The Fountainhead & Atlas shrugged

[eighthobstruction]

....the Adam Curtis film really is worth watching again....with 10 years more info' and experience it really chilled in a much more profound way....we really are just ants....and i'm glad i am not a hero....living in a fairly isolated alienated manner but with autruism....and knowing the cogs, pipes, wires, ordinary mankinds sweat and endurance that help make it all happen....

[Belgrove]

....the Adam Curtis film really is worth watching again....with 10 years more info' and experience it really chilled in a much more profound way....we really are just ants....and i'm glad i am not a hero....living in a fairly isolated alienated manner but with autruism....and knowing the cogs, pipes, wires, ordinary mankinds sweat and endurance that help make it all happen....

Indeed it is a great series that bears repeated watching. In the last programme the overarching thesis reaches ‘The Selfish Gene’. I did not know previously the story of Hamilton and Price that forms the back storey to this. It is both inspiring and deeply tragic, and is wonderfully told. Curtis’ technique of using stock footage to provide the visuals to his soothing narration is like being in someone else’s dream - utterly mesmeric.

[Serial_Apologist]

autruism

I think you may have hit on an important new concept there, eighth: a sort of conflation of truism and autism.

Belgrove is right in praising the Curtis documentary. In addition I would draw attention to the one-time Rand followers, some of them eminences grises in the emergent Neo-Cons, some of them now at best doubtful of what they helped unleash upon the world, in the form of an ideological pandemic (for which no effective antidote has as yet been found, though the ingredients are to hand).

[LHC]

For what it’s worth, Sajid Javid claims to be a big fan of Ayn Rand. Apparently he re-reads the courtroom scene in ‘The Fountainhead’ at least twice a year. The Canadian Rock Group Rush were also fans and referenced Rand’s work in several of their albums.

When Javid admitted to his admiration of Rand, the philosopher and theologian John Milbank had this to say:

'It is extraordinarily disturbing that any mainstream politician should express any admiration for Ayn Rand. We should be concerned that someone like Sajid Javid can now hold high office within the United Kingdom. Rand promoted a cult of amoral selfishness and ruthlessness that is certainly not conservative in any traditional sense – certainly not Burkean, but quite emphatically Nietzschean. The cult of Ayn Rand represents exactly the point where neoliberalism tends to veer towards a particular niche corner of the Far-Right. For there is little in her outlook that would necessarily favour democracy.'

[Serial_Apologist]

For what it’s worth, Sajid Javid claims to be a big fan of Ayn Rand. Apparently he re-reads the courtroom scene in ‘The Fountainhead’ at least twice a year. The Canadian Rock Group Rush were also fans and referenced Rand’s work in several of their albums.

When Javid admitted to his admiration of Rand, the philosopher and theologian John Milbank had this to say:

'It is extraordinarily disturbing that any mainstream politician should express any admiration for Ayn Rand. We should be concerned that someone like Sajid Javid can now hold high office within the United Kingdom. Rand promoted a cult of amoral selfishness and ruthlessness that is certainly not conservative in any traditional sense – certainly not Burkean, but quite emphatically Nietzschean. The cult of Ayn Rand represents exactly the point where neoliberalism tends to veer towards a particular niche corner of the Far-Right. For there is little in her outlook that would necessarily favour democracy.'

I would agree with Mr Milbank (whose name incidentally deserves a place outside Tate Britain!), apart from omitting "necessarily" from what he had to say there. Now you mention it, I do now recall Sajid Javid's Ayn Rand sympathies coming up some while back.

[Leinster Lass]

Seconded. I haven't actually read any of her books, but then I haven't read Mein Kampf either.

I'd rather read 'Fifty Shades of Grey' and its sequels if I REALLY had to choose.

