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“Dagny hooks up with John Galt the first night she meets him, and D’Anconia thinks…that’s just fine?“
The thing is, if you’re an immigrant Russian chick trying to strike gold, the feelings of other men don’t really matter. The few Russians girls I have met were all quite aware that children would interfere with their lifestyle. So Rand kind of makes sense when you realise that she’s a woman with no responsibilities, LARPing about being with the number one oligarch..
“You don’t have to see through the eyes of others, hold onto yours, stand on your own judgment, you know that what is, is–say it aloud, like the holiest of prayers, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”
Mercenary Moscow gold-digger! (Yes I know she’s from SPB but whatever, she still uses characteristic Russian comma splices)
And it kind of makes sense how the people who don’t outgrow Rand are the beta orbiter types.
Aug 2, 2023·edited Aug 3, 2023Liked by Tree of Woe
Think of it as the opposite gender version of the modern Isekai fantasy where the average looser protagonist ends up with a harem of beautiful girls despite doing nothing to make himself worthy of that.
“Dagny is a busy career woman trying to balance running a train company against the morality of her time. Her longtime boyfriend still craves her but a new man has entered her life. Which, if either, will it be?”
It’s nice to see a critique of Rand that isn’t just some characterized hatred of a cartoon image people have of her. I agree that her strict materialism made her far less provocative as a philosopher, and am curious what it would look like if we were to apply Objectivism to a more imaginative set of principles.
So glad to hear this. I would actually love write a guest post for you sometime, if you'd be interested. Ever since deleting my Twitter, I've been cut off from so many people. Where would I email you my pitch?
Wonderful essay. I myself am a follower of Classical philosophers, mainly Aristotle. I believe in Nous, free will, that life has many zero-sum situations (Ownership of land is like reproduction, “I control it and no one else”) and that creating new life ourselves is a necessary element of leading a good life. I believe in the existence of God and in human souls.
You've neatly summed up all of the unease I've felt toward Rand despite the attractions of certain parts of her thinking. I don't know if I heard this from somewhere or coined it myself, but with her I've found it accurate to say that she praises the individual will or ego, while dismissing God, nature, and family (which I mean broadly enough to include all human relationships). Which is hardly an *Aristotelian* perspective on human life.
As a somewhat-aside I like your points about noesis and the "non-rational" elements of the mind. I've been on a slow deep dive into Platonism lately, starting with the Socratic dialogues themselves, and it's surprising me more and more how much insight is already there (including prefiguring much of interest in Aristotle himself).
Part of Rand's confusion on this seems to be the error she shares with all modern theories of reason and rationality -- that reason is restricted to the explicit, conscious, and discursive powers of the intellect. Ancient and medieval writers knew better, though that insight didn't survive the grinding machinery of the "enlightenment".
I agree completely! That has been my experience as well diving into Platonism.
Aristotle called Man the "rational and social animal," but Rand called Man "the rational animal." By removing "social," she created a system that failed to capture the whole of flourishing human life.
But as a critic of communism and relativism, she was the best of the 20th century.
<<"Aristotle called Man the "rational and social animal," but Rand called Man "the rational animal." By removing "social," she created a system that failed to capture the whole of flourishing human life.
But as a critic of communism and relativism, she was the best of the 20th century.">>
That is the most succinct and spot on analysis of Ayn Rand's strengths and weaknesses that I've ever seen anywhere.
Aug 2, 2023·edited Aug 2, 2023Liked by Tree of Woe
If I type up: “ibecindibceibiecbieibcbeiecindhJleonxsjbxkaoxnx” … this is a meaningless string of text. Any Materialist out there (be it Rand or others) now can do one of two things. They can (correctly) note that this is meaningless; and then look into their materialistic philosophies to answer “WHY?” And forever fail to do so (due to issues of regress, justification, grounding, etc)
OR they can acknowledge that their system cannot answer whether or not this has meaning or not *inherent* to it. And in doing so, their system crumbles because it has no basis to say whether language strings have any inherent meanings in them.
No materialist philosophy in general can move beyond the third-person world of “science” and give proper accounts of basic things like natural language. And so they die off in this mundane manner a la becoming irrelevant on the “basics”/fundamentals.
If you type “ibecindibceibiecbieibcbeiecindhJleonxsjbxkaoxnx” it means that you have a tendency to initially favour the use of your index and middle fingers over your ring and little fingers :)
I think you are putting the chicken before the egg, which is easy to do because we actually do have to have a chicken to lay the egg to begin with, but in this case, your chicken can't catch meaning because there were never any precedent of eggs or chickens i.e., convention or orthodoxy. Drity words these are, these foul days. But, without the convnetion of a formal launguage, I'm not making any sense or meaning either. Why do words have meaning? Because we say they do! And we define every one and their relations in various grammars which often correleate via translations. They are as discriminating as they are eclectic. Paradox seems to be more of life than the rationality we cling to however tenuously, civilization having proven to be a slippery thing and language its core. Dead languages and dead civlizations? Gods no longer worshipped? For in the beginning, there was the Word!
>>Why do words have meaning? Because we say they do! <<
This is sort of the superficial, everyday understanding of "meaning".
