/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.7065681]

College freshman anarcho-capitalist here, just finished this and loved it. Tell me why it sucks, /lit/

[Anonymous No.7065684]

>>7065681
>not reading the masterpiece

[AZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZA No.7065688]

>>7065681
Not enough gay sex

[Anonymous No.7065690]

>>7065684
Also a good book. Are her books actually bad, or do people just hate her because she hurts their feelings?

[Anonymous No.7065701]

>>7065690
Her books are nothing but a bad expression of her philosophy. You'll never read one and be sad or happy about a character, you'll never be excited to know what happens next, you'll never be enchanted by beautiful prose
If you like her philosophy or not is up to you..

[AZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZA No.7065705]

>>7065701

“If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders - What would you tell him?"

I…don't know. What…could he do? What would you tell him?"

To shrug.”

[AZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZA No.7065712]

>>7065701
>>7065705
It really is shit, isn't it? And this is the best excerpt I could find. Nothing irredeemable here.

[Anonymous No.7065751]

>>7065681
>>7065690

The Fountainhead is essentially Ayn Rand having a steaming fantasy about her "ideal man", who can be summed up as an emotionally stunted autistic. Her arguments against socialism/socialist behaviour are essentially one big strawman "hurr durr socialists so evil, they pretend to be nice but ecshually just try to control you and bring you you down maaan1!1!1!!!"

She does bring up valuable points about being uncompromising in your creativity, but she takes her arguments too far and beyond rational behaviour Like when Howard Roark blows up buildings with dynamite because his "speshul" plans were altered

The worst part about Ayn Rand isn't her lengthy, amphetamine-driven ramblings. It's her cult-like fanbase. It attracts plebs of the worst kind, because the ones that stick it out through novels like Atlas shrugged (longer than IJ, by the way), are just exposed to the same ideas in essentially a repetitive manner, to the point where they begin to like them only because they've heard them for countless hours.

The Fountainhead is her better book. It's less philosophical and about 2/3 of the duration.

As a final note I'll also throw in that on an academic level, everyone basically BTFO'd her philosophy and she was simply regarded as a massive edgelord for shouting very very loudly about how "le selfishness is actually a virtue, XD"

[Anonymous No.7065764]

>>7065690
Her books are not that great, but Fountainhead is okay. Ellsworth Toohey is a great villain, and Gail Wynand is an interesting character.

>>7065751
This. I'm pretty sure Ayn Rand was autistic.

[Anonymous No.7065773]

>>7065681
I really liked the fountainhead. I haven't read anything else by her, and I don't talk about her philosophy. I don't care about libertarianism or whatever people associate with her, I just enjoyed the book.

[Anonymous No.7065797]

>>7065681
>>7065684
at least the art deco is nice

[Anonymous No.7065798]

>>7065681
>College freshman anarcho-capitalist here
Of course you are.

[Anonymous No.7065815]

>>7065681
>an-cap
>liking Rand

[Anonymous No.7065820]

>>7065705
Oh god is this real? It is like from one of those posts in those greentext threads that mocks the title

[Anonymous No.7066224]

>>7065681
Ayn Rand is a beautiful soul and I'm glad she lived. If you read her nonfiction, you'll understand where she was coming from and appreciate her more. She was sincere and devout in reason, individuality, and the heroic nature of humanity.

She tried to show people heroes and said the illness of the modern age is that people sneered at heroes instead of emulating them.

When so many institutions and doctrines are telling you that you are insignificant and must obey, Rand says "no, humans are great, you are a hero, and you can direct your own life."

I like her a lot, and I'm glad her books exist.

[Anonymous No.7066248]

>>7066224
What confuses me personally is the apparent disconnect between the contents of The Fountainhead and her fans. Whereas Rand portrayed numerous rich characters as parasitic (most notably, Gail Wynand, who is a tragic character because he squanders his potential in a futile pursuit of power, which he finds out is only illusory so long as he continues to tell people what they want to hear), your typical Randroid ancap tends to be a worshiper of the rich. It's hard to really reconcile her support of capitalism with some of the ideas in her writing, when people like John Erik Snite, Gordon L. Prescott, Guy Francon, Peter Keating, and Gail Wynand were all diligently following market demand; the architects were satisfying the vapid aesthetic tastes of the public, while Wynand's Banner was merely printing whatever its readers wanted to hear (and later, when Gail tries to use his power to challenge public opinion, he ends up irredeemably damaging the Banner's reputation). According to Rand, not only are the sort of 'power' and 'prestige' gained by Wynand and Keating hollow, but people like the architects in the book specifically, though they were supplying public demand, are seen to be righting on the shoulders of innovators; at first, the architects followed the classical traditions, then they started building in the modern style when Roark and the late Henry Cameron rose to prominence. This shows that they are 'second handers'.

