I will not die, it’s the world that will end!
The most dangerous thing in the world today is the universities!
Today’s conservatives are worse than today’s liberals
… because they do not know how to preach capitalism
… because they do nothing but apologize
… because they are all altruistic!
… the rest of the interview.
Rand was a fascist.
Harry J. Balsac is a moron.
Balsac: Fascism is collectivist … I think you’re looking for another term.
*sighs* I love this woman. Her philosophy has taught me so much about my inner being, so much about the moral responsibility I have to myself, and so much about the power that is with in me to further my natural existence. It’s soooo ironic that I once tried to find this power in Jebus, but it simply cannot be found in religion. It can only be attained by a willful act, a choice, to think objectively and rationally.
“Rand was a fascist.”
Really? That is news.
Was she really a member of the German Nationalist Socialist party under Adolf Hitler? She’s not wearing a brown shirt… come to think of it, I never saw George Bush wearing a brown shirt either. But then I guess truth and reality never stopped a good lefty slag!
“Going around the world apologizing to naked savages for having more money than them.”
Rand was speaking about Jimmah Cartah.
Obama supporters must be very proud about the way he carries on this legacy of collective defeatism.
Hairy Balls is a fascist.
I recall university in the 60’s…
Margaret Mead, Rachel Carson and Ayn Rand.
They were required reading and treated as fact/gospel.
A short time later my imployer directed me to War College—totally different environment—-this terrible trio were exposed to us as fitting in the same category as Marx, Engels, and Mao….which is where they belong….part of the stealthy communist/collectivist/lefty infiltration…..which is currently experiencing some success in the US….a success which is unravelling rapidly….
Ayn Rand is “part of the stealthy communist/ collectivist/ lefty infiltration”? Ayn Rand was “required reading and treated as fact/ gospel” in the universities in the 60’s? Congratulations, sir, you may have won an award for one of the single stupidist comments ever posted to the Internet, and let me tell you, there’s a lot of competition there, considering how stupid most comments posted to the Interenet are.
Ayn Rand a Communist? WTF? She rejects religion, therefore she is a commie, wow.
Intellectual conservatism should not be an oxymoron and as long as thumpers vilify conservative atheists there will be little hope for the movement. A house that is divided….
good point rob
There’s categorizing and then there’s labeling…
And aetheists who label all Christian’s “thumper’s” doesn’t help much either.
A little over a year ago, in the church I have attended as a child, one of the parishioners decided to leave.
His reason? The priest refused to map out a game plan on what this Protestant convert should do with his life.
I like Ayn Rand because she espouses much of the same ‘now that we’re here, what do we do about it?’ philosophy I have known since i was a child.
I’m much older now and appreciate the gift of free will that’s within every human being.
Like the unfortunate parishioner who was looking for somebody to dictate his life (in part, I’d guess, so he’d have somebody to blame when things go wrong), American society has been dumbed down and has lost confidence in their own abilities.
We all make our choices and I’m quite certain what I learned in church helped me deal with an abusive father, who’s been dead now for 27 years.
Watching Rand only confirms, not contradicts, what I have learned in church since my childhood. It only cost me a couple of hours a week and, IMHO, has been worth every second.
I truly continue to feel sorry for those who have not had the same experience in so-called Christian denominations, who seem more concerned with wordly politics than teaching their children the beauty of the truth.
I just finished “Atlas Shrugged” a few weeks ago.
Written in 1957 it is remarkably and eerily descriptive of exactly what is happening in US politics today.
“Look at Mr Carter, a very peculiar creature,”
OMG!
Not all Christians are “thumpers”. Just as not all atheists are liberals. I advise caution at finding offense so easily, you might find yourself in strange company, after all, martyrdom is the aspiration of all fanatics.
To people that think like Harry, everybody that is not a Marxist collectivist, is a fascist.
sasquatch, not sure why Rand would have been included in the same category as Mao, Marx and Engels by the War College. Rand believed the total opposite to collectivism. Your prof was out to lunch on that one.
Just waiting for the “god squad” to come out on this one. SDA should have a 100 comments or more by midnight.
Knight:
That’s mighty tolerant of you.
I love this woman…she is so smart and what she said back then is still true today.
Now, now, boys, don’t squabble, isn’t one of the tenants of conservatism that each one of us can either reject or accept a religious belief?
