Man, i didnt know it was this good, i mean ive never read something like this before...

man, i didnt know it was this good, i mean ive never read something like this before, its so densely packed its terrifying, the existential themes, the wicked psychology, all of this in very cult-like subtlety, its definitely a work of a genius.

Other urls found in this thread:

youtu.be/yAa6dYBwy7M
salon.com/2013/12/10/ayn_rand_loving_ceo_destroys_his_empire_partner/
uk.coop/resources/what-do-we-really-know-about-worker-co-operatives
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

it's for autismo faggets

end of stry m8

you need to read in between the lines, but how am i kiding keep reading your shallow literature.

i agree, it's my favorite book and i've read it five times. i consider it to be more of a mythology than a novel. you can see the mental forms as clear and sharp as a shadow on the moon. i think that a person of any virtue will be immensely moved by atlas shrugged.

her other shit is good too but i really consider this the best book i've ever read, and i've read an alarming amount of books.

yes you can def see and feel the states of mind of the characters, though not as clear -at least in my opininon- because sometimes theres a lot going on and her writing -which is subtle par excellence, mixed with realism a lil bit of symbolism thrown in -doesnt help much because she tends to convulte herself at times. but yeah super great insight, incredible sesitivity, this woman is clearly not recognized to what she really is, a psychologist

It's a remarkable, thought provoking book, but should be read with a critical eye and not swallowed without question.

the basis of her philosophy was essentially an understanding of why 'doing the ideally right thing' is the path to happiness. she espoused 'romantic realism' as the perfect form of art, a la greek sculpture - realizing in art the absolute height of what is possible for man.

i think the best example of the purity of her artistic intent is that there is none of the ambiguity that is so fashionable today... "oh, the bad guy is doing bad things but he has a good reason and he was abused, and so how can we judge him, and the good guy is doing good things, but he's really flawed and kind of a bad person". for a person who is sick of the fuzziness found in the ideas presented by modern pop art, it's like discovered art all over again when reading ayn rand.

her politics can't really be applied, and her economics have the right intentions but wouldn't work, man being what he is. but they're a profoundly beautiful dream of what mankind COULD be, if we were willing to make it happen.

in that sense i consider it completely morally accurate as an ideal, something to guide your choices towards virtue, but not something to expect out of the world. people can get carried away with it simply because of the power it has.

This whole post was excellent.

mm not true at all, you seem to only have read wiki articles or what other people said about the book, you need to re read the book, and later, come back to me.

Shitpost harder, please

it's my favorite book and i've read it 5 times. plus perusing my favorite passages. i memorized about a third of galts speech before i gave up due to the length. i've also read all of her other books except for 'the fountainhead', just because i've never had a copy handy i guess.

i know what i'm talking about with regards to ayn rand. maybe you could bring up some specific points that we could discuss.

this is a common but wholly unfair response to ayn rand on lit, and i think you should maybe really read her books with an open mind and see if you feel the same way.

Your irony detectors are faulty.

>but they're a profoundly beautiful dream of what mankind COULD be, if we were willing to make it happen
Who creates the sewage system in her society?

her society believes in allowing people to live best, however they choose to. she believes that even people with small jobs should lead lives where they understand their role in the world and are in no way looked down upon - and that the wealthy captains of industry would, if they are capable of her morality, be creating a world in which you can live well on very little.

are you talking about anarcho capitalism? because there is a court system and an army in her idea of a society. maybe you don't think it's reasonable that a company would sell sewer building services and that the sewers would be fine, but that's ok - that's a point of contention that you can talk about without dismissing her entire pantheon with a broad stroke.

she imagined a secret hideaway, a sort of heaven for the righteous, where all men worked together in the moral way that she sought to express - not out of 'duty' but out of immense self respect that translates to expecting nothing out of others; ironically, her glorification of 'self' and 'selfishness' ultimately leads to the greatest sort of generosity, where one asks as little as possible of others while offering as much as possible. she sought to create a beneficient circle, instead of a vicious circle.

you can disagree with her economic politics insofar as they're currently unpracticeable and we have no idea how we could even accomplish such a change. but to dismiss her on summary grounds such as you do isn't right.

