April 29, 2011
How Ayn Rand Became an American Icon
Johann Hari in Slate:
Ayn Rand is one of America's great mysteries. She was an amphetamine-addicted author of sub-Dan Brown potboilers, who in her spare time wrote lavish torrents of praise for serial killers and the Bernie Madoff-style embezzlers of her day. She opposed democracy on the grounds that "the masses"—her readers—were "lice" and "parasites" who scarcely deserved to live. Yet she remains one of the most popular writers in the United States, still selling 800,000 books a year from beyond the grave. She regularly tops any list of books that Americans say have most influenced them. Since the great crash of 2008, her writing has had another Benzedrine rush, as Rush Limbaugh hails her as a prophetess. With her assertions that government is "evil" and selfishness is "the only virtue," she is the patron saint of the tea-partiers and the death panel doomsters. So how did this little Russian bomb of pure immorality in a black wig become an American icon?
Two new biographies of Rand—Goddess of the Market by Jennifer Burns and Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne Heller—try to puzzle out this question, showing how her arguments found an echo in the darkest corners of American political life.* But the books work best, for me, on a level I didn't expect. They are thrilling psychological portraits of a horribly damaged woman who deserves the one thing she spent her life raging against: compassion.
More here.
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 05:28 AM | Permalink
Comments
Dude looks like a lady.
Posted by: frannie | Apr 29, 2011 7:46:33 AM
While it was some time ago, I've read Rand and I can't recall her ever "raging against compasion". Please site a passage and correct me if I'm wrong.
IIRC, she had no problem at all with people *choosing* to be charitable. What she took issue with was using force to steal from one person and give to another in the supposed name of charity.
Posted by: Steve Dekorte | Apr 29, 2011 7:59:09 AM
Selfish claptrap. No wonder Limbaugh loves her.
Posted by: mr.ed | Apr 29, 2011 8:10:21 AM
I liked Rand when I was 16. You could be a hero for being a complete asshole, and that is very cool when you are 16!
I think that is why Rand is so popular with the US public, as most are in a repressed juvenile stage of development, and Rand's base assumptions go along with this retarded development.
Posted by: Scott | Apr 29, 2011 10:18:08 AM
'Sub Dan Brown potboilers': ungracious and wrong. Has JH read both authors?
AR was a deeply flawed character (who isn't?) with deeply offensive and crazy views. Yet one thing she said holds true, as long is it's not accepted as justifying uncaring dismissal of the masses — which it could be. Paraphrasing: it's by being the best person that we can possibly be that we can do most for others.
Isn't it rather easy journalism to slag dead, unpleasant people and to deny them any redeeming traits?
Posted by: BJ Walsh | Apr 30, 2011 6:10:15 AM
The "sub" text of the Fountainhead (the only AR book I have read) is that the irresistible urge of the spokespersons of the mediocracy is to tear down the unconstrained individualist by any means possible. Slagging them after they're dead seems par for the course.
Posted by: Carlos | Apr 30, 2011 8:33:59 AM
>> "she is the patron saint of the tea-partiers"
Hardly.
Way back in 1957 William F. Buckley's "National Review" magazine, the quasi-official record of conservatives, chose Whittaker Chambers to review Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged". He trashed it.
The Tea Party is composed of a wider variety of groups than those on the left are willing to admit. Just as those on the right claim that everyone to their left is a commie, those on the left claim that everyone to their right is a fascist. Not particularly productive as far as dialog goes.
There are libertarian elements in the Tea Party, and surely a large percentage of them agree with the basic message of Ayn Rand's work. However, there are others who just want us to live within our means so that we are not saddling our grandchildren with exorbitant debt.
The "good news" is that it appears our profligate ways are only becoming more so by the hour. On our current path we will certainly trash our own prosperity before our grandchildren are out of their diapers.
Posted by: DAS | May 1, 2011 9:32:33 AM
Ayn Rand was the "nom de plume" for Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, who, as a child, witnessed some of the horrors of the Soviet Union at the time.
I think what most people miss about her was her focus on the individual as opposed to the group.
Virtually all great achievements of civilization are the results of the efforts of a single individual rather than a group or committee.
Just think of the great physicists, like Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Tycho Brahe, Issac Newton, Karl Gauss, Clerk Maxwell,Madame Curie, Robert Millikan, Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Enrico Fermi, ... and on and on and on.
Think of the great chemists
Antoine Lavoisier, Dmitri Mendeleev, Madame Curie, Carl Linus Pauling.
Think of the discovery of anesthesia by Crawford Long, M.D. and three others, or the discovery of blood groups by Karl Landsteiner, M.D. and two others or the discovery of penicillin or the Polio Vaccine.
Think of the discovery of the steam engine or the cotton gin or the process to manufacture steel from iron ore or mass production from the genius Henry Ford or the light bulb from the genius Thomas Edison.
The list is almost endless.
Yes, a group successfully developed the atomic bomb to destroy the earth. But a group has failed now for over 50 years to develop cheap, clean energy from fusion. A group has failed for almost 50 years to solve the cancer nightmare problem.
Groups have a long history of dismal failure to solve fundamental problems. They are useful for solving engineering problems after the fundamentals are fully understood.
Ayn Rand focused on the genius of the individual and their contributions to civilization.
She despised the story of Robin Hood, the mythical outlaw in Sherwood Forest who stole from the rich and gave to the poor. She despised the philosophy of Karl Marx "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs". Both the philosophy of Robin Hood and Karl Marx have clearly been adopted by Amerika of 2011. She basically predicted this in her great books. This is likely why she is so successful and idolized after her death.
Andrew Carnegie was her idol.
Andrew Carnegie came to America at age 13. His Father had been put out of work as a loom opeator in Scotland by the invention of the steam engine. His Father never again obtained work in his field.
Young Andrew worked for textile mills in Pennsylvania for about a penny per hour. Over the next half century he bacame the richest man in the world in more ways than one.
Before his death, he gave away over 90% of his vast earned wealth in the form of the Carnegie Institute of Technology, numerous fabulous and magnificent Carnegie Libraries all over the world and numerous other cultural contributions to aid others in their climb up the same ladder he climbed. Andrew Carnegie was the individual genius largely responsible for the industrial revolution of the late nineteenth century in automobiles, airplanes and many other products. This was the pinnacle of America. Today, we are witnessing its decline into bankruptcy in more ways than one.
Ayn Rand, through her great books, wrote about the ascent of America and predicted its decline to the bottom of the cesspool. This is why her books earn nearly # 1 million per year after her death.
Winfield J. Abbe, Ph.D., Physics
Reference: "The Gospel of Wealth" by Andrew Carnegie, 1889.
Posted by: Winfield J. Abbe | May 2, 2011 8:18:06 AM
She never raged against compassion - ever! She was very clear that mutual aid was fine, but she denied that it had moral primacy. She had a revolutionary concept of ethics and it is a fallacy to map her onto an ethical grid with which she did not agree. From her own lips: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/compassion.html and http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/altruism.html .
Posted by: Michael R. Brown | May 3, 2011 11:17:05 PM
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