[dieterrams]

The fundamental problem with Rand's ideology is her cartoonish categorization of everyone that isn't Galt-esque or an enthusiastic, hypercompetent support person as evil looters/parasites. Iirc, Galt is basically trying to collapse society for everyone but the former.

When you realize that you can't just write off people because they didn't turn out to be brilliant entrepreneurs or perky worker bees, and that the workings of government and justice are more complicated than Rand would allow, Atlas Shrugged does become pretty repugnant. Granted, she was reacting to her experiences with communism, so I don't totally blame her for going all the way to the other extreme.

But insofar as someone wants to invent great things and do well from them, I don't take issue with that.

[glalonde]

Everyone was cartoonish, even the good guys. It was like a small army of glimmering MD PhD's with perfect physiques vs. the lazy bums.

It's a work of fantasy, why does anyone point to it and say "This is what I base my beliefs on."? That would be like using LotR as your moral compass. Except with worse plot holes like gross misrepresentations of how small mountain village economies could possibly function.

[stale2002]

Rands work was a direct criticism of communism.

Given that this is the topic that we are discussing, I do not find her ideas to be fantasy at all.

Stalin and Mao killed many millions of people, both intentionally, and through mere neglect. Probably more than the Nazis. So given that this is the topic, her criticism of a collapsing society doesn't seem that ridiculous.

[arkis22]

I disagree.

In the book society was already collapsing. Plenty of regular people in the novel realized something was wrong and removed themselves from the looters' economy to roam the country.

Galt simply refused to be the one to prop up the looters failing economy.

Interesting that you see Galt as the one collapsing society. Rand's point was that the looters collapsed society and that they were too ignorant to understand why or how.

[holtalanm]

This.

Galt and the others that removed themselves from the collapsing society were not the ones that were collapsing society, nor was the collapse their end-goal.

In the story, the looters were causing the collapse, and were taking everything not nailed down in the process. Galt and the others simply decided to leave them to it.

[amptorn]

So in the metaphor of the story's title, Atlas, whose shrugging caused the collapse of society, is the looters? Not the successful entrepeneurial giants, Galt et al., who in their collective departure from the world leave it, figuratively speaking, unsupported?

[arkis22]

No, Atlas is people like Galt.

The point is that the looters pushed the weight of the world on to them, and that's the failure of their society.

[amptorn]

This is a terribly muddled metaphor.

[EdSharkey]

Ayn Rand's characters and storytelling is crappy. The correct response when someone asks, "Who is John Galt?" is always "WHO THE #$%^&* CARES?!" That notwithstanding, Rand understood that one can moralize without limitation in our culture as long as one does it in narrative form, and she used her platform to the extreme.

The message and moral I took from her stories was essentially pro-human, where the archetypal good is that independent man who creates according to their own taste, without any overlords, and without the approval of others. The greater any effort is collectivized, the greater the sin.

Rand's is a hyper-optimistic view of the individual - it feels like an atheist's attempt to replace God with Man and then posit him as the highest virtue. And in the introduction to The Fountainhead, I believe Rand even said her philosophy was a form of worship of Man. It's foolish because life is much too brutal for man to ever truly ascend that way. In any case, her brand of optimism is so rare, and that sells.

It's so interesting to me that your critique went to group politics and identity, though. Rand was consistently negative about groups and big government cronyism. She treated her archetypes as equally noble whether they were breaking rocks in a quarry or engineering some new miracle metal. Do you view the world through such a group identity lens that you couldn't see that in her writing? It's absolutely plain.

The evil archetypes in the Randian universe are any nullifying spirit, destroyer, or parasite. Remember, these are archetypes, no-one in the real world is so black-and-white. It's not a bad characterization of evil, and has parallels in religion and literature.

[dieterrams]

> It's so interesting to me that your critique went to group politics and identity, though. Rand was consistently negative about groups and big government cronyism. She treated her archetypes as equally noble whether they were breaking rocks in a quarry or engineering some new miracle metal. Do you view the world through such a group identity lens that you couldn't see that in her writing? It's absolutely plain.

I’m not really sure what you’re talking about. I do have thoughts on group and identity politics, but I certainly wasn’t referencing them in my post. Not consciously or in any way that is obvious to me, at least.

