12 ms·

The Curse of Ayn Rand's Heir

127 points by Michelangelo11 2y ago

gcp123 2y ago
The tragic irony of Objectivism is perfectly captured in Peikoff's life story. A man who dedicated himself to a philosophy of radical independence ended up defining his entire existence through dependency. First on Rand, now apparently on his caregiver-turned-wife. I met Peikoff at an ARI event in 2009. He was surprisingly warm in person, but you could see the weight of being "the heir" in how defensively he responded to even mild questions about Rand's work. Now reading about the fracture with his daughter over the estate, it's like watching Atlas Shrugged's plot play out in real life: the bitter disputes over Rand's intellectual property mirroring the novel's battles over physical resources. What's most disturbing isn't the personal drama but what this reveals about how Objectivism operates in practice. For a philosophy obsessed with reason and independence, its institutional guardians seem remarkably focused on excommunication, loyalty tests, and controlling access to primary sources. The gap between preaching individualism while demanding conformity has always been the movement's central contradiction.
- MrMcCall 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - guhidalg 2y ago
    I agree with you that the most consistent theory for explaining the current GOP going off the rails is a lack of compassion and empathy for their fellow human beings, replaced by a hope that Trump will smile upon them and be compassionate to them. It's a vicious cycle of signaling, since Reagan, that your government is not compassionate towards you therefore you should not empathize with your government and instead trust corporations (but don't think about their need to make money). I don't know how to promote empathy and compassion without relying on religious arguments. I usually find the strictly secular and over atheists are very compassionate and empathetic, but the mildly religious and definitely the evangelists in my life and the absolute _least_ compassionate people to those outside their tribe.
    - MrMcCall 2y ago
      > I usually find the strictly secular and over atheists are very compassionate and empathetic, but the mildly religious and definitely the evangelists in my life and the absolute _least_ compassionate people to those outside their tribe. Sadly enough, I am of the same opinion, too. That is because true spiritual seeking must accompany humility and love for ALL others, not just of those of their tribe, and most religious practitioners fail that miserably. That is why universal compassion is the only real purpose of religion, as it is the target that we must all aspire to, or we will fall well short of the mark. Most people of all ilks fall prey to selfish self-superiority, thinking incorrectly that their path is the only one that is "saved". They are just coldly and completely wrong. That is why one of the Masters said, "That which you do to the least of my brothers and sisters, that you have done unto me." > I don't know how to promote empathy and compassion without relying on religious arguments. I have settled on this fact: that no human being can survive the first years of their life without selfless, compasssionate care from adults in their orbit. This is the template for human life, but most people do not realize that this care should be attended to by every human being to every other human being as we grow older, where we are hopefully lucky enough to transition from the helped to the helper. We know that those with a more comfortable upbringing tend to do better in life, financially, mentally, and physically. If we were to invest, as societies, in the "least of our brothers", we would essentially be the water that lifts all boats, and our entire world would flow more smoothly. The problem is that it would take those who have more to give more, and generosity is a virtue of the spirit that has its counterpart vice, greed, active in our being as well. Every human being resides in the crux between the various vices they are susceptible to and the virtues they are presupposed to manifesting. It is incumbent upon us all to honestly search ourselves to find out in which ways we are less virtuous and then seek to become better. There are 19 pairs of vice/virtue pairs in the human being, so that's a lot of whack-a-mole to perform along our lives, but few of our fellows care enough to care enough about others to "Know thyself" deeply enough to do what Gurdjieff called "The Work". Caring for the happiness of others is the best balm for not only our own spiritual development, but for the ills of the world. Please remember that religion is always a personal affair, involving the internal relationship between the human being and our Creator. It does not enforce Its suggestions on our free will, which is truly given -- that's why there is so much mischief upon our world, and so much resulting suffering. As we Sufis say, "When you take one step towards God, It comes running." Self-evolution is the act of manifesting the miracle of defeating our selfish ego over many battles with many losses and less victories. It is how we learn humility, grace, mercy, kindness, and compassion, among all the other virtues. Of course, that requires the person to truly want to become a better person; most people are simply satisfied that they perform certain practices in accordance with their traditions, but that ain't love and doesn't count for shit in the grand scheme of things. As Rumi says, "The Way goes in." Peace be with you, friend. I am at your service.
  - IncreasePosts 2y ago
    Republicans on average are more charitable than Democrats: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/03/your-money/republicans-democrats-charity-philanthropy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/03/your-money/republicans-de... Maybe Democrats are less charitable because they are more likely to live in Democratic controlled areas that provide more government services to the needy. However, does that really reflect compassion if you merely live in a system which provides those services through mandatory taxation? A republican moving from Kansas to NYC doesn't become more compassionate simply by paying more in taxes because they have to.
    - JKCalhoun 2y ago
      Might Christianity (and the likelihood one group or another is more Christian) have something to do with their charitable giving?
      - MrMcCall 2y ago
        In addition to tax write offs.
        IncreasePosts 2y ago
        Tax write offs are available to Democrats equally.
        MrMcCall 2y ago
        That doesn't mean they use them to the fullest, and GOPers are really, really into avoiding taxes. It's like a religion to them, and they are about to crush our economy to make more absurd tax cuts for their rich friends and sycophants.
      - IncreasePosts 2y ago
        Sure, but why would it matter if it did?
- cmrdporcupine 2y ago
  Whenever I go reading about these people and this ideology and community it reminds me a lot of the various Trotskyist or other far left sects and personalities I encountered when I was younger. Similar dramas and egos and personality quirks and strident philosophical emissions, ideologically-focused groups built around persons/personalities. Often involving sexual relationships and dubious power dynamics. Just from, y'know, 180 degree philosophical positions. Maybe it was a product of her original linguistic/cultural extraction, but when I read Rand's "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal" as a teen it reminded me very much of Stalinist or Trotskyite tracts I encountered around the same time. Different positions, same tone of absolute certainty and similar polemical flourishes. All of which to say, it all strikes me as more theological than philosophical.
  - mapontosevenths 2y ago
    I think this is an astute observation. Taking any extreme position will inevitably put someone in the position where they find it difficult or impossible to live up to their own ideals. At the far ends of the spectrum everything starts to look alike. Ayn Rand herself died while collecting Social Security and Medicare.
    - Ray20 2y ago
      I don’t see any contradiction or failure to follow own ideals here. It's like blaming a slave who believes that slavery shouldn't exist, for eating his master's food.
