Cultural Anthropology of Atlas Shrugged
All definitions here come from the Anthropology glossary at Palomar College, San Marcos, California.
(https://www2.palomar.edu/anthro/tutor...)
They are inline with what I learned, not special, just convenient to quote.
Remember when Dagny was in the Valley and found out that she could not buy gold?
special purpose money -- objects that serve as a medium of exchange in only limited contexts. In societies that have it, usually there are certain goods and services that can be purchased only with their specific form of special purpose money. If you don't have it, you cannot acquire the things that it can purchase. You may not be able to easily obtain the special purpose money either. The Tiv people of central Nigeria provide an example. In the past, they used brass rods to buy cattle and to pay bride price. These rods were acquired by trade from Sahara Desert trading peoples who ultimately obtained them from the urbanized societies of North Africa. If a man could not acquire brass rods by trade or borrowing them, he would be prevented from acquiring cattle and getting married.
Why did they have the Strike?
applied anthropology -- the branch of anthropology oriented towards using anthropological knowledge for practical purposes. The work of most applied anthropologists has the goal of helping small indigenous societies adjust to the massive acculturation pressures that they are now experiencing without their suffering culture death and genocide.
Who was in charge in the Valley?
acephalous -- a society in which political power is diffused to the degree that there are no institutionalized political leadership roles such as chiefs and kings. Bands and tribes are acephalous. Most foragers and simple horticulturalists have highly egalitarian, acephalous societies. The word "acephalous" is Greek for "without a head."
The Valley had many characteristics of a non-market economy.
non-market economy -- ... Work teams are small and usually only include members of the local community. Large-scale collaboration on subsistence jobs is of short duration if it occurs at all because most tasks are relatively simple and require only a few people. Work related interactions between people are of a face-to-face personal kind. People who work together hunting, gathering, herding, or tending crops are usually kinsmen or lifelong friends and neighbors. ... There also is the pleasure of working with friends and relatives. In addition there is potential for increased social prestige from doing the job well. Impersonal commercial exchanges rarely occur in non-market economies. They usually take the form of either barter or gifts. Every household usually provides for its daily needs from its own production. Non-market economies can only function successfully in isolation. They have always been destroyed by prolonged contact with societies that have market economies.
(Yes, the complete definition includes some characteristics contradictory of the intention of the Valley. Such as "Little or no attempt is made to calculate the contribution of individuals or to calculate individual shares. Social pressure generally obligates individuals to freely share food and other products of their labor with whomever needs it or asks for it in the community." While no one asked for help, it was, nonetheless offered benevolently. Again, that benevolence is typical of a market economy.)
What was the moral force that enabled the society of the Valley?
inner-directed personality -- a personality that is guilt oriented. The behavior of individuals with this sort of personality are strongly controlled by their conscience. As a result, there is little need for police to make sure that they obey the law. These individuals monitor themselves. The inner-directed personality is one of the modal personality types identified by David Riesman in the early 1950's.
What were the moral forces that opposed the Valley, or required its creation?
other-directed personality -- a personality that is shame oriented. People with this type of personality have ambiguous feelings about right and wrong. When they deviate from a societal norm, they usually don't feel guilty. However, if they are caught in the act or exposed publicly, they are likely to feel shame.
tradition-oriented personality -- a personality that has a strong emphasis on doing things the same way that they have always been done. Individuals with this sort of personality are less likely to try new things and to seek new experiences.
What anthropological principle explains the creation of the Valley?
social velocity -- the common social phenomenon in which disruptive interpersonal conflicts increasingly occur as the number of people in a society grows. Richard Lee coined this term as result of observing the phenomenon among the ju/'hoansi of southwest Africa. Band fissioning occurred before a community reached the full carrying capacity of the environment. Families decided to leave and form their own bands because the conflict settling mechanisms were not adequate to resolve differences. It was not food scarcity but, rather, social discord that was the cause of the break-up
(https://www2.palomar.edu/anthro/tutor...)
They are inline with what I learned, not special, just convenient to quote.
