Jennifer Burns -- Goddess of the market
=========================================

References:

- "Goddess of the market: Ayn Rand and the American Right", by
  Jennifer Burns

- "Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed", by Lisa Duggan

- "Ayn Rand and the world she made" , by Anne C. Heller

- "The Last of the Ayn Rand Acolytes", by Alexander Sammon; "The New
  Republic"
  (https://newrepublic.com/article/154705/last-ayn-rand-acolytes)

Ayn Rand is fascinating for a number of reasons:

- The books that she wrote were so extreme, so overly dramatic, so
  outlandish.  They are both drama and comedy.

- She herself acted and lived a life that was so dramatic, so filled
  with self-importance, such a self-character.

- She worked hard at her craft, that is, at writing fiction.  We can
  argue about the quality of her fiction, whether it is overly
  dramatic, too long and excessively wordy, even silly.  But, Ayn
  Rand did put lots of effort and study into her work.  And that
  study did influence both ideas and the descriptions, e.g. of
  architecture and manufacturing in "The fountainhead" and "Atlas
  shrugged".

- Ayn Rand had and still has a huge following and lots of readers.
  And, that has had significant influences and consequences for both
  lives and our society and for businesses and for our politics.
  Very influential business leaders and politicians are devotees and
  true believers in her and her ideas and guidance.

Ayn Rand was very motivated by politics.  Her fiction, especially
"The fountainhead" and "Atlas shrugged", but other works like xxx,
were really thinly veiled fiction that argued for life-style
choices.  She spent a good deal of her life arguing for her
positions and ideas.  She collected people (devotees) around her and
spent hours and hours and countless days and nights persuading them
in her beliefs.

Ayn Rand had an incredibly inflated view of herself.  Perhaps we
should say, justifiably so.  After all, she receive large amounts of
fan mail after publishing "The fountainhead" and "Atlas shrugged"
and both "The fountainhead" and "Atlas shrugged" sold and continue
to sell successfully.  Rand thought of herself, or at least claimed
that she did, as a first rate philosopher, as someone who had
original theoretical and philosophical ideas, as someone who had
created a theoretical system by herself with no dependence on
previous or other thinkers.

Ayn Rand used her philosophical writing and her fictional writing to
back and promote her ideological ideas.  "The fountainhead" and
"Atlas shrugged" do that.  Her "Manifesto of individualism" does
also.  This manifesto essay contains many of the ideas of her later
thought, and it can be viewed as a basis for her support for the
right-wing, reactionary, small government ideology, including the
belief that government produces nothing and idividuals create
everything.

Although she worked very hard on her intellectual thought and ideas,
Ayn Rand still had a tendency and desire to reduce most issues to a
dichotomy and reduce them to a simple dichotomy at that.  Her
distinctions between active man (good) vs. passive man (bad) and
between individual/creator vs. second-hander were examples of this.

Ayn Rand argued for capitalism as the only path to prosperity.  That
would be a more acceptable and arguable position if her vision of
capitalism were not so extreme.  However, given that version of
capitalism allows for *no* government regulation, *no* safety net,
*no* taxation (which is considered robbery), *no* government
investment in infrastructure or science, it begins to seem to be a
very austere and hard to justify position.

Yet, although her positions were (for many of us) extreme, her
arguments were (for some of us) persuasive.  In part this was
because she had her very dramatic and romantic fiction to back her
up, and because her arguments were, according to Burns, both
abstract and moral.  She used history as scaffolding and support,
and she argued in terms of right and wrong.

And, more over, she was a tireless promoter of both herself and her
ideas.  Although there is a good deal of evidence that she used
drugs and chemical stimulants to produce that tireless promotion.


11/01/2019

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