Why no, that hacking sound I’m making is merely my allergies getting to me.
I find myself dwelling with fascination over this post of Atrios’s where he links two quotes about Alan Greenspan that are currently heavy in buzz rotation with a quote from Ayn Rand about how white people were justified in snatching lands from Native Americans. I’m fascinated both by Atrios’s cleverness in doing this (his point being that Greenspan’s support of the war and BushCo’s motivations from the beginning were pure imperialism wearing a missionary-for-democracy guise), and more by the sheer “duh” factor with the quotes.
The first “duh” revelation is what I thought everyone knew, which is that Greenspan was a dipshit Objectivist in his youth. I’m quoting a different part from what Atrios did, FYI, so read his post.
Mr. Greenspan met Rand when he was 25 and working as an economic forecaster. She was already renowned as the author of “The Fountainhead,” a novel about an architect true to his principles. Mr. Greenspan had married a member of Rand’s inner circle, known as the Collective, that met every Saturday night in her New York apartment. Rand did not pay much attention to Mr. Greenspan until he began praising drafts of “Atlas,” which she read aloud to her disciples, according to Jeff Britting, the archivist of Ayn Rand’s papers. He was attracted, Mr. Britting said, to “her moral defense of capitalism.”
Yes, the fierce morality that leads one to justify stealing land from people on the theory that they’re simply inferior and if they were smarter, they would have just willingly handed it over. I read this article with bemusement, since I have recently read, on Scott Lemieux’s recommendation, Two Girls Fat and Thin by Mary Gaitskill, which is a pretty complex book, but like most of her stuff, about sadomasochism, the dark side of human nature, and power struggles.* This particular book also is a biting satire of Objectivism, mocking both Ayn Rand for being an all-around hack and the Collective for being a collection of self-aggrandizing assholes wrapped into glory fantasies. Had I no knowledge that the book was satirizing real happenings, I would have found the whole way that the “Definitist” junkies in the book become movers and shakers of a capitalist empire to be beyond belief, but knowing that’s exactly what happened in real life just makes the book darkly funny and sad.
The other quote that Atrios yanks out is one that’s making the rounds, because it seems a little more immediate than the confirmation that our economy might be screwed over by someone who had his brain fried by Rand worshipping.
Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, said in an interview that the removal of Saddam Hussein had been “essential” to secure world oil supplies, a point he emphasized to the White House in private conversations before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Denying the obvious—that the Iraq war was fundamentally about the oil—has been mysteriously mandatory to be considered a Serious Person when discussing this war. Even a lot of liberals who’ve opposed this war from the get-go will run screaming if they hear “no blood for oil”, because ohmigod, only the wacky leftists would accuse the Bush administration of such mercenary motivations. (Part of the problem of admitting that it’s about the oil makes one realize that the Democrats will be insufficiently motivated to pull out and take the chances of losing control over that resource.) So this giant unwillingness to face up to a fairly obvious truth has allowed an especially repugnant version of pundit asshattery, according to Digby.
I just love watching Chris Matthews and Howard Fineman and the rest of these Village gasbags blithely discussing Alan Greenspan’s pronouncement that the Iraq war was all about oil as if it’s always been just so obvious. It’s not even controversial except that it’s Alan Greenspan who said it, which they seem to find tittilating. But now they go on and on about how America runs on oil and that wars are fought over resources (even though it’s a “Marxist” argument *shudder*.)
Well, no shit. It was always obvious and there were a whole bunch of people who told the truth about that from the very beginning and were vilified as traitors, naifs, terrorist sympathizers and worse by these oh-so-jaded commentators who are discussing it now with all the emotion they used when they ordered their lunch today.
Unless the practice of scholarship dies the death that right wingers are trying to spearhead, there’s exactly no way that “control of oil resources” will not be the primary reason for the Iraq debacle in future history books. One would think this obvious fact would give more people pause before they get angry at we dirty hippies screaming against blood for oil from the get-go. Why not join us? The pleasures of “I told you so” are bittersweet, but are still far superior to having egg on your face and feeling guilty about your complicity with this bloodbath.
*She wrote the short story that the movie “Secretary” was based on.
94 Responses to “I wouldn’t call it a shrug so much as the “It wasn’t my fart” dance”
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The Iraq War as all about democracy in the same sense that the Late Unpleasantness was all about the principle of States’ Rights.
What’s screamingly, darkly funny about Greenspan is how perfectly he illustrates the fact that the fundamentalist Republicans (secular or religious) have one key thing in common with their Muslim fundamentalist counterparts: they would prefer to live in the shit created by Their Own Kind over a better situation brought about by the Dreaded Other.
Look at the fact that Greenspan’s book flatly identifies the most effective fiscal president he served under as Clinton. Yet the Clinton years were noted by the Fed often second-guessing the White House on matters of economic policy, reining in growth far too early, lest it lead to inflation.
Look also at the fact that Greenspan candidly admits that Bush’s economic plans were obviously going to run the economy into the ground and cause the deficit to skyrocket. Yet he not only said nothing, he prostituted his integrity (hysterical laughter) by for Bush on the record.
Got the pattern? Dem president does well, rein it in. GOP president about to burn down the house? Talk about how good he is with matches.
Like Canada’s former PM Brian Mulroney famously said in a too-candid moment: “There’s no whore like an old whore”.
I was just in the car listening to Terry Gross attempting to interview Greenspan (paying for the war is nothin’, what we have to worry about is underfunding Medicare when the boomers retire) but I had to change the station because I didn’t think reaching into the radio and trying to strangle him would actually do any good.
I’m also in the middle of re-reading Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal, and this time I noticing that one of its threads is anti-Rand. There’s this character named Gilt, see, who’s all about the pure triumph of the individual. And other people’s money.
And did you notice the other day that the firm responsible for the Deutsche Bank demolition disaster is the John Galt Corporation? That’s what we call an Objectivist correlative.
