because it's fun; we fall in love and lust for all sorts of reasons, not jus because we admire our mate; we spend time on the internet typing two or three thousand words about Ayn Rand, though probably only a half-dozen people will read it; he take walks along the lakeshore when we could be making money — just because it feels good; we get that quivering, jelly feeling in our bellies at the sight of a small child because our genetic heritage as built caring for children into our nature; we spend idle hours at cafes, or arenas, because we just like being around other people — I could go on and on.
All philosophers build simplified models of reality in order to explain that which is. Good philosophers change their models over time, seeking to make the model come ever closer to matching reality.
Bad philosophers stick rigidly to the model and, in all seriousness, propose genocide when reality fails to have the good sense to match the model.
Ayn Rand was a very bad philosopher indeed and her "masterpiece" is an evil book, by any truly objective standard.
(Chicken-shit and slothful self-justification: This was first draft and I don't think I'll want to write a second. Please ignore any but the grossest typos. But feel free to correct me if I've mis-interpreted any of Rand's philosophic premises; I've been cribbing from Wiki and paraphrasing from Atlas Shrugged's climactic, 60-page speech.)
The appeal of an apocalypse is easy to see. In dramatic terms, there's nothing worse than the end of the world and, provided the story assumes at least a few survivors, it provides the writer with a more or less blank slate for social satire, adventure, horror or the romance of Starting Civilization Over and presumably Better, according to the writer's idea of what "better" means. And of course, the reader can live the adventure vicariously, assuming himself (I suspect the genre is more popular with men than with women, and with young men especially — how better for a teenaged boy to prove his mettle than to survive and prosper when all around him has been destroyed? How easy it is to imagine oneself a hero without the bothersome constraints of a complex and intellectually demanding society?) to be one of the few survivors, one of the brave, the smart, the strong.
It takes no great insight into human psychology to presume that adolescent power-fantasy lies at the heart of a great part of such stories. Nevertheless, most that I have read at least pay lip-service to the idea that the destruction of civilization, along with billions of human lives, is in fact a tragedy, no matter that the survivors have a great time — feeling "more alive" than ever, as in John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids.
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Published in 1957 and set at some vague point in the relatively near future, Atlas Shrugged depicts a world falling apart, with the United States as the last country to still hold a vestige of capitalism. But it is a country under seige by corrupt businessmen and union leaders, self-serving government officials and ordinary scum and cowards. Rand pulls no punches in including the vast majority of the human race as being moral and intellectual cowards at best, and active promoters of death and destruction at worst.
Railroad heiress Dagny Taggart is one of the few competent "men" (from the perspective of the early 21st century there is something really archaic in Rand's use of man and men to refer to human beings in general, but since it is her usage, I will follow it here) in a world seething with corruption and malice.
As the novel opens, the economy is in serious decline (Fifth Avenue is teeming with "bums" and, "...not more than every fourth one of the stores was out of business, its windows dark and empty.") and a vague fear stalks the hearts of the few good men remaining. Indeed, within eight years, and despite her heroic efforts to save it again literally impossible odds, Dagny's once vast transcontinental railroad is a single, broken line keeping east and west in touch, the cities are going dark and starvation is spreading across the continent, leaping the oceans like a contagion from the "People's States" (clearly representing Rand's vision of the Soviet Union) that have settled on the rest of world like vampires.
The entire world has been bled dry by "moochers and looters", every government run by self-dealing thugs who promise "the people" everything with one hand while more or less systematically destroying their respective economies with the other.
It is a nightmarish, Catch-22 kind of world, in which successful businessmen are forced to divert their profits to keep open incompetent and even criminal factory's, in which collective "sharing" drives men to sink to the lowest common denominator to avoid being singled out (and forced to work harder) for their success. It is a world of absolute moral and philosophical relativism, in which the dominant ethic is that "no one" can say what is right or wrong (except the increasingly totalitarian State) and in which no one ever accepts responsibility for anything.
And in truth, despite a pulpish quality to the prose and characters devoid of any shades of grey, Rand paints a compelling portrait of a society undergoing a complete collapse — think today's Zimbabwe on a world-wide scale. Her elegiac paens to the vigorous industrialism which built New York's sky-scrapers is affecting and disturbing. Even her brief acknowledgment of the inevitable deaths of hard-working farmers towards the novel's end are moving, despite the fact they (and billions like them around the world) are merely what would now be called "collateral damage".
You see, it isn't just the corrupt and the dissolute, the criminals and the weak-minded followers, who are destroying the world. In the world according the Rand, the end is inevitable, but the Good Guys are giving it quite a push to speed the process along.
In the world according to Rand, the destruction of civilization and the death of billions of men, women and children is not a tragedy. In fact, it is a Good Thing, a necessary cleansing, kind of like's God's need to rid the world of everyone but Noah during the time of the Biblical Flood.
Atlas Shrugged's narrative tension is derived from Dagny's refusal to accept the inevitable. She, and a few other hold-outs, like her one-time lover, the steel magnate and inventor Hank Reardon, are fighting the good fight, or so they believe. Shrugging off crippling taxation and regulations, they struggle on against hopeless odds, consciously determined to save a world the reader soon enough knows is beyond saving.
