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Milkman · 02-05-2009, 03:23 PM

Ayn Rand on religion. She's an Atheist. She is asked typical question by Americans.

YouTube - Ayn Rand on Religion

Jet Gorgon · 03-05-2009, 02:26 PM

^ Thanks for the vid interviews, MM.

I concur with many of Ayn's views but not all. The same reason I do not follow any one ideology -- I think for myself. I find that Ayn lacks compassion -- yet, I like compassion on my own terms, not what a union or government dictates to me what it is. I also disagree with her on the god issue in the sense that I believe my spirit will not die with my body and that there is a greater power over all. I do not pray to a greater power. I give thanks every day for the gifts of strength given to me and I pray to the spirits of those departed whom I love. Everyone else can fek off.
The reason I abhor libbies is that they want me to feel guilty for having more or being better than the lesser man (in this sense, I agree with Ayn). This I do not condone. Yet, I still have compassion for the needy, BUT, I think I should be able to decide by myself which needy person I will help. I do not need a government or a collective to order me to do so via taxes or union fees. No. I ask nothing of no man, and expect them to ask nothing of me. I give alot, and it is sincere and from my stupid selfish heart, selfish because it just makes me feel good to do so, and it is always given anonymously. I do not need a hug from the libbies for a donation nor do I want big brother to tell me who and what I give to.

And BG, if unions are so great, how come as you said they screw their workers?

Milkman · 07-05-2009, 07:56 AM

Very interesting article about a predecessor to Ayn Rand: Isabel Paterson.

She's worth looking into and she wrote a novel, as well as Rand regarding this viewpoint.

Quote:

Finding Atlas PDF
Before Ayn Rand there was Isabel Paterson.
By Stephen Cox

The Economist recently reported that Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, first published in 1957, is back on the bestseller lists. A week before the president’s inauguration, more people were buying it than Obama’s Audacity of Hope.

For the uninitiated, Atlas explores a future world in which the nation’s economy is collapsing because of government interference. The theme developed out of Rand’s own era: she started planning her novel in 1943, in the midst of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. But it’s no wonder that it seems relevant today. New Deal activism, which was principally responsible for prolonging the Great Depression, guides our current economic stimulators.

Rand’s disciples are a devoted lot. A recent issue of the New Yorker profiled one local group—the dentist with “John Galt,” the hero of Atlas Shrugged, on his license plate; the wealth manager who piously intones, “I’ve been a follower of Ayn Rand for five years”; the helpful fellow who suggests, “When civilization collapses, we’ll just have to organize an Objectivist gang.”

Mention the name Isabel Paterson in such a gathering, and you’re likely to draw blank looks. For all the fervor that Rand inspires, little notice is paid to the woman who most inspired her.

Paterson (1886-1961) was a novelist and literary critic. She was slight, just over five feet tall, with a delicate taste in food and drink, a deep love of nature, and a nationally famous sense of humor. Stubborn and sharp-witted, she was also one of the New Deal’s fiercest foes.

Paterson grew up in poverty on the Western frontier. She had only two years of formal schooling. But she learned from her own experience, as well as her encyclopedic knowledge of history, that economic success results from individual initiative, not federal management. As an author, she also knew what makes a plausible story and could see that there could not possibly be a happy ending to the government’s efforts to fix everything that was broken in the 1930s.

Both Roosevelt and his hapless predecessor, Herbert Hoover, tried to inspire confidence by keeping unsuccessful enterprises afloat at the expense of successful ones. Strangely, prudent investors declined to be stimulated, no matter how fervently they were exhorted to trust the government’s programs. For Paterson, that result was tediously predictable. She told readers she was “tired of being told that ‘credit depends on confidence.’ Fudge. Credit depends on real assets, sound money and a clean record. … When any one asks us to have confidence we are glad to inform him that the request of itself would shatter any remaining confidence in our mind.”

Then there was the issue of government planning. To Paterson, the notion that federal experts can plan to ensure the people’s welfare was a ridiculous projection of childish fantasies—“a mother’s boy economic program with a kind maternal government taking care of everybody out of an inexhaustible income drawn from mysterious sources.” Perfect planning requires perfect foresight—and who

possesses that?