What I was hinting at was MEANING of the variety that (as an analogy) makes it so that the pursuits we do in the first place (such as social conventions and sentences having meaning or not because we say they do) have a Truth Valence or "worthiness" (if you will) to them. This is of course an analogy- The implication being that "the sort of MEANING that these pursuits have is akin to the deeper underlying meaning sentences and propositions have in formal language when we evaluate them"
Anyhow, the point raised was that Materialism (regardless of the variation) cannot give a proper account of this "MEANING". You can certainly get a relational, sociological and "customary" understanding of lower tiers of "meaning" (a la the "because we say they do!" sort of stuff), but "MEANING" as such will be elusive in such a system.
Therefore, the honest materialist who accepts that his model/system fails to say whether or not such a "MEANING" exists or not... he will have (at the moment he makes that admission directly or indirectly) Destroyed his entire Project definitively.
Yes, it is the "superficial, everyday understanding of meaning" and that, IMO, is all there is.
If one tries to attach other meanings to words, one is making up new words, which philosophers do all the time and why I get annoyed with them. Set up a world the way you want it and then, of course, your conclusions will be right. Everything that might contradict has already been excluded.
This is fine in science. We exclude everything but the phenomena of interest so as to understand just that without interference but we don't expect reality to be so kind. We may need several theories.
Rigor in science is fine because we're translating concepts into math and back again. Some of these ideas never existed before and need their own words. However, "entorpy" isn't just another word for "chaos". It's the amount of heat lost from a heat exchange per degree temperature change. The "universe" isn't going to die of entropy. (We have "cliamte chagne" for that. Ha!)
But if you can't explain it ordinary language derived from reality, I think you're just making things up, like "Atlas Shruggged'. It was a novel. I couldn't get thru it. But I did suspect that Dagny would hook up with Galt.
Julius Evola commanded a very erudite style but he never made up words that I know of. He was articulate and he knew what he wanted to say.
"4th Political Theory" is sheer aggravation, not because Alexander Dugin is so smart, but because he really hadn't gotten his ideas sorted out. In "The Great Awakening vs eh Great Reset" he must have either found a good editor or finally discovered exactly what he wanted to say which is what I sort of thought it was but the later work was pleasure to read and the language ordinary and simple.
The deeper meaning most are looking for is just validtion of what they'd alrady decided.
"Cherish those who seek the truth. Beware of those who find it." Voltaire
If the superficial form of "meaning" is all there is then... <<Yes, it is the "superficial, everyday understanding of meaning" and that, IMO, is all there is.>> ... <-- Denote this as X.
X is a Descriptive statement (i.e. of the form "A is B"). So X is either able to prompt certain sequences of Action from said Description (in yourself, others or a combo of the two) or it cannot do so.
Example: The Descriptive statement X *should be able to* prompt in me, you , others, etc (some combo of this) the action of "changing one's mind". Namely toward the view: "Yes, only superficial meaning exists".
If you are correct, then X is unable to do so a la having no "MEANING" of the sort over and above the superficial, and we get a contradiction. Namely, somehow "superficial meaning is all there is" and yet... X is able to prompt in me, you, others, etc aforementioned action (at the minimum).
No statement I make can "change your mind" or promt any action. You're the one who does that. The only meaning is whatever convention assigns to those words which is why legalese and technical writing are so demanding and rigorous i.e., so we can take action iaw wiords. One cannot say, "But that's not how I understood it."
If your understanding is not iaw with convention, you are wrong, not the piece even if it isn't the best example of the art. (and there is a lot of that about!)
Here, "supeficial" means unambiguous.
Ambiguity is what happens from trying to impose some universal theory or philosophy upon reaity when the more limited the theory the more accurate it is.
Bronsted-Lowry is another way to look ar Arrehnius acids and bases and both are simple.
Lewis acids and bases will get yo into organic chemistry.
Oxidation Reduction replaces the whole acid-base idea with electromotive force and we're into batteries although Brinsted-Lowry is the smart way to adjest pH in teh swimmjng pool.
Capitalism describes a system of investment, manufacture and profit but governments also do it, some better than others, but that can be said of private corporations as well.
And, how aren't large corporations "collectives"? At a certain point in size, individual ownership disapperas like it does in state corporation or any municpal project.
Do stock holders have any more say than tax payers? Somtimes less, I would say.
Innovations? Ah, "Mahatten Project"? The ME 163 "Komet"?
Ayn Rand tried to make some univserasl philosophy of "captialism" and "collectivism" into an evil : a pseudo-religion, assigning "meaning" to words like "profit" and "altruism" that they didn't have. It was as much a slight of hand as anything Marx came up with, a Prussian Jew who translated Frederick's "Kamarilla" via the French Revolution into his "holy cause" complate with an Apocalypse and 2nd Coming.
Well, I guess wehave to hand it to Marx for "slight of hand" or, at least, a lot more of it.
But that's how desperate COld War "capitalists" and Republicans were and still are, as though "meritocracy" didn't impinge on "equality".
>>No statement I make can "change your mind" or promt any action. ...<<
It's not the "utterance", but rather the proposition and/or the statement *as such* I was speaking about. I would agree with you if it was the former; but the latter is very different. If there was not "Gap" with regard to Descriptive qualities (i.e. "able to pinpoint") and Active qualities (i.e. "able to prompt"), then Formal Language would be the inevitable, Deterministic evolutionary endpoint of Natural Language in every Human Society.
However, not only do we not see this, but rather we see the Collapse of Formal Language systems (the 20th century failure of the Positivist movement was the start, now it has only accelerated) because of their overall inability to find within themselves the Normative standards which justify their own field to begin with.