For the Good Guys — the free thinkers, the industrialists, the few good artists, a few honest workmen (but especially the industrialists) — are all mysteriously vanishing. In the office one day, simply vanished — quite and disappeared — the next. For much of the novel, Dagny is convinced there is a man she calls "the Destroyer" who is ridding the world of the competent and the honest and the able.
And even when she learns the truth, that the Destroyer is one of the Good Guys — indeed, the Greatest of the Good Guys, still she refuses to accept the inevitable, despite having fallen in love with him.
For the Good Guys have gone on strike. The fruit of their labour, of their minds being stolen from them, they have given up the world, they say, left it to its own devices.
Except that they are also doing their best to actively destroy it, of course. The pirate Ragnar Danneskjöld somehow manages to sink just about every trans-oceanic vessel going to or coming from the United States, and Dagny's first lover, Francisco d'Anconia, heir to the world's copper supply, systematically destroys nearly all the copper mines in the world.
The Good Guys know the end is coming and they have no intention of allowing the world to die a natural death.
And so it goes. Civilization — and billions of people — perish. This is Rand's idea of a happy ending, a slaughter so vast it makes the Holocaust seem like a stubbed toe along history long march to the bottom. The novel ends with the a scene that comes as close as Rand can manage to humour — Dagny is planning to rebuild her railroad and Hand Rearden jokes that she, "...will probably try to take the shirt off my back with the freight rates she's going to charge, but — I'll be able to meet them."
They could not see the world beyond the mountains, there was only a void of darkness and rock, but the darkness was hiding the ruins of a continent: the roofless homes, the rusting tractors, the lightless streets, the abandoned rail. But far in the distance, on the edge of the arth, a small flame was waving in the wind, the defiantly stubborn flame of Wyatt's Torch, twisting, being torn and regaining its hold, not to be uprooted or extinguished. It seemed to be calling and waiting for the words John Galt was now to pronounce.
"The road is cleared," said Galt. "We are going back to the world."
He raised his hand and over the desolate earth he traced in space the sign of the dollar.
Were this not an influential book, I wouldn't bother with it. The world is full of theoreticians and philosophers whose ideas for Utopia would (or would seem to) work just fine were it not for the unfortunate complication of people.
The early Soviets were convinced they could create a "new man", if only society's walls were built anew and so sorry about the 20 million people who were collateral damage of the great dream; the Chinese Great Leap Forward would make farmers of philosophers and neo-cons everywhere really seem to believe that wealth will "trickle down" if only business is "unshackled" from "excessive" regulation and taxation (somehow, they forget that it is easier in the short run to make money by buying companies rather than building them, by lending money in ponzi-schemes based on the fantasy of infinite housing-price increases rather than cautious appraisal of risk).
And Rand? Well Rand seems to believe that most of the human race is garbage in need of disposal. Once that job has been done, then comes the millenium!
As I said, I wouldn't be talking about this book were it not taken seriously. Not just by the tin-hat brigade or or survivalists jealously guarding their ten-year supplies of canned good in remote parts of North America, but by people like Alan Greespan and Clarence Thomas, along with Libertarian and neo-conservative think-tanks.
Like many philosophies, Rand's objectivism has a seductive simplicity at its base. Appealing to the common desire (particularly among the young) to be, and the feeling that one is, special, Objectivism posits first, that what we see is what is — "A equals A" or "existence exists".
As someone who spent far too many drunken nights arguing with people who thrilled to the impossibility of proving that even other people exist, Rand's impatient sweeping away of just about all metaphysics holds a definite appeal to me. If the coffee-table on which I bark my shin hurts my shin, I am quite happy to grant it reality and go one to other things.
That she further goes on to dismiss feeling as a legitimate form of knowing the world also appeals to a materialist like myself. Though I cannot prove it to a logical certainty (and don't have any interest in trying), I believe in an objective reality — or at least, act as if I do and believe that so do most people, most of the time. (There's that table and there's that shin again.)
All of which is pretty basic stuff and not really objectionable, except on rigorously philosophical grounds. Where Rand gets strange, and from once springs her novel's monstrous conceit, is the utter extreme to which she takes her major concept, that of rational egoism or rational self-interest.
In the world according to Rand, "...it is both irrational and immoral to act against one's self-interest." Charity and altruism are questionable qualities at best; "enforced" (as by taxation, for instance), they are inevitably "evil".
Rational self-interest means that it is moral for a productive man to keep all that he has created, only dealing with others in voluntary mutual trade. In the world according to Rand, taxation and government — any form of collectivism, with the notable exception of the military, to protect the nation against foreign aggression (to her credit, Rand explicitly denies that any form of first strike can be moral, though her novel's heroes certainly contradict that claim as they hurry along the cleansing apocalypse to rid the world of the "moochers" and the "looters"), and the police and the courts, to protect men's property rights. Property rights being the basis of all other liberties.
To Ayn Rand, any other form of collective action seems to be a form of theft, of extortion. If a man has an idea for a factory, and the money to build it, he can "trade" with individual men for their labour, but let there be no doubt that trade is a one-time thing. His idea is what created the value of the factory, and what Marx would call the "labour-value" is worth no more and no less than what the market will bear. That market being, of course, entirely free of labour unions or anything else which might serve to alter the value-balance.
