
The Persistent Ghost of Ayn Rand - pseudolus
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-persistent-ghost-of-ayn-rand-the-forebear-of-zombie-neoliberalism
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vikingcaffiene
Something that I don’t think gets talked about enough with AR is just how bad
her writing is. It’s both overly descriptive and yet clumsy. The John Galt
monologue at the end of Atlas Shrugged alone bored me to friggin tears.

~~~
hirundo
I was told that cheese and fish don't go together. I think the fact that
McDonald's has sold a gazillion filet of fish sandwiches with cheese
demonstrates that this is questionable. I was told that Ayn Rand was a bad
writer. I think the fact that people have bought around 29 million copies of
her books demonstrates that this is questionable.

But I'm perfectly willing to believe that you found her writing bad and
boring. I find it engrossing and boring in different places, and skip the
famously tedious monologue too.

~~~
manifestsilence
Ayn rand herself actually had a pretty good explanation of why this may be.
She differentiated between a writer's technical skill and their "sense of
life", and said that one could appreciate a writer's skill but hate what their
writing revealed about their unconscious attitudes about the universe, or
conversely think a writer is trash but love what they have to say. I found the
Fountainhead incredibly appealing when I first read it; you're right that it
strikes a strong chord in people. But she breaks a lot of rules of what is by
modern standards considered to be good writing. Her literary influences,
though, were Victor Hugo and Ian Fleming (the James Bond author). So that's
interesting company to keep. They both have that same vice, the love of the
monologue. Fleming calls himself out on it in an essay that's been circling
round lately.

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pseudolus
What's the rationale for flagging this submission? Articles from the New
Yorker are frequently posted and there's nothing particularly extraordinary
about this story.

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skilesare
It is about fucking ayn rand.

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peterwwillis
The psychology of Rand's protagonists are terrified control freaks. They
insulate themselves from the pain of human emotion by only caring about the
self. They hedonistically gobble up pleasures (wealth, sex, food) to fill
gaping emotional holes. They don't believe in God because that would mean
something had agency over them or their future. Randian characters are
completely alone in the world, wielding shields of power.

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sharadov
When you are reading it you feel like you're living vicariously through the
hero. It's a constant feed to your ego.

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pseudolus
Her work was very much in line with the "Great Man" theory of history which
lends itself very well to fiction as opposed to other theories such as the
"People's History" which are too diffuse - people are always looking for a
saviour.

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kaiju0
I've often thought the books are more of an extremist stance in the effort to
make a point. That only someone of worth can build something the produces real
value. That as soon as the value is noticed it will be stolen by others
claiming its their right to it.

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manifestsilence
I think the big sell with Ayn Rand is that she promises freedom from the
persistent guilt that many have been raised with through religion, family
pressures, traditions, etc. People are encouraged to conflate their personal
emotional freedom with a freedom from all social responsibility and, as the
article says, interdependence.

The disastrous nature of this mindset is illustrated by the plot of the
Fountainhead, though she somehow paints it as an act of a hero: he rapes his
future lover and blows up a building. He confuses ownership of the plans to a
building with ownership of the building itself, and thinks it's fine to
destroy a huge expensive project that was not paid for with his money just
because he was the originator of the design. I can see why this sells so well
to egomaniacs like Trump...

Edit: The only thing I like by Rand any more is the Romantic manifesto. She
says some pretty interesting things about the act of writing and the meaning
of art to her. A pity that the actual application of this philosophy led where
it did for her. I blame the trauma she experienced under communism and
scarcity.

Edit2: I don't know if meta-commentary is prohibited on here, but would like
to note that this was the first substantive comment on this thread and was
immediately downvoted without comment. Try defending your philosophy if you're
a real fan of her...

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eej71
I think one gulf in understanding that exists between those of us who like her
and those who don't is that - for me - Trump is not a man of genuine self.
Trump is just a series of impulses. Trump is no Roark.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
That looks a lot like a "no true Randian" argument.

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sfRattan
> She was closely allied with Ludwig von Mises, an economist and historian who
> helped shape neoliberal thinking.

I don't know too much about whether Rand and von Mises interacted personally,
but I know that Murray Rothbard (who moved in the same Austrian economics
circles and founded the Mises Institute) wrote a satirical play mocking
her.[1]

> She invited her readers to rejoice in cruelty. Her heroes were superior
> beings certain of their superiority. They claimed their right to triumph by
> destroying those who were not as smart, creative, productive, ambitious,
> physically perfect, selfish, and ruthless as they were.

