
Review: Ayn Rand’s ‘Ideal’ Presents a Protagonist Familiar in Her Superiority - aaronbrethorst
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/11/books/review-ayn-rands-ideal-presents-a-protagonist-familiar-in-her-superiority.html
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dmfdmf
70+ years since the Fountainhead and 33 years since Rand died and yet somehow
Rand just won't go away despite decades of smears, misrepresentation, attacks,
denouncements, denials, lies and hatchet jobs like this "review" directed at
her, her novels and her philosophy of Objectivism. Weird.

~~~
IsaacL
Heh. It does add a certain something when you read her books.

1984 probably packed more of a punch when it was distributed covertly in
totalitarian Soviet states. You're reading about a society which bans books,
in a book banned by your society. It's less meaningful in a liberal democracy
where 1984 is widely read.

Likewise, in Atlas Shrugged you're reading about a society which doesn't ban
certain ideas but sneers at them and makes them unseemly in polite society.
Which is exactly how Atlas Shrugged is treated.

For the record, I think the Fountainhead is the most literary of her books.
Rand is more original when discussing psychology than politics, and the
Fountainhead paints a more interesting spectrum of characters than Atlas
Shrugged, especially in her "almost-heroes". Gail Wynand, the tabloid
newspaper tycoon who transformed the idiocy of the masses into a personal
fortune, who lives a shamelessly public life except for a secret private art
gallery he only enters alone -- in Rand's words, a man who "could have been",
who possessed every other Randian virute but who had abandoned his integrity
-- is such an original character, and shows how nuanced her views could be.
Were her political ideas not anathema to modern academia, the Fountainhead at
least would certainly be more widely studied.

I found Atlas Shrugged to be a good page turner, but to my eyes it's clear
that Ayn Rand was pissed off that everyone misunderstood the Fountainhead and
so she turned the intensity and contrast up to 11, making everything as black-
and-white as possible, at the expensive of believability. The political focus
means people like or dislike AS based on their prior feelings towards
libertarian philosophy, which obscures the fact that her ideas have some
distinctions from libertarianism. In particular the focus on maintaining an
independent mind; something which always requires effort, not rote formulas or
blindly relying on other's opinions. In one memorable scene a group of people
invest in a company based purely on the stock price movement going up, in
another the heroine bets on a new alloy, going against the scientific
consensus which, after studying it, she believes to be unfounded. In the first
case people who follow the herd go down with the herd; in the second case one
who goes against the herd succeeds.

On the same note, her best non-fiction book is the obscure Romantic Manifesto,
a set of her essays on art. Her philosophical essays aren't as bad as some
people make out, but she oversimplifies and makes false dichotomies, and there
isn't much which is original in her political ideas. She also has some
horribly confused notions about intellectual history which alone are enough to
exclude her from the top rank of philosophers. She's a philosophical novellist
but not a philosopher; her gift is for portraying characters which embody
particular ideas.

This has turned into quite an effortpost so I might as well finish with a
comment on her and Nietszche, someone she's often compared to, though who is
surprisingly much more tolerated in the intellectual establishment. Nietzsche
didn't originate the wave of Nihilism which spread over European culture from
the top down in the 20th century, but he was the first to properly anticipate
it. The guy managed to inspire a diverse array of groups, from Nazis to French
postmodernists to new age shamanists, but I think the Objectivists might be
the ones with the seed of an actual solution. Specifically, their focus on
reason and a purpose-driven life, and their embrace of industrial capitalism
(as the most natural thing for man, even).

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aaronbrethorst
For what it's worth, what makes me sneer at _Atlas Shrugged_ is the awful,
stilted dialog.

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dmfdmf
I find it hard to believe that bad literary technique could elicit a sneer.
Stilted dialog might result in, at most, bemused indifference or perhaps
sadness at witnessing a failure. I'd bet you don't sneer at flat-earthers
because they don't threaten your worldview. A sneer is reserved for much
greater transgressions and you are afraid to admit that Rand's works, as art,
presents a worldview that clashes with your own.

