Is Ayn Rand overrated?
 

Interesting review of a new biography on one hell of an inspirational thinker/writer: http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/60120/

i didnt know Rand worked for AVN...

but yeah, he's probably overrated... :2 cents:

i think it is "she"

The Fountainhead sucked balls...

I've been trying to read her books and they so so fucking dry it tuff to get though more than a couple of pages at a time.

this guy sums up ayn rand. she should of never been taken seriously.

http://lefteyeonthemedia.files.wordp...an-alan-03.jpg

http://www.alangreenspan.org/images/...n_Ayn_Rand.jpg

Nah, she's great, right up there with L. Ron.

This is about as polarizing a question - "Is Ayn Rand overrated?" - as speaking about abortion, Ronald Reagan, Clinton/Bush, Republican/Democrat, Yankees/Red Sox, etc.

BUT -

Yes, she's overrated - and no, in terms of her INFLUENCE, she's UNDERrated.
IMHO, if you want to "understand" Ayn Rand relatively quickly and succinctly, then read "The Virtue Of Selfishness". The title says it all, actually.

So there ya go - now you understand Ayn Rand. "If everyone was selfish and ONLY concerned themselves WITH THEIR OWN desires, needs, etc then no one would be NEEDY and everything would be perfect."

Fuck her, the heartless cunt, and anyone who believes in that kind of bullshit.

Discuss.

If you like the the recent economic meltdown of the US, you will appreciate Ayn Rand. She's another fucking meatball.

Atlas Shrugged is said to be some sort of actual blueprint...

Poorly regurgitated Nietzsche, what's there to discuss?

Yes, she's overrated.... try reading Hans-Hermann Hoppe instead...

http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Econ...dp/0765808684/

i have been meaning to read that :(

I usually don't have too much time so I got the Audio Book of Atlas Shrugged. Its a quicker less dry way to get the Cliff Notes. The only draw back is if you get a Audio book with some monotone mutha fucker, but that one was fine. "They" need to hire some actors and make audio books more exciting. I had Art of War , but the dude reading it sucked cock in Macy's window during Black Friday.

Atlas Shrugged is a great book. Anyone who wants to truly be an entrepreneur should read it, or at least read the cliff notes version. Understand the concepts of the story .

everyone is overrated

you should grow out of that shit when you are 15.

disagree totally, I think The Fountainhead is a great book and everyone should read it :2 cents:


and thinking that Ayn Rand type philosophy is similar to what got us in the banking mess we are in is showing a complete non-understanding of her theories, in fact it is exactly what she was most strongly against that has resulted in the messes we are in :2 cents:

Many of you may already know that the book "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand, is the blueprint for the New World Order. In fact it is a little known habit of the elite to place a copy of this book like the one below (35th anniversary gold embossed) on their coffee tables. If you are one of "them" you will be able to quickly identity that these people (who process this book) are "in the know". This is really no different than a Freemason using a secret handshake to identify a fellow Mason.


In 1957, a 1,168 page book by Ayn Rand, called Atlas Shrugged, was published. According to one source, Rand was alleged to be a mistress to Philippe Rothschild, who instructed her to write the book in order to show that through the raising of oil prices, then destroying the oil fields and shutting down the coal mines, the Illuminati would take over the world. It also related how they would blow up grain mills, derail trains, bankrupt and destroy their own companies, till they had destroyed the economy of the entire world; and yet, they would be so wealthy, that it would not substantially affect their vast holdings. The novel is about a man who stops the motor of the world, of what happens when “the men of the mind, the intellectuals of the world, the originators and innovators in every line of industry go on strike; when the men of creative ability in every profession, in protest against regulation, quit and disappear.”


If we are to believe that the book represents the Illuminati’s plans for the future, then the following excerpts may provide some insight to the mentality of the elitists who are preparing us for one-world government.



One of the characters, Francisco d’Anconia, a copper industrialist and heir to a great fortune, the first to join the strike, says:



“I am destroying d’Anconia Copper, consciously, deliberately, by plan and by my own hand. I have to plan it carefully and work as hard as if I were producing a fortune- in order not to let them notice it and stop me, in order not to let them seize the mines until it is too late ... I shall destroy every last bit of it and every last penny of my fortune and every ounce of copper that could feed the looters. I shall not leave it as I found it- I shall leave it as Sebastian d’Anconia found it- then let them try to exist without him or me!”



A bit later, d’Anconia says: “We produced the wealth of the world- but we let our enemies write its moral code.” Still later, he says: “We’ll survive without it. They won’t.”