[Anonymous No.7066252]

>>7065705
Did Rand really not know that Atlas carried the heavens on his shoulders and not the world? I suppose she might exculpate herself after the fact by saying it was what the character believed but setting that central false idea as the title is really embarrassing.

[Anonymous No.7066260]

>>7066252
She should've started with the greeks, amirite?

[Anonymous No.7066264]

>>7066224
eat my weenie

[Anonymous No.7066267]

>>7065701
>Her books are nothing but a bad expression of her philosophy.
You could say the same about Camus
>inb4 high school defence force "le stranger was my favor1te book evaaaaaa!!!!"

[Anonymous No.7066268]

>>7066248
This is pretty much the exact reason Rand despised Libertarians. They misinterpreted and perverted her views into blind wealth and freedom worship.

She was judgmental and virtue-oriented, not pro-"lol man smoke weed erryday FREEDOM."

[Anonymous No.7066270]

What a poor soul is this one you have, OP. If you want to know why she is so bad, read her philosophy (of course that won't work if you don't understand nothing of the subject). I think most people hate her because she was a "capitalist", but what she wrote is honestly garbage.

[Anonymous No.7066271]

>>7065701
They are actually a good representation of her philosophy, and its massively successful and also the dominant philosophy of our time.

[Anonymous No.7066273]

>>7065681

Feeling confident or good about yourself is heresy. Give away all your rights to the government and the central planning bueraeu or your a lord of the rings sperg 15 year old cheetos eating loser CREEP

[Anonymous No.7066282]

>>7066267

[Anonymous No.7066403]

>>7066267
I never understood the hype about Camus. I was forced to read it in the original French in school, and it was boring. Like "wow, look at this guy, how can he put milk in his coffee if his mother just passed away! what a bastard!"

I don't understand the edgy teen following he has on /lit/ and never will. I feel old.

[Anonymous No.7066405]

>>7065681
>anarcho capitalist
God that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

[Anonymous No.7066406]

>>7066405
https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarcho_Capitalism/

[Anonymous No.7066418]

>>7065751
What academic rebuttals of Rand are worth reading?

[Anonymous No.7066424]

>>7066418
Das Kapital by Karl Marx
Phenomenology of the Mind by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
SJWs Always Lie by Vox Day

[Anonymous No.7066429]

>>7066403
Camus is overrated but you're an idiot

[Anonymous No.7066452]

I can't, but the people forced to sell their labour to survive probably could if they weren't being too busy being rented.

[Anonymous No.7066466]

>>7066429
Why do you think I'm an idiot?

[Anonymous No.7066467]

>anarcho-capitalism
Yeah, you're going to end up in rehab or AA meetings in 6 mos. Nice stupid philosophy, queer.

[Anonymous No.7066502]

>>7066424
He said WORTH reading

[Anonymous No.7066512]

>>7066502
There you have

>>7066424
>Das Kapital by Karl Marx
>Phenomenology of the Mind by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

[Anonymous No.7066743]

>>7065681
tell us why it's good first..GO.

[Anonymous No.7067277]

>>7065681

[Anonymous No.7067288]

>college freshman
>anarcho-capitalist
>Ayn Rand
You really know how to press buttons, OP

[Anonymous No.7067316]

Where to start with her?

No Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged and, of course, no Greek meme.

[Anonymous No.7067327]

>>7065681

>freshman
>an-cap
>Ayn Rand

Gr8 b8 m8 I r8 8/8

[Anonymous No.7067349]

>>7065751
>everyone basically BTFO'd her philosophy
how?

[Anonymous No.7067722]

>>7065751
No she refused to allow any other academic to respond to her work. She knew they would tear it to shreds

[Anonymous No.7067973]

>>7065681

[Anonymous No.7070042]

Vast swathes of her "philosophy" were plagiarized from Aristotle's metaphysics without contributing anything really original of her own. Her writing drones on with teenage-tier purple prose to pad its own sense of self-importance and uses ridiculously exaggerated caricatures of monocle-wearing villains and flawless heroes in a fictional context to prove a point about the real world without her books all resembling it. She didn't submit her philosophy to academic peers at the time for fear of criticism, which almost always rings an alarm bell that someone is full of shit. Not to mention she doesn't even understand basic terms; calling her epistemology based on "reason" when it's quite clearly empiricist - although she didn't care about actual scientific rigor and entertained all sorts of pseudoscience like evolution and global warming denial, and hating quantum physics because she saw it as a threat to her 2000 year old conception of epistemology and metaphysics. Regarding ethics; her system is neither consistent nor practical, and the whole libertarian thing seems somewhat like a charade on the social end of politics, disavowing force and fraud while supporting the domination of Native Americans and hating gay people because... muh feels, basically.

