Never try to engage with Ayn Rand's work in good faith: worst mistake of my life. She and her fanboys are basically the human version of brainy smurf. Even the name, Objectivism, is her bragging about herself. Thus since they are akin to brainy smurf, don't bother arguing with them because they will claim omniscience. Instead, deal with them as the rest of the smurfs dealt with brainy smurf.
Me: "Oil companies are using their private property to inflict environmental pollution that I do not consent to. Since they are using their property for evil, we should limit their use of a property. This way no one gets physically harmed, not even the oil tycoon."
Rand's Response: "This is stupid, how dare you tell someone what to do with their property. Live and let live! It is actually moral to let people use things that rightfully belong to them for immoral reasons."
Native Americans: "I just want to be left alone please."
Native Americans: "Didn't you just say people who own property should do whatever they please with it, and anyone who has a problem with it should mind their own business?"
Rand's Response: "Ugh, you fucking IDIOTS! Clearly you know nothing about my philosophy of IKnowEverythingIsm."
Me: "Uhhh...okay. I gotta say, insisting that you are the standing authority on all knowledge is a little dogmatic, it sounds kind of like a reli..."
Rand's Response: "UGH! RELIGION IS FOR IDIOTS AND IS AN INSULT TO THINKING!"
I genuinely wanted to read something from the right's POV so I could better understand them, lest I become as dogmatic as Rand here. So far, the closest I got was reading some classical liberal stuff like Plato's Republic, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, and some Nietzsche. But it seems like anything further is just full on pompous dogshit. The Chapo book had more depth than this.
Hot take maybe, but I think it’s pretty common for most people to gravitate towards ideas that confirm how they already view the world or provide an explanation for their experiences. Sometimes those ideas have merit, sometimes not, but having some kind of emotional/personal connection to an idea is often a necessary prerequisite for people to open up to it. Ayn Rand is what selfish assholes gravitate towards, for obvious reasons.
I gravitated to her at one point. She confirms a lot of the biases that Americans are indoctrinated with but are never really said out loud. So just hearing the unspoken social rules stated plainly was refreshing, as was the constant pretense of rebellion that drips from her writing.
Objectivism gives you a license to be an asshole and to think you're better than everyone around you
That's my best guess for why people like her
she was a soviet union defector and was pushed by the us elite
just imagine if yeonmi park could write slightly better englishNo actually philosopher has ever taken Ayn Rand seriously for even a moment. It's pure :zizek-preference:
I only studied her in philosophy courses as like an example of bad philosophy. It was only in my intro to philosophy course, which spent a lot more time on John Stuart Mill, Descartes, and Sartre. Everything about Rand's totalizing theory of Objectivism just runs headlong into the wall of all the other philosophies. It's just so... out of place. It's easy to see how awful it is when you line it up with other more compelling theories about existence.
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I'm an engineer alienated from my labour but I don't understand alienation and my alienated consumption doesn't fill the void
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I have a higher income because I worked hard to become an engineer and am really smart in this particular way
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[Passive cultural indoctrination of Malthusian overpopulation theory, protestant work ethic, and white supremacy/patriarchy]
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I'm better because I'm smarter and work harder than other people. My income is threatened by taxes to support the unworthy poor. All of my engineer friends are similarly smart in the only kinds of thought we engage in so I mistake it for general intelligence.
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If all the engineers stopped working in my dumb guy understanding of unionism, we'd get the full benefits of our labour in my dumb guy understanding of the labour theory of value
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I can't formally accept these things because I accept all the reactionary framing that materially benefits me. The best I can do is that libertarian city in New Hampshire where they had to fight bears because they didn't believe in municipal trash collection. We'll all move there and we'll be smart together and that will make a utopia.
I think about the people I know who like Rand's books. They are all people who a.) were born with a certain degree of privilege - upper middle class parents who could afford nice things; and b.) landed jobs where they're in the top 5% or so of income earners. When you're in that situation, it's easy to read Atlas Shrugged and feel like a kindred spirit with the protagonist - someone who's so successful and it's all because she's amazing. And one who isn't as successful as them/her is just a hater and a loser.
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One answer I haven't seen anyone in this thread give to the answer the question "How did Ayn Rand get so many simps?" is that she was basically a cult leader. She wasn't just writing things people liked; she was actively cultivating a cult of personality around herself.
