Hacker News Reader

Comment by forgotpwtomain | Hacker News Reader

I find very little merit or pleasure in reading fiction where the author has an underlying agenda which they constantly grind as the novel progresses (I find some of Le Guin's otherwise good novels marred by this trend). Ayn Rand is absolutely the worst offender though, her characters are shallow to the point of ridiculousness, the plot is obvious 100 pages in for the next 500 - but she's going to serve up 'profound world changing philosophy' to you for the next 500 pages anyways. But hey - America's answer to communist ideology!

View on HN

That's the reason I could never finish the damn book. I would just roll my eyes and put it down due to the comically shallow characters ("the strong, brave, handsome capitalist" and the "dirty, mooching hobo" were actual character descriptions).

There are masterpieces in this genre too. Take for example Dostoyevsky. Each of his character is a direct representative of a certain philosophy - you easily find certain characters in all of his novels: the "nihilist/atheist" the "religious mystic" the "russian orthodox" etc... I'm totally not accepting his agenda (in short: that God is mandatory to ethics), but if I start to read him, I can't put the book down until the last page...

> There are masterpieces in this genre too. Take for example Dostoyevsky. Each of his character is a direct representative of a certain philosopy

I strongly disagree that Dostoevsky characters are created to be genre representatives by the way - the closest match to this kind prototypical categorization would probably be Devils (Or Demons depending on the translation) which of his works has the most political character hues - and I've read the various literary theory that pigeon hole Dostoevsky's characters in Devil's to various ideological/political positions - but in my own natural impression of the work this wasn't there and I am inclined to believe this is the author's of the related literary theory imposing what they would like to read form the work onto Dostoevsky's imagination.

It's hard to explain why exactly I think it reads so differently - but I would say my impression of the literary imagination and creative process is entirely at odds with the accounts that want to extract political or ideological positives from which these theories are built; it's not that > 'God is mandatory to ethics' is not part of Dostoevsky's thought process let's suppose it is - but I would rather suggest that the idea of agenda is foreign to his work (consider what is the agenda in for example The Idiot? -- to prove that natural goodness in people is useless and leads to insanity?) - and that rather the construction happens organically, my hypothetical recipe for imitation would be something like this: let us suppose some starting conditions and an ideological theory within a setting (suggested say by current events, or local conditions, or a real life individual) and then try to see how this character (with application of his ideological theory) develops in this setting. But this is surely a different process from starting with agenda and designing characters with the goal of convincing the public of a particular ethical or economic theory. Of course I cannot prove that Dostoevsky was not trying to convince the public of something - this is only my particular impression, but I would say two things point in favour of it - the literary merit itself - and the fact that despite the literary merit, rarely is the agenda ever clear or strongly convincing.

Ok. But on the other hand if we suppose you do have an agenda, then it just a decision if you write it in original platonic style (I dont know anything, I have only questions, let see where the conversation leads), or in Gallileo style (poor stupid Simplicio...) Of course the second will be more clearly propagandastic...

What I liked about Dostoevsky was that he seemed to primarily focus on the psychology of his characters, and any politics and agenda felt like a natural part of this. Because of this focus on 'rich' individuals, I never felt he simply put words in the characters mouths to promote or reject an agenda. Real humans are too messy for that.

In contrast, a writer who I personally greatly love, C.S. Lewis, had a tendency to become overtly preachy. I'm using him as an example because he strikes me as a perfect case of someone torn between telling a good story and wanting to put out a message.

There's an interesting split in his oeuvre between books that are wonderful stories (Perelandra), and books that try to convince you to be a Christian, and his Narnia Chronicles occupy a confusing mix of the two. Many people love his stories despite his preachiness, and many people absolutely hate him for his preachiness despite the fact that he was a good writer.

Personally, I wasn't bothered by most of his overt Christian themes in Narnia, for example, because many of those themes transcend mere Christianity (budum ching). But the little tidbit about one of the core characters not going to heaven because she liked lipstick a little too much (basically) felt like a terrible violation of his storytelling just to make a point.

Anyways, I'm getting off topic here but I like any excuse to get into Lewis, as he's one of my favorite characters precisely because he strikes me as so maddeningly torn between different things. Carry on.

