The new age of Ayn Rand

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/10/new-age-ayn-rand-conquered-trump-white-house-silicon-valley

by spking • 9 years ago

32 115 9 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.

-- John Rogers

e40• 9 years ago

I never get tired of reading that quote.

aaron-lebo• 9 years ago

We read Anthem freshman year.

It's been a long time, but that seems like a good piece of fiction that covers similar themes without getting bogged down in plot and/or dogmatism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthem_(novella)

matwood• 9 years ago

Speaking of her other books, I found The Fountainhead to be a much better story with less preaching than Atlas Shrugged. The ideas I took from it were to work hard, and expect to be compensated for your efforts. The lead character was also very much an idealist, doing things the 'right' way in his mind and going through periods of wealth and poverty because of it.

jjtheblunt• 9 years ago

that's pretty funny

IsaacL8• 9 years ago

Did John Rogers meet many Ayn Rand fans before forming this opinion? Did you?

I'm been an active Objectivist for the last two years and I've met dozens of others. They're a diverse bunch (I know Objectivist actors, Objectivist musicians, Objectivist academics, Objectivist finance guys, tons of Objectivist programmers), but in general, I'd say they're way more friendly, less cynical and more optimistic than the majority of people I meet. They're fun to be around and are usually working towards some personally meaningful life goals.

I do think that teenagers probably shouldn't read Atlas Shrugged -- they're too likely to take away a shallow understanding of the message. I first read it just before my 25th birthday, and I think it's best read in your mid-20s, when your youthful idealism starts crashing into practical reality.

IsaacL8• 9 years ago

I posted these links elsewhere in the thread, but I think they'll be of special interest to HN readers, who might want to know about the more technical aspects of her philosophy.

An index of her thoughts on many topics: http://aynrandlexicon.com/book/conceptual.html

A graduation speech which summarises her views on philosophy in general: http://fare.tunes.org/liberty/library/pwni.html

Her most technical work, her theory of concept-formation (and the book that sold me on her ideas): https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Objectivist-Epistemology...

cam_l• 9 years ago

I think it fair to judge objectivism by the actions of its most infamous followers, say the koch Bros. Same as I judge communism by the actions of lenin or mao, or capitalism by, oh I don't know, Madoff.

But yeah, garden variety objectivists, just like garden variety communists or people generally really, are good people.

DArcMattr• 9 years ago

If only this were true.

I worked at the Ayn Rand Institute, and still keep tabs with their activities and their progress.

If Ayn Rand's ideas were as widespreadly acknowledged and held, then we'd see a distortion free economy, not a series of spin jobs all geared towards acquiring political power.

res0nat0r• 9 years ago

It seems her philosophy these days has been converted to: screw everyone else and how can I get as rich as possible? Which is no wonder why most of the CEOs and politicians in the article adore her so.

ffk• 9 years ago

Can you describe what her philosophy was originally?

gozur883• 9 years ago

Except that they don't adore her. CEOs like big government, because they can use it to raise barriers to competition.

ska2• 9 years ago

   then we'd see a distortion free economy

That is either incredibly optimistic, or incredibly naive. Perhaps both. To the degree that Rand's thoughts can be made consistent in this area, they touch on many areas of economic complexity that nobody has a very good idea how to understand & model, let alone control.

theseatoms3• 9 years ago

Right. No one man (or small group of men) can understand, model, or control many areas of society. (Depends specifically what you have in mind here.)

But it's not incumbent on Rand to plan these areas. (Not sure if you're implying that it is.) Free market price signals do the majority of the heavy lifting, in resource allocation, broadly speaking.

To the GP, I would stipulate "state distortion free". ("State", as in "by force".)

vkou2• 9 years ago

If Ayn Rand's ideas were as widespreadly acknowledged and held, then we'd see a distortion free economy, not a series of spin jobs all geared towards acquiring political power.

