Atlas Shrugged

[Jeff K.]

The context of Rand, being raised and educated during the time of war and then in a Soviet system, and then seeking some method by which she could reconcile freedom without God led to some of the issues in place is facinating. She rejected God, as so many progressive leftists do, but with the personal experience of a leftist system out of control, she could not accept the limits on freedom that leftists feel is necessary. I do not think you can reconcile the morality of God from the freedom of man. Leftists feel that freedom of choice must be externally limited by a benevolent dictatorship of the proletariot (or rather the people) while many on the right (that do not believe in God) believe that freedom exists and internally driven functions or motivations are irrelevant. I think God which provides the impetus for internally driven motivations that are good, is as important as the freedom to act without government control.

As I used to tell the church basketball team. Referees should be there to keep us honest, not make us honest.

[WalkerW]

I'd like to see you back up that claim, tss. Not a formal CFR, but I'd find it interesting to see how you come to it.

He is probably referring to this AlterNet article. He's linked it elsewhere.

[WalkerW]

The movie is out today and I have to say as a fan of the book I was pleasantly surprised at how good it was. They story was updated but true to the heart of the book. Although no doubt being familiar with the characters may have filled in what non-readers of the book might not get. What is even more amazing is that they did this movie on such a low budget and yet it doesn't look low budget, at least to me.

The acting I thought was superb and the cinematography beautiful. I recommend it to anyone who loves freedom and individuality, whether you've read the book or not. My sister did not read the book and just said "Wow." Now she wants to read the book. I'm wanting to read it again as it's been a few years and it's amazing how timeless it is.

Recent article on the film: J. Patrick Rhamey, Jr., "The Continued Relevance of Rand's Villains," Mises Daily (April 19, 2011).

[Deborah]

WalkerW, that article makes a great point. I think it accurately portrays American's frustration with their government as they see their home values shrink, food and gas prices going up, and their jobs becoming more and more dependent on the whims of government strangulation, oops regulation; that is if they even have a job. And what does government do? Tell us we need to tighten our belts while they freely spend tax dollars or dollars they don't even have as if there were a golden goose with no end to golden eggs.

We feel so helpless and most of us have been working hard and paying our mortgages and seeing everything we worked for being destroyed by government mismanagement. We can barely take care of our own families, much less help others who have even less. It makes me want to cry.

[Deborah]

Here is another article on the surprising success, which concludes with this remark: “People are hungry for what these characters are saying,” says executive producer John Aglialoro “They’re telling the government, ‘Just leave me alone. Let me hang onto my life and pursue my passions and rational self-interest. That’s what will benefit society.”

Please note that self-interest is not the same as selfishness.

Atlas success

[WalkerW]

Isn't it rather ironic that the supposedly evil and selfish John Galt (according to frankenstein) offers the same prosperity and freedom to...others (0:01-0:20):

As for "who is John Galt," he is the film's director and the quite wicked Dan Scott of One Tree Hill.

That's right. One Tree Hill.

We own the entire first season of One Tree Hill and I've seen it all. That's what happens when you buy such things for your wife. You know what else happens? You end up seeing the entire first season of things like The O.C. as well.

Not to worry. I've heard Dan is heading in the

now.

[Stargazer]

He is probably referring to this AlterNet article. He's linked it elsewhere.

I don't see how Ayn Rand's use of social security and medicare makes her a closet socialist. Having paid into the system most of her life (like the rest of us), she probably felt that there was sufficient moral justification for receiving some benefit for what she had paid. I am not an Objectivist by any means, but my paying into the system makes me feel perfectly jusitifed for accepting a payout from it.

Giving up the benefit, after having paid for it, could easily be described as an altruistic act, something dear Ayn was opposed to.

[thesometimesaint]

Stargazer:

Actually her publicist told her that she would never make enough money selling her books to pay for her retirement or surgeries for lung cancer. She was a two pack a day smoker. She collected on her husbands' Social Security.

http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/149721/ayn_rand_railed_against_government_benefits,_but_grabbed_social_security_and_medicare_when_she_needed_them/

[Stargazer]

Stargazer:

Actually her publicist told her that she would never make enough money selling her books to pay for her retirement or surgeries for lung cancer. She was a two pack a day smoker. She collected on her husbands' Social Security.

http://www.alternet....he_needed_them/

Sigh.