Dagney Taggart, the main character of the book, is the head of the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad. Her goal was to find out who John Galt was. She discovered that he was a young inventor with the Twentieth Century Motor Company, who said he would put an end to the regulations which bound a man to his job indefinitely. Before disappearing, he said: “I will stop the motor of the world.” He told her:



“Dagney, we who’ve been called ‘materialists’ ... we’re the only ones who know how little value or meaning there is in material objects ... we’re the ones who create their value and meaning. We can afford to give them up ... We are the soul, of which railroads, copper mines, steel mines, and oil wells are the body- and they are living entities that beat day and night, like our hearts, in the sacred function of supporting human life, but only so long as they remain our body, only so long as they remain the expression, the reward and the property of achievement. Without us, they are corpses and their sole product is poison, not wealth or food, the poison of disintegration that turns men into hordes of scavengers ... You do not have to depend on any material possessions, they depend on you, you create them, you own the one and only tool of production ... leave them the carcass of that railroad, leave them all the rusted nails and rotted ties and gutted engines- but don’t leave them your mind.”



Later in the book, Galt says:



“And the same will be happening in every other industry, wherever machines are used- the machines which they thought could replace our minds. Plane crashes, oil tank explosions, blast furnace breakouts, high tension wire electrocutions, subway cave-ins, and trestle collapses- they’ll see them all. The very machines that made their life so safe- will now make it a continuous peril ... You know that the cities will be hit worst of all. The cities were made by the railroads and will go with them ... When the rails are cut, the city of New York will starve in two days. That’s all the supply of food its got. It’s fed by a continent three thousand miles long. How will they carry food to New York? By directive and ox-cart? But first, before it happens, they’ll go through the whole of the agony- through the shrinking, the shortages, the hunger riots, the stampeding violence in the midst of the growing stillness ... They’ll lose the airplanes first, then their automobiles, then their trucks, then their horsecarts .. Their factories will stop, then their furnaces and their radios. Then their electric light system will go.”



Francisco d’Anconia, who blew up all the copper mines in the world, said of Galt:



“He had quit the Twentieth Century. He was living in a garret in a slum neighborhood. He stepped to the window and pointed at the skyscrapers of the city. He said that we had to extinguish the lights of the world, and when we would see the lights of New York go out, we would know that our job was done.”



Galt led the men of the mind, on strike, and they retired to a self-supporting valley, where a character, Midas Mulligan, says that “the world is falling apart so fast that it will soon be starving. But we will be able to support ourselves in this valley.” Galt said: “There is only one kind of men who have never been on strike in human history ... the men who have carried the world on their shoulders, have kept it alive, have endured torture as sole payment ... Well, their turn has come. Let the world discover who they are, what they do and what happens when they refuse to function. This is the strike of the men of the mind.”



The book describes what resulted from the strike: “But years later, when we saw the lights going out, one after another, in the great factories that had stood like mountains for generations, when we saw the gates closing and the conveyer belts turning still, when we saw the roads growing empty and the streams of cars draining off, when it began to look as if some silent power were stopping the generators of the world and the world was crumbling quietly...” And the culmination of their efforts: “The plane was above the peaks of the skyscrapers when suddenly, with the abruptness of a shudder, as if the ground had parted to engulf it, the city had disappeared from the face of the earth. It took them a moment to realize that the panic had reached the power stations- and the lights of New York had gone out.” The men of the mind had taken over the world.



Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged, which was a bestseller; had previously written We the Living (1936); The Fountainhead (1943), which became a 1949 movie starring Gary Cooper as an architect willing to blow up his own work, rather than see it perverted by public housing bureaucrats; and Anthem (1946). She later wrote For the New Intellectual (1961), Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966), and The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1970). She also published a monthly journal (with Nathaniel Branden, a psychological theorist) called The Objectivist.



Rand based her novel on her philosophy which she calls Objectivism. As she puts it: “We are the radicals for capitalism ... because it is the only system geared to the life of a rational being ... The method of capitalism’s destruction rests on never letting the world discover what it is that is being destroyed.” She also said about the book: “I trust that no one will tell me that men such as I write about don’t exist. That this book has been written- and published- is proof that they do.”



In the book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, in a chapter titled “Is Atlas Shrugging” she wrote that “the purpose of this book is to prevent itself from being prophetic.” She also quoted several news stories which seemed to indicate that the world was indeed being depleted of its brains and intellectuals.



Is Atlas Shrugged a coded blueprint for the Illuminati’s plans of bringing this world to a point where they can institute a one world government? It certainly is thought provoking, and it is included only for the sake of conjecture. Being that the Illuminati is destroying our economy, and they do control the corporate structure of the United States, if not the world, there just may be something to this book, and maybe we should consider it a warning.

tl;dr copypasta.... :1orglaugh

if by over-rated you mean batshit crazy.. then yes.