Sounds exactly like what my neighbourhood Marxist-Leninist tells me. (He also avises me to not listen to the drivel spewed by the New-Trotskyists.)

nyolfen2• 9 years ago

If Ayn Rand's ideas were as widespreadly acknowledged and held, then we'd see a distortion free economy, not a series of spin jobs all geared towards acquiring political power.

this is such a bizarre idea to me. i've only read the fountainhead some years ago and watched a documentary or two about rand herself, but it seems to me that the general thrust of her ideas is that acting in one's self interest is the most morally correct mode of activity in the economic sphere (and to some degree, the interpersonal).

establishing and maintaining a leveled, open and fair market seems to essentially be altruisitic, a term i know she was not fond of. it's working to further a level playing field that conforms to ideal principles at direct cost to one's self, if one is dominant in any particular part of that market.

monopolistic and semi-monopolistic behavior is pursued because it works. the essentially charitable act of aiding your competition by shunning those practices seems to contradict the lessons of her philosophy, as far as i can tell. it's subalterning the individual to the collective. feel free to correct if i've read her incorrectly, though.

awptimus6• 9 years ago

I love articles like these because it's nothing but regurgitated BS by people who don't get Rand, about people who aren't really 'devotees'.

Writing caricatures of people and ideas and how those caricatures of people ideas relate to each other is great.

Here's an honest sentence "Paul Ryan, who has never really done anything the protagonists of Rand's novels would, is said to have liked the book a lot"

0xCMP• 9 years ago

Devil's Advocate: Kind of goes with the idea that the characters are unrealistic right?

arkis2212• 9 years ago

People have argued that, but I don't buy it.

We have captains of industry that we hero worship today.

Devil's Advocate: Jesus was the son of God, but we don't ignore his ideals as unrealistic.

awptimus6• 9 years ago

Yes, the characters are intended to be one dimensional. You'll notice all the characters have differences from each other in important ways, because they are meant to show how certain beliefs (and contradictions in beliefs) interact and have consequences.

Dagny and Rearden have internal contradictions, and it's not the point to find relation to them as people, but how their contradictions affect them.

The one sided villains aren't meant to be rich characters full of life, but people who carry out principles you here uttered in real life to their extreme conclusions.

The purpose is to take people at what they claim their values are and illustrate their implications.

CalChris2• 9 years ago

Similarly, I hate articles like this because she will always be defended by people who don't quote her atrocious writing or summarize her mediocre ideas. Instead we are told that we don't get what you won't say.

awptimus6• 9 years ago

Give one example of a "mediocre idea."

duckingtest3• 9 years ago

Villains in Atlas Shrugged may appear ridiculously one-dimensional and simplified, but then one look at Venezuela today should convince anyone they are indeed realistic.

That's not accidental - after all she lived in the early USSR and seen it all with her own eyes. That's how life under socialism really is - envy and brutality combined with breathtaking incompetence.

kesselvon• 9 years ago

Too bad no one is really advocating socialism, most people want capitalism with guardrails (aka Scandinavian social democracy)

ue_5• 9 years ago

Too bad no one is really advocating socialism

I am (on the Internet at least).

aniro• 9 years ago

Funny, because i see the current US corporate+political sphere as being a far better repesentation of her anti-heroes. There are far more Tooheys in the upper echelon of American society than there are Galts.

Venezula looks a lot more like Animal Farm.

vslira• 9 years ago

I really like this quote: "In this respect, Rand was a merely half-great writer: her villains were real, but her heroes were fake. There is no Galt’s Gulch." - Peter Thiel

s_kilk• 9 years ago

envy and brutality combined with breathtaking incompetence.

For a moment there I thought you were describing Capitalism.

ue_5• 9 years ago

That's how life under socialism really is - envy and brutality combined with breathtaking incompetence.

Why do you think these are core to the ideas of Socialism? If by envy you are referring to envy of private property holders, have you considered that it could be something else? The Marxian and indeed anarchist analysis of capitalism brings in the ideas of exploitation, commodity fetishism and alienation. I think it is quite incorrect to characterise Socialism as envy of the wealthy.

With regard to incompetence and brutality, I don't want to get into a match of Whataboutism, though it should be pointed out that capitalism exhibits these qualities too, in the state defence of private property all the way to sweatshop labour and overproduction.

duckingtest3• 9 years ago

The core but unspoken idea of socialism is a zero-sum world. Everything stems from that. Marx's labor theory of value is an attempt to explain how economy works given that premise. In a zero-sum world every profit indeed means loss for the other party; so employers' profits must come from workers exploitation.

