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by axiom 6843 days ago
It's funny, everyone likes Roark more than Galt :)

Yeah, I thought there just wasn't enough characterization with Galt, compared to any of the other characters. He just kind of appears towards the end of the novel and you never really understand what is motivating him on an emotional level. Maybe I'm just not remembering it properly, it's been 6 or 7 years since I read Atlas Shrugged.
1 comments
JulianMorrison 6843 days ago
Personally I see Galt as something of a disproof-by-overextension of some of Rand's ideas. Galt was her "perfect man". For a character to be human, the author must be able to get inside their head. For even Ayn Rand herself to be unable to thus think like Galt indicates to me that she was unable to make her own thoughts follow her own ideals. As any Rand follower will agree, the quickest way to get your thoughts to stall and boggle is to try and deny a natural axiom, or push through a contradiction. (Similarly you get much the same stall-and-boggle leading to an authorial 3rd person stance, when other erroneous ideas are tried to destruction - compare most utopian fiction.) So that's a strong warning signal.

What could be the fault she ran into? I think she had a bit of the "chasing words" disease. The words for her were "rational", "mind", "self-interest" - and those are words that break down quite quickly and thoroughly when you look at the brain and the human organism in context. (In her defense, she was writing some 50 years before the science would become any good.)

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axiom 6842 days ago
That's one weakness of Objectivism which has become more apparent to me in the last few years. The philosophy seems to almost construct a platonic form of "rationality" and "self-interest" and never really reconnect with concretes, staying entirely in the abstract. So it ends up handling most cases pretty well, but a lot special cases get left behind.

Still, when I re-think through her reasoning again and again, I don't see how one could reach any different fundamental principles. Special cases are just that, and the best course seems to be to just deal with them as they arise.

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JulianMorrison 6842 days ago
Actually, her theory of "mind" is probably the worst flaw. All the modern psychological research indicates that the rule-following, conscious mind you use to do formal "reason" is a tiny, weak, singly threaded, monitoring rather than commanding subsystem in a brain that is mostly fast, parallel, unconscious, and NOT rational.
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