
Ayn Rand Mike Wallace Interview 1959 - martian
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ukJiBZ8_4k
======
seekely
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 :)

~~~
idlewords
"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.

~~~
seekely
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."

~~~
gnosis
If you like this sort of thing, you should read Nietzsche (which is where Rand
appropriated this sort of thing from).

Nietzsche is not only a much more eloquent writer, but his ideas are far more
profound.

------
tokenadult
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.

------
jsz0
I never understood why people were so keen on Ayn Rand. Seems like a
philosophy built to justify being a jerk.

~~~
seekely
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.

~~~
jbooth
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.

~~~
dantheman
I think you misunderstand the story.

1\. John Galt convinces the "rich", though quite a few weren't, that
continuing their work would lead to their destruction so in order to survive
they would need to go on strike. Perhaps the better analogy is the man who
invents a new weapon and then is killed by someone else using it.

2\. The problem was that as the bosses left others with corrupt ideologies
were taking their place.

3\. Nothing in the book has to do with the rich needing luxuries, in fact they
all move out to Galt's gulch and do manual labor and leave the life of luxury
behind. In fact her stories are all about being true to yourself and living
your life the way that you want to.

I'm not a fan of everything she's written, but I think you really missed the
point of the book.

~~~
jbooth
Well, thanks, but that's just as childish. Oh, they'll be replaced by the
impure -- what a silly premise, only these few supermen are worthy of doing
high-end industrial jobs, and if they don't do it then it'll be done in an
ideologically impure manner... who's pure?

Gimme a break. If anything, the way things work in the corporate world the
bosses are some of the least likely people to have consistent morals in the
face of expedient solutions.

There's a million people waiting to replace them and, with a little time to
get used to a job, there's no fateful reason why the previous person doing it
is the only person who possibly could.

The thing about that story is that the adherents claim to be all wise and
worldly, oh, you'll get it once you're making money -- I'm making money, I
think it's BS and nobody actually succeeds with such a childish, self-
gratifying attitude.

~~~
dantheman
If your responding to bullet 2, then the it wasn't a question of "purity" it
was the government dictating who was in what position.

Have you read the book?

"Gimme a break. If anything, the way things work in the corporate world the
bosses are some of the least likely people to have consistent morals in the
face of expedient solutions." This behavior occurs throughout the novel.

What is the childish self-gratifying attitude? That those who work hard and
persevere are successful? That it's wrong to steal from others? That at the
end of the day you exist for yourself and what you find important (friends,
family, etc) and that no one else has a claim on you?

It seems like you setup straw men and then knock them down.

~~~
jbooth
The childish, self-gratifying attitude is the part where you think because you
achieved some success in life, you owe nothing to the society that made it
possible for you. People of that sort of moral stature don't tend to have the
firmitude to succeed in other ways, in my experience -- it's more typical of
college republicans than it is of actual business leaders.

------
blhack
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.

------
maxharris
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.

------
Tycho
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
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.)

~~~
Tycho
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).

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

~~~
seekely
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
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.

~~~
greenlblue
No, I stopped watching because she was talking about something so obviously
wrong. The amount of processing your brains does to fill in details and
recreate memories from sparse details is quite amazing and this is enough
evidence for me to throw out objective reality. Also, I don't understand how
HN influences people's philosophical views or why anyone with an HN account
would be pro objective reality.

~~~
SwellJoe
The flawed human brain and its ability to remember is merely evidence of a
flawed observer, and not evidence of a flawed reality.

The processing your brain does to fill in details is irrelevant when there are
multiple methods of observation and multiple observers, and all agree with
reasonable precision. When multiple observers can measure an object and find
that it has volume and mass, we can all agree that the thing exists. We might
disagree on what to name it, or what it "means", but it'd be pointless to
argue that it might really not be there.

While one _could_ argue that everything, including all the other observers,
are a product of my imagination, it isn't productive to do so. Whether it is
all in my head (or in a supercomputer and I'm really just a simulation) isn't
a useful theory. I can't _do_ anything with that theory. It is untestable, and
thus is mere superstition.

In short, objective reality is a good model for...reality. And, so, it makes
sense to behave as though jumping off of a cliff will probably end ones
existence.

I believe the notion that someone on HN would be "pro objective reality"
(whatever that means...I'm not sure there is any way to win against what _is_
, so why fight against it?) comes from the fact that we are all mostly nerdy,
science-oriented, and we tend to be more likely to know how things (where
"things" can be mechanical, biological, electrical, etc.) work. We know that
when you feed voltage into a particular semi-conductor, the same thing happens
every time...so, we tend to be less likely to fall into the trap of thinking
things happen because of magic or because we imagined they happened or
whatever.

In short, I reckon accepting objective reality has a net positive value in my
life. I'm not sure how denying reality would do me any good. I'm pretty
pragmatic, and I like having some level of control over stuff in my life, so I
reckon I'm a believer.