You have to be kidding me! You are the one that apparently does not understand her theories. Unrestricted capitalism, the idea that markets are self correcting, etc., keeping government regulation out of the marketplace are her tenants and exactly the reason we are in an almost complete economic disaster. Get yourself a Kindle and take a minute.

you must be joking

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Greenspan

watch the 1st clip

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/cron/

It is a blueprint, except for the part where the looters -- people like the banking and insurance folks -- who use political influence to take from those who actually work and create value . . . well, they were the villains in Atlas Shrugged.

that might be the way to go. i got a book that is all about her theory of objectivism and i try to read, but after a couple of pages, i need to take a break.

i was FORCED to read rand, ugh, had a college economics professor who thought she was the shit, this was back in the early 90s.

http://www.slate.com/id/2233966/#return

ayn rand was a fucking kook

Atlas Shrugged is the only think of her's that I have read. I liked it and thought it was good. I also thought it made some good points, but is an over simplistic view as far as how an economy works.

Sure, if you take away all the incentive for someone to develop something good, they will stop trying to develop it (at least in many cases). I have made this argument about torrents and some tube sites. If people insist on downloading movies for free and not paying for them eventually we might come to a place where the return on a movie doesn't justify the means and those that make the movies will just give up and crank out low budget shit that makes a profit instead of actually developing decent ideas. We will end up like Idiocracy says with all TV shows being either monster truck rallies or people getting hit in the balls. The same can be said for industry. If you work hard to come up with a great concept and are forced to give it to your competitors for free, your motivation for working hard to create new concepts will be nearly zero.

Where Rand falls short in her vision, IMO, is where she fails to show how completely unregulated capitalism eventually fucks over the little guy and give them less and less including less incentive to work hard and add something of value to the companies they work for. The same can be said about true communism. When companies control every aspect of the market they can conspire to keep wages at whatever level they want and working conditions at any level they want. This can cause a shrinking of the middle class and makes something like the typical "American Dream" harder to reach for many people. Uncontrolled capitalism also makes it very difficult for an average guy to start his own business and prosper because it allows for large companies to grow unchecked and control everything. With pure communism you end up with a central government controlling everything, with pure capitalism you end up with a central core of big businesses controlling everything. Neither can last forever and neither is good for a healthy society.

Still, I don't see it as a blueprint for a new world order or a one world government. I see it more as a warning that too much regulation is bad and that we need to let people who create. invent and revolutionize things do their thing.

"In Atlas Shrugged, Rand tells the story of the U.S. economy crumbling under the weight of crushing government interventions and regulations. Meanwhile, blaming greed and the free market, Washington responds with more controls that only deepen the crisis. Sound familiar?"

?Yaron Brook, "Is Rand Relevant?"
The Wall Street Journal, March 15, 2009

she's overrated

What is happening has all been planned. They are crashing everything including their own companies in hopes of providing their world government system as a solution. People need to understand that a world government on a planet isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's just that the people behind this particular "New World Order" as they call it are nothing but scumbags who would just as well see you and I dead.

So if they don't care about anyone but themselves and don't care if people live or die, why would they want a "One World Government"? What good would it do them to have an entire planet that hates them? What more would they gain from this that they don't already have?

Succinct and accurate. Thanks for the quote :thumbsup

Most people probably won't "hate them," they will welcome their world government with open arms.

Families like the Rothschilds have been controlling the currency of nations through central banks for centuries now. They are past money, it's about power. Power to rule the entire planet, it's the oldest conquest in the book. They want 80% population reduction and the rest microchipped. Our job is to not let this happen. Call it crazy all you want, it is crazy, and it's all unfolding right before our eyes.

But according to everything that has been posted it has been unfolding for hundreds of years. I just don't buy it. It has been just around the corner forever and never happens nor will it ever happen.

If you follow the news you will see how the New World Order is coming to fruition... the financial stages started at the last G-20 meeting in April.....

Kind of like how Onwebcam a few weeks ago swore up and down that with the signing of the new climate control treaty in December that the new world government would be upon it and at last we will all see what he has been ranting about then, alas, with a few minutes on Google the reality is known that the treaty is doomed because somehow these world leaders, all of whom are supposedly under the oppressive thumb of this new world order, can't seem to come to an agreement and so it doesn't happen.

And if it is just financial issues causing this take over, why didn't they do it in the 30's during the great depression when there were soup lines in every town in the nation and there wasn't an internet that allowed people to get the truth out? They could have swept in and saved everyone and been welcomed with open arms by their saviors. . . that is, until they killed 80% of the world's population (as you claim) which makes as much sense as a guy sitting around and slapping himself in the nuts all night just for entertainment.

