Ayn Rand - Anthem

Objectivism anyone?

I liked the book, but objectivism is very hard to successfully enact on a large scale. Any thoughts?

I loved how the word I wasnt used till the end. And how in the collective individuality not only didn't exist, but wasn't even known.

EGO!

 

Relative to Einstien, objectivism becomes the ultimate subjectivism.

The object always becomes relative to the subject.

Individuality is an experience we collectively share.

Collectively we create each other's individual experience.

We add each other into our total experience as an individual.

You, as an existing individual, increases the power of my individuality.

You, walking your unique spirit path, becomes a part of me, walking my unique spirit path.

That's the individual mosaic of the tribal collective.

Only the path of the fearless Brave is lit by that star.

Ayn Rand's individual objectivist, is best understood psycho-sexually.

 

Anthem is a WEAK attempt to describe the anal-retentive impulses motivating civilized man.


Ayn Rand attempts to delude herself and her readers that these retentive homo-erotic impulses to control others is NOT ubiquitous to the motives of civilization.

Instead, Ayn Rand would prefer to believe that these impulses are only the result of Socialist Collectivism.

Ayn Rand can not bring herself to open her eyes to see the collective psycho-sexual impulses that slavishly expresses itself through corporate capitalism.

Ayn' response is understandable for a self-loathing sado-masochistic female who is unattractive and frustrated by the desire to be desired by alpha-males.

Here is Ayn Rand's moving soliloquy passionately revealing her idealized male:

(quote):

"I saw a man once when I was very young.

He stood on a rock, high in the mountains.

His arms were spread-out, and his body bent backwards.

And I could see him as an arc against the sky.

He stood still and tense, like a string trembling through a note of ecstasy no man had ever heard.

I have never known who he was.

I knew only that this is what life should be."

(unquote)

Now, does that man embracing the sky high upon a mountain rock remotely resemble one of Ayn Rand's alpha-male entrepenuers?

Can you picture a typical corporate business-man with his neck tied-up in his usual neutered limp-phallac symbol standing upon that mountain rock clothed in his fussy little business-suit?

NO!

A suit and tie is the business-man's ubiquitous symbol of alienation from nature.

Ayn's idealized man of nature's spontaneous passion has nothing to do with Ayn's idealized men of industry.

Rather, when I read Ayn's idealized man, I see the wholistic, non-conforming spirit of the hippie, un-afraid to embrace nature's spontaneous perfection.

I see the anti-thesis of Ayn's alienated anal-retentive slave.

 

I would agree. Ayn Rand conjures beautiful imagery- imagery that fundamentally contradicts what she says.

 

Ayn's contradictions are so un-conscious, so un-intentional, that her works become sub-conscious revelations.

I strongly recommend Ayn Rand's works as some of the most revealing of our pathos ever written in the 20th century.

All the more so, because Ayn is convinced that she is revealling something completely different from she actually is revealling.

By the way, Astrid, is a beautiful and mysteriously evocative name.
I remember the mysterious Astrid who so influenced the Beatles before they became famous.
Astrid was also the girl in "White Oleander". An awesome book by Janet Fitch, and great movie with amazing performances by Michelle Pfifer and Alison (Lohan?).

 

I mainly agree with m6m. I am a big fan of hers, read almost everything she wrote (and, remember, her first language was Russian), but she didn't forsee corporate cut-throat capitalism. All her heroes and heroines owned their own companies or businesses and treated and paid their employees well. The government was the enemy of the capitalists; now, the government is the enemy of the working man.


Read her first novel, "We The Living", which is set in revolutionary Russia, if you can find it. Also, read the biography of her (I forget the author) that came out 10 years or so ago. She wasn't a pleasant human being.

Still, it's sad she didn't live to see The Soviet Union fall.

 

Thudly, I've been telling myself that I was going to find and read "We the Living" for two years now.

You've piqued my curiosity again, and so now I've finally put it on Inter-library Loan.

"The Passion of Ayn Rand" written by Barbara Bradford, Ayn's close disciple, and the wife of Ayn's number one disciple and sometime lover.

They made a great movie out the book with the same title and starring the great Helen Mirren as Ayn, a perfect if obvious choice.

Also, there's a really great beautifully done documentary called "Ayn Rand".

You can rent it by mail through Netflix.

I find it interesting to compare the lives and works of both Ayn Rand and Emma Goldman.

Two woman Russian Jewish imigrants to America, near polar opposites, yet,,,

 

Emma Goldman, as you know, arose from the Lower East Side of NYC and became a rabble-raising early feminist. I think she lived to be close to 100. I never read her-- her causes were long gone, but she was an inspiration to Brookylnite Henry Miller, with whom I corresponded with in his last years.
LONG LIVE HENRY!

