eric76 said:

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Reed McDonald 92 said:

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Serious question--
So I recently read up on 'objectivism,' and I'll admit I guess I don't understand. (this is about the author, not the character in her book). But as I translate it, she was stating that it is morally wrong not to pursue everything in life that you desire. Surely, I'm not translating that correctly. Or am I?

Anyone care to enlighten me?

And to be clear, I am not a lib, leftist, or democrat. I'm just a simple peasant.

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Ayn Rand was a fan of William Hickman. William Hickman kidnapped a little girl, killed her, disemboweled her, then put her in his car with her eyes propped open to convince her father that she was still alive so that he would pay Hickman the ransom.

It is said that Howard Roark in The Fountainhead was somewhat based on William Hickman.

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Got a link for that?

If you want to understand Ayn Rand, the first thing you should probably do is become familiar with Nietsche.

I like Objectivism except for its supernatural belief in free will.

aggiehawg said:

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eric76 said:

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Reed McDonald 92 said:

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Serious question--
So I recently read up on 'objectivism,' and I'll admit I guess I don't understand. (this is about the author, not the character in her book). But as I translate it, she was stating that it is morally wrong not to pursue everything in life that you desire. Surely, I'm not translating that correctly. Or am I?

Anyone care to enlighten me?

And to be clear, I am not a lib, leftist, or democrat. I'm just a simple peasant.

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Ayn Rand was a fan of William Hickman. William Hickman kidnapped a little girl, killed her, disemboweled her, then put her in his car with her eyes propped open to convince her father that she was still alive so that he would pay Hickman the ransom.

It is said that Howard Roark in The Fountainhead was somewhat based on William Hickman.

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Got a link for that?

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https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/william-e-hickman-the-killer-who-inspired-ayn-rand-c8a9b874bd40

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Unlike the small-minded masses, Rand saw in Hickman the perfect Neitzchean "superman" "a man with no regard whatever for all that society holds sacred, with a consciousness all his own." When she read this quote by him in the newspaper "I am like the state: what is good for me is right," she wrote in her journals that this was "the best and strongest expression of a real man's psychology I ever heard."

...

The same narcissistic, sociopathic traits that defined Hickman are central to the main characters in Rand's other novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged protagonists with "the spirit of Argon and the nature of a medieval feudal lord … Imperious. Impatient. Uncompromising. Untamable. Intolerant. Unadaptable. Passionate. Intensely proud. Superior to the mob… an extreme 'extremist.' … No respect for anything or anyone."

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I disagree with [Nietzsche] emphatically on all fundamentals. Ayn Rand (1962)1

I do not want to be confused with Nietzsche in any respect. Ayn Rand (1964)2

Why was Ayn Rand determined to distance herself from Nietzsche? Because in her time, as today, various writers portrayed her as a Nietzschean, claiming that she embraced his ideas and modeled her characters accordinglywhich she did not.

The notion of Rand as a Nietzschean was promulgated most viciously in Whittaker Chambers's 1957 review of Atlas Shrugged, published in National Review. Although he acknowledged Rand's debt to Aristotle, Chambers wrote that she is "indebted, and much more heavily, to Nietzsche" and that "her operatic businessmen are, in fact, Nietzschean supermen."3 Since then, similar claims have been made in countless articles and books, including Goddess of the Market, in which Jennifer Burns declared that Rand's "entire career might be considered a 'Nietzschean phase.'"4

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Was Rand influenced by Nietzsche? To some extent, yes. In the 1930s, she called him her "favorite philosopher" and referred to Thus Spake Zarathustra as her "bible." As late as 1942, Nietzsche quotes adorned the first pages of each section of her manuscript of The Fountainhead. But from her first encounter with his ideas, Rand knew that her ideas were fundamentally different from his.

