Atlas Shrugged, from Francesco Sabella

This morning I finished rereading the classic Atlas Shrugged of Ayn Rand and every time I learn something new; her thought is monumental. I don’t agree with a lot of her ideas and I fully agree with others, but I’ve always found this book to be an impressive catalyst for thought; this is in my opinion her power: the ability in sparking debate.

Rich Bubb comments:

Atlas Shrugged is also available as a 3-part movie. I think the book was better.

Adam Grimes writes:

My opinion on her work has shifted over the years, in a strongly negative direction. Too much of my experience contradicts her metaphysics and epistemology, particularly the rigidity of her rational materialism, and, as someone who treasures the craft of writing, much of her prose lands as clunky and overly didactic. I'm also now unconvinced on the primacy and sufficiency of rational self-interest… but, as you said, perhaps her greatest value is in creating discussion.

Asindu Drileba adds:

Ayn Rand had a reading group called the "Ayn Rand Collective" — Which Alan Greenspan was part of. They [Greenspan, Rand and a "professor"] would meet at Rand's apartment to read every new chapter of her new book. She (Ayn Rand) then fell in love with the professor and they started dating.

After sometime, the "professor" encountered a pretty young student in his own class and he "fell in love with her". The professor told Rand about the affair, but Rand begged the professor to cancel it. The professor then said that he would dump Ayn Rand, and then exclusively date the young pretty student. He said that this was the right thing to do since he was following his "rational self-interest". Ayn Rand got angry, slapped the professor in the face twice and kicked him out of her reading group.

This was a good illustration of cognitive dissonance. Rand thought her readers should practice "rational-self interest" towards everyone else, except her.

Francesco Sabella met a girl:

I was very fascinated to meet a girl times ago who I knew for her philanthropic activities and for her ideas being the exact opposite of Rand; and I was surprised to see her carrying an Ayn Rand book and she told me she didn’t like at all her; it made me think of her ability in creating debates.

Victor Niederhoffer responds:

i would always marry a girl who admired the book. susan introduced me to it and i knew then i had to marry her. it was very good choice.

Gyve Bones has a view:

I was for a time, in my wandering in the wilderness of searching for meaning in life, living in Austin from '93–'96, and became associated with the local Objectivist group, which was centered around the University of Texas. Randian Objectivism appealed to me because it was so coherently integral, rational, and reason-able. It made sense and it was like a big intellection puzzle to wrap my mind around it. It appealed to my ambient narcissism and selfishness at that age, enjoying life pair-bonded to a series of committed relationships with women outside of the bonds of marriage. The group met frequently for social gatherings, for talks given by Objectivist luminaries, for movie screenings which were followed by intense intellectual dissections of the film we had just watched. The highest best wish you could impart to a fellow Objectivist was "May you have good premises." (because from solid premises was built the entire coherent philosophy.)

I collected from my readings of Rand some quotations which are in my Signatures file of collected quotations that seemed when I collected them to express wisdom, especially if it was concise or funny. Here are my souvenirs from that period of my life before I got married, had children and found the Randian premises wanting, and reconverted to the Faith of Our Fathers in the Catholic Church in which I had been raised, which required accepting on faith a different set of premises:

Did you really think we want those laws observed?” said Dr. Ferris. “We want them to be broken. You’d better get it straight that it’s not a bunch of boy scouts you’re up against… We’re after power and we mean it… There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted—and you create a nation of law-breakers—and then you cash in on guilt. Now that’s the system, Mr. Reardon, that’s the game, and once you understand it, you’ll be much easier to deal with. [Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged]

And especially for traders, this credo:

The symbol of all relationships among [rational] men, the moral symbol of respect for human beings, is the trader. We, who live by values, not by loot, are traders, both in matter and in spirit. A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved. A trader does not ask to be paid for his failures, nor does he ask to be loved for his flaws. A trader does not squander his body as fodder or his soul as alms. Just as he does not give his work except in trade for material values, so he does not give the values of his spirit—his love, his friendship, his esteem—except in payment and in trade for human virtues, in payment for his own selfish pleasure, which he receives from men he can respect. The mystic parasites who have, throughout the ages, reviled the traders and held them in contempt, while honoring the beggars and the looters, have known the secret motive of their sneers: a trader is the entity they dread—a man of justice. [Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged]

But, ultimately I came to understand Rand, her philosophy, and her fiction (Atlas Shrugged is a philosophical tract in the disguise of a bad fictional novel) as Flannery O'Connor did:

I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re: fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky. [Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being]

Francesco Sabella prefers Popper:

I am, since I was 15/16, a huge admirer of Sir Karl Popper, at the point that when I was 18/19 in high school and we were studying him, the professor allowed me to give some of the lectures because he, very humbly and surprisingly , said that I was significantly more prepared than him on the topic.

I’d say Popper is the opposite of Rand, and my philosophy of life , how I see things, is 100% Popperanian. The fact that someone like me, and I know a few others, do not share most of the values of Ayn Rand but still picks up her books, says a lot about her; I hardly think it happens for many intellectual debates where people are often arrogant and often close minded.

I do find both Popper and Rand had a similarity tho: they both hated the idea of blindly believing in unchallenged truths, Popper because he thought it stopped progress, Rand because she thought it would go against independent thinking.

Laurence Glazier comments:

The issue here is that art becomes tarnished if mixed with ideology. In this sense, The Fountainhead is purer. Both books stand proudly on my shelf.

Gyve Bones suggests:

I would suggest the following hypothesis: all art represents the ideology of the artist's patron if it is commissioned art, and or that of the artist if he's arting on spec (hoping to be able to sell it to some imagined or target patron when it is completed.) There is no separating art from the ideology of the culture in which it is made: artists make art to please their patrons. Patrons can purchase art from discretionary capital which they have obtained by working within the culture and technological means available to accumulate it.

H. Humbert disagrees:

This seems precisely wrong. Real art is meant to challenge and tear down conventional ideas and ideals that probably need changing for culture and humankind to advance (or stay off the wrong track). What you are referring to is the mundane world of interior decoration, typically carried out by otherwise unemployable social science majors (nowadays). To the extent that a patron hires an artist who is challenging conventional wisdoms, it is not because the patron directed the artist to do so, but merely because their world views overlayed prior to any commercial arrangement.

Gyve Bones retorts:

Challenging conventional ideas and ideals is the ideology of a revolutionary, a shit disturber, an asshole, a disciple of Satan, the prototypical rebel. Certainly we have had no shortage of shit-disturber art patrons, funded by other people's money confiscated from them at the point of a gun such as the CIA who funded the modern art movement so we could win the race of producing degenerate art with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. But again, the art produced reflects the ideology of the patron, so my hypothesis has withstood the falsification challenge.

Carder Dimitroff comments:

I'm no art expert, but all points seem valid because the subject is so broad. I found an interesting treatment of the issue presented in Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, Frederic Spotts.

William Huggins extends the analogy to trading:

a financial parallel is that in pricing theory, you basically pick a numeraire - some measure (fixed rate of return) around which everything else varies. like a monetary standard, it can be arbitrarily chosen but in practice its a lot easier (mathematically) to pick something which its fairly stable already if your object of study is "what drives the distribution". in theory there is no reason that two people working from two different "numeraire" descriptions of the same system would derive a different understanding of the mechanics, they would just use different bases while both being coherent from their own perspectives (say, CAD base vs USD base for portfolio optimization)

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