Just one other thing about Greenspan, demonstrating just how dominated US economic discourse by not only the Fiscal Right but the extreme Fiscal Right. Turn Greenspan’s past around and ask yourself if a man could build a federal career as successful as Greenspan’s after writing that monopolists and the parasitic rich should “perish as they should”, or be taken seriously after falling in unrequited love with a prominent female communist extremist? To even suggest such things sounds ludicrous.
Which rather brings us to the oddity of American economic political discourse. Why is economic extremism causing massive cruelty acceptable if it is called individualism and terrifying if it is called collectivism?
You have to have lived in a socialist (e.g. India’s License and Permit Raj) state to appreciate Ayn Rand. Her “We the Living” is probably her best novel, I think. E.g., the governmental idiocies in “Atlas Shrugged” all have parallels in real life.
It is also incumbent on anyone who takes up Ayn Rand’s root message about the primacy of reason, and to first turn that instrument back on her. Then one cannot be an Objectivist for long. It is people who take up the word and not the spirit that are the bane of any philosophy and Objectivists are no exception.
Also, we must hold e.g., Ayn Rand’s words about native Americans against her to the extent we hold similar actions and words against anyone else, e.g, Jefferson or Washington. Humans are wonderfully complex and not consistent and definitely fallible. We do not reject an entire body of work; but only the elements that we find wrong. Of course, if what is wrong is a central element of the work, then it all goes down; but Ayn Rand’s views on native Americans are not central to her ideas.
G-d, I love “Two Girls Fat and Thin.” I was just recommending it last night on Feministe. Please, everyone, read it. You’ll be so happy you did.
Who is this “prominent female communist extremist” you refer to?
My favorite part of the Fresh Air interview was when Greenspan spoke about how surpluses were bad because they could give the government the power to distort financial markets. The corollary must be that massive deficits play no role whatsoever in the financial markets, right?
I told you, Eric, I’m DONE setting you up on dates! Why won’t you listen????Seriously, I didn’t have anybody in particular in mind, just that Rand is an individualist extremist on the one hand and a communist extremist would be at the other for comparison’s sake.
Oh, but if I had to pick one of equal fame, how about La Pasionaria?
She and Ayn Rand were of roughly the same age at the same time.
Arun, the issue with Rand vis-a-vis Native Americans goes directly to her central message. The fundamental right to life is fundamental only for people of european extraction?
Jefferson and Washington are tarnished by their racism. But at least they aren’t guilty of being late 20th century advocates of genocide. Those 1974 comments by Rand put her in Malkin territory.
Objectivism is a cult whose followers selflessly toil to convince the world that altruism is bad.
I just wanted to say, that may be my favorite description ever of “The Fountainhead. It really captures the tedium of hundreds of pages of “No, I will not design classical buildings! Only the modern style truly captures the greatness mankind, by which I mean me and people who agree with me!”
The adjustable rates thing is what Greenspan will be hung for. He wasn’t oracular then as he was with the tax cuts thing earlier. He was on national tv advising people to do something directly against their natural interests.
I wonder how much commonality Greenspan feels with the rest of humanity. I suppose we’re the great, blind, unwashed. You know what, I bet the real question would be the level of irony present, if he were to be asked how much in common with the Enron traders that mocked Grandma Millie…
Last i checked there were 30,000 more troops after the so-called anti-war democrats were elected to the majority of Congress. For all the rhetoric about Bush being an idiot, he has outmaneuvered liberal-left anti-war “movement” on almost every level even with around 70 % of the population opposing his handling of it.
And yes, the war is about oil and that’s why a democratic president won’t leave Iraq either unless they are forced to. They aren’t about to leave the world’s most important energy up for grabs or allow (if they can help it) the larger region to devolve into chaos.
Ding!“yes! seeker6079!”
“Uh, what is `zero’, Alex?”
BING BING BING BING BING!!!!!!!!!!
The pleasures of “I told you so” are bittersweet, but are still far superior to having egg on your face and feeling guilty about your complicity with this bloodbath.
If they had a shred of decency they would feel guilty, but too many of them don’t.
Well said, Amanda.
Greenspan has ben a pig for a long, long time.
You may or may not believe this, but in that paragon of so-called progressivism that is Daily Kos, so-called Democrats defended Greenspan to me a few weeks ago when I said he has long been anti-worker.
Please keep telling the truth as you see it.
I am learning that the “gatecrashers” are becoming the new gate keepers. I do not think you have or will.
I sometimes come her and read you just to get a voice of sanity.
Thanks.
Oh, Ayn Rand was pig also. And wrote really dumb books. A cult of selfishness.
Needed to read the Buddha’s works. Desire leads to suffering.
So wait, what?
Ayn Rand’s inner circle was called the Collective?
The Collective????
And no one saw anything wrong with that?
It’s to the point where I start to appreciate straightforward assholery like Greenspan’s. Of course we fuckin’ invaded Iraq for the Oil and everyone with a brain knows it. Yet the public has such bottomless hypocrisy and delusion, many people say it isn’t true.
There’s actually an awful lot of otherwise smart people who are suckered in by the economic conventional wisdom regarding employment and inflation, to be honest. Greenspan is the king of that, to be honest, but again, most people seem to agree with it.
The concept is if wages increase, then oh my god, everybody needs to increase their prices to compensate!!!! OMG!! INFLATION!! WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE..
*ahem*
This is only necessarily true if the increased wages outstrip the added value (and some labor truly is priceless, without that labor, there would be no business) that the worker provides. However, it’s pretty obvious that in most industries/fields, this is not the case at all.
No, prices are determined by competition. People buy the best product for the lowest price. It’s as simple as that. No, what the whining is about that profits might not be infinite, that the investment system is indeed beyond broken, and that the status quo is going to be replaced with something entirely different.
As far as I’ve been able to penetrate Rand’s writing, the things she got right (mooching off other people is bad, reason is good) were said better by others, and the things she got wrong are, well, wrong.