Rand first read Nietzsche in 1920, at the age of fifteen, when a cousin told her that Nietzsche had beaten her to her ideas. "Naturally," Rand recalled in a 1961 interview, "I was very curious to read him. And I started with Zarathustra, and my feelings were quite mixed. I very quickly saw that he hadn't beat me to [my ideas], and that it wasn't exactly my ideas; that it was not what I wanted to say, but I certainly was enthusiastic about the individualist part of it. I had not expected that there existed anybody who would go that far in praising the individual."5

However attracted to Nietzsche's seeming praise of the individual, Rand had her doubts even then about his philosophy. As she learned more about philosophy and about Nietzsche's ideas, she became increasingly disillusioned. "I think I read all his works; I did not read the smaller letters or epigrams, but everything that was translated in Russian. And that's when the disappointment started, more and more."6

The final break came in late 1942, when she removed her favorite Nietzsche quote ("The noble soul has reverence for itself")7 from the title page of The Fountainhead. By this time, she had concluded that political and ethical ideasincluding individualismare not fundamental but rest on ideas in metaphysics and epistemology. And this is where the differences between her philosophy and that of Nietzsche most fundamentally lie.

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Link

That's not a refutation of her admiration for Hickman, merely a refutation that she thought her ideas were not the same as Nietzsche's. They're unrelated except for the author's comparison of Hickman as a Nietzschean superman. Regardless of the author's comparison, Rand still, "wrote in her journals that this was 'the best and strongest expression of a real man's psychology I ever heard.'"

Been a few years but I admittedly scanned the speech. That was the overly long radio address, correct? I skipped through that and read everything else.

I thought her semi-long explanation of money was really well done. That passage hit me because it was one of the first writings I ever read about the reality of money.

This sounds like a blast. Will check these out.

American Hardwood said:

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aggie_wes said:

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The fountainhead gets the message across a lot more concisely.

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While Objectivism may be the blood running through the veins of both books, I believe that The Fountainhead is the argument for the protection of intellectual property while Atlas Shrugged is the argument against crony capitalism/fascism.

(Edit to correct the proper books.)

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Make no mistake, Ayn Rand of a person sucked.

She has a point in atlas shrugged.

That's pretty much all you can say about that.

Great story with horrible writing. She's the flip side of Steinbeck.

Everyone asks "Who is John Galt?" No one asks "How is John Galt?"

I'll weigh in despite the fact I'll undoubtedly get flamed for saying this, but the Randian view of the world is naive and borderline childish. It was ok for the time, I guess, but modern behavioral economic models show that individualist strategies actually lead to suboptimal outcomes.

As an example, consider a game between two players. One player is given money and offers the other a deal to split the money. The second player can either take the deal and keep the offer, or he can reject the deal and both players get nothing. It is in the first player's best interest to lowball the other player, maximizing his share, because it is also in the second players best interest to take any offer, because even a lowball offer is better than none and means money he didn't have before.

That is bad strategy for both though. Long term, it is better for the second player to reject offers because that puts pressure on the first player to offer higher. It is in the first player's interest to make higher offers at the outset and avoid having offers rejected. Despite being the one with the money, the first player can't dictate the game. He and the second player must come into agreement on fairness for either to benefit.

Rand's characters and thoughts are oblivious to this. The Dagnys and Reardens have this opinion, "My business, my money, **** all you little people wanting s bigger pierce of the pie." The problem is that they're the first player and making what the second player, everyone else, thinks is raw deal. Government intervention and unions are simply their way of rejecting it.


Now, alternatively, you could view everyone else as a second player asking for more than a fair offer and Rand's heroes refusing to make them anything else, and that might be valid.

However, that is also contrary to Rand's own ideas on objectivism, as if the world could be reasoned into black and white. Reality is inherently a matter of perception and estimation, and it is decidedly not objective. Certainly, some things are objective, but the human experience is not one of them. You cannot have a world that can boiled down to objective absolutes and still have disagreements that can be argued both ways.