I am disappointed about this, assuming that she couldn't make enough with her books to fund a retirement. I don't know, for all that I think that the woman was shortsighted and crass in some respects, I guess I look at her work overall and just consider it "worthy", in the sense of have done "good" presenting a philosophy, and then it seems she should have been able to do "well" (in respect of relative prosperity) as a result. Not unsurprising, though. I know two sci fi novelists who have published 17 novels that are still in print, and they can hardly fund a vacation with the proceeds.

Philosophy as a career is not necessarily one of the most lucrative, for all that she probably thought of Dagny Taggart as her alter-ego. But consider Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Paul Allen. Talk about doing well because of having done good. And all three of them spend their money trying to lift up the world. That is very worthy.

[thesometimesaint]

Stargazer:

Too true. Most authors never are famous, and seldom make enough money off the books to quite their day jobs. It was a sad way to go for Ms. Rand. No one deserves to die from cancer.

[Jeff K.]

Many people are problematic. Consider that Thomas Jefferson was against slavery and yet attempted to pass laws outlawing slavery in the west, but his first memory and last were of slaves serving him.

[thesometimesaint]

Jeff K.:

It was a "peculiar institution".

[Deborah]

To say that someone was a socialist because they used a system that is established and they paid into is ridiculous. Even rich people can quickly go through their money because of the high cost of medical care. My own grandmother had a significant amount of retirement set aside but had to spend it all on medical care before finally having to fall back on SS and Medicare, which by the way contributed to the rising cost of medical care. She had planned to leave a large legacy to her children, including my Mom, but ended up with practically nothing.

In any case the movie has nothing to do with that. It's a great story about people fighting for their right to own their own product and to be able to work freely without constant government interference trying to stop them or make it harder.

[thesometimesaint]

Deborah:

She was a closet socialist. She publicly railed against the system. Then when it came to herself, she privately took advantage of that system under her husbands' name. That is known as gross hypocrisy.

We(the US) is a Capitalist economic system. Make all the money you want. Be another Bill Gates. But please don't rig the system in such a way that it is Socialism for you when you fail, but it is Capitalism for everyone else. "Too Big to Fail".

[WalkerW]

WalkerW:

The modern Liberal/Progressive movement got its start in the farm and labor movements of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

The Social Gospel is mentioned in Leonard's article, but I thought this one was extra informative:

Gary North, "Millenialism and the Progressive Movement," Journal of Libertarian Studies 12:1 (Spring 1996).

[Deborah]

She was a closet socialist. She publicly railed against the system. Then when it came to herself, she privately took advantage of that system under her husbands' name.

Good grief. That is probably her legal name under which she had to apply. Don't try to make something nefarious of it. The fact is Medicare is there whether we like it or not and many people are forced to fall back on it whether they like it or not because of the extraordinary costs of medical care. My grandmother never intended to use it either but had no choice because they wouldn't treat her without it.

Here is another view on the issue than the liberal claptrap that is out there. Rand and Medicare And I yes I know one can't file for SS with a power of attorney but one can get approval to act for the recipient.

In any case that still has nothing to do with the government interfering in our lives to the point of not letting us keep the benefits of our own production. Ideally charity should be under the auspices of churches and communities, not the federal government.

I find it interesting that with many more people seeing the movie it still remains an A- on Yahoo user reviews and reports are prevalent of audiences applauding. And Yahoo doesn't even list it as showing but people are giving their input. There appears to be a hunger for the message.

[Jeff K.]

Deborah:

She was a closet socialist. She publicly railed against the system. Then when it came to herself, she privately took advantage of that system under her husbands' name. That is known as gross hypocrisy.

We(the US) is a Capitalist economic system. Make all the money you want. Be another Bill Gates. But please don't rig the system in such a way that it is Socialism for you when you fail, but it is Capitalism for everyone else. "Too Big to Fail".

I think Ayn Rand is a closet socialist like you are a closet conservative libertarian

She did "use" the system, however she also was forced by law to pay into it. So "take advantage" meaning she recieved more than her due would be incorrect. It is like someone who dislikes carbon emitting gas guzzling cars and wants electric. They may, by the system, be forced to wait until everyone is on board, but until then, that person must still drive to work in a gas car.

[Jeff K.]