At first glance, the idea even seems to make a fair amount of sense. In theory, I'd say it does make a fair amount of sense.
But like the totalitarians she so detested, Rand's theory very quickly leads to power-imbalances that would quickly see the entire world reduced to a rich-poor ratio that would make the slums of Mexico City seem a marvel of social and economic equality. The man who "builds" one factory and makes a successful go of it, will soon build another, and another. Before long he will will offer his competitors offers they "can't refuse" and find himself with a monopoly in his field and a strangle-hold on his labour-force.
Yes, someone else might come along and build a better factory, but nine times out of ten, the first man will buy it before it becomes a serious competitor. In the real world, Rand's vision would soon become a nightmare.
In the real world, the vicious competition for jobs at ever-decreasing wages would breed crime and despair, and the factory-owner would find himself paying ever-higher taxes to keep his economic slaves in line or in prison. In the real world, he would retreat from the decaying streets of the city first to "gated communities" and then into armed compounds, while the market for his products grew ever-smaller.
In the real world, it wouldn't be long at all before another holocaust was necessary, to cleanse the world yet again of the losers in her social-Darwinian Utopia.
In the real world, human beings are so much more complex than Rand's simplistic models (like so many other simplistic models of human nature) would have us believe. For a start, and whether you like it or not, human beings are not purely homo economicus, we are not (not only) rational actors in the tales of our lives.
In real world, most of us consider purely rational actors to be psychopaths, or robots at best.
In the real world we all do things that don't "make sense". We gamble when the odds are against, because it's fun; we fall in love and lust for all sorts of reasons, not jus because we admire our mate; we spend time on the internet typing two or three thousand words about Ayn Rand, though probably only a half-dozen people will read it; he take walks along the lakeshore when we could be making money — just because it feels good; we get that quivering, jelly feeling in our bellies at the sight of a small child because our genetic heritage as built caring for children into our nature; we spend idle hours at cafes, or arenas, because we just like being around other people — I could go on and on.
All philosophers build simplified models of reality in order to explain that which is. Good philosophers change their models over time, seeking to make the model come ever closer to matching reality.
Bad philosophers stick rigidly to the model and, in all seriousness, propose genocide when reality fails to have the good sense to match the model.
Ayn Rand was a very bad philosopher indeed and her "masterpiece" is an evil book, by any truly objective standard.
(Chicken-shit and slothful self-justification: This was first draft and I don't think I'll want to write a second. Please ignore any but the grossest typos. But feel free to correct me if I've mis-interpreted any of Rand's philosophic premises; I've been cribbing from Wiki and paraphrasing from Atlas Shrugged's climactic, 60-page speech.)
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I read that one of her editors begged her to polish up the text a little, at least to cut some obvious and multiple repetitions. Allegedly she responded, would you dare edit the Bible?
Got to give her points for moxie.
Definitely Moxie
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"Evil" probably overstates the case here; "shoddy" seems closer to the mark to me. I can accuse Rand of writing inelegantly and failing to unite form and substance, but that's about it. Pushing a worldview I don't agree with is pretty hard to deem a crime, literary or otherwise, but she never seemed to realize that trying to make your own worldview rigorous and perfectly consistent is a mug's game.
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On The (Relatively) Judicious Use of the Word "Evil"
"Evil" probably overstates the case here; "shoddy" seems closer to the mark to me.
I wouldn't go so far as "shoddy", at least not in terms of the writing. As I think I said, though there is a pulpish feel to her prose, her description of the decline, and of Dagny fighting the long defeat against it, were compelling.
But insofar as her worldview — at least as she posits it here — necessitates the deaths of billions as part of her "happy ending", I stand by my use of "evil". Also, I suspect I was influenced by her own free use of the term and concept to describe the book's villains.
In the real world, that willingness to abstract the lives of actual human beings in favour of "the greater good" is what leads idealists of all stripes to countenance gulags and war-zones, mass starvation and mass slaughter as nothing but "collateral damage".
Re: On The (Relatively) Judicious Use of the Word "Evil"
But then again, pogroms, gulags and secret police weren't part of Marx's vision. If Rand had equivalents of Lenin and Stalin to nightmarishly interpret their own totalitarian interpretations of her thought, then she'd certainly be on Marx's level. Whether that's "evil" seems up for debate; I don't consider Marx evil, though I do consider those who would directly order human liquidation in the name of a Marx-envisioned utopia evil. Then again, I'd consider those who would directly order human liquidation evil in most cases anyway.
Re: On The (Relatively) Judicious Use of the Word "Evil"
But then again, pogroms, gulags and secret police weren't part of Marx's vision.
But it certainly was the central conceit of that particular novel. Granted, her premise insists that the mass dying is going to take place anyway, which arguably removes culpability from Galt & company — but my inner (plot-oriented) reader kept wondering, If they'd waited, couldn't they have found and saved a few more good men?
If Rand had equivalents of Lenin and Stalin to nightmarishly interpret their own totalitarian interpretations of her thought, then she'd certainly be on Marx's level.
I'd argue that she did have those equivalents, at least roughly (the death-tolls weren't quite so high), in people like Milton Friedman, who was quite happy to actively support tyrants like Augusto Pinochet in his murderous policies in the name of the "free market".