[Anonymous No.7070075]

>>7066267

Except Camus can write motherfucker

[Anonymous No.7070203]

>>7066224
>When so many institutions and doctrines are telling you that you are insignificant and must obey, Rand says "no, humans are great, you are a hero, and you can direct your own life."
Why not just read Stirner then?

[Anonymous No.7070236]

>>7070203
Exactly. Rand is like an obnoxious attempt at Stirner by someone who didn't get to realizing property rights are as much of a spook as any collectivist ideology.

[Anonymous No.7070248]

>>7066224
>Rand says "no, humans are great, you are a hero, and you can direct your own life."

Is this really a good thing to say? Sure, "you can direct your own life" makes sense enough, but telling some random Joe they're heroic and shouldn't be critical of anything "human"? Come on. No wonder her philosophy appeals so much to teenagers.

[Anonymous No.7071326]

>>7066224
Where do I start with her, then?

[Anonymous No.7071436]

>>7071326
Her easiest novel is Anthem. However, I enjoyed The Fountainhead the most due to Howard Roark's character.

Of course, everyone considers Atlas Shrugged her masterpiece, so my verdict is:

Anthem>The Fountainhead > Atlas Shrugged

[Anonymous No.7072420]

>>7071326
The ego and his own

[Anonymous No.7072494]

>>7071436
You can't be serious... Roark seemed to me to resemble a plot device more than a character. I actually liked all the wrong characters in the novel and found the drama to be entertaining. Toohey, as much as a caricature as he was, was kind of amusing to me. Keating seemed very human and his downfall actually made me sympathise with him, though in the end when he begs Roark do design the housing development for him, I found it was overexaggerated and unrealistic--a better ending would be for Roark to have refused to do it for him and instead taught him to design it himself (earlier in the book it Roark does say Keating rarely could draw some good stuff). Generally, the ending was bad. Probably the book is at its best somewhere up to the middle.

[Anonymous No.7072680]

>>7072494

Roark stood up to his school, got expelled for it, didn't go to the big firms, didn't sell out, and stuck to his principles, unlike Keating's unconfident meandering.

Roark is the representation of determination, independence, and talent - those are qualities I strive for too. Maybe I'm alone in this, but I loved Roark.

[Anonymous No.7072733]

>>7072680
Roark is an ideal, not a character.
You can admire the qualities he promotes but he's not really a character.

What annoyed me the most is how everyone was 'afraid' of him. It really annoyed me how many times it happens.

[Anonymous No.7072752]

>>7072733
What irritated me is that the whole book is ideals and archetypes. There was some potential there, but none of the characters grow. It would be nice if in the end Roark became more human and Keating found redemption. Instead, the former stays as a distant 'ideal' while the latter becomes a bumbling mess. Also Dominique is just incomprehensible to me, despite that Rand's writing is such that it leaves nothing to the imagination (very explicitly states emotions rather than attempting to convey them through dialogue). She is literally fucking crazy.

[Anonymous No.7072804]

>>7072680
Roark's actions are not what bothers me. I did not feel like Roark conveyed any emotion and I couldn't get a sense for, or sympathise witg, his motives. He seemed entirely robotic to me. He had a sort of 'arc' (working with cameron, getting rejected from jobs when cameron's studio shut down, having his own business, going broke and working in the quarry etc) but there's no internal conflict like with Keating; no temptation. He is inhuman.

[Anonymous No.7072812]

>>7065705
>…
puke

[Anonymous No.7072864]

>>7070042
>pseudoscience like evolution
christfags pls

[Anonymous No.7073228]

>>7072804
I dunno, I could relate to Roark very closely. He was enigmatic, granted, but I would not describe him as robotic.

Naturally, being calculated is "robotic", but I definitely think he was human in the book

[Anonymous No.7073231]

>>7066271
I like this post a lot. It's very aesthetic.

[Anonymous No.7073237]

>>7065705

This seems straight out of one of those

>and holden truly was the catcher in the rye

Threads. Is this real?

[Anonymous No.7073248]

>>7072864
I think he meant evolution denial.

[Anonymous No.7073836]

[Anonymous No.7074878]

>>7066452
No one is forcing them though.

[Anonymous No.7074922]

Chapter 2 of Atlas Shrugged is beautiful. The rest is shit.