I am coerced and forced into belonging to a union, that doesn't make me a closet socialist, it merely described a circumstance that I must deal with.

[ERayR]

Deborah:

She was a closet socialist. She publicly railed against the system. Then when it came to herself, she privately took advantage of that system under her husbands' name. That is known as gross hypocrisy.

We(the US) is a Capitalist economic system. Make all the money you want. Be another Bill Gates. But please don't rig the system in such a way that it is Socialism for you when you fail, but it is Capitalism for everyone else. "Too Big to Fail".

What is socialist about using something you have paid for? What is socialist is that one is forced to pay for it.

[thesometimesaint]

She didn't pay for it. She filed under her husbands name. Yes it was and is legal to do so.

She publicly derided Social Security and Medicare recipients as less than leeches and her "What are your masses...but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?" philosophy was that doing for others is contemptible; that doing for self is the purpose of human life; that altruism and service are somehow pathologies pushed by collectivists and should be subordinated to selfishness and greed.

Yet when it came to her she was somehow better than you and I. So she secretly got her Social Security and Medicare.

She truly was a hypocrite. That some here see value in that philosophy is strange to me.

[Jeff K.]

Not quite. She and her husband were forced into paying for a system. Her husband I presume was of the same mind she was and her husband's "investments" would have been carried out with the same presumed forced end result by the state. You cannot call someone a hypocrite for being part of that system. If her husband were free to make other investments in place of the one the government dictated, and they both still chose the government system, then it would be hypocrisy. But really, you take a chunk of my income (by force) invest it for me (as you dictate) and then when I, or my wife pull on that investment, you call us both hypocrites for doing so? I don't think so.

There is great value in rational self interest, which is what drives capitalism, and strangely enough it seems in general individuals are much more efficient at making the right decisions for themselves than governments are for individuals. Because individuals know what the right decision is for themselves.

[Deborah]

Yet when it came to her she was somehow better than you and I. So she secretly got her Social Security and Medicare.

So I'm wondering how many people go out and publicly announce that they are getting SS and Medicare. If they don't go put an ad in the paper then they are being hypocrites.

So much vitriol against an old sick woman who became desperate at her latter years. All of us tend to see only black and white when we are young; we are also more idealistic but as we get older grey areas begin to appear and we realize our ideals aren't always able to be realized. I don't fault anyone for growing up. Her basic philosophy was never about what seems to be tss' big bugaboo. It was about the right to the rewards of your own production and the right to say how they are used. It was about the government not interfering in the name of altruism and in the end causing greater harm.

I wonder how much taxes she paid on the proceeds of her books, lectures, movie scripts etc; money which could have been invested and used more wisely and perhaps even for medical treatment. SS and Medicare taxes aren't the only payments one makes to a government whose recipients depend on how powerful the lobbies are and who makes the most politically correct noise.

[Stargazer]

She didn't pay for it. She filed under her husbands name. Yes it was and is legal to do so.

She publicly derided Social Security and Medicare recipients as less than leeches and her "What are your masses...but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?" philosophy was that doing for others is contemptible; that doing for self is the purpose of human life; that altruism and service are somehow pathologies pushed by collectivists and should be subordinated to selfishness and greed.

Yet when it came to her she was somehow better than you and I. So she secretly got her Social Security and Medicare.

She truly was a hypocrite. That some here see value in that philosophy is strange to me.

Hypocrisy is sometimes indistinguishable from survival. Your contention is that she should have nobly eaten cat food and allowed the cancer to eat her alive, just to prove... what?

Oh, she got her comeupance, as you point out. Reduced to public charity after having striven to be Dagny Taggart, and fallen short. She was smart enough to have seen it herself, and I am sure she did.

