/lit/ - Literature

Firstly, most academics are leftists, and don't like capitalists.

Secondly, there's literally no reason to defend capitalism when nobody has any choice but to live under it.

>>11237112
It's undeveloped and shallow as is, but academia could easily derive some """interpretation""" like they do with everything else. Finding great meaning and philosophical depth in the trite or vague. It's just not socially fashionable to do so, for Objectivism (if it were older it'd probably be better developed).

>>11237133
Academics take Heidegger seriously even though he's a Nazi.
Rand isn't taken seriously because she's not very good at philosophy. You don't expect psychiatry to take L. Ron Hubbard seriously

>>11237112
Are any of her works worth reading?

Because it’s arguably dumber than Marxism

She didnt start with the greeks

>>11237133
The capitalism that Rand defended is different from the one we live under though, and all countries implement more socialist policies than she would like.

>>11237133
>there's literally no reason to defend capitalism when nobody has any choice but to live under it
There is a reason to defend capitalism, or rather: to look for whatever makes it worthwhile. Otherwise you can't hope to notice and eventually get rid of the shittier parts.

Because reality is ontologically incomplete

>>11237112
It's just a hodge-podge of other philosophies.

>>11237112
Because it's isn't a legitimate philosophy

>>11237398
>Academics take Heidegger seriously even though he's a Nazi.
Heidegger's work didn't revolve around Nazism

>>11237701
False news.
Here's a quote from Heidegger
>If you're not a nazi, you're literally not a Being (and Time™)

>>11237112
She *literally* argues for an oligopoly.

>>11237112
Same reason for this dude.

>>11237112
The problem with most defenders of Rand -- or even those who just take a passing interest in her philosophy -- is they have literally read no other philosophical works at all.

Forget starting with the Greeks, just pick up one other book in the genre, or read a wikipedia page about another philosopher from the 20th Century.

Randroids, like most religious people and mold, thrive in an environment of darkness.

>>11237518
It's a toxic world view and it will impede your growth as a human until you unlearn it.

The Fountainhead is a much better work of fiction than Atlas Shrugged. If you want to cure yourself of the desire to read Rand, just read the John Galt speech from Atlas Shrugged. Don't skip any parts Read the whole thing.

>>11237700
She also refused to engage other philosophers, and bragged that she had only read Artistotle and all other works of philosophy (which she hadn't read) were pointless (except hers because reasons).

>>11237806
>If you want to cure yourself of the desire to read Rand, just read the John Galt speech from Atlas Shrugged. Don't skip any parts Read the whole thing.
Like a parent making their child smoke a whole package of cigarettes? I like it

>>11237650
>real capitalism has never been tried

>>11237112
most people say her novels are shit, but i've heard people speak positively about some of her non-fiction work.

that being said you should ignore academics, and anyone else for that matter. ayn rand is used as a punching bag by lazy leftists. ignore the noise, read it for yourself and make up your own mind.

>>11237795
I liked virtue of selfishness, but haven't read anything other than some of the Greeks (Plato, Xenophon) and responses to them. What should i to know better than accept Rand's view?

>>11237112
> filename

>>11237112
Her work is full of holes. Hell, her entire philosophical system is build on the principle "I can assume things because they seem intuitive," which is pants-on-head retarded. She also commits tons of fallacies, ignores basic problems of philosophy like is-ought, and doesn't have a working understanding of most of the philosophers she criticizes. And almost everything she says has been said already, by someone who can argue for it better.

Her whole body of work is 90% polemic and 10% old and/or bad ideas.

>>11238827
>I can assume things because they seem intuitive
wow you just described all of philosophy

>>11237650
>socialist policy
What is this meme

>>11237112
Dignity of Being for itself

>>11237398
>Rand isn't taken seriously because she's not very good at philosophy
So why do they take Derrida seriously?

>>11237112
Shit-tier, underdeveloped and shallow epistemology and ontology.

people's goals and desires are determined entirely by a neurochemical relation with a physical environment mediated through psychological imprinting from social structures

in Ayn Rand's ideal world where everyone pursues their own base goals without consideration for others, a class of those adept at manipulating others psychologically and chemically will naturally arise and find it easier just to engineer their fellow man into cattle and reap the benefits of power without consideration for long term projects that transcend their being as an individual with a finite lifetime

it comes to no surprise then that Ayn Rand was an atheist, and that her prose is terrible

>>11238109
We The Living is an okay novel, suprisingly enough.