I’ve never thought much of Rand as an analyst. In her own way, she was as bad as Marx.
You can’t write about economics without factoring in human nature. The economic neolib is as doomed to be wrong as the most passionate Marxist, and they’re wrong for the same reasons.
JollyRoger: Aren’t the limitations of both Marxist and libertarian analysis an inevitable limit of any form of analysis? What one the quainter delusions of anybody who adheres too closely to a given mental frame is their belief that it can either (a) explain everything and/or (b) solve everything. Libertarianism and Marxism as means of ordering a society are batshit crazy. As means of analyzing society they are both very, very useful tools. But no good craftsman is fool enough to limit himself to one tool in a toolbox.
I think Mr. Greenspan has become a symbol of crony capitalism that his mentor so accurately described. I will never understand how an ‘objectivist’ became the leading state banker.
but Ayn Rand’s views on native Americans are not central to her ideas.
Sure they are. Her philosophy is that if you want something, and you have the power to take it by force, you should do so. You have the right to it by virtue of being stronger than it’s original owner. Her comments on Native Americans are the direct application of that philosophy.
i didn’t know alan greenspan was a objectivist until mental floss magazine ran a feature on atlas shrugged.
The fact that oil was a major factor in the invasion of Iraq should come as no surprise to anyone. What I have always found frustrating is a true understanding among activists — and even conservative pundits — to understand what this means. Most seem to believe that somehow this means that Iraqi oil would fill American storage tanks and we all would have cheap oil. This is simply fantasy.
As I have written previously, geo-politically the ability to influence global oil prices presents a nation with enormous power. Regardless of the Reagen mythology, a major cause for the collapse of the Soviet Union was the major increase in Saudi oil production in 1985, and the resulting decrease in oil prices. The result was a loss of $20bn a year in Soviet oil revenues. Greenspan’s remarks are in keeping with his religious beliefs in unfettered trade: a US controlled Iraq supplying huge amounts of oil outside of OPEC would undermine the economies of Russia, Venezuela, and smaller oil producing states, while at the same time fueling economic expansion in the US.
Of course, the Iraqi’s weren’t / aren’t too happy to turn their economy and oil resources over to the control of American corporations. So, here we are. . .
BTW: Ihad read some of Mary Gaitskill’s work years ago, and I recall her being a fine author. I am glad to know she is still writing. I will pickup this book tomorrow.
1. Caroline, the “Collective” was an ironic in-joke.
2. TomP, it wasn’t about selfishness, it was about the right to the rewards of your own work.
3. Roses, Rand’s work specifically CONDEMNS the government for taking things by force. Y’know, she does this over and over and over and over and over and over and….. over again.
That’s only true if you’re only aware of the most reductionist possible interpretation of Marx’s work, which has sadly been the dominant tendency both from those dismissive of his work and many of those who have claimed to embrace it.
And in any case your criticism is wrong-headed from the beginning precisely because the Objectivists (and libertarians and classical liberals) all hinge their entire philosophies on the human nature that they assume exists in perfect accordance with their ideology and wholly eschew examining human history, while Marx rejected the very notion of a fixed human nature that existed outside of history and remained unchanged between the vastly different societies that humans have lived in.
Eric:
A diamond-encrusted turd is still a turd.
The quote in question being:
I’d just like to note that Ayn Rand’s position on this does is simply a restatement of that of John Locke who, in his defense of property, declared the Americas empty (notwithstanding the inhabitants) because the land was not enclosed and cultivated by people (i.e. Europeans) who seek to improve productivity so as to be able to sell on the market.
…or the work of others you could appropriate by virtue of them mysteriously ending up with no means of feeding themselves except to labour for those who had somehow ended up with all the property…another case where Rand was simply regurgitating the arguments of Locke….
Eric: Ayn Rand thinks that INDIVIDUALS taking things by force is fine and moral. Selfishness is definitely her credo. There is a scene in Atlas Shrugged where one character gives the other a blue fur coat (ugh and ugh), not to GIVE it to her, you understand, ‘cause that would go against his selfishness: no, because it gives him pleasure to see her in it. So it’s not really a gift at all.
On a feminist note, the central female character in Atlas shrugged never has consensual sex: her boyfriends always just do it by force. There is one line that goes something like “it would have meant less to her if he had asked [for her consent].” So she is consistent across the board, from hostile takeovers, to genocide, to rape.
Stan Goff said it best, so I’ll just paraphrase him: Ayn Rand is some of the most dangerous reading an awkward male teenager can have.
I threw a copy of this book violently acros the room in our Austin apartment one memorable day; the only time I have ever had such a visceral reaction to an author’s words or ideas. Took me a few more years to try again to work through it, then read a few more of hers as well, including ‘We The Living” and “The Fountainhead”.
Have read “Atlas” a dozen times plus now since, but still not comfortable with it.
JollyRoger:
I agree with you completely, but I’d be more specific. The central flaw in Rand and other libertarians is that they don’t believe humans are social animals.
I phrase it that way because “human nature” is vague and unspecific, while “social animals” emphasizes that we’re talking about a specific, objective aspect of nature, about which libertarians are objectively wrong.
Anyone who gets into Ayn Rand should next read Nietzsche. I read both and found that Nietzsche’s philosophy is basically a more honest and thorough version of Rand’s. Nietzsche’s take on society is that the mass of people are stupid and fit for nothing but slavery. He wants an ‘Ubermensch’ to come and enslave them, using trickery, force, or whatever is necessary. He thinks that morality is for suckers. He also thinks democracy is a terrible idea since it gives stupid people some power.
Basically, it’s a more honest version of Rand’s philosophy, where he outright says all the things that Rand just hints at. Nietzsche is also useful for understanding the Neo-conservatives, by the way.
