Ayn Rand wrote wildly romantic fantasies of wish fulfillment about sexy
supermen — NOT white papers on American economics and governance. It takes an
idiot who thinks he's smart to confuse the two.
It's like basing the national
defense plan on comic books.
Rand's
primary concern was to describe a world that would be ideal for the kind of
ruthless, brilliant, fictional supermen she had worshipped from childhood.
Sadly, that world does not intersect with the real one.
The problem is those who see themselves as John Galt are actually Wesley Mouch doing the lobbying for the rapacious plutocracy. They just don't know it.
ReplyDeleteAt best, these deluded libertarians are Eddie Willers. Like me and like most Americans.
Having trudged through the long hard slog of Atlas Shrugged the most pertinent fact about the book, to me, was which character I most readily identified with.
I know I am not a Ragnar Danneskjöld super engineer able of crafting a Super Stealth Ship, or have the chess mastery of Francisco d'Anconia to undercut and play a 20 year deep Global Game of Intrigue, or possess the Hank Reardon intellect to invent an entirely new alloy, or the comic book super powers of John Galt himself so I identified with Dagny Taggart's loyal assistant, Eddie Willers.
Eddie represents the common man in Rand's book and philosophical worldview. And it clearly shows that Rand views the mass of humanity as dogs; hard-working, enduring, and loyal creatures but not possessing many other positive traits and with the ability to be turned to good or evil by how they are treated. Dagny Taggart was obviously Ayn Rand herself.
And how does Dagny (Rand) treat her loyal assistant, the common man, as the "evil" society crumbles? She leaves him to fucking die on the train tracks!
Because that is what Objectivism holds for the mass of humanity.
The comman man is nothing and the few brilliant beautiful people are everything. And even amongst the select few there exist a pecking order. Amongst the elect there are some even more Objectively Superior and those people need to be allowed special privileges.
A majority of the reason Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged was because of her desire to justify her sexual mores and proclivities.
Well said.
ReplyDelete