>>11237112
"i dont like state" therefor
"state is objectively bad"
this is why

>>11238076
kek that is the absolute state of libertarians

>>11238994
I'm full fedora and utterly disgusted by Rand.

Making loud assertions without backing isn't philosphy (and it's certainly the opposite of everything I love about atheism!). It's just shouting. And shitty, shitty writing.

Nobody claims that she's a top philosopher.
Just think of her work as self-help book for the society at large

>>11238994
>people's goals and desires are determined entirely by a neurochemical relation with a physical environment mediated through psychological imprinting from social structures
Oh boy. You aren't in any fit state to be criticising Rand. And Rand is really stupid

>>11239253
enjoy your next meal

>>11239237
>Just think of her work as self-help book for the society at large.
That analogy works, in the sense that 4 out of 5 self-help books are also a shitty waste of time.

>>11237650
capitalists have literally been making this same argument since the crash in the early 1870s. for some weird reason, any period of intense free market growth is followed by a period of stagnation, corruption, and inequality. the whole process that makes the free market work will inevitably end with wealth being vacuumed upward at a rate faster than the wealth is being created, and its autistic to believe that the extremely wealthy won't use that financial power to gain political power. libertarianism, and objectivism, basically want to put a scaffolding of ethics around the dog-eat-dog world of the market. their ideal world is one where all the millionaries read ayn rand and go "oh, i see, violence is bad, and i shouldn't use my money to capture government power", but that's a pipe dream, literally autistic. you can't have social darwinism where everyone plays nice, you can't have a competition with real stakes and real costs for those who lose and expect everyone to play by some arbitrary set of rules.

>>11238835
>t. never read pic related

>>11239409
What form of government do you recommend over capitalism then?

>>11239480
Happy you asked anon!

1. Establish a philosopher king, Find the most meritorious individual by way of standardized testing, which must be taken by the entire population. Randomly create a pool of 1000 electors from 500 elite journalists, businessmen, and academics of varied political and cultural backgrounds to select the winner based on his essays, and use an extremely difficult multiple choice on ethics, logic, mathematics, philosophy, hard science, and history to establish a objective aspect of the exam to weight it. Using these two criteria, find the "winner" from the entire population of either the US or the world.
2. Give that individual total dictatorial power until death and elevate him as the living representative of reason.
3. Repeat at his/her/xir death.

>>11239533
>what could possibly go wrong

>>11239533
>>>/the_barrel/

>>11239536
It works for China...

>>11239533
one of the most retarded things I've ever heard in my life

Why people ask on lit what they could search on google?

>>11239480
>>11239480
someone is imitating me, ignore them

capitalism can work if the flows of wealth are rerouted, if there are mechanisms put in place by a government to redistribute wealth or make sure workers can exercise power in some way and share in the prosperity. but if you want capitalism and democracy to be compatible, the only route is some form of keynesianism, or social democracy. the problem is that inevitably you have some right-wing bullshit like the powell memo that ends up dismantling this more stable configuration.

when the wealth stops being shared, when wages stagnate and prosperity is limited to the few, this inevitably leads to political instability. its a catch-22, when the market is completely free, it moves towards its own collapse. if the underclass wins, they may just reinstate a form of social democracy again, restarting the cycle, or they may get rid of the market altogether. if the rich and powerful win, they will continue to rig the social order in their favor, continue to sabotage the market from above, until its ruled over by monopolies backed by state power.

the things is, as computers and AI grow more advanced, the free market may be facing extinction. leftists could talk about realistic central planning with the aid of AI. and the right-wingers could do something similar but with a corporatist style economy.

personally, i think capitalism isn't the worst thing, but its a precarious and temporary system if left unchecked, which is currently facing a double-bind from the social forces that it has itself unleashed (including climate catastrophe), and advanced technology that may make the market mechanism look inefficient and old-fashioned

in this light, libertarians and objectivists are just weirdos who pruposefully put the blinders on, who have to remove all nuance and ignore all wider political implications to make their philosophy work. they're like people who want us to rev an engine that is already flying apart. at least the accelerationist types are honest about the long-term prospects for capitalism, objectivists are delusional

>>11239022
le epic keke. shadilay

>>11239533
So you want "society", or rather what a select few intelligent individuals such as yourself deem to be "society", to choose an individual to basically be god through a system of similar hoops that capitalism already throws at us, based on things capitalism has already given us, which are all just as entirely feasible, if not more? Doesn't this arguably have, if not as much, more problems than capitalism? If that's the case, why bitch about capitalism and imply we should create something else if you don't have a good alternative? I'm not saying you shouldn't criticize capitalism, you should, but I don't see much of a point if you don't do anything with the knowledge you get from criticizing capitalism by refusing to offer a better form of government.

