cybrwzrd: In my younger days I was an objectivist. I still am in many ways. I do believe in the Randian idea of rational selfishness. That is - doing what is best for yourself as long as it does not harm another.

You mean like blowing up a housing project or destroying civilization or raping women as a token of divine selfishness?

Here's what's wrong with Ayn Rand and Objectivism:

What Ayn Rand did was simplify a complex network of economic theories, ideas, practices and human motives and constructed a mono-dimensional faux-reality as a vehicle to push her pulp. Then she filled it full of cardboard cutout characters and mary sue ubermensches who don't talk but lecture for tedious pages about why the rich and powerful have divine right to being rich and powerful. And of course things play out exactly the way her philosophy says because she's the author and she controls the farking outcome. In clear violation of every standard of ethics, politics, economics, reality, life, human nature, philosophy, and farking national train corporation management. It's dishonest, and it's wrong.

As an example of how wildly skewed her understanding of reality really was, just looked at how she twisted the Robin Hood fable. She called him the most evil fairytale hero in history because he stole from the producers to give to the moochers. On the contrary, Robin actually stole the people's taxes from the oppressive government and gave them back to the their rightful owners. He should be a Tea Party icon. I don't understand why she didn't look this up thoroughly enough. It was a bad allegory because it's heavily dependent on point of view.

The book's premise is ridiculous because NO ONE is so important that they think they can destroy the world by retreating from it. Nature abhors a vacuum. Everything important and meaningful that has ever been created -- from thoughts to ideas to products to technology to companies -- is instantly taught, copied, and spread around, effectively building an organic backup system in case the original fails or dies (or retreats to Galt's Gulch). No one is the sole arbiter of anything. No one has a privileged position on humanity's future. To rely on a single source for progress and advancement is dangerous to a functioning system. True stability means constant evolving contingencies, backup plans, and millions of redundancies. Society can't fail because one man lost his motor car plans in a factory. Everyone is replaceable. Even John Galt.

But the worst thing about Ayn Rand is her absolutism. She always makes sweeping, absolute statements like "Capitalism is an end in itself".....no its not. There is no rational, logical, or verifiable proven instance that justifies such a statement. For starters, it's wrong. Capitalism is not an end, it is a means to improve the quality of life. It is a tool. It is a process. And despite what she might think, freedom is not defined in terms of economic productivity. Building a house does not make one happy. Living in one does. Bread isn't beneficial to anyone. Eating it is.

Living things do not live for themselves. Preservation of the self is a cherished tenet, but preservation of the species is equally as cherishable (and, depending on the circumstances, will frequently trump the former), and the concept of family and community is stronger in most societies than the concept of individualism. This is not brainwashing, this is not state-mandated. People do this because they prefer to do this, it is something inescapable and ingrained, and as far as we are concerned it is the moral, ethical, and empirical reality of our species. But Rand wouldn't know this because she never had any children herself and her husband spent their entire marriage drinking himself into a stupor and staying away from her. This is why Objectivism finds the most favor among asocial autistics and aspies who may be brilliant intellectuals but can't fathom the purpose behind relationships and peer bonding. There is another word for these people: Sociopaths.

Man is not a rational animal. Man is an emotional animal. Man is not an individual animal nor is he a social animal. Man is a TRIBAL animal. These are not belief structures. They are physical realities that have defined the evolution of our species.

Ayn Rand does not encourage you to think for yourself. She encourages you to think about her. Her philosophy is attractive to people for the wrong reasons. Most of them are drawn to the characters in her books and use that as justification for promoting her philosophy. But when people are driven by aesthetic (rather than rational) criteria, it's impossible to reason with them in terms of formal argumentation hence the famed "Randroid syndrome".

The authoress herself knew little about reason and even less about philosophy. She admitted she barely read anyone, which is why Objectivism sounds a bit like the idealism of Nietzsche, with maybe a bit of Kant and Bernard Shaw. She once claimed that the only book on philosophy she read was by Aristotle, which explains her appeal to his logical absolutes, particularly the first one: the Law of Identity (ie: A is A).

