-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal), Guest Blogger
The GOP hearts Ayn Rand. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and his father Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), all mention the works of Ayn Rand as being influential in their lives. Even Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas references her work as influence in his autobiography. Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, is an acolyte of Rand’s thinking and knew her personally.
I would like to focus on one aspect of Ayn Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism, and its implications for Christianity.
Rand saw the role of any philosophical system as the understanding of reality. Reality (existence) and the ability to understand reality (consciousness) are at the heart of Objectivism. Considering existence (reality) and consciousness (man’s awareness of it), Rand assigns primacy to existence, “the universe exists independent of consciousness (of any consciousness).” In other words, “wishing doesn’t make it so.”
For Rand, consciousness is the faculty of perceiving that which exists, “consciousness is consciousness of an object.” Eric Johnson, in a review of chapter one of Leonard Peikoff’s book Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, wrote:
Since the nature (identity) of consciousness is to be aware of reality, existence is prior to, necessary for, and not subject to the control of, consciousness.
Consciousness cannot be conscious only of itself because you run into the chicken-and-the-egg problem. Consciousness requires objects to be aware of in order to create consciousness. Sensory deprivation does not validate the notion of consciousness without anything to be conscious of. Consciousness of objects, and their associated memories, were already formed before any experiments with sensory deprivation.
Rand’s primary axiom of Objectivism is the Primacy of Existence. In contrast is the Primacy of Consciousness, “the notion that the universe has no independent existence, that it is the product of a consciousness (either human or divine or both).” Rand’s Primacy of Existence is the reason for Objectivism’s position of atheism with respect to religion, especially Christianity and its “creator God.”
The Christian concept of God as a disembodied consciousness that created everything, except itself, is antithetical to Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism. Objectivism provides a solid philosophical foundation for rejecting the Christian worldview.
The Primacy of Existence hasn’t received the media attention that it deserves, and I doubt that Rand’s fans in the GOP/Tea Party would understand its ramifications.
H/T: AlterNet, Anton Thorn, Dawson Bethrick, Objectivism Wiki, Ayn Rand Lexicon.
As always, one lives to be of service. lol
Buddha:
Brilliant. You have invented self-altruistic objectivism.
Mike A.
Coincidentally enough, I just did in my last post on the War on Easter thread:
Matthew 9:35 (Rand Edition)
Then Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every sickness and every disease among the people . . . but only those who could pay Him 100 shekels each.
It was BIL who observed that sugar is a harsh mistress.
rafflaw:
I expect at some point someone will attempt a philosophical/theological synthesis and produce something called Randian prosperity theology.
OS,
“Larry’s mom must have run out of Twinkies again.”
Poor dear … 😀
OS,
Now that you mentioned Twinkies, I am getting hungry again!!
Why do we have this sudden resurgence of attention to Ayn Rand? Is her nonsense being used to try to provide some sort of evidence why the greed is good theory of screwing the middle class is needed to get us out of this economic hole that was created in the first place by the greed is good folks?
Larry’s mom must have run out of Twinkies again. He seems to be getting more manic by the minute. Grandiose too, because he seems to expect someone to talk to him. Live sucks when you live in mom’s basement and subsist on Twinkies.
Roco:
I disagree with you entirely. In my view, objectivism is merely a less offensive word than solipsism, but means the same thing in practice. But one can readily understand why it is embraced by people like Rush Limbaugh. Furthermore, I do not equate personal and economic relationships. The purpose for imposing restraints on capitalism is to prevent the tyranny of economic power.
I think I can safely say that if Ayn Rand was as much of a hero to the left as she is for the right, the Rabid and Ridiculous Right would be having a major nuclear meltdown …
“Economics is about individual freedom of action”
No. It’s not.
Economics is a social science concerned chiefly with description and analysis of the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. This would include a variety models with varying degrees of personal control in transaction. You are entitled to your opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.
“I have no interest in what any conspiracy theorist has to say, considering every one I seem to meet is an obsessive compulsive nutcase who tries to create “evidence” out of nothingness.”
Funny, THREE of your pieces of “evidence” were LIES!!!!
You said:
1. Take off time to crash time for AA77 was 35 minutes—LIE
2. ATC knew where AA77 was the WHOLE time—LIE
3. That I said that witnesses saw people in the windows when I actually said that’s the government’s version
Did I lie in any of my posts? NOPE!
BLARP!!
Mike Appleton:
“It appears that they intend to rely upon a particularly ignorant and narrow version of Christianity for defining and regulating personal relationships and upon Ayn Rand for defining and regulating economic relationships. That won’t work because it can’t.”
