Thread: Ayn Rand

Originally Posted by Boon Mee

Atlas Shrugged Sales Are Going Through the Roof

If you were to read only one work of fiction, it should be Atlas Shrugged, in which Ayn Rand foresees the destruction of America by collectivist looters like Obama, and the emergence of a resistance that refuses to be enslaved by Marxist ideology. Encouragingly, sales of the prophetic book are soaring:

Sales of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" have almost tripled over the first seven weeks of this year compared with sales for the same period in 2008. This continues a strong trend after bookstore sales reached an all-time annual high in 2008 of about 200,000 copies sold.

"Americans are flocking to buy and read 'Atlas Shrugged' because there are uncanny similarities between the plot-line of the book and the events of our day" said Yaron Brook, Executive Director at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights. "Americans are rightfully concerned about the economic crisis and government's increasing intervention and attempts to control the economy. Ayn Rand understood and identified the deeper causes of the crisis we're facing, and she offered, in 'Atlas Shrugged,' a principled and practical solution consistent with American values."



Read it Surin...

You just assumed I haven't? I can guarantee that I'm far more well read {diversity and variety} than you might be.

^
I doubt it...

Rand's Fountainhead is actually a decent novel. Atlas Shrugged is just a showcase of her plagiarised Nietzschean philosopy, and accoirdingly a second rate novel.

Well, in any event, folks are flocking to read Atlas Shrugged as there are uncanny similarities between the plot-line of the book and the events of our day...

Will the movie follow the book? They usually take some elements and ommit others. Hard to move from book to screen play. Because of these times and with the bailout, it's interesting that many Americans are starting to read Ayn Raynd's "Atlas Shrugged."

Some posters above (thanks) have mention other books by her, such as "Fountainhead."

"Atlas Shrugged" is on the Amazon top seller list at the moment.

With 'Atlas Shrugged,' Hollywood may have its first anti-bailout movie

By Steven Zeitchik
Hollywood could soon be going Objectivist.
After decades in development hell, Ayn Rand’s capitalism-minded “Atlas Shrugged” is taking new steps toward the big screen — with one of the film world’s most prominent money men potentially at its center.
Ryan Kavanaugh’s Relativity Media is circling the Baldwin Entertainment project and could come aboard to finance with Lionsgate, which got involved several years ago.

Rand’s popular but polarizing book — it’s derided by many literary critics but has a huge public following — tells the story of Dagny Taggart, a railroad executive trying to keep her corporation competitive in the face of what she perceives as a lack of innovation and individual responsibility.
A number of stars have expressed serious interest in playing the lead role of Taggart. Angelina Jolie previously had been reported as a candidate to play the strong female character, but the list is growing and now includes Charlize Theron, Julia Roberts and Anne Hathaway.
Although it was written a half-century ago, producers say that the book’s themes of individualism resonate in the era of Obama, government bailouts and stimulus packages -- making this the perfect moment to bring the 1,100-page novel to the big screen.

“This couldn’t be more timely,” said Karen Baldwin, who along with husband Howard is producing, with film industry consultant John Logigian advising on the project. “It’s uncanny what Rand was able to predict — about the only things she didn’t anticipate are cell phones and the Internet.” Baldwin may be on to something -- love it or hate it, "Shrugged" is seeing a resurgence, with book sales spiking as debates rage in Washington and around the country about the government's role in a faltering free-market economy.

The author’s final novel offers an embattled railroad company as a metaphor for a society that Taggart (and Rand) sees as succumbing to socialism at the expense of individual creativity. Its backbone is a 50-page speech by the mysterious but major character John Galt in which he lays out the Rand principles of Objectivism, which argues for an aggressive free market and against government activism. Let's just say it's probably not on the president's nightstand.

With all the long speeches and with plot points often a Trojan Horse for Rand's ideas, it's not an easy writing or directing gig, but producers believe they've got the man who could do it. Randall Wallace, the writer on other crisis-era, politically themed works such as “Braveheart” and “Pearl Harbor,” has written the latest draft of the screenplay and is also interested in coming on to direct.(He would follow in the steps of "House of Sand and Fog" director Vadim Perelman, who had been attached to direct and fell off; we like Perelman, but would have been quite the transition for him.)

The project would likely land in the $50 million-budget range but could go higher depending on talent.