The problem with writing fiction with the end goal of it being a treatise of your philosophy is that nothing unexpected can happen. Every situation you write is predetermined. It makes the exposition predictable, conflict manufactured, and the characters stereotypes.

[Anonymous No.7074960]

>>7073248
I did.

[Anonymous No.7075154]

>>7073836
fuck everyone in this pic

[Anonymous No.7075163]

>>7065681
>want to study russian literature
>"ow, i can't wait, soon i will know the deepness of Mayakovsky, the sadness of Tsvetaeva, the oprofound outlook of Dostoevsky and the unreachable style of Tolstoy".
>ayn rand
This is your bigger fail.

[Anonymous No.7075578]

>>7070075
about as well as Rand or Sartre.

none of them are artists, just ninth-rate philosophers.

[Anonymous No.7076270]

all these rand threads are trite. i am a big fan of rand, but there's this fuckin berlin wall up between hates and loves and you'll never reconcile. none typically have mentioned any parts of the plot. rand would be ashamed.

[Anonymous No.7076275]

>>7076270
the wall is THERE because and i doubt rand would argue me saying this: she wished the haters were dead.
the reason her philosophy is the only one of its kind is it has filled the nich. all politics occurring post rand all have to do with the radian pivot. this is NECESSARILY true because her ethics are derived from her metaphysics.

[Anonymous No.7076282]

to spice up the thread i'll post something i once wrote (probably a shit summary)
Galt held the world, blood running down his eyes, locked on the eyes of Howard Roark and Howard Roark's eyes locked on his. At the same moment, Atlas shrugged and Roark took the world. It fit in the palm of his hand. He had wanted a world to hold.

[Anonymous No.7076289]

>>7076282
oh, and i refer to the protagonist of "Anthem" as beep bop 35

[Anonymous No.7076309]

I intend to find a theoretical equivalent of Rearden Metal

[Anonymous No.7076384]

>>7076309
Cool

[Anonymous No.7076388]

Remember when the rules prohibited Ayn Rand posts? Great times...

[Anonymous No.7076901]

>>7067349
Basically any non middle class businessman and 18 year old reading her books come to her with the million different reasons her philosophy could be objectively proven wrong in areas and she basically plugged her ears and went "LA LA LA" and accused people of just being slaves to defend their society.

The ironic thing about Ayn Rand is that for as much as she wanted to spout about free will, she tried as hard as she could to just ignore everyones that opposed her.

[Anonymous No.7076935]

>>7076901
>accused people of just being slaves to defend their society.
Pretty ironic, given that according to Marxism too, people who support capitalism but do not own any private property (non-bourgeois) suffer from 'false consciousness'.

[Anonymous No.7076950]

I'm not really into Rand, but I do want to know more about the different kinds of Anarcho-Capitalism like Anarcho-Keynesianism, Anarcho-Monetarism, and Anarcho-Social-Democracy...

[Anonymous No.7076965]

>>7074878
You're right. If only we could get them to renounce any claim to be part of humanity and walk on all fours, it would be complete.

[Anonymous No.7076972]

>>7076950
anarcho-social-democracy? sounds like mob rule to me

[Anonymous No.7077083]

>>7072752
Dominique never made any sense to me. She's suppose to be the female Roark, as Rand herself states, but she comes out that way. She just bitches and does whatever she wants but then loves Roark and just wants to fuck him. She's unable to make everyone appreciate him, she just becomes a slut to various people just to piss him off. I don't see that as living your own life, simply being a slave to Roark. She doesn't even live to the standards Rand imposes on Roark. Dagny from Atlas Shrugged felt more to that standard but she still just wants to fuck. I never understood why her female protagonist are so eager to want to have sex while her male protagonist are all stoned wall men who can control their dicks.

I found Keating beyond redemption but I feel that was the point. He listened to his mother and became an architect instead of being a painter, when he had talent. Everyone except Rand's ''ideal characters'' were interesting to me but Dominique and Roark make no sense as characters.
Roark just doesn't give a fuck and Dominique just fucks.

>>7072804
I find it funny somewhat that the ideal human for Rand has to be nearly inhuman. A psychopath who only cares about himself, his art, his service but doesn't become immoral. The only thing that makes him not inhuman to me is that, near the end, he still cares for Keating when he shows Roark his paintings and what could have been.

[Anonymous No.7077110]

>>7070248
How did you extrapolate
>and shouldn't be critical of anything "human"
from any of her philosophy. One should be aware of how powerful the mind is if one puts it to use.

I think what gets in the way for a lot of people, when trying to understand her philosophy, is an unwillingness to take responsibility of their own autonomy.

There's a difference between a reason and an excuse.