Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand Psychopath?

I don't know if it was mentioned elsewhere in this topic, but Alan Greenspan was one of her acolytes. Is it any wonder things are such a financial mess in the US?
 
Redrock12, in 1966 Alan Greenspan actually contributed an article to Ayn Rand's book, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal called "Gold and Economic Freedom." In it he explains how many large banks that had their hands in government helped to create the federal reserve, its role in bringing about the Great Depression, and in general how fiat currency by its very nature places control over the country's economic pulse in the hands of a few private individuals. True to objectivists, he advocated the gold standard, which is a nation's safeguard against runaway spending (the collosal spending and size of modern governments would not have been possible on the gold standard, or any hard asset for that matter). Essentially, Greenspan's principles changed when he began to move up the ladder in importance and eventually joined the federal reserve. Now he helped to orchestrate the very calamities he criticized earlier on. So the free market cannot be blamed for the consequences of government intervention in the economy.

Ayn Rand's one of the most interesting public personalities I've ever come across. Many people love her worship of reason, the intellect, freedom, and our capacity for achievement. Many also are somewhat disturbed by her love of egoism, selfishness, and elitism, to say nothing of her highly fetishistic sex scenes.

I read Judgement Day: My Years With Ayn Rand, by Nathaniel Branden: a close associate of Ayn Rand's for 18 years, from during the writing of Atlas Shrugged to the establishment of an Objectivism newsletter and lecture series. In the book he grew from being a faithful fan of her work to a lover of hers, to an eventual nemesis, and saw many aspects of Ayn's personality few people publicly realize. She had an incredible capacity for rationalization (in one scene she noticed many empty booze bottles around her husband's house, and though he was using them for mixing his paints - this apparently had nothing to do with her openly philandering with someone else). The fact that she admired William Hickman, a brutal serial killer, for his brilliance and lack of concern for norms and other human beings, does not bode well for her either.

If not a psychopath, she certainly suffered from a low sense of empathy, and the critiques her work has often received by critics for having shallow, wooden characters can testify to this. For Ayn, all action was motivated by reason, stemming from particular premises. Those who were evil (such as James Taggart in Atlas Shrugged) were said to have no desire to live, and therefore no desire to honor selfishness, productivity, reason, and all the other traits Ayn's heroes were known for, and set about destroying their achievements, and the achievements of humanity. To her, people didn't not murder eachother in the streets because they cared for one another; they did so because they were rationao. It obviously is rational to not kill people, but the fact that we have intellectual and emotional reasons for our actions is completely lost with Ayn Rand; actions based on emotion are, according to her, simply failures of reason.

Taken from Prophet 451's Journal in the Democratic Underground (http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Prophet%20451/168)

Hare's checklist lists certain personality factors as indicative of psychopathy. The average person will perhaps exhibit one or, at most, two. The psychopath will exhibit all but on or two. In no particular order, these items are:

Glibness/superficial charm. After her writings became popular, Rand collected around herself a group of cultists who virtually worshipped her.

However, shallow affect, the psychopath's charm is only ever superficial. As one comes to know and understand the psychopath more fully, the charm which initially attracted one to them is revealed as only skin-deep. In this, Rand was entirely textbook. She was described by most who knew her best as a bitter, friendless child who grew into an equally bitter and acidic woman.

Grandiose sense of self-worth would certainly fit Rand. A woman who names her beliefs "Objectivism" out of a belief that any reasoning person who observes the objective truths of the world would necessarily come to full agreement with her would probably qualify. The fact that her little cult were required to memorise her works and discounted as "imbecilic" and "anti-life" if they asked questions simply seals the deal. Her sincere belief was that thinking freely would automatically lead to total agreement with her views. The ruthless policing of her cult would also qualify her under the Cunning/manipulative qualifier.

Patholigical lying is one that Rand is probably innocent of. So far as we know, there is no reason to believe she was a pathological liar.