Producers are looking to shoot next year, driven in part by the timeliness, as well as by a clause in the option. A high net-worth individual with whom the Baldwins have partnered controls the option, but that option would revert to the Rand estate if production doesn't begin by the end of 2010.
An “Atlas Shrugged” movie has gone through endless development fits and starts. Faye Dunaway and Clint Eastwood had been attached to earlier versions -- if that doesn't give you an idea of how far back it goes, we don't know what will -- but with both Rand and the Rand estate very particular about how the story was handled, those iterations didn’t get traction.

This decade, Howard Baldwin and Philip Anschutz were on board to produce at their Crusader Entertainment banner, but that effort didn't take flight. The Baldwins took the project with them when the “Ray” producers split from Anschutz several years ago and pacted with the high net-worth figure, who is said to especially like the timeliness of the book's message.

Producers also say that while Relativity and Lionsgate are in the pole position to
finance and distribute, other studio and financier suitors could yet materialize.
Still, Karen Baldwin praised Lionsgate and Michael Burns, who has championed the project at the studio, and also said Kavanaugh would be an appropriate partner. “The subject of the book would seem to fit with the kind of people who are willing to step up and take big chances," she said.


The Rand involvement on earlier versions -- along with the verbiage-heavy sections -- is probably why there hasn't been a Rand project on the big screen in 60 years, not since Gary Cooper played Howard Roark in Warner Bros.' "The Fountainhead." With some big-time entrepeneurs potentially coming board, there now may be a lot less shrugging and a lot more shooting.

Link: The Hollywood Reporter: Risky Biz Blog: With 'Atlas Shrugged,' Hollywood may have its first anti-bailout movie

Heh...check out that Atlas Shrugged book is still moving up in the Amazon rankings.

Originally Posted by Boon Mee

Heh...check out that Atlas Shrugged book is still moving up in the Amazon rankings.

Yeah, Boon.

The hypocrites and the functionally illiterate that are finally reading this book never read it before.

Says a lot.

Originally Posted by Takeovers

The present crisis is the result of free entrepreneurship gone mad without checks and balances. So the thesis of Atlas shrugged is proven wrong.

exactly.

Originally Posted by Milkman

The hypocrites and the functionally illiterate that are finally reading this book never read it before.

This version is a hot seller.

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

^ 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?

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.

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

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:

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.”
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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

Ayn Rand's hypocrisy:

Here is the plot to "Atlas Shrugged," and a discussion of the real-life characters today in the US.

I haven't read the book. I don't read fiction and it's a thousand pages. But this helps give an idea.

With the current actions (and recent action over the past few years and decades) there has been a resurgence in Atlas Shrugged (and also, Fountainhead.

http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?pa...s_iv_ctrl=2485

“Atlas Shrugged” Sets a New Record!

January 21, 2010

Irvine, CA--Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” sold more than 500,000 copies in 2009, more than double the previous record set in 2008, reports Penguin USA, publisher of the four American editions. For the first time, combined annual sales of Ayn Rand’s four novels totaled more than 1,000,000 copies.

“The explosion in sales of ‘Atlas Shrugged’ more than a half century after its initial publication is truly remarkable,” said Dr. Yaron Brook, president of the Ayn Rand Institute. “Annual sales of ‘Atlas Shrugged’ have been increasing for decades to a level never seen in Ayn Rand’s lifetime.

“People are discovering the prescience of Ayn Rand’s writing. They’re seeing the policies of ‘Atlas Shrugged’ villains Wesley Mouch and Cuffy Meigs acted out by our government officials today. They’re looking for answers on how to stop government intrusion in our lives. ‘Atlas Shrugged’ provides those answers, and many more.”

First published in 1957, “Atlas Shrugged” continues to draw media attention, including a recent episode of “Stossel” on Fox Business Network dedicated to the novel. More than 7,000,000 copies of “Atlas Shrugged” have been sold since it was first published.

Fountainhead is a far better novel.

I dunno if you've signed up with any of these 'Conservative' Email sites, but I have- 'Human Events', during Obamas election campaign. When it comes down to it, they are direct mailing sites- and their main revenue line is book sales. But they'll sell anything, up to and including 'stay sharp' cutlery and investment newsletters. Recently, they even asked for cash- complaining that their postal charges have gone up. Fat chance- I can't even work out how to Unsubscribe from the bloody thing.

Originally Posted by sabang

Fountainhead is a far better novel.

