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/lit/ - Literature

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15944379 No.15944379 [Reply] [Original]

Should I read Ayn Rand?

>> No.15944411

>>15944379
why? She is a hypocrite and a shit writer.

>> No.15944417
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15944417

>>15944379

>> No.15944439

>>15944379
The Fountainhead is great, would recommend. Atlas Shrugged is shit, stay away. Don't listen to the pseuds saying she's the worst author ever.

>> No.15944494

Tried to read Atlas Shrugged. Idk if I got filtered, but I couldnt stand that every two pages it was all like "ooo weee great individuals acomplish everything, the masses suck" and make a whole doorstoper around that notion with so little delicacy or technique, it was like listening an incel that thinks he is a total Chad.
Poor caracteres, everything felt clowny as fuck and a parody of itself.
But then again, maybe I got filtered hard.

>> No.15944525

>>15944417
she killed herself

>> No.15944576

>>15944525
Did she post any nudes before she died?

>> No.15944616

>>15944379
No, She is a retard and pro-capitalist.

>> No.15944627

>>15944379
I thought the Fountainhead was good. There is some weird shit in there, like why does Ayn Rand hate the Parthenon? Also it became evidently clear that Ayn Rand has control fantasies (specifically, I believe it was her desire to be raped by two men at the same time) and of course it's all a thinly veiled self-congratulation to herself about her writing career, AND the audacity of an heiress to lecture anyone about self-determination is naturally repulsive. But it's a pretty good book from a crafting perspective, and it does have a real message to deliver, that's honestly quite refreshing. Or at least was to me.

>> No.15944646

>>15944627
>Also it became evidently clear that Ayn Rand has control fantasies (specifically, I believe it was her desire to be raped by two men at the same time)

Sounds pretty hot and based desu Didn’t she have a harem of young men who followed her?

>> No.15944674

>>15944379
Just give yourself a quick wank while praising selfishness, it'll give you the same effect.

>> No.15944905

>>15944494
lol do you take cock in the ass, complaining about not having your dainty little delicacies.

>> No.15944922

>>15944379
>should I listen to kikes?
No, dumbass.

>> No.15945399

>being a lolbertarian in current year

>> No.15945426

>>15944379
she's interesting

>> No.15945573

Why are her books so popular among stemtard?

>> No.15945585

>>15945573
They're not? They make stemtards and redditors seethe

>> No.15945593

>>15945573
Stemtards are liberals

>> No.15945737

>>15944379
The fountain head was a genuinely interesting read, found the characters quite one dimensional. aka individualist good, collectivist bad. Wish she had blurred the lines more so. However definitely worth the read.

>> No.15945765

>>15944379
Maybe, depends on what you are looking for. Atlas Shrugged is decent. It is a bit repetitive on some aspects, but it is not a shit book. I haven't read Fountainhead.

>> No.15945796

>>15944379
I actually read Atlas Shrugged because of John Scalzi, who made this blogpost confessing how this book is his guilty pleasure. Here's what I learned:
1) Her philosophy is very basic and it's easy to poke holes in it, but STILL every criticism you read of her online is a dumb strawman. She didn't really defend selfishness in the contemporary sense and she wasn't a hypocrite by taking social security. Her political priority today would probably be attacking money in politics, as this is where the most egregious looting takes place.
2) I understand the american right better after reading the book. Mostly, right wing pundits didn't read the book, but they clearly read someone who have read it. She's still really influential.
3) If you're like me and Scalzi, it's an entertaining read. Treat it as science fiction (which it is, it's the technology that mainly drives the plot) and suspend your disbelief.
4) No rape scenes, /lit/ lied to me on this one. Not even in the ballpark of a little rapey or questionable in any way, it's all consensual.

>> No.15945862

The Fountainhead and We the Living are legit great books.

It's weird that she progressively goes crazier and crazier as she publishes her novels though. You can see it primarily in characterization. We the Living has flawed heroes, one of which is a literal communist. The Fountainhead has Roark, who is an autist, but also has Peter Keating and Gail Wynand - who despite being antagonistic are very humanized and well written - and Ellsworth Toohey who is just a great scheming villain.

Then you move to Atlas Shrugged where the villains are all whiny retards and the only character flaw Dagny and Rearden are shown to have is not letting society collapse sooner. She also has this scene where a bunch of leftists are asphyxiated to death and the narrator takes great delight in saying why every single one of them deserved to die. I think Rand had a gift for structuring her novels and despite the size you could tell every word had a purpose and served the meaning she was trying to convey. She also had great rhetorical power which explains a lot of her popularity and how her books influenced people's politics.

All in all, I think she's a great writer who is treated unfairly as a writer because both of her politics and abrasive personality. I plan on reading Ideal in the future.