 

She was a pompous bore.

We the Living was made into a movie in Fascist Italy in 1942. Ayn Rand "Objectivists" claim that freedom is their highest value, but most would rather live under a right wing dictatorship than a left leaning democracy. The only "freedom" they care about is private property rights.

 

The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult

by Murray N. Rothbard

Virtually every one of its members entered the cult through reading Rand’s lengthy novel Atlas Shrugged, which appeared in late 1957, a few months before the organized cult came into being. Entering the movement through a novel meant that despite repeated obeisances to Reason, febrile emotion was the driving force behind the acolyte’s conversion...

Since most neophyte Randians were both young and relatively ignorant, a careful channeling of their reading insured that they would remain ignorant of non- or anti-Randian ideas or arguments permanently...

after the titanic Rand-Branden split in late 1968...Rand cultists were required to sign a loyalty oath to Rand...Close relatives of Branden were expected to – and did – break with him completely...

Interestingly enough for a movement which proclaimed its devotion to the individual exertion of reason, to curiosity, and to the question "Why?" cultists were required to swear their unquestioning belief that Rand was right and Branden wrong, even though they were not permitted to learn the facts behind the split...

Another method was to keep the members, as far as possible, in a state of fevered emotion through continual re-readings of Atlas. Shortly after Atlas was published, one high-ranking cult leader chided me for only having read Atlas once. "It’s about time for you to start reading it again," he admonished. "I have already read Atlas thirty-five times."

The rereading of Atlas was also important to the cult because the wooden, posturing, and one-dimensional heroes and heroines were explicitly supposed to serve as role models for every Randian...

The Biblical nature of Atlas for many Randians is illustrated by the wedding of a Randian couple that took place in New York. At the ceremony, the couple pledged their joint devotion and fealty to Ayn Rand, and then supplemented it by opening Atlas – perhaps at random – to read aloud a passage from the sacred text.
Wit and humor, as might be gathered from this incident, were verboten in the Randian movement...

Personal enjoyment, indeed, was also frowned upon in the movement...

The psychological hold that the cult held on the members may be illustrated by the case of one girl, a certified top Randian, who experienced the misfortune of falling in love with an unworthy non-Randian. The leadership told the girl that if she persisted in her desire to marry the man, she would be instantly excommunicated. She did so nevertheless, and was promptly expelled. And yet, a year or so later, she told a friend that the Randians had been right, that she had indeed sinned and that they should have expelled her as unworthy of being a rational Randian...

so long as he was in the movement, a new Randian Man emerged, a grim and joyless figure indeed. For a while the Randians would discourse at length on "happiness," and on the alleged fact of their perpetual state of being happy, it became clear on closer examination that they were happy only by definition...

In practice, however, the dominant subjective emotions of the Randian cultist were fear and even terror..

Rand, though considered infallible by her disciples, changed her mind a great deal...

No Randian, even the top leadership, was exempt from the all-pervasive fear and repression...

People were invariably transformed by the moulding process from diverse, often likeable men and women to grim, tense, hostile poseurs – whose personalities could best be summed up by the word "robotic."

Preferring Bach, for example, to Rachmaninoff, subjected one to charges of believing in a "malevolent universe."

The Randian replied that smoking, according to the cult, was a moral obligation...the actual reason, as in so many other parts of Randian theory, from Rachmaninoff to Victor Hugo to tap dancing, was that Rand simply liked smoking...

But we have not yet precisely focused upon the central axiom of the esoteric creed of the Randian movement, the implicit premise, the hidden agenda that insured and enforced the unquestioning loyalty of the disciples. That central axiom was the assertion the "Ayn Rand is the greatest person that has ever lived or ever shall live."

in the name of individuality, reason, and liberty, the Rand cult in effect preached something totally different. The Rand cult was concerned not with every man’s individuality, but only with Rand’s individuality...

the guiding spirit of the Randian movement was not individual liberty – as it seemed to many young members – but rather personal power for Ayn Rand and her leading disciples...

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard23.html

 

Way to bump an ancient thread just to bash the topic. Ayn Rand was not the most brilliant or wonderful person who ever lived, but all this personal hatred of her is pretty retarded. She was a thinker and an author like thousands of others. I don't agree with everything Sartre said either, but I don't go around saying what a horrible person he was and discouraging everyone from reading his work. You read it and you take it for what it is. Why is this so hard to understand?

 

hey! nobody mentioned the fact that Rush's '2112' was based on 'Anthem!'