She was no L. Ron Hubbard -- not many people are -- but she did have a small but intense group of fans that she spent time with, and which evolved into what later became institutions like the Ayn Rand Institute and the Atlas Society. The original circle included Nathaniel Branden (usually associated with the "self-esteem" movement) and Alan Greenspan (who later became the chair of the Federal Reserve, appointed by Ronald Reagan).
I don't think anyone in academia takes her seriously as a philosopher, although I'm sure some find her interesting as an object of study. It would probably be more accurate to say that she was the Jordan Peterson or Ben Shapiro of her day.
yea like, all the libertarian thinkers have their fans but i think only Rand has worshipers. She aimed to provide not just a theory of economics (although she hardly bothered with that) but a complete moral philosophy. Peterson is the perfect comparison
Thanks for reminding me that book exists and is something i once paid for.
:yea:
I think it’s because her philosophy fully elucidates the fantasy appeal of capitalism. The things that people say when they defend capitalism as the best system, not merely as the least bad one. Stuff like the freedom in the free market, people are sorted into the positions that they deserve (meritocracy), people can reach their full potential, etc.
Of course, Rand was confused and angry at some capitalists for their corruption and anti-free market collaboration because she didn't understand that capitalism is a class project, not dedicated to the ideals she wanted it to be.
I think if you want utopian vision but you can't reject capitalism, you turn to Rand.
I came from an incredibly right wing upbringing, like I didn't even know what socialism was until I was around 25. The reason I am currently here and not on some godforsaken right wing board is because this is only political ideology I've found that makes any fucking sense and doesn't contradict itself every single step of the way.
What you're discovering in this journey is that issue I believe, and I think the reason people stick with it is for either of these reasons depending on the person you're speaking to:
A. They're cynical actors disseminating propaganda to make themselves rich.
or
B. They literally just have not been successfully introduced to political theory that isn't full of blatant falsehoods
If you ever find something that makes vague sense, I’d be interested to hear about it. I’ve read Siege by James Mason and it was largely typical fascist talking points and very affective rather than analytical. I thought that maybe the book the fascists convinced each other to read would have some sort of aha moment similar to when I first read State and Revolution. At least something to make what they do have some internal consistency. There was none.
I’ve heard Mussolini’s writing is better. Burke is considered the father of conservatism, but then you’re getting back to reading older thought. Another one that gets pushed pretty often is von Mises. I dunno. I think at this point, having a rough overview of key thinkers’ frameworks is enough to contextualize readings about history. Getting into the political leanings of historians tends to be a little more grounded.
Mussolini's Doctrine was ghostwritten by Gentile, who is actually kinda interesting to read despite being a :no-fash: . If you wanna go down the far-right thinkers rabbithole just out of curiosity, you're better off checking out the people who were actually pretty influential as thinkers: Schmitt, Spengler, Evola, Gentile, and especially Sorel who was a Marxist that set the ball rolling on the development of Fascism. You're probably not gonna get a lot out of them since all of them (save for maybe Schmitt, whose political project can be summed up as completely fucking destroying liberal democracy and everything it stands for) are pretty batshit, ESPECIALLY Evola, who is worth reading for the :jesse-wtf: alone and for getting the point of view of a true reactionary to the core. If anything ,the biggest benefit you get from reading them, besides knowing thy enemy, is getting a good knowledge of reactionary thought traps you shouldn't fall into. You should also know ahead of time that absolutely no right-winger actually reads their own theory, especially no far-righter, so if you ever go through with reading these guys you should know you're probably alone in doing so lmao
As an aside, all of these draw their influences from reactionary interpretations of earlier, much better known thinkers, like for example Evola says his main influences are Plato and Nietzsche and urges people to read them instead. So basically, you would be getting all right wing thought and more by just getting going through the important thinkers in philosophy and political theory from antiquity to today..
If you want a book I genuinely, whole-heartedly recommend to communists: "Coup d'Etat; Technique of Revolution" by Curzio Malaparte. He's an Italian fascist, later turned Communist (and for some reason, Catholic?) who, as the title implies, went through the effort of analyzing the art of a coup d'etat and forceful seizure of power. I recommend it mainly for the honestly incredible chapters on the October Revolution and Soviet Russia, breaking down the Bolsheviks seizure of power, written as more of an "this is what a communist insurrection looks like and what to watch out for", which ironically ended up an extremely good guide for a communist insurrection lmao. The book, written in 1931, also gives a pretty dismissive portrait of Hitler as a mere reactionary and a simple imitator of Mussolini, which is interesting since you get to see what the rise of Hitler looks like from the point of view of an ardent Mussolini fan.