P.S. Sorry for the multiple edits showing up in your in-box; HTML and I are having some arguments.
Re: On The (Relatively) Judicious Use of the Word "Evil"
Now, I do think there's an argument to be made that one shouldn't go around telling dictators how to improve aspects of their countries, because they're dictators and thus by definition on a moral level with hostage-takers. While I'd technically prefer to live in a dictatorship with functioning markets than one without, I'd really prefer that the outside world put a bullet in the guy whose thumb I'm under than tell him how to cripple the economy less. Also — and I don't know the extent to which this could have been foreseen, but still — it was a bit irresponsible to do economic reforms under a man as hated as Pinochet, since it's given economic reforms a bad name in Chile whose traces persist today.
If Friedman had taken over a country himself and then ordered those who disagreed with him executed in the name of the greater good of the free market, I'd be the first to put him in league with Lenin and Stalin — and if he held up Ayn Rand's teachings as his lodestone, Rand could go right in there with Marx. But he didn't, so I can't.
Re: On The (Relatively) Judicious Use of the Word "Evil"
But that's all they (at least, Klein) does accuse him of: that he approved of the deaths squads (else, he'd have been offering his active services elsewhere) and so was complicit with them.
I'd really prefer that the outside world put a bullet in the guy whose thumb I'm under than tell him how to cripple the economy less.
It's a nice thought, but that way lies Iraq. As brutal as it would be in the (relatively) short-term, the best way to improve other parts of the world is to leave them settle their own affairs (as a general rule; there may be exceptions).
If Friedman had taken over a country himself...But he didn't, so I can't.
Literally, the analogy doesn't hold; morally, I think it does.
Re: On The (Relatively) Judicious Use of the Word "Evil"
But even if we assume that Friedman did approved of Pinochet's death squads, etc., the trouble comes when trying to square that with the rest of the picture. Friedman's body of work is near-singlemindedly dedicated to the question of how to increas human freedom, in the negative freedom-from-coercion sense, be it coercion by an authoritarian government, a democratic government, or even non-government entities. It's an interest in human freedom even above economic prosperity; going by what he's written, Friedman would sacrifice prosperity if it meant freedom.
So into this we must fit that he somehow, for the brief period he lectured in Chile, decided to start approving of the worst kind of repression — starkly counter to the ideas he professed — and then stopped just as quickly. Which, while possible, does not strike me as particularly plausible.
And I'd agreee that attempted dictator removal can lead to Iraq, but I'd add it especially leads to Iraq if it's assumed to be quick and easy, which it most certainly is not.
Re: On The (Relatively) Judicious Use of the Word "Evil"
Whether giving a lecture on an economics in a dictator's country and then endorsing a few of one's colleagues to advise that government's economic policymakers entails approving of whatever vile methods that dictator may or may not be using is, I think, a little up for debate than that.
True enough. However, it's my belief (admittedly based largely on Klein's book) that Friedman actively supported Pinochet's "experiment". I suspect he considered the dead and mutilated to be nothing more than "collateral damage".
...the trouble comes when trying to square that with the rest of the picture. Friedman's body of work is near-singlemindedly dedicated to the question of how to increas human freedom, in the negative freedom-from-coercion sense...
And Rand would say the same. The fact (or "fact") that, when given the opportunity, Friedman cooperated with and supported a death-squad using dictatorship kind of renders whatever he may have written moot. Which more or less relates to the point I was trying to make about philosophers who place theory over reality. You can talk 'till you're blue in the face about liberty and "freedom from coercion", but if you need to murder opponents to put your theory into practice, there's something wrong with your theory.
So into this we must fit that he somehow, for the brief period he lectured in Chile, decided to start approving of the worst kind of repression — starkly counter to the ideas he professed — and then stopped just as quickly.
Did he ever disavow his support for Pinochet? If so, I'm not aware of it.
And I'd agreee that attempted dictator removal can lead to Iraq, but I'd add it especially leads to Iraq if it's assumed to be quick and easy, which it most certainly is not.
No arguments from me on that one!
Re: On The (Relatively) Judicious Use of the Word "Evil"
As far as I know, I don't think Friedman ever avowed support for Pinochet — he went to the country and lectured. It might be arguable that his colleagues who went on to do the advising offered their "support" in that they offered their advice, but few seem to want to assert that.
In Friedman's own work, the theme of economic freedom leading to political freedom gets dropped quite often, before and after his Chile experience. He believed that free markets lead inexorably to free politics. I don't know if I buy it all the way — it's well-argued in a lot of works, especially Capitalism and Freedom — but he certainly did. Given that belief, I think you could say one of the following about Chile:
- Friedman's theory was irrelevant; Chile became a democracy for other reasons
- Friedman's theory did work; it was a primary driver for Chile's political freedom
- Friedman's theory was correct enough; free markets were one of many factors leading to free politics
But it's tough to come up with an argument that he would approve of free markets in Chile but not free politics, since in his mind — again, I'm not saying it's a certainty in the world itself — free politics would be a consequence of free markets. It seems to me that if he approved of the dictatorship, he'd urge Pinochet not to implement any economic reforms.Re: On The (Relatively) Judicious Use of the Word "Evil"
And mine elsewhere.