>> No.15945880

>>15945862
>She also has this scene where a bunch of leftists are asphyxiated to death and the narrator takes great delight in saying why every single one of them deserved to die.
I don't remember that, where exactly?

>> No.15945895

>>15945880
When the train goes into the tunnel with a faulty motor. Just before it enters there is a long summation describing the passengers and their sinful, non-objectivist beliefs which are implied to have led to that situation.

>> No.15945909

As the tunnel came closer, they saw, at the edge of the sky far to the south, in a void of space and rock, a spot of living fire twisting in the wind. They did not know what it was and did not care to learn.

It is said that catastrophes are a matter of pure chance, and there were those who would have said that the passengers of the Comet were not guilty or responsible for the thing that happened to them.

The man in Bedroom A, Car No. 1, was a professor of sociology who taught that individual ability is of no consequence, that individual effort is futile, that an individual conscience is a useless luxury, that there is no individual mind or character or achievement, that everything is achieved collectively, and that it's masses that count, not men.

The man in Roomette 7, Car No. 2, was a journalist who wrote that it is proper and moral to use compulsion 'for a good cause' who believed that he had the right to unleash physical force upon others - to wreck lives, throttle ambitions, strangle desires, violate convictions, to imprison, to despoil, to murder - for the sake of whatever he chose to consider as his own idea of 'a good cause',which did not even have to be an idea, since he had never defined what he regarded as the good, but had merely stated that he went by 'a feeling' -a feeling unrestrained by any knowledge, since he considered emotion superior to knowledge and relied soley on his own 'good intentions' and on the power of a gun.

The woman in Roomette 10, Car No.3, was an elderly schoolteacher who had spent her life turning class after class of helpless children into miserable cowards, by teaching them that the will of the majority is the only standard of good and evil, and that a majority may do anything it pleases, that they must not assert their own personalities, but must do as others were doing.

The man in Drawing Room B, Car No. 4, was a newspaper publisher who believed that mend are evil by nature and unfit for freedom, that their basic interests, if left unchecked, are to lie, to rob and murder one another - and, therefore, men must be ruled by means of lies, robbery and murder, which must be made the exclusive privilege of the rules, for the purpose of forcing men to work, teaching them to be moral and keeping them within the bounds of order and justice.

The man in Bedroom H, Car No. 5, was a businessman who had acquired his business, an ore mine, with the help of a government loan, under the Equalization of Opportunity Bill.

The man in Drawing Room A, Car No 6, was a financier who had made a fortune by buying 'frozen' railway bonds and getting his friends in Washington to 'defreeze' them.

The man in Seat 5, Car No.7, was a worker who believed that he had "a right" to a job, whether his employer wanted him or not.

The woman in Roomette 6, Car no. 8, was a lecturer who believed that, as a consumer, she had "a right" to transportation, whether the railroad people wished to provide it or not.

>> No.15945916

>>15945909
The man in Roomette 2, Car No. 9, was a professor of economics who advocated the abolition of private property, explaining that intelligence plays no part in industrial production, that man's mind is conditioned by material tools, that anybody can run a factory or a railroad and it's only a matter of seizing the machinery.

The woman in Bedroom D, Car No. 10, was a mother who had put her two children to sleep in the berth above her, carefully tucking them in, protecting them from drafts and jolts; a mother whose husband held a government job enforcing directives, which she defended by saying, 'I don't care, it's only the rich that they hurt. After all, I must think of my children.'

The man in Roomette 3, Car No. 11, was a sniveling little neurotic who wrote cheap little plays into which, as a social message, he inserted cowardly little obscenities to the effect that all businessmen were scoundrels.

The woman in Roomette 9, Car No. 12, was a housewife who believed that she had the right to elect politicians, of whom she knew nothing, to control giant industries, of which she had no knowledge.

The man in Bedroom F, Car No.13, was a lawyer who had said, 'Me? I'll find a way to get along under any political system.'

The man in Bedroom A, Car No.14, was a professor of philosophy who taught that there is no mind - how do you know that the tunnel is dangerous? - no reality - how can you prove that the tunnel exists? - no logic - why do you claim that trains cannot move without motive power? - no principles - why should you be bound by the laws of cause and effect? - no rights - why shouldn't you attach men to their jobs by force? - no morality - what's moral about running a railroad? - no absolutes - what difference does it make to you whether you live or die anyway?. He taught that we know nothing - why oppose the orders of your superiors? - that we can never be certain of anything - how do you know you're right? - that we must act on the expediency of the moment - you don't want to risk your job do you?

>> No.15945923

>>15945916
The man in Drawing Room B, Car No.15, was an heir who had inherited his fortune, and who had kept repeating, 'Why should Rearden be the only one permitted to manufacture Rearden Metal?'