She was a clear as Solzhenitsyn was, at roughly the same time at Harvard. AS much as she predicted
the world of the ‘dog eat dog’ laws, she also seemed to suggest the inevitable foil in the form
of Dagny Taggart, I can’t find an equivalent for John Galt
well, I just think if the edjukashun cystem included how not to be exploited/ignored/bullied and how to be independent and self-supporting, a lot of the arguing about which socio-political philosophy is best would be unnecessary. we would *already* have the best fit for the majority.
and a lot of gubbamint bureaucrats would be out of a job.
think not? how many times in your primary, secondary and post-secondary edjukashun did they cover ‘starting your own enterprise 101’?
The Mike Wallace interview from 1959 is even more impressive.
This woman is spot on. I probably though would have said that not only do they not know how to preach capitalism, they do not practise it.
Also it escapes me why some insist on defining others by their religious affiliation or lack of instead of listening to what they have to say. If they make sense and ‘practise what they preach’ it matters not.
Cjunk, thank you very much for this. I’ve watched all 3 segments and found them to be refreshing and intellectually stimulating.
WOW, compare Sneiderman’s interview to what would happen today. I thought he did a superb job. He was genuinely interested in getting to the core data of Ayn Rand, and had no agenda I could detect. AND, after some apparent discomfort with his body language (the finger pointing, and other hand gestures) she seemed to geniunely enjoy the encounter. And how lovely her ease with “God Bless” and like phrases.
Like Hayek (The chapter: Why I am not a Conservative in The Road to Serfdom) she makes it very clear that she is not a conservative. And she is absolutely right that the right has utterly failed to “preach” capitalism — “Preach” being not an ill-advised word here, because, really, capitalism, properly understood, is the only truly moral basis for the organization of society. She’s absolutely right that the right apologizes too much. I believe it was Steyn (?) who made a similar observation recently, that when the right is IN, it acts as if it’s just a temporary caretaker government until the liberals return. “Conservatives” today seem to say: “We’ll deliver the goodies too, only way faster and much more efficiently … we’ll be more efficient altruists!”.
Her remark about conservatives being worse than liberals ties in nicely with Glenn Beck’s controversial statement that McCain would have been worse than Obama. What he really meant was that, with him, conservatism would be killed, stone dead, whereas with the Marxist Obama, there is a chance at a conservative/libertarian revival.
I especially appreciated her remarks about “the attack on ability” and the “age of envy”. One of my own coinages, of recent vintage, is “never underestimate the power of envy in the world?”.
The nicest thing my wife of 40 years has ever said to me (recently) is, “you don’t have an envious bone in your body”.
And yes, VITRUVIUS, Sasquatch’s was truly one of the dumbest remarks I’ve ever encountered on this blog or anywhere else for that matter. Let’s give him/her the benefit of the doubt and say s/he was drunk.
I just saw everyone calling everybody everything.
I still cant get a wit of relevancy from that interview.
Rand is Rand. I am of my own mind.
Snyder, not Sneiderman, chuckle. It’s just that he seemed so smart that …
Me No Dhimmi – yes, since there’s probably going to be a lot of religion on this thread, as Knight 99 observed @4:36, it’s worth stating that a dogmatic atheist, i.e. one who believes that Atheism is good for society and the individual, can probably never be defined as a conservative. “Conservative” and “Libertarian” don’t mean the same thing at all, and “Right Wing” doesn’t really mean anything.
Rand was a genius and diametrically opposed to collectivism.
She sometimes is credited with doing for capitalism what Kant did for God, demonstrating the veracity of capitalism on moral grounds. When she died she had wreaths in the shape of dollar signs on her grave.
Her argument was based on the morality of working for money instead of stealing it, or mooching it, or manipulating people for it.
She also demonstrated what happens when socialist policies and a culture of dependency “stop the motor of the world”. In other words, she demonstrates what happens when so much capital has been sucked out of the private sector by the parasitic sector that finally there is no possibility for upward mobility; or starting new companies; or being productively creative. All because government (which creates nothing, simply takes) has become a parasite bigger than its host.
At the same time, Nathaniel Brandon has publicly stated that Rand never read one book on mysticism or religion in her life. (She called anyone who believed in any sort of higher power a “mystic”.) She always spoke perjoratively of believers.
However, as Brandon explains, it’s simply a case of someone knowing a great deal about some areas, but being abysmally ignorant in others. This is a regrettable dilemma that overtakes many brilliant people. They know a lot about their subject, but they don’t know much about anything else. They are so accustomed to be the authoritarian know-it-all that they can’t absorb the idea that they really ignorant about things outside their sphere.
