Who is Ayn Rand and what is Randism?

[Red Future]

I got the impression she is some sort of libertarian but don't really understand what exactly Randism and her views are ...is it some sort of proto-capitalist anti state Libertarianism ?:confused:

I am from the UK and so somewhat unfamiliar with libertarians.

[MattShizzle]

She was an idiot. Basically her views were those of the most extreme tea-party people today. She died decades ago. She was against ANY sort of help for the needy, any government regulation of business, etc.

[CHE with an AK]

http://www.revleft.com/vb/atlas-shrugged-while-t159148/index.html

:)

[Tommy4ever]

http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?q=ayn+rand+ugly+face&um=1&hl=en&biw=1280&bih=607&tbm=isch&tbnid=G5234UFN_A8QPM:&imgrefurl=http://exiledonline.com/atlas-shrieked-why-ayn-rands-right-wing-followers-are-scarier-than-the-manson-family-and-the-gruesome-story-of-the-serial-killer-who-stole-ayn-rands-heart/&docid=T9mfmG3nQbb9EM&w=480&h=360&ei=-05ETveEGoOq8QOGrbzsBQ&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=743&vpy=257&dur=469&hovh=194&hovw=259&tx=103&ty=69&page=1&tbnh=147&tbnw=176&start=0&ndsp=17&ved=1t:429,r:9,s:0http://i1211.photobucket.com/albums/cc433/ATTACK77/ayn-rand21.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivism_%28Ayn_Rand%29http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?q=ayn+rand+ugly+face&um=1&hl=en&biw=1280&bih=607&tbm=isch&tbnid=G5234UFN_A8QPM:&imgrefurl=http://exiledonline.com/atlas-shrieked-why-ayn-rands-right-wing-followers-are-scarier-than-the-manson-family-and-the-gruesome-story-of-the-serial-killer-who-stole-ayn-rands-heart/&docid=T9mfmG3nQbb9EM&w=480&h=360&ei=-05ETveEGoOq8QOGrbzsBQ&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=743&vpy=257&dur=469&hovh=194&hovw=259&tx=103&ty=69&page=1&tbnh=147&tbnw=176&start=0&ndsp=17&ved=1t:429,r:9,s:0

[CHE with an AK]

http://www.buffalobeast.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/rand-v-jesus1.jpg

[Ilyich]

I do not understand philosophy very well, but I believe that objectivism is the thought that everything exists in its true form outside the human consciousness. I am not sure how this relates to her right libertarianism.

[L.A.P.]

I do not understand philosophy very well, but I believe that objectivism is the thought that everything exists in its true form outside the human consciousness. I am not sure how this relates to her right libertarianism.

If you want to understand philosophy, I don't think objectivism will leave a very good taste in your mouth. After all the time I spent trying to understand her philosophy, I just realized it's the most incoherent shit excuse for a "philosophical theory". She is literally the worst philosopher to ever walk the Earth. Seriously.

[Rooster]

Basically, Randoids split things into being objective and subjective (seemingly at random). All subjective things are usually called idealistic. They add timeless elements to objective things when it comes to humanity like capitalism has always existed and human nature is one of greed and paranoia and stuff. Objective things is stuff that is outside of human conciousness or can be measured scientifically or something. Concepts like good and evil are subjective hence aren't real and hence should be done away with. Politically, they want to have no government influence on anything and want the market to run everything. They don't like collective bargaining either or democracy in the form of mass democracy because it's against human nature or something. They think these things impede capitalism and they believe that true capitalism has never existed, that it's being held back by governments, that if only they were allowed to just be who they want to be then everyone would be happy and rich and if you weren't then you just weren't trying hard enough.

[Weezer]

Some Russian lady obsessed with a serial killer. (http://www.alternet.org/story/145819/ayn_rand,_hugely_popular_author_and_inspiration_to _right-wing_leaders,_was_a_big_admirer_of_serial_killer?p age=entire)

Her philosophy is and always be irrelevant in the real world, her philosophy solely exists in the minds of her zombies and the places of the Internet in which they dwell.

[Reznov]

Some Russian lady obsessed with a serial killer. (http://www.alternet.org/story/145819/ayn_rand,_hugely_popular_author_and_inspiration_to _right-wing_leaders,_was_a_big_admirer_of_serial_killer?p age=entire)

Her philosophy is and always be irrelevant in the real world, her philosophy solely exists in the minds of her zombies and the places of the Internet in which they dwell.

