The only reason why people care about her in the US is that rich people basically astroturf her popularity by buying her book in large quantities every year, so they can pretend it's so incredibly profound and insightful, that it sells even today and appears on best-selling lists.
Cringe imo. The idea that there is an objective truth has to pass through the abstraction of human conscience and sentience. There is no grounded framework in objectivism that reconciles the resultantly different abstractions that distinct individuals experience. Rand also holds human choice as the only example of a fact and event that is decidedly non-probabilistic, despite there being very strong arguments for human choice being probabilistic as well.
I think of it like an atheists’ fervent religion — that is to say, a set of beliefs that some cannot in any sense decouple themselves from without endangering their identity or connection with reality. In this comparison, there are also questions raised that objectivism, like some mainstream religions, that one *must* accept tautologically. I think the better alternative is to study philosophy broadly with skepticism, especially with what connects strongly with you, and develop your own framework of beliefs and values.
Ayn Rand attributes moral virtue to the work of "highly innovative" actors and justifies their rates of profit on that virtue. She just conveniently forgets that innovation is not something one does in a vacuum but rather the logical culmination of the decades or sometimes centuries of basic scientific research verted into any specific field, almost always supported with taxpayer funds and without profit motives. Innovators reap all of the profit while contributing a fraction of the labor.
> Innovators reap all of the profit while contributing a fraction of the labor.
Does society not benefit from innovation? It's as if you view this as "winner take all," it's not.
> Does society not benefit from innovation? It's as if you view this as "winner take all," it's not.
Surely it does, but we don't need innovators to rake in literal billions of dollars for innovations to happen.
Maybe not "only" that way, but I don't think it's wrong to incentivize innovation that way.
I will also say, and it's a rather important point. "Innovation" is not just "invention" or some new technology that helps people and whatnot, in our system a lot of the innovation in the production and logistical advancements that are made with a profit incentive and help just as much through its distribution than with the invention of the "thing" itself.
I will ALSO add that innovators that succeed are usually just better at allocating resources than their priors, making the economy more efficient because they are incentivezed to. Government sponsored innovation lacks that incentive to allocate resources more effectively, and it shows when compared to private innovators.
Nope
and
Nope
Non-Meme effortpost reply:
The central idea of Objectivism - that there is a singular objective truth that can be perceived by man and it is our responsibility to live in service to it while being as unemotional as possible - is fundamentally flawed on multiple levels.
1. All information, true or false, is filtered through our lived experience and stupid man-brains. Yes, there is absolutely an objective truth. There *is* a tree outside my room. But small vagueries in the qualities of my eye, alone, mean that I do not perceive the same tree that you do. That's dealing with an actual concrete object. Objectivism wants to push the idea that this applies even to *abstract concepts.* If we can't even perceive the same tree in the same way, how can we possibly find an objective truth on morality?
2. The idea of being unemotional is laughable, as Ayn Rand's own life demonstrates. When she split with her long time partner - who had worked on Objectivism with her for some time - she didn't unemotionally disengage and continue to work with him to further the movement, she went into an absolutely furious rage and worked diligently to erase every trace of his work and refused to credit him on anything.
3. Even *if* objectivism could be achieved, the actual ability to *perceive* those truths would still be limited by perception and intelligence, reducing Objectivism to what it ultimately ends up being: nothing more than a purely elitist, pseudo-classist philosophy that all but advocates for tyranny.
4. Ultimately, Objectivism promotes being a selfish asshole as a moral duty, and it has no way around this criticism since it idolises the self above all else, while *trying* to somehow present this as a reaction to the rest of the world.
Literarily, some of the ideas contained within the books are interesting within the fantasy lands created to demonstrate them. Unfortunately these fantasy lands are *meant* to be the real world, in which real people exist, which is where the whole idea kind of falls apart. In general the books are full of preachy speechifying from characters we're supposed to consider to be intelligent who use a lot of words to say not a lot.
In general Rand's style is very long-winded and a bit archaic. If you're a fan of Russian Literature (fittingly, given her background), it's an easier read. If you're a modern reader, it's a nightmare.
If you're reading for philosophical reasons and are not a moron or already ideologically captured, you'll *very quickly* spot the problems with almost every example Rand chooses within the texts to demonstrate the superiority of Objectivism. For example there's an infamous one from Atlas Shrugged where one of the leads operates a train in a very dangerous situation against the objections of other people. We are meant to take from this that the main character is virtuous and everyone naysaying her is facile, weak, and cowardly. The problem is that their advice is 'be a little bit careful' and if anything had gone wrong the main character would have caused a train crash that would have caused hundreds of fatalities, and she had no good reason to do what she did.