Personally, I think the situation is the former. Rand's characters are self-righteous and self-important. They're of the mind that they built their empires and deserve everything while everyone else should take whatever they're offered. So does Rand. I tend to disagree, as their empires wild not exist without their employees. As profits grow and the business makes more money, the disparity between owner and employee compensation grows as well. Now, it certainly shouldn't be equal as the owner has put forth effort and taken risk to bring the company into being, but the employees are also key players as well because without them, collectively, the business makes $0 and the owner gets nothing. In the game, this is the first player getting a larger pot of money, but still giving the second player the same deal. Eventually, the second player reaches a point where they begin rejecting the deal on principle because of the new disparity. If Rand's characters took a more cooperative approach, they'd end up doing better in the long run.

In the end, the non is nothing more than a pontificating ideologue's wet dream. It's full of idealism on how the world should work according to Rand and her followers, but it diverges from and ignores how the world actually works.

ABATTBQ11 said:

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I'll weigh in despite the fact I'll undoubtedly get flamed for saying this, but the Randian view of the world is naive and borderline childish. It was ok for the time, I guess, but modern behavioral economic models show that individualist strategies actually lead to suboptimal outcomes.

As an example, consider a game between two players. One player is given money and offers the other a deal to split the money. The second player can either take the deal and keep the offer, or he can reject the deal and both players get nothing. It is in the first player's best interest to lowball the other player, maximizing his share, because it is also in the second players best interest to take any offer, because even a lowball offer is better than none and means money he didn't have before.

That is bad strategy for both though. Long term, it is better for the second player to reject offers because that puts pressure on the first player to offer higher. It is in the first player's interest to make higher offers at the outset and avoid having offers rejected. Despite being the one with the money, the first player can't dictate the game. He and the second player must come into agreement on fairness for either to benefit.

Rand's characters and thoughts are oblivious to this. The Dagnys and Reardens have this opinion, "My business, my money, **** all you little people wanting s bigger pierce of the pie." The problem is that they're the first player and making what the second player, everyone else, thinks is raw deal. Government intervention and unions are simply their way of rejecting it.


Now, alternatively, you could view everyone else as a second player asking for more than a fair offer and Rand's heroes refusing to make them anything else, and that might be valid.

However, that is also contrary to Rand's own ideas on objectivism, as if the world could be reasoned into black and white. Reality is inherently a matter of perception and estimation, and it is decidedly not objective. Certainly, some things are objective, but the human experience is not one of them. You cannot have a world that can boiled down to objective absolutes and still have disagreements that can be argued both ways.

Personally, I think the situation is the former. Rand's characters are self-righteous and self-important. They're of the mind that they built their empires and deserve everything while everyone else should take whatever they're offered. So does Rand. I tend to disagree, as their empires wild not exist without their employees. As profits grow and the business makes more money, the disparity between owner and employee compensation grows as well. Now, it certainly shouldn't be equal as the owner has put forth effort and taken risk to bring the company into being, but the employees are also key players as well because without them, collectively, the business makes $0 and the owner gets nothing. In the game, this is the first player getting a larger pot of money, but still giving the second player the same deal. Eventually, the second player reaches a point where they begin rejecting the deal on principle because of the new disparity. If Rand's characters took a more cooperative approach, they'd end up doing better in the long run.

In the end, the non is nothing more than a pontificating ideologue's wet dream. It's full of idealism on how the world should work according to Rand and her followers, but it diverges from and ignores how the world actually works.

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Your post ignores how the world actually works, but thank you for the analysis.

tehmackdaddy said:

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Your post ignores how the world actually works, but thank you for the analysis.

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Ayn Rand didn't understand how the world works. In her science fiction universe, only Nietschean supermen were capable of making inventions and running a company and without their leadership, everything collapses in on itself. Nearly everyone else was just a cog in the machine.

It's as if the companies in her world were mostly populated by welfare moms who didn't want to work at all and had no intention at all of ever doing a good job.

As some have noted she may not have been a compelling storyteller, but rather was attempting to communicate her ideas thoroughly. With that frame it's reasonable to assume that she was using hyperbole in her stories to highlight her philosophical points to the extremes and not setting an example for how an individual should live their life in the real world.