~~~
greenlblue
Whoa, nobody said anything about denying that things exist but what I did deny
was the fact that it was objective. Objective only makes sense if you know
what subjective means and since all I know are subjective states of being it
does not make sense for me to say there is something else that I can not make
any sense of that is as real as anything I feel. All I can say is that there
is a patchwork of things that my brain puts together and that thing is what I
call reality but to jump from the patchwork to the existence of a completed
whole is in my opinion a mistake.

~~~
SwellJoe
_You_ said something about denying that things exist. You said that "objective
reality" is a myth, and you said it as though people who believe in objective
reality are simpletons.

If there is no objective reality, one person can say, "There is a car in my
garage." and someone else can say, "There is a dragon in your garage." and
both will be equally correct (because there is no objective way to determine
otherwise). But, because objective reality does seem to be an accurate model
for our universe, other observers can look in the garage, and see that, yes,
there is a car (or dragon, as the case may be) in the garage. You can take a
picture of the car (or dragon) in the garage, you can measure it, you can hop
in (on) and take it for a drive (flight), you can touch it, etc. While your
perception and your recollection may have gaps, we have scientific tools to
remove the ambiguity of faulty perception and memory. With enough
measurements, recordings, and photographic evidence of something, we can know
it pretty darned objectively.

My point is that it's simply unproductive to deny that there is an objective
reality. The world behaves as though there _is_ objective reality. My house
has never turned into a turtle, and my dog seems to be a dog every day no
matter how much she might want to be a cat. I may not remember all the details
of each of these things, but that doesn't mean they _aren't_ what they are.
The "patchwork of things" that my brain puts together about the world can be
made to match the patchwork of things that other brains put together by using
tools to measure and record those things, even while understanding that no one
will ever have a complete grasp of the entirety of reality (it's pretty big,
and even one single pebble, is too much for a single human to grasp in its
entirety, when you start thinking in terms of atoms and particles and such).

Basically, I think you've decided that "objective reality" means humans can be
all-knowing and perfectly observant...but that's not what anyone else means
when they use the term.

~~~
RevRal
Oh the frustration, eh? And it gets more annoying every time.

I still don't have a clear idea on how one can reject objective reality, or
reject what is real.

There have been some simularities between all my confrontations over the
years: the people don't make very much sense; they demand respect for their
"opinion;" and, they attribute arrogance to believing in an objective reality.

Somewhere, they learned the wrong thing. And I think I've deduced part of the
problem: they take the subjectivity of some definitions as a sort of proof
that an objective reality doesn't exist, and at an intuitive level, they don't
accept reductionism.

Definitions being a form of reductionism. That is to say, at a very
fundamental level, they take issue with you saying "this orange weighs .3kg ."
They won't confront you for saying that, but if they happen to like the movie
Joe Dirt, and you say "Joe Dirt is a bad movie," watch out. You are now
offending _their_ reality and it is now very personal.

And just to further clarify, when I say "the subjectivity of some
definitions," I mean the various degrees of allowed interpretation of ideas.
There are different degrees of subjectivity to different ideas: people have an
amount of leeway to define some things for themselves, such as love, as it is
not very well understood anyway. However, some ideas are very close to a real,
concrete, one-to-one, definition of reality.

Yet these people have it in their head that they can make up whatever they
want with anything, even though they don't normally execute this power to make
up whatever they want. But they _do_ get caught up on their _right_ to make up
whatever they want, which boils down to rejecting objective reality. I think
there's some kind of empowerment high and self-consolation that "opinions"
hold merit by merely existing, even for concepts that aren't lenient with
subjectivity.

This submission is pretty much dead but I hope you read this comment since I
had this Aha! while reading your comment. This is a rough sketch of something
I'm going to expand upon, but hopefully I explained it well enough for now.