How ironic, Greenspan was on Daily Show last night. Jon actually kinda went after him, which shocked me (it probably shouldn’t, but it did), but what Greenspan said, in short is that the Fed Reserve has at it’s goal to maintain the illusion, at the same time, of the profitability of investments, and to limit the “euphoria” of consumers who will go and make bad purchases and cause inflation.
Argh.
Just another “yes, read it!” vote for Two Girls, Fat and Thin. It’s been at least ten or twelve years since I read it (and now I am off to find another copy) but I remember how much I loved it, mainly for that utterly delicious satire of Objectivists.
All I can say is that we read very different things in Rand then, depending on one’s cultural background.
For instance, the idea that most people are stupid only occurred to me after Americans **reelected** Bush, and not having read Rand as a teenager in India. Until 2004, I had the belief, almost an article of faith, that even a mostly illiterate people (as in India) given freedom of thought and action would make on the whole good choices. The Indian people, btw, have not so far disappointed me.
I did not see any Ubermensch as saviors of society having read Rand, the Darwinian nature of American capitalism was not revealed to me by Rand. It rather reinforced in me the idea that enabling other people to do their best is in my own best, yes selfish, interest. Why I do not protest heavy taxes to pay for schools though I have not any children is precisely from that calculation. To me, a Galt or Rearden is not a **real** person any more than Picasso’s paint blobs are a real person, rather they are stylized artistic abstractions.
It was also very visible in India of pre-1990s that to do anything it did not matter much how capable one was, but rather what political patronage one could gather. It is also painfully visible in the US that political patronage is a way to “business” success, but at least it does not affect everyday life as it did in India.
Even to have uninterrupted electric power and water at one’s home is the result of the exercise of a long chain of competencies. I think Americans tend to forget this, just as so many children think that milk comes from a shelf in the supermarket, and have forgotten about cows. You just have to hear a little about the shenanigans e.g., at the Kerala State Electricity Board to know that exercise of competence is not an automatic thing, it is something we have to fight for.
The most successful oppressions are those that feed on people’s desire to live. Non-cooperation with such oppression even at high personal cost is a Gandhian idea that is echoed in Atlas Shrugged.
And so on. We must agree to disagree.
Well, Arun, she was writing to an American audience who was hungry to hear that smashing the poor in the name of capitalism was a moral good. Context does matter.
Does the Kerala State Electricity Board have any relationship to Enron. Remember the energy crisis in CA a few years ago. Created by competent people acting selfishly in order to increase profits. Perfectly acceptable, apparently.
That Rand could still justify genocide in 1974, 20 years after the end of WW II is appalling. What’s worse is that there are still people alive today who don’t see a problem wit that.
And when did parroting 18th Century notions that were dubious at the time and had been proven morally and intellectually bankrupt by two intervening centuries of bloody history make you a cutting edge modernist? That’s a neat trick.
The most successful oppressions are those that feed on people’s desire to live. Non-cooperation with such oppression even at high personal cost is a Gandhian idea that is echoed in Atlas Shrugged.
Where did Ghandi call for the extermination or enslavement of people who stood in the way of progress? I think I missed that part Arun.
I think Greenspan effectively sank his reputation with the lines: “well, now I’ll admit it was a bubble” and the “but no-one would have DREAMED that a meltdown in the subprime mortgage area would affect other sectors!”
I remember being told to read Rand by a woman I was involved with at the time (some 25 years ago) - It was “for the New Intellectual” - I got about 3 paragraphs in before I was tossing the book across the room. For the record the money shot was a sneering refence to how the philopshy of people who live in grass huts can be expected to run world of airplanes and Nukes - The book tossing was a viseral reaction to the hatred that seethed in every sentance - The only other person I have ever read that hated mankind as much was Celine and Celine could a) write and b) could tell a joke or two. Rand not so much.
And Rand making her comments in 1974 as the Native American Movement was rising (Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee was published in 1970) was saying “we should have killed you all you dirty savages.”
last point - the lung cancer that killed her was brought about by smoking - which she would not quit saying she did’t belive the surgeon General’s report - granted she wasn’t the only one to do something like this but for someone posited as the goddess of reason, it’s a pretty ironic ending.
The problem lies, Arun, in the fact that most people who overtly adhere to a libertarian philosophy do not accept the rationality in your second statement. They accept with near religious fervour that no good can come of the state trying to “enabl[e] other people to do their best” whether by direct help or by merely providing equal opportunity. Like fundamentalists everywhere they reject the very notion that good can come out of what they philosophically oppose. No matter how efficient the result of “a long chain of competencies” they insist that the striving of individuals and the market can and will do it better, even when pointed to historical proof to the contrary. Moreover, while they reject collective notions for betterment they are wildly blind to the notion that unrestrained selfishness in a corporate world merely leads to more and more corporate collectives which exert even greater and less accountable monopolistic power than any government could wish for; like a Believer trapped in the myth of Paradise they are trapped in the myths of the individual and the market.I think ‘atheist’ has the most uncharitable reading of Nietzsche I’ve ever seen. It seems to me based on the revisionism of his ideas that his sister promulgated to make them line up with Nazism.
For one, Nietzsche had as scathing an attack on ‘master morality’ as ’slave morality’. The ubermensch, or free man, is not dominated by the arbitrary institutions that were instituted by humankind, but he also has no need to dominate others with them. One sees a similarity to Max Stirner’s “union of egoists” (which, as I like to remind the vulgar libertarians, contains TWO words: union AND egoists… there is a need both for the social and the individual).
Rand’s Indian genocide comment is a brutal and horrifyingly amoral waste of human space.
For a more lucid, intelligent pondering of what happens when nomadic / plunderer horse peoples meet farming peoples and the two try to coexist on the boundaries one should read the relevant section of Keegan’s Warpaths, where he discusses the issue, putting it into comparison with similar situations on the great European steppes and in the Middle East. Keegan (with a frank lack of sympathy for the horse peoples) takes the position that that such coexistence can’t be maintained because depredatory nomadic peoples do not adhere to the finality of bargains, nor are they interested in any bargains which prevent them from pillaging as far into the settled lands as they are militarily capable of doing.