There's no room for any improvement in this mindset. In a zero-sum world being more efficient at something and hence more profitable means you're stealing, either from customers or from less-efficient producers. Which really means any attempt at making things better is evil.

After a generation or two people start to internalize it, and you get a 'homo sovieticus' society which interprets any ambition as aggression - wanting a better life becomes synonymous with wanting to steal.

arkis2212• 9 years ago

I would like to recommend Atlas Shrugged to anyone who has not read it.

It is long, and it is indeed preachy, but she nails so much about the human condition.

I do think that most people that complain about her don't really understand her work. In her eyes capitalism is an intrinsically _personal_ system, individuals helping each other.

The heroes of the story all have their companies named after themselves, while the "bad companies" are bland things like associated steel. Her point is that as soon as you divorce the individuality from capitalism, you get these bad outcomes. At the end of the day companies aren't companies, they're people.

To drive this home, the USSR treated people as interchangable inputs. If that's your policy you are completely ignoring people's individuality. Are they lazy? smart? work hard? People are not interchangable, and by respecting that the US outspent the USSR.

This "personal" capitalism is far different from the way our multinationals, governments, or even people, act today.

ue_5• 9 years ago

This "personal" capitalism is far different from the way our multinationals, governments, or even people, act today.

As a Socialist myself, I have wondered: how does capitalism become personal? Is it possible to achieve this? Let's assume for a moment that Marx was wrong about exploitation; how does wage labour, unexploitative, take the form of personal relation?

From my point of view, I was thinking that the division of labour will create an impersonal relationship, so much so that the worker will not see his own labour in the final product. How does personal capitalism fare with division of labour and automation?

I want to keep an open mind rather than to steer this ideologically, so I hope you are not put off by my differing viewpoint.

Danihan4• 9 years ago

How is capitalism, or any financial system, ever not personal?

At its core, capitalism is simply the codification of a win-win transaction between two or more parties. I work for your company, you pay me X salary.

Whereas socialism is the codification of a win-lose, non-consensual transaction. You're doing well, give me your money so I can give it to a third party, or else.

Of course there are negative externalities to worry about, contractual enforcement, etc. But those don't change the core philosophies.

Artistry121• 9 years ago

Have you ever worked for someone you liked? Or have you ever been offered a job or promotion because of a good personal relationship?

Most things sold in the business world are sold by personal relationships and conversation or personality.

RangerScience3• 9 years ago

I think the issue Marx points out isn't an "original" quality of capitalism, but rather an "eventual" (steady-state) quality of it.

AFAIK, capitalism is the idea of investment of capital. Marx's issue is that the capital pools in such a way that most people don't have it, or don't get to spend what they do have in a way that gets returns.

In an ideal situation, I am able to "spend" my "excess capital" - my excess time, skills, drives, etc - to improve my own situation. This is personal.

However, in practice, many people can't or don't do this. Maybe they're missing that drive towards self-investment. Maybe they're minimum wage and literally don't have any excess.

Marx's issue of "praxis" - that you do not own (literally or emotionally) the product of your work is an emergent, rather than inherent, quality of capitalism. So it seems reasonable that a society could exist with other factors the confound that emergent quality, so that you can have you cake (the core bits of capitalism) and everyone gets to eat it (everyone can actually take advantage of those core bits)

jressey• 9 years ago

This is a satirical analysis of Atlas Shrugged, right?

When I read it, my impression was that the message is 'all acts are moral if they are in your own self-interest.'

The 'heroes' as you call them abandoned civilization to create a utopia where the free-market is the only law. Check out Bioshock to see what might happen.

Danihan4• 9 years ago

'all acts are moral if they are in your own self-interest.'

I believe it's more, "All acts are moral when transactions are conducted fairly and consensually between the involved parties."

arkis2212• 9 years ago

'all acts are moral if they are in your own self-interest.' Is obviously wrong.

The villains of the book think that charity takes precedence over everything, or that they are intrinsically entitled to something just because they exist. In other words, if we're both starving, it's my moral obligation to feed you first.

