There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
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Snerk.
My line was always that I’m not an Objectivist for the same reason I’m not a Scientologist: I refuse to join a cult founded by a failed science fiction author to steal all of my money.
—Myca
I think I love you.
Well, Kung Fu Monkey, really. But you brought me the Awesome, so I love you too.
How does Objectivism steal your money? I was an Ayn Rand fan for the period between the middle of second semester sophomore year (when I read “The Fountainhead”) and the beginning of first semester senior year (when I read the Branden bios, having exhausted the majority of Rand’s own writings). Admittedly I didn’t have a lot of money as a high school student, but I don’t recall anyone’s asking for some.
Holy ableist metaphors, batman! Seriously, reading Rand makes you socially crippled?! Did you actually read Maia’s post from three days ago?
(I was sort of hoping the comment about orcs was going to be a lead-in to discussing the ways that Lord of the Rings is a great book in many ways but has problematic dynamics around race. But no, apparently a bookish fourteen-year old in Kung Fu Monkey’s world is always white.)
LotR does have problematic dynamics around race, but that doesn’t mean that a lot of non-white people don’t enjoy it or have it change their lives. Implying that the quote above can only apply to white people is… weird.
(And again, that’s not to say that LotR isn’t racist, cuz it is, but that still doesn’t imply that bookish people whose lives are changed by the book MUST BE white.)
Go0d point about the metaphor, IEA. No excuses, I just missed it.
(But I agree with Mandolin regarding race and LoTR.)
Mandolin, I agree with you that many young people of color fall in love with LotR and experience it as a life-changing book. But how many 14-year-old black kids do you imagine get excited about Atlas Shrugged? It’s the conjunction of the two very white books that made me read it as assuming that the bookish teenager in Kung Fu Monkey’s example is white. And the list of all the things that are wrong with Atlas Shrugged is being contrasted with the orcs in LotR for humour, which could have gone to a really interesting place with, well, AS has a million problems but LotR, though obviously better, has one big problem too. So I was disappointed that the comment didn’t go there, rather than specifically objecting to the inclusion of orcs.
The Ayn Rand Institute solicits donations, but no more aggressively than any other non-profit organization. Really, I think a lot of people are probably better off financially for their exposure to Rand than they would otherwise be. One of the big takeaway lessons is that it’s okay to want to be materially successful—that it’s not selling out or exploitation, and that being an engineer or an accountant isn’t morally inferior to being a full-time activist.
Agree or disagree with those judgments as you wish, but my suspicion is that they do tend to lead to greater financial success than philosophies which postulate a conflict between doing good and doing well.
On the other hand, there are those poor lost souls who didn’t read Rand until their sophomore year of college and immediately changed their majors to philosophy.
Gotcha now, Individ. And agreed. Sorry I wasn’t thinking about the Rand (it’s such a non-entity in my life apart from ??? what are people thinking? that I just focused on the LOTR.)
And to overanalyze this quote to death, there are lots of books that change young people’s lives. Don’t strip the last vestiges of hope away from we poor writers. ;)
“But how many 14-year-old black kids do you imagine get excited about Atlas Shrugged?”
Justice Clarence Thomas? He still inflicts the film version on his unfortunate clerks. I’m pretty sure my ex’s libertarian best friend also “got excited about Atlas Shrugged.”
Unless you know a decent-sized sampling of conservative and libertarian black people, I wouldn’t make too many assumptions about whether Atlas Shrugged was a formative experience in their choice of becoming a political minority within their ethnic community, even if unlike Thomas they eventually grew out of it a bit.
PG, you make a good point as usual. I have no doubt some black kids get into Rand; after all, POC are not a monolith! But the blanket statement that teenagers are either obsessed with Rand or Tolkien isn’t really applicable to the “political minority” of “conservative and libertarian black people”.
I am not sure how popular this opinion will be in leftist circles, but I do believe that in a better world there would be more outlets for conservative POC which are not racist bordering on white supremacist. You might be prepared to overlook that in Rand, if you were really desperate for a right-wing role model, but you shouldn’t have to. I think even if you are progressive, you might prefer POC to take a left-wing position because they’re really convinced by it, rather than being forced to affiliate because the other side is incompetent at hiding their blatant racism.