But she was right about some things. She originated in a system (the Soviet Union) in which one was forced to altruism and service against one's will and against one's interest, all so a few at the top could eat caviar. A condition more commonly referred to as slavery or indentured servitude. Her mistake was in not seeing that truly voluntary service of one's fellow humans is among the noblest virtues. All she could see was the jackboot and the thugs, and imagined that selflessness was something that betrayed one's own freedom and will. One of the greatest sayings among the Objectivists was and is "Do what you want and harm no-one." This is sometimes mistaken for selfishness, but it is in point of fact the greatest freedom. If another can command your charity, then it is not charity but tyranny. But if you can command yourself fully, then the end of your existence is answered, and you will do what is right for the right's own sake -- or you will not. No ambiguity. Satan's Golden Rule is that "He who has the gold makes the rules," but this is not a condition that can exist in perfect freedom. This is why Satan is all about control. I think he is still trying to do for us what he told Father he would do for (and to) us, and that is force us to do right: as he sees it, at least. You see this in politics worldwide where those who supposedly are trying to promote social justice work in as many ways as they can to stamp out suffering, by the only means at their disposal: force. This is why there is such a thing as Political Correctness. This is where the Thought Police come in. This is where 1984 rears its ugly head: if the language can be sufficiently manipulated, then words to express objectionable thoughts will lose their currency, and in the end we will no longer even be able to think out of the box in which they want to place us.

The value in the philosophy that Rand advocated is simply this: Father's plan as implemented by the Christ provides a Savior, so that we may all in perfect freedom choose right from wrong. Jesus is there because we will certainly choose the wrong at some point, but by His virtue (and not ours, for we don't have enough) we may escape in the end if we choose to turn back to the right. Rand missed that part because possibly through no fault of her own she could not see God in the world. I respect her for what she got right, and give her a pass for what she missed. I am surely as imperfect as anyone else in the world, and a little forbearance goes a long way.

This is where our own dear frankenstein goes off the rails. He seems to think that if a person gets one or two things wrong, then he or she gets it all wrong, and why he insists on finding a private interpretation of Paul's "Prove all things, hold fast to that which is good." If his theory were correct then we should ignore everything he himself says, since he is like everyone else -- far from perfect.

[Deborah]

It is interesting that those who condemn Rand for being an atheist do not understand that she was not condemning Christ. She rather thought of Christ as symbolizing for Christians the ideal man whom the undeserved sacrificed for their own benefit. I don't think that she understood in any way the voluntary nature of the sacrifice, nor that it wasn't given entirely undeservedly, but that men were expected to keep the commandments and give gratitude for their blessings. How could she when in general Christianity's teachings on the subject leave out that last part. It is interesting that her character Hank Rearden represents in her mind the man who knowingly sacrifices for his ungrateful and undeserving family, because he is willing and able to carry the burden when they aren't. After they continually denounced him and worked to destroy him, all the while accepting his charity, he finally left them to the consequences of their own actions.

This is what Rand had to say about Christ: "Now you want me to speak about the cross. What is correct is that I do regard the cross as the symbol of the sacrifice of the ideal to the nonideal. Isn't that what it does mean? Christ, in terms of the Christian philosophy, is the human ideal. He personifies that which men should strive to emulate. Yet, according to the Christian mythology, he died on the cross not for his own sins but for the sins of the nonideal people. [...] And it is in the name of that symbol that men are asked to sacrifice themselves for their inferiors. That is precisely how the symbolism is used. That is torture." (Alvin Toffler, "Ayn Rand: A Candid Conversation with the Fountainhead of 'Objectivism,'" Playboy, March 1964, reprinted as a pamphlet by Second Renaissance Books, pp. 9-10.) I can't really say I disagree with her on this point given her limited understanding of what Christ really represented as well as the world's misunderstanding of what the Atonement is.

Her symbolism of the dollar in the book was only meant to signify "free trade and, therefore, of a free mind" the latter being of most worth to her having seen what government did to her father and family.

[thesometimesaint]

Utter male bovine fecal material.

Here is the real Ayn Rand. Back in the late 1920s, as Ayn Rand was working out her philosophy, she became enthralled by a real-life American serial killer, William Edward Hickman, whose gruesome, sadistic dismemberment of 12-year-old girl named Marion Parker in 1927 shocked the nation. Rand filled her early notebooks with worshipful praise of Hickman. According to biographer Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market, Rand was so smitten by Hickman that she modeled her first literary creation — Danny Renahan, the protagonist of her unfinished first novel, The Little Street — on him.

What did Rand admire so much about Hickman? His sociopathic qualities: “Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should,” she wrote, gushing that Hickman had “no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel ‘other people.’”

This echoes almost word for word Rand’s later description of her character Howard Roark, the hero of her novel The Fountainhead: “He was born without the ability to consider others.”

And for the religiously minded.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTmac2fs5HQ&feature=related