    - cmrdporcupine 2y ago
      I mean, I dislike Rand's outlook passionately but I would not hold it against her to withdraw from a system she paid into or from living in the framework of society she lived in, even if she resented it.
      - stevenAthompson 2y ago
        She wanted to let the disabled starve or beg on street corners so she'd have a tiny fraction more wealth to fritter away. We don't owe her the benefit of the doubt.
- yapyap 2y ago
  That is pretty funny, in the ironic sense. What it feels like to me is the leaders of the Objectivism movement are all narcissists and the followers are paradoxically not Objectivists because they’re following a philosophy instead of being guided by the self. Being a peak Objectivist would be to not care about being an Objectivist or not, basically making it impossible to be an Objectivist if you follow the philosophy, even at the top of it because you are dependent on your followers for influence, status and power. The irony of it all, turns out a philosophy based on self sufficiency is as big of a grift as a political movement trying to convince everyone that in this day and age self sufficiency is the best move, mostly cause they can’t fathom sharing. One of the _most_ ironic bits being that if everyone were truly self sufficient there would be no social hierarchy and no money anymore.
  - seanhunter 2y ago
    Objectivism has many of these sorts of contradictions. Most famously, Ayn Rand herself collected medicare and social security as her health deteriorated towards the end of her life.
    - lumenwrites 2y ago
      Is that really a contradiction? We all have our ideals, and we all fail to live up to them sometimes, because life can be brutal.
      - stevenAthompson 2y ago
        To be fair, Rand herself said (to paraphrase) that because the state took it from her against her will it was fair play to take it back and I think that was self-consistent. That said, she wanted to let the disabled starve to death so I don't think anyone really has to be fair to her at all. Empathy is only for the empathetic.
        marknutter 2y ago
        Ayn Rand did not "want to let the disabled starve to death". What a ridiculous lie.
- kashunstva 2y ago
  > what this reveals about how Objectivism operates in practice...the movement's central contradiction Is it only the gatekeepers of Rand's legacy that exhibit this discrepancy, or was it contradiction from the beginning? I seem to remember the first Objectivist herself accepted assistance from the Federal government near the end of her life. Anyway, to someone with a distant outsider's view of this movement, it can seem that it misses something fundamental about the human psyche as it evolved to operate in co-dependent groups.
  - thrance 2y ago
    Not really a defense of this clown ideology, but Rand would be acting rationally (if a bit hypocritically) by accepting the Government's check. In her views, it's the State that's acting irrationally by offering support in the first place. On a similar subject, she believed disabled people (or more generally, people unable to work) should not receive any help other than from "voluntary charity" [1], a fact I find absolutely disgusting and should discredit this ideology to any sane person. [1] https://youtu.be/rM4HqlqQYwo https://youtu.be/rM4HqlqQYwo
  - notahacker 2y ago
    Even her fictional utopia Galt's Gulch is basically a commune, a commune where people cosplay at being hardnosed capitalists who won't give anything for free by charging each other token amounts for everything...
    - lazystar 2y ago
      Exactly - theyre all non-conformists, and you can be a non-conformist and join them in their commune if you act just like them in every way.
    - fireburning 2y ago
      [dead]
  - kbelder 2y ago
    She addressed the problem with accepting assistance in relation to student tuition assistance. Briefly, she said hate the game, not the player. The students have a structure imposed upon them, and it's not irrational or unethical to take the aid the government provides since the government still regulates them and taxes them in various ways. However, it would be unethical to advocate for increasing that assistance (because the benefit is taken forcibly from others).
- jollyllama 2y ago
  > The gap between preaching individualism while demanding conformity has always been the movement's central contradiction. Check out Adam Curtis's documentaries for work that zeroes in on this.
- hinkley 2y ago
  Something life and then later therapy has taught me is that intellect can paper over a lot of shortcomings, but it’s just paper. At the end of the day situations that involve humans always involve feelings. And you stunt your growth (personal or organizational) if you try to pretend it isn’t the case. The problem with intellectualizing is that it’s very good at employing itself to avoid all other options. If you get too old pretending otherwise, the road back is full of brambles and many would rather double down than accept it. Once you understand this it’s easy to see the hollowness in what Rand offers, if it wasn’t already patently obvious to you before.
  - kibwen 2y ago
    > At the end of the day situations that involve humans always involve feelings. My more cynical take is that humans are emotional beings first and foremost, and reason is a distant second at best. And even our pretenses to reason can't be trusted, as they are often just emotion masquerading as reason, and the most insufferable of the reasonpilled are those that refuse to understand this. I'm not trying to say emotion/reason are good/bad. What I am trying to say is that any hopes for a human society that place reason above emotion are fundamentally unachievable.
    - hinkley 2y ago
      I know some people are pushing back on Thinking, Fast and Slow’s assertions but whether everyone’s brains work that way or not, there’s at least a visible minority of people whose brains do, and I’m among them. We do many things based entirely on intuition, and then afterward gin up a reason for having done them that doesn’t make us sound insane, or like five year olds. It’s part explanation/excuse and part description, but presented as description. And if you’ve read anything on anger management, there’s a split second where the angry individual is experiencing some other emotion, like vulnerability or betrayal, before they sublimate it into anger. The problem is in how fast and to what degree they perform the substitution, and often even they miss the event, which takes away their own agency in the response. Recovery involves clawing back that agency.
      - 2y ago
- deleted 2y ago
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- cle 2y ago
  The irony isn't one of dependency. The philosophy celebrates interdependence and the achievements of groups of cooperating people who take care of each other. The irony and tragedy is broader and encompasses both the cult leaders and the cult detractors who are both unwilling separate the ideas from the people.
- glenstein 2y ago
  Could not have put it better myself! After finding myself very inspired by the novels, mostly as an introduction to the virtues of critical thinking and how those can be foundational to a worldview (which is good!), the cracks in the armor really started to show when looking at the community, and especially Rand's relationship with Nathaniel Branden. There's lots to say about how Objectivism oversimplifies and attacks caricatures, and doesn't address itself to sophisticated economic thinking. You can get good out of it (I read it during the Bush admin and felt like it was making the same warnings against the excesses of state power that 1984 was), and it's not terrible to expose a person to the virtues of philosophy, and critical thinking. In my case it opened my eyes to moral realism, at which point I traded in any interest in Objectivism for that instead. Even if you want to take the novel on its own terms that it has super-intellectual heroes, how humans work is every bit as much a part of reality as the physics of inventing a new metal. And the talent of administering human organizations is never present. It also never really models how mere mortals can reconcile their imperfections to the standards articulated, and is not self aware enough to speak to the population of mere mortals who would misdiagnose themselves as misunderstood heroes.