As far as I know, I don't think Friedman ever avowed support for Pinochet — he went to the country and lectured...
At the very least least, he also wrote directly to Pinochet in 1975, according to Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, who quotes from it on page 87, referencing Friedman's Two Lucky People: Memoirs. And further,
It seems clear to me that Friedman, at best, believe that on a hierarchy of values, his version of capitalism trumped democracy if democracy would lead to a less "pure" version of capitalism.
As for why Chile returned to democracy (prior to Pinochet's coup, it had a 160 year history of democracy, 41 years uninterrupted), a major reason was that Pinochet's economic policies failed. Pure market economics did not lead greater wealth for the majority of the population. Quite the contrary.
As I think we're seeing now throughout the Western World following a decades-long experiment in deregulation in the name of market economics.
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In the real world, Rand's vision would soon become a nightmare.
In the real world, Rand's vision is impossible, because one of the other things she didn't understand was economics. See the recent bailout in the U.S. The free market can't exist without extensive government intervention—even in the age of robber barons that she so idolizes, the state had to intervene violently to allow capitalism to happen at all.
Free market's existence
(Anonymous) 2008-09-22 12:41 pm (UTC)(link)I've never read such deep understanding of economics. Congratulations.
Probably Not Worth Your Time, But Might Be Worth Hours
The free market can't exist without extensive government intervention...
Sure it can. See Darfur, or any gangster-dominated slum. Although arguably, those are mercantile-style feudal systems ... oh, never mind, you're right (again).
no subject
My Pleasure
no subject
Rand is one author I have avoided for many of your above stated reasons.
I Aim to Please!
no subject
And what would motivate someone to spend all the weeks and months that task would take?
Instead, on the outside chance that you have an honest mind, I'll take a long shot at inspiring you to bite the bullet and correct your own violations.
And hyperbolic your errors are:
"Genocide Is Painless: The World According to Rand ---- In the world according to Rand, the destruction of civilization and the death of billions of men, women and children is not a tragedy. ---- And Rand? Well Rand seems to believe that most of the human race is garbage in need of disposal. Once that job has been done, then comes the millennium!"
Point to one death reported in Atlas and explain the standard by which you lay the blame on any one of her heroes. [cite chapter/page of specific incidents please. I haven't read it for several decades.]
Here's some help: Start with the two ideas you correctly agree with Rand on: 1) existence is independent of our mind (objective) and 2) feelings are a result of the ideas man holds, not a substitute, i.e. action directed by reason is our only means to live -- to survive and flourish as a human being. Add to 1) and 2) that our reason and actions are exercised by choice -- volition. And that means all men are fallible. And thence, if your life depends on the rationality of your actions to produce and acquire the sustenance of your life and my life depends on the same for my life, and both of us are fallible, neither has a moral claim to the choices and actions of others or the product of those. And since physical force is the only possible way to interfere with volition, only one socio-economic principle is necessary:
No man may initiate the use of physical force to gain, withhold, or destroy a value owned by any other human being.
Rand's heroes never violated that principle. Whence the "genocide"?
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And here is a whopper of a self-contradiction:
"In the real world we all do things that don't "make sense". We gamble when the odds are against, because it's fun; we fall in love and lust for all sorts of reasons, not jus because we admire our mate; we spend time on the internet typing two or three thousand words about Ayn Rand, though probably only a half-dozen people will read it; he take walks along the lakeshore when we could be making money — just because it feels good; we get that quivering, jelly feeling in our bellies at the sight of a small child because our genetic heritage as built caring for children into our nature; we spend idle hours at cafes, or arenas, because we just like being around other people — I could go on and on."
You already agreed that feelings are not knowledge. Here you take for granted that the positive feelings in each case validate the actions (whether they "make sense" or not). You have pre-excluded that a positive feeling could come from an irrational action (in the short run) that when repeated through life will have disastrous consequences. The connection you have missed is that the very objectivity of reality and independence from our wishes means that those practices either are or are not valid in each individual's case, and reality is the judge and jury. You may not take validity of anything for granted solely on the strength of "we all do it."
When you assemble your personal philosophy, you avoid false assumptions about people and their actions by identifying the underlying ideas that are the root cause. And those you must order and validate by tracing their lineage all the way back to that axiom of axioms: existence exists. And even though its creator is an Objectivist, you can't get that ability from Wikipedia.
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Two-Parter A-Comin'
"But feel free to correct me..."
And what would motivate someone to spend all the weeks and months that task would take?
I have no idea. You've dropped into my house. Which is fine, most of the time. I am an egoist and I like to argue and learn. But mind your manners. I don't like ad hominems in the public sphere; I have an extremely low tolerance for it at home.
Instead, on the outside chance that you have an honest mind...
You're treading on thin ice, pal. Do you always begin a conversation with (barely) veiled insults?
And hyperbolic your errors are:
"...according to Rand, the destruction of civilization and the death of billions...is not a tragedy...And Rand? Well Rand seems to believe that most of the human race is garbage in need of disposal. Once that job has been done, then comes the millennium!"
Point to one death reported in Atlas and explain the standard by which you lay the blame on any one of her heroes. [cite chapter/page of specific incidents please. I haven't read it for several decades.]