In the game that ABATTBQ11 mentioned, for instance, why is it assumed that the first person would offer only a little if there's the chance of losing it all? They have a strong motivation to help the other in order to help themselves, and the real world is like this in many, many situations. They just need to think the game through thoroughly.

This is an admittedly simple view, but the reason Ayn Rand speaks to me is because as individuals we can only truly control ourselves and do what we think is right for ourselves - whether materially or for our own self-respect. Coupled with my faith that often includes acts of charity, love, but of course also includes working hard and ensuring my contribution is valued for what it is to do maximum good (Ayn maybe wouldn't agree with that last part, but it's one of my personal motivations). Society is made up of individuals, and too often society has forgotten that.

File5 said:

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In the game that ABATTBQ11 mentioned, for instance, why is it assumed that the first person would offer only a little if there's the chance of losing it all? They have a strong motivation to help the other in order to help themselves, and the real world is like this in many, many situations. They just need to think the game through thoroughly.

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I offer you a dime and keep 90 cents, we both come out ahead. Logic would dictate that since we both gain something, you should accept the deal. In real life, the second person often rejects the deal because of the perceived unfairness of the offer.

ABATTBQ11 said:

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I'll weigh in despite the fact I'll undoubtedly get flamed for saying this, but the Randian view of the world is naive and borderline childish. It was ok for the time, I guess, but modern behavioral economic models show that individualist strategies actually lead to suboptimal outcomes.

As an example, consider a game between two players. One player is given money and offers the other a deal to split the money. The second player can either take the deal and keep the offer, or he can reject the deal and both players get nothing. It is in the first player's best interest to lowball the other player, maximizing his share, because it is also in the second players best interest to take any offer, because even a lowball offer is better than none and means money he didn't have before.

That is bad strategy for both though. Long term, it is better for the second player to reject offers because that puts pressure on the first player to offer higher. It is in the first player's interest to make higher offers at the outset and avoid having offers rejected. Despite being the one with the money, the first player can't dictate the game. He and the second player must come into agreement on fairness for either to benefit.

Rand's characters and thoughts are oblivious to this. The Dagnys and Reardens have this opinion, "My business, my money, **** all you little people wanting s bigger pierce of the pie." The problem is that they're the first player and making what the second player, everyone else, thinks is raw deal. Government intervention and unions are simply their way of rejecting it.


Now, alternatively, you could view everyone else as a second player asking for more than a fair offer and Rand's heroes refusing to make them anything else, and that might be valid.

However, that is also contrary to Rand's own ideas on objectivism, as if the world could be reasoned into black and white. Reality is inherently a matter of perception and estimation, and it is decidedly not objective. Certainly, some things are objective, but the human experience is not one of them. You cannot have a world that can boiled down to objective absolutes and still have disagreements that can be argued both ways.

Personally, I think the situation is the former. Rand's characters are self-righteous and self-important. They're of the mind that they built their empires and deserve everything while everyone else should take whatever they're offered. So does Rand. I tend to disagree, as their empires wild not exist without their employees. As profits grow and the business makes more money, the disparity between owner and employee compensation grows as well. Now, it certainly shouldn't be equal as the owner has put forth effort and taken risk to bring the company into being, but the employees are also key players as well because without them, collectively, the business makes $0 and the owner gets nothing. In the game, this is the first player getting a larger pot of money, but still giving the second player the same deal. Eventually, the second player reaches a point where they begin rejecting the deal on principle because of the new disparity. If Rand's characters took a more cooperative approach, they'd end up doing better in the long run.

In the end, the non is nothing more than a pontificating ideologue's wet dream. It's full of idealism on how the world should work according to Rand and her followers, but it diverges from and ignores how the world actually works.

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So many people do not understand Ayn Rand and try to oversimplify it.

