Ayn Rand: The Philosophy of the Psychopath

[Svartalf]

You mean seth really is one?
Frack, and I was thinking I was going to receive a blue post...

[Clinton Huxley]

I wonder what our resident Objectivist will make of this thread.

I'm expecting a change of heart and an embrace of European style social democracy.

[Animavore]

I wonder what our resident Objectivist will make of this thread.

"Our glorious and revered leader is infallible. All objections are null by definition."

[Bella Fortuna]

I wonder what our resident Objectivist will make of this thread.

"Our glorious and revered leader is infallible. All objections are null by definition."

All hail Pappa!

[Coito ergo sum]

Almost one third of Americans, according to a recent poll, have read Atlas Shrugged

Really? I wonder if one third of Americans have read any one of those bestsellers with the embossed title pages that sell like hotcakes at airports, let alone ploughed through several hundred pages of unadulterated, relentlessly boring crap.

I don't believe that statistic at all.

The highest stat I found was 8.1% of Americans have read it. Even that sounds high. I strongly suspect some of that 8.1% had heard of it, but only said they read it.

Hardly any Americans even read one book per year. The assertion that 1 in 3 have read Atlas Shrugged seems to me to strain credulity. I wonder what the evidence is of that?

[Audley Strange]

Perhaps it was 1/3 of Americans that claim to have read it that actually have?

[Ian]

I don't know how "popular" her crap really is. Even among the handful of people who've read her stuff, I don't think most are convinced by it. Did you know there was an Atlas Shrugged movie last year? You may or may not have heard of it, because it was a total bomb (a budget of $20 million, and they made back less than $5 million). And the movie wasn't even the whole book - they split the story in order to make a trilogy of films, but the box office results were so pathetic that the development was downsized; part 2 might go straight to DVD.

She's as much a "prophet" as Karl Marx was, and just as unrealistic - and for exactly the same reason: each of their theories vilifies and belittles people on one end of the economic spectrum for the sake of glorifying and coddling people on the other end.
With Marx, he demonized the bourgeoise, cruelly exploiting the contributions of the working people for their own benefit, with the solution of tearing down the rich in order to produce a classless society. For Rand, she demonized the lower classes, who lackadaisically drain away the production and wealth created by the rich and creative elite, with the solution of tearing down government in order to free the wealthy and powerful from the burdens of supporting the dependent masses. These two lunatics are at opposite ends of a spectrum, and reality lies somewhere in the middle of it.

[Feck]

How many copies have been printed ? how long has it topped the best seller list for ????

[hadespussercats]

To compare the stupid bitch to karl marx is a fucking insult.

Yeah, Marx never wrote a hot sex scene.

[hadespussercats]

Funny, I always thought sociopath was the correct description:

so·ci·o·path   [soh-see-uh-path, soh-shee-]
noun Psychiatry .
a person, as a psychopathic personality, whose behavior is antisocial and who lacks a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience. - dictionary.com

I guess they are somewhat interchangeable?

Yes. At least according to Jon Aronson(?) in The Psychopath Test.

[Coito ergo sum]

The article cited in the OP is an embarrassment.

Selfishness, it contends, is good, altruism evil, empathy and compassion are irrational and destructive. The poor deserve to die; the rich deserve unmediated power. It has already been tested, and has failed spectacularly and catastrophically.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... -rand-marx

I take issue with this description as the contentions of objectivism. I'm not an objectivist, but there certainly are portions of the philosophy that make sense.

Objectivism is called objectivism because it holds to a metaphysics involving an objective reality - that it is axiomatic that existence exists, and that consciousness exists - and that there is a reality. The epistemology of objectivism is "reason" and all knowledge is based on perception with the validity of the senses being axiomatic. Being axiomatic doesn't mean they are true -- it just means that we have no other choice -- they are inescapable. And, the fundamental concept of reason is logic based on that perception.

Objectivist ethics involve self-interest. That's different than the colloquial usage of the word "selifsh" and it does not say that the poor deserve to die or that rich deserve unmediated power. Those are not stated by Rand as part of objectivism.

The self-interest suggested by Rand is not a psychotic or evil self interest - it's embodied in the John Galt quote -- "I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine." -- it's at bottom an anti-slavery notion that suggests that one ought not be subjugated for the benefit of another person, or require another to be subjugated for you.

The politics of objectivism is individual rights, and laissez-faire capitalism.

There is nothing "psychotic" about her philosophy, and the article is a gross misrepresentation.

Right from the get-go, the author sets up his straw man - he calls Rand's family "a prosperous Russian family." Not particularly true -- her father was a middle class - bourgeois - family. In 1917, when Rand was about 10 or 12 - all her family's assets were confiscated by the communists. They had to flee from St. Petersburg to the Crimea, and in her teen years they were desperately poor, often nearing starvation.

The author alleges that Randian philosophy was tried in the US --- "Once in government, Greenspan applied his guru’s philosophy to the letter, cutting taxes for the rich, repealing the laws constraining banks, refusing to regulate the predatory lending and the derivatives trading which eventually brought the system down."

Of course, Greenspan was never really in the government -- he was Fed Chairman, an advisory post, and he had no control over whether taxes were cut for the rich or anyone else, or repealing laws constraining banks, or refusing to regulate predatory lending, etc. Frankly, predatory lending WAS regulated, and the problem was the federal regulations MANDATED extension of loans to people who couldn't afford to pay them back and federal incentives spurred on the subprime lending market to encourage riskier and riskier loans. And Greenspan had nothing to do with laws constraining banks -- and the truth is that banks came under generally greater regulation over the past 35 years, and the real problem was the removal the Glass Steagall separation of certain kinds of banks and other financial institutions and allowing ill-advised banking mergers. That occurred, of course, in the late 1990s, under a decidedly non-Randian administration.

Greenspan can, of course, be criticized for many things - he helped purposefully fuel the fake housing boom after the dot.com crash. He helped keep interest rates artificially low for too long. But these aren't Randian or Objectivist things.

[hadespussercats]

You mean seth really is one?
Frack, and I was thinking I was going to receive a blue post...

"I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine." says Ayn Rand.

Well, if Seth adheres to that, I don't see why he's so against my argument for reproductive choice. Maybe he thinks she meant "man" literally.

[Svartalf]

Or do we have anybody else who seems to be, or has declared him/herself to be one?

[Pappa]

Or do we have anybody else who seems to be, or has declared him/herself to be one?

Andrew is a devotee, I believe.

[Coito ergo sum]

I am not an Objectivist, but I have read:

Atlas Shrugged
The Fountainhead
Virtue of Selfishness
Anthem
Capitalism: An Unkown Ideal
Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology
The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution
And, some stuff by Leonard Peikoff

I used to listen to a radio show in the early 1990's hosted by the now deceased Objectivist libertarian Mark Scott. He would discuss Objectivist principles and philosophy in some depth. A rare intellectual talk radio program. He's been dead about 15 years now, though.