>>11239652
>I'm not saying you shouldn't criticize capitalism, you should, but you still shouldn't
lol

>>11239533
First year university student, the post.

>>11237112
humans do not have access to objective reality, there is no Self (it by definition could not exist), physics cannot simulate most of the behavior of living systems, this is why we haven't mapped out the behavior of the genome or diseases very accurately, and why people still die from cancer and heart disease regularly and we're helpless to do anything, we have no idea what we don't know about matter and energy, hence debate continues about what constitutes them and what types they produce, some people doubt the existence of dark matter, others think quantum phenomena is mathematical bullshit and want to keep the standard model away from such species of thought, and still others think that there is an element of emerging intelligence or self-organization in physical systems which again we are only barely cognizant of. There is also a hard limit on computing which we're fast approaching as well as one for the human nervous system, we've just now reached and this is why art has died and why scientific genius has all but dried up (and why we will focus all our efforts on programming and social control systems, gene engineering and move away from deep space exploration, high energy physics, energy tech and theoretical physics; since we cannot go further). Beyond this, there is the issue of using language to communicate and that maths comes from language and human grammatical conventions, its rooted in the logic of barely sentient nervous systems which are not fine tuned for the task of maths. Finally, technology and biology are primary to economics, so it makes no sense to root one's philosophical understanding in economics, which is what Ayn Rand did. I could not imagine not just being a biodeterminist materialist who accepts the heterogeneity of irreconcilable elemental forces and an incomplete epistemology that continually leaks truth value and yields nothing like objectivity but works long enough to salvage a technological cocoon within which we can protect ourselves from the schizogenic effect of the screaming void. That's what I see as the most logical and painless philosophy possible. OF course this makes people want to die, which it should, and so they continue searching for meaning where there can be none.

>>11237112
it's just a fanfiction on how Real Capitalism That Has Never Been Tried Before would look like

>>11239624
>capitalism can work if the flows of wealth are rerouted, if there are mechanisms put in place by a government to redistribute wealth or make sure workers can exercise power in some way and share in the prosperity
The government is made up of appointed individuals, so giving them power to combat the power of the wealthy would solve inequality? Why would the wealthy, who presumably hold power because of their wealth, give openings for the lesser workers to even create such a government? Wouldn't the government also just become corrupt and probably work with the wealthy, since, the wealthy can make them wealthy too (And so on)? Who are you implying is rightful to hold power anyway? Because it seems that if we followed your ideas and redistributed power there would inevitably be another new upper class -Even in a social democracy- who you or someone else would probably also criminalize; essentially, the same thing we had with capitalism but with people changing places. You're just as delusional as the libertarians and objectivists you criticize.

>>11239624
>capitalism can work if the flows of wealth are rerouted
Socialism. The concept you are looking for is Socialism.

>>11239763
you're not making a very clear argument, you think you are but your thoughts are piling up like a car crash. i didn't say that social democracy gets rid of inequality, it just doesn't let it get to the point where the situation becomes politically dangerous. if wealth and prosperity is more widely spread, things stabilize, and the market can work. the problem is that this can just be dismantled anyway, because as you suggest, inequality would still exist, and those with wealthy may plot behind closed doors to dismantle the mechanisms of redistribution. i may have been too definite with my language before, but historically speaking the only time that wealth inequality was stable and not increasing (and thus trending towards its own demise) was during the peak of mid-century welfare states and social democracies
>Wouldn't the government also just become corrupt and probably work with the wealthy, since, the wealthy can make them wealthy too (And so on)?
i don't think you read my post i made this exact point. wealth is power, and any society with some sort of wealth inequality needs checks on the influence of wealth on politics and government. but by the nature of capitalism, the whole point of capital accumulation, these checks always seem to be eroded over time.
>Who are you implying is rightful to hold power anyway?
i'm not making ethical judgements, i'm just describing how the world works. capitalism is not a stable system. it could maybe work, theoretically, if you had social democracy with very robust workers rights, and strong checks on the influence of wealth on governance. but even that may only be temporarily stable. the point is that capitalism is very dynamic but always seems to trend towards its own transformation or demise. i'm not talking about the haves and have nots that seem to exist in any society, i'm very specifically talking about the market society, and how if you say you love the market, there seems to be very few circumstances where the market mechanism can be preserved. keynesian ideas succeeded for a few decades but it has its own flaws, and ultimately fell apart anyway (but it probably has the best track record in terms of stabilizing wealth inequality, and in a way saves the market from itself)

>>11239806
yes i'm aware, i'm just trying to engage with the people who worship the free market, build their entire philosophy around it. "under what circumstances could the market mechanism be preserved?" is the question I'm trying to get them to answer

>>11239533
lol

>>11238955
because Derrida is good at philosophy, DUH

>>11239891
>you're not making a very clear argument, you think you are but your thoughts are piling up like a car crash
Likewise.