- richardanaya 2y ago
  Your understanding of objectivism is deeply flawed if you think the philosophy sees no possible value in the trade between two people. Radical independence in objectivism as a virtue is independence of judgment, not some caricature you present of being an irrational loner.
- btilly 2y ago
  The central problem of Objectivism is that they tie their logical conclusions into emotional knots. You can see this in their use of loaded language such as "theft". The problem is that this causes them to believe that their conclusions are purely logical, even when they are not. Therefore any disagreements are "proof" that the other is being illogical and should be rejected. This leads to an intolerance of disagreement, that in turn leads to the excommunication, loyalty tests, and so on. All of which will be expressed in the rhetoric of the philosophy, which is designed to appeal to reason while connecting to emotion. It is perfectly predictable emotional behavior. As is the inability to process inconvenient information that does not align with what the philosophy wishes to believe is true.
- _wire_ 2y ago
  All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace - Adam Curtis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_of_Loving_Grace_(TV_series) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines... See ep-1 "Love & Power," on contradictions of Ayn Rand's life versus her philosophy; can be found on yt / vimeo Series supplies interesting history for any nerd interested in systems analysis and provides a survey of California Ideology. His documentary on the legacy of Henritta Lacks' immortal cells and biology, "The Way of All Flesh" is also interesting food for thought on systems analysis.
- trhway 2y ago
  >What's most disturbing isn't the personal drama but what this reveals about how Objectivism operates in practice. For a philosophy obsessed with reason and independence, ideology. People pervert everything into ideology. > its institutional guardians seem remarkably focused on excommunication, loyalty tests, and controlling access to primary sources. The gap between preaching individualism while demanding conformity has always been the movement's central contradiction. that can be said about any ideology. Ideologies can be different yet those guardians and the gap between declaration and practice is always the same.
ryandrake 2y ago
I have the pleasure of living in a pretty "red" part of the country, and everyone I know who is a self-described libertarian (or otherwise worships at the altar of self-sufficiency) lives utterly dependent on societal systems. They're on Medicare, Disability or Social Security, live in neighborhoods with solid public services, rely on the rule of law for protection from crime, and enjoy clean air and drinking water, safe food and medicine, that they only have access to due to strong environmental and safety regulations. They were the first ones to freak out on Social Media during COVID when they had to actually rely on themselves for a bit. As someone else put it on Twitter, they are like house cats: absolutely convinced of their fierce independence while utterly dependent on a system they don't appreciate or understand.
- thrance 2y ago
  It took thousands of years of technical and social progress to produce people that think they can survive alone.
- jonfw 2y ago
  Ayn Rand didn't write novels about homesteading- none of the characters in her books are self sufficient. I don't think that participation in society as it exists should prevent anybody from holding their philosophy of choice.
  - jplusequalt 2y ago
    You're right, Ayn Rand wrote about a fantastical world, full of make believe people and things.
    - jonfw 2y ago
      AKA fiction
      - slater 2y ago
        Always a good time to remember this fantastic quote: “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
teekert 2y ago
I also get such energy from Atlas Shrugged, I don't understand why. I know that the good guys are very carefully crafted, they don't cheat, they don't do things like lobbying to win. They don't compromise on their world view to the extreme. They don't have children, that makes it all easier, but also less real. Raised christian but feeling burned out by the contradictions, the emptiness of trying to live for others (it's killing for relationships I can tell you), the mental struggle to rationalize all the rules, I too felt that spark. I realize dogmatism is always bad but that voice inside keeps saying: It's not when the theory is perfect! The truth is knowable and can be discovered through reason. How super comforting (and damn that Incompleteness Theorem I learned about later). I don't know what it is, my hunger for a system? For rules to make sense of the world? Whatever it is, Rand's philosophy remains so appealing. It's probably the reason I started a company, walk into meetings now boldly, with a goal, why I enjoy things now, just to enjoy myself. As a rational, healthy human, there is nothing wrong with that, in contrast to what my upbringing tried to instill in me. Perhaps that's it, it liberated my from a confining worldview. Perhaps another worldview could have done the same.
- fatbird 2y ago
  "It's chaos, be kind" [0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sicUhD1n-es https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sicUhD1n-es
- HeckFeck 2y ago
  > the emptiness of trying to live for others Someone else was burned one too many times. It's fine and dandy until you notice a pattern: others who lack conscience will always work your convictions against you. Though the religion admits as much - it eschews 'worldly wisdom' - i.e. what you need to make anything of a life in this world.
  - teekert 2y ago
    I mean it's empty because you deny people that love you to do nice things for you (I don't care (and it shows!), what do you want to do?). Keep it up long enough and you don't even know what you like anymore. And then you aren't really a fun person anymore. At least, that is how I experienced it.
jonfw 2y ago
I fail to see the irony of "inheriting" an empire from Rand, when the protagonist of atlas shrugged and other main characters were heirs to a fortune. Inheritance is thoroughly explored in her work. To me- this article is about the social dangers of taking a philosophy to the extreme, and about how easy it is to take advantage of the elderly when estranged.
- bigstrat2003 2y ago
  The thing that I felt came through in this article (or maybe it's just my biases) was the hollowness of engaging in relationships purely for one's own selfish ends. Sooner or later (as happened to these people), the selfish desires don't line up any more, and the relationships get torn apart. Contrary to Rand, I don't think that love is inherently selfish (quite the opposite in fact), and it seems to me that love based on altruism is much more stable (and more praiseworthy) than love based on what the other person can do for me. But then again I would say that, so it's hard to tell if that actually is something I took away from the article or if it's just confirmation bias at play.
  - ahartmetz 2y ago
    IMO: In the end, everything we do is out of inner motivation, and love is no exception, so: all selfish. But that is not to be taken too literally - being unselfish can feel good, too, and is therefore "selfish". Rand's recognizing moral character or whatever as the base of love seems completely random, not how any of that works. We're smart animals! Biological creatures. We need to reproduce. It gets messy.
- n4r9 2y ago
  The quote I think you're referring to: > like many tragedies, this one is marked by a dark irony: A man devoted to the principle of individualism has ended up living a life defined by a reliance on others. The irony is that Peikoff believed himself an advocate of individualism, while simultaneously subjugating himself, saying stuff like “I would let her step on my face if she wanted.”
kleton 2y ago
Confusingly, at various point in this article they refer to him in the past tense, "was a good father" etc, while he's still alive.
- dmitrygr 2y ago
  Was, and then there was a lawsuit with kid. Probably hard to claim still is then? Lawsuits tear families apart.
- miltonlost 2y ago