I dunno if you've signed up with any of these 'Conservative' Email sites, but I have- 'Human Events', during Obamas election campaign. When it comes down to it, they are direct mailing sites- and their main revenue line is book sales. But they'll sell anything, up to and including 'stay sharp' cutlery and investment newsletters. Recently, they even asked for cash- complaining that their postal charges have gone up. Fat chance- I can't even work out how to Unsubscribe from the bloody thing.

I am not a member of any conservative groups/forums/e-mail lists.

I got this from another forum that focuses on Gold and Precious metals.

Yes, one thing about subscribing, is getting stuff you don't want or messages you don't need. I rarely "subscribe" to anything.

I still have not read her books. Perhaps someday I'll try "Fountain head" or something. I'm in no hurry.

For those of you who listen(ed) to the rock band Rush, many of their songs have lyrics inspired by Ayn Rand. "The Trees" is one example. Neil Peart wrote many of the lyrics and he was influenced by Ayn Rand.

But UK students will take a stab at Ayn Rand next year:

The new age of Ayn Rand: how she won over Trump and Silicon Valley

Her novel The Fountainhead is one of the few works of fiction that Donald Trump likes and she has long been the darling of the US right. But only now do her devotees hold sway around the world


Her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged earned her a cult-like following, dubbed the Collective.


Monday 10 April 2017
As they plough through their GCSE revision, UK students planning to take politics A-level in the autumn can comfort themselves with this thought: come September, they will be studying one thinker who does not belong in the dusty archives of ancient political theory but is achingly on trend. For the curriculum includes a new addition: the work of Ayn Rand.

It is a timely decision because Rand, who died in 1982 and was alternately ridiculed and revered throughout her lifetime, is having a moment. Long the poster girl of a particularly hardcore brand of free-market fundamentalism – the advocate of a philosophy she called “the virtue of selfishness” – Rand has always had acolytes in the conservative political classes. The Republican speaker of the US House of Representatives, Paul Ryan, is so committed a Randian, he was famous for giving every new member of his staff a copy of Rand’s gargantuan novel, Atlas Shrugged (along with Freidrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom). The story, oft-repeated, that his colleague in the US Senate, Rand Paul, owes his first name to his father Ron’s adulation of Ayn (it rhymes with “mine”) turns out to be apocryphal, but Paul describes himself as a fan all the same.

Not to be left out, Britain’s small-staters have devised their own ways of worshipping at the shrine of Ayn. Communities secretary Sajid Javid reads the courtroom scene in Rand’s The Fountainhead twice a year and has done so throughout his adult life. As a student, he read that bit aloud to the woman who is now his wife, though the exercise proved to be a one-off. As Javid recently confessed to the Spectator, she told him that if he tried that again, he would get dumped. Meanwhile, Daniel Hannan, the Tory MEP many see as the intellectual architect of Brexit, keeps a photograph of Rand on his Brussels desk.


Sajid Javid: the communities secretary boasts of reading Rand’s novel The Fountainhead twice a year throughout his adult life. Photograph: Carl Court/Getty

So the devotion of Toryboys, in both their UK and US incarnations, is not new. But Rand’s philosophy of rugged, uncompromising individualism – of contempt for both the state and the lazy, conformist world of the corporate boardroom — now has a follower in the White House. What is more, there is a new legion of devotees, one whose influence over our daily lives dwarfs that of most politicians. They are the titans of tech.

So who is this new entrant on the A-level syllabus, the woman hailed by one biographer as the goddess of the market? Born Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum in 1905 in St Petersburg, Russia, she saw her father impoverished and her family driven to the brink of starvation by the Soviet revolution, an experience that forged her contempt for all notions of the collective good and, especially, for the state as a mechanism for ensuring equality.

An obsessive cinemagoer, she fled to the US in 1926, swiftly making her way to Hollywood. She paid her way through a series of odd jobs, including a stint in the costume department of RKO Pictures, and landed a role as an extra in Cecil B DeMille’s The King of Kings. But writing was her passion. Broadway plays and movie scripts followed, until the breakthrough came with a novel: The Fountainhead.

How Ayn Rand became the new right's version of Marx
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Published in 1943, it tells the story of Howard Roark, an architect dedicated to the pursuit of his own vision – a man who would rather see his buildings dynamited than compromise on the perfection of his designs. All around him are mediocrities, representing either the dead hand of the state, bureaucrats serving some notional collective good, or “second handers” – corporate parasites who profit from the work and vision of others.

