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Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt in Ayn Rand's 'Atlas Shrugged'

by Alexander G Rubio Thu Apr 27th, 2006 at 03:18:56 PM EST


Ayn Rand
There are very few books that actually enrage me. There are of course works such as "Mein Kampf", by everyone's favourite moustachioed mad man, and "The Protocols of the Elders of Sion". But in such cases you know going in, that you're dealing with historical documents by fruit cakes and loons.

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. Such a book is "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand.



The 1949 movie
"The Fountainhead"
starring Gary Cooper
It is difficult for Europeans, and other non-Americans for that matter, to appreciate the influence of Ayn Rand's work in The United States. Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, as she was originally named, was born in Russia in 1905, on the cusp of the cascading revolutions which would result in the foundation of the Communist Soviet Union. Her family lost just about everything in that process, something which imbued her with a deep seated hate for anything smacking of socialism.

In 1926 she emigrated to The United States and tried to make her way as a writer in Hollywood, with mixed success. It wasn't until "The Fountainhead" in 1943 that her philosophical and political  thoughts, later called Objectivism, began to crystallise and she found a wide audience. Her 1957 magnum opus, "Atlas Shrugged" went on to become, according to some, the "second most influential book in America, after The Bible".

Take the practise of laissez-faire capitalism, turn it into an ideological creed while subtracting the invisible hand of the masses, mix liberally with debased and half baked Nietzscheanism and worship of the Superman, stir, and shake, with a soupçon of bitterness, ego-mania and contempt for average small minded human beings, and Voila! Objectivism, a name that belongs with DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik) in the annals of egregiously false labels.


Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie
in "Mr. & Mrs. Smith"
I was 15 when I borrowed the book at the library. And I'm sorry to say it was a bit the worse for wear when I returned it, as it had been thrown at the wall on a number of occasions by that time. It was the first time it dawned on me that Americans, not having been on the sharp end of it at home, had a problem recognising re-heated and re-packaged Fascism when confronted with it.

Now it seems that this dreary tale of the capitalist supermen cutting their ties to the rest of the useless mass of dolts, who subsequently flounder in ignorance and economic breakdown, at long last is getting its Hollywood apotheosis.

Variety reports (subscription required) that Lionsgate has picked up worldwide distribution rights to "Atlas Shrugged". Howard and Karen Baldwin will be producing along with business man John Aglialoro. And the actors rumoured to play Dagny Taggart and hero John Galt? Do-gooders par excellence Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt of course. Yes, starring in a propaganda vehicle for a philosophical school of thought which posits that even private and voluntary charity is an abomination and coddling the inferior, apparently goes hand in hand with saving the poor and downtrodden of the world. Putzes!



This article is also available at Bitsofnews.com and Daily Kos.


Display:
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?
by Laura on Thu Apr 27th, 2006 at 03:43:13 PM EST
Putz is slang for "idiot". And thank you, Laura :D

Bitsofnews.com Giving you the latest bits.
by Alexander G Rubio (alexander.rubio@gmail.com) on Thu Apr 27th, 2006 at 03:55:46 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Not exactly..."putz" is Yiddish slang for the male sexual organ, much in the same way you call someone a "dick" in English.
by Rick in TX on Thu Apr 27th, 2006 at 11:47:52 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Right.

Be nice to America. Or we'll bring democracy to your country.
by Drew J Jones (pedobear@pennstatefootball.com) on Fri Apr 28th, 2006 at 11:13:39 AM EST
[ Parent ]
<shudder>
by Colman (colman at eurotrib.com) on Thu Apr 27th, 2006 at 03:51:25 PM EST
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

by Jerome a Paris (etg@eurotrib.com) on Thu Apr 27th, 2006 at 03:51:31 PM EST
If rumours are to be believed, yes. He was one of her disciples at least....

Bitsofnews.com Giving you the latest bits.
by Alexander G Rubio (alexander.rubio@gmail.com) on Thu Apr 27th, 2006 at 03:54:27 PM EST
[ Parent ]
My comments are the same as Jerome--enjoyed the book while not accepting the extreme political/economic view.  I'd love to see the movie, because I don't think I want to go back and reread the book.