Remember when Dagny was in the Valley and found out that she could not buy gold?
special purpose money -- objects that serve as a medium of exchange in only limited contexts. In societies that have it, usually there are certain goods and services that can be purchased only with their specific form of special purpose money. If you don't have it, you cannot acquire the things that it can purchase. You may not be able to easily obtain the special purpose money either. The Tiv people of central Nigeria provide an example. In the past, they used brass rods to buy cattle and to pay bride price. These rods were acquired by trade from Sahara Desert trading peoples who ultimately obtained them from the urbanized societies of North Africa. If a man could not acquire brass rods by trade or borrowing them, he would be prevented from acquiring cattle and getting married.
Why did they have the Strike?
applied anthropology -- the branch of anthropology oriented towards using anthropological knowledge for practical purposes. The work of most applied anthropologists has the goal of helping small indigenous societies adjust to the massive acculturation pressures that they are now experiencing without their suffering culture death and genocide.
Who was in charge in the Valley?
acephalous -- a society in which political power is diffused to the degree that there are no institutionalized political leadership roles such as chiefs and kings. Bands and tribes are acephalous. Most foragers and simple horticulturalists have highly egalitarian, acephalous societies. The word "acephalous" is Greek for "without a head."
The Valley had many characteristics of a non-market economy.
non-market economy -- ... Work teams are small and usually only include members of the local community. Large-scale collaboration on subsistence jobs is of short duration if it occurs at all because most tasks are relatively simple and require only a few people. Work related interactions between people are of a face-to-face personal kind. People who work together hunting, gathering, herding, or tending crops are usually kinsmen or lifelong friends and neighbors. ... There also is the pleasure of working with friends and relatives. In addition there is potential for increased social prestige from doing the job well. Impersonal commercial exchanges rarely occur in non-market economies. They usually take the form of either barter or gifts. Every household usually provides for its daily needs from its own production. Non-market economies can only function successfully in isolation. They have always been destroyed by prolonged contact with societies that have market economies.
(Yes, the complete definition includes some characteristics contradictory of the intention of the Valley. Such as "Little or no attempt is made to calculate the contribution of individuals or to calculate individual shares. Social pressure generally obligates individuals to freely share food and other products of their labor with whomever needs it or asks for it in the community." While no one asked for help, it was, nonetheless offered benevolently. Again, that benevolence is typical of a market economy.)
What was the moral force that enabled the society of the Valley?
inner-directed personality -- a personality that is guilt oriented. The behavior of individuals with this sort of personality are strongly controlled by their conscience. As a result, there is little need for police to make sure that they obey the law. These individuals monitor themselves. The inner-directed personality is one of the modal personality types identified by David Riesman in the early 1950's.
What were the moral forces that opposed the Valley, or required its creation?
other-directed personality -- a personality that is shame oriented. People with this type of personality have ambiguous feelings about right and wrong. When they deviate from a societal norm, they usually don't feel guilty. However, if they are caught in the act or exposed publicly, they are likely to feel shame.
tradition-oriented personality -- a personality that has a strong emphasis on doing things the same way that they have always been done. Individuals with this sort of personality are less likely to try new things and to seek new experiences.
What anthropological principle explains the creation of the Valley?
social velocity -- the common social phenomenon in which disruptive interpersonal conflicts increasingly occur as the number of people in a society grows. Richard Lee coined this term as result of observing the phenomenon among the ju/'hoansi of southwest Africa. Band fissioning occurred before a community reached the full carrying capacity of the environment. Families decided to leave and form their own bands because the conflict settling mechanisms were not adequate to resolve differences. It was not food scarcity but, rather, social discord that was the cause of the break-up
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Psychology: The Human Potential movement which ultimately informed Nathaniel Branden's Objectivist psychology and led thereby to this Biocentric theories and practices. What you call "mass neuroticism and narcissism" is just the Me Generation bringing on successive generations of self-interested individuals. Sure, people are silly. Sure, people are stupid. But the mistakes do not negate the advances we have made, in large part because of the ideas of Ayn Rand. (See my comments above about aerodynamics.)
Economics: Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations was shot through with errors. So what? So was Newton's Principia (if you read it). We make progress one step at a time. To condemn economics as a study is to write off Menger, Mises, Hayek, and those who lead now such as Seltman, and Caplan.