>i don't think you read my post i made this exact point.
I did, but I thought you were implying something different.

>i'm not making ethical judgments
You need to or else you can't make any judgments at all regarding how society should be run. You've explained the faults of capitalism fairly well, almost all of which I already agree on, but are you going to make a stance on which form of government is best for society?
>I'm not making ethical judgments
Then that's a, "no".

It made the mistake of having testable claims. Never allow your philosophy to be held up to real scrutiny.

>>11239543
works for china? are you high?
every few hundred years, chinese dynasties crash and then millions of chinese die to get a new dynasty rolling.

>>11237112
don't read her she's a kike who created a philosophy to undermine white people by making them selfish on an individual level.

i'd recommend people to watch this series.
peikoff and ridpath destroys leftists
most people here constantly misrepresent rand's ideas and attack her as an individual rather than her ideas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGo2G1Sjb6M&list=PLC70DBDE7AFAC0366

they can't deal with how she BTFO'd their daddy Kant

>>11238124
Thomas Hobbes is probably a good one to help refute randianism, without being too different stylistically. Chomsky's analysis of political events, although you may disagree with it, is pretty thorough and exploits her weaknesses in logic. Also I've heard David Hume is a good source, but I haven't read enough of him to know why

>>11237112

In part because much of Established Academia is left-wing and Anti-Capitalist. And because many of the even more right-leaning academics are turned off by Rand's ultra-individualism and atheism.

In part, it is Rand made her career and name as a fiction writer. She was an outsider to Contemporary Western Philosophy and its trends. Came in from a different angle, and is shunned for it.

why do people care about academics nowadays anyways? philosophy is now so distant from society, hiding behind all the jargons. the only thing those academics produce are peer-reviewed articles which no one reads except the authors and editors, just a circle jerkfest.

>>11241947
I think he means the current Chinese leadership, which is a technocracy.

>>11239891
>wealth is power, and any society with some sort of wealth inequality needs checks on the influence of wealth on politics and government
This problem can be solved by making the wealthy the ruling class. The wealthy can have as much wealth as they want and have the necessity of distributing said wealth to the population to prevent unrest.

>>11242065
even looking at modern china, he's still a retard.
before deng, in the eras of mao and other full on communists, china was a shithole.
the 'philosopher kings' wanted chinese steel production to match western powers, know what to do? get every peasant to give in their spoons, window frames, woks everything metal. result? the metal turned in and could not be used to produce good steel, they were all useless. and the good steel were used for what? to make woks, spoons and window frames.
china only started to develop when deng opened china and steered china towards capitalistic policies, decreasing government intervention, attracting foreign investments.

>>11237650
>I don't know what an economic system is but that shouldn't stop me educating people about economic systems

>>11237521
>arguably

>>11237650
>socialism is when the government does stuff

>>11237539
She stopped with the Greeks

Because Socrates had already addressed Thrasymachus 2500 yrs ago.

I hate how she called it "objectivism".
I have a very novel outlook and approach to philosophy, theories, etc, whereby I do not involve myself emotionally at all.

I can confront the Nazi movement, the Soviet state, without getting emotional and see the logic of actions undertaken in each.

I try to defend such controversial actors at times, not because of personal feelings toward either, but simply to explain why the actions that were undertaken by such regimes make sense.

I find I cannot do this, even on an antonymous message board without being slandered as a "communist", or "fascist".

I feel had Ayn Rand never existed, that objectivism would be the best term for how I approach social-political-philosophical movements and questions. So, if someone called me a commie or a nazi, I would simply retort, "No sir, I am not, I am merely looking at this through the lenses of objectivism and trying to remain impartial when viewing loaded topics". However, I cannot because she existed and forever tainted the term.

Rand's a dilettante. Why take someone seriously who doesn't even take the discipline seriously enough to study it?

>>11242848
>antonymous
anonymous

>>11237112
It is, but that doesn't make every objectivity or their books legitimate philosophy.

>>11237133
You can *gasp* move!

>>11239533
>philosopher king established by an essay contest and standardized test
>xir

I chuckled