Lack of remorse or guilt and Callous/lack of empathy could be described as "Ayn Rand syndrome". These two qualifiers are really the core of her books, philosophhy and worldview. In one of her books (The Fountainhead), her "hero", Howard Roarke, blows up a housing project he designed when a minor alteration is made and then orders the jury to acquit him (the fact that, as an architect, Roarke was presumably contracted for his work and therefore, it wasn't "his" anymore piddles all over the supposed respect for property too). In Atlas Shrugged, her ode to the super-rich which imagines them going on strike against progressive taxation, Rand describes the rest of the world (without whom, let us not forget, the super-rich would be unable to make anything) in such niceties as "savages", "refuse" and "immitations of living beings". When one of the strikers engineers a train crash (because they don't just strike but commit acts of terrorism too), Rand makes it clear that she believes the murdered victims deserved their fate because they supported progressive taxation. A stewing hymn of Nietzchean will-to-power, misanthropy, failure to understand economics, feudalism and sexual politics verging on the obscene, Atlas Shrugged is full of this stuff. Her heroes spend their time both insisting that they are the heroic producers (and without labour, what are they producing exactly?) and bemoaning that others do not worship them as such. In her spare time, Rand was an admirer of serail killer William Hickman (I'll spare you the details of his crimes save to say that they were brutal even by serial killer standards), describing him as "a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy"; "other people do not exist for him and he does not see why they should" was her evaluation of his crimes and Rand considered this worthy of praise.

Finally, on the personality factor, there is Failure to accept responsibility for one's actions. Since our record of Rand's life isn't fully detailed, it's difficult to say how much she satisfied this one. Certainly, when her lover Nathaniel Branden found another partner, she blamed him rather than herself or her increasingly poisonous views. We shouldn't sympathise with Rand as injured party too much here, she was herself married to someone entirely different and cruel enough to carry on the affair without regard to discretion. Indeed, if the only duty of the superman is to please himself, Brendan was acting according to Rand's ideals and she should have applauded him. She once said the the USA should be a "democracy of superiors only" with "superior" being defined as "rich". One scarcely needs to point out that such a system wouldn't be democracy at all but oligarchy and interestingly elitist for all her followers claim to despise elitism.
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(strike-throughs added to parts and interpretations of parts of Rand's novels I really don't think do justice to the context in which the events took place, or are otherwise simply false.)

My theory is that she was emotionally quite psychopathic. What I find ironic in her is that, intellectually, she advocates a very libertarian economic system, diametrically opposed to the totalitarian worldview most psychopaths advocate. She grew up in the Russian Revolution, and the horrors of ponerology were instilled in her at a very young age. She spent the rest of her life reasoning out a political system in which such atrocities could never be realized ever again. From that standpoint, I think libertarianism and the free market are a resounding success in that sense (I know talking capitalism vs socialism is like opening up a can of worms, but trust me I've done my homework :P).

Followers of Ayn Rand tend to fall either into the libertarian/empathic camp or the more psychopathic camp. Alyssa Bereznak, the woman behind the article "How Ayn Rand ruined my childhood," would be in the former camp, as she believes strongly in economic freedom but at the same time hating the callous and sociopathic side her father took to so strongly. Unfortunately the psychopathic side is beginning to take greater hold, as is common in institutionalization. This has been marked by an increased preponderance of statism in the Objectivism camp - from supporting military adventures abroad in the middle east to Leonard Peikoff (Ayn Rand's proclaimed "intellectual heir") claiming the mosque that was proposed to be built near ground zero back in 2010 should be evacuated and then demolished, since Islam (get this: not Islamic extremists, but Islam itself) was unamerican at heart.

In the end though, only time will tell if Ayn Rand is fundamentally an asset or a liability to the eradication of the societal evils and ponerology she initially set out to destroy.
 
Below an article of Whitaker Chambers on Rand. Chambers is mostly known for his role in the Alger Hiss denunciation as communist spy, which he used to be also.

Big Sister is Watching You
Whittaker Chambers

Several years ago, Miss Ayn Rand wrote The Fountainhead. Despite a generally poor press, it is said to have sold some four hundred thousand copies. Thus, it became a wonder of the book trade of a kind that publishers dream about after taxes. So Atlas Shrugged (Random House, $6.95) had a first printing of one hundred thousand copies. It appears to be slowly climbing the best seller lists.