It's not an accident that "Science" is collapsing as we speak (I can go on a tangent on Stanford and others being caught red handed falsifying all sorts of stuff, but I will desist on that); this is the inevitable result of the "Normative-Descriptive" Gap coming to the fore. And it will only get worse.
When I read Atlas Shrugged, oh, some almost 15 years ago now, i was struck by the prescience of some of her takes on what we today call the woke, and the concept of A is A. But i could never be a full blown objectivist, my faith deeply rooting me too much.
But the idea of a Thing always being what it is, still appeals to me, especially in this modern world in which so many actively try and destroy any sense of objective reality. A chair is a chair, whether you sit on it or not. Even if you use it as a table, it remains a chair, it was designed and made to be sat on. If you break it into pieces, it remains the pieces of a chair.
So too are men and women. A man is a man, no matter how much he may damage himself. A woman is a woman, no matter how much she surgically mutilates herself. Calling evil "DEI" or "Environmentalism" or "equity" Doesn't make it not evil.
Coincidentally, one of my favorite superheroes, after the original Captain Marvel (SHAZAM), is the Question. Created by an objectivist, his best run was the original Charlton Comics series where he was written by his Creator Ditko. A close second is his appearances in the animated series Justice League Unlimited, where he gets to give a Randian Objectivist lecture to Lex Luthor.
I am a fellow fan of Steve Ditko and the Question. And I find Rand's insistent that "A is A" is one of the most powerful weapons we have against the postmodern relativism sapping our sense of truth.
I got into libertarianism via Heinlein. Didn't encounter Rand until a few years after becoming an anarchocapitalist.
I found parts of Rand's works to be thrilling, but other parts left me a bit nauseous. All this hating on altruism bugged me. Especially considering how altruistic Rand's heroes acted. Blowing the family fortune pretending to be a playboy and not getting laid is rather altruistic in my book.
And you don't even need the issue of reproduction to run into zero sum games. First year economics covers plenty of free rider and public goods problems. And there is a backward bending supply curve for cheap labor that does need to be addressed.
One rather important public good: good government itself. Libertarian activism is expensive and time consuming. Somebody has to put in way more than they get back in tax cuts.
As a populist, I can better appeal to a much broader group's rational self-interest than I could as a pure libertarian.
From your description of the plot, 'Atlas Shrugged" is typical myth, in which John Galt slays the dragon and gets the girl. He'll reproduce more little Galt-Tagert Objectivists iaw Herbert Spencer who will breed a class that rules the world, I suppose. It's the tale of Brave Odysseus told from Penelope's point of view, in a way, and couldn't be anything but Kafka otherwise. It's a convnetional novel.
It just occurs to me that "Atlas Shrugged" (what I saw-read of it) was unique in one aspect, that her major characters shamelessly espoused their personal ambitions while workers, their satisfaction-pride in being part of a great capitalist system.
It was rather wooden (socialist in tone if not in content) but not even Smith nor Ricardo would take "greed" to that length. Rather, they focussed upon the (wait for it) "collective" benefit of everyone pursuing the Founders' "happiness" and propserity, and how everything magically balanced out if "collectivist" gov't stayed out of it : a battle of collectives, which politics always is.
"Atlas Shrugs" remains an unusally bold statement of laisseiz faire even for 1957 when no politician, glitteratti nor influencer would ever admit to ambition i.e., they all "serve others" as some sort of ultruism".
But, of course, so is Ayn Rand! That's why she wrote her novel about capitalism though never actaully having engaged in it. She was an intellectual-glitteratti from the start, Petrograd State University 1921.
From our view in 2023, her characters would be Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg who are everything Marx said about them and so did Rand although she would seem to see them as liberators.
That Rand has lost her creds is one indication of a Post-Modern Era beginning while Rand remains an iconic relic of the Modern Era.
She seems to think of every worker as self-employed which may have been true in 1921 Russia, backward as it was. But by Reconsruction, more than half of Americans had become wage earns and that has increased ever since.
Wage earners are not as independant as the self-employed of ante-bellum America yet mass production is here to stay unless it collapses.
Whatever Ayn Rand thought the future would or should be, she was living in the past.
Yes, but then, who will buy what the robots produce?
Over prodfuction was a major cause of the 1896 and 1930s Depressions.
Too little money in general circulation was a major cause of the 1873-1930s depressions, most of the gold backed currency in investment houses or upper class circulation and limited by gold reserves on hand so all three were deflationary. Manufactruers couldn't make a profit, fired workers, and exacerbated the problem.
This where Keynes deficti gov't spending came in to introduce money into ciruclation which did work, although the money was supposed to be repayed (which it hasn't) so we get inflation with recovery which never goes away.
Colonial scirpt was a fiat currency that was well mangaed to stablize prices and when used like that, it works too.
But, of course, this is all gov't management which Rand rejected.
The Rerum novarum or Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor, is an encyclical issued by Pope Leo XIII on 15 May 1891 which got into all that rather well. It holds property sacrosanct but equates currency to labor and demonstrates the the supply-demand curves of currency, land and labor are't the same as commodities and then goes on to a just wage and price being complementary however difficult to arrive at.
