Ayn Rand Question

coold8

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May 25, 2009
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Hi,

A friend of mine went to some CATO institute thing, and came back and told me the following. I did some research, and all I found was that Libertarians and Ayn Rand did not get along. I am trying to figure out what is fact and fiction here.

His statements were:
1. Toward the end of Ayn Rand's life, she admitted that Atlas Shrugged was completely wrong.
2. She admitted she was no longer an Atheist and found god.

What is true and not true?

Thanks.

-Dave
 
Hi,

A friend of mine went to some CATO institute thing, and came back and told me the following. I did some research, and all I found was that Libertarians and Ayn Rand did not get along. I am trying to figure out what is fact and fiction here.

His statements were:
1. Toward the end of Ayn Rand's life, she admitted that Atlas Shrugged was completely wrong.
2. She admitted she was no longer an Atheist and found god.

What is true and not true?

Thanks.

-Dave


I am always confused when artists are investigated after the fact. Most artists are, by the standards used to reckon the worth of the rest of us, nut jobs. It is because they aren't a good fit with society and because they are geniuses that they excel in art.

When i was much younger, it was revealed that Michelangelo was gay. So What? Did that make the Sistene any less grand?

Picasso smoked and smoked heavily. Now, the places where his art hangs do not allow smoking. If Picasso were to visit one of these places, he'd light up and dare the art lovers to throw him out. Don't think so? He challenged the Nazis.

Ayn Rand wrote a pretty good pair of books and a few others that weren't so good. Does it matter if she was a Communist or a Libertarian or a Martian? I don't think so. I never met her and never will. It's her work that makes her a value to me.

If you like her work, then like it. If you dislike her work, then dislike it. She is related to her work in the way that a mother is related to her daughter. You can see her through her work, but she is not her work.
 
Hi,

A friend of mine went to some CATO institute thing, and came back and told me the following. I did some research, and all I found was that Libertarians and Ayn Rand did not get along. I am trying to figure out what is fact and fiction here.

His statements were:
1. Toward the end of Ayn Rand's life, she admitted that Atlas Shrugged was completely wrong.
2. She admitted she was no longer an Atheist and found god.

What is true and not true?

Thanks.

-Dave

Didn't happen, and, as far as I know, Cato has never claimed it did.
 
Ayn Rand was a liberterian.

I doubt very much that she renounced Atlas Shrugged.
 
Ayn Rand wrote a pretty good pair of books and a few others that weren't so good.

I hope you're not talking about Atlas Shrugged. That was one of the most boring books I ever read. It goes through the same political screed over and over again and doesn't have a single fully-fledged character, only caricatures. To call it a novel, is to insult real novelists.
 
Ayn Rand was a liberterian.

I doubt very much that she renounced Atlas Shrugged.

From a purely cynical point of view: Even if she didn't believe in the message of Atlas Shrugged, why would she renounce it? Atlas Shrugged, together with Fountainhead, is the primary source of her fortune and fame.

So I doubt very seriously she denied it. I'd be very surprised.
 
I've never had any interest in reading either Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead.

I was reading an article about Rand in a recent issue of National Review. It did not mention that she later rejected her thoughts in Atlas Shrugged nor whether she ever found God. The impression I got was that she was a pretty miserable and angry woman who put herself on paper through some really sick characters.
 
Ayn Rand wrote a pretty good pair of books and a few others that weren't so good.

I hope you're not talking about Atlas Shrugged. That was one of the most boring books I ever read. It goes through the same political screed over and over again and doesn't have a single fully-fledged character, only caricatures. To call it a novel, is to insult real novelists.

I also came away from The Fountainhead thinking what an a__hole Howard Roark was.
 
I've never had any interest in reading either Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead.

I was reading an article about Rand in a recent issue of National Review. It did not mention that she later rejected her thoughts in Atlas Shrugged nor whether she ever found God. The impression I got was that she was a pretty miserable and angry woman who put herself on paper through some really sick characters.

I actually liked The Fountainhead when I read it as a teen. The movie is okay, too, if you're in the right mood. Couldn't finish Atlas.

I also read one of her shorter works, the one where all the chracterrs names are numbers. Not terribly original even then, but an okay little read.

Later I learned about the cult surrounding her, and how she seemed to nurture it.

William F. Buckley's novel Getting It Right describes it well, I think. Here he discusses her in an interview with "Human Events:"

Terry Jeffrey: So what was the matter with Ayn Rand's point of view and why was it necessary to bring that back into today's debate?

