I don't know how I feel about this. It's my favorite book, and I've read it many times, but I feel like it's something that either means a lot to you or means nothing. It doesn't translate very well beyond how you personally take it, and I'm afraid of flamewars breaking out over the content, which can have no winner. Or the studios missing the point to make it more mainstream. I also just have a very good internal idea of what it looks like, and I'm somewhat afraid of it being ruined by a movie which misses the mark, but that's remedied easily enough by me not seeing it.
Atlas Shrugged is a powerful book, but the arguments it makes highlight fundamental disagreements between sections of society. We'll do as we will, and others will do likewise. Bringing it to a national stage I don't think would cause many to go "Oh! I get it now!". At worst, it could cause sentiment to turn against entrepreneurs given the current political climate, casting them as arrogant and malicious towards the rest of society. Not that popular opinion should influence the entrepreneurs, though.
Agreed 100%. I love the book, but I can't see how it could possible be turned into a good movie. I almost don't want the movie to be made at all...if it's not done well it'll just convince people the book isn't worth reading.
Some things just don't translate well. I also love the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and the movie was painfully bad.
Well, obviously. People who hate Rand loathe her, and people who love Rand are annoying and misphrase her stuff and say stupid things.
At the core of her philosophy is the belief that you should live for yourself, that you should do things not because other people want you to but because you want to, that you should never feel guilty for the things that you can do that other people can't, and that the worst kind of person is the person who leeches off of other people. Is that none good?
I've got nothing against her philosophy in the abstract, it's how people interpret it that I have a problem with. The "selfishness" in living for yourself is supposed to be open ended, but often people interpret this as taking as much as they can for themselves, without thought of the consequences to others.
Rand positioned the major protaganists in Atlas Shrugged (eg. Dagny, Rearden, Galt, etc) as real producers, who through their selfishness, were actually acting in the public interest (railroads, steel, etc). The same can't be said for a selfish sub-prime mortgage lender. Rand's ideas are more or less amoral, and probably need to be coupled with some other moral framework for it to be described as "good".
Exactly! That's the problem with lots of her fans. I tried joining an Objectivist forum once - big mistake. I think the closest to a real Objectivist scene you get is a scene of entrepreneurs, actually.
Dude the sub prime lender is nothing at all like Rand's ideas...
First, the idea of the virtue of selfishness is that we should question the "virtue of self-sacrifice". Really what she means is "the virtue of self-actualization". The idea is that the idea that we should all somehow do what we don't want (being selfless) is what she attacks, and her argument makes perfect sense.
Second, someone who is part of the home/mortgage industry is not really a capitalist. The industry is full of subsidies, tax breaks, transfers, etc., and is home to Fannie and Freddie, which are government created, Enron-style entities that allow the government to do things "off the books". You're absolutely right that there is nothing the slightest bit similar between the mortgage industry (or most big, entrenched business in the US) and Rand's heroes...
>> First, the idea of the virtue of selfishness is that we should question the "virtue of self-sacrifice". Really what she means is "the virtue of self-actualization".
Good point. Rand called one of her books _The Virtue of Selfishness_, apparently either as a marketing idea or just to get a rise out of people (she seemed to enjoy controversy). "Self-actualization" is more new-agey, and she would probably have disliked it, but it's clear from her writing that that's exactly what she meant.
The values you describe are good ones for the most part (the devil, as ever, is in the details), but I have little interest in Rand's development of them given what I've about the rest of her work, and the fruits thereof. Maybe that's unfair, but life is short.
The philosophy behind the book is good, the politics are stupid from whatever point you look at it. It typifies both stereotypes of capitalism, for the left wing 'capitalism = evil' and for the right wing 'capitalism = glorious'.
From a literary stand point, Rands work is the pulp fiction of politics. It plays the traditional stereotypes and helped make the woman famous (specifically in the USA, I believe the word is infamous elsewhere) without contributing anything truly new or unique to the discourse.
But it takes a much more friendly approach to some pretty heavy philosophical things. I and my friends moved from Rand to Emerson. Reading Emerson (or his contemporary Thoreau) at 16 is a pain unless you have motivation to read his thoughts, and Rand provides that motivation.
Ugh, such a gross misinterpretation. One of Rand's big points is that it doesn't matter what you're doing as long as you do it well. One of her physicists becomes a janitor, and when the misguided protagonist expresses horror at that, he says that there's nothing wrong in doing menial tasks.
Bob is incredibly stupid because he makes fun of something that Rand expressly says is a good thing. Furthermore, the Rearden parody ("I only know how to pay people to invent alloys") ignores that in the book, Rearden is the scientist who invents the alloy himself. He's portrayed as a very skilled mathematician. So it's a good parody IF you're okay with laughing at something that Rand never actually wrote.
This is a perfect testament to the masses of people who think they understand (and thus have license to lay valid criticism on) Rand because they read the first 30 pages of Atlas Shrugged.
I'm so sick and tired of hearing some pseudo-sophisto unload on Rand at a cocktail party, their insults and blind lambasting only to abate when confronted with questions about Rand's actual philosophy and works as opposed to her reputation.
Atlas Shrugged is a powerful book, but the arguments it makes highlight fundamental disagreements between sections of society. We'll do as we will, and others will do likewise. Bringing it to a national stage I don't think would cause many to go "Oh! I get it now!". At worst, it could cause sentiment to turn against entrepreneurs given the current political climate, casting them as arrogant and malicious towards the rest of society. Not that popular opinion should influence the entrepreneurs, though.