Alex, I really enjoyed reading your diary, because it was very interesting kind of educating! Btw, I had only heard of "The Fountainhead", but I hadn't realized how significant it was and what was its deeper ideological connotation. So, thanks a lot for the information! Now, I just want to ask you what does "Putzes!" mean?

<shudder>

That's quite an irresistible title for a diary! But I did not believe, when reading it, that it would be about an actual movie project...

I'll confess that I actually enjoyed reading the fountainhead and atlas shrugged even if I never took the underlying philosophy very seriously.

Having known the Soviet Union, I could see what bits of the Russian/Soviet history would trigger her anger and diatribes.

BTW - is it true that Greenspan was her lover for a while?

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

Hmmm.  I just saw Miss Jolie on TV this morning being interviewed by some pathetic excuse for a journalist, who compared her to Laura Bush.  Wow.  If looks could kill...  

Do keep in mind that actors, esp. the best -though I'm not proposing that she is (and Brad just sucks)- accept roles often according to the challenge and visibility of them, not nec. the political message of the piece.  That's why they are actors, they aren't being paid to be themselves...  

I've not read Atlas shrugged, as the thought of doing so makes me want to vomit and that's not really how I like to spend my spare time.  So I don't know the plot, and how much of a statement the director wants to make.  Could it be possible to use it to illustrate what's wrong with this philosophy (if you can call it that...)?  A critique?  Who knows.

And who knows what the expecting couple's motivations are.  Maybe they want to make a ton of money to give to the African children?  Maybe they are hipocrites?  Maybe they aren't even actually going to take the roles but the rumours are an attempt to lure investors?  How do we know?  

Whatever, she's adopting freaking orphans and advocating for impoverished children.  What am I doing, ya know?  

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. -Voltaire

I saw a movie on Ayn Rand's life, called simply "Ayn Rand." It was not the best movie I'd ever seen (quite bad actually), I must say, but I think it offered a very good insight into Rand's life, especially her love affairs, and showed how  her philosophy reflected on her relationship with Nathaniel Branden, and how she ultimately wasn't able to stand by her beliefs. She fell in love with Branden, although he was married and she was as well, and together they managed to convince their spouses that it would be utterly selfish of them if they tried to stand in the way of Rand's and Branden's relationship. They openly asked them for a permission to see each other once a week and have sex together. The spouses were so cornered by their lofty words that they gave in, but were, quite naturally, miserable. This went on for quite some time, until Branden got tired of Rand and  got himself a new lover, one of his young students. Rand absolutely lost it... forget about any objectivism. She behaved like the most cheated-upon and betrayed wife, publicly humiliated Branden (and herself) and made him leave the institution that they worked and taught in. (It might be an interesting subject for Jolie and Pitt, indeed :)). A prime example that principles of such kind are often very difficult to live up to by their creators when they are faced with their powerful emotions.

I do think Rand was nuts... a smart woman but not in the good kind of way.

   

"If you cannot say what you have to say in twenty minutes, you should go away and write a book about it." Lord Brabazon

And then there are those books which come highly recommended by a vast number of seemingly sane and educated people, but turn out to be either loony or borderline evil.

Whittaker Chambers, who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan, made a similar comment in a devastating review he wrote of Atlas Shrug while he was editor at the National Review:

The news about this book seems to me to be that any ordinarily sensible head could not possibly take it seriously, and that, apparently, a good many do. Somebody has called it: "Excruciatingly awful." I find it a remarkably silly book. ... Its story is preposterous.

Incidentally, the review contains a pretty substantial and entertaining analysis of Rand's philosophy, albeit a possibly idiosyncratic and certainly very critical one ("the author has, with vast effort, contrived a simple materialist system, one, intellectually, at about the stage of the oxcart, though without mastering the principle of the wheel").

I was struck by how much much the second to last paragraph of the review reminded me of the current President's administration:

Something of this implication is fixed in the book's dictatorial tone, which is much its most striking feature. Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal. In addition, the mind which finds this tone natural to it shares other characteristics of its type. 1) It consistently mistakes raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before it. 2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked. There are ways of dealing with such wickedness, and, in fact, right reason itself enjoins them. From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: "To a gas chamber -- go!" The same inflexibly self-righteous stance results, too (in the total absence of any saving humor), in odd extravagances of inflection and gesture-that Dollar Sign, for example. At first, we try to tell ourselves that these are just lapses, that this mind has, somehow, mislaid the discriminating knack that most of us pray will warn us in time of the difference between what is effective and firm, and what is wildly grotesque and excessive. Soon we suspect something worse. We suspect that this mind finds, precisely in extravagance, some exalting merit; feels a surging release of power and passion precisely in smashing up the house. A tornado might feel this way, or Carrie Nation.

Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.

Interesting.  I never made it through either book.  I thought they were incredibly boring.  Aren't Pitt and Jolie a bit too mainstream for a Lionsgate flick?  The only film I'm even aware of that the studio was involved with was Fahrenheit 9/11.

Where's your motherf*%&ing flag pin?

to enjoy rand.

i was and did...

now i see it as 'capitalism for dummies'!

stirring scenes of galt surveying with orgasmic pride the smokestacks polluting once pristine valleys....

Peace is not the absence of war -- peace is the absence of fear. Ursula Franklin

...that The Fountainhead was one of my favorite movies.

