Mon 14 Apr 2008
I feel like I can divvy up the people I’ve met into two groups: people who are angry that they bothered reading all the way through Atlas Shrugged (or Fountainhead), and Objectivists. Ayn Rand gets a lot of guff, but she’s got her fans, and literary disgruntledness aside I’ve met some perfectly nice and reasonable fans of Objectivism.
So, what’s the deal? What makes sense and what doesn’t? If you’re for, if you’re against: why, and how did you get there?
Would everybody be happier if the John Galt speech was a quarter as long but substantially the same?
Posted by Josh Millard5 answers so far!
Okay, let's hear it.
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Good question. I was definitely in that camp of people who wanted to burn my copy when finished. I think it was the MEMEMEMEMEMEMEMEME (everyone else be damned) is justified tone that peeved me. If I’m mistaken totally, it was like 8 years ago so can’t recall exactly.
One of the days, I should reread it.
Yeah, the Galt speach? I completely skipped. I didn’t even skim it. What I did read of it, the first five pages or so, was just a repetition of every theme she was already talking about in the book. I felt it was like: Just In Case You Didn’t Get The Point Of The Book, Let Me Spell It Out To You In Excruciating Detail One More Time. And then I stabbed myself in the eye.
What an interesting coincidence that you post this question, and a few hours later, I come upon this.
I personally struggled through most of Atlas Shrugged one summer, with my parents prouldy encouraging me. I kept going “wtf? Are they really advocating me to adopt a philosophy that encourages being this selfish?” I didn’t finish, and didn’t engage my parents in any discussion of the books themes. Even in high school, I knew I viewed the world as a very different place than they did.
I actually tend to use “the Romantic Manifesto” as a better test of this. I’ll admit that I’m pretty strongly in the postmodern camp, in that I tend to place an infinite burden of proof on anything claiming to be “objective” and believe that looking at the world in relative terms tends to be a lot more useful and correct over time.
This is my main problem with “objectivism.” It proponents and practitioners are usually unwittingly subscribing to entirely subjective ideas and claiming them as absolutes. Though objectivists are famously skeptical (think Penn and Teller) they are selectively so.
In addition, I would argue that some areas are impossible to address when relying on absolutes. In “Manifesto,” Rand concedes that she can find no proper way to subscribe absolute (non-relative) meaning to music, and that taste in music is therefore too subjective and emotion-based to have significant value or meaning. That conclusion is absurd, though. Music derives its value and meaning from its ability to synthesize vastly disparate cultural information into an art form which conveys little to a person of one background and much to a person from another. Thus, there is no entirely translatable absolute at the center of a melody or movement.
A much better philosiphy is existentialism, which also focuses heavily on comprehension and action, but accepts the near infinite variety and relativity of the human condition.
I would say the Objectivism’s biggest flaw is that it’s author was at best passingly familiar with the philosophical cannon. I can’t say I’ve read any of the primary texts, but I’ve talked to exponents and I’ve read some summaries.
The general impression I get is that she rarely says anything that means much, and what she does say is simplistic and ignores difficulties instead of answering them.