Objective morality can't exist without subjective content, and more and more of her pseudo-philosophy is being unraveled by such stark and painfully obvious contradictions, though I guess at the time no one had the guts to tell her because she was so damn intimidating and.........what's the word she loved to use? ah yes: "insolent".

It seems that Objectivists, following the lead of Rand, spend more of their time denouncing detractors than actually being the highly-enlightened, individualistic rational beings that they think they are.

3 problems with Objectivists:

1) Objectivists are not highly-enlightened. It's a lazy philosophy, so it attracts lazy intellectuals, aka people who haven't read widely in the field which is what makes Rand's work so impressionable.
2) They are not individualists. Rand's cult was even called "the Collective", and to speak out of line or against the party line was extremely frowned upon (and she burn noticed her anointed successor, Nathanial Branden, because he refused to sleep with her anymore)
3) They are hardly rational, since their defence of the philosophy and attacks of dissenters normally comes in a high-pitched shrill and antagonistic, standoff-ish mental bullying

Organized Objectivism has some cult-like tendencies creepier than Scientology. It's ironic that Rand had more in common with Josef Stalin than anyone else, someone who's ideals she spent the better part of her life denouncing but who's cult of personality she emulated to a T. Today, most Objectivists are simply people who are incapable of thinking for themselves, letting only the bitter memory of the late Ayn Rand make decisions for them.

But essentially, what Rand did was what all pop philosophers do: Tell rich and powerful people what they want to hear (ie: that they have a noble reason to be self-righteous assholes).

cybrwzrd: Both of Rand's heroes were blue collar workers, both had to fight against oppressive business and political climates that wanted to profit off of their hard work.

Not quite. Reardon is the only rich and powerful guy who is self-made. Wyatt is rich and powerful and old money, D'Anconia is rich and powerful and old money, James Taggert is ONLY rich and powerful because his sister, Dagny, is rich and powerful but they are old money, Judge Naragansett was rich and powerful, the composer guy (can't remember his name, running off memory) was rich and powerful, the danish pirate was rich and powerful.... and everyone who wasn't rich and powerful in Galt's Gulch was either rich and powerful at one point in their lives and threw it all away to make some sort of statement, or chose not to seek riches because they preferred not to gift society their talents, like Owen Kellogg, the titular John Galt, and that motherfarker in the diner who made the BEST TASTING BURGER OF ALL TIME because Objectivists are champions at everything they do, even being short order cooks at truckstop diners.

The Bob the Angry Flower cartoon nails the exact problem with an Objectivist Universe: No one in the post-apocalyptic society really could really do any of the real gruntwork that makes society function -- the farmers and garbage crews and janitors and sewage cleaners and miners and lumberjacks and oil workers and all the dirty, disgusting jobs that none of them knew how to do and didn't have the strength to do anyway. Sure, some of them ran some industrial companies, but in truth the builders and geniuses of the world need a disposable slave class to do the work that is too demanding and too hazardous, otherwise they wouldn't have the time to do their genius things because all their waking energy is spent on procuring their next meal.

This is an important point that Objectivists continuously fail to understand, so let me say this: In order for any apex civilization to pursue higher qualities like art and science, it must first employ an underclass to take care of it, freeing up time to engage in these high pursuits. In order to obtain such an underclass, it must invade its neighbors. In order to invade its neighbors, it must have a really good army. No high civilization is ever benign - every one celebrates its noble accomplishments on the backs of cheap labor exploited by tyrannies of chauvinistic patriarchies, and an Objectivist society that doesn't do this will not have the time or the power to accomplish anything at all. The fruits of man's genius will be devoured by manual labor.

This is why the Objectivist platitude of "doing whatever you want so long as it does not harm another" is an outright bold-faced lie, especially in a system as globally integrated as ours is.