It's just funny because most Austrian economists would think her society is retarded. I mean, Carl Menger would say half the goods they grow, because they are cyclical and because of the limits of resources, trade, and ability to expend on upkeep, would not circulate freely, and therefore could not be counted as having a very definite exchange value. The system, because of a disconnect with the outside world would have a lot of natural monopolies arising.

And this sewage system, these entrepreneurs, assuming there wouldn't be a natural monopoly on the sewage system, would compete for shares of pipe space and customer shit? I'm confused.

you know, there's a lot of criticisms that can be made; i acknowledge that. there's a lot of theory as well as practical concerns that can be put forth regarding any sort of real world implementation of the system ayn rand sought to create in her novel.

but i don't think very many people actually believe that it's the bible. and even the people that do believe atlas shrugged is the bible, realize that the bible involves a lot of interpretation. with all that said, i think you could possibly think of these problems in terms of 'is this a problem? then we can solve it'. of course, in the real world, the solution to some of these problems is government. i say ayn rand's dream society is basically an image of heaven, and i do think it's possible for people with purified souls, free from sin.

i don't give a lot of credit to economists and their explanations, though. i think they miss something very basic.
r

Three years since I've visited /r/lit, top post is still Atlas fucking Shrugged.

the book evokes strong feelings in almost everyone, and very polarized feelings at that.

>, the solution to some of these problems is government
Well let me ask you a question, how exactly would the government work in her ideal society? Any Rand herself said one of her axioms was no taxation at all.

I think the problem of Rand's thought is that she imagines everyone is intelligent enough to succeed. It's a fundamental flaw. We will always need high taxes, a strong government, and a welfare state.

if you're trying to debate me point by point to prove that 'maybe we shouldn't worship ayn rand and take her word as gospel and try to do everything she said' you've already won because i agree.

she believed there needed to be judges in order to arbitrate when there was unresolvable disputes between people, and basic laws such as you might imagine. 'don't rape, don't steal, don't commit fraud, don't murder, don't vandalize' etc. taxes could be raised for this and an army.

a step toward her idea for us would be to eliminate all forms of taxation and aid that don't benefit every citizen equally.

in any case, literally implementing her perfect society is not the point, and poking holes in it is really missing the value that she offers in her literature.

I'm planning to read it.
I read The Satanic Bible by Anton LaVey, and I agree with many of the things in the book of Satan and the book of Lucifer, and I heard that those two parts were inspired a lot by Ayn Rand, so I am really interested in reading it.

you can derive a satanic inspiration from ayn rand but you can't derive a randian inspiration from satanism.

anyways, laveyan satanism is basically just christianity minus the cucky parts when you get down to it.

Lol. It's because Ayn Rand likes chaos and evil, much like Satan.

Satan would love a free market society

I plan on reading Atlas Shrugged without trying to see a connection between what she wrote and what Anton LaVey wrote; I am going to pretend that I have never read The Satanic Bible.

But The Satanic Bible was written after Atlas Shrugged.

i would do so as well. her bone with christianity was that it's symbol is that of a torture device, and a man being sacrificed for everyone else - which is kind of what communism does, it sacrifices individuals for the greater good.

she was really, really against human sacrifice of any sort. i think a more profound view of christianity is possible but the view she took of the worshipping of human sacrifice isn't unreasonable. from that perspective yes, lavey and rand both offer a similar moral correction to the flaw in christianity.

i think you're out of your league here. i hope this is just a shitpost.

yeah. lavey read it and like many people it profoundly touched him, so of course it's in some way echoing that. but, my point is that you can get something like the satanic bible from atlas shrugged. you could NOT get atlas shrugged out of the satanic bible. the satanic bible is really a rather average book and hasn't a tenth the weight of atlas shrugged.

Right you're going to reply that the Satanic Bible isn't evil or the free market isn't evil, but the existence of the free market has started a majority of the wars that you see happening across the globe.

