Atlas Shrugged

oscarBravo

ancapailldorcha wrote: »

Why the warnings about The Fountainhead? What's going on there?

I've said it before: Fountainhead is the only book I've ever read where I wanted to punch every single character in the face, repeatedly and hard, from the first page to the last.

ancapailldorcha

oscarBravo wrote: »

I've said it before: Fountainhead is the only book I've ever read where I wanted to punch every single character in the face, repeatedly and hard, from the first page to the last.

I haven't read the whole thread yet hence my asking.

oscarBravo

ancapailldorcha wrote: »

I haven't read the whole thread yet hence my asking.

It may not have been in this thread I said it, to be fair.

BlaasForRafa

oscarBravo wrote: »

I've said it before: Fountainhead is the only book I've ever read where I wanted to punch every single character in the face, repeatedly and hard, from the first page to the last.

Try Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, I did last only 12 pages though before throwing it at the wall.

robindch

ancapailldorcha wrote: »

Would people recommend reading Atlas Shrugged?

I'm going to be polite this morning and say - no, there really are more worthwhile things to do with your time.

Nodin

ancapailldorcha wrote: »

The ideas alone are probably reason enough to read Atlas Shrugged. Glad I didn't buy Fountainhead along with it now! I had a quick look on Wikipedia and it appears that the lead character is basically Rand's vision of the ideal man.

*shudder

Vivisectus

Basically, society runs on Randian Ubermen, who do everything right because they are just objectively awesome, and because the tragedy of the commons does not exist. Meanwhile communist crab-people keep sucking the life-blood out of them like leeches. One day they leave and society collapses because no-one knows how to do anything without these objectively awesome creatures. The end.

ancapailldorcha

Vivisectus wrote: »

Basically, society runs on Randian Ubermen, who do everything right because they are just objectively awesome, and because the tragedy of the commons does not exist. Meanwhile communist crab-people keep sucking the life-blood out of them like leeches. One day they leave and society collapses because no-one knows how to do anything without these objectively awesome creatures. The end.

I was hoping to read it myself. Thanks for that.

Vivisectus

Ah but there is a twist:

All poor people are stupid and lazy, and all rich people have earned their money by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps

robindch

Would I be right in thinking that there's motivation on offer too:

Spoiler:

It's good to pay people bugger-all it works to encourage the low-paid to want a better job. And if they get successively better jobs, then perhaps they too might ultimately become sufficiently rich and desocialized to be counted amongst the Randian Ubermen themselves.

marienbad

robindch wrote: »

Would I be right in thinking that there's motivation on offer too:

Spoiler:

It's good to pay people bugger-all it works to encourage the low-paid to want a better job. And if they get successively better jobs, then perhaps they too might ultimately become sufficiently rich and desocialized to be counted amongst the Randian Ubermen themselves.

And at the if all else fails they can throw themselves at the mercy of the social services they spent a lifetime vilifying , the hypocritical spongers !

PopePalpatine

Vivisectus wrote: »

Basically, society runs on Randian Ubermen, who do everything right because they are just objectively awesome, and because the tragedy of the commons does not exist. Meanwhile communist crab-people keep sucking the life-blood out of them like leeches. One day they leave and society collapses because no-one knows how to do anything without these objectively awesome creatures. The end.

You forgot the sequel, where they all feck off to a space station and use robots to keep the underclass down. I think they made a movie about it, its title sounded like a Greek myth.

Nodin

robindch wrote: »

Would I be right in thinking that there's motivation on offer too:

Spoiler:

It's good to pay people bugger-all it works to encourage the low-paid to want a better job. And if they get successively better jobs, then perhaps they too might ultimately become sufficiently rich and desocialized to be counted amongst the Randian Ubermen themselves.

....evidently Ms Rand didn't learn the lesson of her motherland.

Brian Shanahan

oscarBravo wrote: »

I've read it a couple of times, apart from John Galt's monologue, which I just physically can't.

It's not well written, and I find it a pretty detestable philosophy illustrated by one-dimensional characters, but it's got a pacey plot.

Don't read The Fountainhead.

Do. Not. Read. The Fountainhead.

Trust me on this.

To be honest, if you have any compassion for your fellow man, I'd strongly advise against reading Atlas Shrugged as well. When a person's philosophy can be pithily and 100% accurately described as "Fúck you, I got's mine!" then you really don't nead to read further about it.

magicbastarder

slight thread resurrection, but this is good:

http://the-toast.net/2015/01/12/actual-letter-ayn-rand-wrote-little-girl/

bnt

marienbad wrote: »

And at the if all else fails they can throw themselves at the mercy of the social services they spent a lifetime vilifying , the hypocritical spongers !