/I read Atlas Shrugged in its entirety while sitting on the can. It took me 2.5 years to use all the pages.
//The Atlas Shrugged movie is just like the book in that you can skip forward 10 minutes and the same person is still talking.

Walter Paisley: What didn't she despise?

Rape.

cybrwzrd: He didn't harm anyone by blowing it up... The building was empty and noone was hurt.

Yes he did, he harmed the property owners, the builders, the contractors, the insurance doods, the marketers and realtors and people who had invested money into the project! That's their farking paycheck, and now things are tied up in courts and legal battles for years and their families are going to suffer because the project they worked so hard on was destroyed by a disgruntled architect. Roark is a god damn asshole. His actions harmed thousands of people.

cybrwzrd: Actually, Roark had a sound reason to blow up the housing development. He designed a self sustaining building, but due to politics it was corrupted to the point of becoming an absurb mockery of itself. He didn't blow it up because of what it was to be used for. He blew it up because it was not his design.

Irrespective, it still makes him a hypocrite champion of Objectivist doctrine.

cybrwzrd: You obviously have never read any of the fiction or the books surrounding Objectivism

I have read Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, Anthem, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal and the Virtue of Selfishness. That's how I know her so well -- even better than you. You think I cribbed all that shiat I wrote above from Wikipedia or something? ....do a search, I've been posting in Fark Objectivism threads for years.

Interestingly, you are not the first Objectivist to reply to one of my anti-Ayn Rand rants with "You've obviously never read any of her works". In fact, that's something of a common retort from you guys: Blind dismissal instead of rational argument. That makes you no better than Creationists.

cybrwzrd: I just think that you should maybe focus your vitriol on the idiots who have taken the Objectivist philosophy and corrupted it instead of the philosophy itself.

Like who, Leonard Peikoff or Alan Greenspan? ...or Ayn Rand herself?

Listen: She was damaged goods, dude. Those mean ole Bolsheviks took her daddy's business and robbed her of the privilege and position she most undoubtedly deserved in Russian society and she spent the rest of her life whining about it. She was an absolutely despicable person according to EVERYONE who ever had the misfortune of working with or even meeting her, indomitably defiant, obscenely difficult, and was known to completely suck the life out of a room. She never smiled or laughed, she abhorred small talk, and she would often approach strangers with random questions like "Tell me about your premises." She just didn't get people -- she was a pure autistic in every sense of the meaning. And her problem with her philosophy was, like all philosophers, she assumed that everyone thinks like her, or ought to.

She was wrong. Horribly, depressingly, ridiculously wrong.

/And now, a fun Ayn Rand fact:

"Suppose you are a nice family of Russian Jewish immigrants living in Chicago in the 1920s. Suppose you get a frantic letter from some distant cousin in Russia, begging for help because their daughter is a stubborn loudmouth who will certainly be killed if she stays in the country for much longer. Suppose you happily provide the necessary affidavit of support for a visa, promise her a job in your family business, and open your home-a five-room apartment already so crowded that the cousin will have to sleep on a cot in the dining room-to her for six months.

Now suppose your cousin keeps everyone else in the house up all night, every night, with her incessant typing (which you translate into English for her) or her long baths that use up all the hot water (although she will later abandon this practice). Suppose that during the day, while you are faint from sleep deprivation, your cousin roams the apartment singing "I'm Sitting on Top of the World" as loudly as she can. Suppose she declines to speak to you because your conversation topics don't "interest me." Suppose she leans on you to arrange an extension of her visa, borrows a bunch of money from you to move to Hollywood, and promises to buy you a "mink coat and a Rolls-Royce" when she makes it big.

You might, then, be forgiven for holding a grudge when your cousin becomes wealthy and famous and she neither buys you anything nor pays you back the money she borrowed. Instead, all you get are copies of some ponderous novels, tickets to a couple of revolting lectures, and the pleasure of learning, in many interviews, that your cousin "had no family in America" and that "nobody helped [her]" when she immigrated."

Holy shiat, 1000 posts.

What's going on in this thread?

/makes coffee