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Yes, the pathology of "freedom" is somewhat more recent, at least in terms of its extreme intensity. My gut feeling is that it can be traced back to Ayn Rand &
by Florin_Andrei 5y ago
Yes, the pathology of "freedom" is somewhat more recent, at least in terms of its extreme intensity.
My gut feeling is that it can be traced back to Ayn Rand & Co, but it's hard to say. But around that time, and near that environment, some spectacularly evil things came to be accepted as "reasonable".
- meowfly 5y agoThe science historian and author, Naomi Oreskes has argued that the hyper-individualistic attitude of the 70s-80s was a result of the cold war. The US was so anti-communist that anything that smelled of communism/socialism was denounced.
- Florin_Andrei 5y agoThat's kind of what happened to Ayn Rand. She and her family suffered quite a lot from the Communist Revolution. I think she probably had a form of PTSD or similar. The mythology she came up with is so obviously opposite-to-communism-in-every-way (even when it makes no sense). Like someone who almost drowned in the ocean, and then thinks showers are evil.
- ryandrake 5y agoThis is also a theme of Adam Curtis’s Can’t Get You Out Of My Head [1]. 1: https://thoughtmaybe.com/cant-get-you-out-of-my-head/ https://thoughtmaybe.com/cant-get-you-out-of-my-head/