  "He was a red head. Now, after the hair dye, he has black hair" is perfectly normal way of using past tense of someone while they are alive.
greener_grass 2y ago
Readers might enjoy Mozart Was a Red, a play by Murray Rothbard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIk5C2qsRH8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIk5C2qsRH8
richardanaya 2y ago
[flagged]
richardanaya 2y ago
Peikoff is a wonderful man who wrote books that inspire me and intrigue me to this day.
- glenstein 2y ago
  He suggested on a podcast that if a woman had no access to resources to perform an abortion she should throw herself down the stairs. Presumably as a way to solve it that doesn't involve getting freebies from the state.
reverendsteveii 2y ago
Ayn Rand is the ultimate proof of something I've realized as I've grown: doing the right thing is actually really simple. It's not easy as in "low difficulty of accomplishment", but it's simple as in "low difficulty of understanding". In fact, I've started to think of complex decision making as the moral equivalent of a code smell: if I'm waffling back and forth over what the right thing to do is sometimes it's a genuinely complex situation where principles are in conflict but much (Much, MUCH) more often it's just that I no what the right thing to do is and just don't wanna do it. Objectivism feels like the inverse of this: you can make anything feel like the right thing to do if you just expand, generalize, hypotheticalize and muddy the question until "Should I give a hungry person a sandwich when I've got one I won't miss?" becomes something like "How do you expect society to function if no one works?"
- grandempire 2y ago
  The question of Ethics is what we should we do, With life. There is nothing easy or clear about that. Morality is not just being generally nice when it’s convenient for all parties. One of the themes in the Fountainhead is contrasting someone with this attitude with the individual with a longer term vision and goals.
  - reverendsteveii 2y ago
    >expand, generalize, hypotheticalize and muddy the question
    - grandempire 2y ago
      Yes that is something you said. And no I don’t think it’s true. If you don’t have an answer to the question of what should be done in life, you have no framing for other dependent moral questions.
arp242 2y ago
Seems like an unpleasant person. I read on his Wikipedia page that he called Obama's re-election "the worst political event ever to occur in the history of this continent" and "worse than the Civil War". An estimated 600,000 to one million people died in the war. And many more suffered life-long injuries, had to deal with the loss of their child, spouse, etc. Also seems to me the slave system in the US – where people were born in to slavery with no realistic hope of freedom – is the ultimate in state control and stripping of individual rights that people like him are supposed to be against. You can dislike Obama, nothing wrong with that. But is having a president you dislike for 4 years really worse than up to a million dead people? And the institute of slavery? Also denies property rights to Palestinians and native Americans. The notion that individual rights are paramount again goes out of window at the first sign of inconvenience. So not just unpleasant on a personal level, also morally decrepit and intellectually vapid.
- glenstein 2y ago
  The attempt by Randians to apply her to modern politics was a major tell when I was young to get out of that crowd. One person, supposedly a an intellectual leading light of Objectivism at the time, said that nuking Iran was fine because Iran pursing nuclear enrichment constituted "initiation of force" (important term of art in the Rand lexicography), seemingly squaring the circle between Rand's brand of hardcore libertarian isolationism and neocon warmongering that was popular at the time. I wanted to see intellectual hero philosophers as the legacy, but what objectivism produced, outside of Nathaneil Branden and David Kelly who were at least interesting, was largely a complete joke.
GlibMonkeyDeath 2y ago
This is a truly tragic story. Toward the end of the article (regarding the 2024 findings in San Diego Superior Court), Peikoff sounds like he has his faculties intact, according to multiple doctors and attorneys. He has freely chosen to marry his caregiver, much to the dismay of his daughter (who believes the caregiver is a grifter, and so his daughter forced the court inquiry.) His response, "if being unreasonable is choosing to be with the woman I love, then I choose to be unreasonable" is peak objectivism. He is going to do what he wants - to do anything else would be a betrayal of objectivist principles. He is now estranged from his daughter Cordelia -er, Kira - over this.
black_13 2y ago
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4fterd4rk 2y ago
It's interesting to me how Rand wrote books about socialism leading us to a world where irrationality takes over in a dysfunctional world and we now live in a world where unrestrained capitalism has caused irrationality to take over in a dysfunctional world.
- booleandilemma 2y ago
  I wonder if the end result is always dysfunction.
- Duwensatzaj 2y ago
  > unrestrained capitalism I’m not sure how you can look at an America where it is largely illegal to build and claim with a straight face that anything is unrestrained.
nonrandomstring 2y ago
Getting famous and having a cult following isn't always the best thing for an author. Not for their works. Rand wrote one good book [0]. Actually really got to me. Probably not one you think of. "We The Living", a pretty bleak account of collectivisation and the exodus from communism. A shocking, semi-autobiographical account of watching the world you love and know torn up. I think it might be more apropos Americans today than any of the "objectivism" stuff. All her later work I read in my 30s seemed lacking. But that first one really had an impact, not quite Solzhenitsyn or Kafka, but a hard hit with a similar interior. That book really defines her I think. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_The_Living https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_The_Living
Animats 2y ago
I read both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and wasn't impressed by either. The author never got the "show, not tell" memo. Long, long speeches. (In the movie version of The Fountainhead, Howard Roarke's architecture is terrible. His buildings resemble 1960s US housing projects such as the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago. There's good minimalism, but that's not it.)
- gavinray 2y ago
  My Ayn Rand "unpopular opinion" is that Atlas Shrugged is a wordier, less interesting The Fountainhead. Wouldn't suggest anyone read Atlas Shrugged, saying this as someone who also read Peikoff's "Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand" Just read The Fountainhead and imagine that with trains and the railroad. "Anthem" is a short read and also pretty solid.
  - mixmastamyk 2y ago
    Each one was further dumbed-down, according to an interview of hers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18203189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18203189
    - gizzlon 2y ago
      hehe, that's one way to answer criticism. Atlas Shrugged just needed a good editor, or someone else, to cut it down to the same size as The Fountain head
- cryptonector 2y ago
  Pretty much. Plus her approach to love is completely off-putting and inhumane.
Devasta 2y ago
Atlas Shrugged was one of the most important books I ever read. A society where the rich destroy the entire world fighting stupid battles against each other, even witholding technology that would aid all humanity because someone other than them would benefit, all the while ordinary men like Eddie Willers are left to die in the desert? Marx couldn't have laid it out so clear to me as Rand has.
ratrocket 2y ago
https://archive.ph/sXHrb https://archive.ph/sXHrb
fireburning 2y ago
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deleted 2y ago
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jalapenos 2y ago
"In the throws of narcissism" is best way to describe them. Living hellish painful lives purely volitionally, from the mental cage they created for themselves. Must've had extra specially unpleasant childhoods.

