What was Ayn Rand wrong about?
COMMENTARY:
Daniel Kaplan gets it about right: her system of thought is crap, but it appeals to Conservative libertarians because it doesn’t require critical thinking but a heroic capacity for memorizing slogans and sound bites.
I will say this in her defense: she is an example of the American Dream and the mythology of pulling oneself up by their boot straps. If her mother hadn’t obtained a visa for her to go to Chicago, she would have ended up in the Gulag as a reactionary. And, when she gets to America, her story is really quite remarkable, including becoming something of a mascot for Cecile B DeMille, then running the wardrobe shop for a major movie production company, writing and presenting a mystery drama on Broadway and building a publishing and lecture enterprise with her lover, Nathan Branden, that has had significant political impact associated with the January 6 conspiracy.
And that’s all the defense she gets from me.
John Galt is a domestic terrorist engaged in dismantling the administrative state. just like Steve Bannon and Newt Gingrich.
“Atlas Shrugged” has been a template for what has become the January 6 conspiracy. It also captures the continuing subversion of very rich people, like the Koch brothers and William F. Buckley, to FDR and the New Deal.
My thesis about Atlas Shrugged is that it is Ayn Rand’s version of the Russian Revolution if she had been in charge. The whole thing about “Who is John Galt” represents the anticipation of the return of Lenin from Paris to lead the insurrection, which is why 2/3rds of the narrative occurs before Galt’s radio broadcast, which compares in the quality of its thought to the UniBomber’s manifesto that was published and led to his capture.
If I was teaching History and Moral Science at West Point, I would require the cadets to read Atlas Shrugged as a prerequisite and if they really, really loved the novel, the chances are they are hard-wired Fascists like Doug Mastriano or Mike Pompeo. Rand spoke at West Point in 1974 on the theme “Philosophy: Who Needs It?” (which is the title of one of her publications). As a consequence of the moral confusion that she represents and introduce into that cloistered community, 200 cadets were separated for Honors violations 2 years later and, to tell the truth, I’m not sure she hasn’t corrupted several generations of West Point grads current serving.
For example, David Petreaus was a senior when she spoke and some of his decisions have been pretty flakey. There was always the danger of the Nazification of the All Volunteer Military before the fact and Doug Mastriano is pretty solid evidence that the Nazification associated with the January 6 conspiracy going back to William F. Buckley’s 1960 anti-Eisenhower political manifesto, the Sharon Statement and his farm system of crypto-Nazi clones of the Young American Foundation should be self-evident to the independent observer.
I personally first ran into evidence of the Nazification of the US Army in 1995 during an informal OD performance audit of an Army headquarters that connects directly to the criminal Nazification of Donald T Regan’s Wall Street scheme he engineered as Treasury Secretary and Reagan’s COS with Merrill Lynch International that is in the mix of Part 2 of Mueller’s Russiagate investigation.
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Now, that may seem to be a far remove from Ayn Rand, but she and William F. Buckley were something of a tag-team during the 60’s promoting what amounted to a reframed version of the John Birch Society’s agenda for blowing up the federal government and the New Deal. When you hear right-wing commentators like Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones committed to making Democrat presidents fail, that is purely John Birch Society sentiments going back to FDR. The entire purpose of Reaganomics has been to dismantle Nixon-Moynihan-Carter Affirmative Action in order to defend the Military Industrial Complex and prevent the evolution of economic policy to reflect the transition to the Aerospace-Entrepreneurial Matrix made possible by Apollo 11.
The thing is that virtually the entire Boomer generation, liberals and conservatives, have adopted the post-modern historical deconstruction of dialectical Marxism: if you can’t fix an element of a narrative with historic certainty, it doesn’t exist. This is especially true of the debate between Pro-Life Christian apologists and evangelical anti-theists like Richard Dawson and Richard Carrier. Marx is a materialist and, among other things. his economics discards the moral elements of capitalism that make capitalism work, such as synergies and cash flows. Like Ayn Rand’s version of capitalism, Marxism is economic theology which violates the 4th Law of Logic in the name of logical integrity
The 4th Law of Logic establishes the principle that paradox cannot be reduced. Both Marxism and the 18th Amendment violate this principle. This principle has always been in operation, but has been ignored because there wasn’t any mathematics or language for examining chaos until Isaac Newton developed his calculus to measure systems in motion. As a consequence, the relationship between Kant’s Categorical Imperative and Hegel’s dialectical synthesis is determined by the 4th Law of Logic, which neither Hegel or Marx seem to recognize at the time. Supply Side economics represents a violation of the 4th Law of Logic and both Soviet Marxism and Reaganomics are Supply-Side economics, which is how the Conservative libertarians have been able to introduce Nazification into American culture.
Which brings us back to Ayn Rand. To understand how her Fascist sophistry works, read “The Virtue of Selfishness”. Her entire ethical structure rests on her dishonest presentation of the definition of “selfishness” as being “concern with one’s self interests”, which is exactly half of the Webster definion, the second half being the clause “without regard to others”.
You see this sort of singularity of virtue throughout Conservative libertarian, including the decisions of the Fascist majority in SCOTUS, with politicians like Rand Paul, who always claim their proposals arise from high moral principle, and the Pro-Life Evangelical litmus test for male righteousness being consistent with the TULIP doctrine of Calvinism, generally, and the Presbyterian Church, in particular.
The TULIP doctrine rests squarely on the Total Depravity of EVE which is a legacy of the misrepresentation of God by Moses in regards to women that kept Moses from entering the Promised Land at the end of Deuteronomy. It’s taken mankind 4000 years to get to the 19th Amendment to sort that shit out and Sam Alito can’t understand the female parts to the 19th Amendment that makes Roe V Wade moot. In a truly Christian world, Planned Parenthood is the obvious, and rational, application for Mark 5:25 - 34. Pro-Life is totally an anti-constitutional mechanism for controlling women and a potent money pump for the Nazification of Christianity.
In the final analysis, Atlas Shrugged is a political treatise disguised as a Harlequin novel, with the action of the narrative driven forward by the sexual promise of Dagny Taggart, who is, for my money, one of the most compelling characters in literature.
It’s useful to remember that Atlas Shrugged came out in 1956 at about the same time the first issue of Playboy appeared and it represented nearly all the requisite elements of a first rate stroke book of the era. The intimation is that Dagny fucks everybody in the book, but she doesn’t really achieve the Big O until John Galt’s logic and egoism proves to be the ultimate aphrodisiac.
One of the universal characteristics of the MAGA nation is their unholy emotional investment in the ideological crap of Reaganomics. It all starts with Ayn Rand. In her tangled epistemology, she defines her Pasion for Reason and accuses anyone who disagrees with her as being a “Hater of the Mind”, a meme that is echoed throughout the Nazification of the MAGA nation and Conservative libertarianism of the GOP.