Paterson’s Golden Vanity, one of the few good novels about the Depression, focuses on reputed experts’ outrageous failures of foresight. Its climactic scene is a confrontation between an investor and the financier she entrusted with her money—a man who worked, with the government’s assistance, to create a baffling maze of bad investments. When she hears him admit, “We could not foresee…,” she has finally had enough. “Why couldn’t you foresee?” she demands. “If you can’t foresee, what are you paid for?” She is wrathful, and there is dignity in her wrath.

The fundamental problem, Paterson proposed, is confusion of the economy with politics. In 1932, when Hoover was still in office, she said that “our ‘best minds’ ... have already got the political machinery dangerously entangled with the economic system, disrupting both; and they are now demanding that the government should save them from what they’ve done to it.” As others stood for separation of church and state, Paterson stood for separation of politics and business. She wanted no new government programs to save an economy that government programs had already disrupted. Readers wrote to her, asking her to identify her own plan for the government to solve the nation’s problems. She replied, “What these correspondents really demand is dope. If we don’t believe in their dope, what dope can we suggest in place of it? None whatever. We do not even know a remedy for gullibility.”

Her idea was simply to leave people alone to make their own investments, to earn profits and keep them, and to liquidate unprofitable enterprises. History backed her up. She remembered the nation’s relatively quick recovery from the economic crisis of her girlhood, the depression of the 1890s: “This country experienced bankruptcy in the nineties. Part of the loss was borne by foreign bondholders. That part of the situation is now reversed. It is a much worse bankruptcy. But that is all it is.” She knew that once the incompetent were permitted to go bankrupt, the competent could “pick up the pieces.”

Such notions were contemptuously disregarded by the public intellectuals of the 1930s, men who considered Paterson a reactionary lady novelist, lacking the ability to comprehend big, hairy-chested Keynesian and Marxist theories. Edmund Wilson, America’s leading young literary critic, informed Paterson that she was “the last surviving person to believe in [the] quaint old notions on which the republic was founded.”

She maintained, however, that “the principle of the lever remains the same.” And she wasn’t the last to believe in the old Republic. Among the rising generation of conservative and libertarian intellectuals whom she influenced was a young escapee from Soviet Russia, Ayn Rand. At that time, Rand was an author without an audience. An avid reader of Paterson’s weekly newspaper columns, she sought the older writer’s acquaintance during the dark days following the election of 1940, when the Republicans ignominiously lost to Roosevelt for a third time. During the next few years, Rand sat at Paterson’s feet, learning about economics, politics, and American history. When Rand published her breakthrough novel, The Fountainhead, in 1943, she inscribed her gift copy to Paterson, “You have been the one encounter in my life that can never be repeated.”

Soon afterward, Rand started the long process of writing the 1,168-page Atlas Shrugged, a work of original genius that was nevertheless distinctively influenced by Paterson’s ideas. Both women were rigorous individualists, but when it came to images of the capitalist system as a whole, Rand yielded to Paterson.

In Rand’s opinion, The God of the Machine, Paterson’s great work of economic and historical theory, “does for capitalism what Das Kapital did for the Reds” and “what the Bible did for Christianity.” In her book, Paterson conceptualized capitalism as an enormous circuit connecting producers and consumers throughout the world, using real money and real profits to generate new efficiencies and larger amounts of energy. She stipulated that government’s proper role was to safeguard the infrastructure of this system, keeping it free from force and fraud. If government went beyond that and tried to manage the economy, it could only divert its energy and, eventually, short-circuit and destroy it.

This is exactly the way in which Rand depicts the world in Atlas Shrugged. The novel’s central story concerns a railroad—a literal circuit of economic exchange—and the people who try to keep it running, despite the government’s best efforts to connect it to projects that sap its energy. With every new government plan, with every new administrative proposal to stimulate a lagging economy, the railroad’s profits dwindle, its lines shorten, industrialists who rely on it go bankrupt, and consumers have less access to the means of life. Eventually, there is a massive breakdown. The circuit of production and consumption can be reconnected only by individuals who plan their own economic behavior. The greatest of these is the man who best understands how energy is generated.
It is a compelling picture of the world —one that demonstrates the importance of the literary imagination as a generator of intellectual energy. Indeed, if modern conservative and libertarian ideas had been forced to wait until professional economists and politicians conveyed them to the public, they would never have been conveyed. The task required people of imagination who were willing to offer America an alternative vision of itself. To put it bluntly, the task required people who could really write.