The tragic irony of Objectivism is perfectly captured in Peikoff's life story. A man who dedicated himself to a philosophy of radical independence ended up defining his entire existence through dependency. First on Rand, now apparently on his caregiver-turned-wife. I met Peikoff at an ARI event in 2009. He was surprisingly warm in person, but you could see the weight of being "the heir" in how defensively he responded to even mild questions about Rand's work. Now reading about the fracture with his daughter over the estate, it's like watching Atlas Shrugged's plot play out in real life: the bitter disputes over Rand's intellectual property mirroring the novel's battles over physical resources. What's most disturbing isn't the personal drama but what this reveals about how Objectivism operates in practice. For a philosophy obsessed with reason and independence, its institutional guardians seem remarkably focused on excommunication, loyalty tests, and controlling access to primary sources. The gap between preaching individualism while demanding conformity has always been the movement's central contradiction.

MrMcCall 2y ago
[flagged]
- guhidalg 2y ago
  I agree with you that the most consistent theory for explaining the current GOP going off the rails is a lack of compassion and empathy for their fellow human beings, replaced by a hope that Trump will smile upon them and be compassionate to them. It's a vicious cycle of signaling, since Reagan, that your government is not compassionate towards you therefore you should not empathize with your government and instead trust corporations (but don't think about their need to make money). I don't know how to promote empathy and compassion without relying on religious arguments. I usually find the strictly secular and over atheists are very compassionate and empathetic, but the mildly religious and definitely the evangelists in my life and the absolute _least_ compassionate people to those outside their tribe.
  - MrMcCall 2y ago
    > I usually find the strictly secular and over atheists are very compassionate and empathetic, but the mildly religious and definitely the evangelists in my life and the absolute _least_ compassionate people to those outside their tribe. Sadly enough, I am of the same opinion, too. That is because true spiritual seeking must accompany humility and love for ALL others, not just of those of their tribe, and most religious practitioners fail that miserably. That is why universal compassion is the only real purpose of religion, as it is the target that we must all aspire to, or we will fall well short of the mark. Most people of all ilks fall prey to selfish self-superiority, thinking incorrectly that their path is the only one that is "saved". They are just coldly and completely wrong. That is why one of the Masters said, "That which you do to the least of my brothers and sisters, that you have done unto me." > I don't know how to promote empathy and compassion without relying on religious arguments. I have settled on this fact: that no human being can survive the first years of their life without selfless, compasssionate care from adults in their orbit. This is the template for human life, but most people do not realize that this care should be attended to by every human being to every other human being as we grow older, where we are hopefully lucky enough to transition from the helped to the helper. We know that those with a more comfortable upbringing tend to do better in life, financially, mentally, and physically. If we were to invest, as societies, in the "least of our brothers", we would essentially be the water that lifts all boats, and our entire world would flow more smoothly. The problem is that it would take those who have more to give more, and generosity is a virtue of the spirit that has its counterpart vice, greed, active in our being as well. Every human being resides in the crux between the various vices they are susceptible to and the virtues they are presupposed to manifesting. It is incumbent upon us all to honestly search ourselves to find out in which ways we are less virtuous and then seek to become better. There are 19 pairs of vice/virtue pairs in the human being, so that's a lot of whack-a-mole to perform along our lives, but few of our fellows care enough to care enough about others to "Know thyself" deeply enough to do what Gurdjieff called "The Work". Caring for the happiness of others is the best balm for not only our own spiritual development, but for the ills of the world. Please remember that religion is always a personal affair, involving the internal relationship between the human being and our Creator. It does not enforce Its suggestions on our free will, which is truly given -- that's why there is so much mischief upon our world, and so much resulting suffering. As we Sufis say, "When you take one step towards God, It comes running." Self-evolution is the act of manifesting the miracle of defeating our selfish ego over many battles with many losses and less victories. It is how we learn humility, grace, mercy, kindness, and compassion, among all the other virtues. Of course, that requires the person to truly want to become a better person; most people are simply satisfied that they perform certain practices in accordance with their traditions, but that ain't love and doesn't count for shit in the grand scheme of things. As Rumi says, "The Way goes in." Peace be with you, friend. I am at your service.
- IncreasePosts 2y ago
  Republicans on average are more charitable than Democrats: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/03/your-money/republicans-democrats-charity-philanthropy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/03/your-money/republicans-de... Maybe Democrats are less charitable because they are more likely to live in Democratic controlled areas that provide more government services to the needy. However, does that really reflect compassion if you merely live in a system which provides those services through mandatory taxation? A republican moving from Kansas to NYC doesn't become more compassionate simply by paying more in taxes because they have to.
  - JKCalhoun 2y ago
    Might Christianity (and the likelihood one group or another is more Christian) have something to do with their charitable giving?
    - MrMcCall 2y ago
      In addition to tax write offs.
      - IncreasePosts 2y ago
        Tax write offs are available to Democrats equally.
        MrMcCall 2y ago
        That doesn't mean they use them to the fullest, and GOPers are really, really into avoiding taxes. It's like a religion to them, and they are about to crush our economy to make more absurd tax cuts for their rich friends and sycophants.
    - IncreasePosts 2y ago
      Sure, but why would it matter if it did?
cmrdporcupine 2y ago
Whenever I go reading about these people and this ideology and community it reminds me a lot of the various Trotskyist or other far left sects and personalities I encountered when I was younger. Similar dramas and egos and personality quirks and strident philosophical emissions, ideologically-focused groups built around persons/personalities. Often involving sexual relationships and dubious power dynamics. Just from, y'know, 180 degree philosophical positions. Maybe it was a product of her original linguistic/cultural extraction, but when I read Rand's "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal" as a teen it reminded me very much of Stalinist or Trotskyite tracts I encountered around the same time. Different positions, same tone of absolute certainty and similar polemical flourishes. All of which to say, it all strikes me as more theological than philosophical.
- mapontosevenths 2y ago
  I think this is an astute observation. Taking any extreme position will inevitably put someone in the position where they find it difficult or impossible to live up to their own ideals. At the far ends of the spectrum everything starts to look alike. Ayn Rand herself died while collecting Social Security and Medicare.
  - Ray20 2y ago
    I don’t see any contradiction or failure to follow own ideals here. It's like blaming a slave who believes that slavery shouldn't exist, for eating his master's food.
  - cmrdporcupine 2y ago
    I mean, I dislike Rand's outlook passionately but I would not hold it against her to withdraw from a system she paid into or from living in the framework of society she lived in, even if she resented it.
    - stevenAthompson 2y ago
      She wanted to let the disabled starve or beg on street corners so she'd have a tiny fraction more wealth to fritter away. We don't owe her the benefit of the doubt.
yapyap 2y ago
That is pretty funny, in the ironic sense. What it feels like to me is the leaders of the Objectivism movement are all narcissists and the followers are paradoxically not Objectivists because they’re following a philosophy instead of being guided by the self. Being a peak Objectivist would be to not care about being an Objectivist or not, basically making it impossible to be an Objectivist if you follow the philosophy, even at the top of it because you are dependent on your followers for influence, status and power. The irony of it all, turns out a philosophy based on self sufficiency is as big of a grift as a political movement trying to convince everyone that in this day and age self sufficiency is the best move, mostly cause they can’t fathom sharing. One of the _most_ ironic bits being that if everyone were truly self sufficient there would be no social hierarchy and no money anymore.