[french frank]

'It is extraordinarily disturbing that any mainstream politician should express any admiration for Ayn Rand. We should be concerned that someone like Sajid Javid can now hold high office within the United Kingdom. Rand promoted a cult of amoral selfishness and ruthlessness that is certainly not conservative in any traditional sense – certainly not Burkean, but quite emphatically Nietzschean. The cult of Ayn Rand represents exactly the point where neoliberalism tends to veer towards a particular niche corner of the Far-Right. For there is little in her outlook that would necessarily favour democracy.'

This from Stephen Davies of tge IEA: “Followers of Rand are not really conservatives in the proper sense of that term. What they are is supporters of a particular economic position (free market capitalism) who are also fans of small government in general and are admirers of individualism as an ethical and social position. Rand articulates very powerfully and clearly things that they feel in a much less articulate way, above all an assertion of individual will and autonomy against social conventions and the will of the majority.”

And Javid: “It’s about the power of the individual … About sticking up for your beliefs, against popular opinion. Being that individual that really believes in something and goes for it.” And there's more! Really!

I very often feel an inclination - even a compulsion - to probe further into a black hole of my ignorance. But in her case I resist. But I was interested in the Curtis documentary to discover her name is pronounce Eye-n not Ayn. And on a very petty level, she was furious when Nathaniel Thing took the course of action HE wanted to take rather than yielding to HER demands. I'd have liked to have heard her response if he'd explained that he was thinking of his own happiness rather than hers.

[eighthobstruction]

This from Stephen Davies of tge IEA: “Followers of Rand are not really conservatives in the proper sense of that term. What they are is supporters of a particular economic position (free market capitalism) who are also fans of small government in general and are admirers of individualism as an ethical and social position. Rand articulates very powerfully and clearly things that they feel in a much less articulate way, above all an assertion of individual will and autonomy against social conventions and the will of the majority.”

And Javid: “It’s about the power of the individual … About sticking up for your beliefs, against popular opinion. Being that individual that really believes in something and goes for it.” And there's more! Really!

I very often feel an inclination - even a compulsion - to probe further into a black hole of my ignorance. But in her case I resist. But I was interested in the Curtis documentary to discover her name is pronounce Eye-n not Ayn. And on a very petty level, she was furious when Nathaniel Thing took the course of action HE wanted to take rather than yielding to HER demands. I'd have liked to have heard her response if he'd explained that he was thinking of his own happiness rather than hers.

....I'd have liked to have heard her response if she'd had to shovel the coal/clay/iron ore/coke to make the materials that constituted her skyscraper....or dig roads to put in drainage for her faeces....etc etc etc....self indulgent twit (and there I use my most unmighty expletive....hoping it will really get up her dead nose)....Nobody came out of that film with any thing but muck on their faces....

[Serial_Apologist]

....I'd have liked to have heard her response if she'd had to shovel the coal/clay/iron ore/coke to make the materials that constituted her skyscraper....or dig roads to put in drainage for her faeces....etc etc etc....self indulgent twit (and there I use my most unmighty expletive....hoping it will really get up her dead nose)....Nobody came out of that film with any thing but muck on their faces....

I couldn't agree more.

But at the same time I don't read that concatenation of personalities and economic forces as other than a straightforward expression of the state of capitalism at that point beyond the very consumerism earlier so-called One Nation Conservatives had greeted Keynsianism as more socially inclusive than anything connected with the politics of Conservatism pre-World War II, when it (repressive permissiveness, as Herbert Marcuse called it), was revealed to the very ideologues for and supporters of big business as meddling with, and contrary to, the spirit of "healthy competitiveness" as espoused by the "proud Victorians" who had challenged destiny and built the Empire and all that was great about Britain.

This is what I don't get about those people who claim that Ayn Rand and her band of followers' brand of Conservatism was not "true Conservatism". The very foundations, practice and ideology of Conservatism had always been rooted in self-reliance and the self-made entrepreneur in competition with "his" fellow exploiters - Christian values in the end coming down to an issue of "Do as we say, not as we do", as can be seen in the mounting scandals surrounding leading lights in C19 banking and industry. Obviously there were exceptions - the Carnegies, Cadburys and other philanthropists who held to humanitarian ideals in dealing with their workforces; but these were in the minority and never accepted in ruling class circles as heroic examples to hand on to history and have statues of themselves built.