Benjamin Franklin and the 18th century "electricians" thought of positive charges flowing like a liquid, the "electric fluid." Then, we were offered little balls with minus signs jumping out of orbits and running down wires... Even in 1920 power company electricians spoke of the fields of electrical transmissions. So, they had jumped (like quanta) into the modern understanding as soon as physicists expressed it. But that did not percolate down into the science classes. And yet, those kids who were misinformed put a man on the Moon. (And quantum electrodynamics returned to the "fluid" model. At least, that is what Feynman was awarded a Nobel Prize for.
The sociology of science is a field dominated by anti-science sociologists. Yet, if you clear away the dross, the precious few drops of gold can be extracted for your own benefit. ... if you want to benefit...
https://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2...
(Also at the table will be his wife, Denise Schmandt-Besserat, who demonstrated that the invention of numbers larger than three led to the invention of writing. See https://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/ )
We do not discus politics much because they are liberals. But they are nonetheless scintillating intellectuals. I recommend that within the biographies of Ayn Rand, you read about her long relationship with her editor Bennett Cerf. Good ideas are where you find them. Anthropology and sociology have much to offer if you seek to understand the civilization you live in.
Errors in theory are well-known. We make progress nonetheless, as the errors are corrected. That applies to anthropology and sociology no less than to physics and chemistry.
Lucky wrote: "The scientific method barely makes a formal appearance in science and engineering education, there is no need. The scientific method is what they do, not what is to be regurgitated in first quarter exams. The plane designer sees the first flight, the plane takes-off, it flies, goes up and this way and that, all the laws of nature are obeyed."
What you seem not to know, speaking of aerodynamics in particular, is that despite 100 years of advancement in fluid mechanics, the basic facts of lift are still taught wrong in many (if not most) aviation textbooks. I learned it wrong** when I learned to fly in the 1990s. (I soloed in 2000 and logged 100 hours total, half of them solo, including night flight.). See NASA here:
https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/air...
Yet, I was able to fly. I controlled the airplane. It passed the inspections of the FAA repeatedly. Yet, we failed to understand the very fundamental principle that makes flight possible.
Despite all of that, we do not condemn the entire study of aerodynamics the way so many here react to the social sciences, which do, in fact, teach science qua science. Engineers in particular suffer from a materialist, anti-intellectual, cookbook curriculum that appeals to religious fanatics. Just sayin'... If you want to condemn...
Our no-longer-contributor Dale Halling did a rebuttal for us on here, coupla years ago, I remain fence sitting.
What contribution have all the social studies and pseudo sciences made?
They contributed to the vocabulary used by socialistic progressivistic political movements, victimology, antifa, wimins studies, exploitation, racism, blah blah ..
Psychology-
Psychology, not just of the Freudian variety, has proved singularly useless in explaining Man to himself or in guiding him in how to live. No doubt it has helped some people in some circumstances, but its intellectual harvest after so much effort has been meagre and its cultural effects have been devastating.
. . the disease that it pretends to cure, . . might be said of psychology as a whole. It places a distorting lens between ourselves and genuine self-reflection. It has encouraged, if not caused, mass neuroticism and narcissism. Know thyself: read no psychology.
.. Psychiatrist Anthony Daniels who writes in The Spectator
Economics-
A field of study with potential for understanding has been swamped by Keynesianism, started perhaps as a joke!
Our contributor Vinay did a great debunking recently in thesavvystreet.
Physics and anthropoligy both struggle against errors in discovering, understanding, and applying truths. Despite the errors in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, your computer nonetheless exists because of our understanding of subatomic particles.
Despite errors in explanation, anthropology and sociology have progressed from their inventions in the 19th century. Central to that progress was abandoning the idea of "social physics" sought by both Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer. Spencer improved his understanding of how societies function; Comte remained woefully ignorant. The error was seeking simple formulas to explain human action. People are not billiard balls. Comte and his followers still want to act on that, making people into objects to be manipulated.
William Graham Sumner was probably the last great ideological individualist of the previous century. But in our time, I point to economists George Selgin and Dierdre McCloskey. On the OrgTheory Blog by Brayden King, Fabio Rojas and others take an individualist approach to market systems and social interactions. They are not alone.
As I said above, "I came to the anthropology definitions by way of work. I am documenting software that tracks family structures and family members. Wanting to make sure of my terms, I googled them. Reading the definitions for "fictive kin" and other terms, the fact of "special purpose money" jumped out." Does the original post contain any errors of fact?