Rand and William F. Buckley Jr didn’t care for one another when obviously they shared a lot of economic and politcal philosophy, despite what name it travelled by.
And it is true that today Atlas Shrugged seems prophetic.
Agreed, Greg. Personally, back in ’72, I tended to find Branden more palatable than Rand, though I did think that her Objectivist Epsitemology, her The Virtue of Selfishness, and her Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal books were excellent. She carved a far better rant than he did, but I’d rather be him than her.
I also thought that Greenspan’s comments on Rand in this Charlie Rose interview were interesting, though I’m loath to mention it because someone will probably try to use it to talk about Greenspan instead of the topic here today.
Posted by: Black Mamba>
“…..one who believes that Atheism is good for society and the individual, can probably never be defined as a conservative. “Conservative” and “Libertarian” don’t mean the same thing at all, and “Right Wing” doesn’t really mean anything.”
I cannot see how Conservative thought or Liberalism has any religious affiliations at all? I agree that “Right Wing” has no meaning except to those of the “Left” that wish to launch their hatred at a stereotype. I can also understand that Libertarian and Conservative are not mutually inclusive. But I do have difficulty understanding why an Atheist cannot be a Conservative?
I suppose you would need to define what the terms Conservative and Libertarian mean to you and why religion (assuming Christian) has a pseudo copyright protection to the labels.
PS: For the sake of understanding my arguments standpoint, I am not an Atheist, my earlier comment could have been made by a Catholic Priest without embarrassment. I will add though I am not “religious”.
Mamba:
Can you offer any proof that there’s going to be a lot of religion on this thread?
Can I hold you to that prediction?
Knight predicted 100 posts by midnight.
Let’s see who’s more tolerant and more patient.
Knight 99 – I don’t think an atheist can’t be a conervative, I think that a person who believes that society would be better off without any religion can’t be a conservative, because some form of religion has always been an integral part of human society, and conservatives want to, you know, conserve. What individual conservatives wants to conserve is quite variable, of course, and I distinguish between Conservative and Reactionary; but I believe that my dictum about proselytizing Atheism being incompatible with Conservatism is reasonable.
set you free – no I can’t and no you can’t, because I said “probably”. It was a hunch.
“..and a lot of gubbamint bureaucrats would be out of a job.”
El problemo numero uno.
If necessary a civil war to put buroskum back in their place.
though I’m loath to mention it because someone will probably try to use it to talk about Greenspan instead of the topic here today.
CHUCKLE.
Vitruvius, sincerely, do you by any chance know the minute mark of Greenie’s remarks about Ayn Rand? I’d like to avoid confirmation bias and look at that. Sincerely.
Black Mamba>
Ok I think I get your point. Not entirely sure if I agree, but might if I thought about it some more.
I agree that the basis of Conservatism is to “conserve”, but I think the ideology runs much deeper in the sense that conservatism tends to be logic based thinking and pragmatic (Atheists many who tend to be scientists claim the same attributes for example).
I do see that you indeed said “I don’t think an atheist can’t be a conservative” and that is what I misunderstood in your original comment.
Of course the biggest issue I have with Ayn Rand’s ‘self actualization’ is that were it possible wouldn’t we all have done it?
Try roughly 04:40 to say at least 07:00 Me No Dhimmi, though there is another remark later about how as he learned more about real-world practice, Rand’s theory became less applicable as a matter of fact. Which is pretty much what I ended up figuring out too. Sorry I don’t have the time to find the latter reference right now, but I’ve got to go get tonight’s Late Nite Radio show out the door.
Knight 99 – I would say that Conservatism is more reasonable and pragmatic than Liberalism (but again definitions are tricky); “logic based thinking” is only as good as the premises that go into it. Left-wing ideas can be perfectly logical if you start off with completely idiotic assumptions about human nature.
But I think we’re straying into debating society territory here.
I’ve never read any Rand, but I did watch “the Fountainhead” (with Gary Cooper) a couple of weeks ago. God it was awful. Apparently Rand didn’t like it either, although it was her script.
I do admire her very much, based on what I know.
Thanks Vitruvius.
You’re welcome. I forgot to mention, Alan says
he was a close friend of Ayn for thirty years.