(Fairness-to-Keegan note: he goes into detail about how those on the “settled” side, ie the Americans, didn’t keep their agreements either. Although, ironically enough, there were government efforts to prevent white incursions into the Black Hills, stymied by the sheer weight of white incursion and the lack of US Army resources to stop it, even though they, for a time, surprisingly did their best. He is weak, it must be conceded on the essential fact that the so-called settled peoples while settled are not stable: their demands for permanently cultivated land tend to move into the nomad space. It is a dynamic very noted in Russian history, too: “solving” a border problem by moving the border out, thus creating a new border problem which is “solved” by moving the border out again, an imperialist process which is stopped only when the expansionist power bumps up against a natural geographic barrier or territory able to defend itself.)
Lest anybody be foolish enough to think that I’m taking any position in favour of land theft or related mass murder or starvation, I’m not. I just advance Keegan’s thesis because it is a well-done and fascinating analysis which compares the American situation to similar situations elsewhere, and well worth a read.
As an anarchist, and thus a libertarian socialist, I would really appreciate if people started using Libertarian instead of libertarian to criticize the policies of the Libertarian party and the Libertarian right in general. Small-l libertarian politics is not wedded to market economics. In fact, I would say that the Libertarians are a recent (as in, less than a half-century old) mutation of ideas that were explicitly left-wing for over a century and a half, if not more.
Think of it as using Republican instead of republican to distinguish discussions of the GOP’s policies as opposed to the political philosophy of republicanism.
Sorry, forgot to add a key point of Keegan’s: that any genuine efforts made by the settled peoples to try to adhere to bargains often broke down because of what he sees as the centrality of the plunder culture to a nomadic, raiding people. Unspoken in any agreement with them (if I may summarize and paraphrase his point) was that they mentally incorporated a caveat into every treaty: “sure I’ll respect your property line and our contract, as long as it’s understood that I have the right to rob your huse every so often, and I can’t see why you have a problem with that, ‘cause it’s what I do”. One need balance that out with the fact that the settled peoples were simultaneously dreaming of entirely dispossessing the horse peoples, and did so oft with savage cruelty. (Custer, for example, is very much an SS, not cavalier, figure.) But we need not accept that the entire fault-for-conflict dynamic lies on one side, Keegan posits.“For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their ‘right’ to keep part of the earth untouched, unused and not even as property, but just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal, or a few caves above it.”
Of course, even on its own repugnant terms, this wasn’t really true, as many groups had towns, fields, etc., and in all cases their part of the earth was pretty touched - including landscape management via fire - and intensively used. Of course, it’s almost certain that Rand was completely ignorant of this, since this rationalization was probably still being taught in ’70s classrooms - the difference is that countless decent people of the time still believed this and thought nonetheless, well, that was neither fair nor right.
Having read The Fountainhead (yawn), attempted Atlas Shrugged (blarf), and got 2 pages into We the Living, I will say that the best thing Rand wrote was Anthem.
Best selling point: It’s *SHORT* (like 100 pages).
Next best: It takes place in some unnamed future, thus entering the realm of speculative fiction.
I’m assuming she was attempting to criticize socialism or some such, but it had much more the atmosphere of Orwell’s 1984 so that it was actually pleasurable to read.
Or it could be that I was only 16 at the time and totally missed the point.
Dan S,
Ah but that’s the thing. The classical liberal (and laterly Libertarian and Objectivist) defense of property hinges precisely on its improvement (i.e. capitalist cultivation) as the justification for taking that land right out from under its former inhabitants.
You have to remember that classical liberalism’s purpose in defending enclosure at the time of its birth in England was literally to try and justify the horrors that were being inflicted on the English peasantry by being driven off the land and to the brink of starvation in the enclosure movement.
BlackBloc:
I think ‘atheist’ has the most uncharitable reading of Nietzsche I’ve ever seen. It seems to me based on the revisionism of his ideas that his sister promulgated to make them line up with Nazism.
I am actually quite aware that Nietzsche was not a Nazi, despite the way that his sister altered his ideas, after his death, to make them line up with Nazi ones. Actually, years before he had completely rejected the proto-Nazi racism of Wagner and his party.
However, I think it is important to note that he mostly rejected these ideas because the stupidity of racism and anti-semitism became obvious to him. I don’t think that he was much concerned with the suffering of people under such a system, but rather with the way such a system could die from its own stupidity and prejudice. Nietzsche had, after all, said that slavery would be necessary for true increase of human power.
For my part, I much enjoyed reading Nietzsche, and found that he had a lot of useful, good things to say. But I think that people ought to follow his ideas to their logical conclusion, and see that they don’t lead to freedom for most people- far from it indeed.
Which is one of the reasons why the USSC’s appalling recent eminent domain decision was greeted with such stunned shock: “My god, these rationales can be used to take away the property of middle class white people!!” Immoral and wrong, but it has to be seen as just giving a taste of the big money theft whip to a group who had deluded itself that it was immune by virtue of class or colour.Its funny that this is all coming out right now. Last month the hit videogame Bioshock was released for the Xbox 360 and PC and the whole game is basically a scathing critique of Objectivism and Ayn Rand’s ideas. And lets be honest if a 10 hour video game can demolish your philosophy there isn’t much there to begin with.
She definitely got crazier as she got older. By the time she made those comments her husband was a full time drunk (she was in complete denial over this) and her “collective” had excommunicated anyone who could actually think (meaning, criticize her in any way) and had become so cult-like they all smoked cigarettes and many affected fake Russian accents just like their “hero”.
She did have some interesting ideas, but I think the coldness and sterility (figuratively and literally, neither she nor her characters ever had kids, nor showed the slightest interest in thyem) was probably her biggest turn off as a writer.
