I'd been hoping for a more or less balanced account of Ayn Rand's life and her influential novel, "Atlas Shrugged." It's getting harder to ignore both of them, what with our current Vice Presidential candidate having become a convert to objectivism in his youth.
It was a disappointing movie, coming across as a hagiography, something like the life of Jesus. Ayn Rand, a Russian émigré, seems to have predicted the panic that grips so many of us today. There's a lot of philosophical fluff, and some of her writing is nicely done, but you know what's at the heart of our despair? Too many regulations, that's what.
The world is divided into creators and looters. There are those who make and those who take. The government is the chief taker and its instruments are tax collectors and Wall Street thugs. The government imposes regulations and then imposes regulators on the regulations and it all multiplies like cancer cells. Among the looters would have to be counted those of us on food stamps, unemployment benefits, Medicaid, Social Security, Medicare, anyone who received help from Mother Theresa. That's about it. If it begins to sound a little familiar -- "Let's free the job creators", and so forth -- that's because it is. I DID say the philosophy was "influential."
Rand, judging from what I've read elsewhere, was a more complex, and a more interesting person than this well-done propaganda gives her credit for. Her philosophy attracted a number of bright and eager young people in the 1950s and Rand became a sort of cult leader, tolerating little in the way of dissent. She bedded one or two of the more devoted males, with which I find absolutely nothing wrong, and threw out some dissidents.
I didn't recognize any of the many talking heads. I'm not a philosopher nor a follower of any, except for a loose commitment to science and a notion of humanitarianism that's rapidly becoming antiquated. I guess I'd have been dismissed from the group. I think, though, that I may have heard of Harry Binswanger. He's a smart guy. He was teaching at CUNY at the same time I was. But I don't think any discussion with him would be very fruitful because he's so orthodox. For instance, he would throw open the borders of the United States and allow all the immigrants to flood the country. Ayn Rand, after all, was herself an immigrant. And Binswanger wouldn't worry about terrorism. If there were a threat from, say, Iran, he'd invade and conquer the country and eliminate the threat. Simple, no?
There's a recurring problem with straightforward and simple analyses of the world around us, however appealing they might sound. The problem is that the world hasn't been structured in a way that's deliberately designed to facilitate our understanding of it. It's pretty complicated.
That's one of the reasons it seems to me that charter documents like the Constitution are worded so vaguely. It's good that they're inexact. They can be interpreted in ways that fit the problems of the times. Imagine if one of the Ten Commandments read, "Thou shallt not allow any money-lending institution with a capital base of more than ten thousand shekels to lend money at a rate greater than 3.6 percent per annum." Imagine if the Second Amendment read, "No guns allowed for any citizen under any circumstances." Imagine a philosophy that says flatly, "Let's get rid of taxes and make the government impotent."
Eric Fromm once observed that thinking was an irritant and it was Charles Sanders Peirce who defined "belief" as "thought, at rest."
It was a disappointing movie, coming across as a hagiography, something like the life of Jesus. Ayn Rand, a Russian émigré, seems to have predicted the panic that grips so many of us today. There's a lot of philosophical fluff, and some of her writing is nicely done, but you know what's at the heart of our despair? Too many regulations, that's what.
The world is divided into creators and looters. There are those who make and those who take. The government is the chief taker and its instruments are tax collectors and Wall Street thugs. The government imposes regulations and then imposes regulators on the regulations and it all multiplies like cancer cells. Among the looters would have to be counted those of us on food stamps, unemployment benefits, Medicaid, Social Security, Medicare, anyone who received help from Mother Theresa. That's about it. If it begins to sound a little familiar -- "Let's free the job creators", and so forth -- that's because it is. I DID say the philosophy was "influential."
Rand, judging from what I've read elsewhere, was a more complex, and a more interesting person than this well-done propaganda gives her credit for. Her philosophy attracted a number of bright and eager young people in the 1950s and Rand became a sort of cult leader, tolerating little in the way of dissent. She bedded one or two of the more devoted males, with which I find absolutely nothing wrong, and threw out some dissidents.
I didn't recognize any of the many talking heads. I'm not a philosopher nor a follower of any, except for a loose commitment to science and a notion of humanitarianism that's rapidly becoming antiquated. I guess I'd have been dismissed from the group. I think, though, that I may have heard of Harry Binswanger. He's a smart guy. He was teaching at CUNY at the same time I was. But I don't think any discussion with him would be very fruitful because he's so orthodox. For instance, he would throw open the borders of the United States and allow all the immigrants to flood the country. Ayn Rand, after all, was herself an immigrant. And Binswanger wouldn't worry about terrorism. If there were a threat from, say, Iran, he'd invade and conquer the country and eliminate the threat. Simple, no?
There's a recurring problem with straightforward and simple analyses of the world around us, however appealing they might sound. The problem is that the world hasn't been structured in a way that's deliberately designed to facilitate our understanding of it. It's pretty complicated.
That's one of the reasons it seems to me that charter documents like the Constitution are worded so vaguely. It's good that they're inexact. They can be interpreted in ways that fit the problems of the times. Imagine if one of the Ten Commandments read, "Thou shallt not allow any money-lending institution with a capital base of more than ten thousand shekels to lend money at a rate greater than 3.6 percent per annum." Imagine if the Second Amendment read, "No guns allowed for any citizen under any circumstances." Imagine a philosophy that says flatly, "Let's get rid of taxes and make the government impotent."
Eric Fromm once observed that thinking was an irritant and it was Charles Sanders Peirce who defined "belief" as "thought, at rest."