Ayn Rand Mike Wallace Interview 1959

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ukJiBZ8_4k

by martian • 16 years ago

36 53 16 years ago

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tokenadult3• 16 years ago

Archive of early Mike Wallace interviews from 1957 and 1958.

http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/collections/film/holdings/wallace/

Wallace has had an amazingly long career.

blhack• 16 years ago

One of the most amazing thing about this interview is just how well composed Mike Wallace is.

Wow...I wish there were still people like this on television.

_lc1i6• 16 years ago

Despite Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead being amongst my favorite books, Ayn Rand always has me so polarized. Her moral philosophies and ability to write characters earns my unmatched admiration. But her blinding hatred for socialism (as conveyed from her very first book) keep her economic views from ever being realistic or even interesting. For the same reason communism fails, her free market would fail, because it only takes one (inevitable) company to ruin the party for everybody. Man is too easily corrupted to live at the economic extremes of communism or completely free markets.

I always like to think Ayn Rand's selfish desires and socialism could work together. Just think of taxes going to reasonable causes (such as infrastructure or health care) as forced self-interest :)

tokenadult3• 16 years ago

"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2009/03/ephemera-2009-7.html

_lc1i6• 16 years ago

Those kinds of condescending and trite dismissals are just not interesting. Rand draws more than her fair share of them and I don't think an honest debate can be held over her (good) philosophies because of their prevalence.

idlewords• 16 years ago

"Her moral philosophies and ability to write characters earns my unmatched admiration."

Rand's characters are cartoon heroes and villains whose distinguishing characteristic is a leaden humorlessness.

Her moral philosophy is as cartoon-like as that of the communists she hated so much. The world consists of a few beleaguered (and attractive!) supermen, and the great mass of sponging inferiors who bleed them dry.

This is heady stuff when you're fourteen, but it bears about as much relationship to reality as the Left Behind novels, which offer the same kind of subtle characterization and philosophical depth.

maxharris3• 16 years ago

I have been following Diana Hsieh's exploration of Atlas Shrugged (http://www.exploreaynrand.com/1957/), and I very much disagree with your characterizations of her moral philosophy and her characters.

Here are two questions that serve to show the level of depth that you're not seeing in the book (but very much exists):

"What is Lillian's view of sex? Why does it torture Hank? Is he right or wrong to accept that torture?"

"How has Hank Rearden's attitude toward and treatment of his family changed? How -- and why -- has it remained the same?"

If you can't see it in a fiction book, perhaps Tara Smith's "Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics" might help you to understand the nuance of Rand's moral philosophy. (Tara Smith is a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin.)

_lc1i6• 16 years ago

Her characters are certainly often exaggerated and unrealistic, but they are so in her crafted fictional world setup to convey her philosophy while a telling a good story. However, the dialogue and surrounding thoughts of her characters still provide incredible insight (at least to me). Maybe I am an ignorant jerk needing to read more sophisticated philosophy (likely on both accounts), but she introduced to me, through her characters, a compelling way to think and live

And even if you hate her characters and her philosophies, with exchanges like the below, she is a least interesting to dissect and deserves more than dismissing her writings to fourteen year olds.

"Do you believe in God, Andrei?"

"No."

"Neither do I. But that's a favorite question of mine. An upside-down question, you know."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, if I asked people whether they believed in life, they'd never understand what I meant. It's a bad question. It means nothing. It can mean so much that it really means nothing. So I ask them if they believe in God. And if they say they do--then, I know they don't believe in life."

"Why?"

"Because, you see, God--whatever anyone chooses to call God--is his highest conception of the highest possible. And whoever places his highest conception over his own possibility thinks very little of himself and his life. It's a rare gift, you know, to feel reverence for your life and to want the best, the very greatest, the highest possible, here, now, for your very own. To imagine a heaven and then not to dream of it, but to demand it."

pw0ncakes3• 16 years ago

I can understand her dislike for Soviet-style socialism, but this would only lead me to have more contempt for 21st-century corporations, which combine the worst of both worlds between socialism and capitalism.

dantheman4• 16 years ago

I don't know if you've read atlas shrugged or not, but a large part of it is about collusion between government and private corporations.

Radix• 16 years ago

She really really did. I have read up to that last long (very long) speach by Atlas, which is plenty to note: most of the worst characters are business men. One of the most disfavorable characters in the entire book is Dagny's brother James, who unlike her grasps at the government for support.

Also, she anchors her book in America. Imagining how America could go wrong, but uses the socialism in Argentina and Mexico as a backdrop. She spends quite a lot of time giving examples of good selfish capitalism and bad selfish "capitalism"

greenlblue7• 16 years ago

I stopped watching after she said something about the existence of objective reality.