Individ-ewe-al,
Agreed. POC shouldn’t have to choose between being genuinely anti-tax, pro-life, etc. and having their skin color be accepted. However, I don’t think there’s anything overtly racist (i.e. something that would make a black person flinch from Rand anymore than she’d flinch from GW Bush) in Rand’s fiction — black people just aren’t noticed in her world, neither heroes nor villains nor even minor characters. Rand opposed affirmative action, but for the same reason as Clarence Thomas: she thought it was just as bad to give someone who had been disadvantaged a leg up due to being black as it was to discriminate against that person for being black.
The obliteration of ethnic identity is one of those themes in Rand that becomes more apparent when you read about her personally and discover that she was Jewish. Even in her most autobiographical work (“We the Living”), Rand portrays her family background as being part of the undifferentiated majority (Russian Orthodox). She idealized Northern European looks — tall, thin, fair-skinned, gray or blue eyes (unlike her own black hair and eyes) — and pre-modern Nordic culture. This is white supremacy of the subtle sort that in my experience frequently passes muster with conservative and libertarian POC.
Re: Objectivism stealing all of my money.
My snark wasn’t intended as a comment on some sort of membership fee that Objectivists charge, but rather on the flaw (which they hold in common with all ultra-free market ideologies) of profiting greatly from government and society while refusing to support or contribute to it. They’re freeloaders, basically.
Or wannabe freeloaders, anyway, since we actually do tax them.
—Myca
Never read Atlas Shrugged, but The Fountainhead was hi-larious!
LotR does have problematic dynamics around race,
To say the least! First we have the orcs who are an evil race and must be wiped out: the only good orc is a dead orc. Then we have the “superior” men of the…er….the folks Aragorn belonged to who are just better than everyone else (somehow or another). On the other hand, ultimately, the heroes of the book are the “insignificant” hobbits whom everyone (bad and good guys) ignore until it’s too late (or almost too late for the good guys.) So it has some good points concerning race too–how many mainstream books written in the 1940s and 50s had members of an “inferior” race as their main heroes*? I could say the same about gender: it’s a clearly sexist book but the stuff around Eowyn at least suggests that Tolkein realized that his world was sexist and that sexism hurts women.
All that aside, I unashamedly love LotR for one primary reason: it is the most complete fantasy world I’ve ever read. As far as I can remember, there are no inconsistencies, no points at which it looks like Tolkein forgot what he said earlier or lost interest in it, no continuity problems. Unlike essentially every other fantasy series I’ve ever read.
*Actually, what it mostly is is aristocracy loving. Every last one of the main characters, except Sam, turn out to be aristocrats of some sort or another. Sam is the token upwardly mobile lower middle class guy, I guess.
Actually, China Miéville (who is awesome, and whom you should all read) had an excellent essay in The Socialist Review several years back analyzing Tolkien from a socialist perspective.
It brought new meaning to the term “scathing.”
—Myca
Myca:
If you want to trash objectivism, you should at least try to do so in a way that demonstrates a rudimentary understanding of it. The objectivist line on government services is that people should pay the cost of the services they use, but should not be required to contribute to redistributive programs. To characterize this as a desire to freeload is either ignorant or disingenuous.
And again, one of the points that Rand kept hammering is that we do good by doing well. Paying taxes is only one way in which people contribute to society. Consumer surplus is another, and perhaps even the more significant of the two. So even if your strawman objectivist who didn’t want to pay for the government services he used were real, it wouldn’t be accurate to say that he didn’t contribute to society.
And Brandon, if you want to defend objectivism, you should do so in such a way that demonstrates a rudimentary understanding of how the world actually works.
Of course, I guess doing so would be at odds with the entire canon of objectivist thought, so there’s certainly no reason to start now.
Oh, absolutely! Which is why they have no problem paying for the entire structure of government and society that provides an industrial framework for them to build their industries on, a skilled, educated, and healthy workforce to hire, etc.