I would have a real difficult time seeing this book as having the impact that others have described--second to the Bible? I don't think this book would be in the top 100 on that criterion.

by wchurchill on Thu Apr 27th, 2006 at 04:37:38 PM EST
[ Parent ]
You should spend more time around the techno-libertarians. It's sort of scary.
by Colman (colman at eurotrib.com) on Thu Apr 27th, 2006 at 04:43:14 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Yes, mention Ayn Rand on Slashdot and behold the collective techno-geek erection...

Oh yes, programmers and technologists are a breed above and don't need no stinkin' unions etc... One would have thought the dot.bomb crash and outsourcing would have taught them differently by now. So much for superior cognitive abilities...

Bitsofnews.com Giving you the latest bits.

by Alexander G Rubio (alexander.rubio@gmail.com) on Thu Apr 27th, 2006 at 04:47:28 PM EST
[ Parent ]
The techno-geek crowd is rather diverse. Slashdot was da bomb in the mid to late 90s, after that most reasonably minded techno-geeks gave up on this site as it plunged into worthlessness with the popularization of the internet. Many of the techno-geeks I know (quite a large number), read Ayn Rand, and loved it, when we were 15. Then we grew up and stopped being such arrogant and selfish little shitheads. I can't speak to who these Ayn Rand lovin' crazies on slashdot are, but they are not the only ones who might fit the techno-geek label.
by someone (s0me1smail(a)gmail(d)com) on Fri Apr 28th, 2006 at 09:31:12 AM EST
[ Parent ]
hmmm, not sure I know any techno-geeks.  and based on your comments, should I want to?
by wchurchill on Fri Apr 28th, 2006 at 01:57:36 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Aah, most of us techno-geeks are decent people. Well, except for the trekkies; they're just plain weird.

As for Ayn Rand...read Atlas Shrugged a while ago. Some parts were really infuriating. But mostly it was God damn repetative. Over and over and over and over, not to mention and over, again Rand kept making the same point ("If you're stupid you deserve to starve. I pwnz you!"). Now, if she'd cut about 500 pages of the book, it might have made for a decent read.
I don't know if it's second only to the Bible in terms of influence, but I think it's second only to the Bible in terms of length!

"The basis of optimism is sheer terror" - Oscar Wilde

by NordicStorm (m<-at->sturmbaum.net) on Fri Apr 28th, 2006 at 07:32:37 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Well, except for the trekkies; they're just plain weird.

Hey, I resemble that remark. :-P

You have a normal feeling for a moment, then it passes. --More--
by tzt (tzt) on Fri Apr 28th, 2006 at 08:09:24 PM EST
[ Parent ]
There's loads of them around here, so I wouldn't worry. It's a certain dist
by Colman (colman at eurotrib.com) on Fri Apr 28th, 2006 at 09:41:02 AM EST
[ Parent ]
You mean, Greenspan being Jolie's lover ? How women happen to have strange tastes sometimes ... :)

When through hell, just keep going. W. Churchill
by Agnes a Paris on Fri Apr 28th, 2006 at 03:22:38 AM EST
[ Parent ]
No such luck for old Alan, I'm afraid. He had to settle for schtupping Ayn Rand, which, though I've never slept with either off them, seems like a poor substitute ;)

Bitsofnews.com Giving you the latest bits.
by Alexander G Rubio (alexander.rubio@gmail.com) on Fri Apr 28th, 2006 at 09:00:29 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Hmm...Rand or Jolie?  Decisions, decisions....

Be nice to America. Or we'll bring democracy to your country.
by Drew J Jones (pedobear@pennstatefootball.com) on Fri Apr 28th, 2006 at 11:08:02 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Nah.  Greenspan's been sleeping with Andrea Mitchell for centuries.

Be nice to America. Or we'll bring democracy to your country.
by Drew J Jones (pedobear@pennstatefootball.com) on Fri Apr 28th, 2006 at 11:15:24 AM EST
[ Parent ]
You would hope so since they married 9 years ago...

A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn't have to be that way. — Paul Krugman
by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Fri Apr 28th, 2006 at 11:21:21 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Well, he was working with the American male assumption that sex stops where marriage begins, so he got a few centuries in prior to the vows.