The news about this book seems to me to be that any ordinarily sensible head could possibly take it seriously, and that apparently, a good many do. Somebody has called it: "Excruciatingly awful." I find it a remarkably silly book. It is certainly a bumptious one. Its story is preposterous. It reports the final stages of a final conflict (locale: chiefly the United States, some indefinite years hence) between the harried ranks of free enterprise and the "looters." These are proponents of proscriptive taxes. Government ownership, Labor, etc. etc. The mischief here is that the author, dodging into fiction, nevertheless counts on your reading it as political reality. "This," she is saying in effect, "is how things really are. These are the real issues, the real sides. Only your blindness keeps you from seeing it, which, happily, I have come to rescue you from."

Since a great many of us dislike much that Miss Rand dislikes, quite as heartily as she does, many incline to take her at her word. It is the more persuasive, in some quarters, because the author deals wholly in the blackest blacks and the whitest whites. In this fiction everything, everybody, is either all good or all bad, without any of those intermediate shades which, in life, complicate reality and perplex the eye that seeks to probe it truly. This kind of simplifying pattern, of course, gives charm to most primitive story-telling. And, in fact, the somewhat ferro-concrete fairy tale the author pours here is, basically, the old one known as: The War between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. In modern dress, it is a class war. Both sides of it are caricatures.

The Children of Light are largely operatic caricatures. In so far as any of them suggests anything known to the business community, they resemble the occasional curmudgeon millionaire, tales about whose outrageously crude and shrewd eccentricities sometimes provide the lighter moments in Board rooms. Otherwise, the Children of Light are geniuses. One of them is named (the only smile you see will be your own): Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastian d'Antonio. This electrifying youth is the world's biggest copper tycoon. Another, no less electrifying, is named: Ragnar Danesjold. He becomes a twentieth-century pirate. All Miss Rand's chief heroes are also breathtakingly beautiful. So is her heroine (she is rather fetchingly vice-president in charge of management of a transcontinental railroad). So much radiant energy might seem to serve an eugenic purpose. For, in this story as in Mark Twain's, "all the knights marry the princess" — though without benefit of clergy. Yet from the impromptu and surprisingly gymnastic matings of heroine and three of the heroes, no children — it suddenly strikes you — ever result. The possibility is never entertained. And indeed, the strenuously sterile world of Atlas Shrugged is scarcely a place for children. You speculate that, in life, children probably irk the author and may make her uneasy. How could it be otherwise when she admiringly names a banker character (by what seems to me a humorless master-stroke): Midas Mulligan? You may fool some adults, you can't fool little boys and girls with such stuff — not for long. They may not know just what is out of line, but they stir uneasily.

Children of Darkness are caricatures, too; and they are really oozy. But at least they are caricatures of something identifiable. Their archetypes are Left Liberals, New Dealers, Welfare Statists, One Worlders, or, at any rate, such ogreish semblances of these as may stalk the nightmares of those who think little about people as people, but tend to think a great deal in labels and effigies. (And neither Right nor Left, be it noted in passing, has a monopoly of such dreamers, though the horrors in their nightmares wear radically different masks and labels.)

In Atlas Shrugged, all this debased inhuman riffraff is lumped as "looters." This is a fairly inspired epithet. It enables the author to skewer on one invective word everything and everybody that she fears and hates. This spares here the plaguy business of performing one service that her fiction might have performed. Namely: that of examining in human depth how so feeble a lot came to exist at all, let alone be powerful enough to be worth hating and fearing. Instead, she bundles them into one undifferentiated damnation.

"Looters" loot because they believe in Robin Hood, and have a lot of other people believing in him, too. Robin Hood is the author's image of absolute evil — robbing the strong (and hence good) to give to the weak (and hence no good). All "looters" are base, envious, twisted, malignant minds, motivated wholly by greed for power, combined with the lust of the weak to tear down the strong, out of a deep-seated hatred of life and secret longing for destruction and death. There happens to be a tiny (repeat: tiny) seed of truth in this. The full clinical diagnosis can be read into the pages of Friedich Nietzsche. (Here I must break in with an aside. Miss Rand acknowledges a grudging debt to one, and only one, earlier philosopher: Aristotle. I submit that she is indebted, and much more heavily, to Nietzche. Just as her operatic businessmen are, in fact, Nietzschean supermen, so her ulcerous Leftists are Nietzsche's "last men," both deformed in a way to sicken the fastidious recluse of Sils Maria. And much else comes, consciously on not, from the same source.) Happily, in Atlas Shrugged (though not in life), all the children of Darkness are utterly incompetent.