While 19th and eayly20th Century corporations and cartels were guilty of all sorts of "collective" labor abused, on the other hand, they also tried to administer wages and prices to avoid all the destructive excesses of competition on such a huge scale. The German cartels were best at it, descending from Frederick's 18th Century "Camarilla". Henry Ford got honorable mentionin "Mein Kampf" for exactly that sort of thing i.e., payinghis workers enoguh so they could buy his cars, an outrageous $ 5 a day!
You'd think the declining populations of White countries would be desirable since automation can take over the work even as the poulation "ages", but I think there is more to open immigration than just cheap labor, although historically it always has been.
I never understood the attraction to Ayn Rand's attempts at fiction writing. She couldn't write fiction at all. Also, every single self described Objectivist I ever met was an insufferable asshole. It sounds as though your former girlfriend may have been an Objectivist.
She was an Objectivist in spirit. "What do you mean your start-up is only paying you $40,000 a year? EVERYONE earns 6 figures." "Uh, no babe, actually only a tiny percentage of people earn 6 figures." "Yah but those people don't COUNT."
In the business world you rarely find people who have not been beaten to within an inch of their life. Trying to explain (for instance) that to get to 10+ k monthly (regularly) one had to first have something abysmal like “(1,345.18 CDN)” in their Debit account at 4 am… such an explanation always sadly falls on deaf ears for most.
really well written. I went through my rand phase not long after high school when i was in college. i still read and can quote the books but now I look at them a little more critically.
In the 'Letters of Ayn Rand' and her correspondence with Isabel Paterson it was clear she was unable to ever accept the concept of original sin, which if she did could have seen the truth in traditional Catholicism. Could Rand argue say against the writings of Pope Leo XIII (particularly the encyclical Rerum Novarum) that was as anti-communist as Rand's We The Living.
I actually quite concur -We the Living and Anthem were her best works. We the Living, in particular, I thought was very powerful for its demonstration of how a good man (Andrei Taggart) was destroyed by his belief in a bad system.
In reading through comments here I notice that most readers take the Bible surface meanings literally. This is of course how the powers that be have controlled humanity for eons. Even for the practical atheist there is still that draw to that Armageddon psychology where by global warming the sins of mankind destroy the planet. The original teachings and philosophy of Qabalah is written in Genesis. But it's surface meaning must not be taken literally for it is speaking in terms of states of consciousness. The best example I can give you is God/Super-consciousness Adam/Self Conscious awareness, Eve/Subconsciousness, and now the quote "The desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee." The surface meaning is still used to control us to this day. But is it not true that in self conscious awareness we desire and our subconscious cannot desire, but rather by imagery it can answer any question we ask 1000 fold. Ask yourself why on any given subject and subconsciousness will flood your mind with answer upon answer. You then use your powers of self-consciousness to sift and sort through all the answers, while subconsciousness through memory verifies and validates, it cannot reject for that is a power of self consciousness-affirming and aligning to the Bible's above quote. We rule over subconsciousness-yet it is also our link of communication with Super-consciousness. Thus in awareness we lean towards Altruism and Unity rather than the ridiculous mass culture madness of separation. Shalom Ahebe
I don't feel theologically astute enough to be able to respond to this. I do not have years of Biblical experience to match my years of Randian research. What you are saying does resonate with certain works I have read in tradition, however.
Ayn Rand PLAGIARIZED Hitler. See Chapter 4 of Volume II of Mein Kampf. Rand admitted that she could read German in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. She had a strong interest in National Socialism and German philosophy generally. She supervised the writing of the Ominous Parallels with an iron rod. https://sites.google.com/view/gbg-journal
I read both "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead" because my brother said they were good to read. I read several other books by Ayn Rand. It was after reading "Atlas Shrugged", I think, that I rejected some of her basic ideas. If I remember right, she thought that belief in God was a hindrance and if people could just get rid of this belief, things would improve. She also thought that people who did good were really receiving some sort of mental/emotional "reward" and that that was their true motivation for helping others. I told my sister that I no longer wanted to read Ayn Rand's book because she disliked people so much. And I felt she was wrong about God. My brother thought differently. You can tell by the way our lives turned out. Whenever a person writes a book, they should always consider the effect that book might have on the people that read it. I believe her book caused damage to my brother's life because his acceptance of her ideas caused him to not seek out better paths. And, in my mind, he was/is a very valuable and worthwhile person and his life could have been happier. I am glad you wrote this article.
I'm sorry to hear your brother ended up on a dark path. I think Rand wrote many good things but some of her thoughts lead to an unhappy and miserable life -- which, frankly, is what she lived.
Welcome to all my new subscribers. I'm not sure how or why but dozens of new people signed up after I wrote this article. It must have gone viral somewhere. I hope you enjoy your weekly doses of micro-despair!
“Dagny hooks up with John Galt the first night she meets him, and D’Anconia thinks…that’s just fine?“
The thing is, if you’re an immigrant Russian chick trying to strike gold, the feelings of other men don’t really matter. The few Russians girls I have met were all quite aware that children would interfere with their lifestyle. So Rand kind of makes sense when you realise that she’s a woman with no responsibilities, LARPing about being with the number one oligarch..
“You don’t have to see through the eyes of others, hold onto yours, stand on your own judgment, you know that what is, is–say it aloud, like the holiest of prayers, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”
Mercenary Moscow gold-digger! (Yes I know she’s from SPB but whatever, she still uses characteristic Russian comma splices)
And it kind of makes sense how the people who don’t outgrow Rand are the beta orbiter types.