It's natural, but not necessary 100% of the time. God is real, and it's no coincidence Ayn Rand gets along so well with the Satanic Bible.

Oh, I see your point.
Yes, I also think that The Satanic Bible is average as best.
I did say that I agree with it, but I never said that I follow it myself. The reason I agree with it is because I think it is a very accurate description of how a lot of people behave, especially people who seek power.

From what you've said, I assume you haven't even read The Satanic Bible, and you probably think it's about worshiping Satan or something.
It's not; the satanic bible does not have a religion. After reading it, I think that Anton LaVey was either a pantheist or a deist (from the things he said in the chapter "God Wanted Dead or Alive", and from the weird part of the book about magic).
Also, can you please tell us why you think a free market is "evil". How is a free market responsible for the wars that we see, if you don't have an actual free market anywhere in the world?

the satanic bible isn't evil. they don't advocate cruelty or murder or lawlessness or anything like that. if i recall correctly, it's been some time, it basically just says that you don't owe other people shit just because they exist, and that you should excel and take pride in excelling. which for a lot of people is exactly what they need to hear.

as for the free market, you're just talking about normal human behavior... acquire shit, trade shit, make shit, try to have a lot of stuff and be secure. of course people fight. they have conflicting intentions and goals and so it comes down to force oftentimes. that's 'bad' and 'shitty' but i wouldn't say it's evil. it'd be more evil if you were unwilling to fight for anything at all.

i also believe in 'god' (whatever we mean by that) and i think that if there was a 'good god' he'd be proud of ayn rand.

>the existence of the free market has started a majority of the wars that you see happening across the globe
What the fuck did I just read?

he's either young or not so bright, and also strongly opinionated

It's the truth though. Oil is what started the war in Afghanistan.

Every natural resource is capable of starting a war depending on how valuable it is.

>Oil is what started the war in Afghanistan.

(You)

grow up

>oil is a free market.

user, I...

it's a bit more complex than that.

but whats your point, anyways? that value is evil because people are willing to fight over it?

what about the idea that maybe war is actually GREAT because it allows people to experience the extremes of what the human spirit is capable of, and who cares if people die or hurt? pain should just be borne, and everyone dies. so war is actually awesome as fuck.

that's another perspective.

Afghanistan started as a proxy war against Russia.

Here's a nice introductory video about the concept of a "free market".
Watch the video, user, because you clearly don't understand what a free market is.
youtu.be/yAa6dYBwy7M

actually, consider the following:

in the 30s-50s the west purchased vast amounts of land from arabic nations, and installed huge infrastructure to extract the oil. they employed and trained locals quite a bit, and that's how they learned to drill oil and run an oil business. they were paid fairly for the oil and the local common people were being greatly enriched.

what happened next? the leaders, who are a step above warlords, nationalized the oil. all that we had done for them and paid them for that land and oil was stolen from us. the profits then went to enrich a few people - those who are now the princes, sheiks, dictators, etcetera. now their nations are shit as a result and spawn massive misery. they used to be pretty normal.

now, don't we have a right to kick someones ass after they steal from us?

the middle east is a perfect example of the free market being fucked with and just sheer fucking misery resulting from it.

This is false.

The Afghanistan war started because of corporate interests in the middle eastern supply of oil. Bush had connections and ties with oil companies his father was affiliated with.

The rampant free market accelerates war. During the period of Keynesian economic policy, you saw great reduction in war en masse.

state sponsored corporatism is a looong ways away from 'free market'. the 'free market' implies certain rules apply in order that freedom may also exist. freedom isn't the absence of law. and if you want to know what bushes corporate interests in the middle east was, it was a direct result of government power over business.

(we didn't take any oil from them by going there. we just prevented other nations from getting it and it allowed bushes other oil concerns to not have competition from OPEC.)

exact opposite of free market. like i say here the free market had created a great thing that benefited both the arabs and the west... it was when the free market died that the troubles began.