Just a tad bit ironic.

[Seresan]

I read one of her books once... It hurt me morally to do so, even though at the time I didn't even really know what communism is. Randism appeared too selfish for me to even bother with, so as soon as I finished Anthem I stopped thinking about her theories.

Suffice to say, the main plot of it was the word "I".

[Tim Cornelis]

Objectivism has four cornerstones:

1) Egoist ethics
2) Laissez-faire capitalism and minarchism
3) Objective reality (A=A)
4) Reason and rationality

She contributed to none of these principles significantly and most of it was already said before her. All she did was take a few principles joined them together and gave it a new name--much like Frankenstein.

Platitude sums it up.

[Blackburn]

Ayn Rand detested Libertarians. She described them as monstrous people. Yet today the modern internet warrior Right Libertarian worships her ideology.

[Bardo]

Pampered princess who didn't understand that the poor aren't poor by choice.

Also she was an obsessive anti-communist even though the Russian revolution opened universities to women allowing her to be among the first group of women to enroll into her university.

[Commissar Rykov]

Objectivism is nothing more than a pseudo-intellectual attempt at justifying being an asshole and exploiter of your fellow humans. Only Rand and her crazed followers even think of her as a philosopher.

[Dzerzhinsky's Ghost]

Ayn Rand: ugly cheerleader for world capital.
Randism: cult.
Objectivist: fancy way of saying arrogant prick.

[AnonymousOne]

I got the impression she is some sort of libertarian but don't really understand what exactly Randism and her views are ...is it some sort of proto-capitalist anti state Libertarianism ?:confused:

I am from the UK and so somewhat unfamiliar with libertarians.

She's weird.

Politically: She's essentially a Minarchist (the lowest amount of government possible without losing the army, the courts, and the police [all the things needed to defend private property]). She's in love with Capitalism, calling it the only moral system in the world.

Philisophically:
She goes through this thing about how things exist and we can truly percieve them, the world is real etc. Reason as the only way to determine existence and percieve reality. (We're relatively okay so far, minus her random denunciation of materialism for some reason) She also hates Kant, calling him the most evil man in history (after the holocaust btw)

Where it breaks down is where we start discussing the nature of man, she claims that man's moral and ethical goal is survival, and then she bases everything else off of that without justifying why that's the case. Further more, even accepting that on face, that's still no justification of why that means be a dick to everyone.

A good way to get familiar with her views is this site:

http://aynrandlexicon.com/

Pick a topic and you'll learn about her naive and misguided views on it.

[CAleftist]

Objectivism is to philosophy as Scientology is to religion.

[AnonymousOne]

Objectivism is to philosophy as Scientology is to religion.

Correction, Objectivism is a religion.

[CAleftist]

Correction, Objectivism is a religion.

You're right, my mistake.

[RED DAVE]

I wrote this many years ago, and I posted it in one form or another every once in awhile. Apologies of you've read it.

Anyway:


Sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s two similar books were published. One was Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand and the other was Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland. The former is an immensely long (I think it's longer than War and Peace), silly book by a crack-pot, philosopher-novelist. The latter is a late-Enlightenment picaresque dirty novel more commonly known as Fanny Hill.

Both are stroke books. Both appeal to the feverish sensibilities of 17-year-old males and not very sophisticated ones at that. (Sophisticated guys back then were reading Crime and Punishment and de Sade's novels.) Anyone who takes Ayn Rand's book (or the rest of her work) seriously is still engaging in a wank, whether political, philosophical, literary or economic (this last variety is currently quite popular, endless porn on the Internet notwithstanding). Anyone using Cleland's book for what it was obvious written for is engaged in an honest act.

For readers much past 17, neither book has much merit. But both are good for some kind of a jerk-off, should you choose to indulge. I confess to have wasted a few hours when I was young and foolish trying to read Atlas Shrugged. Its style places it somewhere around the average woman's magazine fiction of its day such as appeared in Woman's Home Companion. I gave it up after about page 25. Fanny Hill was a more constant companion when I was still too uptight to approach the opposite sex.

No one has ever taken Cleland's book seriously (although any book banned for 200 years can't be all bad). But, incredibly, people did and do take Ayn Rand so. I saw her once at NYU, about 1962. She was a shrill, unfortunately mean-looking woman (her photographs don't do her justice: she looked like the Wicked Witch of the West's ugly sister). She was not well received politically when she dismissed the Civil Rights Movement as a violation of the right of employers to discriminate!