I did read Atlas Shrugged, but tried the Fountenhead and gave up after only 50 pages or so. the movie version sucked as well.
From a feminist perspective, it’s very interesting that you should critque Rand’s writing in that way.
It presupposes that a woman’s function is to physically reproduce, not reproduce her conciousness via the dissemination of ideas.
Rob, I’m not a gamer, so could you please help me out and give a Reader’s Digest version of how Bioshock does that?
Peak oil is approaching and probably a lot of people will end up dead. But most probably it will be the Third World countries which will again take the wallop. The West will probably do whatever it takes to secure energy reserves as it scrambles to switch it’s economy to renewable sources. Iraq is only a taste of what’s coming and I expect it to get much worse. All the talk about spreading freedom and human rights will go out the window as the shit creeps towards the fan. As much as we like to think it I’m afraid this era of trying to play it fair and not oppress our fellow man is coming to an end
The loss of cheap oil will doom any hopes of development for poor countries. I don’t expect green economies in such countries I expect peasants starving next to giant corporate biofuel plantations destined for the West. The West will survive although at a lower living standard but the poor countries will only have a dead standard. Talk of humanitarian aid and development funds are a oil fueled luxury. Evolution goes into overdrive only when resources became scarce and if we equate states with organisms I expect the weaker ones will be swallowed by the powerful ones. Colonialism 2.0
As a guy said “The Haves will push the Have-not’s from the global lifeboat”
Well, my point was more that NONE of her characters showed the slightest interest in children, or family relations of any sort. That was the ‘coldness’ I referred to, the lack of normal human bonding. There’s no doubt that she could create strong characters (both male & female), which was probably the source of much of her appeal.
I find Keegan’s viewpoint in Warpaths, as posited here by some here, is positively neurotic, mostly for the reason Praxis outlined. Land and people and their things aren’t permanent property of anyone versus the opposite.
Atheist, Nietzsche is simply telling from economic history. At very fundamentally deep levels, this modern world would not have existed without capital-guided bonded labor. It’s not even for the cash crops generated, that they were so important. Slavery was an extemely important secondary and tertiary factor in building the knowledge of how to spring Europe from Malthusian traps.
In any event, I’m someone who figures that increasing the ability of everyone to make choices is a major good thing. I’m not a Libertarian, and not Hobbsian either. Government and regulatory control exists to increase choices of everyone involved, as far as I’m concerned. Stopping various prisoner’s dilemmas and preventing other people from limiting other people choices as a means to enhance their own is why we have someone in authority. The authority though, should be chained by the respect that people have said authority. Ehhh, my thoughts are pretty complex about this, as I’m saying them pretty simply and poorly. Anyways, for example, I was strongly reacting against what I felt was a Hobbsian mentality recently.
Rand was also reacting against her perception of Leviathan, I think. I’ve read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. My perception of what she was really arguing for was this really pessemistic, dreary idea that government was evil, because it was made up of evil people, and that we should cut to the chase and look up to the entirely unsympathetic human. I.E. we should worship whoever got the most loot, whether he (and it is he) built it or not. It’s better if the guy was productive, but the point is to climb to the top of things. I have no problems believe she thought genocide was okay. She had followers because she was largely telling them to be unsensitive egoists. That’s really easy to do. L Ron Hubbard made a profitably ugly religeon as well. There are bunches of philosophies and religeons that advises this (at least in how the followers percieve it). Rand isn’t anything but a new(er) crank playing the same old ringtone…
So during the USA’s westward expansion, where we broke every treaty we ever made with any native peoples and continuously forced them out of their homes, killing millions, does the USA count as a (filthy) nomadic, raiding people? Or do/did native americans not count as raiders? I don’t see how Keegan’s point, such as it is, has anything to do with what Ayn Rand said.
Here’s a link to the Wikipedia article on Bioshock: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioShock
The attack on Objectivism isn’t even subtle. Bad guy named Andrew Ryan (Ayn Rand), Boss named Atlas, who then becomes “Fontaine”,
Now I must find time to buy and play it.
nomadic peoples had the upper hand as long as weapons technology was low and their superior fighting skills and mobility made very hard to defeat by slow moving sedentary armies. This changed when the technology level of weapons advanced beyond what a nomad society could sustain and the settled people began destroying the nomads.
balom, peak oil isn’t about running out of oil. We have huge amounts of reserves. Peak Oil is about the running out of potential surplus economic growth.
Politics is all about control of surpluses. No one will listen to a person who “controls” the only watering hole. That person will be dead soon. Likewise, no one will listen to a guy who offers sea water on an ocean going vessel. That person will be laughed at.
Politics, at heart, is about rewarding your friends with goodies, and punishing your enemies by withholding goodies and forcing them to find what they need elsewhere. The punishment is not starvation, necessarily, but extra labor and privation, that keeps them too busy and too desperate to compete with the friends of the big boss. This centralization of profit-taking is at the heart of the trauma of the agricultural revolution 10k years go.
So think about it this way. The West loses control of the *surpluses*. The oil countries *gains* control because they *absolutely* have to, because they need the oil for their own economies. Hence Iran’s attitude about building nuke plants. It has very little to do with building bombs, and everything to do with Iran gaining much more control in the international marketplace for oil if it can power internally with nuclear plants. So along this vein, if oil is progressively more consumed close to where it’s produced, how does the US get the money + oil to maintain the military machine that secures oil for the US? Then think a little further on the geopolitical implications, if you are brave enough…
Bush invaded Iraq very much largely because of a Seven Days In May situation.
Because understand the ultimate implications on the US domestically. For example, religeous authoritarians are a key source of labor for oppressing everyone else for the sake of the elites. What do you think is going to happen when the military industrial complex starts failing to supply the upper class levels of such people, people who have such a Calvinist mentality about their wealth? They are going to do whatever it takes to reestablish their relative wealth, including a very high willingness to engage in violence. One only has to read about Bleeding Kansas to get the big picture. These people will not listen to the elites or anyone else because that status is absolutely *everything* to them.
