tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29196034.post3376170604046645451..comments2024-03-27T05:47:21.295-07:00Comments on Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature: Objectivist Round-up, September 2022Daniel Barneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06359277853862225286noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29196034.post-47473030454155929122022-09-11T15:31:11.302-07:002022-09-11T15:31:11.302-07:00Organized Objectivism would have gone away by now ...Organized Objectivism would have gone away by now if it hadn't been kept in business artificially thanks to subsidies from some wealthy Rand obsessives. Also Rand's novels are not as authentically popular as her fans claim, considering that the Ayn Rand Institute has bought and given away over 4 million copies of her works as part of its essay-writing contests. It's like Directive 10-289 in <i>Atlas Shrugged</i> established a combined Balph Eubank/Simon Pritchett Institute to keep Eubank's unwanted novels in print and forcing young people to read them, and reinforced by indoctrinating them with Pritchett's bad philosophy. Albionic Americanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07863146943953471221noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29196034.post-83224190198417065942022-09-11T15:20:49.145-07:002022-09-11T15:20:49.145-07:00Objectivists are also doubling down on empirically...Objectivists are also doubling down on empirically false views of human behavior. Notice that they don't talk about how tribally-oriented people can flourish as entrepreneurs and capitalists, like the South Asian immigrants in the United States who own and run hotels and other businesses. These people are still generally religious, family-oriented and endogamous (apparently for caste reasons); they aren't living at all like Rand's fantasy of atheistic atomized individualists. Albionic Americanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07863146943953471221noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29196034.post-72484188776499557652022-09-10T10:52:04.282-07:002022-09-10T10:52:04.282-07:00I think Rand did her mature thinking in the 50s du...I think Rand did her mature thinking in the 50s during the high tide of behaviorism and after WW II when the idea of a biological basis for behavior understandably got a bad name.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29196034.post-25753597171856264992022-09-08T11:56:24.095-07:002022-09-08T11:56:24.095-07:00Does the end of JARS signify that interest in Rand...Does the end of JARS signify that interest in Rand and Objectivism is on the wane? We don't have any hard data on this, and of course the end of JARS could be merely that Chris Sciabarra has tired of being its editor. But even so, why isn't there someone to fill Sciabarra's shoes and keep the journal going? No such person exists --- which tells us what? I would suggest that the end of JARS indicates, not so much a waning of interest in Rand, but quite possibly a waning of interest in the philosophy of Objectivism. Let's face it: Objectivism nowadas comes off as hopelessly out-dated. Rand's blank slate philosophy is so 1950s. It's hard to take such a view seriously after the rise of the evolutionary psychology of Pinker and the social psychology of Jonathan Haidt. But Rand's novels, particularly <i>Atlas Shrugged</i> and <i>The Fountainhead</i>, still get read and still have their fans. But most of these fans prefer to ignore the finer philosophical points in these books, because they just don't have much relevance any more.gregnyquisthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13653516868316854941noreply@blogger.com