Nor was her fervent advocacy of the cause of some GE executives just jailed for price fixing on a massive scale received with much sympathy, nor was her complicity with McCarthyism, which was noted by speakers from the floor. A few months later her boy-toy Nathaniel Branden made an appearance. He was better looking, but his presentation of the philosophy of Objectivism didn't exactly set off fireworks.

Nowadays, Rand's various works are somewhat the rage. As long as self-indulgence, selfishness, racism and other neat stuff is popular, Rand will be read. How can you argue with Alan Greenspan's favorite scribe? Bill Gates probably has a copy of Atlas Shrugged by his bed like Stalin had a copy of Machiavelli.

Me, if I want to go that route I prefer Fanny Hill.RED DAVE

[Os Cangaceiros]

I was never very interested in philosophy, so I'm not sure what her views are in relation to more abstract questions, but her position on political economy wasn't just false, it was objectively (no pun intended) false. The idea of the "looters" voting themselves into the government and then ransacking the hard-earned wealth of the rich would be fine and all, if not for the fact that it was the rich who in most cases constructed and fine-tuned the legislation regulating them, often to destroy competition and consolidate industry. That's what happened, for example, during the Progressive Era; much of the progressive era reform was intended to 1) impose federal regulations and standards in order to eliminate state-based controls, which were enabling smaller businesses to succeed and had the unfortunate tendency to be more effectively controlled by citizens of the state, and 2) to more effectively compete in foreign export markets, esp. Europe (this is what happened with meat packing regulations, for example). Andrew Carnegie and Elbert Gary even endorsed the idea that the federal government should fix prices in the steel market! (a proposal that a Democratic commision called "semi-socialistic").

I mean, it's hard to reconcile that with the idea that the wealthy and titans of industry are just the hardworking entrepeuners, constantly put down by the federal government through burdensome regulation, isn't it? And it's obviously not just during the "progressive era"...one can look all through history and see the exact same thing, of the state being largely composed and dominated by capital's "executive class", all the way from America's supposedly "laissez-faire" era (which was anything but) to the present day. A president of Ford becomes Secretary of Defense, a CEO of Halliburton become vice president, Joe Biden's intellectual property task force operates in conjunction with Disney and the MPAA, Goldman Sachs gets their boy Henry Paulson to the position of Treasury Secretary, the list goes on...

sorry if that seems rambling, I just hate the "Randian" notion of regulation acting as anything other than the collective capitalist laying down some law and order, individual capitalists be damned.

[Metacomet]

http://www.morethings.com/philosophy/ayn_rand/ayn-rand-155.gif

[BE_]

Ayn Rand followers are usually unbelievably annoying and rude.

[Pirx]

Her thinking seems to be inconsistent. If egoism is the highest of all values, than parasites should be her heroes and not to be despised. Just Nietzschean crap – rationalization of egoism and masking a clinical lack of empathy.

[Die Rote Fahne]

I got the impression she is some sort of libertarian but don't really understand what exactly Randism and her views are ...is it some sort of proto-capitalist anti state Libertarianism ?:confused:

I am from the UK and so somewhat unfamiliar with libertarians.
Some welfare queen....seriously though...she took social security cheques...hypocrite.

[CHE with an AK]

Ayn Rand: The New Sociopathic "Heart" of the American Right-wing
s7zwO88nRH8

- Plus you have to love the fact that the only thing Rand got 'right' (her Atheism) is the one thing that the American right ignores about her.

[CHE with an AK]

Ayn Rand's racism - on Israel and the Middle East (1979)
2uHSv1asFvU



Ayn Rand's sexism - on a female President
wpzDdTrw5II



Plus her racist views on Native Americans and "property" are real hypocritically "special" ...


"They (Native Americans) didn't have any rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using. What was it that they were fighting for, when they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their 'right' to keep part of the earth untouched, unused and not even as property, but just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal, or a few caves above it. Any white person who brings the element of civilization has the right to take over this continent."


--- Ayn Rand,
Q and A session at The United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, March 6, 1974

[ZeroNowhere]

Correction, Objectivism is a religion.
No, it isn't.