It’s not the third world that’s going to crash. At least not as much as the First World is going to *crash*. The third world’s problems (outside of India and China, who have horrific environmental/industrial/political problems), are largely going to be environmental changes and AIDS. If they get through those alright, then they are going to be in good shape. Most of the first world will not be that lucky.
As author David Korten said:
In the 1980s capitalism triumphed over communism. In the 1990s it triumphed over democracy.
Greenspan could have retired in 2000 triumphant. But like so many others, he stuck around and allowed his reputation to be trashed by contact with the odious Bush administration. It couldn’t happen to a more useful idiot.
>>I’m afraid this era of trying to play it fair and not oppress our fellow man is coming to an end
Geez, and some of us were still waiting for it to begin…
Right after I closed the back cover of The Fountainhead many years ago, the impression I was left with was sheer whininess: “Oh, dear! I’m a misunderstood genius and everyone hates me!”
Oh, suck it up, Mr. Roark. We all have to get along in this world. If you’re highly intelligent you already have a big leg up on everyone else. Learn to use that to your advantage, and for gods’ sake quit whining.
I’m continually amazed by people who claim to see a wonderful affirmation of the human spirit in Rand’s books. They have nothing of the sort.
(And I’m not picking up Atlas Shrugged unless someone pays me.)
Give Rand credit for one thing: she gives a lot of sedentary people something to huff and puff about. Really, she’s a health adjunct.
It’s true that the longer she wrote, the worse a writer she became. But, she was aware her characters were cardboard: her comments about writing in the Romantic (captial-R) style pretty much prove that.
I like the point about none of her (main) characters (any?) having children. The families depicted were uniformly horrible. While I find Rand interesting those no denying that a pervasive bitterness leaps off of every page. (OK, not the “locomotive scene”, but a lot of the pages. THAT scene is positively joyful.)
Rand’s life was an incredible soap-opera, and I think those that take her to task should consider that she saw first-hand a lot of the villainous behaviour she depicted in early Soviet Russia.
As fiction, I’d say “We The Living” and “Anthem” are her best stuff. And I think Arun has a unique perspective on this blog as someone from a culture where the Randian villains have gained a true upper hand.
From Karmakin, Squad Captain of Garlic Bread:
“…Argh.”
Ah, a fellow pirate! Avast, me hearty!!
(Today is the Official “Talk Like A Pirate” Day!!)
http://www.talklikeapirate.com/piratehome.html
See? Probably the one day a year when pirating a thread is to be expected…
Oof! Ayn Rand was, at best, a hack science-fiction writer in the sense that she created universes wherein people in unusual professions (say, architect?) become central to social continuity.
I first heard of her back when I was a homeless high-school dropout — she was extraordinarily popular among junkies who felt her philosophy helped justify their methods for obtaining heroine. Later, when I finally started college, The Fountainhead was assigned in a 3rd-quarter intro to social theory class. One of the professors observed that Rand has the protagonist born, full grown, on the first page because (in true sci-fi fashion) anyone who had been a small child would have had some comprehension of compromise.
Her ideas about sex, at least as expressed in her books, were just so fucked up! That compromise is such a bad thing that “decent” sex must be obtained without consent just… just… an even worse world view than we have now.
I dunno. Let’s just say I was unimpressed. Unimpressed by her writing. Unimpressed by her personal life. Seriously unimpressed with the little trolls and moral weevils that think her theories were morally sustainable.
She died on my birthday that year, right around the point I was writing a paper on her vision with that of other inadvertent dystopians we’d been assigned in the course. It’s astonishing that she’d be missed.
Even more astonishing that any of her followers would have risen as high as Fed chairman. What a world! It’s no wonder he recommended everyone switch to adjustable rate mortgages — she would have said, as Greenspan no doubt believes, that anyone stupid enough to take that piece advice deserved economic colonization.
figleaf
figleaf
Ayn Rand is a hack “philosopher” and a hack “writer.” Anything of value in her work is found a million times over in the work of others–those others being dead-white-guys like Socrates and Aristotle and Kant, as well as many feminists.
Arun, there are far better critiques of communism and that general mindset than those in Rand, that have greater insights and less batshit insanity.
I once ran into someone who said her “deepest beliefs” were Objectivist. My politeness failed me and I implied she was on the level of a two-year-old whose “deepest beliefs” were “I want! Gimme!”
I will not defend Ms. Rand for the Indian crack, but would like to point out almost all Native Americans practiced the same kind of power dominance of each other that the Europeans did to them. The Aztecs and the Incas were not particularly altruistic masters and resembled their European usurpers in their brutality to their subject populations.
tpx: I’m by no means an expert on Native Americans, but even I know that what you’re saying is rubbish. For a start, the Aztecs and Incas were in Central America and thus are not what is generally implied in the USA by “Native Americans”. And even I know that some North American groups were warlike, but on the other hand, many were not. So your generalisation of “almost all” is bullshit.
And in any case, even if ALL of them had been just as bad to each other as the Europeans were to all of them, how the FUCK is that a valid excuse for genocide and robbery of their territories? Since when is, “Well, I saw X hit Y, so I just went in and hit them both” a reasonable explanation for bad behaviour?
Sure, the Native Americans fought amonst themselves, exterminated other tribes, even, in some places, enslaved each other (i.e. the Aztecs did that to others.) They acted much like the European tribes had toward each other (English vs. French, Saxons vs. Celts, Romans vs. everyone else, etc.) Actually people around the world fought like this at that stage of human development.
That’s not the point. The point is that Rand thinks it was justified to kill them all so long as this led to “progress”. That’s why she was cold and evil.
“I will not defend Ms. Rand for the Indian crack”
So that’s what she was smoking!
So that’s what she was smoking!
