Ayn Rand and the evil cult of antisocialist greed

[Elliot Temple]

http://shadow-of-mars.livejournal.com/6059.html?thread=26795

anyone care to comment?

it's so bad i didn't read it all.

-- Elliot Temple
http://beginningofinfinity.com/

[Alan Forrester]

On 21 Apr 2013, at 05:58, Elliot Temple <cu...@curi.us> wrote:

> http://shadow-of-mars.livejournal.com/6059.html?thread=26795
>
> anyone care to comment?
>
> it's so bad i didn't read it all.

That's all right. Neither did he:

> The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are by most accounts (I've read only a few chapters of the latter) terrible, terrible books.


"By most accounts" they are terrible books? Lots of people buy them and claim to like them. Also, why does he hide behind other people. Why not just say: "I read some of Ayn Rand's work and I hated it"?

> But bad as the writing may be, it's the philosophy & the fanbase that makes them really astonishingly horrific. An idealised libertarianism, elevating callous selfishness, ruthless self-interest and a cruel class-based mentality as the highest values for the rational individual.


Rand wasn't a libertarian and didn't have a class-based mentality.

> Laissez-faire ultracapitalism taken to its inhuman, violent, exploitative conclusion. A universe of antisocial egotists who destroy everything and everyone that gets in the way of their mission of conquest, rape and cannibalism of the unfortunates below them in the social scale, enthusiastically blaming the victims all the while with words like "you got where you are by your own efforts alone".


They don't conquer, rape and eat people.

> Randianiasm is the inability to differentiate between healthy self-interest and antisocial greed... as contrasted against healthy human compassion, which is presented as identical to insane surrender of all individuality into the Herd or State.


What's "healthy human compassion"? The good characters in AS and FH sometimes help people but they don't do it out of pity. Like Rearden helping the Wet Nurse after a bunch of thugs shot the Wet Nurse and left him for dead on a slag heap. Rearden helps the Wet Nurse because the Wet Nurse has become a good person.

Also note the medical jargon. Rather than actually argue he just tacks the word "healthy" onto something and expects people to support it.

> How a woman could produce such a supremely evil philosophy makes perfect sense when you consider that she grew up in Lenin's dictatorship.


So this person is a sexist.

> Her libertarianism is an unsophisticated reaction to ultrastatist socialism. The Bolsheviks declared the ethereal ideal of free, equal and happy people sharing the world's capital for mutual enjoyment, yet proceeded to coercively "expropriate" the belongings of everyone in all Russia, creating an authoritarian state which governed every iota of life, eventually installing CCTV in people's showers and abducting many thousands to die horribly in the Gulags. Rand saw this collectivist nightmare begin to unfold and sought to counter it by synthesising a sort of antimatter Marxism...


"Ultrastatist socialism". So he concedes that under the name of socialism many terrible crimes were committed but he still wants to describe his position as socialist.

Would anybody accept this from a Nazi I wonder? "Yeah, sure, Hitler did some bad stuff, but that was just ultrastatist Nazism. I'm the nice kind of Nazi". Also, Nazism is a kind of socialism and yet he doesn't mention that.

> Almost like dialectic gone backward, Objectivism came about. It is best described as antisocialism, for it is both anti-socialist and antisocial-ist.


An unexplained smear. Objectivism didn't consist solely of being opposed to socialism: it said a lot of other stuff about epistemology and metaphysics.

> The capitalist class produces all of the world's wealth, the proles with their unions are ungrateful vampires, the desperate poor with their upturned hats are evil moochers who coerce the righteous rich with their crocodile tears.

Rand doesn't go in for cheap class-baiting. Some of the rich people in the book, like Jim Taggart and Orren Boyle are bad and unproductive. Some of the workers are good, like Owen Kellogg. One of the poor people in the book is better than many of the rich people like Jim Taggart: Cherryl Taggart.

> Christian and socialist preachers of Selflessness are state collectivists in disguise, who ever since that great enemy of the Superman, Marx, began this plague of self-delusional philosophy of "surrender to the herd" have been restlessly robbing the deserving rich and brainwashing weak-minded fools with messages of collectivist self-denial.


Not brainwashing. The people who preach selflessness often succeed in persuading other people of their ideas. This isn't necessarily entirely the fault of the people who are persuaded. See the description of the Wet Nurse's teachers in AS.

The author also seems badly confused. In one sentence he writes:

> Like most cults, the Randians proclaim that the tenets of their moralistic and political philosophy is grounded in Scientific Objective Reality.


A few paragraphs later he writes:

> The extreme amoral philosophy of laissez-faire capitalistic individualism, promoting antisocial greed as a virtue and camaraderie as stupidity and weakness, is nothing new.


How can a philosophy be both amoral and moralistic?