Oh? What’s that you say? They don’t want to pay for that stuff? And yet they benefit from it?
Feh. Freeloading looters.
To pretend that any industry …. say (just to pick one out of thin air), a railroad could exist without a regulatory framework and a raft of other industries, themselves reliant on other, different regulatory frameworks is pure childishness.
There is within Objectivism a tragic inability to understand that there are both individual and collective goods and individual and collective costs. Even something as simple as the proper use or regulation of antibiotics stymies objectivist thought utterly. This shit is why Objectivism simply cannot be taken seriously as a philosophy, political, economic, or otherwise. It doesn’t just ignore the tragedy of the commons, it embraces it and pretends it’s a goal.
Hey, if you want to debate objectivism, that’s fine, and maybe this is even a good thread for it, but honestly, I don’t see the point. There’s not much to debate. There’s plenty to laugh at, though.
—Myca
Rand is hugely popular in India. Two reasons are often given:
1. Indians, having suffereed for so long under the tryanny of socailism, are very open to the idea of capitalism not only as a right, but as a morally superior system to all others.
2. Rand’s books were given away for free. Heh. Really.
Er, not to be defending Objectivists, but…
… that doesn’t seem to fit with the whole “we could go Galt!” thing. Galt’s Gulch is about going off the grid and no longer receiving any benefit from government or the rest of society. Now, obviously there are the benefits they’ve already received and carry with them, but there’s clearly a strong belief that these are things they would have obtained anyway.
Objectivism, as I recall, wants at minimum a night watchman & legal system state. So there would be no government regulation of railroads; if accidents occur, the combination of tort liability and loss of customers to better, safer railroads will encourage being a safe railroad.
Now, I think we’ve seen repeatedly that non-regulated industries *aren’t* always that worried about competition springing up, in many industries due to costs of entry, monopoly effects, etc., but this is nonetheless the theory. Objectivism is stupid but I don’t think it’s internally inconsistent; it’s just inconsistent with all human experience (kind of like Communism).
OMG, the Indian guys I have encountered who are still hopped up on Rand because they didn’t read her books until college.
Yeah, that’s more or less what motivated Rand as well. It makes sense, really, in the same way that communism would make sense to someone who lived through the industrial hellscape of the 19th century. Here’s to moderation!
Oh totally, totally. I was talking more about the impulse to ‘go Galt’. Remember, you drop out of society to forge your own way boldly into the wilderness because it’s illegitimate to be asked to pay for shit you don’t directly consume . . . but that decision is almost always made after having consumed a hell of a lot.
I’ve got no problem with people deciding that the accumulated detritus of society is too much for them and leaving. What I have a problem with is people building a railroad with government land grants and the ability to hire engineers who can read and write . . . and then turning around and moaning about how unfair it is of the government to take the profits that they made on their own all on their solitary lonesome without any help from anyone.
I mean hey, you folks want to drop out? Be my guests. Rapture here we come.
Bingo. Like I said, childish.
—Myca
I think that 14 is the right age for Rand — if you’ve grown up in a generally liberal environment like I did, then it’s a totally different way of looking at the world, and good as a mental exercise (as well as gripping as fiction, despite the digressions). Later, you hopefully develop the critical system to see what she was about and put it back into perspective relative to all the other values of the real world and the way that you would like to see competing needs and values handled. But anything that upends your perspective on things in adolescence is a good thing, I think.
interestingly, when I read Atlas Shrugged, I identified with the protagonists — not so much in terms of entitlement as in terms of wanting to Do What Could Be Done with one’s abilities. was surprised to find that a friend of mine, who feels like a general equal in intellect and self-confidence, bristled against the protagonists as a separate class throughout. (not sure of her age at reading it.) probably the type of identification you feel affects whether you like the book and also whether your view of it evolves with your own maturation.
“The objectivist line on government services is that people should pay the cost of the services they use, but should not be required to contribute to redistributive programs. To characterize this as a desire to freeload is either ignorant or disingenuous.”