Be nice to America. Or we'll bring democracy to your country.
by Drew J Jones (pedobear@pennstatefootball.com) on Fri Apr 28th, 2006 at 11:28:21 AM EST
[ Parent ]
No.  It's not true.  He was a good friend of Rand's, and some would say a follower, but they never quite agreed on philosophy.  I think he was a member of the Collective, though -- by the way, the most ironic name for such a group of people that could've possibly been thought of.  Greenspan has always been a believer in the activist Fed, which is, of course, the opposite of the Randian and Rothbardian views that hold it to be totalitarian in nature.

Be nice to America. Or we'll bring democracy to your country.
by Drew J Jones (pedobear@pennstatefootball.com) on Fri Apr 28th, 2006 at 11:04:43 AM EST
[ Parent ]
It must be said that Greenspan has shifted his position quite a bit over the years. Old "Bubbles" even used to be something of a gold-bug, before he was put in charge of the printing press...

Bitsofnews.com Giving you the latest bits.
by Alexander G Rubio (alexander.rubio@gmail.com) on Fri Apr 28th, 2006 at 11:47:38 AM EST
[ Parent ]
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

by p------- on Thu Apr 27th, 2006 at 04:32:05 PM EST
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.

This would be a sweet piece of subversion.  If only Kubrick were still with us...  A Cohen Brothers version would be a lot of fun, too.

According to the Variety article, "Oliver Stone was attached to direct a remake of Fountainhead for Warner Bros. and Paramount, but the project has languished in development."

Can't get a read on Howard Baldwin's political/philosophical leanings from the movies he's produced.  I loved Ray, but the rest of the lot looks like a bunch of commercial pulp.  Maybe Baldwin simply thinks he can make a money-maker out of this.  Signing up Pitt and Jolie would be an  excellent move towards doing that.

Point n'est besoin d'espérer pour entreprendre, ni de réussir pour persévérer. - Charles le Téméraire

by marco on Fri Apr 28th, 2006 at 07:46:47 AM EST
[ Parent ]
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

by Barbara on Thu Apr 27th, 2006 at 04:44:16 PM EST
If I remember correctly, the movie (which we watched together despite my protestations that I didn't want to touch a movie about Ayn Rand witha 10-foot pole) is actually called "The passion of Ayn Rand", and based on the book of the same title by Barabra Branden, Nathaniel's wife (the book is mentioned in the wikipedia article on Rand).

A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn't have to be that way. — Paul Krugman
by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Thu Apr 27th, 2006 at 05:15:03 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Yes, you're right, as usual. It's been a while since we've watched it :).

"If you cannot say what you have to say in twenty minutes, you should go away and write a book about it." Lord Brabazon
by Barbara on Fri Apr 28th, 2006 at 03:42:41 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Incredible but few weeks ago I found out that I can watch few Serbian TV channels LIVE on my computer and I saw exactly that same movie there. Not knowing anything about her before, by just seeing a movie I think I agree with you...
Quote:
I do think Rand was nuts... a smart woman but not in the good kind of way.

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind...Albert Einstein
by vbo on Fri Apr 28th, 2006 at 12:10:09 AM EST
[ Parent ]
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.


Point n'est besoin d'espérer pour entreprendre, ni de réussir pour persévérer. - Charles le Téméraire
by marco on Fri Apr 28th, 2006 at 08:18:56 AM EST
Delightful. Thank you.
by Colman (colman at eurotrib.com) on Fri Apr 28th, 2006 at 08:51:19 AM EST
[ Parent ]
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.

Be nice to America. Or we'll bring democracy to your country.
by Drew J Jones (pedobear@pennstatefootball.com) on Fri Apr 28th, 2006 at 11:12:57 AM EST
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....

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Fri Apr 28th, 2006 at 02:29:17 PM EST
...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. :)

by cskendrick (cs ke nd ri c k @h ot m ail dot c om) on Fri Apr 28th, 2006 at 07:56:05 PM EST
..or the onset of Alzheimer's, but bugger me if I am able to make out just what you're saying here...