She advocated for self interest. Based on what you said a Randian would say being cooperative is the right choice if it leads to a better outcome for the individual. This can be an outcome in the short-term or it can be the outcome in the long-term. Take a rich person who pays a larger share of property taxes used for education. In the short-term paying more for the communities education may impact the person negatively economically, but may provide more utility to the rich person in the long run, in the form of of an educated workforce that can be used by the capitalist to produce more economically, provide better social interaction and finally by making sure the uneducated masses don't decide to eat the rich.

Remember from economics a persons wellbeing is defined as their utility level, not their financial position. A Suicidal billionaire is worse off than a mildly happy poor person.

ABATTBQ11 said:

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Rand still, "wrote in her journals that this was 'the best and strongest expression of a real man's psychology I ever heard.'"

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What exactly is wrong about this? She is just saying that any human does what they believe (their psychology) will bring them the most utility. Not what they say they believe will do so, but what they actually do. In economics this is revealed. preference.

That person's thought process may be abhorrent to the majority of us, but it is an extreme example of pure human psychology.

BBRex said:

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File5 said:

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In the game that ABATTBQ11 mentioned, for instance, why is it assumed that the first person would offer only a little if there's the chance of losing it all? They have a strong motivation to help the other in order to help themselves, and the real world is like this in many, many situations. They just need to think the game through thoroughly.

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I offer you a dime and keep 90 cents, we both come out ahead. Logic would dictate that since we both gain something, you should accept the deal. In real life, the second person often rejects the deal because of the perceived unfairness of the offer.

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Not if you gaining 80 more cents than me brings me more unhappiness than gaining 10 cents. It's about utility not financial logic.

Your game ignores the entire speech from Francisco D'Anconio. Some benefactor is giving money to player one, for nothing. And there is a rule that player one has to offer some deal to player two.

The entire concept is to offer value for value. A true Randian player one would not accept the deal in any way, shape, or form; because they are not receiving the profit for a trade in value. Player one would be perfectly okay with not receiving one red cent because they did not earn the offer.

That player one/two analogy is hilarious bad.

Make up a game that has no bearing on how capitalism or anything in the world works, show that solutions to that bogus game are non-optimal, and pretend that is a legitimate argument on how capitalism if flawed. Brilliant!

Here's another one: Imagine a game where one person has a bunch of the money. If anybody else offers to trade goods for some of that money, he shoots them and himself in the head . You see!! This "proves" why capitalism is flawed!

Great book and many themes and speeches were on point.

Rand definitely needed an editor tho.

I think Rand's philosophy has a few flaws, but they are VASTLY superior to what liberals offer and she has proven to be much better at getting her view out to the masses then pretty much every other modern conservative other than perhaps Reagan (because he was articulate AND president).

Is she as good of a fiction writer as Mark Twain? No, but almost nobody is. Is she as intellectually smart as the founding fathers? No, again but almost nobody is that either. But she has more of that combo than any liberal in existence. And none of us on this board (including critics) could hold a candle to her on that.

If she were able to be elected president and had 60% of congress, then we would be MUCH better off today than we are now. That's for damn sure.

aggrad02 said:

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BBRex said:

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File5 said:

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In the game that ABATTBQ11 mentioned, for instance, why is it assumed that the first person would offer only a little if there's the chance of losing it all? They have a strong motivation to help the other in order to help themselves, and the real world is like this in many, many situations. They just need to think the game through thoroughly.

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I offer you a dime and keep 90 cents, we both come out ahead. Logic would dictate that since we both gain something, you should accept the deal. In real life, the second person often rejects the deal because of the perceived unfairness of the offer.

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Not if you gaining 80 more cents than me brings me more unhappiness than gaining 10 cents. It's about utility not financial logic.

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But you're not acting rationally...which is the premise of the game.

You have just increased your wealth by doing nothing but accepting an offer. A rational person would take the offer as it's better to get $.10 than $.00.

The other person in the game did all the "leg work" to get the $1 to split. All you have to do is accept the conditions. So why shouldn't they be able to keep more since they did the work to generate the money?