For what it's worth, there is a handful of classic lib stuff still holds up in my book. Thomas Paine was bretty based for his time. Common Sense even starts off with this banger of a paragraph:
"Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general Favor; a long Habit of not thinking a Thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of Custom. But the Tumult soon subsides. Time makes more Converts than Reason"
Yeah, Thomas Paine was most certainly a :LIB:, but there are times when Common Sense makes him sound like a proto antifa-supersoldier:
"Thus necessity, like a gravitating power, would soon form our newly arrived emigrants into society, the reciprocal blessings of which would supercede, and render the obligations of law and government unnecessary while they remained perfectly just to each other; but as nothing but Heaven is impregnable to vice, it will unavoidably happen that in proportion as they surmount the first difficulties of emigration, which bound them together in a common cause, they will begin to relax in their duty and attachment to each other: and this remissness will point out the necessity of establishing some form of government to supply the defect of moral virtue." Basically, Thomas Paine is pro-society but anti-government. He isn't exactly like Thomas Hobbes because his reasoning is "human nature complicated" rather than "human nature bad".
Also, this paragraphs gives an actual coherent reason for "limited government":
"I draw my idea of the form of government from a principle in nature which no art can overturn, viz. that the more simple any thing is, the less liable it is to be disordered, and the easier repaired when disordered"
I ended up reading Atlas Shrugged; both out of genuine curiosity for where someone on the right might be coming from and also for the memes. I also read an essay or two she wrote.
Atlas Shrugged is shitty fiction, but it's also her iconic book that lays out objectivism.
In a nutshell, Atlas Shrugged does the meme and basically describes late stage capitalism the elites are rigging the system for their own gain and the poor are getting poorer. But it does the same anti-populist bullshit that dems have been doing. It's not a battle versus the rich and the poors, it's a battle between the "dirty rich" and the "clean rich". All the poverty in the world is caused by populist rubes trying to alleviate poverty instead of simply setting up a corporate technocracy where the special boys can save the rest of the rubes from themselves. When they do, the working class just shuts up and accepts the shit-tier minimum wage jobs for the sake of porky, who knows what's good for everyone.
This book has an "individualism good" message which is fine to sympathize with, but "individualism" is NOT distributed equally, only for the main characters who really matter. The background characters of the working class eventually gladly bear any burden for the benefit of our protagonist. Also, another message of the book is "do whatever you want. YOLO!" Although as I mentioned in the post, Rand supported the Genocide of Native Americans simply because she thought they were dumb. This message is clearly not intended for everyone, and she also told minorities to stop noticing racism because liberals brought it up (unfortunately, the source is paywalled lol)...implying they should act altruisitcally and serve as a lightning rod for any dysfunction among white people. Granted, to her credit, she is famously quoted with calling racism the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism, but this makes her bone to pick with Native Americans all the more confusing, especially when you bring into question that the Aztecs rivaled the Romans in indoor plumbing, and Hawai'i was a totally independent nation before the Hawaiian league swooped in.
Again, so many contradictions. At least Marx offers thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.
I've only ever read Anthem which was mercifully short. Pretty good for what it was (unabashed propaganda), but I couldn't help but notice that the existing capitalist empire just as often crushes individuality and technological innovation as the primitivist, anti-meritocratic, collectivist state she imagined out of whole cloth. Ayn Rand obviously never bothered to put as much work into knowing her enemy as you have done here.
I'm genuinely impressed you were able to get through Atlas Shrugged. Not only is it just an incoherent mess that is by any literary standard absolute dreck; it's an absolute unit of a book, length-wise. Like, one of the characters does a monologue rant for like 50 pages or something.
Thanks for bravely going into the Bullshit Mines for the rest of us. The nice write-up is appreciated.
Her shitty fiction usually involves thinly veiled excuses for her to pontificate for pages on end.
Boomers who poisoned their brain on Ron Paul opinion pieces and AM radio, and fedora millennials who internalized the idea of Bioshock as “the thinking mans FPS” even though they barely think themselves
The big reveal in Bioshock kinda mocks the players for thinking they were in control the entire time. Chuds are so goddamned stupid they can't even understand a hamfisted metaphor like Bioshock.
Like the whole world depicted is just that unfettered capitalism is gangsterism. Then mayhem and destruction.