Bitsofnews.com Giving you the latest bits.
by Alexander G Rubio (alexander.rubio@gmail.com) on Fri Apr 28th, 2006 at 08:09:06 PM EST
[ Parent ]
oh, just the usual ahistorical "the Nazi party's unabbreviated name had the word Sozialist in it, therefore Socialism=Nazism=Eeeeeevil" mantra.  never mind the feral facts... that the Nazis in fact destroyed communist and socialist parties, magazines, libraries, and newsletters, busted unions, etc.;  that much of the heroic underground resistance in France, Italy, and even w/in Germany was undertaken by communist groups;  or that no small number of those resistance cells were subsequently betrayed to the Nazis/Fascists just before the Allied victory... by the Allies, who were already working on the "containing Communism" strategy.  I suppose the fact that one of the words in the unabbreviated name of the DNC is "Democratic" means that they actually represent democracy?  :-)

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
by DeAnander (de_at_daclarke_dot_org) on Fri Apr 28th, 2006 at 09:13:11 PM EST
[ Parent ]
...in what way Nazism was a orgy of individualism run amok.

Because I don't see how a movement that based its legitimacy on being an ultranationalist version of communism was anything but a form of socialism gone mad.

Sometimes, even in Europe, the working class falls in behind the wrong party.

Must be a human thing, and last I checked, the same species of hominid resides on both sides of the Atlantic.

Have Keyboard. Will Travel. :)

by cskendrick (cs ke nd ri c k @h ot m ail dot c om) on Sat Apr 29th, 2006 at 01:56:35 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Who would you chalk the 100,000 dead Iraqis of the past 3 years to?

"Malicious advocacy of the self", or  "malicious defense of the commonality"?

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

by Jerome a Paris (etg@eurotrib.com) on Sat Apr 29th, 2006 at 06:58:28 AM EST
[ Parent ]
is that it smacks of orthodoxy, albeit a secular and intellectual one, on the warpath against heresy.

regarding the WMD war in Iraq

Bush would claim it was to free Iraqis, ergo, it was individual-minded.

Since that is so not the case...

Have Keyboard. Will Travel. :)

by cskendrick (cs ke nd ri c k @h ot m ail dot c om) on Sat Apr 29th, 2006 at 04:21:51 PM EST
[ Parent ]
So after the pogroms, the lynch mob, the Holocaust, now it's the Inquisition.

You don't ever worry you're overstating your case?

by afew (afew(a in a circle)eurotrib_dot_com) on Sat Apr 29th, 2006 at 04:43:29 PM EST
[ Parent ]
...for doing exactly that.

Have Keyboard. Will Travel. :)
by cskendrick (cs ke nd ri c k @h ot m ail dot c om) on Sat Apr 29th, 2006 at 07:25:39 PM EST
[ Parent ]
That's a flip response. Trouble is it has nothing to do with anything I can see in this diary or discussion, which I've just read through again to be sure I wasn't dreaming.

Where is anyone overstating what case?

by afew (afew(a in a circle)eurotrib_dot_com) on Sun Apr 30th, 2006 at 01:40:31 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Unless, of course, that just happens to be perfectly true.

Have Keyboard. Will Travel. :)
by cskendrick (cs ke nd ri c k @h ot m ail dot c om) on Mon May 1st, 2006 at 07:24:02 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Ayn Rand is evil incarnate

Read through Alexander G Rubio's diary and all the comments up to the point where you Godwin's Lawed in with the Holocaust, etc, and you will see absolutely nothing of the kind you suggest.

by afew (afew(a in a circle)eurotrib_dot_com) on Tue May 2nd, 2006 at 07:14:33 AM EST
[ Parent ]
No one ever perpetuated a Holocaust so that individuals may be free.

Au contraire.  Most holocausts are perpetuated at least in part so that individuals (of Type A) may be free -- of the unwanted presence of individuals of Type B.  (Individual profiteering by looting the dead people's persons and property is also a factor).  But to step back a pace (and to be a bit more serious), what mass act of violence has ever been perpetuated under the slogan "so that individuals may be free"?  Is this "free" as in Arbeit Macht Frei?   And if we cannot find such a slogan on the banner of a act of large scale violence does this prove that individualism never generates l.s.v., but socialism does?

Backing off still further, is there even such a thing as an "individual" in this sense, since a holocaust by definition can only be perpetrated by large numbers of individuals acting under either a common ideological agenda or a common agenda of self interest?  A mass murderer no matter how diligent can, absent nuclear or biological weaponry, only kill a rather limited number of people in one lifetime:  holocausts by definition require collective action.  So, this is either a naive, or a deliberately obfuscatory, way to phrase the question.