- seanhunter 2y ago
  Objectivism has many of these sorts of contradictions. Most famously, Ayn Rand herself collected medicare and social security as her health deteriorated towards the end of her life.
  - lumenwrites 2y ago
    Is that really a contradiction? We all have our ideals, and we all fail to live up to them sometimes, because life can be brutal.
    - stevenAthompson 2y ago
      To be fair, Rand herself said (to paraphrase) that because the state took it from her against her will it was fair play to take it back and I think that was self-consistent. That said, she wanted to let the disabled starve to death so I don't think anyone really has to be fair to her at all. Empathy is only for the empathetic.
      - marknutter 2y ago
        Ayn Rand did not "want to let the disabled starve to death". What a ridiculous lie.
kashunstva 2y ago
> what this reveals about how Objectivism operates in practice...the movement's central contradiction Is it only the gatekeepers of Rand's legacy that exhibit this discrepancy, or was it contradiction from the beginning? I seem to remember the first Objectivist herself accepted assistance from the Federal government near the end of her life. Anyway, to someone with a distant outsider's view of this movement, it can seem that it misses something fundamental about the human psyche as it evolved to operate in co-dependent groups.
- thrance 2y ago
  Not really a defense of this clown ideology, but Rand would be acting rationally (if a bit hypocritically) by accepting the Government's check. In her views, it's the State that's acting irrationally by offering support in the first place. On a similar subject, she believed disabled people (or more generally, people unable to work) should not receive any help other than from "voluntary charity" [1], a fact I find absolutely disgusting and should discredit this ideology to any sane person. [1] https://youtu.be/rM4HqlqQYwo https://youtu.be/rM4HqlqQYwo
- notahacker 2y ago
  Even her fictional utopia Galt's Gulch is basically a commune, a commune where people cosplay at being hardnosed capitalists who won't give anything for free by charging each other token amounts for everything...
  - lazystar 2y ago
    Exactly - theyre all non-conformists, and you can be a non-conformist and join them in their commune if you act just like them in every way.
  - fireburning 2y ago
    [dead]
- kbelder 2y ago
  She addressed the problem with accepting assistance in relation to student tuition assistance. Briefly, she said hate the game, not the player. The students have a structure imposed upon them, and it's not irrational or unethical to take the aid the government provides since the government still regulates them and taxes them in various ways. However, it would be unethical to advocate for increasing that assistance (because the benefit is taken forcibly from others).
jollyllama 2y ago
> The gap between preaching individualism while demanding conformity has always been the movement's central contradiction. Check out Adam Curtis's documentaries for work that zeroes in on this.
hinkley 2y ago
Something life and then later therapy has taught me is that intellect can paper over a lot of shortcomings, but it’s just paper. At the end of the day situations that involve humans always involve feelings. And you stunt your growth (personal or organizational) if you try to pretend it isn’t the case. The problem with intellectualizing is that it’s very good at employing itself to avoid all other options. If you get too old pretending otherwise, the road back is full of brambles and many would rather double down than accept it. Once you understand this it’s easy to see the hollowness in what Rand offers, if it wasn’t already patently obvious to you before.
- kibwen 2y ago
  > At the end of the day situations that involve humans always involve feelings. My more cynical take is that humans are emotional beings first and foremost, and reason is a distant second at best. And even our pretenses to reason can't be trusted, as they are often just emotion masquerading as reason, and the most insufferable of the reasonpilled are those that refuse to understand this. I'm not trying to say emotion/reason are good/bad. What I am trying to say is that any hopes for a human society that place reason above emotion are fundamentally unachievable.
  - hinkley 2y ago
    I know some people are pushing back on Thinking, Fast and Slow’s assertions but whether everyone’s brains work that way or not, there’s at least a visible minority of people whose brains do, and I’m among them. We do many things based entirely on intuition, and then afterward gin up a reason for having done them that doesn’t make us sound insane, or like five year olds. It’s part explanation/excuse and part description, but presented as description. And if you’ve read anything on anger management, there’s a split second where the angry individual is experiencing some other emotion, like vulnerability or betrayal, before they sublimate it into anger. The problem is in how fast and to what degree they perform the substitution, and often even they miss the event, which takes away their own agency in the response. Recovery involves clawing back that agency.
    - 2y ago
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cle 2y ago
The irony isn't one of dependency. The philosophy celebrates interdependence and the achievements of groups of cooperating people who take care of each other. The irony and tragedy is broader and encompasses both the cult leaders and the cult detractors who are both unwilling separate the ideas from the people.
glenstein 2y ago
Could not have put it better myself! After finding myself very inspired by the novels, mostly as an introduction to the virtues of critical thinking and how those can be foundational to a worldview (which is good!), the cracks in the armor really started to show when looking at the community, and especially Rand's relationship with Nathaniel Branden. There's lots to say about how Objectivism oversimplifies and attacks caricatures, and doesn't address itself to sophisticated economic thinking. You can get good out of it (I read it during the Bush admin and felt like it was making the same warnings against the excesses of state power that 1984 was), and it's not terrible to expose a person to the virtues of philosophy, and critical thinking. In my case it opened my eyes to moral realism, at which point I traded in any interest in Objectivism for that instead. Even if you want to take the novel on its own terms that it has super-intellectual heroes, how humans work is every bit as much a part of reality as the physics of inventing a new metal. And the talent of administering human organizations is never present. It also never really models how mere mortals can reconcile their imperfections to the standards articulated, and is not self aware enough to speak to the population of mere mortals who would misdiagnose themselves as misunderstood heroes.
richardanaya 2y ago
Your understanding of objectivism is deeply flawed if you think the philosophy sees no possible value in the trade between two people. Radical independence in objectivism as a virtue is independence of judgment, not some caricature you present of being an irrational loner.
btilly 2y ago
The central problem of Objectivism is that they tie their logical conclusions into emotional knots. You can see this in their use of loaded language such as "theft". The problem is that this causes them to believe that their conclusions are purely logical, even when they are not. Therefore any disagreements are "proof" that the other is being illogical and should be rejected. This leads to an intolerance of disagreement, that in turn leads to the excommunication, loyalty tests, and so on. All of which will be expressed in the rhetoric of the philosophy, which is designed to appeal to reason while connecting to emotion. It is perfectly predictable emotional behavior. As is the inability to process inconvenient information that does not align with what the philosophy wishes to believe is true.
_wire_ 2y ago
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace - Adam Curtis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_of_Loving_Grace_(TV_series) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines... See ep-1 "Love & Power," on contradictions of Ayn Rand's life versus her philosophy; can be found on yt / vimeo Series supplies interesting history for any nerd interested in systems analysis and provides a survey of California Ideology. His documentary on the legacy of Henritta Lacks' immortal cells and biology, "The Way of All Flesh" is also interesting food for thought on systems analysis.
trhway 2y ago
>What's most disturbing isn't the personal drama but what this reveals about how Objectivism operates in practice. For a philosophy obsessed with reason and independence, ideology. People pervert everything into ideology. > its institutional guardians seem remarkably focused on excommunication, loyalty tests, and controlling access to primary sources. The gap between preaching individualism while demanding conformity has always been the movement's central contradiction. that can be said about any ideology. Ideologies can be different yet those guardians and the gap between declaration and practice is always the same.