Then, in 1957, came Atlas Shrugged, whose Penguin Classic edition stretches to 1,184 pages. Here Roark gives way to John Galt, another capitalist genius, who leads a strike by the “men of talent” and drive, thereby depriving society of “the motor of the world”.

In those novels, and in the essays and lectures she turned to afterwards, Rand expounded – at great and repetitive length – her philosophy, soon to be taught to A-level students alongside Hobbes and Burke. Objectivism, she called it, distilled by her as the belief that “man exists for his own sake, that the pursuit of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose, that he must not sacrifice himself to others, nor sacrifice others to himself”. She had lots to say about everything else too – an avowed atheist, she was dismissive of any knowledge that was not rooted in what you could see in front of your eyes. She had no patience for “instinct” or “‘intuition’ … or any form of ‘just knowing’”.

The Fountainhead was serially rejected and published to ambivalent reviews, but it became a word-of-mouth hit. Over the coming years, a cult following arose around Rand (as well as something very close to an actual cult among her inner circle, known, no doubt ironically, as the Collective). Her works struck a chord with a particular kind of reader: adolescent, male and thirsting for an ideology brimming with moral certainty. As the New Yorker said in 2009: “Most readers make their first and last trip to Galt’s Gulch – the hidden-valley paradise of born-again capitalists featured in Atlas Shrugged, its solid-gold dollar sign standing like a maypole – sometime between leaving Middle-earth and packing for college.”

But for some, objectivism stuck. Perhaps her most significant early follower was Alan Greenspan, later to serve as chairman of the US Federal Reserve for 19 years. In the 1950s, Greenspan was one of the Collective, and he would be among the mourners at her funeral in 1982, where one floral wreath was fashioned into that same 6ft dollar sign, now understood to be the logo of Randism.

Greenspan is the link between the original Rand cult and what we might think of as the second age of Rand: the Thatcher-Reagan years, when the laissez-faire, free-market philosophy went from the crankish obsession of rightwing economists to the governing credo of Anglo-American capitalism. Greenspan, appointed as the US’s central banker by Ronald Reagan in 1987, firmly believed that market forces, unimpeded, were the best mechanism for the management and distribution of a society’s resources. That view – which Greenspan would rethink after the crash of 2008-9 – rested on the assumption that economic actors behave rationally, always acting in their own self-interest. The primacy of self-interest, rather than altruism or any other nonmaterial motive, was, of course, a central tenet of Randian thought.

Put more baldly, the reason why Republicans and British Conservatives started giving each other copies of Atlas Shrugged in the 80s was that Rand seemed to grant intellectual heft to the prevailing ethos of the time. Her insistence on the “morality of rational self-interest” and “the virtue of selfishness” sounded like an upmarket version of the slogan, derived from Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, that defined the era: greed is good. Rand was Gordon Gekko with A-levels.

Alan Greenspan
Alan Greenspan: the former chairman of the Federal Reserve was a longtime member of Rand’s inner circle. Photograph: Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The third age of Rand came with the financial crash and the presidency of Barack Obama that followed. Spooked by the fear that Obama was bent on expanding the state, the Tea Party and others returned to the old-time religion of rolling back government. As Rand biographer Jennifer Burns told Quartz: “In moments of liberal dominance, people turn to her because they see Atlas Shrugged as a prophecy as to what’s going to happen if the government is given too much power.”

In that context, it seemed only natural that one of the success stories of the 2012 presidential campaign was a bid for the Republican nomination by the ultra-libertarian and Rand-admiring Texas congressman Ron Paul, father of Senator Rand Paul, whose insurgent movement was a forerunner for much of what would unfold in 2016. Paul offered a radical downsizing of the federal government. Like Ayn Rand, he believed the state’s role should be limited to providing an army, a police force, a court system – and not much else.

But Rand presented a problem for US Republicans otherwise keen to embrace her legacy. She was a devout atheist, withering in her disdain for the nonobjectivist mysticism of religion. Yet, inside the Republican party, those with libertarian leanings have only been able to make headway by riding pillion with social conservatives and, specifically, white evangelical Christians. The dilemma was embodied by Paul Ryan, named as Mitt Romney’s running mate in the 2012 contest. Ryan moved fast to play down the Rand influence, preferring to say his philosophy was inspired by St Thomas Aquinas.