So the Children of Light win handily by declaring a general strike of brains, of which they have a monopoly, letting the world go, literally, to smash. In the end, they troop out of their Rocky Mountain hideaway to repossess the ruins. It is then, in the book's last line, that a character traces in the air, "over the desolate earth," the Sign of the Dollar, in lieu of the Sign of the Cross, and in token that a suitably prostrate mankind is at last ready, for its sins, to be redeemed from the related evils of religion and social reform (the "mysticism of mind" and the "mysticism of muscle").

That Dollar Sign is not merely provocative, though we sense a sophomoric intent to raise the pious hair on susceptible heads. More importantly, it is meant to seal the fact that mankind is ready to submit abjectly to an elite of technocrats, and their accessories, in a New Order, enlightened and instructed by Miss Rand's ideas that the good life is one which "has resolved personal worth into exchange value," "has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment.'" The author is explicit, in fact deafening, about these prerequisites. Lest you should be in any doubt after 1168 pages, she assures you with a final stamp of the foot in a postscript: "and I mean it." But the words quoted above are those of Karl Marx. He, too, admired "naked self-interest" (in its time and place), and for much of the same reasons as Miss Rand: because, he believed, it cleared away the cobwebs of religion and led to prodigies of industrial and cognate accomplishment.

The overlap is not as incongruous as it looks. Atlas Shrugged can be called a novel only by devaluing the term. It is a massive tract for the times. Its story merely serves Miss Rand to get the customers inside the tent. And as a soapbox for delivering her Message. The Message is the thing. It is a sum, a forthright philosophic materialism. Upperclassmen might incline to sniff and say that the author has, with vast effort, contrived a simple materialist system, one, intellectually, at about the state of the oxcart, though without mastering the principle of the wheel. Like any consistent materialism, this one begins by rejecting God, religion, original sin, etc. etc. (This book's aggressive atheism and rather unbuttoned "higher morality," which chiefly outrage some readers, are, in fact, secondary ripples, and result inevitably from its underpinning premises.) Thus, Randian Man, like Marxian Man, is made the center of a godless world.

At that point, in any materialism, the main possibilities open up to Man. 1) His tragic fate becomes, without God, more tragic and much lonelier. In general, the tragedy deepens according to the degree of pessimism or stoicism with which he conducts his "hopeless encounter between human questioning and the silent universe." Or, 2) Man's fate ceases to be tragic at all. Tragedy is bypassed by the pursuit of happiness. Tragedy is henceforth pointless. Henceforth man's fate, without God, is up to him. And to him alone. His happiness, is strict materialist terms, lies with his own workaday hands and ingenious brain. His happiness becomes, in Miss Rand's words, "the moral purpose of his life." Here occurs a little rub whose effects are just as observable in a free enterprise system, which is in practice materialist (whatever else it claims or supposes itself to be), as they would be under an atheist Socialism, if one were ever to deliver that material abundance that all promise. The rub is that the pursuit of happiness, as an end in itself, tends automatically, and widely, to be replaced by the pursuit of pleasure with a consequent general softening of the fibers of will, intelligence on "man as a heroic being" "with productive achievement as his noblest activity." For, if man's "heroism" (some will prefer to say: "human dignity") no longer derives from God, or is not a function of that godless integrity which was a root of Nietzsche's anguish, then Man becomes merely the most consuming of animals, with glut as the condition of his happiness. And this, of course, suits the author's economics and the politics that must arise from them.

For politics, of course, arise, though the author of Atlas Shrugged stares stonily past them, as if this book were not what, in fact it is, essentially — a political book. And here begins mischief. Systems of philosophic materialism, so long as they merely circle outside this world's atmosphere, matter little to most of us. The trouble is that they keep coming down to earth. It is when a system of materialist ideas presumes to give positive answers to real problems of our real life that mischief starts. In a age like ours, in which a highly complex technological society is everywhere in a high state of instability, such answers however philosophic, translate quickly into political realities. And in the degree to which problems of complexity and instability are most bewildering to masses of men, a temptation sets in to let some species of Big Brother solve and supervise them.