I'll cite what I want, thank you kindly. Fortunately, there's no need for chapter and verse.
Galt actively works to withdraw those men he believes are needed for a functioning economy, thus deliberately bringing it down and ensuring the deaths of millions. His cronies, like the pirate and Francisco, use piracy and the destruction of property on a massive scale to ensure that the system can't survive, thus ensuring the death of most of the world's population. Indeed, those deaths are a prerequisite for Galt's plan to rebuild the world.
Add to 1) and 2) that our reason and actions are exercised by choice -- volition...And since physical force is the only possible way to interfere with volition, only one socio-economic principle is necessary:
Hang on. You're making one hell of an unproven assumption. Namely, that because your volition can only be influenced by physical force, the rest of us are like that, too. In fact, most of us (at least some of the time) are open to a number of other influences, such as argument, empathy, laziness and especially, a different understanding of just what is rational self-interest.
No man may initiate the use of physical force to gain, withhold, or destroy a value owned by any other human being.
Rand's heroes never violated that principle.
Somewhere in there (no I won't re-read it to find the specific passage, but I'm pretty sure it's in Galt's speech), it is made clear that "property" is that which is produced by a man — i.e. the product of his labour or (especially) of his ideas.
Francisco destroys access to most of the world's supply of culture, on the grounds that he owns the mines. Since he didn't create the copper, how does he then claim to own it?
Whence the "genocide"?
Er, Francisco? Ragnar? Galt's gang didn't just go on strike, the engaged in one hell of a lot of vandalism, too.
And here is a whopper of a self-contradiction:
"In the real world we all do things that don't "make sense". We gamble...fall in love...spend time on the internet typing two or three thousand words about Ayn Rand...ake walks along the lakeshore..."
You already agreed that feelings are not knowledge.
I don't think I did. Certainly I didn't intend to. I explained that that was what Rand believed.
Re: Two-Parter A-Comin'
Galt et al are the victims of parasites dragging their physical and spiritual equity (the virtue of productivity) in life toward zero. They withdrew solely to stop the flow of their life's blood to them. The parasites had finally reduced them to the point at which flipping burgers was more productive than running corporations being confiscated. So they withdrew their ideas, their actions, and all that had been created by their ideas and actions that was still their property from the reach of the parasites. They owed no one anything. The parasites were free to sustain their lives by any means they chose. If they failed to and died, it was their fault. No man has any moral claim to the service of any other man.
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"Hang on. You're making one hell of an unproven assumption. Namely, that because your volition can only be influenced by physical force, the rest of us are like that, too."
I did not say "influenced", I said "interefered with". Influence can be ignored. Physical force cannot. Physical force is the only enemy of freedom (volition).
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"Francisco destroys access to most of the world's supply of culture, on the grounds that he owns the mines. Since he didn't create the copper, how does he then claim to own it?"
Objects such as land or raw materials that are not man-made may not be owned by anyone. Human beings own only the product of their own mind and the actions of their own body and anything that they acquire by exchanging those products with others. But when that product constitutes a value added to an unowned object, one has the moral right to control the object as the inseparable receptacle of the value added. This does not diminish any value owned by anyone else, so long as there is no value in the object contributed by anyone else that was not paid for. The same principle is operative whether the value added is an enabling idea or actual physical labor, whether the object is land or the object is currency.
Francisco owned the mines and destroying them diminished no value owned by others.
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"Er, Francisco? Ragnar? Galt's gang didn't just go on strike, the engaged in one hell of a lot of vandalism, too."
Vandalism is the destruction of a value owned by someone else. I know of no such instance in the book.
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"You already agreed that feelings are not knowledge.
I don't think I did. Certainly I didn't intend to. I explained that that was what Rand believed."
You did that here:
"That she further goes on to dismiss feeling as a legitimate form of knowing the world also appeals to a materialist like myself."
------------------------
Part II:continued from above:
So when you cited that list of fuzzy-feeling human practices as an argument I reminded you that feelings are not knowledge, and the significance of that list can first be accessed in determining which are valid, and which not.
You then here add:
"Again, I was not arguing validity, but existence."
But the mere existence of those practices that do not seem to make sense has no value until one validates or invalidates them. Observing existence is only step 1. The product of that step cannot provide you with a standard by which you can make your life choices without step 2, the evaluation of the existence you observe.
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Re: Two-Parter A-Comin'
You're talking about the book as if it's central conceits make sense in the real world. That's like arguing whether Gandalf made the right decision in taking the path through Moria in The Lord of the Rings. The latter argument might be interesting but the former is not, because Tolkien's book wasn't meant to apply to the real world whereas Rand's was.
Her model might be self-consistent, but it breaks down in the face of reality.
Physical force is the only enemy of freedom (volition).
For sake of argument, I'll accept that. But so what. There's no such thing as absolute freedom ("Your right to swing your arm stops at my nose.) Again, Rand wants to change reality in order that reality fits her theory.
Francisco owned the mines and destroying them diminished no value owned by others.
Sophistry. Francisco destroyed access,/i> to the mines (which, again, only works in Rand's mind because the world was made of nothing but "zeros"). Destroying access to the copper he did not produce denied others the possibility of others' creating value, according to Rand's own terms.
Vandalism is the destruction of a value owned by someone else. I know of no such instance in the book.
