Rand and Lenin
Posted by j_IR1776wg 6 years, 7 months ago to Ask the Gulch
In view of this Vladimir Lenin quote,
'...All our lives we fought against exalting the individual, against the elevation of the single person, and long ago we were over and done with the business of a hero, and here it comes up again: the glorification of one personality. This is not good at all. I am just like everybody else...'
http://thepeoplescube.com/lenin/lenin...
Do you think Ayn Rand's glorification of the hero in Man was purely a protest against Lenin?
Or was his quote the trigger that forced her into philosophy to prove and demonstrate that his views were incompatible with Man's proper existence on earth?
'...All our lives we fought against exalting the individual, against the elevation of the single person, and long ago we were over and done with the business of a hero, and here it comes up again: the glorification of one personality. This is not good at all. I am just like everybody else...'
http://thepeoplescube.com/lenin/lenin...
Do you think Ayn Rand's glorification of the hero in Man was purely a protest against Lenin?
Or was his quote the trigger that forced her into philosophy to prove and demonstrate that his views were incompatible with Man's proper existence on earth?
'Destroy the family, you destroy the country. '
I think this is meant as instruction not as criticism, no surprise it is exactly what the green/left are doing!
"While the State exists there can be no freedom; when there is freedom there will be no State."
Lenin, supporter of libertarianism?
Yes, to blarman and ewv.
From what is known about Lenin, he was no libertarian, nor was he an anarchist.
So what does that statement mean?
Suggestion 1: Lenin gives no value to freedom so a State giving no individual freedom is quite ok with him.
Suggestion 2: The statement has value only for its poetry, it sounds deep when in a speech,
the masses then can scream approval. It is ramblings just like those from the modern soft left
- progressives, liberals (to Americans), democratic socialists, etc. - rhetoric devoid of sense.
The primacy of the individual for Rand, as well as the importance given to clarity and thought over
emotion make instructive contrasts between Lenin and Rand.
To answer the question, Ayn Rand thinking driven by her experience with communism which she able to juxtapose with her American experience. She loved American and had a unique insight into what actually made American great and values are needed to achieve that greatness in the future.
Her escape from and avoidance of the whole communist experience was driven by her own sense of life and philosophy, not the other way around. The evil of Russia was a negative, not a force for anything.
I see Lenin as just carrying on the put-the-tribe first mentality in a world that was industrializing, with disastrous results.
Rand is not objecting just to Lenin but rather the whole system of putting the tribe's interest first that human kind grew from.
BTW, I have not studied Rand's motivations at all. My response is more about what her books mean to me, about humankind rising above an undesirable default state, than her actual motivations.
All the rest towered over the average voter, and likely their erroneous feelings of superiority started when they beat up the smallest kids on the playground. Fortunately, the rest of us learn to be adults.
Because it is the natural state of most lifeforms--beehives, wolf packs, herds and flocks, prides of lions and slime mold cultures, spores and forests, multicellular organisms, tribes and families, language structure--because there is strength and security in numbers and systems. Because organic things (life) grow from a singularity to a complex assemblage, like a fractal or moiré pattern, replicating a template to a larger and larger grouping, each of which becomes the entry to the next level.
The isolated singleton is an anomaly, not the norm. To survive, most lifeforms need at least two members to reproduce. Without reproduction, extinction follows. Likewise, thoughts and belief systems are aggregates of bits of software that function by a process of integration. A rational mind is one that integrates according to an accurately identified reality. That is unique to each mind and sets the individual apart, even when in a cooperative assemblage. The individual is a value onto himself.
That idea is seldom acknowledged. Collective groupings treat each member as a disposable element, unless it's the queen bee genetically selected as an egg factory or the alpha male who earned that position through brute force. Losers are excommunicated to find another group or perish. Oh, there are species where an individual lives alone unless seeking out a mate, or where mates stay together for life but apart from their fellows. It’s rare, because there is safety in numbers.
Cell structures cooperate to keep the larger entity growing and healthy—unless they turn cancerous and eventually kill the host. That works with political ideas as well. They can turn cancerous and thereby destroy entire civilizations. It happens over and over. Not learning from the lessons of history, or from visionary philosophers, keeps repeating the old patterns. That's why. How would you persuade the present decision-makers to avert the coming doom?
At a primitive level it makes sense to stay together for mutual defense and to exchange the product of effort. That doesn't imply collectivism. The proper form of relationships requires abstract thought. Moral concepts and principles are an advanced achievement, in contrast to emotional outbursts and force. They are an achievement. "Civilization is the process of setting man free from men."
For me Ayn Rand is standing up to all of it and showing how bad it is.
She continued to stand up to it throughout her life, but was not motivated by a crusade against Lenin or the communists in particular. Shortly after arriving in America she was frightened to see the same mentality spreading here and knew what the result would be if it were not challenged. All her life she applied her principles to fighting against what she later learned were the philosophical roots of it, exposing the result in reality of irrationalism, mysticism, altruism and collectivism as it evolved.
But it wasn't all about fighting the irrational. She explained and fought for what she was for: reality, reason, science, individualism, freedom and capitalism, and romantic art. Her early fiction and major novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, put her own sense of life into fiction. The Fountainhead was a psychological novel portraying the independence of the first hand mind. Atlas Shrugged portrayed her vision of what she called the "ideal man", which she had planned to do since a child. This was all intended as positive value, but the shear motivating contrast with the cesspool of the collectivists decimates them.
But she could not leave the philosophy to fiction, even with its philosophical speeches. It has to be systematically explained for the principles to be conceptualized and organized. She wrote important non-fiction breaking new ground, including "Philosophy Who Needs It", For the New Intellectual (including the semi-nonfiction Galt's speech and other such philosophical passages from her fiction) , Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, "The Objectivist Ethics", "The Metaphysical versus the Man Made", "Causality Versus Duty", "Apollo 11" and "Apollo and Dionysus", "Man's Rights and "The Nature of Government", "What is Capitalism", "The Property Status of Air Waves" and 'Patents and Copyrights", The Romantic Manifesto, and "Don't Let it Go". All of her social and cultural critiques included the basic principles of what is right to explain and illustrate the proper standard. And she sponsored and made possible entire lecture series on her philosophy, notably those by Leonard Peikoff.
Yes!!! Most of human history those didn't hold sway. The parts of the books that stood out to me were about celebrating those things rather than lamenting when they don't prevail.
Ayn Rand's motivation for writing the novel was to portray in fiction her vision of the ideal man. She wrote in the introduction to Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, "The political aspects of Atlas Shrugged are not its theme. Its theme is primarily ethical-epistemological: the role of the mind in man's existence—and politics, necessarily, is one of the themes consequences." [emphasis added] The plot was designed to show the role of the mind by showing what happens when it is withdrawn from society.
She said that while writing Atlas Shrugged she kept telling herself that she was trying to prevent the plot from coming true in reality, not to predict it. She recognized that 'men of ability' reacted to controls by avoiding them, not by working harder to satisfy them -- as in her later "Is Atlas Shrugging?" -- and ultimately refusing to cooperate more when it gets worse (as in the Soviet Union), but I don't think she would have liked the widespread characterizing of her ideal hero as a hippie-of-the right drop-out motivated by the worst and expecting utopia if only everything collapsed, 'somehow' creating a miracle by no means and with no understanding of the theme of her novel. 'Going' Galt, to her, meant something much more positive: the ideal man.