One Big Brother is of course, a socializing elite (as we know, several cut-rate brands are on the shelves). Miss Rand, as the enemy of any socializing force, calls in a Big Brother of her own contriving to do battle with the other. In the name of free enterprise, therefore, she plumps for a technocratic elite (I find no more inclusive word than technocratic to bracket the industrial-financial-engineering caste she seems to have in mind). When she calls "productive achievement" man's "noblest activity," she means, almost exclusively, technological achievement, supervised by such a managerial political bureau. She might object that she means much, much more; and we can freely entertain her objections. But in sum, that is just what she means. For that is what, in reality, it works out to. And in reality, too, by contrast, with fiction, this can only head into a dictatorship, however benign, living and acting beyond good and evil, a law unto itself (as Miss Rand believes it should be), and feeling any restraint on itself as, in practice, criminal, and, in morals, vicious — as Miss Rand clearly feels it to be. Of course, Miss Rand nowhere calls for a dictatorship. I take her to be calling for an aristocracy of talents. We cannot labor here why, in the modern world, the pre-conditions for aristocracy, an organic growth, no longer exist, so that impulse toward aristocracy always emerges now in the form of dictatorship.

Nor has the author, apparently, brooded on the degree to which, in a wicked world, a materialism of the Right and a materialism of the Left, first surprisingly resemble, then in action tend to blend each with each, because, while differing at the top in avowed purposed, and possibly in conflict there, at bottom they are much the same thing. The embarrassing similarities between Hitler's National Socialism and Stalin's brand of Communism are familiar. For the world, as seen in materialist view from the Left. The question becomes chiefly: who is to run that world in whose interests, or perhaps, at best, who can run it more efficiently?

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 one 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 the gas chambers — 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 differences 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.

We struggle to be just. For we cannot help feel at least a sympathetic pain before the sheer labor, discipline and patient craftsmanship that went to making this mountain of words. But the words keep shouting us down. In the end that tone dominates. But it should be its own antidote, warning us that anything it shouts is best taken with the usual reservations with which we might sip a patent medicine. Some may like the flavor. In any case, the brew is probably without lasting ill effects. But it is not a cure for anything. Nor would we, ordinarily, place much confidence in the diagnosis of a doctor who supposes that the Hippocratic Oath is a kind of curse.

Copyright © 1957 by National Review, Inc., 215 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10016. Reprinted with permission.
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I am an AR fan, and to be honest, will never know the truth about whether she was a psychopath or not. But what I have been pondering on lately was the human element in relation to what we take in through our eyes, ears, etc. One thing I have noticed is that everybodys reality is a little different from everybody else's. Thus, everybody will process what make sense to them. What if that is part of our human saving grace. The ability to take something that may be disingenuous and apply it in a beneficial way because of our perception. Perhaps we are able to mutate the info we receive into something good even though it was given with the intent to misdirect or disinform. I gained a lot of insight from reading Atlas Shrugged about how psychopaths can use you through weakness, and the importance on trying to look reality square in the face at all times. Likewise, there are some movies that I love that could be considered illuminati or whatever, as well as music groups. I'm having trouble reconciling the "good" I have gotten from these things as far as perspective and thought stimulation, with the "badness" that they originate from, whether real or not. Am I deluding myself to think this? What can be the "evil" in the pure joy I get from listening to Led Zepplin? I read Jimmy Page was really into alistair crowley, but does that affect the way I hear the music?
 
lizzietreid said:
I am an AR fan, and to be honest, will never know the truth about whether she was a psychopath or not.
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There is a wealth of information here re: psychopathy. You can use the Search tool in the upper right hand part of the page.
 
lizzietreid said:
One thing I have noticed is that everybodys reality is a little different from everybody else's. Thus, everybody will process what make sense to them. What if that is part of our human saving grace. The ability to take something that may be disingenuous and apply it in a beneficial way because of our perception. Perhaps we are able to mutate the info we receive into something good even though it was given with the intent to misdirect or disinform.
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This is actually discussed in "Political Ponerology" and is called "Critical Correction." Unfortunately, even when it is done, it is never entirely free of the pathological taint of its origin.
 