Yes, indeed, Black Mamba, that film was gawdawful. Clearly, Gary Cooper just said the lines, didn’t have a clue!
I read The Fountainhead decades ago, and Atlas Shrugged only a year or so ago. I’ve never read the philsophy, some of which Vitruvius refers to above.
From a strictly literary point of view, I find the novels to be seriously flawed, but none the less very engaging despite this. Great literature does not use cardboard characters as idea water carriers. I had a similar feeing about Thomas Mann when I read a bit of him decades back.
The most amazing thing I’ve discovered is how broad her audience is. I’ve met lots of young people of a clear liberal bent, who loved both novels. Perhaps it’s the tough mindedness, the utterly uncompromising approach to living she embodied. Yutes like that, I gather.
That’s the BIG CHALLENGE. To get across to young people the high morality of free market capitalism and the immorality and degradation of collectivism.
A big bushel of thanks Cjunk for your post. It made my day. I read everything Ayn published back in the day. I think Branden had a newsletter back then & I subscribed to that as well. I must dig out Ayn’s books and reread them.
She predicted the collapse of the US and from what I can surmise she was dead on. This last crisis is far from being over and will deepen into a depression that will be shocking. Time will tell whether the US will continue on its present course or will turn around by adopting the ideals spelled out in the constitution.
This is such a timely reminder that moving further to the left is so wrong for Canada. The U.S. will (unless they are too far gone) do a reversal in the 2010 Senate race, as they are more individualistic than we are.
Many US Republicans are VERY far right, and still suffer from some of the baggage about which Ayn Rand spoke. Most conservative voters/MPs in Canada are not religious ideologues, as they are in the U.S. The CPC party has a lot of agnostics, atheists, people who do not think about religion and people who support personal choice on abortion, for example. Many are are former PC people, and I am one, a Peter Lougheed fan, though I have not lived in Alberta for years.
Our nation could also go down, if personal and corporate achievements are continually criticized and not rewarded, as they are these days by centre-lefts and the left-wing. Ayn is so right that university students continue to be brain-washed with post-Kantish ideas. The enviro-holocoust =failed-in-Europe Cap’n Trade solution would be an example of how to create doom and economic suicide for all Canadians with no benefits. Except altruism! Which Ayn says is pretty self-destructive.
Iffy’s real problem is that he knows Ayn is right on many issues. In Canada, he can’t take the party right, as he has too many powerful dependents who are collectivists wanting to increase the nanny state. The boy from Shawinigan and his idealistic buddy, P.E. Trudeau, have created a country of rights vs. initiative.
To the young people of Canada, read Ayn Rand and take what you will from her ideas. It will make you ask better questions of the popular press/politicians.
Maybe we should raise the voting age to 35, when people have some money. I did not get it either when I was 21. as I voted for Trudeau because he was more cool, while still believing in PC principles and values! Don’t make the same mistake I did in my youth, trusting a dreamer!
P.S. I thought being in prison meant temporarily removing rights – why can these people vote? I do not remember voting for that!!!
I love her !! I was lucky enough to be directed to her writing in my late teens. I know for a fact that reading her work changed my life forever.
I have purchased numerous books of hers to give to your people I meet, and get many many people thanking me years later.
My one Shitzu is named after her, so I say her name numerous times a day !!
I love her, right after I love her works.
Just waiting for the “god squad” to come out on this one. SDA should have a 100 comments or more by midnight.
Posted by: Knight 99 at October 3, 2009 4:36 PM
Keep the faith, brother.
Only two hours to go and 52 more posts to come.
You so smart.
Of course Knight 99 is smart SYF. He thinks that a “philosopher” sophomores idolize speaks the profoundest wisdom. Distill it all down and Evil is Good/Good is Evil yadda yadda yadda. Yawn.
It has become a virtue to diminish ourselves in the mistaken view that this is respectful to others–that we should feel apologetic if we are fortunate and that self-denial and sacrifice are virtues. An example might be that we should consume less and reduce our impact on this planet so as to make it possible for more and more people to live in increasingly marginal circumstances. I can’t think of a philosophy that is more likely to lead to the annihilation of life on this planet than this apparently altruistic one. I’m not advocating excessive consumption but I think we should stop feeling guilty for having space, social options, decent living conditions–and stop making it a moral virtue to reduce our own circumstances and trash our own society in the misguided hope of making this planet sustain several more billions of people. This is how I would apply some of Ayn Rand’s views to our present world.