How do you calculate the cost of what services you use? For example, if you run the numbers in depth, including the addition to cost of living caused by shipping having to share an infrastructure that is an order of magnitude overpriced because it is designed around cars, lower middle class people who use public transit are actually subsidizing middle and upper-middle class people who don’t. From the snootiness of your comment I can predict with a fair degree of certainty you are someone who would likely pay far MORE tax if you were “only” to pay for what you use.
It is simplistic, childish ideas like “people should pay the cost of services they use” — ignoring the fact that the benefits society provides are a complex and interconnected web, subject to many wildly varying accountings — that are ignorant and disingenuous and cause people with something resembling a portion of a clue to roll their eyes in disgust at objectivists.
S.o.G.
Sure, but if all roads are toll roads built by private sector entities who charge for use, the people who use public transit no longer have to subsidize those use the roads. I think you have to expand your idea of how different Objectivists want the world to be for their philosophy to make sense internally.
H. L. Mencken famously said, “For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.”
It’s like that.
—Myca
Absolutely, but then incremental implementation of Objectivist principles is meaningless. The only useful thing they could do is go found an undersea city somewhere to test their principles out in toto.
—Myca
Myca,
Agreed, but let us be grateful that the Objectivists stay among us and provide fodder for hilarious personals ads.
Jesus PG, those are hilarious. My two favorites are:
I mean, reading them, you just know they live in their parents’ basements. I’m torn between ‘cute’ and ‘sad’.
—Myca
No, not cute. Not cute at all.
“Lewis, London, U.K.
I love intelligent, sassy girls, particularly those working in consulting or investment banking (but other fields are great too). Really, nothing is hotter than an accomplished girl in a suit, as long as she is willing to settle down and have my children. I want a girl who will support my ambitions against the naysayers in society. ”
It’s the secret wish of every career woman everywhere — to give it all up so she can pop out babies and bake pies for someone who insists on calling her “girl” and prioritizes his ambitions above hers. How did he know!?
Re Ayn Rand:
Back in the ’60s she was known as “the Saint of the C- mind”. Looks like things haven’t changed that much.
Myca:
Your original claim was that objectivists want to “profit greatly from government and society while refusing to support or contribute to it.” It seems that you’ve now retreated to a much more moderate accusation, which is that objectivists don’t want to pay as much in taxes as you think they should. Before we move on to new business, can we declare the old business settled?
No, certainly not. They want to support and contribute specifically to themselves, not society as a while, which involves collective burdens and benefits.
—Myca
Brandon,
Could you quote where Myca said that Objectivists don’t want to pay as much in taxes as Myca thinks they should? Because I totally missed that part of the conversation.
The last thing Myca said that was related to that part of the discussion was, “then incremental implementation of Objectivist principles is meaningless. The only useful thing they could do is go found an undersea city somewhere to test their principles out in toto.”
Which is not quite the same as “objectivists don’t want to pay as much in taxes as [I] think they should.”
Oh, and I should clarify that I’m talking about Objectivists operating within existing societies. I hereby exempt every single Objectivist who actually puts their money where their mouth (and principles) are and gets the hell out of dodge.
I do not exempt Objectivists who take advantage of government-funded pre-existing frameworks and argue that taxation is theft (or, since I hear this particular bit of racism so often from Objectivists, slavery).
—Myca
it should be noted that alan Greenspan was famous for dating beautiful women. rand herself was very impressed, despite generally being opposed to having numerous partners. he was unusually silent and apparently had bad breath, but many have testified that women in general found him irresistible.
didn’t do so bad later in life marrying that nbc anchor (forget her name).
got this from the bob woodward bio of greenspan i think.
now you guys appear to have a minor anti-rand obsession (as does feministe) so i really shouldn’t give you ammo, but since you’re feminists this tidbit may interest you:
i recall reading in one of the Brandon’s autobio how some young objectivists, in an attempt to appear like howard rourke (not micky), tried to pull off the infamous rape scene during dates. fortunately none of them succeeded.
learning the limits of ideology the hard way, i guess. i can almost see you all shuddering