Understanding Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand is one of the most famous novelists and philosophers of the 20th century. Her ideas about free markets and free minds still captivate millions. Gloria Alvarez with the Objective Standard Institute tells Rand’s fascinating story.
This episode was made possible by a generous donation from The Objective Standard Institute https://objectivestandard.org/
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Script:
Who is John Galt?
This is one of the most famous questions in modern literature. Even today, over 50 years after it was written, you’ll hear people asking it.
Why?
Because it recalls the riveting suspense story, heroic characters, and powerful ideas portrayed in the bestselling novel Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand.
Born in St. Petersburg, Russia on February 2, 1905, Rand became one the most celebrated authors and philosophers of the 20th century. Her most famous novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, still sell hundreds of thousands of copies every year around the world.
Rand lived through the early years of the Russian Revolution, saw her father’s pharmacy business confiscated by the Bolsheviks, and experienced the horrors of communism firsthand.
She longed to emigrate to America. In 1926, she did—and never looked back.
To Rand, the United States meant freedom. She saw the Founding Fathers as heroes. They created a country based on individual rights.
“Man’s right to his own life, to his own liberty, to the pursuit of his own happiness,” she said, means that every individual has a “right to exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself”—nor to the government.
The practical results of the American system, Rand said, could be seen in the skyline of New York City.
“America’s skyscrapers,” she noted, “were not built by public funds nor for a public purpose: they were built by the energy, initiative, and wealth of private individuals for personal profit. And, instead of impoverishing the people, these skyscrapers, as they rose higher and higher, kept raising the people’s standard of living.”
Rand advocated pure capitalism, which she described as a system in which “the government acts only as a policeman that protects man’s rights.” No bailouts, no special favors for big business, no government intervention into the economy.
When people are free to produce and trade, and when the government is limited to protecting rights, everyone benefits. Individuals thrive. Societies prosper.
How do we know this?
Compare freer, more capitalist societies to less free, more statist ones:
In Rand’s day —
America compared to the Soviet Union.
West Germany to East Germany.
More recently:
South Korea to North Korea.
Colombia to Venezuela.
Such differences were painfully obvious to Rand. So were their causes.
In Atlas Shrugged, she showed how easily a free society can collapse into a dictatorship. The heroine, Dagny Taggart, works tirelessly and brilliantly to save her family’s railroad business, while ever-increasing government interventions destroy businesses and crush the economy.
Meanwhile, one by one, the top producers across various industries mysteriously disappear. No one knows where they have gone. The only clue is a question they leave behind: Who is John Galt?
As the economy crumbles, how do politicians, bureaucrats, and academics react? They blame “the greedy businessman” and decry the profit motive and free markets. Their solution: more government intervention which, of course, only makes the problem worse.
Sound familiar?
Atlas Shrugged is a cautionary tale about pursuing equality over excellence—state control over free markets—but it’s also about the power of the individual and the power of reason.
The individual’s reasoning mind, Rand argued, is his tool of knowledge—his only means of understanding what is true or false, how the world works, what is good or bad for his life.
This is the theme of Rand’s work more broadly: In order to thrive, to achieve happiness, the individual must think for himself and live by the judgment of his own mind.
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Hey, y'all! Remember that Ayn Rand was an atheist, and figured belief in God was completely irrational?
She would be a Great fictional Antagonist
She was a militant atheist- odd to have her "philosophy" of selfishness celebrated on a forum that proselytizes on the value of religious faith. She couldn't write, there was no humour or joy or simple good feeling for people in anything she did. Even William F.Buckley OF ALL PEOPLE found her appalling as far back as the 1950s; Whittaker Chambers famously trashed Atlas Shrugged in the National Review. Who was John Galt? Who gives a shit?
Christopher Hitchens on Ayn Rand:
"I don't think that there is any need to have essays advocating selfishness among human beings. I don't know what your impression has been, but some things require no further reinforcement."
Heh-heh.
For you conservatives is like taking a stroll in a mine field. You don't want talk about individual rights and you can't
I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine…
Rand, Huxley, and Orwell should ALL be required reading as a part of Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University. Call it an Economics class.
"I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery." – Thomas Jefferson
Government provides no bailouts.
ayn rand IS ROTTING IN HELL IN EXCRUCIATING AGONY FOR ALL ETERNITY
I've tried to understand Ayn Rand. I can't agree with her way of thinking. I am a Christian, Conservative, Republican who is leaning towards Independent. She just thinks so differently from me that I want to run from anything that has to do with her.
Ayn Rand is the anti-Christ
Ayn Rand overcompensated and, in turn, created an opposite, but equally destructive philosophy. Álvarez most certainly subscribes to it, and supports abortion, euthanasia, drugs and sexual deviancy. Some pursuit of happiness.
I watch videos like this hoping that someone can explain Ayn Rand in a way that makes her philosophy seem reasonable on some level, but I keep being disappointed. The explanations fail to explain issues that Ayn Rand must have addressed. For example, the notion that government regulation is inherently evil implies that the capitalists have every right to pursue their own happiness while the public must accept the collateral costs of their business enterprises (contamination, etc.) and maintain without cost to the capitalists the social structures that enable them to do business. And I'm always left wondering what the great achievers do once they're all together in their cozy community without "deadbeats" to work their factories or buy their products. Guess I'll just have to read "Atlas Shrugged" after all.
Hey! That's that philosophy lady that worships a child killer. A guy that kidnapped a young girl, murdered her, ransomed her to her father, and dumped her out of his car in pieces right in front of her father. what a role model. Didn't she die on welfare?
Ayn Rand is goddess
disgusting almost anarcho capitalist
Ayn Rand was not a conservative. Look it up, she said conservatives are more dangerous than liberals. MAGA is collectivist and accept Christian altruism.
As one who is sick of left wing propaganda, I see a similarity between the leftist claim that 'proper socialism hasn't been tried yet' and Rand's similar claim regarding capitalism. Could both claims be right?
“Diversity, equity, and inclusion really means bureaucracy, victimology, and incompetence. And it’s a scam.”
If Ayn rand was against "bail outs", and "special favors for big business" than she would be openly against neo liberal capitalism today.
I simply dont like her attitude towards the destitute. and her whole philosophy is just "F___ you got mine" in layman's terms.
The democrats are using 1984 and atlas shrugged as instruction manuals with frightening effectiveness.
Well, if one doesn't have equality of at least, opportunity, then capitalism or no, the system values Ayn proposes can never work correctly.
5:31 "This video was made possible by a generous donation from the Objective Standard Institute." ~ um, wasn't it Ayn Rand who said, "Altruism is evil"? Now there's a contradiction if ever there was one.
"Fransisco stopped, looked at her, and slapped her face.
She felt …[a] violent pleasure that Francisco had done it. She felt pleasure frm the full, hot pain in her cheek and from the taste of blood in the corner of her mouth. She felt plesure in what she suddenly grasped about him, about herself and about his motive. She…stood facing him in he consciousness of a new power, feeling herself his equal for the first time.
'Come here,' he ordered.
She laughed, stepping back. 'Oh no. I want to keep it as it is. I hope it swells terribly. I like it.'"
-Ayn Rand, the greatest philosipher of all time, and author of shitty erotica
“This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.” – Dorothy Parker in her review of “Atlas Shrugged”