ryandrake 2y ago

I have the pleasure of living in a pretty "red" part of the country, and everyone I know who is a self-described libertarian (or otherwise worships at the altar of self-sufficiency) lives utterly dependent on societal systems. They're on Medicare, Disability or Social Security, live in neighborhoods with solid public services, rely on the rule of law for protection from crime, and enjoy clean air and drinking water, safe food and medicine, that they only have access to due to strong environmental and safety regulations. They were the first ones to freak out on Social Media during COVID when they had to actually rely on themselves for a bit. As someone else put it on Twitter, they are like house cats: absolutely convinced of their fierce independence while utterly dependent on a system they don't appreciate or understand.

thrance 2y ago
It took thousands of years of technical and social progress to produce people that think they can survive alone.
jonfw 2y ago
Ayn Rand didn't write novels about homesteading- none of the characters in her books are self sufficient. I don't think that participation in society as it exists should prevent anybody from holding their philosophy of choice.
- jplusequalt 2y ago
  You're right, Ayn Rand wrote about a fantastical world, full of make believe people and things.
  - jonfw 2y ago
    AKA fiction
    - slater 2y ago
      Always a good time to remember this fantastic quote: “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

teekert 2y ago

I also get such energy from Atlas Shrugged, I don't understand why. I know that the good guys are very carefully crafted, they don't cheat, they don't do things like lobbying to win. They don't compromise on their world view to the extreme. They don't have children, that makes it all easier, but also less real. Raised christian but feeling burned out by the contradictions, the emptiness of trying to live for others (it's killing for relationships I can tell you), the mental struggle to rationalize all the rules, I too felt that spark. I realize dogmatism is always bad but that voice inside keeps saying: It's not when the theory is perfect! The truth is knowable and can be discovered through reason. How super comforting (and damn that Incompleteness Theorem I learned about later). I don't know what it is, my hunger for a system? For rules to make sense of the world? Whatever it is, Rand's philosophy remains so appealing. It's probably the reason I started a company, walk into meetings now boldly, with a goal, why I enjoy things now, just to enjoy myself. As a rational, healthy human, there is nothing wrong with that, in contrast to what my upbringing tried to instill in me. Perhaps that's it, it liberated my from a confining worldview. Perhaps another worldview could have done the same.

fatbird 2y ago
"It's chaos, be kind" [0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sicUhD1n-es https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sicUhD1n-es
HeckFeck 2y ago
> the emptiness of trying to live for others Someone else was burned one too many times. It's fine and dandy until you notice a pattern: others who lack conscience will always work your convictions against you. Though the religion admits as much - it eschews 'worldly wisdom' - i.e. what you need to make anything of a life in this world.
- teekert 2y ago
  I mean it's empty because you deny people that love you to do nice things for you (I don't care (and it shows!), what do you want to do?). Keep it up long enough and you don't even know what you like anymore. And then you aren't really a fun person anymore. At least, that is how I experienced it.

jonfw 2y ago

I fail to see the irony of "inheriting" an empire from Rand, when the protagonist of atlas shrugged and other main characters were heirs to a fortune. Inheritance is thoroughly explored in her work. To me- this article is about the social dangers of taking a philosophy to the extreme, and about how easy it is to take advantage of the elderly when estranged.

bigstrat2003 2y ago
The thing that I felt came through in this article (or maybe it's just my biases) was the hollowness of engaging in relationships purely for one's own selfish ends. Sooner or later (as happened to these people), the selfish desires don't line up any more, and the relationships get torn apart. Contrary to Rand, I don't think that love is inherently selfish (quite the opposite in fact), and it seems to me that love based on altruism is much more stable (and more praiseworthy) than love based on what the other person can do for me. But then again I would say that, so it's hard to tell if that actually is something I took away from the article or if it's just confirmation bias at play.
- ahartmetz 2y ago
  IMO: In the end, everything we do is out of inner motivation, and love is no exception, so: all selfish. But that is not to be taken too literally - being unselfish can feel good, too, and is therefore "selfish". Rand's recognizing moral character or whatever as the base of love seems completely random, not how any of that works. We're smart animals! Biological creatures. We need to reproduce. It gets messy.
n4r9 2y ago
The quote I think you're referring to: > like many tragedies, this one is marked by a dark irony: A man devoted to the principle of individualism has ended up living a life defined by a reliance on others. The irony is that Peikoff believed himself an advocate of individualism, while simultaneously subjugating himself, saying stuff like “I would let her step on my face if she wanted.”

kleton 2y ago

Confusingly, at various point in this article they refer to him in the past tense, "was a good father" etc, while he's still alive.

dmitrygr 2y ago
Was, and then there was a lawsuit with kid. Probably hard to claim still is then? Lawsuits tear families apart.
miltonlost 2y ago
"He was a red head. Now, after the hair dye, he has black hair" is perfectly normal way of using past tense of someone while they are alive.