Great analysis.
Think of it as the opposite gender version of the modern Isekai fantasy where the average looser protagonist ends up with a harem of beautiful girls despite doing nothing to make himself worthy of that.
Atlasa Shrugero
The new manga
Indeed! Warp chick lit. Woman 20 years into career is still the love magnet for the world's metaphysical super heroes.
Sounds like a W Network movie.
I can never enjoy Atlas Shrugged again now because of this comment
“Dagny is a busy career woman trying to balance running a train company against the morality of her time. Her longtime boyfriend still craves her but a new man has entered her life. Which, if either, will it be?”
Russian?! If she was Russian then I'm a member of a well known family of international financiers.
Not a Russian nose, is it?))
It’s nice to see a critique of Rand that isn’t just some characterized hatred of a cartoon image people have of her. I agree that her strict materialism made her far less provocative as a philosopher, and am curious what it would look like if we were to apply Objectivism to a more imaginative set of principles.
Rachel, great to see you here! I agree. I think that is an effort worth pursuing. I am, in my own meandering way, trying to do so.
So glad to hear this. I would actually love write a guest post for you sometime, if you'd be interested. Ever since deleting my Twitter, I've been cut off from so many people. Where would I email you my pitch?
You would be absolutely welcome to write a guest post. I'll email you.
Wonderful essay. I myself am a follower of Classical philosophers, mainly Aristotle. I believe in Nous, free will, that life has many zero-sum situations (Ownership of land is like reproduction, “I control it and no one else”) and that creating new life ourselves is a necessary element of leading a good life. I believe in the existence of God and in human souls.
We are of like mind, sir.
You've neatly summed up all of the unease I've felt toward Rand despite the attractions of certain parts of her thinking. I don't know if I heard this from somewhere or coined it myself, but with her I've found it accurate to say that she praises the individual will or ego, while dismissing God, nature, and family (which I mean broadly enough to include all human relationships). Which is hardly an *Aristotelian* perspective on human life.
As a somewhat-aside I like your points about noesis and the "non-rational" elements of the mind. I've been on a slow deep dive into Platonism lately, starting with the Socratic dialogues themselves, and it's surprising me more and more how much insight is already there (including prefiguring much of interest in Aristotle himself).
Part of Rand's confusion on this seems to be the error she shares with all modern theories of reason and rationality -- that reason is restricted to the explicit, conscious, and discursive powers of the intellect. Ancient and medieval writers knew better, though that insight didn't survive the grinding machinery of the "enlightenment".
I agree completely! That has been my experience as well diving into Platonism.
Aristotle called Man the "rational and social animal," but Rand called Man "the rational animal." By removing "social," she created a system that failed to capture the whole of flourishing human life.
But as a critic of communism and relativism, she was the best of the 20th century.
<<"Aristotle called Man the "rational and social animal," but Rand called Man "the rational animal." By removing "social," she created a system that failed to capture the whole of flourishing human life.
But as a critic of communism and relativism, she was the best of the 20th century.">>
That is the most succinct and spot on analysis of Ayn Rand's strengths and weaknesses that I've ever seen anywhere.
Thank you so much!
If I type up: “ibecindibceibiecbieibcbeiecindhJleonxsjbxkaoxnx” … this is a meaningless string of text. Any Materialist out there (be it Rand or others) now can do one of two things. They can (correctly) note that this is meaningless; and then look into their materialistic philosophies to answer “WHY?” And forever fail to do so (due to issues of regress, justification, grounding, etc)
OR they can acknowledge that their system cannot answer whether or not this has meaning or not *inherent* to it. And in doing so, their system crumbles because it has no basis to say whether language strings have any inherent meanings in them.
No materialist philosophy in general can move beyond the third-person world of “science” and give proper accounts of basic things like natural language. And so they die off in this mundane manner a la becoming irrelevant on the “basics”/fundamentals.
ibecindibceibiecbieibcbeiecindhJleonxsjbxkaoxnx
Vogon poetry before Babel fish insertion.
If you type “ibecindibceibiecbieibcbeiecindhJleonxsjbxkaoxnx” it means that you have a tendency to initially favour the use of your index and middle fingers over your ring and little fingers :)
I think you are putting the chicken before the egg, which is easy to do because we actually do have to have a chicken to lay the egg to begin with, but in this case, your chicken can't catch meaning because there were never any precedent of eggs or chickens i.e., convention or orthodoxy. Drity words these are, these foul days. But, without the convnetion of a formal launguage, I'm not making any sense or meaning either. Why do words have meaning? Because we say they do! And we define every one and their relations in various grammars which often correleate via translations. They are as discriminating as they are eclectic. Paradox seems to be more of life than the rationality we cling to however tenuously, civilization having proven to be a slippery thing and language its core. Dead languages and dead civlizations? Gods no longer worshipped? For in the beginning, there was the Word!
>>Why do words have meaning? Because we say they do! <<
This is sort of the superficial, everyday understanding of "meaning".
What I was hinting at was MEANING of the variety that (as an analogy) makes it so that the pursuits we do in the first place (such as social conventions and sentences having meaning or not because we say they do) have a Truth Valence or "worthiness" (if you will) to them. This is of course an analogy- The implication being that "the sort of MEANING that these pursuits have is akin to the deeper underlying meaning sentences and propositions have in formal language when we evaluate them"
Anyhow, the point raised was that Materialism (regardless of the variation) cannot give a proper account of this "MEANING". You can certainly get a relational, sociological and "customary" understanding of lower tiers of "meaning" (a la the "because we say they do!" sort of stuff), but "MEANING" as such will be elusive in such a system.