That is why William F. Buckley Jr., laying the foundation for the modern conservative movement with the creation of National Review in 1955, identified Paterson as one of the people he most wanted to write for him. He got her, too—for a while. She left NR because—an individualist in every respect—she preferred not to be edited.

Paterson’s relationship with Rand also fared badly. In 1948, an argument ended their friendship. As Paterson had written, “one genius is about all a house will hold,” and each of these geniuses had a very considerable temper. But there was an even more important reason for the break-up: Paterson’s belief in God.

This was not an unexamined assumption; it was an intellectual conviction, reached after long consideration of other ways of explaining the world. Paterson believed that the energy of the world required a source. She also believed, as she says in The God of the Machine, that no one could “rewrite the Declaration of Independence without reference to a divine source of human rights. It cannot be done; the axiom is missing.” A world without God would be a world without an intellectual and moral framework, and thus without a grounding for liberty. These were ideas that Rand, a dogmatic atheist, could never fully grasp.

As her own fame supplanted Paterson’s, Rand allowed the older woman’s influence on her to fall gradually into the shadows. Yet for many years she insisted that people who were interested in her own work must also read Paterson’s. Nor did she ever completely disavow her link to the “one encounter” that had decisively influenced her career.
Russell Kirk, the philosopher of American conservatism, had his own quarrelsome relationship with Paterson. Yet, he said, she “stood out courageously, in defiance of the Lonely Crowd. I thought that everyone must be reading her ... and could never forget her.”

Probably no one who encountered Isabel Paterson easily forgot her. Now a new generation needs an introduction. In this moment when, under stress, basic ideas are being recovered, Atlas is surging in popularity, and the historic failures of the New Deal are being re-examined, it is time to revisit her wit and learning. “The principle of the lever remains the same.”

__________________________________________
Stephen Cox is professor of literature at UC San Diego. His two latest books are The New Testament and Literature and The Woman and the Dynamo, a biography of Isabel Paterson.

The

Link: The American Conservative -- Finding Atlas

Milkman · 02-11-2009, 12:23 PM

Here is an Op-Ed. Ayn Rand and her book "Atlas Shrugs" (and other books) are being advocated for reading now.

Is Ayn Rand a direction people want to go, in these times.

People advocating Rand's ideas (Limbaugh, Beck) have not publicly advocated rescinding Social Security and Medicare, which is the only way to avert the current and coming socialism of America.

Talking about government regulations is certain one thing, but omitting SS, Medicare and the Military-Industrial Complex spending is hypocrisy.

The US is not a nanny state. There is no one there to pick you up if you fall down after unemployment benefits run out.

Article:

Quote:

Ayn Rand’s Revenge

By ADAM KIRSCH

Published: October 29, 2009

A specter is haunting the Republican Party — the specter of John Galt. In Ayn Rand’s libertarian epic “Atlas Shrugged,” Galt, an inventor disgusted by creeping American collectivism, leads the country’s capitalists on a retributive strike. “We have granted you everything you demanded of us, we who had always been the givers, but have only now understood it,” Galt lectures the “looters” and “moochers” who make up the populace. “We have no demands to present you, no terms to bargain about, no compromise to reach. You have nothing to offer us. We do not need you.”
Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image

Lester Kraus
Ayn Rand in 1964.

AYN RAND AND THE WORLD SHE MADE

By Anne C. Heller
Illustrated. 567 pp. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. $35

At the Oval Office, 1974. From left are Rose Goldsmith, mother of Alan Greenspan; President Ford; Greenspan; Rand; and her husband, Frank O’Connor.

Enlarge This Image

Allyn Baum/The New York Times
Ayn Rand in Manhattan in 1957.