It is estimated that during the 4 1/2 centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Portugal was responsible for transporting over 4.5 million Africans (roughly 40% of the total). During the eighteenth century however, when the slave trade accounted for the transport of a staggering 6 million Africans, Britain was the worst transgressor - responsible for almost 2.5 million. (A fact often forgotten by those who regularly cite Britain's prime role in the abolition of the slave trade.) [...]
obligatory url

The Triangle Trade, though morally reprehensible, was integral to the growth of the economies of the United States and Great Britain. The last leg of that trek, known as the Middle Passage, retains the infamy of having been a horrific journey for Africans who had been free in their countries but were being enslaved in the Americas. The Middle Passage is synonymous with intense human suffering, degradation, and mortality.
NTTI lesson plans

Let's ask now, whether the Triangle Trade and related activities of pre-fossil-energy, slavery-based commerce represented a sudden incursion of socialism and commensalism in the freebooting 17th and 18th centuries, the golden era of individualistic philosophy?  The centuries in which was consolidated that Wealth of Nations on which Smith's theories rest, that saw the birth of the highly individualistic "capitalist ideology"?  Were all these slave traders, each out for his own personal profit, somehow closet socialists?  How about the plantation owners who bought these human beings cheap and worked them to death on private plantations for private profit?  collectivist proto-Marxists to a man, no doubt.

Shall we split hairs and say that, well, this wasn't really a holocaust and doesn't count, because the burn rate in human lives was too low, this being a pre-industrial horrorshow?

Or should we conclude that slavery was a "crime of individualism" because the slave traders were
enthusiastic capitalists and believers in competition, and the trade primarily benefitted the economies of nations which became poster children for the Capitalist Way and the Cult of the Individual?  

"Collectivism is evil,"  "Individualism is evil," it's just not a meaningful way of parsing the world.  Without collectivism all along the way, from our primate ancestors to the Internet that enables us to exchange these fanfaronades [or Robinsonades in csk's case, hat tip to the old KM himself], we wouldn't be here.  Without individualism within that collective framework we wouldn't have art and idiosyncrasy and novelty of ideas and all kinds of interesting developments from trivial to profound.  The danger imho lies in idolising -- and I do mean idolising (as Rand did), making a golden calf or a graven image of, one or t'other instead of recognising them as tensile forces in balance providing structural integrity.


The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

by DeAnander (de_at_daclarke_dot_org) on Sat Apr 29th, 2006 at 10:44:52 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Was over intellectualizing the obvious -- that mob rule is bad, no matter how hip the slogans.

And Rand did this to the point of justifying the obscene -- that it's not the moral responsibility of any person to stop mob rule, if I don't feel like it.

That many people sit with their hands in their pockets and let war, slavery, injustice, lynch mobs happen, either out of closet sympathy or fear of becoming the next target of that mob, does not make it any better.

Alas, it does happen.

Ironically, Rand's code is a code of nihilism, ecstasism and subjectivism -- doing what one wants, on whatever impulse is present, for whatever goal one has in mind....or for no reason at all.

In that respect, she was most certainly aligned with the Nazis, or any other movement (read: mob) that has an ad hoc community of interest to do the occasional good deed, or the far more frequent harm to something beautiful, important, valuable and fragile.

Perhaps the intellectual story of her life should be titled "When Good Dialectic Goes Bad".

Still, she did not create the problem of selfishness, as much as tried to patent it and define it into some vehicle for fortifying the will of people who seem to attract public outrage....not all of whom are by definition nice, creative, productive people who if left alone would make the world a better and more beautiful place.

Sometimes, people off by themselves, with no self-restraint, do terrible things. Rand missed that. Boy, did she.

Have Keyboard. Will Travel. :)

by cskendrick (cs ke nd ri c k @h ot m ail dot c om) on Sun Apr 30th, 2006 at 08:11:07 AM EST
[ Parent ]
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 ...

by DeAnander (de_at_daclarke_dot_org) on Fri Apr 28th, 2006 at 09:31:38 PM EST
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

by Jerome a Paris (etg@eurotrib.com) on Sat Apr 29th, 2006 at 06:55:55 AM EST


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