Good one- the image that came to me was a little different, and a little less work-safe…
I will not defend Ms. Rand for the Indian crack
“….but I will make stupid, disparaging remarks about Indians to try and suggest Rand wasn’t all that bad.”
It wasn’t a “crack”. It was a blatant admission that her A=A, equal exchange, individual freedom and excellence philosophy took a distant back second to her racism.
No. Jefferson and Washington grew up in a society where a particularly noxious idea was accepted. Ayn Rand grew up in a world where folks had an opportunity to reflect on the horrors of genocide and abuse of power.
No, no, no–It’s expressly not the Objectivist position that it’s okay for A to take things from B by force simply because A is stronger. It’s the Objectivist position that when A is the government and B is a white dude, then that’s wrong and evil and haven’t you heard of the Non-Aggression Principle?, while when A calls itself a “corporation”, then there’s no such thing as coercion and everyone’s receiving their due shares of handjobs from The Invisible Hand.
The Objectivist point of view, near as I can figure it out, isn’t that it was okay for the Whites to take the Native Americans’ land, but rather that they never took it in the first place. Gaze upon the sheer balls-out glory of Objectivist thought!
Longhaired weirdo is in error in that he doesn’t go far enough.
Thomas Jefferson’s own racism and personal and fiscal weakness prevented him from freeing his slaves but he at least realized the horror of slavery and spoke out against it and tried to have it abolished, even in an era where almost everybody of his class and stature approved of it. Rand was advocating imperialist invasion and genocide thirty years after the horrors of the Holocaust and the Stalinist famines and deportations were known, and, despite her supposed anti-totalitarian credentials, saying that the concepts were a good thing if done to the Indians.
Worse, she was saying such a vile thing to the direct institutional — and often literal — descendants of those who had done so much to end the Nazi horrors and contain the Soviet ones. Disgusting beyond words.
>>The Objectivist point of view, near as I can figure it out, isn’t that it was okay for the Whites to take the Native Americans’ land, but rather that they never took it in the first place.
Actually, it seems to me that Rand’s POV is that it wasn’t wrong for Whites to take the land since the American Indians had never taken it for themselves in the first place, so it really just was lying there ripe for the picking.
Yep, it’s that distasteful. Similarly, I expect Rand would defend the feudal lords who took Europe’s land, since the only supposed owners were the European village communes and we all know that communal property is a load of poppycock and that the first private individual who comes along and makes a claim on it is the rightful owner…
Yeah, BlackBloc, that’s pretty much what I meant. The whole point of Objectivism is to make vacuously obvious statements, but come up with whole new meanings for the words used therein. Seth Finkelstein wrote a good piece on the practice; sadly, I don’t foresee it ever becoming obsolete.
I’ll give Rand her due - She wrote strong female characters long before it was fashionable to do so. Her Dagny Taggart, railroad executive, was feminist long before the term had even entered our lexicon. Even as a young girl, she was determined to succeed in a man’s world, and her reply to the notion of “But, girls can;t run a railroad!” was basically “Oh yeah, watch me!”
Native Americans refers to all of the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere. Most Native North Americans practiced justifiable warfare against each other. Probably all did. I do not know if they considered it progress.
Aztecs justified their use of mass human sacrifice. The Incas had no problem with enslaving other indigenous peoples.
Funny story. I was at a farmers market and chatting with a woman in line and she said something like if only we could adopt Native American ways there would be peace and harmony. I pointed out the Aztec human sacrifice civilization and she never spoke to me again.
Native Americans were susceptible to the failings of human behavior like every other people.
maaaan, if it wasn’t so obviously late in the thread…
nah, I’ll go ahead. Please stop using Aztecs and Incans as the be all and end all of all Native American thought, practices, and evilness okay?
Not to say that they were significantly different in mentality than any other culture like that, but…well…
1) The Aztecs Empire wasn’t entirely governed by the Aztecs. The official name of the empire was The Triple Alliance, formed from three city-states. One of the founders, the leader of Texcoco was Nezahaulcoyotl, is one coolest native americans of history, and was well beloved by his people as a poet-king. If Cortez came just a few decades earlier, it would have been pretty interesting…
2) Pachacuti, the founder of the incan empire was also really interesting himself. His ideas about the formation of his state was really Stalinist, but also fairly interesting.
In any event, reducing the Aztec and Incan to a byword of human sacrifice, is kinda sad. I understand one would want to do it, but MesoAmerican and Andean cultures were genuinely interesting, and at various times in the world, probably could be said to be among the most civilized. This is really not to criticise anyone, but only to inform.
aaaaaach, I see…it’s just tpx. Hmmph. I suppose I could just say that the lady he was talking to probably thought he was as full of bull as I think of him now.
I’ve got to work on this nontolerance of idiocy…
but in any event, the other replies to tpx is sufficient. Also will note that the Texcoco part of the Triple Alliance and elements of the Inca were *very* altruistic and could count on a certain reliability from their subject nations, so not even this example stands too well on its own.
The whole “They were just as bad as we were, so what’s the loss?” attitude, I believe I will leave for others to disparage.
Rand’s beliefs on tribal nations are not her fault…after all Firesign Theater’s “Temporaily Humbolt County” had yet to be recorded
The patriarchy exists in all cultures, even Native American ones.
>>The patriarchy exists in all cultures, even Native American ones.
ALL?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroquois#Features_of_Confederacy
What about the Iroquois war culture? link
Justin Raimondo on Ayn Rand
http://www.takimag.com/site/article/ayn_vs_the_randians/
The 50th anniversary of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is being celebrated by her partisans, and they are many – myself among them. Rand’s novel of what happens when “the men of the mind” go on strike is the second most widely-read text in the US, just below the Bible. To the dismay of her more enthusiastic admirers, this popularity doesn’t indicate total agreement with her “Objectivist” philosophy so much as it is a tribute to the author’s talent for telling a rip-roaring fasten-your-seatbelts story.