Is this a reference to the story that Rand took Medicaid benefits towards the end of her life? After a lifetime of paying income tax, I can't really fault her for taking some of it back. :P

PopePalpatine

I figured this was a better choice of thread than the Republican Fruitcakes one - the story of "Sacrificing Lives for Profit" - or rather, "How I Learned to Stop Feeling Empathy for Ordinary People and Started to Love F*cking Them Over" - brought to you by the Koch brothers!

karma_

PopePalpatine wrote: »

I figured this was a better choice of thread than the Republican Fruitcakes one - the story of "Sacrificing Lives for Profit" - or rather, "How I Learned to Stop Feeling Empathy for Ordinary People and Started to Love F*cking Them Over" - brought to you by the Koch brothers!

Well, we can't accuse them of being dishonest. I dread to think of the world these vile fúckers are going to create with the sheer volume of money they are throwing at education.

robindch

Zack Snyder, a director known for films like Batman v Superman, appears to be planning to take Rand's The Fountainhead and turn it into a gripping film. The Irish Times is not so sure this will work.

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/the-trouble-with-ayn-rand-and-zack-snyder-s-the-fountainhead-1.3513733

Irish Times wrote:

Forget the non-news that Danny Boyle will be directing Daniel Craig in the next James Bond film. The skinny that’s got the cinema world abuzz concerns Zack Snyder’s plan to direct a film version of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. The phrase “Zack Snyder’s The Fountainhead” reads like the answer to a question involving the words “worst ever…” on Mock the Week. Think “Dan Brown’s Mein Kampf”. It’s not just that a much-reviled director is taking on a much-reviled author. There’s something special about both these people. The director of Batman Vs Superman and Legend of the Sucker Punch has, not entirely unfairly, come to stand in for all that’s wrong with big-budget, fan-servicing comic-book movies.

The late Ms Rand is something else altogether. Mentor to a thousand half-bright libertarians, she has – with turgid bullet-stoppers such as Atlas Shrugged – gradually emerged as a literary version of Marmite. You either hate her books or you’re a maniac. (With apologies to people who don’t like Marmite.) A confession is due. I have read none of The Fountainhead and only around 150 pages of Atlas Shrugged. So you may reasonably stop reading here. I watched four series of The West Wing to confirm I couldn’t stand the thing. If life were a thousand times longer, it would still be too short to make any similar accommodation with Rand’s turgid prose.

Exhaustingly occupied with forwarding a ruthless philosophy dubbed “Objectivism” – essentially “abandon granny on the ice floe” – Atlas Shrugged concerns a future America that burdens strivers with endless unnecessary regulations. As the novel unfolds, a figure named John Galt emerges to offer escape from this collectivist drudgery. Altruism is a sham. Adherence to rational self-interest is the only worthwhile aim. Hey, I got the seat first, pregnant lady. I guess you’re going to have to stand all the way to Seattle.

Again, I am taking much of this on trust. Galt is, for most of the first million pages, little more than a vague rumour. He properly forms himself sometime after the glacial storytelling and proselytising, street-lunatic dialogue wore down my perverse resolve. Were I the Mighty Thor, I would have flung the book across the room. Granted only mortal strength, I was able merely to let it crash seismically to the carpet.

Yet the works of Ayn Rand have somehow become among the most influential on American campuses. You know that trust-fund radical – here he’s called something like OdhrCrosby-Sporkington – who presses David Foster Wallace on every uninterested woman? He is nothing to the sinister proto-Galt who enjoys ostentatiously reading The Fountainhead in public places. Few literary departments will have anything to do with Rand but, in 1999, when Random House ran a poll to discover the greatest novel of the 20th century, Atlas Shrugged ended up at No 1, with The Fountainhead just behind in second place. Two more Rand novels landed in the top 10.

Born in Russia before the revolution, resident in the United States since 1925, Rand gathered a group of acolytes around her that included Alan Greenspan, future Federal Reserve chairman, while she was working on the paving slab that became Atlas Shrugged. The books were initially not big sellers. King Vidor’s film of The Fountainhead, starring a hilariously miscast Gary Cooper as a deranged architect, was almost universally panned on its released in 1949.

As the decades passed, however, more and more Worshippers of the Self found themselves drawn to her crackpot philosophy. Not all Rand’s dicta suit the current American right – she was an atheist and, as an opponent of all regulation, pro-choice – but her followers at the libertarian end of the spectrum have filleted out the bits that matter. The books have become The Lord of the Rings for people who find beggars an eyesore. They are Randians. She has become an adjective.

As Snyder moves forward on his version of The Fountainhead, he should, however, remember that Rand remains very much an American phenomenon. Few lunatics in British or Irish universities press the books on unlucky acquaintances. Fans of good eggs Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett and Philip Pullman arrange online campaigns to elevate their books in polls such as the Modern Library’s. Nobody on this side of the Atlantic does the same for Rand.

She belongs in a hefty file containing US cultural phenomena that perish in transit. It also includes noodly college rock such as that perpetrated by Hootie and the Blowfish, The Dave Matthews Band and the unlistenably dexterous Phish. She belongs with broad comedy such as Saturday Night Live. She belongs with grape soda, jello salad, grits, corn dogs and sweet potato with marshmallows. An endlessly grand woman, Rand would have hated that last comparison. Which is why we make it.