Bill Buckley: She's a mythogenic character. She had an enormous hold on conservative opinion in the 60's and to a certain extent she still does posthumously. Also she was a fantastic human being. And her sort of breakdown on the sexual things was a big story. Do you know that story?

Jeffrey: No.

Buckley: Well, she fell in love with Nathaniel Branden, 25 years younger, who had been elevated by his association with her, sort of her number one apostle. And she felt that she had to call in his wife and her husband to tell them why transcendent objectivist imperatives required that they sleep together. So this went on for two or three years, then she had sort of a melancholic bout right after Atlas Shrugged was published. So she lost interest for two or three years.

But then interest revived, but at this point he had another lady. So, he felt he ought to tell her, and there ensued a great theatrical scene recorded by two of the five people who were there, Nathaniel Branden and Barbara Branden, and it's in their biographies.

But she was out of her mind crazy. She fired Nathaniel Branden, wouldn't talk to him. Disestablished the Nathaniel Branden Institute. Removed his name from Atlas Shrugged, to whom she had dedicated the book. Putting that together with her insistence that her philosophical mastery of herself was so complete that she never gave vent to any impulse that wasn't a derivative of her exercises in ratiocination made it all the funnier.

She had no sense of humor whatsoever, but she had this terrific hold on people. Alan Greenspan sat there for seven years every Saturday and drooled over her along with a lot of other members of the collective. She was an extraordinary lady.

Getting it right: A conversation with Bill Buckley | Human Events | Find Articles at BNET
 
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I've never had any interest in reading either Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead.

I was reading an article about Rand in a recent issue of National Review. It did not mention that she later rejected her thoughts in Atlas Shrugged nor whether she ever found God. The impression I got was that she was a pretty miserable and angry woman who put herself on paper through some really sick characters.
You may find these informative...

Part one of five, with Phil Donahue:

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzGFytGBDN8]YouTube - Ayn Rand Phil Donahue Interview Part 1 of 5[/ame]

Part one of two, with Mike Wallace, in glorious B&W:

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ukJiBZ8_4k&feature=related]YouTube - Ayn Rand Mike Wallace Interview 1959 part 1[/ame]

Part one of three, with Tom Snyder:

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4doTzCs9lEc&feature=related[/ame]
 
I've never heard anything about her renouncing the ideas in Atlas Shrugged or her Atheism, but she hated libertarians.

"I don’t think plagiarists are effective. I’ve read nothing by a Libertarian (when I read them, in the early years) that wasn’t my ideas badly mishandled—i.e., had the teeth pulled out of them—with no credit given. I didn’t know whether I should be glad that no credit was given, or disgusted. I felt both. They are perhaps the worst political group today, because they can do the most harm to capitalism, by making it disreputable."

"Because Libertarians are a monstrous, disgusting bunch of people: they plagiarize my ideas when that fits their purpose, and they denounce me in a more vicious manner than any communist publication, when that fits their purpose. They are lower than any pragmatists, and what they hold against Objectivism is morality. They’d like to have an amoral political program."

The Ayn Rand Institute: Ayn Rand's Q & A on Libertarianism

Though I've always found it funny that Ayn Rand would call libertarians "plagiarists," when I think it's clear that she plagiarized the character John Galt and the saying "Who is John Galt?" from Garet Garrett's novel The Driver. In this novel there's a character named Henry Galt, and the saying "Who is Henry Galt?" It too has a free market bent, like Atlas Shrugged.
 
Ayn Rand was a liberterian.

I doubt very much that she renounced Atlas Shrugged.
Wrong...She was an anarchist.

She detested being called a libertarian.

She wasn't an anarchist, she hated anarchists as well as libertarians.

"All kinds of people today call themselves “libertarians,” especially something calling itself the New Right, which consists of hippies, except that they’re anarchists instead of collectivists. But of course, anarchists are collectivists."

The Ayn Rand Institute: Ayn Rand's Q & A on Libertarianism
 
Ayn Rand was a liberterian.

I doubt very much that she renounced Atlas Shrugged.
Wrong...She was an anarchist.

She detested being called a libertarian.

Back when I was in the libertarian party the principle divisions within the party were the mini anarchists and the macro anarchists.

Of course there were, and I assume are, many more divisions within the party.

Scratch a libertarian, you get an anarchist.
 
I've never heard that she had regrets about "Atlas Shrugged", and would be really surprised if that were the case. As for giving up atheism, it seems to be something that happens to a good number of people when they are aging and getting toward the end of life. Rand was an interesting woman, whose philosophy I can pretty easily identify with personally. I'm not an objectivist purist by any means, but her ideas have enough merit to be worth consideration imo.
 

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