That's because we disagree on the definition of "ownership".
You did that here:
"That she further goes on to dismiss feeling as a legitimate form of knowing the world also appeals to a materialist like myself."
To be pedantic, note that I said it "appeals to me, not that it's true.
But in any case, I'll withdraw that and say instead, feeling is a legitimate way of knowing the world, but it is not of much use in analyzing it.
Re: Two-Parter A-Comin'
Two-Parter A-Comin' (Part Two)
I've done nothing of the sort. I have simply noted the objective reality of elements of life which don't fit into Rand's model.
I'll note now (that I think of it) that Rand's model "pre-excludes" the concept something that makes sense on one scale might not make sense on another. As an example, a small hunter-gatherer tribe that operates largely on the basis of informal consensus is probably a good way to run a small hunter-gatherer tribe. That does not necessarily mean it's a good way to run an industrial civilization.
The connection you have missed is that the very objectivity of reality and independence from our wishes
The connection I was trying to get at is that our wishes are a part of objective reality.
means that those practices either are or are not valid in each individual's case, and reality is the judge and jury. You may not take validity of anything for granted solely on the strength of "we all do it."
Again, I was not arguing validity, but existence. Nor am I arguing against the fact that extinction is ultimate arbiter of whether something works. However, morality too has an objective reality and is part of objective reality. If your morality posits that it is better than you and 19 friends survive at the cost of the other 6,000,000 people on this planet, then there's something wrong with your morality (not to mention your imagination).
Rand's vision of human reality is ludicrous, because she who claims to be concerned with objective reality dismisses about 90 percent of it.
When you assemble your personal philosophy, you avoid false assumptions about people and their actions by identifying the underlying ideas that are the root cause.
No. You try to. Anyone who believes they have uncovered all of the underlying root causes is a fool. (Er, no offense.)
When you make sweeping statements about how you "avoid false assumptions" you make the false assumption that reality is as as easily knoweable as the rules to the simplest child's game.
Reality in fact is, contrary to Rand's simplistic view, chock full of (apparent) contradictions. The only "objective" needs are air, food and water — all else is dependent upon a myriad of factors, including (but not limited to) the innate intellectual and psychological of each and every individual human being, the social position into which he or she is born, the relative ease (or lack thereof) they can transcend that initial position, blind chance (do they meet the person who would become a friend who introduces them to a new idea or interest; do they meet the person who see "value" in them and give them a hand up, or conversely, a person who would knock them down?), individual likes and dislikes, learned and innate, etcetera etcetera.
We are not robots. We live in an objective reality, yes, but it is vast and very far from completely understood, even by Ayn Rand.
RnBram
(Anonymous) 2008-09-22 04:47 pm (UTC)(link)The prose is loaded with metaphors and multi-level meanings that are conspicuously absent from, or are incredibly shallow in, most other forms of fiction. Adding the qualities of the characters you complain are missing would massively, and unnecessarily lengthen the novel —something else that displeased you
As a fiction work Rand is not advocating the deaths of millions of ordinary citizens, she is showing the full consequences of the ideas of a culture were they carried to full implementation. She also shows their consequences in partial implementation.
It is ironic, almost to the point of sick, that as America economy is tanking you would say, "Even her brief acknowledgment of the inevitable deaths of hard-working farmers towards the novel's end are moving, despite the fact they (and billions like them around the world) are merely what would now be called "collateral damage"." The Bush administration and the Democratic congress prohibited "redlining (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining)" of mortgage loans. (Redlining identified regions containing properties where the highest risks to lenders were believed to occur. It was not racially motivated, but some areas did have notable racial characteristics.) Lenders who were even perceived to be redlining were subjected to business destroying audits and abandonment by their banking institutions. Lenders who were willing to make riskier loans (believing they were protected by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac), &/or who were forced by government to carefully avoid 'redline' financial 'discrimination', made riskier loans to enable people with poorer judgment to buy homes they could not afford.
As the monetary cost of the defaults of these home buyers added up, more and more lenders found themselves going bankrupt. This process steadily snowballed until major companies, including the quasi-government Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae organizations began to fail. Now, the taxpayer is paying for ALL of it... ten thousand dollars or so, for every working adult (not to mention the $20,000 each pays for the War on Terror).
Why is the taxpayer covering these loans, when they never agreed to it? ...because they agreed that socialist intervention was needed so those risky homebuyers could get mortgages they could not afford. Events like these bailouts make Rand's Atlas Shrugged prescient!
With closer examination it should be more clear as to who is slaughtering millions. Was it those who rationally, in their own self-interest (such as the BB&T bank) did not obey the government and culture, or those who did? I think it clear that it was those who did who have caused the loss of trillions of dollars of wealth, with millions of investors losing their hard earned wealth, some of them going bankrupt as their retirement looms.
The culprits are not the Capitalists, but the mixed-economy types and the government. It is the latter who set up the Ponzi scheme, the very people Atlas Shrugged shows are the problem. As with any Ponzi scheme the last to enter are the victims, and the victims are the taxpayers. You apparently overlooked that.