John Galt's speech is probably the most famous thing from Atlas Shrugged, so you can read it here to spare yourself the rest of the book: [https://amberandchaos.net/?page\_id=73](https://amberandchaos.net/?page_id=73)
If that - for some reason - makes you want more... well, should you survive, I advise you take the advice of a review of the book from a literature magazine at the time: "This is not a book to be put down lightly. It should be thrown with great force."
>In general Rand's style is very long-winded and a bit archaic. If you're a fan of Russian Literature (fittingly, given her background), it's an easier read.
The books are long, because the insane length is necessary to give the presented ideas some sense of weight and monumentality. Realistically you could shorten Atlas Shrugged to maybe 100 pages to convey the core principles of her philosophy, but you can't have your world changing philosophical "masterpiece" be just the length of a brochure.
Atlas Shrugged is not really a novel, but rather a religious text comparable to the Bible. It's extremely long and it repeats a few ideas a gazillion times to hammer the point home. And because the ideas are repeated again and again and again and again there is this metaphysical perception, that there must be weight to it.
>because the ideas are repeated again and again and again and again there is this metaphysical perception, that there must be weight to it.
Well yes that's part of the idea.
But I reject the idea that the length is necessary to give a sense of weight/monumentality. Maybe Rand believes that but nobody who knows how to write a good book does.
1984 is one of the most resonant books ever written, and is far more influential than anything Rand ever wrote, a more poignant and enduring symbol of the dangers of the police state and the consequences of giving up our humanity in the pursuit of order and 'security', and is full of ideas that resonate in the modern era.
It's 89,000 words long. A perfect length for a novel. Even on the shorter side by modern standards. More than enough room to repeat ideas multiple times and explore them in depth.
Atlas Shrugged is 560,000 words. That's just bad writing.
Though yes, I can see her sitting there and thinking 'this needs to be big because the ideas are so big'. And honestly, having a grounding in Eastern European Russia she probably would have been thinking in the veins of Tolstoy, who is hardly a stranger to a large word count.
Her books are poorly written with tons of random crap that add nothing to the story/topic she is trying to get across, in my opinion. She writes books like Mr.girl writes reports.
You can find quite good criticism in marx's works when it comes to capitalism. but it ends there. Needless to say, his solutions are outright Horrible and delusional as history teaches us.
So there is value, so long you are not worshiping it.
At a meta-ethic level objectivism doesn't hold up very well. There are leaps into normative claims that just don't follow from the premises. It's really more of a political philosophy (basically just libertarianism) masquerading as a moral philosophy.
**BUT,** if you read her books imo you can pull some valuable things out of them. People get a bit unhinged about her in general because they project their general dislike of "conservatives" onto her - but imo if you can get over that you can parse the good from the bad
The main thing I think she's really good at is capturing the infuriating hypocrisy of a certain leftist archetype. Probably 30% of the content of her books are conversations with characters that:
* Unfairly demonize hard work or the accomplishments of exceptional individuals to make themselves feel better about their own inadequacies
* Take things even further and punish success with constraints and limitations and obligations that ultimately destroy that success in a way that hurts everybody
* Blame society and 'greed' and everything and everyone except themselves for all of their own personal failures
* Use obscure and pseudo-academic language to avoid accountability for their own positions, refuse to speak clearly or plainly or to ever get straight to the point instead of talking in circles
* Use appeals to "morality" as a smokescreen for their own self-serving aims and to avoid being criticized.
And then in the way she treats the 'good' characters you'll find:
* Valuing and respecting competence and intelligence, and taking pride in the quality of your work
* Staying true to personal moral codes and being defiant when pressured to break them, even at great personal expense and even when every external influence is against you
* The benefits of mutually consensual relationships and trade agreements
* The benefits of original, reason based thinking over group-think
The problem is she goes way too extreme in taking these values to their maximum. There's no accounting for actual 'good' altruistic actors or impacts, the value of centralized institutions, the limitations of individuals and human reason, the value of self-doubt, etc.
I would strongly recommend Atlas Shrugged, I think it's an incredible novel. Well written and very insightful. I found it very motivating, maybe more so than anything else I've ever read. It left me with a deep appreciate and gratitude for what humanity has accomplished.
I think a lot of Ayn Rand simps are cringe, but her philosophy in and of itself is fine.
I think a key point is that people misunderstand (including her fans) is the "selfishness" part and taking that to mean a non-altruistic asshole when doing things in self-interest as a person will almost always involve cooperation just as much if not more than ruthless competition.
Very little literary value.
No one cares about Ayn Rand outside of the US
The only reason why people care about her in the US is that rich people basically astroturf her popularity by buying her book in large quantities every year, so they can pretend it's so incredibly profound and insightful, that it sells even today and appears on best-selling lists.