Abandoned civilization? By the end of the book the main characters had their wealth confiscated and civilization had fallen apart. And it's not just the heroes. There's countless references to regular workers "abandoning civiliation," giving up work and roaming the countryside stealing food.

I would love for you to point out a passage where Rand says that the only law should be the free market.

Florin_Andrei3• 9 years ago

She had PTSD or something similar. Her "literature" was therapy.

Born in the upper-middle class in tsarist Russia, her dad a business owner. Got thrown out in the street by the muzhiks, along with the whole family. Had to wander through the country, nearly starving on occasion. Fled the place at the first opportunity.

It's all in the books. The glorious, near superhuman entrepreneurs are echoes of Daddy. The welfare state is the masses who robbed her family of their wealth. She has a visceral hate of them because, well, they were the cause of her family's destitution in real life.

And she is actively trying to construct an ideology which is in every way, every single detail, opposite to the ideology of the revolution that sent her life on a different course - opposite even when it makes no sense. Like someone who got raped and then is preaching how sex is bad for you.

It's quite transparent.

nyolfen2• 9 years ago

In her eyes capitalism is an intrinsically _personal_ system, individuals helping each other.

I don't think 'helping' is the best word choice here

cknight3• 9 years ago

Nice one.

For those who haven't read Atlas Shrugged: amongst the group of protagonists in the book, the granting of favours or donations is clearly outlined as immoral, as per Rand's philosophy. All goods and services are to be traded for fair value.

arkis2212• 9 years ago

I meant helping in the sense that when the two parties engage in a transaction, it's mutually beneficial. So the two parties obviously aren't harming each other (they're helping).

ch4s3• 9 years ago

If as you say "Her point is that as soon as you divorce the individuality from capitalism, you get these bad outcomes." Then she totally misses that humans are inherently social and will trade for social capital whenever possible, and form cartels naturally. She seems to have had a poor understanding of actors who engage in realpolitik.

notahacker4• 9 years ago

capitalism is an intrinsically _personal_ system, individuals helping each other.

Rand was so averse to the idea of "individuals helping each other" that she includes a scene where a zillionaire capitalist charges for giving one of the other heroes a short ride in his car[1]. It's the villains who show their villainy by talking about doing each other favours and the heroes who talk about driving a hard bargain even when they're about to consummate the business relationship by having an affair.

[1]which is absurd both for the assumption that it's better that way and for the assumption that a zillionaire capitalist accepting a token amount of gold for performing unskilled labour represents a functioning market.

IsaacL8• 9 years ago

She also includes scenes where the heroes help one another, or even help strangers. (Example: Dagny inviting the tramp to join her for dinner).

The scene where "a zillionaire capitalist charges for giving one of the other heroes a short ride in his car" is symbolic. The characters in the valley wanted to uphold the ethos that everyone there lived by the product of his or her own effort.

Ayn Rand didn't include that scene for people like you who want to nitpick everything. She is writing for the kind of readers who think "hmm, having to pay for everything sounds annoying -- but on the other hand, it means you're not constantly dealing with requests for free favours. What kind of people would live in a place where everything had to be paid for? Would I want to live with those people?"

htaunay2• 9 years ago

I like to compare Rand's work with Marx's.

When I read the "Communist Manifesto" and - part of - "The Capital", I was impressed by Marx's critique of capitalism. Most of his hypotheses (back from the 19th century) were eventually proved true, while seeming absolutely unthinkable at the time (e.g. the issue of over-production). However, his proposed solution - Communism - seemed naive and overly-optimistic, probably due to the outcomes we already are already aware of from such social experiment today. His critique was excellent, but his proposed solution weak, and dare I say almost a fairy-tale.

When reading Rand, her solution - Objectivism - seems also impracticable and overly-optimistic. I personally believe that he who disassociates his well being from the well being of his neighbor, has little understanding of how society behaves in the long term. However, her critique of Socialist policies is spot on, and almost eerie. I live in Brazil, and there are many moments of our current political catastrophe that seem to have come out of Atlas Shrugged, and therefore I cannot through away the authors entire work because of a broken solution, which is only part of both novels. The anticipation of such self-destructing forms of government with more than half a century in advance is a merit of Rand's.