greener_grass 2y ago

Readers might enjoy Mozart Was a Red, a play by Murray Rothbard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIk5C2qsRH8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIk5C2qsRH8

richardanaya 2y ago

[flagged]

richardanaya 2y ago

Peikoff is a wonderful man who wrote books that inspire me and intrigue me to this day.

glenstein 2y ago
He suggested on a podcast that if a woman had no access to resources to perform an abortion she should throw herself down the stairs. Presumably as a way to solve it that doesn't involve getting freebies from the state.

reverendsteveii 2y ago

Ayn Rand is the ultimate proof of something I've realized as I've grown: doing the right thing is actually really simple. It's not easy as in "low difficulty of accomplishment", but it's simple as in "low difficulty of understanding". In fact, I've started to think of complex decision making as the moral equivalent of a code smell: if I'm waffling back and forth over what the right thing to do is sometimes it's a genuinely complex situation where principles are in conflict but much (Much, MUCH) more often it's just that I no what the right thing to do is and just don't wanna do it. Objectivism feels like the inverse of this: you can make anything feel like the right thing to do if you just expand, generalize, hypotheticalize and muddy the question until "Should I give a hungry person a sandwich when I've got one I won't miss?" becomes something like "How do you expect society to function if no one works?"

grandempire 2y ago
The question of Ethics is what we should we do, With life. There is nothing easy or clear about that. Morality is not just being generally nice when it’s convenient for all parties. One of the themes in the Fountainhead is contrasting someone with this attitude with the individual with a longer term vision and goals.
- reverendsteveii 2y ago
  >expand, generalize, hypotheticalize and muddy the question
  - grandempire 2y ago
    Yes that is something you said. And no I don’t think it’s true. If you don’t have an answer to the question of what should be done in life, you have no framing for other dependent moral questions.

arp242 2y ago

Seems like an unpleasant person. I read on his Wikipedia page that he called Obama's re-election "the worst political event ever to occur in the history of this continent" and "worse than the Civil War". An estimated 600,000 to one million people died in the war. And many more suffered life-long injuries, had to deal with the loss of their child, spouse, etc. Also seems to me the slave system in the US – where people were born in to slavery with no realistic hope of freedom – is the ultimate in state control and stripping of individual rights that people like him are supposed to be against. You can dislike Obama, nothing wrong with that. But is having a president you dislike for 4 years really worse than up to a million dead people? And the institute of slavery? Also denies property rights to Palestinians and native Americans. The notion that individual rights are paramount again goes out of window at the first sign of inconvenience. So not just unpleasant on a personal level, also morally decrepit and intellectually vapid.

glenstein 2y ago
The attempt by Randians to apply her to modern politics was a major tell when I was young to get out of that crowd. One person, supposedly a an intellectual leading light of Objectivism at the time, said that nuking Iran was fine because Iran pursing nuclear enrichment constituted "initiation of force" (important term of art in the Rand lexicography), seemingly squaring the circle between Rand's brand of hardcore libertarian isolationism and neocon warmongering that was popular at the time. I wanted to see intellectual hero philosophers as the legacy, but what objectivism produced, outside of Nathaneil Branden and David Kelly who were at least interesting, was largely a complete joke.

GlibMonkeyDeath 2y ago

This is a truly tragic story. Toward the end of the article (regarding the 2024 findings in San Diego Superior Court), Peikoff sounds like he has his faculties intact, according to multiple doctors and attorneys. He has freely chosen to marry his caregiver, much to the dismay of his daughter (who believes the caregiver is a grifter, and so his daughter forced the court inquiry.) His response, "if being unreasonable is choosing to be with the woman I love, then I choose to be unreasonable" is peak objectivism. He is going to do what he wants - to do anything else would be a betrayal of objectivist principles. He is now estranged from his daughter Cordelia -er, Kira - over this.

black_13 2y ago

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4fterd4rk 2y ago

It's interesting to me how Rand wrote books about socialism leading us to a world where irrationality takes over in a dysfunctional world and we now live in a world where unrestrained capitalism has caused irrationality to take over in a dysfunctional world.

booleandilemma 2y ago
I wonder if the end result is always dysfunction.
Duwensatzaj 2y ago
> unrestrained capitalism I’m not sure how you can look at an America where it is largely illegal to build and claim with a straight face that anything is unrestrained.

nonrandomstring 2y ago

Getting famous and having a cult following isn't always the best thing for an author. Not for their works. Rand wrote one good book [0]. Actually really got to me. Probably not one you think of. "We The Living", a pretty bleak account of collectivisation and the exodus from communism. A shocking, semi-autobiographical account of watching the world you love and know torn up. I think it might be more apropos Americans today than any of the "objectivism" stuff. All her later work I read in my 30s seemed lacking. But that first one really had an impact, not quite Solzhenitsyn or Kafka, but a hard hit with a similar interior. That book really defines her I think. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_The_Living https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_The_Living

Animats 2y ago

I read both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and wasn't impressed by either. The author never got the "show, not tell" memo. Long, long speeches. (In the movie version of The Fountainhead, Howard Roarke's architecture is terrible. His buildings resemble 1960s US housing projects such as the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago. There's good minimalism, but that's not it.)

gavinray 2y ago
My Ayn Rand "unpopular opinion" is that Atlas Shrugged is a wordier, less interesting The Fountainhead. Wouldn't suggest anyone read Atlas Shrugged, saying this as someone who also read Peikoff's "Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand" Just read The Fountainhead and imagine that with trains and the railroad. "Anthem" is a short read and also pretty solid.
- mixmastamyk 2y ago
  Each one was further dumbed-down, according to an interview of hers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18203189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18203189
  - gizzlon 2y ago
    hehe, that's one way to answer criticism. Atlas Shrugged just needed a good editor, or someone else, to cut it down to the same size as The Fountain head
cryptonector 2y ago
Pretty much. Plus her approach to love is completely off-putting and inhumane.

Devasta 2y ago

Atlas Shrugged was one of the most important books I ever read. A society where the rich destroy the entire world fighting stupid battles against each other, even witholding technology that would aid all humanity because someone other than them would benefit, all the while ordinary men like Eddie Willers are left to die in the desert? Marx couldn't have laid it out so clear to me as Rand has.

ratrocket 2y ago

https://archive.ph/sXHrb https://archive.ph/sXHrb

fireburning 2y ago

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deleted 2y ago

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jalapenos 2y ago

"In the throws of narcissism" is best way to describe them. Living hellish painful lives purely volitionally, from the mental cage they created for themselves. Must've had extra specially unpleasant childhoods.