7% of American adults think chocolate milk comes from brown cows...

[h4rm0ny]

I do worry about you with your frequent quoting of Ayn Rand

It's nice to be worried about. You're also not the first person to express concern about my liking for Ayn Rand. Someone sent me a cartoon about her implying she was corrupting my mind!

I kind of feel a kinship with her. Neither of us are from particularly well-off backgrounds (though I can't compete with Communist Russia!), she intellectualised everything to the point that others considered it unhealthy, we are both staunch believers in capitalism and both despise the governments of our day (She would have hated Trump even more than I do). We are both also terrible writers and pedants.

I feel she's often misunderstood. Here are a selection of statements by Ayn Rand. I'm curious as to which, given your dislike of her, you disagree with.

"A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others."

"Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities."

"The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me."

"Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men."

"Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins."

"Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future."

"I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."

"Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver."

"Government 'help' to business is just as disastrous as government persecution... the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off." (Ayn would have been very much against the bank bailouts. She would have spit feathers at the idea and cheerfully applauded seeing Lehman Brothers fall)

"Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth, the man who would make his fortune no matter where he started."

"Rights are not a matter of numbers - and there can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob."

"The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws."

"What matters is not how much money someone has, but how they got it."

"If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject."

Do the above resonate with you? Or fill you with revulsion? I'm curious.

EDIT: We do, however, differ in she always uses "Men" where "people" is what should be written. I'd like to put that down to the time period in which she wrote, but I fear it's more a product of her sexual fetishes.

 

[Vonhelmet]

Any person might say any number of things in isolation that it's easy to agree with.

And in any case, of those, I'd disagree with her rejection of altruism.

 

[Freakbro]

I don't have time to go into it in much depth at the moment, but I was going to say similar to Von. With lack of context individual statements of hers can be perfectly palatable, though there are a few in that list that make my skin crawl!

It's just taken as a whole I find her absolute intellectual reductionism to be an anathema to my personal ethos. She is like Dolph on steroids, and I find her Objectivism/extreme Libertarian attitude to be fundamentally flawed to how human beings and society should be and verging on being the thoughts of a sociopath. Probably her 30 years of amphetamine abuse helped in that

I liked the comment from her biographer that she is the gateway drug to right wing politics

 

[h4rm0ny]

I'll just post a single reply on this as it's getting off-topic. Although given the topic is chocolate milk hopefully it's not utterly vital that there be no tangents.

Any person might say any number of things in isolation that it's easy to agree with.

And in any case, of those, I'd disagree with her rejection of altruism.

To do so, one must understand what she meant by altruism. Her childhood was in the Soviet Union and she saw some bad things done for the sake of "altruism". Being robbed by a totalitarian regime to enforce "altruism" is going to make an impression. To support the contention that what you think she means is not the same as what she means, I'll point out that she supported charitable giving both in principle and in practice with donations. What she was very much against was state-enforced redistribution of wealth. Not helping others per se.

I don't have time to go into it in much depth at the moment, but I was going to say similar to Von. With lack of context individual statements of hers can be perfectly palatable, though there are a few in that list that make my skin crawl!

It's just taken as a whole I find her absolute intellectual reductionism to be an anathema to my personal ethos. She is like Dolph on steroids, and I find her Objectivism/extreme Libertarian attitude to be fundamentally flawed to how human beings and society should be and verging on being the thoughts of a sociopath. Probably her 30 years of amphetamine abuse helped in that

I usually find myself agreeing with Dolph's posts. I also dislike the notion that viewing things in a coldly intellectual light is akin to sociopathy. To quote one of my favourite fictional characters of all time: "I've never understood why it should be necessary to become irrational in order to prove that one cares. Or indeed, why it should be necessary to prove it at all."

I liked the comment from her biographer that she is the gateway drug to right wing politics

I like that quote! But I'll also say that if you're talking Right Wing as principle, then sure. But if you're talking Right Wing as actual political factions in US politics then no. As I observed earlier, Ayn Rand would have been violently opposed to the bank bailouts. Which is a Capitalist viewpoint, but not the viewpoint of the American Right. Her "Right Wing" is not the same as the current US Right Wing.

 

[Vonhelmet]

To do so, one must understand what she meant by altruism. Her childhood was in the Soviet Union and she saw some bad things done for the sake of "altruism". Being robbed by a totalitarian regime to enforce "altruism" is going to make an impression. To support the contention that what you think she means is not the same as what she means, I'll point out that she supported charitable giving both in principle and in practice with donations. What she was very much against was state-enforced redistribution of wealth. Not helping others per se.

In which case the quote can not and should not be used in isolation, because it doesn't mean what it says. If knowledge of the context is needed to correctly interpret it then it doesn't stand alone in the manner in which you've quoted it. Moreover, I'm sure it is quoted by people to prove a point in and of itself, at which point it becomes dangerously disingenuous.

 

[h4rm0ny]

In which case the quote can not and should not be used in isolation, because it doesn't mean what it says. If knowledge of the context is needed to correctly interpret it then it doesn't stand alone in the manner in which you've quoted it. Moreover, I'm sure it is quoted by people to prove a point in and of itself, at which point it becomes dangerously disingenuous.

I included it both for humour and to avoid presenting Freakbro with a selection of cherry-picked quotes containing nothing controversial. Of course I picked out quotes I liked but this was an effort to avoid picking out only things Freakbro couldn't quibble with.

 

[Freakbro]

I included it both for humour and to avoid presenting Freakbro with a selection of cherry-picked quotes containing nothing controversial. Of course I picked out quotes I liked but this was an effort to avoid picking out only things Freakbro couldn't quibble with.

Are you doubting my quibbling ability?!? ....and that coming from a pedant too!

 

[h4rm0ny]

Are you doubting my quibbling ability?!? ....and that coming from a pedant too!

Whether or not I doubt your ability to quibble well, let me assure you I have no such doubts about your willingness.

 

[Freakbro]

Whether or not I doubt your ability to quibble well, let me assure you I have no such doubts about your willingness.