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Rand never made her sociological understanding of how people become productive explicit because she sort of didn't have any. That's what enables her to view the
by walterk 18y ago
Rand never made her sociological understanding of how people become productive explicit because she sort of didn't have any. That's what enables her to view the highly productive and the less productive (or unproductive or even counterproductive) as good and evil, respectively. If she actually understood the subtle forces at work, she wouldn't have been so quick to judge.
- SwellJoe 18y agoI don't disagree with that. It doesn't alter the fact that the author of the article manages to misunderstand a lot of things, and then presents it as useful discourse. I just wanted to call out that cloudy thinking. It's a pet peeve.
- miked 18y agoRand doesn't view those of lesser productivity as "evil", assuming they aren't leaching off of others when they could be providing for themselves. She simply viewed them as uninteresting: they aren't the people changing the world. She was admittedly quite harsh in her judgement of what constituted "productive". She described the character of Eddie Willers in _Atlas Shrugged_ as "a typical man of mediocrity", and he was a top-level exec in a large railroad company! It's too bad, really. There is so much good in her philosophy that gets obscured by her personnal flaws and her limited (and self-admitted) lack of understanding of human psychology. _The Fountainhead_ is a great novel, raw and bitter and steeped in human struggle as few books are. It has a dozen flaws, but it's still one of the greatest books I've ever read. There is a scene in it where Roark and Dominique discuss the chemical properties of the different kinds of marble. Boring right? It has to be one of the greatest extended allegories ever written. (TASTE the dialog there. Slippery silibants suggesting sly secrets of the soul.)