In any case, Rand's ethical philosophy, which I had written an essay on for some course ages ago, consisted mainly of a mixture of ethical egoism (what is right is what is what is in one's self-interest) and rights theory (morality is based on people having inviolable rights). Of course, this can be a fairly awkward combination, given that the first is consequentialist, while the latter isn't, so that essentially on the one hand one is supposed to act in one's self-interest, but on the other hand one is supposed to unconditionally respect rights irrespective of one's self-interest. Rand essentially seemed to want to pick and choose when to actually apply egoism, so that, other than the arbitrariness inherent to rights theory in general, she also adopted a self-contradictory viewpoint insofar as the principle of inviolable rights contradicts the principle behind ethical egoism.

Otherwise, egoism by itself states that what is good is that everybody act in their own self-interest. Of course, in capitalist society, this can be problematic, as after all a capitalist's self-interest consists of having workers acting in their self-interest, while conversely a worker's consists of the capitalist acting against their self-interest and surrendering profits for wages. If one person's self-interest involves having others act in their self-interest and against their own self-interests, then on the one hand they are supposed to execute this, because it's acting in their own self-interest, but on the other hand it's also supposed to be bad, because it leads to people acting against their self-interests.

As such, Rand, to be consistent with her advocacy of capitalism, was forced into the fairly peculiar position of attacking workers precisely for acting in their own self-interests. In order to do so, it was necessary to import several extraneous considerations into her egoism, such as arbitrarily positing a certain form of life (as opposed to that of the 'parasitical' workers and government, whose lives are not really in self-interest) to be in actual fact everybody's 'self-interest', such that it excludes 'parasitism' and so on more or less just because. Capitalists, as the class which represents capitalist society, were more or less posited as acting in the abstract social interest, and hence consistently with everybody's interest, ultimately.

This also necessitated the heightening of capitalists to paragons of reason (on the basis, ultimately, of the division of mental and physical labour), as well as the importation of several 'rights'. Capitalism had to be presented as in actual fact having a real 'general interest', so that ultimately what we have is just class collaborationism, with the capitalists as defenders of the social interest, and the brains behind it.

In this, she's actually quite similar, ultimately, to Hegel in terms of aim; namely, to display capitalism as the true existence of humanity and reason, as a properly human society, so as to also proclaim it the highest development of history. Hegel, of course, was more insightful on this matter, and quite accurately viewed the state as the embodiment of the general interest, and of reason, although as Marx noted the state is characterized as much by the fact that these are illusory, and that it is only the existence of reason in irrational form. Ultimately, all of these views are superceded by the Marxian view of alienation, which gains palpable reality in capitalist crisis (representing the alienation of subject from object, the individual from the social wealth, etc., so that the supercession of this divide eventually must go beyond capitalism itself, whether in the smaller-scale form of looting or the larger one of the expropriation of the expropriators).

Rand's philosophizing isn't awful, although it is generally quite second-rate. Some of her points concerning reason are decent, while some of her philosophy is distinctly arbitrary. Of course, most of the former are generally already present back in 'The Republic', so not quite novel, but they're decent and probably show more knowledge on the subject than most Revlefters would. She is more advanced than many egoists, including many of her supporters, in that she does attempt to reconcile the individual and social interest (and it is indeed the case that the action of people in their self-interest is a necessary moment in ethics, although only one side of things; this is somewhat similar to Plato's point that knowledge is a hexis, and hence not something which can be purely imposed from without), hence transcending a one-sided form of egoism. However, ultimately she, in the first place, starts from the viewpoint of the abstract, atomized individual, and hence can't really transcend this one-sidedness, and in the second place can't really make this reconciliation of both sides go beyond assertion.

That is, she sees that it is necessary for her egoism that people's interests do not conflict, and indeed claims to be against the sacrifice of others to oneself as much as the sacrifice of oneself to others (and the one is the corollary of the other, of course), but can't really actually carry out this necessity. Of course, this is baseless in capitalism, which is based on the one-sided altruism of the worker on the one hand, and the one-sided egoism of capital on the other (not to say, of course, that capitalists are capitalists because they are greedy any more than workers are workers because they are altruistic.) The right of property and action in self-interest undergoes a dialectical inversion to property over others' labour and the corresponding altruism, and hence reveals itself to be one-sided.