The man in Bedroom A, Car no. 16, was a humanitarian who had said, 'The men of ability? I do not care what or if they are made to suffer. They must be penalized in order to support the incompetent. Frankly, I do not care whether this is just or not. I take pride in not caring to grant any justice to the able, where mercy to the needy is concerned.'

These passengers were awake; there was not a man aboard the train who did not share one or more of their ideas. As the train went into the tunnel, the flame of Wyatt's Torch was the last thing they saw on earth.

>> No.15945933

>>15945895
>Just before it enters there is a long summation describing the passengers and their sinful, non-objectivist beliefs which are implied to have led to that situation.
Nah, she was just describing how decadent the world turned in general, if you read that as some sort of divine justice that's your framing I say. Other than "in a world like this, it's no surprise that trains crash" there's no causality implied and I don't think Rand delighted in choking them.

>> No.15945954

>>15945933
There is most definitely causality implied between the passengers's thoughts and actions and the catastrophe. Look at this excerpt:

>>15945909
>It is said that catastrophes are a matter of pure chance, and there were those who would have said that the passengers of the Comet were not guilty or responsible for the thing that happened to them.

The author is definitely >implying that the passengers of the Comet were responsible for what had happened to them, contrary to "those" (the irrational) who would argue otherwise. And within the framework of the novel, they definitely are.

>> No.15946039

>>15945954
Maybe I'm changing the authorial intent because I can't accept something that doesn't make neat sense to me, but:
The negation of:
Any given passenger was purely blameless and the accident was pure chance.
Is:
Any given passenger was not purely blameless and the accident was not pure chance.
Not:
Passengers were all guilty and responsible and the accident was a direct consequence of their actions.
That's why she enumerates so many examples, to show how responsibility is indirect and diffused. They are looters after all, not a single one of them has the agency to cause a great disaster, but together they can create a disastrous world.
And still, Rand does not delight in "punishing" them. She just states in a matter-of-fact way that their moral choices lead to this outcome.

>> No.15946059

>>15944379
I never have and I'm doing fine.

>> No.15946214

>>15946039
I would disagree with your characterization of it. Atlas Shrugged is a novel whose point is the consequence of ideas in society (the thesis being: abandon of reason/the mind leads to altruism, altruism leads to economic interventionism/socialism, interventionism leads to disaster), and it is explicit in that there is a moral component in the adoption or rejection of these ideas. That is, even if it takes multiple people to accept an evil idea before it starts wrecking society, each of them is individually responsible and condemnable for the consequences.

I also disagree with your assessment that the tone is matter-of-fact; for me, it is very contemptful of the characters involved. Look at the way the passengers are characterized: they write "cheap little plays", sculpt children into "miserable cowards", want to govern men by "lies, robbery and murder." It's not only negative in its assessment of the passengers, but it just despises them as people.

>> No.15946447

>>15946214
>I also disagree with your assessment that the tone is matter-of-fact; for me, it is very contemptful of the characters involved. Look at the way the passengers are characterized: they write "cheap little plays", sculpt children into "miserable cowards", want to govern men by "lies, robbery and murder." It's not only negative in its assessment of the passengers, but it just despises them as people.
True, she's not matter-of-fact when characterizing passengers, Rand has contempt for them and they are vilified, but "they deserved to choke, how delightful it is that they are all dead, oh the moral boner erect in my loins" is taking it further then the text allows imo. The crash is depicted as a natural consequence of events, not as righteous justice. She doesn't say it was deserved, just necessary and unavoidable. **It's not that they deserved to crash, because they are contemptible. They are contemptible, because their behavior leads to disasters.**
>I would disagree with your characterization of it. Atlas Shrugged is a novel whose point is the consequence of ideas in society (the thesis being: abandon of reason/the mind leads to altruism, altruism leads to economic interventionism/socialism, interventionism leads to disaster), and it is explicit in that there is a moral component in the adoption or rejection of these ideas. That is, even if it takes multiple people to accept an evil idea before it starts wrecking society, each of them is individually responsible and condemnable for the consequences.
We are mostly in agreement, but you frame her by other people's ideas. She had something of an aristotelian view of economics, there are producers (the immovable movers) who have agency and parasites, who don't. No single parasite is the antagonist of the story, because they don't have enough individual agency to matter, they are interchangeable unlike the randian hero. Every parasite is responsible and condemnable, but their ideology is the real antagonist and its the ideology that has the causal power to crash trains.

>> No.15946834

>>15944379
Sure, I think if you've read one book of hers you've read them all, but Rand's not the bad writer people make her out to be and her philosophy has been very influential.