TravelAg2004 said:

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aggrad02 said:

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BBRex said:

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File5 said:

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In the game that ABATTBQ11 mentioned, for instance, why is it assumed that the first person would offer only a little if there's the chance of losing it all? They have a strong motivation to help the other in order to help themselves, and the real world is like this in many, many situations. They just need to think the game through thoroughly.

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I offer you a dime and keep 90 cents, we both come out ahead. Logic would dictate that since we both gain something, you should accept the deal. In real life, the second person often rejects the deal because of the perceived unfairness of the offer.

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Not if you gaining 80 more cents than me brings me more unhappiness than gaining 10 cents. It's about utility not financial logic.

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But you're not acting rationally...which is the premise of the game.

You have just increased your wealth by doing nothing but accepting an offer. A rational person would take the offer as it's better to get $.10 than $.00.

The other person in the game did all the "leg work" to get the $1 to split. All you have to do is accept the conditions. So why shouldn't they be able to keep more since they did the work to generate the money?

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Once again acting "rationally" is to maximize utility not financial position. Do rational people work 120 hrs a week to maximize their financial position? Of course not, they pick the amount of work which will lead to the most utility combined with other things in life.

Why are we arguing that bogus game analogy?

It's like arguing about whether Pete Carroll should have given the ball to Lynch and pretending that it somehow applies to Ayn Rand.

I think perhaps the problem is that different people value different things in different proportions, and we have a misunderstanding often about why someone else weights different considerations as they do versus themselves, and how that might put them in concordance or conflict.
I find Rand interesting but extreme. Humans are social animals and our interactions are typically complex and significant to the courses of our lives, so there is often great value to be had in understanding them in sophisticated terms instead of simplified ones. life isn't necessarily a struggle for power and wealth. For most in fact those are only means to other ends and some adequate amount is sufficient for those ends. Most people are placing themselves on various hierarchies of status or of social position and much of that comes through perceptions of others, and how relative relationships might be managed.
Yes, there are personality types that tend to be great movers and drivers of our larger society but most of them really are more narcissistic and sociopathic than the mean, or are obsessive in some respects. Certain personality types prevail in those circumstances, and yet at a micro level, they are ineffective at all the untold number of human interactions that underlie and support the larger frameworks upon which higher level leadership might interact. Because of personality typology and traits, there are few persons that are truly maters of every circumstance and as human beings we're generally complementary as groups with different personality types filling various niches most effectively, and each of us is generally most satisfied when we discover or create that niche within which we are most effective and competent as we perceive it and as we feel others perceive us.

Nobody is 100% right. But I think Ayn Rand is more right than the cronyists she criticizes.

You can tell she has the most contempt for people who look for the handout after your hard work and talent makes you into a success. There are a lot of people who grew up poor with this problem, this idea that they have to be drug down by the bubble the grew up in, because the nice paying job was really luck and not earned.

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I'll weigh in despite the fact I'll undoubtedly get flamed for saying this, but the Randian view of the world is naive and borderline childish. It was ok for the time, I guess, but modern behavioral economic models show that individualist strategies actually lead to suboptimal outcomes.

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This is hubris, pure and simple. "I'm smarter because humans are smarter now" type thinking. That is not the way humans work. Remove a veneer of technology and civilizations don't change over history.

cecil77 said:

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Quote:

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I'll weigh in despite the fact I'll undoubtedly get flamed for saying this, but the Randian view of the world is naive and borderline childish. It was ok for the time, I guess, but modern behavioral economic models show that individualist strategies actually lead to suboptimal outcomes.

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This is hubris, pure and simple. "I'm smarter because humans are smarter now" type thinking. That is not the way humans work. Remove a veneer of technology and civilizations don't change over history.