The Valley was intended as an ideal society, The Utopia of Greed. If you read the socialist story, Looking Backward, it is easy to understand that and the Valley as different versions of Plato's Atlantis and the many other thought experiments. We tend to denigrate that, but imagining a different society is as inventive as new metals such as bronze and steel and new engines such as windmills and water mills.
The archaic Greeks invented new ways to organize their cities, going from monarchy to tyranny, to oligarchy to democracy, as they went from religion to philsophy, and farming to merchantry. Coins were invented at the same time as geometry. And they experimented with government. Twice in the long history of the town of Cyrene, factions were fighting in the streets. It was civil war. So, they sent to Athens for philosophers to come and write a new constitution.
Obviously, Ayn Rand did not know about all of that. But, neither did she need to know much about mathematics and physics, only enough to tell a story.
The story of the Valley in a sub-plot was intended to show how rational people deal with one another when free to do so. It was not "one part of an example of what not to do" until the people in the Valley "hit their limit". The story of the Valley, and the whole novel, ended when the 'strike' succeeded and it was possible to go back to the 'outer world' and pursue values in a civilized country led by the men of the mind unobstructed.
There is no duty to not "give up" under the injustice of demands for sacrifice. Normal people tend to withdraw when punished for their success and ability -- they leave, cut back, retire early or change what they do for a living. That does lead to everything "going to the devil", by gradual degrees in different realms of activity. That result is caused by the irrationalists, not those avoiding punishment.
But the "strike" in Atlas Shrugged was not a prescription for political action to reform a culture -- that takes the spread of the right ideas. She had hoped and expected that the positive philosophical ideas and their illustration in the novel would lead people on the right track without having to suffer the kind of collapse dramatically illustrated in the plot, which was noticeably paralleled by certain events in contemporary society.
Ayn Rand rejected the anti-intellectuals, who miss the point of the novel, advocating a preposterous "strike" to deliberately make everything "go to the devil" in an attempt to bring down the country, as if that were either possible or a substitute for a rational philosophy required to drive the culture and its politics.
Her fundamental purpose in writing Atlas Shrugged was to illustrate in fiction her philosophical idea of the "ideal man". It is a consciously philosophical novel that can only be understood in terms of understanding the proper philosophical ideas.
None of it had anything to do with the supposed anthropological "explanations" posturing as "science" as they ignore the meaning and purpose of the plot and the theme of the novel, evading the philosophical ideas explicitly presented and illustrated. Such anti-intellectual "science" claims to observe "data" consisting of primitive tribes and people otherwise acting on premises the opposite of the heroes in the novel (and the author) while ignoring the "data" spelled out in the novel.
Like the anti-philosophical "strikers", that is anti-conceptual. It is mimicry of science with no understanding, an instance of what Ayn Rand called the "anti-conceptual mentality", and what Richard Feynman called "cargo cult science". It is preposterous non-science.
Maybe Rand intended to raise the question of how to go back from the ashes to a market economy without it all happening again.
Maybe, the emphasis on feelings such as the entertainment industry thrives on, carries over to other areas, people buy what celebrities are paid to endorse, entire political campaigns are based on feelings, acting skill is used to get votes as well as to get buyers. Post-modernism abets chicanery in environmentalism and politics- there is no reality, only feelings matter- We have to save the planet. Want fair shares and free everything? Socialism gives it.
Mitchell in the Club of Rome! Yes I looked this up.
The club said we will run out of everything. Mitchell showed that resources were not defined by a fixed number but quantity was subject to the market, prices and technology.
If I have the timing right, the Club of Rome thing was well before he demolished the idea.
As it is getting late, criticisms about my lack of knowledge of money, special or general, are valid.
Proposition- This could be solved by me getting my fair share (ie, more).
https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/a...
Too many are more cult like far left anti-American training grounds of hate.
https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=11020
The failures of medicine are buried, the architect and civil engineer are remembered by their edifices, social studies academics have tenure and propound until pensioned retirements. There is no objective test, judgment is only from other 'club' members. They lecture to a cohort that, generally, is innumerate but has verbal skill. This skill is used, as with lawyers, to present a case, to twist.