_lc1i6• 16 years ago

It is completely unfair to dismiss Rand for any one thing she says or believes. Like any philosophy, the good come with the bad, and Rand has some very thought provoking, if not indisputable, good.

And objective reality is not so unintelligent or undebatable to be dismissed at the whim of one sentance.

nandemo• 16 years ago

On HN of all places, I expect that most people would agree that there's an objective reality.

I wonder if greenlblue stopped watching because she was talking about something so darned obvious.

greenlblue7• 16 years ago

I'm not dismissing a person. I'm sure in her time she was a nice and friendly person but that doesn't stop me from rejecting her philosophy.

bumbledraven• 16 years ago

"You must learn to take a philosophical attitude," said Dr. Simon Pritchett to a young girl student who broke down into sudden, hysterical sobs in the middle of a lecture. She had just returned from a volunteer relief expedition to a settlement on Lake Superior; she had seen a mother holding the body of a grown son who had died of hunger. "There are no absolutes," said Dr. Pritchett. "Reality is only an illusion."

maxharris3• 16 years ago

Don't be distracted by political arguments - the most important parts of Objectivism are is its metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. Objectivists do have political views, but they are merely conclusions drawn from more fundamental elements of the philosophy. As things stand now, we expect no great change by political means; it is our more fundamental ideas that we want to see adopted in the culture.

jsz0• 16 years ago

I never understood why people were so keen on Ayn Rand. Seems like a philosophy built to justify being a jerk.

pw0ncakes3• 16 years ago

In New York, objectivism is sort of a support group for fucked-up rich people of mediocre intelligence. They have meetings and shit.

_lc1i6• 16 years ago

As written in her books, following her moral can often lead to the unfair perception of being a jerk. Many people briefly exposed or misunderstanding Rand choose to remember (and spread) the jerk self interest part without laying out her moral framework.

jbooth4• 16 years ago

Meh, John Galt went out and convinced all the rich people who were allegedly being preyed on by unions and special interests to.. go on strike? And become a special interest? Wow, that's great.

First off, if my boss left to go do that I'd say "Thanks for the promotion" and take the payraise.

Second off -- and much more importantly -- you should live your life for something more than your own crappy temporary luxuries.

Estragon2• 16 years ago

  Seems like a philosophy built to justify being a jerk.

That's reason enough to be keen on it, if you're a jerk.

Tycho4• 16 years ago

a remarkable thing about Objectivism is the overlap between Rand's epistemology and the paradigm of Object-Oriented Programming. It's uncanny. (if you want to know more, you might be able to find her 70 page essay 'An Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology', also there was an academic paper about the OOP link written recently)

shaddi• 16 years ago

That would be an interesting overlap. It begs the question, however, if our society should be modeled after an object-oriented program, or if people should be treated like objects within it.

My problem with objectivism is that it fails to account for the complexity that exists in our world. It might work better if we were truly rational beings, or if people were only constrained by their own decisions or a set of fair, logical rules. We don't live in a computer. I wonder if this similarity has anything to do with the reason why so many objectivists I know have a technical background?

(I hope I didn't just open up a bad can of worms here... I do appreciate your contribution.)

maxharris3• 16 years ago

Objectivism says a lot more about what individuals need (and need to do) to flourish than about how to organize society. The political stuff is important, but it's not the central point of the philosophy.

America isn't ready for a political system that's acceptable to Objectivists (Americans would reject it.) What it really needs is to discover Objectivism's deep, practical and consistent moral message.

Tycho4• 16 years ago

Not sure I catch your drift... the similarity to OOP pertains to Rand's description of concept formation within the human mind. A concept is like a sub-class, and a unit is like an object; a concept inherits all the properties of its parent-concept but adds some differentiating properties of its own; an instance encapsulates ALL of these properties, not just the differentiating/essential ones (which is what other philosophies fail to acknowledge). The good thing about Objectivist epistemology is that it provides means to extrapolate all the way up/down the conceptual hierarchy, from the simplest data on which microbes can operate, to the most complex abstractions of politics and economics and science. One could argue that O'ism is the one philosophy which DOES account for the complexity of existence, in a comprehensive manner (instead of making unjustified leaps of logic/intuition). Bottom-line on Objectivism in the social context is identify men for what they are - rational creatures - and treat them accordingly (ie. by trade, not by force).

Interesting that you know 'so many' Objectivists... I've never actually met any myself (I live in the UK).

Ayn Rand Mike Wallace Interview 1959

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