Confessions of a recovering Objectivist
Victoria Bekiempis

What of the current moment, shaping up to be the fourth age of Rand? The Randian politicians are still in place: Ryan is now boosted by a cabinet crammed with objectivists. Secretary of state Rex Tillerson named Atlas Shrugged as his favourite book, while Donald Trump’s first choice (later dropped) as labor secretary, Andy Puzder, is the CEO of a restaurant chain owned by Roark Capital Group – a private equity fund named after the hero of The Fountainhead. CIA director Mike Pompeo is another conservative who says Atlas Shrugged “really had an impact on me”.

Of course, this merely makes these men like their boss. Trump is notoriously no reader of books: he has only ever spoken about liking three works of fiction. But, inevitably, one of them was The Fountainhead. “It relates to business, beauty, life and inner emotions. That book relates to ... everything,” he said last year.

Rand scholars find this affinity of Trump’s puzzling. Not least because Trump’s offer to the electorate in 2016 was not a promise of an unfettered free market. It was a pledge to make the US government an active meddler in the market, negotiating trade deals, bringing back jobs. His public bullying of big companies – pressing Ford or the air-conditioner manufacturer Carrier to keep their factories in the US – was precisely the kind of big government intrusion upon the natural rhythms of capitalism that appalled Rand.

So why does Trump claim to be inspired by her? The answer, surely, is that Rand lionises the alpha male capitalist entrepreneur, the man of action who towers over the little people and the pettifogging bureaucrats – and gets things done. As Jennifer Burns puts it: “For a long time, she has been beloved by disruptors, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, people who see themselves as shaping the future, taking risky bets, moving out in front of everyone else, relying only on their own instincts, intuition and knowledge, and going against the grain.”

Rand Paul, Paul Ryan and Steve Jobs
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The acolytes: Republicans Rand Paul and Paul Ryan, and the late Steve Jobs of Apple. Composite: Getty Images
Which brings us to the new wave of Randians, outside both politics and conventional conservatism. They are the princes of Silicon Valley, the masters of the start-up, a cadre of young Roarks and Galts, driven by their own genius to remake the world and damn the consequences.


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So it should be no surprise that when Vanity Fair surveyed these tycoons of the digital age, many of them pointed to a single guiding star. Rand, the magazine suggested, might just be “the most influential figure in the industry”. When the CEO of Uber, Travis Kalanick, had to choose an avatar for his Twitter account in 2015, he opted for the cover of The Fountainhead. Peter Thiel, Facebook’s first major investor and a rare example of a man who straddles both Silicon Valley and Trumpworld, is a Randian. Meanwhile, Steve Jobs is said by his Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak, to have regarded Atlas Shrugged as one of his “guides in life”.

Among these new masters of the universe, the Rand influence is manifest less in party political libertarianism than in a single-minded determination to follow a personal vision, regardless of the impact. No wonder the tech companies don’t mind destroying, say, the taxi business or the traditional news media. Such concerns are beneath the young, powerful men at the top: even to listen to such concerns would be to betray the singularity of their own pure vision. It would be to break Rand’s golden rule, by which the visionary must never sacrifice himself to others.

So Rand, dead 35 years, lives again, her hand guiding the rulers of our age in both Washington and San Francisco. Hers is an ideology that denounces altruism, elevates individualism into a faith and gives a spurious moral licence to raw selfishness. That it is having a moment now is no shock. Such an ideology will find a ready audience for as long as there are human beings who feel the rush of greed and the lure of unchecked power, longing to succumb to both without guilt. Which is to say: for ever.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...silicon-valley

Did you graduate from high school CP? Typically reading Rand occurs then. Along with Lord of the Flies, Babbitt, Animal Farm, Brave New World etc. Sounds like your education was incomplete.

Originally Posted by Humbert

Did you graduate from high school CP?

This is a rhetorical question and I shall not dignify it with a response.

When I was in high school I took English/American Lit: I recall reading, "The Scarlet Letter, Ethan From, Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, The Great Gatsby" and others I've forgotten.

I'm not into fiction.

I read almost every day, but read biographies, economics, history, and things like that.

Typically reading Rand occurs then. Along with Lord of the Flies, Babbitt, Animal Farm, Brave New World etc. Sounds like your education was incomplete.

I read "Animal Farm" on my own leisure time while at Uni.

I don't recall Ayn Rand ever being in high school.

Also, I'm not saying I'm sympathetic to Ayn Rand or Objectivism because I have read her work or philosophy.

I have seen interviews she did.

As for education "not being complete" - we are always learning. Or, we should always be learning something, IMO.

^Fucking idiot.

^ I agree he spends most of his time here bumping his own retarded threads.