Of course they could have done in the 40's too, right after WW2 when half the world was left in ruins and millions were dead and millions more were in dire need of help. But it didn't happen then either.

I think we will end up with a form of a global economy. I don't think that is too far fetched, but we are years if not decades away from anything like that actually happening. And by that I mean a global currency and a global tax system. But there can't be a one world government. If for no other reason religious and cultural beliefs will not allow it to happen.

Not my kind of philosopher but if she had anything to do with Neil Peart's kick-ass drumming style I like her...

kane, why do you waste your time arguing with that idiot?

The biography isn't very flattering. If it were it would be a hagiography instead of a biography. :) Anyway, Rand came along at a time when many people felt they NEEDED to hear her message.

Dude, thank you for that link. I'm all about this type of reading material.

I think I have a sickness :)

As a writer? Yes.

As a thinker? NO.

You are witnessing Ayn Rand's predictions right now as Obama's bigger and bigger government forces economic failure on its citizens.

lol, it's not "Obama's idea." This shit is much deeper than Obama, he's just another puppet frontman. If you could see through your hopeless 2-party-paradigm illusion you would understand that.

This is where some people seem to be off base. Have you read Atlas Shrugged? What starts the downfall in the book is the fact that a company creates a product (in this case a type of super strong steel) that is cheap to make, better than anything on the market and has a million uses. They quickly start controlling the market as more and more companies start buying that metal from this company and move away from regular steel. So the government steps in an forces them to let other companies and make and sell that metal. They make the company give up some of its market share and forbid them from manufacturing over a certain amount of it. So the guy that owns the company gets pissed and refuses to produce anything. He, along with many other barons of industry, start to turn their back on the government and without their "brilliance" and leadership things start to fail. As they start to fail the government takes more and more control of businesses.

Last I checked the government isn't forcing any companies to share their technology with other companies. Our situation is different. We had a financial system that started creating wealth out of thin air. They weren't selling or investing in an actual tangible good, they were simply creating wealth by betting on how good or bad companies would perform. Eventually, that bit them in the ass (of course this is a massive over simplification, but it is the overall theme of what happened). By then many of these companies were so big they were deemed "unable to fail" and were bailed out.

Nobody walked away because they were sick of government regulation. Nobody refused to manufacture goods or services out of protest.

There is a huge difference between what is going on right now and what happened in Atlas Shrugged. Are there some similarities? Sure. Is it the same? Not by a large margin.

Hey Kane, the new President of the European Union seems to think global governance is upon us:

"2009 is also the first year of global governance, with the establishment of the G20 in the middle of the financial crisis. The climate conference in Copenhagen is another step towards the global management of our planet."

http://www.europa-eu-un.org/articles...le_9245_en.htm


Rompuy attended a Bilderberg dinner at Hertoginnendal, Brussels on November 15th, during which he announced a plan to implement EU wide taxes that will be paid directly to Brussels.

Recently Mario Borghezio (Italy), member of the European Parliament, spoke openly against the influence of globalist organizations such as the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission. "Is it possible that no one has noticed that all 3 (EU Presidential candidates) frequently attend Bilderberg or Trilateral meetings?," asked Borghezio.

The Copenhagen meeting is just that, there will be no treaty signed there, all of the members of that group have already admitted that they can't come to terms with each other.

They have been saying that we are under a global governance since the creation of the UN. Couldn't this just mean that the governments of the world are going to work together to solve our mutual problems? It doesn't mean that one group is going to control the world.

I have said it before and I will continue to say that something like this can't happen. There are too many religious and cultural differences in this world to allow it. There is no way Muslims will live under Christian run and vice versa. And you think China and India are just going to allow a group of people to tell them what to do and how to do it? Please. Any real World Government would govern a world in chaos and the only reason you seem to think that they want this is so they can have ultimate power and kill off the 80% of the people that don't agree with their ideals. Call me crazy, but that sounds insane to me.

A one world "religion" is also part of their plan. They have an interesting way that they will try to implement it... but I won't get into that on this forum. That stuff is for the advanced "crazies."

The 80% are not the "80% of the people that don't agree with their ideals." That is simply a number they came up with, they believe about 20% of the current population would be much easier to control... there's just simply too many of us right now. That is why I believe that we are winning... there are so many of us and so much information is being spread on a large scale. I'm sure they think they're winning, but I believe that they are currently losing the battle for their all-mighty tyrannical world government. They might be laying the groundwork but they are still far off from their goal.

Dude, wait, what?