Therefore, the honest materialist who accepts that his model/system fails to say whether or not such a "MEANING" exists or not... he will have (at the moment he makes that admission directly or indirectly) Destroyed his entire Project definitively.
Yes, it is the "superficial, everyday understanding of meaning" and that, IMO, is all there is.
If one tries to attach other meanings to words, one is making up new words, which philosophers do all the time and why I get annoyed with them. Set up a world the way you want it and then, of course, your conclusions will be right. Everything that might contradict has already been excluded.
This is fine in science. We exclude everything but the phenomena of interest so as to understand just that without interference but we don't expect reality to be so kind. We may need several theories.
Rigor in science is fine because we're translating concepts into math and back again. Some of these ideas never existed before and need their own words. However, "entorpy" isn't just another word for "chaos". It's the amount of heat lost from a heat exchange per degree temperature change. The "universe" isn't going to die of entropy. (We have "cliamte chagne" for that. Ha!)
But if you can't explain it ordinary language derived from reality, I think you're just making things up, like "Atlas Shruggged'. It was a novel. I couldn't get thru it. But I did suspect that Dagny would hook up with Galt.
Julius Evola commanded a very erudite style but he never made up words that I know of. He was articulate and he knew what he wanted to say.
"4th Political Theory" is sheer aggravation, not because Alexander Dugin is so smart, but because he really hadn't gotten his ideas sorted out. In "The Great Awakening vs eh Great Reset" he must have either found a good editor or finally discovered exactly what he wanted to say which is what I sort of thought it was but the later work was pleasure to read and the language ordinary and simple.
The deeper meaning most are looking for is just validtion of what they'd alrady decided.
"Cherish those who seek the truth. Beware of those who find it." Voltaire
This does not work.
If the superficial form of "meaning" is all there is then... <<Yes, it is the "superficial, everyday understanding of meaning" and that, IMO, is all there is.>> ... <-- Denote this as X.
X is a Descriptive statement (i.e. of the form "A is B"). So X is either able to prompt certain sequences of Action from said Description (in yourself, others or a combo of the two) or it cannot do so.
Example: The Descriptive statement X *should be able to* prompt in me, you , others, etc (some combo of this) the action of "changing one's mind". Namely toward the view: "Yes, only superficial meaning exists".
If you are correct, then X is unable to do so a la having no "MEANING" of the sort over and above the superficial, and we get a contradiction. Namely, somehow "superficial meaning is all there is" and yet... X is able to prompt in me, you, others, etc aforementioned action (at the minimum).
Therefore, you are mistaken my friend.
No statement I make can "change your mind" or promt any action. You're the one who does that. The only meaning is whatever convention assigns to those words which is why legalese and technical writing are so demanding and rigorous i.e., so we can take action iaw wiords. One cannot say, "But that's not how I understood it."
If your understanding is not iaw with convention, you are wrong, not the piece even if it isn't the best example of the art. (and there is a lot of that about!)
Here, "supeficial" means unambiguous.
Ambiguity is what happens from trying to impose some universal theory or philosophy upon reaity when the more limited the theory the more accurate it is.
Bronsted-Lowry is another way to look ar Arrehnius acids and bases and both are simple.
Lewis acids and bases will get yo into organic chemistry.
Oxidation Reduction replaces the whole acid-base idea with electromotive force and we're into batteries although Brinsted-Lowry is the smart way to adjest pH in teh swimmjng pool.
Capitalism describes a system of investment, manufacture and profit but governments also do it, some better than others, but that can be said of private corporations as well.
And, how aren't large corporations "collectives"? At a certain point in size, individual ownership disapperas like it does in state corporation or any municpal project.
Do stock holders have any more say than tax payers? Somtimes less, I would say.
Innovations? Ah, "Mahatten Project"? The ME 163 "Komet"?
Ayn Rand tried to make some univserasl philosophy of "captialism" and "collectivism" into an evil : a pseudo-religion, assigning "meaning" to words like "profit" and "altruism" that they didn't have. It was as much a slight of hand as anything Marx came up with, a Prussian Jew who translated Frederick's "Kamarilla" via the French Revolution into his "holy cause" complate with an Apocalypse and 2nd Coming.
Well, I guess wehave to hand it to Marx for "slight of hand" or, at least, a lot more of it.
But that's how desperate COld War "capitalists" and Republicans were and still are, as though "meritocracy" didn't impinge on "equality".
>>No statement I make can "change your mind" or promt any action. ...<<
It's not the "utterance", but rather the proposition and/or the statement *as such* I was speaking about. I would agree with you if it was the former; but the latter is very different. If there was not "Gap" with regard to Descriptive qualities (i.e. "able to pinpoint") and Active qualities (i.e. "able to prompt"), then Formal Language would be the inevitable, Deterministic evolutionary endpoint of Natural Language in every Human Society.
However, not only do we not see this, but rather we see the Collapse of Formal Language systems (the 20th century failure of the Positivist movement was the start, now it has only accelerated) because of their overall inability to find within themselves the Normative standards which justify their own field to begin with.