Thank you for the direction, the political ponerology is something I haven't started delving into yet, and I certainly would appreciate any discussion on this as it has really been bothering me latety. Thanks again
 
lizzietreid said:
Thank you for the direction, the political ponerology is something I haven't started delving into yet, and I certainly would appreciate any discussion on this as it has really been bothering me latety. Thanks again
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One book that really helped open my eyes to many of AR's psychological aberrations was Judgement Day: My Years With Ayn Rand, by Nathaniel Branden.

Nathaniel Branden was a very early member of the Objectivist movement, and even considered by Rand to be her intellectual heir. Being Ayn's very first pupil, he became a close friend, confidant, and even lover and chief lecturer on Objectivism. Over time he gradually woke up to Ayn Rand's pathological nature, and was eventually ostracized for it, to the point of even being barred from her Funeral almost 30 years later.

Oddly enough, in spite of being a psychologist, he never actually characterizes her as a narcissist or psychopath, and dismissed it all as a combination of emotional scarring and overusage of dietary amphetamines. I think this is because he still was heavily influenced by her spellbinding thinking on ethics, metaphysics, etc. (he was not entirely objective, in other words), and also because psychopathy of a sub-criminal type was relatively unheard off at the time, or unthinkable in someone he used to worship.
 
whitecoast said:
lizzietreid said:
Thank you for the direction, the political ponerology is something I haven't started delving into yet, and I certainly would appreciate any discussion on this as it has really been bothering me latety. Thanks again
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whitecoast, did you mean to add something?
 
whitecoast, did you mean to add something?
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Whoops. I had a response typed out but it didn't make it to the reply for whatever reason. I added my response to the original post.
 
Re: Ayn Rand Psychopath?

Laura said:
Well, the other thread is in books... so where to put the discussion? Books or Ponerology? It actually looks to me like Rand was a "tool" of the Elites.

If you ever want to read the counterpoint to "Atlas Shrugged," have a look at "Ceremony of the Innocent" by Taylor Caldwell.
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I was looking for a new book to read and first I found Atlas Shrugged (I don´t remember how) but, like I always do, I checked the board first and I found this.

Now, I´ll try to find Ceremony of the Innocent (hard to find in spanish, but I´ll try). :rolleyes:
 
I read Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" last year and couldn't help but notice how much of the story seemed to playing out in the world. It was uncanny-almost the same situations were appearing in the US, where I live. It was like I was reading a playbook or textbook for what I was seeing. That not does make her views correct though.

"Atlas Shrugged" is focused on the materialism and corporatism of life. She does explore emotions in the characters, but through their own self interest and gratification, mainly attached to an ideal which is still based on the self. The main characters destroy others and society by "feeding" off one another through violence, arrogance, supposed justice, desire, and malice. The whole work is extrememly STS. Ayn Rand seems to try to lead the reader to her own conclusion, in a very black and white thinking kind of way OSIT.

I was looking at the back cover of my copy of "Atlas Shrugged" and found she had also written "The Virtue of Selfishness", "Capitialism:The Unknown Ideal", and her philopsophy was called "Objectivism". A quote of Ayn Rand that applies to Objectivism:" My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute".

(Quotes in this post are from Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, Centennial Edition, Copyright 1957)

The basic pricinciples of Objectivism are metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and politics. She translated these into "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed", "You can't eat your cake and have it too", "Man is an end in himself", and "Give me liberty or give me death". This brief explanation of the principles of Objectivism goes on to say "Objectivism rejects any belief in the supernatural-and any claim that individuals or groups can create their own reality", "Objectivism rejects mysticism and skepticism", "Objectivism rejects any form of altruism-the claim that morality consists in living for others or society", and "Objectivism rejects any form of collectivism and mixed economy".

There is also an Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine California that was established in 1985 as a non-profit educational organization.

Overall, it was a very interesting read. The next book on my list is Political Ponerology, and am very interested in reading the counterpoint "Ceremony of the Innocent" by Taylor Caldwell.
 
Atlas Shrugged... Again

I've been reading Atlas Shrugged for the second time in what little spare time I have.
 
It looks like Adam Curtis has made another must-watch documentary series - 'All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_of_Loving_Grace_%28TV_series%29

http://vimeo.com/57157436

In the first episode, Curtis tracks the effects of Ayn Rand's ideas. It's interesting that she was shunned at the time, but surely and slowly her cult following built up over the decades until Silicon Valley CEO-types lived and breathed her ethos pathos.
 
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