Needless to say, it is always easier to criticize then to come up with a solution. In Ayn Rand's case, her critique is pertinent and time has in fact proved it to be well founded. Just please ignore her solution.

RestlessMind• 9 years ago

So TL;DR : "Marx correctly diagnosed the problem with Capitalism, but his prescription was wrong; Rand correctly diagnosed the problem with Socialism but her prescription was wrong"?

I say its much easier to find faults in a system than coming up with a well-designed system.

dragonwriter6• 9 years ago

To drive this home, the USSR treated people as interchangable inputs.

Capitalism does that, too (it's a central element of the Marxist critique); that's actually a big part of why many non-Communist socialists and even non-Leninist Marxists, from very early on, described the system in the USSR as State capitalism (where the State was a vehicle for the Leninist vanguard, rather than the population/proletariat, to control capital and oppress the proletariat in much the same manner as a traditional capitalist elite.)

moomin• 9 years ago

I'm always disappointed at how many "fans" of Ayn Rand seem to have read Atlas Shrugged and decided to emulate James rather than Dagny. They're all in favour of small government when it suits their rent-seeking interests, but watch their favoured industry crash and all of a sudden Something Must Be Done For The Good Of The Country.

theseatoms3• 9 years ago

Her detractors tend to assume too narrow a definition of "selfishness". They tend to read "selfish" as "self-centered", by projecting their own utility functions onto others. :P

Altruistic acts can be, and often are, done selfishly.

awptimus6• 9 years ago

bump

undersuit• 9 years ago

Isn't that one of the arguments made in The Fountainhead?

theseatoms3• 9 years ago

Probably is. It's been a while since I read it.

RangerScience3• 9 years ago

I've been thinking about "failure modes" and "overlapping systems" a lot recently. It really started with utilitarianism and Utility Monsters, which I highly recommend looking up real quick.

At first glance, objectivism makes a lot of sense: In one simple situation, how much easier is it to deal with people when they're clear and certain about what they want?

But then you start to notice the ways that value system fails (it seems easy to miss how indirect aid of others helps you).

That stage set - All systems have failure modes. The trick seems to be layering your systems so that the failure modes don't overlap; the failure mode of utility monster could be covered by functioning objectivism; the short-sightedness of objectivism could be covered by the broad view of patriotism, etc etc. (Not saying this particular stack works, but trying to suggest an example of what I'm getting at)

hirundo• 9 years ago

The social virtue of capitalist selfishness is illustrated by the most rapid drop in poverty in history:

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/amazing-chart-shows-thanks...

https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_reveals_new_insights_...

This massive decline in misery is far more the influence of markets than bureaucracies. We should be so lucky as to be in a new age of Ayn Rand.

forbin_meet_hal• 9 years ago

I find Rand tragic.

She had a real opportunity to educate people about a proper relationship between people and their government, during a time of creeping totalitarianism and collectivism.

Sadly, she also wanted to create a cult.

The chapter about her in Brian Doherty's "Radicals for Capitalism" most certainly bore this out. My favorite part was when she sat her husband down and informed him that the Objectivist philosophy dictated that she should be allowed to bang her assistant.

kapauldo• 9 years ago

Most "Objectivists" use the philosophy to justify turning a cruel eye toward those who need help, by equating their own lot in life to hard work. Its self elevating and impossibe to penetrate.

mchlmllr• 9 years ago

htaunay et al, do not be so quick to discount Rand’s solutions. It is way too easy to make false assumptions about the nature of “Capitalism" as she defines it.

First you have to realize that Politics is but one of a philosophy’s necessary 5 interdependent branches: 1. Metaphysics, which answers the question “what is the fundamental nature of everything?” 2. Epistemology, which answers the question “how do I know that or anything else?" 3. Ethics, which answers the question “given #1 & #2, how should I act in order to achieve the fulfillment of my nature?” 4. Politics, which answers the question “what kind of relationship consistent with #3 should there be between me and others when living in a society?” 5. Aesthetics, which answers the question: “how can I experience concretely the the product of my abstract conclusions in #1-#4 before they are actual, and of what value would that be?”