Re: her archetypes being treated as “equally noble”, I didn’t suggest they weren’t? Although she certainly presents a hierarchy of value that depends on what a given character is doing / capable of. Rearden is without question the lesser man in Rand's and Dagny Taggart's eyes, compared to Galt.

[EdSharkey]

It was two things you said which gave me some insight into your worldview:

> Galt is basically trying to collapse society for everyone but the former.

There is an interesting feature of the Christian bible where God starts out walking/talking directly with Man, and as the stories progress, God grows more and more distant. Eventually, God can only communicate with mankind via prophets and Jesus. I think the point of this storytelling device was to indicate the increasing sin divide between humanity and God. God, being incompatible with sin, simply could not approach us even though He wanted to.

I believe Rand uses this same 'disgusted separation' device in Atlas Shrugged to remove her heroes further and further away from the fallen world.

That you took Galt's exodus and luring of the most productive people from society as an offensive move to destabilize that society struck me immediately as a "class struggle" thought. You had formed Rand's productive archetypes as some kind of oppressive elite class, or some such.

I wish there was some gray in Rand's writing and thoughts to allow for that. In her philosophy, voluntary denial of one's productive capacity to others could never be considered terrorism.

I clearly see targeted terrorism in Galt's luring of key people out of society, regardless of when and why, because we all need one another, period. But Rand thought Galt was saving those people from an already too-far-gone, collapsing world, there to help rebuild after the old world finally bottomed out.

> When you realize that you can't just write off people because they didn't turn out to be brilliant entrepreneurs or perky worker bees

This felt to me like another oppressor/victim thought you had where the oppressor might be the employed and the victim might be the indigent or jobless. Life is more complicated than that, so those characterizations are only sometimes true (and perhaps not even mostly true in my personal, subjective experience.) Reducing the world down to too generic terms risks missing the truth of things, giving one false rationale for all kinds of mischief.

You make a good point about gradients in Riordan vs Galt. It's been a couple of years since I read AS, but I recall Riordan's "sin" was that he loved the work too much and gave in to the government cronies rather than just shrugging them off. Ugh, that book was a hot mess...

[EdSharkey]

> I wish there was some gray in Rand's writing and thoughts to allow for that. In her philosophy, voluntary denial of one's productive capacity to others could never be considered terrorism.

I said that, forgetting there was terrorism (hero blows up a building) in The Fountainhead. AS is definitely a more pure statement of Rand's philosophy, but I think she rationalized away too much in every case to cleanly make her point.

[poulsbohemian]

> it feels like an atheist's attempt to replace God with Man and then posit him as the highest virtue.

So same basic concept as nitschze espoused?

[EdSharkey]

Yeah, she cited Nitschze in the forward to The Fountainhead. I recall she said his ideas were 'underdeveloped', hahaha!

[chimeracoder]

> In any case, her brand of optimism is so rare, and that sells.

You're saying Ayn Rand is popular because of the optimism in her works?

[EdSharkey]

Yes. It's fanciful about the heights to which the human spirit can reach. She's the ultimate optimist, in my opinion. Plenty of hero stories are set in ultra-negative backgrounds, just to set the contrast.

I hope to God Rand's writing isn't gobbled up for its sex scenes, yikers!

[skookumchuck]

It's hard to get more cartoonish than Star Trek's Ferengi, a left-wing caricature of capitalists, going so far as having pointed teeth.

[cultus]

Star Trek is a tv show. Unlike Objectivism, it is not trying to be a philosophy.

[skookumchuck]

Are you sure about that? Most ST episodes have a pretty heavy-handed moral lesson on progressive philosophy.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/06/new-star-trek-series-...

[cultus]

No one bases their lives around Star Trek moral messages besides a few nerds.

Also, you may want to read what I wrote again. I said "Star Trek is not pretending to be a moral philosophy." Ayn Rand claims that Objectivism is the basis for ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, etc. How on Earth does that compare to the Ferengi being greedy as a parable of capitalism?

[skookumchuck]

> "Star Trek is not pretending to be a moral philosophy."

I gave a link showing it was Roddenberry's directive. Also, what do you think of the Prime Directive? (Which, of course, is routinely violated if the aliens don't conform to progressive ideals.)

> besides a few nerds

I've read progressive newspaper columnists citing Star Trek as a model to emulate.

[dieterrams]

I was saying her categorizations are cartoonish, as in overly simplistic morally and sociologically.