Ayn Rand's Literature of Capitalism

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/15/business/15atlas.html?ex=1347508800&en=8fc42c2f2603a791&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

by robg • 19 years ago

33 93 19 years ago

nytimes.com

brianmckenzie2• 19 years ago

Someone whose philosophy can be summed up in a Depeche Mode song is probably not the brightest light in the history of western civilization.

gibsonf13• 19 years ago

Or could it be, in being able to essentialize a message in elevator-pitch fashion, that a person actually really knows what they're talking about?

davidw• 19 years ago

Would that John Galt had been able to deliver an elevator pitch, rather than a 90 page rant:-)

curi• 19 years ago

but it can't be, that's why she wrote a number of lengthy books instead of just one song.

gwenhwyfaer19• 19 years ago

That's one explanation, and possibly not the best...

uuilly6• 19 years ago

The Fountainhead was written in 1943. Depeche Mode saw it's first success in 1981. If even one of the best economic minds in 2045 cite Depeche Mode as their influence then you have a point.

2007 - 1943 = 64

1981 + 64 = 2045

brianmckenzie2• 19 years ago

You're taking what I said waaay too literally.

But if we're gonna go there (and this is all in jest), I see it like this: in 1981 Depeche Mode were a bunch of drama-whoring junkies with Casio keyboards, yet they managed to express the same basic ideas in far fewer words, plus a catchy euro-pop beat.

I appreciate some aspects of Ayn Rand's thought, but find her books a chore to read.

Alan Greenspan considers Ayn Rand a major influence? It's an interesting factoid, but falls far short of implying causality. I could make another Depeche Mode reference here, but it would be extremely tasteless.

When Greenspan and his ilk characterize people as 'parasites', I parse that as 'anyone who gets between me and the forests of money to which I am entitled'. I might see where he's coming from, but his rhetoric is needlessly violent.

SwellJoe7• 19 years ago

All the Ayn Rand you'll ever need is in Anthem. Much shorter than Atlas Shrugged, and better literature to boot.

I'm a long-time fan, after finding one of her books at a flea market when I was a kid (bought it coincidentally at the same time as Walden Two, a socialist manifesto by B.F. Skinner...one was delightfully rational and rang true while the other's greatest feat of intellectual brilliance was the use of glass dinner plates so you don't have to flip them when washing them to know that both sides are clean), but I'll never re-read the John Galt speech. Atlas was just too long. Ayn clearly never heard of DRY (or assumed her readers were too stupid to understand it the first several times she said it).

rrival5• 19 years ago

The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are magnificent. To suggest that anyone -not- read them (for the sake of brevity, no less) is to suggest a reader not experience great, life-changing literature. Her objectivist philosophy may be a bit overt in the latter, but never for a second could I sleep well knowing I'd proposed that others -skip- these books.

rms6• 19 years ago

We should be explicitly working towards the advancement of human civilization instead of working for rational self-interest.

paul7• 19 years ago

"Yes, at first I was happy to be learning how to read. It seemed exciting and magical, but then I read this: Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. I read every last word of this garbage, and because of this piece of shit, I am never reading again." -- police officer Barbrady, South Park (1998)

I made it about 1/3 of the way into The Fountainhead but got bored and lost interest. Self-interest is ok, but I'm not going to make it my religion.

The architect who wouldn't design what people like (because it wasn't rational, as I recall) seemed like a really annoying person to deal with. And I certainly wouldn't want to invest in his startup :)

pg7• 19 years ago

I advised myself to skip them, and I'm happy so far with that advice.

SwellJoe7• 19 years ago

"To suggest that anyone -not- read them (for the sake of brevity, no less) is to suggest a reader not experience great, life-changing literature."

Brevity is one of the virtues of great literature. You'll probably learn that as you grow older and time becomes more valuable to you. Certainly, great literature can be long (Middlesex is perhaps the best novel of the past 20 years, and it weighs in at a pretty hefty 556 pages...this is still significantly shorter than Atlas), but Atlas Shrugged, as art, suffers under the weight of the philosophical treatise that it's carrying around on its back (much like the mythic Atlas, and yes, I believe he should shrug off all that extra weight).

The Fountainhead is somewhat less marred by needless words, but only Anthem is actually free of cruft, in my opinion.

"Her objectivist philosophy may be a bit overt in the latter, but never for a second could I sleep well knowing I'd proposed that others -skip- these books."