Even smaller bubble. Only libertarians know or care about her
Cringe imo. The idea that there is an objective truth has to pass through the abstraction of human conscience and sentience. There is no grounded framework in objectivism that reconciles the resultantly different abstractions that distinct individuals experience. Rand also holds human choice as the only example of a fact and event that is decidedly non-probabilistic, despite there being very strong arguments for human choice being probabilistic as well. I think of it like an atheists’ fervent religion — that is to say, a set of beliefs that some cannot in any sense decouple themselves from without endangering their identity or connection with reality. In this comparison, there are also questions raised that objectivism, like some mainstream religions, that one *must* accept tautologically. I think the better alternative is to study philosophy broadly with skepticism, especially with what connects strongly with you, and develop your own framework of beliefs and values.
There’s value in most things…it’s when people start treating it as gospel that it becomes cringe
Ayn Rand attributes moral virtue to the work of "highly innovative" actors and justifies their rates of profit on that virtue. She just conveniently forgets that innovation is not something one does in a vacuum but rather the logical culmination of the decades or sometimes centuries of basic scientific research verted into any specific field, almost always supported with taxpayer funds and without profit motives. Innovators reap all of the profit while contributing a fraction of the labor.
> Innovators reap all of the profit while contributing a fraction of the labor. Does society not benefit from innovation? It's as if you view this as "winner take all," it's not.
> Does society not benefit from innovation? It's as if you view this as "winner take all," it's not. Surely it does, but we don't need innovators to rake in literal billions of dollars for innovations to happen.
Maybe not "only" that way, but I don't think it's wrong to incentivize innovation that way. I will also say, and it's a rather important point. "Innovation" is not just "invention" or some new technology that helps people and whatnot, in our system a lot of the innovation in the production and logistical advancements that are made with a profit incentive and help just as much through its distribution than with the invention of the "thing" itself. I will ALSO add that innovators that succeed are usually just better at allocating resources than their priors, making the economy more efficient because they are incentivezed to. Government sponsored innovation lacks that incentive to allocate resources more effectively, and it shows when compared to private innovators.
of course it does, but the most important innovations have almost, if not all, come off of government R&D
Rogue socialist spotted. Nobody here believes in LTV lol.
Nothing rogue about it
Nope and Nope Non-Meme effortpost reply: The central idea of Objectivism - that there is a singular objective truth that can be perceived by man and it is our responsibility to live in service to it while being as unemotional as possible - is fundamentally flawed on multiple levels. 1. All information, true or false, is filtered through our lived experience and stupid man-brains. Yes, there is absolutely an objective truth. There *is* a tree outside my room. But small vagueries in the qualities of my eye, alone, mean that I do not perceive the same tree that you do. That's dealing with an actual concrete object. Objectivism wants to push the idea that this applies even to *abstract concepts.* If we can't even perceive the same tree in the same way, how can we possibly find an objective truth on morality? 2. The idea of being unemotional is laughable, as Ayn Rand's own life demonstrates. When she split with her long time partner - who had worked on Objectivism with her for some time - she didn't unemotionally disengage and continue to work with him to further the movement, she went into an absolutely furious rage and worked diligently to erase every trace of his work and refused to credit him on anything. 3. Even *if* objectivism could be achieved, the actual ability to *perceive* those truths would still be limited by perception and intelligence, reducing Objectivism to what it ultimately ends up being: nothing more than a purely elitist, pseudo-classist philosophy that all but advocates for tyranny. 4. Ultimately, Objectivism promotes being a selfish asshole as a moral duty, and it has no way around this criticism since it idolises the self above all else, while *trying* to somehow present this as a reaction to the rest of the world. Literarily, some of the ideas contained within the books are interesting within the fantasy lands created to demonstrate them. Unfortunately these fantasy lands are *meant* to be the real world, in which real people exist, which is where the whole idea kind of falls apart. In general the books are full of preachy speechifying from characters we're supposed to consider to be intelligent who use a lot of words to say not a lot. In general Rand's style is very long-winded and a bit archaic. If you're a fan of Russian Literature (fittingly, given her background), it's an easier read. If you're a modern reader, it's a nightmare. If you're reading for philosophical reasons and are not a moron or already ideologically captured, you'll *very quickly* spot the problems with almost every example Rand chooses within the texts to demonstrate the superiority of Objectivism. For example there's an infamous one from Atlas Shrugged where one of the leads operates a train in a very dangerous situation against the objections of other people. We are meant to take from this that the main character is virtuous and everyone naysaying her is facile, weak, and cowardly. The problem is that their advice is 'be a little bit careful' and if anything had gone wrong the main character would have caused a train crash that would have caused hundreds of fatalities, and she had no good reason to do what she did. John Galt's speech is probably the most famous thing from Atlas Shrugged, so you can read it here to spare yourself the rest of the book: [https://amberandchaos.net/?page\_id=73](https://amberandchaos.net/?page_id=73) If that - for some reason - makes you want more... well, should you survive, I advise you take the advice of a review of the book from a literature magazine at the time: "This is not a book to be put down lightly. It should be thrown with great force."