The validity of any philosophy depends on 1) consistency of conclusions drawn within and between each of the branches and 2) consistency of those conclusions with the actual facts of reality.

So, half of the task in grasping Rand’s radical Capitalism is understanding what its principles are vs. all the other versions of Capitalism. The other half requires understanding how they rest on and derive from her Ethics. While it is easy to inform yourself of her political principles, you can neither validate them nor argue successfully against them without dealing with the ethical principles from which they are derived.

For instance, a Capitalist government, in Rand’s view, may not fund itself through taxation. 99% of her critics will argue that is impractical; but her Ethics, recognizing human fallibility, demands individual autonomy in the pursuit of one’s life, and inherent in claiming the right to autonomy is the obligation to grant it reciprocally to all others.

Therefore, the only job allowed or required of the government is to secure that autonomy for all by forbidding/preventing/punishing the use of force by anyone against others for gain. Since taxation is the use of force by one group against another group for gain, it is inherently immoral, and the immoral may never be argued to be “practical” under any circumstances.

If you cannot devise a way to fund the government without using force, you don’t get a government! If you want to know how to fund a massive worldwide service like Rand’s minimalist government in which those with money pay for it voluntarily while the poorest get it for free, just ask Google or Facebook, who have been there and done that.

Here are 13 fact based conclusions supporting radical laissez-faire Capitalism as the only moral form of government:

the metaphysics: 1) The existence of living organisms is conditional on self-generated selection and exercise of certain actions consistent with their specific nature in the face of alternatives.

2) The most fundamental of all alternatives for all living creatures is life or death.

the epistemology: 3) Of all living creatures, only a volitional human can initiate the selection of which alternative to pursue and how to pursue it.

the ethics: 4) The choice (deliberate or implied in all other choices) to pursue the fundamental alternative of life over death implicitly establishes one’s life as one's fundamental and primary goal.

5) One's fundamental goal is implicitly the standard of measure for all values one acts to gain or keep in its pursuit.

6) Therefore, that which contributes to one's life (consistent with one's nature, as opposed to mere vegetative existence) is necessarily "the ethical good", and that which detracts from it is "the ethical bad".

7) Since the identification and evaluation of goals/values is slow and deliberative while everyday life is spontaneous, the long run pursuit of life necessitates a hierarchical code of values in principle (ethics) to guide (by programming emotions) one's spontaneous choices in any alternative faced, and it requires one to opt, in each concrete instance, for that which is the higher value per that code in lieu of the lower one (the morality of egoism).

8) Man's singular means to fulfill these requirements of his nature in the pursuit of life is by applying the product of his reason to his actions in the production and exchange of values needed to survive and flourish consistent with the nature of the human being he is.

the politics: 9) The extension of that individual ethic to the social context of an individual living in a society of other volitional (and therefore fallible) men requires that one seek to preserve one's own autonomy over the application of one's own reason to one's own action in the pursuit of one's own life ( = freedom from the fallibility of others).

10) The only threat to a man's pursuit of his life in that context would be the initiation or threat of physical force by others to coerce certain choices of action against his will thus diminishing or negating the above defined individual autonomy.

11) The single most fundamental political alternative is therefore not left vs. right, or liberal vs. conservative, but rather: freedom vs. force (autonomy vs. coercion).

12) Therefore, it is morally imperative that each individual human being living in a society of men advocate and sustain, to the best of his efforts and extent possible, a third party institution authorized to remove the use of aggressive force from all human interactions within its jurisdiction.

13) A moral government must therefore guarantee that:

No person shall initiate the use of physical force or threat thereof to take, withhold, damage or destroy any tangible or intangible value of another person who either created it or acquired it in a voluntary exchange, nor impede any other person's non-coercive actions.

Note that every interrelationship, every exchange of values, tangible or intangible among those who are acting in their own rational self interest must be voluntary. Further, in every voluntary exchange of values, both parties profit. Each gives up something he values less to get something he values more, and they do it without using force. That is the essence of a free market!

Thus, no one can oppose Ayn Rand’s politics without sooner or later embracing the use of force against others for their own gain.

The new age of Ayn Rand

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