When we trace the fate of the new entrepreneurs of liberal consumerist 1960s Britain - people such as Mary Quant and in the 1980s Anita Roddick - we see that the logic of capitalism was either that they remain niche providers or were gobbled up by conglomerates, because this is the way capitalism is inherently weighted leaving aside its wastefulness of resources (human and material) and damage to the biosphere. Reforms were offered only when capitalism could afford them, and then largely reluctantly because the more power you grant people the more they get to know and understand.

In the first instance we criticise capitalism for systemic, not personal reasons. We condemn this system for its intrinsic systemic failings before citing the reality that the richest part of the world's population - who grossly benefit disproportionately to the rest who are made to be in thrall to it - will not see reason and disband and share out the wealth and administration of its means of production. This is BECAUSE their wealth endows them with the position and power to decide what happens to the world and to the rest of us, and their political objective is to hang onto that power and privilege and devise systems of control that con people into believing that it is everyone else who has control through, eg, buying their unsustainable product, putting a cross on a ballot paper every X number of years, and sitting back to suck up the ideological dross that serves as their justification for showing how the evolutionary theories they eventually had to accept and then champion got them and their issue where it almost seems they happen to be by a mixture of good fortune and hard work. Of course CEOs and others in the boardroom take on huge responsibilities for what they do: the urgencies and curtailed room to manoeuvre inbuilt in a system in which all parties need to undercut their rivals to be judged "efficient" enough to court investment creates the alternating, intersecting pathways to success or failure the system is set up to operate, and the personality types demanding of exorbitant salaries and golden handshakes: the large percentage of successful CEOs identified as psychopaths says all that needs to be said about underpinning values.

That's it - that's all it is, in a nutshell!

[eighthobstruction]

....yes I agree .......................you and yr lon sentences

[Mario]

....yes I agree .......................you and yr lon sentences

Yes, and I was told that Atlas shrugged is a l-o-n-g book!

Mario

[muzzer]

I would agree with Mr Milbank (whose name incidentally deserves a place outside Tate Britain!), apart from omitting "necessarily" from what he had to say there. Now you mention it, I do now recall Sajid Javid's Ayn Rand sympathies coming up some while back.

Isn’t Javid fond of referring to himself in the third person? Never struck me as especially bright either tbh.

[Serial_Apologist]

....yes I agree .......................you and yr lon sentences

This is no Dave Spart speaking, you know. Those long sentences (which would have appalled my school English teacher) are designed to pack as much germaneness into them as grammar and dialectical materialism can just about cope with. One learns these things listening to politicians and others being interviewed on Today - "Well I'm going to have to stop you there because afraid we're out of time, Mr X". Read them in a stentorian tone of voice, one that broaches no interruptions, in the manner of Sir Laurence Olivier* delivering Shakespeare, and they sound quite effective, even to me!

*See what I did just then?

[vinteuil]

This is no Dave Spart speaking, you know. Those long sentences (which would have appalled my school English teacher) are designed to pack as much germaneness into them as grammar and dialectical materialism can just about cope with.

... it's not so much the long sentences - it's also the format of how the text comes out here. The individual lines are very long, and in your solid paragraphs my eyes sometimes have to work too hard to find out where to go next at the end of a line. Smaller paragraphs might help...

.

[Serial_Apologist]

... it's not so much the long sentences - it's also the format of how the text comes out here. The individual lines are very long, and in your solid paragraphs my eyes sometimes have to work too hard to find out where to go next at the end of a line. Smaller paragraphs might help...

.

I really appreciate your comment, vints. I shall try and edit that post to make it more digestible.