I was interested in being an architect at the time, and the message of social conformism crushing individual creativity was very real to me, on account in my childhood experience it was actually happening.

That the original author of the story was in fact the next best thing to Satan wasn't really part of my thinking at the age of 10.

That I grew up in the American Southeast, as opposed to some socialist paradise which the Old South most certainly isn't, does not take away from the fact that in some circles, my making the above statement is infamia, an unforgivable sin, and therefore I am by definition evil.

I see diaries like this, I know what the intent is: to counter a grievous and misguided attack on communitarian values by a bright yet alienated woman.

Yet there is as much evil committed in the name of the social as in the name of the individual, and since the collective will, good, whatever is far more often invoked, well, calling it like I see it, I'll take the body count attributed to malicious advocacy of the self over the malicious defense of the commonality any day of the week.

On account the ratio is per my estimate on the order of  1:1,000, at the most favorable to collectivism in its various forms. And in my opinion, far closer to 1:100,000.

No one ever perpetrated a Holocaust, so that individuals may be free. No one ever set loose a pogrom or a lynch mob, to liberate. Just to defense a group, an identity, a commonly held notion of who gets to live and who must die so that the in-crowd may prevail.

One speaks of Americans being influenced. Most are influenced by various forms of defense of the herd far more than defense of individual liberty.

Remind me, then who perpetrated the Holocaust. I do believe it was a society far more in touch and the time -- and now -- with socialist principles.

Yep. I'm quite sure of it now.

Funny, how that sort of thing just...slips under the radar.

Have Keyboard. Will Travel. :)

liking Atlas Shrugged at 12 to 15 y.o.  -- while feeling oppressed by one's homeroom teacher and smothered by the galling mediocrity of middle school -- seems pretty normal to me.  it's a ducky book for selfpitying, bright, bored adolescents stuck in a braindead school system.  kind of a Harry Potter of its day, casting "the less bright than me" as the Muggles.  though few 15 year olds these days, I think, would make it through that monstrous soliloquy of Galt's (the radio speech) about 3/4 of the way through.  yaaaawn.  he made Castro sound terse.

yer, it's a lovely adolescent fantasy.  all the Right Thinking People will be tall and handsome, athletic and brilliant -- the world will be plasticene in their hands once they just move those infernal lower beings  -- ideological peasants! -- outta the way.  the novelistic version of every unpopular kid's late-night reveries:  "and when I grow up I will be beautiful and rich and powerful and then they will all be sorry, so there."  kind of a graphic novel before there were graphic novels, let alone ironic or satirical graphic novels that knew how to mock their own adolescent angst :-)

what used to tie my brain in a knot was how Taggart and Galt swear up and down, on a stack of dollars as it were, that no one should ever serve another or even do an unpaid favour for another... and then she proceeds to cook him breakfast and probably do the washing-up as well :-)  Rand just never could figure out how to reconcile her fantasy of the Domineering Manly Man (and hence the programmatic need for her female protagonist to be Romantically and suitably Dominated and subservient) with her "every person is an island, life is predation, take no prisoners, show no mercy" ideology.  now if Dagny had rigged a hostile takeover of Galt's company, outwitted him at every turn, and finally driven him into pitiful bankruptcy, the ideology would have been purer but it wouldn't quite have worked plotwise...

still, at about 11 or 12 I confess I loved the cartoonish, oversized characters, the grandiosity, the simplistic goodguy/badguy costume drama, the pompousness, and most of all the fact that it went on and on and on... being a quick reader I was often frustrated by books that ended too soon.  nowadays I rely on Trollope to feed the "everlasting gobstopper" demon when it strikes :-)

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

is quoted in today's breakfast:

Why Europe should reject U.S. market capitalism

The new American and British market capitalist model, which dictated deregulation of industry and privatization of state enterprises in the 1970s, and globalization of international markets in the 1990s, exists as a result of free political decisions and ideological choices that were anything but inevitable. History may one day describe them as having been perverse and socially destructive.

Two of the most important influences on the new capitalism were academic in origin, and the third, improbably, was an instance of romanticized egoism.

The first influence was monetarist economic theory. This in principle excluded social considerations from economic policy decision. Government economic policy was to be made chiefly in response to a single objectively determinable factor, the money supply. The effect of this new theory was to "dehumanize" economic policy, previously held to be closely related to political considerations, as was the case with the Keynesian tradition that monetarism challenged.

The second influence was primarily political, a reaction to 20th-century totalitarianism. Working in London in the 1930s, the Austrian political theorist and economist Friedrich von Hayek began as a critic of Keynes, but eventually widened his argument so as to assert as a matter of principle that state intervention in society, even in democratic political systems, amounted to a "Road to Serfdom" (the title of a book he published in 1944).
State intervention in economy and society threatened human liberty. The free market produced economic efficiency and human freedom. Hayek had a great influence on Margaret Thatcher.

The third influence was an eccentric one, important in the United States. It was the creation by a Russian-American novelist, Ayn Rand, of a "philosophy" of heroic egoism and pursuit of individual self-interest (against the mob and the weak) by superior persons. Her ideas responded to the longings of impressionable college students (including Alan Greenspan) and her views became something of a mid-century American cult, if not a sect.

A great article altogether.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes