Monk

“I reject her philosophy,” Ryan says firmly. “It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas,” who believed that man needs divine help in the pursuit of knowledge. “Don’t give me Ayn Rand,” he says.

-- ThinkProgress.org

I was stunned to see Paul Ryan throwing his old idol under the bus. I guess Ryan has come to appreciate that, if he ever wants to attain a higher office, such as become a vice-presidential pick, he needs to rate Jesus and Christianity considerably higher than the anti-Christ Ayn Rand.

Heh, political activists are starting to hit hard on the dissonace among Republican leaders for their professed allegiance, on one hand, to Christianity and the Bible, and on the other hand, to Ayn Rand and her anti-faith creed that idealizes selfishness. I wouldn't call this a major earthquake for Republicans, but it is something they should be stumbling over, something they should have to deal with. They should not be able to have it all ways.


LJ

================

June 13, 2011

An interesting article going further, drawing a link between Ayn Rand and Satanism.

_ _ _

Over the past few years, Anton LaVey and his book The Satanic Bible has grown increasingly popular, selling thousands of new copies. His impact has been especially pronounced in our nation’s capital. One U.S. senator has publicly confessed to being a fan of the The Satanic Bible while another calls it his “foundation book.” On the other side of Congress, a representative speaks highly of LaVey and recommends that his staffers read the book.

A leading radio host called LaVey “brilliant” and quotations from the The Satanic Bible can be glimpsed on placards at political rallies. More recently, a respected theologian dared to criticize the founder of the Church of Satan in the pages of a religious and cultural journal and was roundly criticized by dozens of fellow Christians.

Surprisingly little concern, much less outrage, has erupted over this phenomenon. Shouldn’t we be appalled by the ascendancy of this evangelist of anti-Christian philosophy? Shouldn’t we all—especially we Christians—be mobilizing to counter the malevolent force of this man on our culture and politics?

As you’ve probably guessed by this point, I’m not really talking about LaVey but about his mentor, Ayn Rand. The ascendency of LaVey and his embrace by “conservative” leaders would indeed cause paroxysms of indignation. Yet, while the two figures’ philosophies are nearly identical, Rand appears to have received a pass. Why is that?

Perhaps most are unaware of the connection, though LaVey wasn’t shy about admitting his debt to his inspiration. “I give people Ayn Rand with trappings,” he once told the Washington Post. On another occasion he acknowledged that his brand of Satanism was “just Ayn Rand’s philosophy with ceremony and ritual added.” Indeed, the influence is so apparent that LaVey has been accused of plagiarizing part of his “Nine Satanic Statements” from the John Galt speech in Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

Devotees of Rand may object to my outlining the association between the two. They will say I am proposing “guilt by association,” a form of the ad hominem fallacy. But I am not attacking Rand for the overlap of her views with LaVey’s; I am saying that, at their core, they are the same philosophy. LaVey was able to recognize what many conservatives fail to see: Rand’s doctrines are satanic.

I realize that even to invoke that infernal word conjures images of black masses, human sacrifices, and record needles broken trying to play “Stairway to Heaven” backwards. But satanism is more banal and more attractive than the parody created by LeVay. Real satanism has been around since the beginning of history, selling an appealing message: Your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God.

You can replace the pentagrams of LeVayian Satanism with the dollar sign of the Objectivists without changing much of the substance separating the two. The ideas are largely the same, though the movements’ aesthetics are different. One appeals to, we might say, the Young Libertarians, and the other attracts the Future Wiccans of America.

What is harder to understand is why both ideologies appeal to Christians and conservatives. My guess is that these groups are committing what I’d call the fallacy of personal compatibility. This fallacy occurs when a person thinks that because one subscribes to both “Belief X” and “Belief Y,” the two beliefs must therefore be compatible. For example, a person may claim that “life has meaning” and that “everything that exists is made of matter” even though the two claims are not compatible (unless “meaning” is made of matter). This take on the fallacy has long been committed by atheists. Now it appears to be growing in popularity among conservatives and Christians as well.

But to be a follower of both Rand and Christ is not possible. The original Objectivist was a type of self-professed anti-Christ who hated Christianity and the self-sacrificial love of its founder. She recognized that those Christians who claimed to share her views didn’t seem to understand what she was saying.

Many conservatives admire Rand because she was anti-collectivist. But that is like admiring Stalin because he opposed Nazism. Stalin was against the Nazis because he wanted to make the world safe for Communism. Likewise, Rand stands against collectivism because she wants the freedom to abolish Judeo-Christian morality. Conservative Christians who embrace her as the “enemy-of-my-enemy” seem to forget that she considered us the enemy.

Even if this were not the case, though, what would warrant the current influence of her thought within the conservative movement? Rand was a third-rate writer who was too arrogant to recognize her own ignorance (she believed she was the third greatest philosopher in history, behind only Aristotle and Aquinas). She misunderstood almost every concept she engaged with—from capitalism to freedom—and wrote nothing that had not been treated before by better thinkers. We don’t need her any more than we need LeVay.

Few conservatives will fall completely under Rand’s diabolic sway. But we are sustaining a climate in which not a few gullible souls believe she is worth taking seriously. Are we willing to be held responsible for pushing them to adopt an anti-Christian worldview? If so, perhaps instead of recommending Atlas Shrugged, we should simply hand out copies of The Satanic Bible. If they’re going to align with a satanic cult, they might as well join the one that has the better holidays.

Joe Carter is Web Editor of First Things and the co-author of How to Argue Like Jesus: Learning Persuasion from History's Greatest Communicator. His previous articles for “On the Square” can be found here.

-- Joe Carter for FirstThings.com

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.

-- Kung Fu Monkey

Of course, that's probably not strictly true. It seems to me that Randians tend to be up there on the social scale, usually born up there, but successful, whatever their other glowing faults.

As for myself, I'm not sure what to blame. Maybe books in general? Nah, it's probably just me - a little too much my mother's son.

Charles Murray is squeeing over the two new biographies on Ayn Rand. He is intellectual enough to accept her faults, such as her dexedrine-enhanced years, nothing like a little speed for your happy over-achiever. The drugs fueled the larger personality problem that developed in the later years of her exalting success, what Murray calls her “self-delusion on a grand scale”, cowing her devoted acolytes and adoring groupies with an overbearing, dictatorial tempter.

Such is the corruption of power, and I understand it well enough. After all, it was the same with Elvis, all the way down to the crippling reliance on drugs, as it is the same with perhaps countless superstars. It happens. It’s not like Ayn Rand was the messiah of capitalism, but just its greatest prophet. We really need to resist the temptation to deify the greats . It should be enough that we make them rich and famous.

And I am a fan myself, not of the libertarian/objectivist philosophy and the creed of selfishness, of course, but I love “Atlas Shrugged” as one of the great novels of all time. The world she creates is vast and deep and so fantastic, and I get lost in her vivid evocation of a world falling apart and a civilization dying, as her gritty band of hyper-achievers give up on trying to save people from themselves and begin to build a new world of their own.

Murray’s review has whetted my appetite to dive back into that crumbling world for my third reading. It has been almost ten years since my last go, which happened to be a little before I first got on the Internet and settled myself in the blogosphere - it has been a long time. The book is definitely ripe for a rereading.

However, it is a good idea to wait for at least a few months. I am still running a little hot on this Christ thing, and seeing how Rand effectively offers up an entire, opposing metaphysical system for how the universe works, I am sure that I would enjoy “Atlas Shrugged” much more if my psychological space was less crowded. Besides, I have at least a couple of other books that I am more anxious about getting into, not least of which being my first reading of Alice’s adventures in wonderland, finally.

And it's this, ultimately, that makes Rand so corrosive, so deadening to the heart of the intellectual project. People far abler than I have prosecuted the case against Rand, and I don't intend to rehash it here. But this tendency of her writings and her philosophy to compel people to slap concrete on the foundation of their own ideas, to build a moat around their intellectual life, to categorize the whole world into the tiny fraction who are worthy and the great horrid mass that are simply not to be listened to in any circumstance... this is the greatest failing of the woman and her teachings. There are a worse things to inspire people towards-- genocide, war, ethnic cleansing-- but still, a philosopher whose greatest contribution is a vast incuriosity is a dismal thing.

-- Freddie DeBoer


Ayn Rand is one of America's great mysteries. She was an amphetamine-addicted author of sub-Dan Brown potboilers, who in her spare time wrote lavish torrents of praise for serial killers and the Bernie Madoff-style embezzlers of her day. She opposed democracy on the grounds that "the masses"—her readers—were "lice" and "parasites" who scarcely deserved to live. Yet she remains one of the most popular writers in the United States, still selling 800,000 books a year from beyond the grave. She regularly tops any list of books that Americans say have most influenced them. Since the great crash of 2008, her writing has had another Benzedrine rush, as Rush Limbaugh hails her as a prophetess. With her assertions that government is "evil" and selfishness is "the only virtue," she is the patron saint of the tea-partiers and the death panel doomsters.

...

She announced that the world was divided between a small minority of Supermen who are productive and "the naked, twisted, mindless figure of the human Incompetent" who, like the Leninists, try to feed off them. He is "mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned." It is evil to show kindness to these "lice": The "only virtue" is "selfishness."

She meant it. Her diaries from that time, while she worked as a receptionist and an extra, lay out the Nietzschean mentality that underpins all her later writings. The newspapers were filled for months with stories about serial killer called William Hickman, who kidnapped a 12-year-old girl called Marion Parker from her junior high school, raped her, and dismembered her body, which he sent mockingly to the police in pieces. Rand wrote great stretches of praise for him, saying he represented "the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatsoever for all that a society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul. … Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should." She called him "a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy," shimmering with "immense, explicit egotism." Rand had only one regret: "A strong man can eventually trample society under its feet. That boy [Hickman] was not strong enough."

-- Johann Hari at Slate.com

Oh, my god, they can breed!

New York Magazine has published some of the gems gleaned from that site, such as this one from Zak:

I am rational, integrated, and efficacious. So far, I’ve never met a person who lives up to the standard I hold for myself (except online).

I take my relationships seriously. I am simply not attracted to many of the women in this world. I do not “hook-up” with girls. I only kiss those who deserve, and so far I have only encountered one who did. I would love to find someone I can learn something from; someone who challenges me to think; someone I can feel like I’ve won, rather than lowered myself to.

And they say romance is dead, hah!

At least they are more demanding than I am. ;)

♠
Whether Ms. Jolie, who has called herself something of a Rand fan, will bring the novel’s heroine, Dagny Taggart, to life on screen, or merely wind up on a list with other actresses who sought or were sought for the role — including Barbara Stanwyck, Faye Dunaway, Raquel Welch, Farrah Fawcett and Sharon Stone — remains to be seen. Until now, at least, no one in Hollywood has figured out a formula that promises both to sell popcorn and to do justice to the original text, let alone to the philosophy that it hammers home endlessly, at times in lengthy speeches. (The final one is 60 pages long.)

-- Kimberly Brown for The New York Times

I pleasantly remember when Monk first read "Atlas Shrugged." It was one of the few redeeming reads that Monk accomplished in those Bay Horse years, perhaps second only to Dennett's "Consciousness Explained."

Of course, unlike Dennett's book, Ms. Rand did not influence Monk to go down any particular philosphical course. But she did provide a rather beautiful literary justification for that libertarian free-market strain of classical liberalism.

( Brown article )

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