People who like what they find in the shorter Rand books will go on to read the others. People who get stuck in the mud of Galt's speech will never pickup another Rand book. That speech is simply terrible literature. It might be good philosophy, but it's not good art.

gwenhwyfaer19• 19 years ago

I'd have to nominate 'We, The Living' as the best thing she ever wrote, on the grounds of both authenticity and quality. Everything after that was solipsistic pulp polemic, but I do retain a soft spot for WTL. But 'Anthem' was ripped off from 'We' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_%28novel%29) and can't hold a candle to either 'Brave New World' before or '1984' after; its only use is the same as that of 'The Communist Manifesto' (the two works are even as humourless as each other).

SwellJoe7• 19 years ago

Yes, "We" is also wonderful, though I don't see that "Anthem" was a ripoff...it's just another take on the same idea, which many others have taken a stab at over the years. And Brave New World and 1984 are completely different from the former to, and from each other. I love dystopian fiction, so I've read tons of it. My current favorite writer in the genre is Margaret Atwood ("Handmaid's Tale" and "Oryx and Crake"). So I guess if you don't really enjoy reading speculative fiction with a gloomy outlook on the future, maybe you only need to read one of them (probably 1984, since it's the one everybody knows), but otherwise, they're all a lot of fun.

"We, the Living", I didn't care for. The language is stilted (even more than Atlas and Fountainhead). It was her first real writing in English, and it shows. I never recommend WTL to folks who don't already like Ayn Rand, and most of the folks I know who've started it never finished it. I did, but I would never re-read it. (I've re-read Fountainhead and Atlas, minus the Galt speech, a couple of times, and Anthem at least four or five times.)

mikesabat• 19 years ago

I think that every aspiring entrepreneur should buy and try to read the Fountainhead. Howard Roark (main character) is the prototypical entrepreneur fighting to get his ideas to a world that needs them.

It works intellectually, but it is best used for inspiration. How often do you find a piece of literature for $12 that MAY change your life.

patrickg-zill• 19 years ago

One need only look at the current mess of Zimbabwe, where all the productive people both black and white, were driven out or killed, to see "John Galt" in action.

jrmurad2• 19 years ago

Care to explain? It is my understanding that they are being driven out and killed by armed thugs. I'm not sure what percentage of said thugs are government agents but I know it's not 0. How is this John Galt (who desires a world free of the aggressive initiation of force) "in action"?

uuilly6• 19 years ago

Mr. Mugabe nationalized all farms in Zimbabwe. There were many British Empire leftovers (white guys) running farms quite successfully. Zimbabwe was actually one of the rare African hopes pre Mugabe. Many said it would be the "bread basket" of Africa the way Ukraine is to Europe and Kansas is to the US. Mugabe siezed all "white owned" land and had native Zimbabweans run the farms. Predictably this all went to shit and their inflation rate now hovers between 6,000% and 10,000%. No exageration. When nobody could run the farms he actually buldozed tenemants and told the inhabitants to go work on the farms. Very little edible food has materialized.

The way this relates to Ayn Rand is that in all her stories the captains of industry are pervceived as evil profit mongers by the masses. The masses evantually rise up and take back what's "theirs" and the entire economy grinds to a halt. This is what Rand witnessed in the Russian Revolution and this is exactly what is happening in Zimbabwe today.

shawndrost• 19 years ago

Is Ayn saying that the individual is more important than the collective, or that the best route to collective improvement is through selfishness? I suspect it's the latter, but Ayn and her followers frame the debate so combatively that it's hard to be sure. I see this confusion rearing its head throughout this page.

(I read the first 100 pages of Atlas Shrugged, and got sick of it. I thought it was uninteresting as a novel and inefficient and not rigorous as a treatise. This part of the novel seemed to intentionally perpetuate my confusion: the conflict, as I recall, was between truly selfish people and collectivists that were too incompetent to see when the selfish people were doing collective good. Why conflate incompetence and collectivism?)

gwenhwyfaer19• 19 years ago

In any case, competition - and therefore the market - is necessarily a collective endeavour. You can't come second in a race with only one participant (well, except for some snobbish cake competitions in tiny English parishes).

shadowplay• 19 years ago

Might want to get out the pesticide before the Ayn Rand-ers pull a Ron Paul-ing of YC News.

brennannovak• 19 years ago

I have not read any Ayn Rand but I will immediately. I can not help but think of our current situation with our President and how the public views him. As I grow and experience more, being a business owner, etc... It seems that no matter how much one human knows or thinks they know- there is almost always another human who knows something else and that something else just might be what the first person needs to know.

Ayn Rand's Literature of Capitalism

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