“Atlas Shrugged” was published 52 years ago, but in the Obama era, Rand’s angry message is more resonant than ever before. Sales of the book have reportedly spiked. At “tea parties” and other conservative protests, alongside the Obama-as-Joker signs, you will find placards reading “Atlas Shrugs” and “Ayn Rand Was Right.” Not long after the inauguration, as right-wing pundits like Glenn Beck were invoking Rand and issuing warnings of incipient socialism, Representative John Campbell, Republican of California, told a reporter that the prospect of rising taxes and government regulation meant “people are starting to feel like we’re living through the scenario that happened in ‘Atlas Shrugged.’ ”

Rand’s style of vehement individualism has never been universally popular among conservatives — back in 1957, Whittaker Chambers denounced the “wickedness” of “Atlas Shrugged” in National Review — and Rand still has her critics on the right today. But it can often seem, as Jonathan Chait, a senior editor at The New Republic recently observed, that “Rand is everywhere in this right-wing mood.” And while it’s not hard to understand Rand’s revenge-fantasy appeal to those on the right, would-be Galts ought to hear the story Anne C. Heller has to tell in her dramatic and very timely biography, “Ayn Rand and the World She Made.”
For one thing, it is far more interesting than anything in Rand’s novels. That is because Heller is dealing with a human being, and one with more than her share of human failings and contradictions — “gallant, driven, brilliant, brash, cruel . . . and ultimately self-destructive,” as Heller puts it. The characters Rand created, on the other hand — like Galt or Howard Roark, the architect hero of “The Fountainhead” — are abstract principles set to moving and talking.

This is at once the failure and the making of Rand’s fiction. The plotting and characterization in her books may be vulgar and unbelievable, just as one would expect from the middling Holly[at]wood screenwriter she once was; but her message, while not necessarily more sophisticated, is magnified by the power of its absolute sincerity. It is the message that turned her, from the publication of “Atlas Shrugged” in 1957 until her death in 1982, into the leader of a kind of sect. (This season, another Rand book, by the academic historian Jennifer Burns, is aptly titled “Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right.”) Even today, Rand’s books sell hundreds of thousands of copies a year. Heller reports that in a poll in the early ’90s, sponsored by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club, “Americans named ‘Atlas Shrugged’ the book that had most influenced their lives,” second only to the Bible.

Rand’s particular intellectual contribution, the thing that makes her so popular and so American, is the way she managed to mass market elitism — to convince so many people, especially young people, that they could be geniuses without being in any concrete way distinguished. Or, rather, that they could distinguish themselves by the ardor of their commitment to Rand’s teaching. The very form of her novels makes the same point: they are as cartoonish and sexed-up as any best seller, yet they are constantly suggesting that the reader who appreciates them is one of the elect.

Heller maintains an appropriately critical perspective on her subject — she writes that she is “a strong admirer, albeit one with many questions and reservations” — while allowing the reader to understand the power of Rand’s conviction and her odd charisma. Rand labored for more than two years on Galt’s radio address near the end of “Atlas Shrugged” — a long paean to capitalism, individualism and selfishness that makes Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is good” sound like the Sermon on the Mount. “At one point, she stayed inside the apartment, working for 33 days in a row,” Heller writes. She kept going on amphetamines and willpower; the writing, she said, was a “drops-of-water-in-a-desert kind of torture.” Nor would Rand, sooner than any other desert prophet, allow her message to be trifled with. When Bennett Cerf, a head of Random House, begged her to cut Galt’s speech, Rand replied with what Heller calls “a comment that became publishing legend”: “Would you cut the Bible?” One can imagine what Cerf thought — he had already told Rand plainly, “I find your political philosophy abhorrent” — but the strange thing is that Rand’s grandiosity turned out to be perfectly justified.

In fact, any editor certainly would cut the Bible, if an agent submitted it as a new work of fiction. But Cerf offered Rand an alternative: if she gave up 7 cents per copy in royalties, she could have the extra paper needed to print Galt’s oration. That she agreed is a sign of the great contradiction that haunts her writing and especially her life. Politically, Rand was committed to the idea that capitalism is the best form of social organization invented or conceivable. This was, perhaps, an understandable reaction against her childhood experience of Communism. Born in 1905 as Alissa Rosenbaum to a Jewish family in St. Petersburg, she was 12 when the Bolsheviks seized power, and she endured the ensuing years of civil war, hunger and oppression. By 1926, when she came to live with relatives in the United States and changed her name, she had become a relentless enemy of every variety of what she denounced as “collectivism,” from Soviet Communism to the New Deal. Even Republicans weren’t immune: after Wendell Willkie’s defeat in 1940, Rand helped to found an organization called Associated Ex-Willkie Workers Against Willkie, berating the candidate as “the guiltiest man of any for destroying America, more guilty than Roosevelt.”