As other commenters have mentioned, that's not what I recall reading in the
books. The whole message was that the 'heroes' were 'on strike' and 'done
helping.' Not that they were actively trying to destroy anyone.

My take on Rand is that she shared a lot of instincts with other people in the
broader liberty movement and carried a lot of traumatic memories from early
Bolshevik Russia. Atlas Shrugged represented those memories and also a
potential wedge between the left and the right. The sociopolitical elites at
the time treated the novel as a threat to the broad liberal
consensus/compromise they believed was necessary to keep the country's left
leaning and right leaning factions together in the Cold War against communism.
Conservatives aren't going to work with Liberals and uphold the containment
policy if they thinking in terms of 'looters' and 'producers' because they
read a popular, apparently book. All this is my own speculation about the
semi-private machinations of long dead people, of course.

So they savaged both her and the book in the press of the day. Was it high
literature? No. Even a great book? Highly debatable, even among libertarians.
But it probably didn't merit critical comments such as Whittaker Chambers',
"From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful
necessity, commanding: 'To a gas chamber—go!'"[2] An interesting side note
about folks like Chambers is that, if you trace the intellectual lineage of
the neoconservative movement far enough back in time, you find a bunch of
big-C communists (often Trotskyists, though not Chambers specifically) jumping
from one end of the political horseshoe to the other.

And in response to her novel's reception, Rand hardened and radicalized,
becoming a threat to no one. Even others in the broad tent of then-nascent
libertarian movement like Murray Rothbard, found her to be comically one-
dimensional at best. In a way, the latter half of her life is more sad than
anything else.

[1]: [https://mises.org/library/mozart-was-
red](https://mises.org/library/mozart-was-red) [2]:
[http://whittakerchambers.org/articles/nr/bigsister/](http://whittakerchambers.org/articles/nr/bigsister/)

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
As an outsider, it's always seemed that the foundational value of recent
corporate life in the US is narcissism.

Pure grasping self-absorption, untainted by empathy and propped up by
delusions of visionary self-importance, is considered a _good_ thing rather
than a toxic emotional distortion. [1]

As such she was a successful prophet, and her continued fame is unsurprising.

[1] This wasn't always the case - at least not to the extent it is today.
There used to be a compensating paternal/Fordist line in corporate ethics. It
seems to have started to die out in the 80s. It's still present, but it's now
unusual enough to be noteworthy.

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sharadov
When you are reading it you feel like you're living vicariously through the
hero.It's a constant feed to your ego.

~~~
ardy42
Comment is a dup of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20118839](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20118839)

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hartator
> She invited her readers to rejoice in cruelty.

I really don't remember that having read a few books from Ayn Rand.

Edit: Downvotes, can you point to an extract that support this?

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manifestsilence
Roark rapes his future lover (but it's apparently ok because she liked it,
though she gave no sign of such at the time). He blows up a building that he
doesn't own. He tells his colleague who wanted to be a painter that it's too
late for him, that he's wasted his life on the wrong thing and there's nothing
he can do about it, without any other words of encouragement or alternative
suggestions. He is always described as not caring about the emotions or
reactions of anyone else.

Edit: it's always couched in rhetoric about how people are supposed to be free
from unnecessary worry about other peoples' problems, but she often takes it
too far and causes characters to cross the line from self-actualized to
selfish, and sometimes harmful to others.

~~~
eej71
re: the rape scene. There is a clue as to how Dominique feels about it at the
end of the scene. Recall that she draws a bath - but then never climbs in. She
merely runs her fingers through the water.

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manifestsilence
Yeah, but that's after, right? I'm talking about that she didn't give a sign
of prior consent to him, which would affect the moral and legal status of that
action.

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goldcd
Maybe I'm alone here in never actually having read any of her books - but
being well aware of the content as I bump into the lovers/haters online.

To me it's up there with the Bible. I'm aware of the jist, sounds like there's
good and bad stuff in there, but know I f'in hate people that quote from
either.

~~~
Krasnol
It (Atlas Shrugged) really seems to be a kind of bible to a certain kind of
people. I've been introduced to it working with some young people in the
finance sector. One day I picked it up and started reading. It was the first
book I ever put down because it was so terribly written. Even though I was
interested how this very special view of the world would play out, I couldn't.

I tried to speak about my experience with the people who brought it to my
attention only to find out, none of them got as far as I did. Some probably
never even touched it at all.

