Why Ayn Rand?

[Robert Campbell]

Cato Unbound is hosting a discussion of Ayn Rand's ideas and their impact.

The lead article, by Doug Rasmussen, appeared today

http://www.cato-unbound.org/2010/01/18/douglas-b-rasmussen/why-ayn-rand-answers-and-some-questions-for-discussion/

Three replies are scheduled for later in the week.

Robert Campbell

[syrakusos]

Cato Unbound is hosting a discussion of Ayn Rand's ideas and their impact.

It missed the point. They start off strong but then devolve into their own thesis about the purpose of government being to protect rights, etc., etc.... and that is fine in isolation... but the attraction for Ayn Rand's works here and now versus the equally correct view of Von Mises and Von Hayek are far beyond the task of writing a better Constitution.

The attraction for Ayn Rand is that her fiction demonstrates ideas by living example. She draws on the reader's own sense of life, the reader's own self-esteem. Atlas Shrugged is not "about" government. It is "about" achievement. It is true, of course, that the story plays out the consequences of denying the role of -- and source of -- productivity in society. People who read Atlas Shrugged (and The Fountainhead) all the way through because they relate to the heroes do so for reasons far deeper than the role of government.

Nice as Cato is to have around, the fact is that they are like every other lobbyist think tank sucking down America's money in the suburbs of Washington DC. As such, they have lost sight of the true lack of importance of that center of self-defined power. If Cato were serious, they would have located in Cupertino.

[James Heaps-Nelson]

Terrific article by Doug Rasmussen. I especially liked the quote from Den Uyl about the distance between thought and reality. While Den Uyl's perspective is provocative, there is much more to thought than traditional epistemology. There is a constant tug of war between the economy and facility of brain-based pattern recognition and knowledge validated by sense data and the laws of logic. The demarcation of territory properly covered by philosophy and those ocvered by other subjects is an artificial one. It is limited to thought based on traditional epistemology. Man is partly a rational animal, but more completely a brain-based animal.

Jim

Edited January 19, 2010 by James Heaps-Nelson