Ultimately, she finds herself in the same position as Ricardo, who, in order to pretend that crises of overproduction could not take place under capitalism, had to pretend that capitalism was communism, or rather forget that it wasn't. The task of capitalist ideology is to show that in actual fact capitalism is the realization of reason, and the harmony of society with the individual, which generally involves associating reason with the capitalist class as the 'ruling idea' of society. Marx, conversely, locates reason and humanity in concrete practice, and hence ultimately recognizes that capitalism has not only the aforementioned morality, but in actual fact gives rise to the self-interest and morality of the proletariat as something necessarily opposed to capitalism, and hence that capitalism passes from rationality to irrationality, and hence, so to speak, ceases to be actual (ie. its inherent divisions of subject and object, individual and society, productive forces and relations of production and so on come to the fore).

Of course, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and ultimately so long as capitalism is presupposed as the highest form of society, and inherently harmonious, the necessity of overproduction crisis (or even its possibility), and all else that suggests capitalism's transient nature, can have no real explanation in theory. If anything, capitalism could only be undermined by external factors, such as in Ricardo's theory of the falling rate of profit, or alternatively bad personalities, etc.

[RED DAVE]

Even a loathsome right winger like Murray Rothbard couldn't stand her.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard23.html

The randroids formed a kind of political cult around Rand in the early 60s in New York. (Rand lived for many years on 34th Street, near the Empire State Building.) The men were a sort of hostile, intense lot. But the women around Rand tended towards big hats, capes and cigarette holders a la their hero. Both the women and them men would show up occasionally at socialist meetings, where they got creamed in debates.

RED DAVE

[AnonymousOne]

No, it isn't.

Objectivism is a dogmatic, fanatical, absolutist, anti-empirical, people-condemning creed which is based on the assumption that some higher power or order of the universe demands that their views are right and that all serious dissenters to their views are for all time wrong.

That sounds pretty religious to me, not theistic, but like the Tao for assholes.

[RED DAVE]

[L]ke the Tao for assholes.Brilliant.

RED DAVE

[Metacomet]

like the Tao for assholes.


That may be one of the best quotes ever.

[Dzerzhinsky's Ghost]

Ayn Rand: The New Sociopathic "Heart" of the American Right-wing



s7zwO88nRH8

- Plus you have to love the fact that the only thing Rand got 'right' (her Atheism) is the one thing that the American right ignores about her.

I simply can't trust her shifty eyes, it's like watching some evil Russian witch who is about to give some young maiden a poisoned apple.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-q1diMtp36NQ/TWR75S5M9WI/AAAAAAAAAGA/eixcBd5J65U/s1600/WitchApple+Snow+White+Disney.jpg

Coincidence? I think not.

[Ocean Seal]

Essentially Ayn Rand is a preacher for the rich. Saying that their actions are fully moral and justifiable. And private charity solves everything!!!!!!!!
And also fuck everyone else, seriously fuck them. Fuck everyone who isn't a crude authoritarian plant manager. Dumb things, more dumb things.

Quite honestly I can take Rothbard seriously, or some of the libertarians in their philosophy but Rand is just dumb.

[RedSunsZenith]

Her thinking seems to be inconsistent. If egoism is the highest of all values, than parasites should be her heroes and not to be despised. Just Nietzschean crap – rationalization of egoism and masking a clinical lack of empathy.

Rand was not a Nietzschean.

[hatzel]

Rand was not a Nietzschean.

She was, at one point, a Nietzschean, inasmuch as she was keen on Nietzsche's ideas and wrote positively on him during her early career. But she later turned away, though certain elements of Nietzsche's philosophy clearly remained present in her thinking. Still, let's not get into setting up some kind of Church of Nietzsche where we declare who does and doesn't deserve the name...

The issue here is more Pirx's use of the phrase "Nietzschean crap"...as an insult, no less! Shocking oversight! :crying:

[TheSocialistGadfly]

So Ayn Rand states that the main purpose of one's life is to pursue his own self-interest without any regards to other people and that a free and un-dictated market should be promoted.

Wouldn't that be the scariest thing ever?
Free market + Selfish people?

[Seresan]

So Ayn Rand states that the main purpose of one's life is to pursue his own self-interest without any regards to other people and that a free and un-dictated market should be promoted.

Wouldn't that be the scariest thing ever?
Free market + Selfish people?

I'm crying blood at the very thought... I prefer the state of the world in "1984" to that crazy mess.

[Yuppie Grinder]

I once tried reading Atlus Shrugged without knowing what it was about because a friend reccomended it. I made it about 20 pages in and never spoke to that person again.

[runequester]

"the rich should get richer because I deserve it, and everything else can get fucked"

It's pretty much the modern american conservative playbook