I enjoyed Bioshock[1], and that was while I still considered myself a libertarian. Heavy-handed political narratives don't preclude decent storytelling, characters, and (in this case) gameplay. Sure, I thought the delivery was a tad blunt and I didn't appreciate the message until later but it made me think and in hindsight it probably put the first few fractures into that worldview. In any case, Bioshock doesn't commit the same literary sins as Ayn Rand. It doesn't monologue excessively, the villain of its political narrative isn't a negative caricature (instead: "brilliant but tragically misguided," which works even better). The game would probably stand on its own merits without the political undertones, even if the latter is what makes it "great" as opposed to merely "good." The same can't be said for Rand's work, but I can't help but feel that there ought to be a place for political narratives in popular fiction.

[1] A first-person shooter set in a zombie-infested underwater failed libertarian state led by a man named Andrew Ryan. Subtle, no? Well, the nuance comes in the form of backstory that you get while fighting the survivors. Briefly, after construction of the city was complete demand for unskilled labor tanked and unemployment exploded. Nascent genetic engineering entered the scene, the market forced desperate laborers to "splice" in order to remain competitive even though it was known to be a Faustian bargain with psychological side-effects, and the predictable tragedy of the commons ensued. The craziest, most spliced-up, "fittest" citizens survived, and those are what you fight as the game progresses. On a macroscopic level the plot begs the question "how can this be a good economic system when it can't even handle mundane declines in growth rate or overcome tragedies of the commons that everyone sees coming from a mile away?" On a microscopic level, you listen to audio journals and ask yourself "this is supposed to be freedom?" or "this is what the market considers 'value creation'?," an exercise which transfers well to real life.

My favourite part is the part where she talks about that train where everyone deserves to die because they were all lazy socialist scum on government welfare or what not.

You can really feel her anger burning. The whole book feels like she banged it out in one long amphetamine binge.

I liked it, but I wouldn't recommend it. It could have easily been half the size.

Many of the characters are caricatures, which, given the length of the book, I'll concede is more annoying than it is humorous. I did think Hank was solid.

Almost all of the antagonists are, as you say, ridiculously shallow, which goes to your point about her agenda. She did a shockingly better job with The Fountainhead (which I liked less) - but still far from perfect.

Finally, about the plot being obvious. That's true of most stories. It's a big book, and there were plenty of small plots and paths that I wasn't sure how they'd turn out.

Reductio ad absurdum could have been entertaining in a ~300 page package (I'm thinking Animal Farm).

It seems that you have no idea what you're talking about.)

Her philosophy is sound and so are her principles of free market economy, while, perhaps, her plot is idealized and naive and some characters too sophisticated to be true.)

Edit: I have tried to explain it better in a separate comment.

Hint: this is a fiction based on philosophy, not a philosophic treatise based on fiction.

I don't think her philosophy is sound. You cannot advocate unregulated capitalism in a society where people don't start on equal footing.

It's intrinsic to existence that no two people start on equal footing. One will be smarter, another will be a harder worker. Your rule would mean no form of capitalism is permissible at any point. I think at some point parents must have stopped informing their children that life isn't fair and deal with it.

That's very easy to swallow when you are born on the upper end of the scale. Not so much when you are born to a single mother on a Flint MI ghetto or when you are born gay in Nigeria, or a girl on war-torn Sudan.

Just because you are comfortable on middle-upper class doesn't mean you can't be objective about this things. That some kids are born into wealthy families and some are born in sub-Saharan Africa and forced to mine minerals for the former's iPad until they are 15 and keel over is undeniably wrong. But it's what arises from capitalism.

Yes, because there's so much free market in sub-Saharan Africa.

Equality does not exist. It is a mental concept created by communist demagogues. The evolution process which produced everything including our minds is based on generic variation and difference in reproductive success.

Equal rights for by definition inequal beings is what smart guys have tried to put into constitutions.

What's with the ending parenthesis? ".)" ? I've noticed it in another one or two of your comments. Is it used in another language? What does it signify?

Minimalistic "smile", or emoji as it is called nowadays- a way of expressing emotions. Think of it as a Zen-like essential minimalism.

So you're a libertarian and an emoji hipster? Isn't that a bit much?

thanks. I will keep an eye out for it elsewhere!

Rand (along with a couple of other women like Rose Wilder Lane and Isabel Paterson) was instrumental in introducing a lot of people to the free market ethos, but no. She was never a good philosopher, nor a scholar. Her works are probably best understood as the total antithesis of Marxism-Leninism, the crossfire of which she was caught up in at the time until her emigration to the United States.

Rand is a relic and has largely been repudiated by far superior scholars (such as Murray N. Rothbard) who have since made most of her work deprecated.

> It seems that you have no idea what you're talking about.

This is a form of calling names, which the HN guidelines ask you not to do: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Your comment would be much better with that sentence taken out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com