This.

ok ok maybe i was a bit unfair to you. all i say is that its got very interesting things to say in between the lines and i belive thats what makes it transcendental sorry if i didnt make it clear

no, i agree. it's definitely not your run of the mill novel that just tells a story, it asserts an entire perspective on life that many many people find strikingly beautiful and which many many people seem to detest. very few books arouse such intense conflict between people.

there's a lot of people that talk about it without having read it simply because they've heard enough about that they feel they've got the gist.

M point is, at some level, competition engenders the necessitation of resources. The free market is FAR from being 'pure'.

In actuality, this is why the Church exacted a tithe from farms, to redistribute wealth to the poor because too much competition naturally produces a couple of various things
1) static rights on land resources increase their proportion of product's price over time, increasing an already inflationary wage
2) some economists stipulate that interest has a tendency to continually rise under free market tendencies, making the economy worse for the poor as time goes on

i have many views which can be considered libertarian, however, i have very mixed feelings about land property. on one hand people have the right to be able to purchase land and live on it and use it, on the other hand, it's not like other resources at all and must be treated differently.

competition and cooperation are both necessary, of course. competition even if for no other reason that humans in general turn to dogshit when they don't have anything they have to struggle against.

I completely agree with you, and feel the same.
I also have a lot of libertarian views, but I have mixed feeling some libertarian ideas.

yeah the existential phase the she atlas (aka dagny ) goes through to me is very interesting, im barely halfway through and this book is plagued with hopelessnes

Neither do you, competition is essentially a 'free market'. This exists anywhere there is a competition of buyers and sellers. The limitations on competition due to antitrust laws and intellectual property give the free market validity and strength.

However, this process produces corporate giants that can influence and even start wars, as in the case of Afghanistan and Iraq.

i'm a blind fanboy so i know what i'm talking about

corporations are a legal fiction though, without the government, they couldn't exist. basically as long as banks exist to fund new businesses, monopolies are nearly impossible to create. i've contemplated a 'rightful ownership' law that would require all things to have one and only only owner, so that no matter how big a business is, the owner would be fully culpable for what it does. also would simplify taxes.

i think if you had read the thread instead of seeing ayn rand, getting triggered, and coming in to say something dumb, you'd see why that's a stupid thing of you to say.

People will find a way to pool together resources. These sorts of things naturally happen because of the increased return on labor that comes from pooling labor resources together in the name of profit.

It's not a legal fiction, but just because it's naturally occurring under capitalism doesn't make it right. Above () are two naturally occurring processes that are bad for the economy as a whole, but just happen because of the free market. Economies need to be managed. Perhaps free market competition is good for some things and bad for others.

I am of the opinion that currency is one of those areas that should be a managed free market, kind of like how Obamacare was, but instead have the different currencies corresponding to different employments or lines of thought, and have these commodities just be digital, but not minable. This would be a case where the free market could benefit progress. However, the issue is complicated, it's more of an issue of 'we know the dangers of free market en masse', we just need to apply it in the right areas, and well.

>Perhaps free market competition is good for some things and bad for others.

perhaps so

>that part about communistic corporatism
>no one wanted to do anything and nothing was achieved
>decades later in the real world, some sandwich shop decides to be marxist
>it fails horribly
I don't agree with Ayn Rand on a lot of things, but sometimes, she's just right.

she definitely had a knack for identifying how and why a system fails

Your books are boring, Ayn. Go away.

>40 minutes for a fucking sandwich

How

I honestly found it to be boring. The Fountainhead I enjoyed. I remember not being able to put it down, though that was more because I thought it was an amazing fictional/myth novel rather than a novel that actually had meaning.

the miracle of not being selfish, i guess.

Ayn Rand's "philosophy" distilled in two retarded posts.

>A “Marxist” “collectivist” “worker-run” restaurant in Grand Rapids, Michigan, closed its doors this week after customers complained that they could no longer tolerate the bizarre hours, high prices and long lines.

>The Garden Diner and Cafe—previously known as the Bartertown Diner—featured a vegan, vegetarian and raw food menu that had met with significant national acclaim. But the restaurant’s business model, which did not allow for bosses or managers, promised a “living wage” to all employees and a strong union, did not allow the restaurant to make enough profit to stay in business.''