Yet while Rand took to wearing a dollar-sign pin to advertise her love of capitalism, Heller makes clear that the author had no real affection for dollars themselves. Giving up her royalties to preserve her vision is something that no genuine capitalist, and few popular novelists, would have done. It is the act of an intellectual, of someone who believes that ideas matter more than lucre. In fact, as Heller shows, Rand had no more reverence for the actual businessmen she met than most intellectuals do. The problem was that, according to her own theories, the executives were supposed to be as creative and admirable as any artist or thinker. They were part of the fraternity of the gifted, whose strike, in “Atlas Shrugged,” brings the world to its knees.

Rand’s inclusion of businessmen in the ranks of the Übermenschen helps to explain her appeal to free-marketeers — including Alan Greenspan — but it is not convincing. At bottom, her individualism owed much more to Nietzsche than to Adam Smith (though Rand, typically, denied any influence, saying only that Nie[at]tzsche “beat me to all my ideas”). But “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” never sold a quarter of a million copies a year.

Rand’s potent message could lead to intoxication and even to madness, as the second half of her life showed. In 1949, Rand was living with her husband, a mild-mannered former actor named Frank O’Connor, in Southern California, in a Richard Neutra house. Then she got a fan letter from a 19-year-old college freshman named Nathan Blumenthal and invited him to visit. Rand, whose books are full of masterful, sexually dominating heroes, quickly fell in love with this confused boy, whom she decided was the “intellectual heir” she had been waiting for.

The decades of psychodrama that followed read, in Heller’s excellent account, like “Phèdre” rewritten by Edward Albee. When Blumenthal, who changed his name to Nathaniel Branden, moved to New York, Rand followed him; she inserted herself into her protégé’s love life, urging him to marry his girlfriend; then Rand began to sleep with Branden, insisting that both their spouses be kept fully apprised of what was going on. Heller shows how the Brandens formed the nucleus of a growing group of young Rand followers, a herd of individualists who nicknamed themselves “the Collective” — ironically, but not ironically enough, for they began to display the frightening group-think of a true cult. One journalist Heller refers to wondered how Rand “charmed so many young people into quoting John Galt as religiously as ‘clergymen quote Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.’ ”

Inevitably, it all ended in tears, when Branden fell in love with a young actress and was expelled from Rand’s circle forever. That he went on to write several best-[at]selling books of popular psychology “and earned the appellation ‘father of the self-esteem movement’ ” is the kind of finishing touch that makes truth stranger than fiction. For if there is one thing Rand’s life shows, it is the power, and peril, of unjustified self-esteem.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/bo...t.html?_r=1&em

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03-05-2009, 02:26 PM	#2 (permalink)
Jet Gorgon Jihad Barbie Last Online: Today 05:44 AM Join Date: Apr 2007 Location: Near Libbies Posts: 12,472	^ Thanks for the vid interviews, MM. I concur with many of Ayn's views but not all. The same reason I do not follow any one ideology -- I think for myself. I find that Ayn lacks compassion -- yet, I like compassion on my own terms, not what a union or government dictates to me what it is. I also disagree with her on the god issue in the sense that I believe my spirit will not die with my body and that there is a greater power over all. I do not pray to a greater power. I give thanks every day for the gifts of strength given to me and I pray to the spirits of those departed whom I love. Everyone else can fek off. The reason I abhor libbies is that they want me to feel guilty for having more or being better than the lesser man (in this sense, I agree with Ayn). This I do not condone. Yet, I still have compassion for the needy, BUT, I think I should be able to decide by myself which needy person I will help. I do not need a government or a collective to order me to do so via taxes or union fees. No. I ask nothing of no man, and expect them to ask nothing of me. I give alot, and it is sincere and from my stupid selfish heart, selfish because it just makes me feel good to do so, and it is always given anonymously. I do not need a hug from the libbies for a donation nor do I want big brother to tell me who and what I give to. And BG, if unions are so great, how come as you said they screw their workers?

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