You say, of Dagny, "even when she learns the truth, that the Destroyer is one of the Good Guys — indeed, the Greatest of the Good Guys, still she refuses to accept the inevitable...". She is a lot like you. She could see some of the point, but not enough to actually pursue it. And, you thought there were no shades of grey!
Then "The Good Guys know the end is coming and they have no intention of allowing the world to die a natural death. Never mind that the "natural death" would kill, or at least ruin, the lives of millions more, as it did in socialist nations such as the USSR, China, Romania etc.
The first time I read Atlas Shrugged, I too, grasped the plot, but not the full depth of the theme, I too saw it as pulpish and cultish. Some years later, at someone's recommendation, I read it for the theme, the metaphors and the thinking of the characters. It was as if, in that first reading, I had known how to read. To this day I am somewhat embarrassed that I had not read more carefully the first time.
RnBram
(Anonymous) 2008-09-22 05:58 pm (UTC)(link)I separated this to address some points on Rand's philosophy and how it plays out, that I think you misrepresent.
You wrote, "Property rights being the basis of all other liberties."
On the contrary, she argues in great detail in her non-fiction (but more implicitly in Atlas) that a) liberty precludes property rights but is nothing without them and b) the individual, volitional, mind precludes liberty and is of little use to the individual without that liberty. That is, Man by his nature is a conceptual being who is designed to evaluate the physical world and to choose to act according to how he sees it. The removal of liberty to act on his thoughts negates his nature as Man. Similarly a Man is a physical being with the moral requirement to look after his physical existence rather than parasitize others (he is not an ant or bee in a hive), so those things he accrues for the task of maintaining his existence must be viewed as his property. The Rights to Life, Liberty and Property are closely intertwined, but they have a definite hierarchy that begins with a Man's life and mind.
You wrote, "Rand's theory very quickly leads to power-imbalances that would quickly see the entire world reduced to a rich-poor ratio that would make the slums of Mexico City seem a marvel of social and economic equality."
By that argument, once slavery was abolished (thanks to the spread of the ideas of the Founders and their U.S. Constitution's effort to enshrine Life, Liberty and Property for every Man) the U.S. should have degenerated into the very scenario you named. It did not. The slum dwellers of, say, Pittsburgh, had TV's and cars (they should have forgone the TV to get health insurance), while the slum dwellers of other, non-capitalist countries had to beg for food and slept on the streets. People were not immigrating to Mexico, they were immigrating to New York. Rand understood. I contest that a lot more Americans should understand their own country a lot better (I am a Canadian who understands it, and have enough experience with our own socialism to resent it. You guys do NOT want socialized medicine; your Medicare, Medicaid and outrageous litigism against doctors have already driven up your costs and are harming you. More of the same is no solution.)
You wrote, that the successful corporate leader will, "...find himself with a monopoly in his field and a strangle-hold on his labor force."
This is a myth promoted by socialists. No monopoly is secure in a free country. If Bill Gate's Microsoft actually achieved a monopoly by buying out Apple etc. what is to stop GMC or even Honda (both of whom use non-Microsoft compatible software in their vehicles and factories) from seeing an opportunity to compete? Indeed, should 'Bill' gouge his customers too much, potential competitors will seize the opportunity. Likely, they will have innovative ideas, while 'Bill's' bureaucratic behemoth will have (has?) become too stagnant to rise to meet the newcomers. This principle applies to all so-called monopolies, but when legislation interferes with certain markets (laws that require certain standards be met) newcomers have a much more difficult time entering that market, because they have to dedicate limited resources to meeting laws, rather than the customers that appreciate what they offer. Government interference actually helps ensure that monopolies, or a few large corporations, exclude those newcomers.
RnBram
(Anonymous) 2008-09-22 06:13 pm (UTC)(link)One of those using those ideas was Alan Greenspan, who betrayed his own writings in Rand's essay collection titled "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal". Rand also utterly rejected Libertarians and Libertarianism, but you would have to read more to understand why. One major reason is the aforementioned hierarchy of Life, Liberty, Property, and the Pursuit of Happiness. The Libertarians took Freedom as a foundation for politics, defaulting on the moral requirements of the individual mind.
So, you wrote, "In the real world we all do things that don't "make sense"." and proceeded to back it up with examples. Imagine if Thomas Jefferson et al. had stood for that argument. The idea is to free men's minds to do all they could to make better sense, to be more reasonable. Jefferson knew it, and said so: "I swear upon the altar of God, eternal hostility to every form of tyranny over the mind of man." America was the only nation to be built on that principle, a principle a majority of Americans have now forgotten ...save for Rand & those who really understand her vision. Caring for children and enjoying a walk on the beach do not contradict with her views, she would advocate them if you are not ruining your life (skipping a business meeting crucial to your life) in the process.
Enjoy life,
* use reason,
* be an individual (don't blindly accept other's arguments as some commenters here are willing to do),
* be productive (life requires effort) not parasitic,
* be honest (recognize that the unreal IS unreal. E.g. know when you know Rand, and when you don't.),
* practice rational ideas (integrity),
* practice justice (e.g. don't parasitize the productive, don't reward the unproductive) and
* have enough pride in yourself to stick to your most sensible values, even against cultural ideas that would undo any of the seven italicized virtues.
Pardon me for writing so much, I did not have time to write less, and make the same chicken-shit :-) excuses on my typos.