I get why people don’t agree with Ayn Rand, but her philosophy absolutely doesn’t align with modern day Republicans. The villains in Atlas Shrugged are about as Trumpy as it gets.
It’s because her philosophy doesn’t align with reality. She bought into the fantasy that the rich get rich because they’re smarter and harder working than everyone else, when really they’re all a lot more Trumpy than she would have thought.
Howard Roark is about as realistic as Daenerys Targaryen.
She bought into the fantasy that the rich get rich because they’re smarter and harder working than everyone else, when really they’re all a lot more Trumpy than she would have thought.
But that’s really specifically the opposite of what happens in the book.
The richest people in the book are referred to as “The Aristocracy of Pull”: people who make their wealth by influencing governments to unevenly enforce economic restrictions. Oligarchs, basically.
The entire point of the book is that these people are parasites who obtain wealth without producing anything of value. The heroes in the story stop them by withholding their labor until the system collapses.
The president in the story is a useful idiot installed by these oligarchs.
That’s literally the whole book. You can argue about her version of utopia: people thriving by exchanging the fruits of their labor under a free market system. But her version of dystopia is pretty much what we’re going through: incompetent sycophants being installed into positions of power by anti-intellectuals who can’t tell the difference between wealth and talent.
No, the problem is that she props up this idea of the Ubermensch as an answer to the problem of oligarchy, but there’s no such thing as these super men. Most of human achievement is incrementalism with labor providing the engine of progress. Her philosophy is a retort to Marxism, because she was a victim of the Bolshevik Revolution, but her solution solves literally nothing. An oligarchy of capital owners instead of politicians with no system of controls to stop them. Which would make everything so much worse. Sure, no one would have a monopoly of violence, but that would only make violence far more prevalent rather than less.
Edit: it’s why she’s so popular with fascists. She created this myth of the Ubermensch they can envision themselves as and sell to others, while throwing away the pesky “anti-religion” and “anti-oligarch” part of the philosophy.
Well, nobody’s perfect.
I’m just saying, her heroes may be unrealistic, but her villains are a prescient depiction of MAGA. So it’s strange to me when people try to equate Rand with MAGA.
Rand’s fans are MAGAs, that’s why. Argue that they don’t understand the material, and I’ll agree with you, but that doesn’t change that the philosophy does make you think that money is equivalent to value. And robs you of the tools to identify the “leeches” as Rand called them. “Since they argue for smaller government, they must be the good guys”
I was formerly an objectivist (I got better) and that was the same fucking thing I fell for.
She knew, paid propagandist for the rich.
Not paid enough, apparently.
Died pennyless living off state welfare. Ironically.
Too good of a death for her.
Its something kids believe maybe until theyre 20 or so, and hopefully if they’ve actually seen the world and have empathy realize they are fairy tales, not something to strive for.
I still enjoyed reading her books though.
Maybe her other books are better, but Atlas Shrugged was such a slog for me. I can’t even reccomend it as a curiousity.
Ayn made even the sex scenes mechanical and cold, which would have been a great artistic choice to show how dead inside the MCs all were, but she was going for “this makes Dagny strong and empowered!” It wasn’t intentional at all.
Then there’s the section in the middle where they fuck off to “galt-land” and everything the was building up in the real world just kind of stops mattering, until they decide to leave. Another thing that would have been great if intentional, if there were consequences for running away from things, but they just come back like nothing happened.
Except for the biggest problem of all in the book: The fucking radio broadcast chapter. It’s 3/4 of the way into the book. If you don’t understand the themes by that point then you’re blind. But she devotes an entire fucking chapter to having John “perfect representation of the themes in human form” Galt blather on for (iirc) over 20 pages reiterating the themes explicitly.
Some jackass takes over all radio broadcasts, spends hours rambling about the supremacy of people who make things happen… and nothing fucking happens as far as I can recall.
It’s like 50 pages long, which yeah, is way too long.
But what he’s actually doing is calling for a general strike. He’s explaining that if every productive person just stops contributing to society for a few years, then the parasitic oligarchy will die out, because they’re not capable of keeping things running themselves.
It doesn’t resolve the overt conflict, but it’s suggested that his plan is in motion by the end.
The John galt speech is an embarrassment to reality and an affront to logic and it pisses me Off.
What about the trains though.
I too would like to know if Ayn Rand had an unhealthy obsession with trains.
But also, and this is key, how is it unhealthy.
One of my favorite niche Ayn Rand jokes was in an early episode of 'The Simpsons."
Maggie is sent to the Ayn Rand Pre-School. There’s an “A is A” sign on the wall.
Also, RIP Steve Ditko
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