The author also quotes the following equally confused paragraph by Michael Shermer:

> Morality is relative to the moral frame of reference. As long as it is understood that morality is a human construction influenced by human cultures, one can be more tolerant of other human belief systems, and thus other humans. But as soon as a group sets itself up as the final moral arbiter of other people's actions, especially when its members believe they have discovered absolute standards of right and wrong, it marks the beginning of the end of tolerance, and thus reason and rationality. It is this characteristic more than any other that makes a cult, a religion, a nation, or any other group dangerous to individual freedom.


If morality is relative why should anybody care if Rand's philosophy was dangerous to individual freedom? Let's suppose, wrongly, that Rand and all Objectivists want to herd all the anti-capitalists into death camps and slowly torture them. That's just their particular cultural morality.

I don't see much reason to comment on the rest of it since it is all on the same level of confusion and badness.

Alan

[Elliot Temple]

On Apr 22, 2013, at 2:43 PM, Alan Forrester <alanmichae...@googlemail.com> wrote:

>
> On 21 Apr 2013, at 05:58, Elliot Temple <cu...@curi.us> wrote:
>
>> http://shadow-of-mars.livejournal.com/6059.html?thread=26795
>>
>> anyone care to comment?
>>
>> it's so bad i didn't read it all.
>
>
> That's all right. Neither did he:
>
>> The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are by most accounts (I've read only a few chapters of the latter) terrible, terrible books.
>
>
> "By most accounts" they are terrible books? Lots of people buy them and claim to like them. Also, why does he hide behind other people. Why not just say: "I read some of Ayn Rand's work and I hated it"?

yeah

>> The capitalist class produces all of the world's wealth, the proles with their unions are ungrateful vampires, the desperate poor with their upturned hats are evil moochers who coerce the righteous rich with their crocodile tears.
>
> Rand doesn't go in for cheap class-baiting. Some of the rich people in the book, like Jim Taggart and Orren Boyle are bad and unproductive. Some of the workers are good, like Owen Kellogg. One of the poor people in the book is better than many of the rich people like Jim Taggart: Cherryl Taggart.

The bum on the frozen train who Dagny gives a job is another example. He was a much better person than then bulk of the paying customers. Dagny was not prejudiced against poor unemployed bums. She noticed he'd made some effort (e.g. trying to go somewhere else to find work because he couldn't find any where he was before, and the book has a couple more examples) and she judges him on those merits.

Also, from AS:

> She remembered that money inside a man's pocket had the power to turn into confidence inside his mind; she took a hundred-dollar bill from her bag and slipped it into his hand. "As advance on wages," she said.

Dagny is one of the people who helps poor people not be poor anymore. She pays them. She elevates them. She's good for them.

> "Thank you," he said.

Indeed.

> The author also seems badly confused. In one sentence he writes:
>
>> Like most cults, the Randians proclaim that the tenets of their moralistic and political philosophy is grounded in Scientific Objective Reality.

Objectivists are not "Randians".

> A few paragraphs later he writes:
>
>> The extreme amoral philosophy of laissez-faire capitalistic individualism, promoting antisocial greed as a virtue and camaraderie as stupidity and weakness, is nothing new.
>
>
> How can a philosophy be both amoral and moralistic?

People use "amoral" to mean "rejecting some moral ideas I think are important". Idiots.

One way this can happen is if they say "X or Y? this is the moral question of our age!" and then if you reject that particular question they think you're rejecting morality. maybe they don't realize you're trying to replace it with better questions and that some questions can be misconceived.

like with Popper rejecting some of induction's questions and statements of the problem, and people not noticing his replacements.

> The author also quotes the following equally confused paragraph by Michael Shermer:
>
>> Morality is relative to the moral frame of reference.

if all morality is relative to the one "moral frame of reference" then it's all relative to the same thing and therefore not really relative.

it'd be better to just say this "moral frame of reference" -- whatever that refers to -- is a fundamental part of morality itself. and then morality isn't relative anymore, yay.

you can't actually make stuff "relative" by excluding an important part then saying the rest is "relative" to that.

>> As long as it is understood that morality is a human construction influenced by human cultures, one can be more tolerant of other human belief systems, and thus other humans. But as soon as a group sets itself up as the final moral arbiter of other people's actions, especially when its members believe they have discovered absolute standards of right and wrong, it marks the beginning of the end of tolerance, and thus reason and rationality. It is this characteristic more than any other that makes a cult, a religion, a nation, or any other group dangerous to individual freedom.

But if morality is arbitrary, then why be tolerant?

Does he think tolerance is an absolute standard of right and wrong, or not? Should people be tolerant, or not?

> If morality is relative why should anybody care if Rand's philosophy was dangerous to individual freedom?

heh, right. freedom, tolerance, whatever else -- are those true or not? he won't pick.

> Let's suppose, wrongly, that Rand and all Objectivists want to herd all the anti-capitalists into death camps and slowly torture them. That's just their particular cultural morality.
>
> I don't see much reason to comment on the rest of it since it is all on the same level of confusion and badness.

why don't they work on getting less confused instead of publishing bad, confused stuff?

-- Elliot Temple
http://fallibleideas.com/