It's not an accident that "Science" is collapsing as we speak (I can go on a tangent on Stanford and others being caught red handed falsifying all sorts of stuff, but I will desist on that); this is the inevitable result of the "Normative-Descriptive" Gap coming to the fore. And it will only get worse.
When I read Atlas Shrugged, oh, some almost 15 years ago now, i was struck by the prescience of some of her takes on what we today call the woke, and the concept of A is A. But i could never be a full blown objectivist, my faith deeply rooting me too much.
But the idea of a Thing always being what it is, still appeals to me, especially in this modern world in which so many actively try and destroy any sense of objective reality. A chair is a chair, whether you sit on it or not. Even if you use it as a table, it remains a chair, it was designed and made to be sat on. If you break it into pieces, it remains the pieces of a chair.
So too are men and women. A man is a man, no matter how much he may damage himself. A woman is a woman, no matter how much she surgically mutilates herself. Calling evil "DEI" or "Environmentalism" or "equity" Doesn't make it not evil.
Coincidentally, one of my favorite superheroes, after the original Captain Marvel (SHAZAM), is the Question. Created by an objectivist, his best run was the original Charlton Comics series where he was written by his Creator Ditko. A close second is his appearances in the animated series Justice League Unlimited, where he gets to give a Randian Objectivist lecture to Lex Luthor.
I am a fellow fan of Steve Ditko and the Question. And I find Rand's insistent that "A is A" is one of the most powerful weapons we have against the postmodern relativism sapping our sense of truth.
I got into libertarianism via Heinlein. Didn't encounter Rand until a few years after becoming an anarchocapitalist.
I found parts of Rand's works to be thrilling, but other parts left me a bit nauseous. All this hating on altruism bugged me. Especially considering how altruistic Rand's heroes acted. Blowing the family fortune pretending to be a playboy and not getting laid is rather altruistic in my book.
And you don't even need the issue of reproduction to run into zero sum games. First year economics covers plenty of free rider and public goods problems. And there is a backward bending supply curve for cheap labor that does need to be addressed.
One rather important public good: good government itself. Libertarian activism is expensive and time consuming. Somebody has to put in way more than they get back in tax cuts.
As a populist, I can better appeal to a much broader group's rational self-interest than I could as a pure libertarian.
Yes, Rand's heroes frequently act in an altruistic manner, although she denies it. But if they didn't, it wouldn't lead to the world she wants...
From your description of the plot, 'Atlas Shrugged" is typical myth, in which John Galt slays the dragon and gets the girl. He'll reproduce more little Galt-Tagert Objectivists iaw Herbert Spencer who will breed a class that rules the world, I suppose. It's the tale of Brave Odysseus told from Penelope's point of view, in a way, and couldn't be anything but Kafka otherwise. It's a convnetional novel.
Interesting assessment!
It just occurs to me that "Atlas Shrugged" (what I saw-read of it) was unique in one aspect, that her major characters shamelessly espoused their personal ambitions while workers, their satisfaction-pride in being part of a great capitalist system.
It was rather wooden (socialist in tone if not in content) but not even Smith nor Ricardo would take "greed" to that length. Rather, they focussed upon the (wait for it) "collective" benefit of everyone pursuing the Founders' "happiness" and propserity, and how everything magically balanced out if "collectivist" gov't stayed out of it : a battle of collectives, which politics always is.
"Atlas Shrugs" remains an unusally bold statement of laisseiz faire even for 1957 when no politician, glitteratti nor influencer would ever admit to ambition i.e., they all "serve others" as some sort of ultruism".
But, of course, so is Ayn Rand! That's why she wrote her novel about capitalism though never actaully having engaged in it. She was an intellectual-glitteratti from the start, Petrograd State University 1921.
From our view in 2023, her characters would be Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg who are everything Marx said about them and so did Rand although she would seem to see them as liberators.
That Rand has lost her creds is one indication of a Post-Modern Era beginning while Rand remains an iconic relic of the Modern Era.
She seems to think of every worker as self-employed which may have been true in 1921 Russia, backward as it was. But by Reconsruction, more than half of Americans had become wage earns and that has increased ever since.
Wage earners are not as independant as the self-employed of ante-bellum America yet mass production is here to stay unless it collapses.
Whatever Ayn Rand thought the future would or should be, she was living in the past.
> Wage earners are not as independant as the self-employed of ante-bellum America yet mass production is here to stay unless it collapses.
The workers might be, and already partially are, being replaced by robots.
Yes, but then, who will buy what the robots produce?
Over prodfuction was a major cause of the 1896 and 1930s Depressions.
Too little money in general circulation was a major cause of the 1873-1930s depressions, most of the gold backed currency in investment houses or upper class circulation and limited by gold reserves on hand so all three were deflationary. Manufactruers couldn't make a profit, fired workers, and exacerbated the problem.
This where Keynes deficti gov't spending came in to introduce money into ciruclation which did work, although the money was supposed to be repayed (which it hasn't) so we get inflation with recovery which never goes away.
Colonial scirpt was a fiat currency that was well mangaed to stablize prices and when used like that, it works too.
But, of course, this is all gov't management which Rand rejected.
The Rerum novarum or Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor, is an encyclical issued by Pope Leo XIII on 15 May 1891 which got into all that rather well. It holds property sacrosanct but equates currency to labor and demonstrates the the supply-demand curves of currency, land and labor are't the same as commodities and then goes on to a just wage and price being complementary however difficult to arrive at.