You are right it wont. Personal relationships and economic relationships are the same thing. Economics is about individual freedom of action as are personal relationships.
But the left wants that reversed, they want freedom in personal relationships but not in economic relationships. The left is very much like the fundamentalist Christian right. In fact I would say they are natural allies but for some reason haven’t yet figured it out. One can only hope they never do, it would be curtains for the rest of us.
“notebook written by a 22 year old child out of context”
Well, I’ll be damned! And all this time I thought you were an adult at 22!!
Didn’t Ayn Rand just fawn all over a serial killer??
Tue Apr 19, 2011 at 12:41 PM PDT
Hero or Monster: Ayn Rand and William Hickman
So I was listening to the Thom Hartmann Show this morning in which he did a horrific segment on William Hickman, a cold blooded child murderer, whom Ayn Rand idolized. In her journal circa 1928, Ayn Rand quoted the statement, “What is good for me is right,” a credo attributed to a prominent murderer, William Edward Hickman. “The best and strongest expression of a real man’s psychology I have heard,” she wrote.
In an article, http://www.michaelprescott.net/… Romancing the Stone Cold Blooded Killer, Michael Prescott gives a stomach churning terrifying account of William Hickman’s kidnapping and killing of a twelve-year-old girl, Marian (sometimes Marion) Parker.
Warning, graphic description.
Hickman disappeared with Marian, and over the next few days Mr. and Mrs. Parker received a series of ransom notes. The notes were cruel and taunting and were sometimes signed “Death” or “Fate.” The sum of $1,500 was demanded for the child’s safe release. (Hickman needed this sum, he later claimed, because he wanted to go to Bible college!) The father raised the payment in gold certificates and delivered it to Hickman. As told by the article “Fate, Death and the Fox” in crimelibrary.com,
“At the rendezvous, Mr. Parker handed over the money to a young man who was waiting for him in a parked car. When Mr. Parker paid the ransom, he could see his daughter, Marion, sitting in the passenger seat next to the suspect. As soon as the money was exchanged, the suspect drove off with the victim still in the car. At the end of the street, Marion’s corpse was dumped onto the pavement. She was dead. Her legs had been chopped off and her eyes had been wired open to appear as if she was still alive. Her internal organs had been cut out and pieces of her body were later found strewn all over the Los Angeles area.”
In his essay, Mr. Prescott questions the sanity of someone who would idolize a sociopathic child killer.
It seems to me that Ayn Rand’s uncritical admiration of a personality this twisted does not speak particularly well for her ability to judge and evaluate the heroic qualities in people. One might go so far as to say that anyone who sees William Edward Hickman as the epitome of a “real man” has some serious issues to work on, and perhaps should be less concerned with trying to convert the world to her point of view than in trying to repair her own damaged psyche. One might also point out that a person who “has no organ for understanding … the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people” is what we today would call a sociopath.
Prescott’s essay goes into further discussion of Any Rand’s actual comments found in her journals–comments that lead you inside a mind of dark shadows, impossible mazes, circuitous rationalizations, and, ultimately I have come to the conclusion: the mind of an insane sociopath. What does that tell us about her influence on the conservative/libertarian world view?
I encourage you to read the entire piece, as Prescott presents many quotes and comments from AR which support his thesis that she continued –even later in life to believe from the bottom of her heart? soul? being– that Hickman and those like him are to be admired. Prescott concludes thusly:
That Ayn Rand saw something heroic, brilliant, and romantic in this despicable creature is perhaps the single worst indictment of her that I have come across. It is enough to make me question not only her judgment, but her sanity.
At this point in my life, I did not think it was possible to significantly lower my estimate of Ayn Rand, or to regard her as even more of a psychological and moral mess than I had already taken her to be.
I stand corrected.
Democratic Underground and Think Progress put together this video of Rand Paul, Paul Ryan, Sean Hannity, and other libertarians extolling the virtues of Ayn Rand, then cue the chilling interview with Mike Wallace in which one wonders how in the hell could anyone find virtue of value in Ayn Rand’s twisted and insane thinking?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7zwO88nRH8&w=640&h=390]
This video needs to go viral as they say.
So while Paul Ryan’s bold economic plan is to literally take food from the mouths of babes (cutting food stamps) and put it into the hands of our aristocratic royalists, you now may have some understanding of the how starving America’s children and euthanizing our elderly fits right into a philosophy that considers most of us worthless, unworthy of love–we are all (except the chosen elite) mere “lice.”
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/04/19/968385/-Hero-or-Monster:Ayn-Rand-and-William-Hickman