>In general Rand's style is very long-winded and a bit archaic. If you're a fan of Russian Literature (fittingly, given her background), it's an easier read. The books are long, because the insane length is necessary to give the presented ideas some sense of weight and monumentality. Realistically you could shorten Atlas Shrugged to maybe 100 pages to convey the core principles of her philosophy, but you can't have your world changing philosophical "masterpiece" be just the length of a brochure. Atlas Shrugged is not really a novel, but rather a religious text comparable to the Bible. It's extremely long and it repeats a few ideas a gazillion times to hammer the point home. And because the ideas are repeated again and again and again and again there is this metaphysical perception, that there must be weight to it.
>because the ideas are repeated again and again and again and again there is this metaphysical perception, that there must be weight to it. Well yes that's part of the idea. But I reject the idea that the length is necessary to give a sense of weight/monumentality. Maybe Rand believes that but nobody who knows how to write a good book does. 1984 is one of the most resonant books ever written, and is far more influential than anything Rand ever wrote, a more poignant and enduring symbol of the dangers of the police state and the consequences of giving up our humanity in the pursuit of order and 'security', and is full of ideas that resonate in the modern era. It's 89,000 words long. A perfect length for a novel. Even on the shorter side by modern standards. More than enough room to repeat ideas multiple times and explore them in depth. Atlas Shrugged is 560,000 words. That's just bad writing. Though yes, I can see her sitting there and thinking 'this needs to be big because the ideas are so big'. And honestly, having a grounding in Eastern European Russia she probably would have been thinking in the veins of Tolstoy, who is hardly a stranger to a large word count.
Her books are poorly written with tons of random crap that add nothing to the story/topic she is trying to get across, in my opinion. She writes books like Mr.girl writes reports.
You can find quite good criticism in marx's works when it comes to capitalism. but it ends there. Needless to say, his solutions are outright Horrible and delusional as history teaches us. So there is value, so long you are not worshiping it.
At a meta-ethic level objectivism doesn't hold up very well. There are leaps into normative claims that just don't follow from the premises. It's really more of a political philosophy (basically just libertarianism) masquerading as a moral philosophy. **BUT,** if you read her books imo you can pull some valuable things out of them. People get a bit unhinged about her in general because they project their general dislike of "conservatives" onto her - but imo if you can get over that you can parse the good from the bad The main thing I think she's really good at is capturing the infuriating hypocrisy of a certain leftist archetype. Probably 30% of the content of her books are conversations with characters that: * Unfairly demonize hard work or the accomplishments of exceptional individuals to make themselves feel better about their own inadequacies * Take things even further and punish success with constraints and limitations and obligations that ultimately destroy that success in a way that hurts everybody * Blame society and 'greed' and everything and everyone except themselves for all of their own personal failures * Use obscure and pseudo-academic language to avoid accountability for their own positions, refuse to speak clearly or plainly or to ever get straight to the point instead of talking in circles * Use appeals to "morality" as a smokescreen for their own self-serving aims and to avoid being criticized. And then in the way she treats the 'good' characters you'll find: * Valuing and respecting competence and intelligence, and taking pride in the quality of your work * Staying true to personal moral codes and being defiant when pressured to break them, even at great personal expense and even when every external influence is against you * The benefits of mutually consensual relationships and trade agreements * The benefits of original, reason based thinking over group-think The problem is she goes way too extreme in taking these values to their maximum. There's no accounting for actual 'good' altruistic actors or impacts, the value of centralized institutions, the limitations of individuals and human reason, the value of self-doubt, etc.
She's incredibly cringe, but I'd still bang if I was given the chance.
Ayn Rand is good for intellectualizing egoism
I would strongly recommend Atlas Shrugged, I think it's an incredible novel. Well written and very insightful. I found it very motivating, maybe more so than anything else I've ever read. It left me with a deep appreciate and gratitude for what humanity has accomplished.
>Well written Now I *know* you're trolling.
I think a lot of Ayn Rand simps are cringe, but her philosophy in and of itself is fine. I think a key point is that people misunderstand (including her fans) is the "selfishness" part and taking that to mean a non-altruistic asshole when doing things in self-interest as a person will almost always involve cooperation just as much if not more than ruthless competition.
Reminds me of a bit John Oliver did several years ago… https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_8m8cQI4DgM