>People frequently noted on the restaurant’s Facebook page that they waited more than 40 minutes for a sandwich—and that’s when the diner was even open. Because the employees set the shop’s hours by group decision, the restaurant opened and closed at random times, leaving potential sandwich buyers totally confused.

>Some Grand Rapids residents resented that Bartertown offered them a side of Che Guevara with every bahn mi and $2 taco. Customers also complained that the restaurants “equal pay, no tipping” scheme failed to reward exceptional service, pointing out on the message board that “you shouldn’t try running your business on political good will alone.”'

>The Garden Diner and Cafe—previously known as the Bartertown Diner—featured a vegan, vegetarian and raw food menu that had met with significant national acclaim. But the restaurant’s business model, which did not allow for bosses or managers, promised a “living wage” to all employees and a strong union, did not allow the restaurant to make enough profit to stay in business.

>Worse still, while the food earned Bartertown a spot on VegNews’s “10 Hot New Vegan Restaurants” list, customers complained that it was almost impossible to get a meal at the diner.

>People frequently noted on the restaurant’s Facebook page that they waited more than 40 minutes for a sandwich—and that’s when the diner was even open. Because the employees set the shop’s hours by group decision, the restaurant opened and closed at random times, leaving potential sandwich buyers totally confused.

>When the diner offered a free meal to Grand Rapids police officers as a “thank you” for keeping their neighborhood safe, local socialists complained that the business was abrogating its core ideals by siding with fascists and supporting “nearly all-white police force in this era of police violence.”

It's rather hilarious. The fact that it's exactly how Ayn Rand described it is shocking.

>“Marxist” “collectivist” “worker-run”

Neither of these epithets is responsible for the restaurant's failure.

This is apparently how the restaurant described itself, and I simply copied from the article the image was taken.

It's funny that you would say that those aren't responsible for the failure of the restaurant when the rest of the quotes describe how they were each contributing factors to its downfall.

>It's funny that you would say that those aren't responsible for the failure of the restaurant when the rest of the quotes describe how they were each contributing factors to its downfall.
No it doesn't.
If your shop opens and closes at random times that's not the fault of it being worker-run, collectivist, or Marxist, it's the fault of the workers being retards. Besides, we're talking about a vegeterian/vegan restaurant, a niche market. Add that to the worker's being dumbasses and voila.

Not having any management, equal pay to each employer and run solely by the wokers themselves is very much the root of the problem.
Without any management to tell people to get people in line, it's simply the end result. It wouldn't be surprising if the reason for the random opening and closing is likely due to the workers working whenever they wanted.
The workers were idiots, but even if everyone were smart, it would have likely ended up the same way.

I'm trying to say that being "worker-run" doesn't necessarily mean that you'll organize yourself the way they did. Their model failed because they were stupid.
Also, equal pay has nothing to do with them failing.

>I'm trying to say that being "worker-run" doesn't necessarily mean that you'll organize yourself the way they did.
How so? Worker run, without management or hierarchy, is very much what they did. What other ways would you organize a business without higher echelons of responsibility?

>Their model failed because they were stupid.
Or maybe their model failed because the model is stupid and would never work?

>How so? Worker run, without management or hierarchy, is very much what they did. What other ways would you organize a business without higher echelons of responsibility?
Being worker-run doesn't mean not having any management.
>Self-management may include worker supervision and oversight of an organization by elected bodies, the election of specialized managers, or self-directed management without any specialized managers as such.

This is like taking this guy:
salon.com/2013/12/10/ayn_rand_loving_ceo_destroys_his_empire_partner/
and acting like he's proof that corporations fail.

There are worker coops in a number of countries.

Bullshit. Cooperatives outcompete traditionally structured firms all the time, but only when they happen to be the same size.

The argument that a single enterprise fails is as good a argument against socialism as pointing out that a large portion of small business fail within the first year is against capitalism.

Source for cooperatives outperforming traditionally structured firms: uk.coop/resources/what-do-we-really-know-about-worker-co-operatives