AYN RAND: "NO ONE HELPED ME"

[Brant Gaede]

[BaalChatzaf]

Any normal human being who can speak a natural language by age 2 and a half has been helped by its nurturers or care takers. No human in modern times can achieve a language purely by his/her own efforts

[Brant Gaede]

Any normal human being who can speak a natural language by age 2 and a half has been helped by its nurturers or care takers. No human in modern times can achieve a language purely by his/her own efforts

The context of the thread is someone adult or near adult. Nurturing babies is a different context. You are aware you just said the equivalent of "water is wet"?

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Brant,

The more I study screenwriting, the more I think Rand's words should be divided into two categories:

1. The actual ideas, and
2. Storytelling.

Not just any storytelling, either.

Hollywood storytelling.

A guy I'm currently studying, Karl Iglesias, who wrote Writing for Emotional Impact: Advanced Dramatic Techniques to Attract, Engage, and Fascinate the Reader from Beginning to End, says one of the the main story secrets to Hollywood storytelling involves three components:

1. Goal
2. Obstacle
3. Unwillingness to compromise

If that doesn't sound like Rand, I don't know what does.

Then we add stakes, which are values to be lost, protected or gained. A great Hollywood story always involves larger-than-life stakes.

I could come up with quote after quote from Rand's life where she tried to present her storytelling as her reality, but let's take a look at the stakes she set for the most boring technical book she ever wrote, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (from the Forward):

If, in the light of such ''solutions" the problem might appear to be esoteric, let me remind you that the fate of human societies, of knowledge, of science, of progress and of every human life, depends on it.

The fate of "every human life" depends on answering technical questions about the nature of the different schools of epistemology?

Dayaamm!

Nice stakes.

But is that provable fact or good old Hollywood storytelling?

Rand's character archetype (the one she chose for her public persona) is the loner who stands down the crowd. The outsider. The misunderstood genius. Zarathustra.

There's not much room in that archetype for getting a whole lot of help from others.

That is, if one is telling a Hollywood story...

As historical fact, it's easy to see many people Rand owed an intellectual debt to. But historical fact is too often a lousy story--and you have to sell ideas with great stories, not rigorous history.

So Rand the woman became Rand the lone crusader against all of mankind.

btw - I don't fault her for her storytelling exaggerations and inaccuracies. She was a great storyteller. And she had great ideas. Somebody who is that competent at both will inevitably mix them together at times and fudge one side or the other when they don't fit exactly. It's the nature of how the brain works when one has a powerful vision.

Apropos, this is not "faking reality" as in evasion. The intent is to forge reality from a story, to make the story become real. To operate the human mind as a causal agent. That, incidentally, is how all great ideas become real.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

Ayn's book on Hollywood written and published in Russia is (was?) on sale on eBay right now. (Put $100 minimum into the search after searching "Ayn Rand." If not found, check the completed, not sold, listings.

--Brant

edit: the book sold for $1300 just before noon today PST--shipping from Ukraine (wouldn't surprise me if it was heisted from a library; I'd probably approve if it was and I knew the details)

while there put $30,000 into the Ayn Rand search to see the most ridiculously over-priced Rand item ever: her signature only on a three-page 1970s Palo Alto Book Service contract she did not write or originate

Edited December 2, 2014 by Brant Gaede