The scientific method barely makes a formal appearance in science and engineering education, there is no need. The scientific method is what they do, not what is to be regurgitated in first quarter exams. The plane designer sees the first flight, the plane takes-off, it flies, goes up and this way and that, all the laws of nature are obeyed.
The complexity of inter-connected electrical power grids is immense, (see current events in Venezuela). Politicians, lawyers, and social scientists are given power by the gullible, who never learn, scientists and engineers are over-ruled, but nature is not to be over-ruled. Result- massive failure of the entire electrical system in Venezuela.
Why do I love Atlas Shrugged? Let me count the ways.
Rand described the above with brilliant clarity.
If there is value and reality in anthropology, there is more of it in Atlas Shrugged than in all of our U departments of social studies.
Paul Dirac- one of the greats, I greatly admire his personality. Did he admire the USSR? I was not aware of that. Maybe he got an impression that the scientists he interacted with in the USSR had an easier time than he had in the UK.
Maybe in the same group you could put Richard Dawkins, superb work and standing up to bigotry, but he then commits moral posturing in supporting popular enviro-crap.
A person is rightly judged according to their achievements in their field. That Dirac and Dawkins have demonstrated logical anomalies does not detract from their achievements.
But what are the achievements of the various .... studies departments? The diversion of human resources to wasting paper (if that were all) from more productive use of those talents in street sweeping.
Similarly, John D. Rockefeller claimed to be a Baptist and attended church regularly. When I posted here about George P. Mitchell, those who endorsed his great works in fracking also excused his involvement in the Club of Rome.
As I pointed out to FFA above, Rand could no more write about an imagined new society without writing anthropology than she could have train travel without physics.
I came to the anthropology definitions by way of work. I am documenting software that tracks family structures and family members. Wanting to make sure of my terms, I googled them. Reading the definitions for "fictive kin" and other terms, the fact of "special purpose money" jumped out.
We wring our hands over the failings of public education, yet think ourselves immune from its deleterious effects. You think that you know money. Maybe you hold gold coins. Maybe you read Human Action. Do you have anything to add here about special purpose money?
As for the indirect barter of a money economy, if all that were involved were calculated self-interest, why do both parties say "Thank you" at each exchange?
In my last years of university 2005-2010, I would say that nearly every professor was politically left of center. (I had one undergraduate economics instructor who had his market principles nailed down pretty good. But both grad school profs were Marxists.). Moreover, not one of the professors who gave me the A grades resulting in my summa cum laude baccalaureate would recommend me for graduate school. I got in anyway -- and with no GRE, at that. But that was their problem, not mine. I learned a lot. I made it a point of honor to learn everything I could, even and especially, from those whose other assertions were wrongly based or erroneously expressed.
I understand your prejudice. It is common among those who endorse the culture of engineering to denigrate social science. It point of fact, if you read textbooks in sociology, and anthropology, you will see that they explicitly identify the scientific method at every universrity level. Moreover, their university curricula - at least as I experienced it - include formal classes in criticism. On the other hand, the engineering classes I had lacked that. Engineering was a cookbook fixed and formalized like the recipes from Betty Crocker with no concern for the development of the study or criticism of its practices.
You call it "gibberish." Do you deny the existence of "special purpose money"? It is an empirical fact.
Acephalous societies exist and, more to the point here, are the apparent ideal of the libertarian rightwing.
You did not demonstrate a single failing in what I presented.
The fact is that Ayn Rand wrote about a fictional society and many of its features can be explained, independently, by a study that she did not consider. That fact rests on the reality of anthropology. Rand could no more escape it than she could the physics of distance = rate * time when narrating train travel.
Reading the list of questions, I get a message that the material shows ignorance of and probably hostility to Rand's ideas in Atlas Shrugged.
Then, I see it is a selection of anthropology definitions from Palomar College as compiled by MikeMarotta.
Then I think, aha! Anthropology. This is a so-called scientific discipline, among the famous participants are- Margaret Mead, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Ruth Benedict, and Franz Boas.
The only thing worth remembering about Margaret Mead is the description of her work- "It is not even wrong".
I read 'Growing Up in Somoa' in the 19sixties and was much impressed, then.