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As a corollary to that:

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They converged from all over the world onto a little town in Switzerland. Names like Sir David Attenborough, Shinzo Abe, Angela Merkel, Prince William, and Jacinda Ardern gathered in the Swiss town of Davos for the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting 2019. Making up the supporting cast were 3,000 mere millionaires and celebrities from business, government, civil society, academia, arts and culture, and media. On the agenda was literally the roadmap for the future of the world. More formally, the theme was "Globalization 4.0: Shaping a Global Architecture in the Age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution."

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And what a plan it was! There was a scheme for global data governance. The president of Afghanistan, Mohammad Ashraf Ghani announced the passage of 390 new laws to significantly increase the number of women in politics. The government of the UK announced a five-year plan to tackle the global threat of antimicrobial resistance. The forum proclaimed a movement for a new deal for nature and people, led by Al Gore. And greatest of all, it announced support for the United Nations Conventions on Climate Change and Sustainable Development Goals.

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Who could have predicted that, three years later, the president of Afghanistan would have been driven out of the country by the Taliban, the global Covid pandemic would have displaced concerns over antimicrobial resistance, President Joe Biden would be begging Saudi Arabia and Venezuela for oil, Europe would be reviving nuclear power and coal, there would be worries over famine in the Middle East, and NATO would be on the brink of war with Russia invading Ukraine. The in-person 2021 Davos meeting itself would be canceled due to the Covid pandemic.

Events are now developing too rapidly for the explainers to cope. Covid is back in China. Russia is borrowing money from China. China's share market is tanking. The Kremlin's missiles are hitting close to NATO's eastern border. The old global world looks like a Russian T-72 that's been hit by a Javelin missile.

The system collapsed with amazing swiftness because the assumptions on which the projected future was based proved false. Nature, despite advances in medicine, could not be fully controlled. A mutating Covid could be mitigated, but not stopped by vaccinations, masks, and social distancing. Lockdowns and mandates disrupted life and the supply chain far more than experts had predicted. Renewables failed to prevent a growing European dependence on Russian gas. The Green dogma of discouraging oil production only fed the inflation caused by social deficit spending. Governments could not, at least to the extent they imagined, spend money they didn't have. Planning proved no match for complexity.

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Our would be overlords at the last party in Davos. (Hopefully, it will be the last one.) What would Ayn say about Davos?

Link

A far greater book, but nonfiction, if you want to be made aware of and understand the issues with the left, read Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom.

It is far superior to Atlas Shrugged and doesn't advocate the existence of supermen who are placed above the law.

eric76 said:

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A far greater book, but nonfiction, if you want to be made aware of and understand the issues with the left, read Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom.

It is far superior to Atlas Shrugged and doesn't advocate the existence of supermen who are placed above the law.

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"far superior" I don't think so.

One is a philosophical novel. The other economic/political treatise.

Both good, both essential.

Rand was a whack job, sure, but a useful one. Philosphy must be read as philosophy. Comparing a towering work of fiction with a non-fiction book isn't apt.

I'm not a huge Rand fan, especially her personal life, but that doesn't detract from her novels.

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It is far superior to Atlas Shrugged and doesn't advocate the existence of supermen who are placed above the law.

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That's an interesting statement. much of these works involves what "the law" ought to be. Your statement seems to start with "the law" and go from there. There are laws we should all place ourselves above. Mere law is not sacrosanct.

The fawning over this author has always bewildered me. She is a plagiarist and stole ideas much like Marx.

"Circumstance is key" - Thomas Jefferson

Definitely so with Rand and Marx. They both suck IMO.

Don't get me started on Hemingway nor Vonnegut. Blech...

The offal that people read and support never ceases to amaze me.

MaroonStain said:

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The fawning over this author has always bewildered me. She is a plagiarist and stole ideas much like Marx.

"Circumstance is key" - Thomas Jefferson

Definitely so with Rand and Marx. They both suck IMO.

Don't get me started on Hemingway nor Vonnegut. Blech...

The offal that people read and support never ceases to amaze me.

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Spreadsheet updated. You would dismiss Orwell, Huxley, Camus, Sartre, Dostoevsky and many others as "offal"??