While 19th and eayly20th Century corporations and cartels were guilty of all sorts of "collective" labor abused, on the other hand, they also tried to administer wages and prices to avoid all the destructive excesses of competition on such a huge scale. The German cartels were best at it, descending from Frederick's 18th Century "Camarilla". Henry Ford got honorable mentionin "Mein Kampf" for exactly that sort of thing i.e., payinghis workers enoguh so they could buy his cars, an outrageous $ 5 a day!
You'd think the declining populations of White countries would be desirable since automation can take over the work even as the poulation "ages", but I think there is more to open immigration than just cheap labor, although historically it always has been.
I never understood the attraction to Ayn Rand's attempts at fiction writing. She couldn't write fiction at all. Also, every single self described Objectivist I ever met was an insufferable asshole. It sounds as though your former girlfriend may have been an Objectivist.
She was an Objectivist in spirit. "What do you mean your start-up is only paying you $40,000 a year? EVERYONE earns 6 figures." "Uh, no babe, actually only a tiny percentage of people earn 6 figures." "Yah but those people don't COUNT."
In the business world you rarely find people who have not been beaten to within an inch of their life. Trying to explain (for instance) that to get to 10+ k monthly (regularly) one had to first have something abysmal like “(1,345.18 CDN)” in their Debit account at 4 am… such an explanation always sadly falls on deaf ears for most.
really well written. I went through my rand phase not long after high school when i was in college. i still read and can quote the books but now I look at them a little more critically.
Same, same. Thanks for the kind words!
In the 'Letters of Ayn Rand' and her correspondence with Isabel Paterson it was clear she was unable to ever accept the concept of original sin, which if she did could have seen the truth in traditional Catholicism. Could Rand argue say against the writings of Pope Leo XIII (particularly the encyclical Rerum Novarum) that was as anti-communist as Rand's We The Living.
Right. In a sense, my statement "some human interactions are zero sum" is a manifestation of original sin. That's why not everything is positive sum.
"The Virtue of Selfishness"
Think about how vile that title actually is....
Yes, I read it. 45 years ago. It was vile.
Congratulations on your revelations. People get hooked on her as adolescents because only an adolescent can fail to see the evil.
We The Living and Anthem are her best.
I actually quite concur -We the Living and Anthem were her best works. We the Living, in particular, I thought was very powerful for its demonstration of how a good man (Andrei Taggart) was destroyed by his belief in a bad system.
In reading through comments here I notice that most readers take the Bible surface meanings literally. This is of course how the powers that be have controlled humanity for eons. Even for the practical atheist there is still that draw to that Armageddon psychology where by global warming the sins of mankind destroy the planet. The original teachings and philosophy of Qabalah is written in Genesis. But it's surface meaning must not be taken literally for it is speaking in terms of states of consciousness. The best example I can give you is God/Super-consciousness Adam/Self Conscious awareness, Eve/Subconsciousness, and now the quote "The desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee." The surface meaning is still used to control us to this day. But is it not true that in self conscious awareness we desire and our subconscious cannot desire, but rather by imagery it can answer any question we ask 1000 fold. Ask yourself why on any given subject and subconsciousness will flood your mind with answer upon answer. You then use your powers of self-consciousness to sift and sort through all the answers, while subconsciousness through memory verifies and validates, it cannot reject for that is a power of self consciousness-affirming and aligning to the Bible's above quote. We rule over subconsciousness-yet it is also our link of communication with Super-consciousness. Thus in awareness we lean towards Altruism and Unity rather than the ridiculous mass culture madness of separation. Shalom Ahebe
I don't feel theologically astute enough to be able to respond to this. I do not have years of Biblical experience to match my years of Randian research. What you are saying does resonate with certain works I have read in tradition, however.
Ayn Rand PLAGIARIZED Hitler. See Chapter 4 of Volume II of Mein Kampf. Rand admitted that she could read German in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. She had a strong interest in National Socialism and German philosophy generally. She supervised the writing of the Ominous Parallels with an iron rod. https://sites.google.com/view/gbg-journal
I haven't read Mein Kampf OR the Ominous Parallels so I can't intelligently respond. Can you quickly summarize what she plagiarized from Hitler?
I read both "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead" because my brother said they were good to read. I read several other books by Ayn Rand. It was after reading "Atlas Shrugged", I think, that I rejected some of her basic ideas. If I remember right, she thought that belief in God was a hindrance and if people could just get rid of this belief, things would improve. She also thought that people who did good were really receiving some sort of mental/emotional "reward" and that that was their true motivation for helping others. I told my sister that I no longer wanted to read Ayn Rand's book because she disliked people so much. And I felt she was wrong about God. My brother thought differently. You can tell by the way our lives turned out. Whenever a person writes a book, they should always consider the effect that book might have on the people that read it. I believe her book caused damage to my brother's life because his acceptance of her ideas caused him to not seek out better paths. And, in my mind, he was/is a very valuable and worthwhile person and his life could have been happier. I am glad you wrote this article.
I'm sorry to hear your brother ended up on a dark path. I think Rand wrote many good things but some of her thoughts lead to an unhappy and miserable life -- which, frankly, is what she lived.
You might find some answers here. See the post about Faith and Reason.
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Start at Post 1. Thanks for an interesting article but too deep for me. :)