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Comment by typon | Hacker News Reader

It's a reference to Ayn Rand's book Atlas Shrugged. It's sort of a libertarian bible. The Atlas in that book title refers to people like Elon Musk (industrialists, capitalists etc.) who want to carry the weight of the world on their shoulders (like the Greek Titan Atlas), but can't because of terrible government policies. So they "shrug" it off. OP is suggesting that Musk is doing the same thing, but performatively, in other words he's pretending to be super concerned with "getting back to work" but really he cares about making profits

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Is this response not accurate? I'm familiar with the book by title only, really. I've read The Fountainhead. Could someone downvoting typon please provide a better explanation?

That book elicits extremely strong feelings on both sides of the economic spectrum, expect a lot of poorly explained downvoting from here on downward.

You're close but you're missing the entire point of the book. The industrialists DONT want to carry the weight of the world. Everyone else wants them to.

The entire point of the book is that the world pushes the weight on them and they shrug it off. You can't just force a group of people to save the world.

I'm not really sure why that's a controversial idea. If you keep being a jerk to someone they won't want to help you.

I’ve read the book. The entire point of it appears to be that rich elitist people like Ayn Rand’s Russian family was should be worshiped and loved by everyone and are the only people that matter and they should just be allowed to own all the property and exploit people because it’s “better” and also amphetamines are awesome because you can use 4,651 words to say something that could be accomplished with a single sentence.

Yes. I'm sure that was the point. Her dad was a pharmacist who had his business confiscated. Hardly a Russian elite. Is it difficult to be much more intelligent and attuned with the moral integrity of capitalists than everyone else?

Not sure why this is getting downvoted, this seems like a good description of the book reference.

For some reason coronavirus threads attract the downvote brigades. It is a very inflammatory issue.

>Not sure why this is getting downvoted

because people are defensive when their own character flaws are reflected back at them.

Please don't break the site guidelines by posting like this.

It usually (not always) happens that fair-minded users come along and give the unfairly downvoted comment a corrective upvote. That happened here. Complaints like this add noise to threads and don't garbage-collect themselves, hence that rule.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> It's a reference to Ayn Rand's book Atlas Shrugged. It's sort of a libertarian bible.

Objectivist more than libertarian; Objectivism overlaps with (especially American) both conservativism and right-libertarianism, but is its own distinct thing.

> OP is suggesting that Musk is doing the same thing, but performatively, in other words he's pretending to be super concerned with "getting back to work" but really he cares about making profits.

Objectivists would, I think, reject the distinction between “getting back to work” and “makong profits” as goals. “Making profits” is the natural goal of “getting to work” (independently of the “back”) part, so to suggest that an expressed desire for the latter is “performative” because the ultimate goal is the “former” is failing to understand the basic nature of reality and, more specifically, work.

Work doesn’t inherently mean profits. Labor can be pursued for many reasons, exercise being the next most popular reason to perform work. The most popular one is actually to continue living, which in many cases isn’t all that profitable, what with all our expensive needs. You can also labor for pleasure, for love, and for a host of other reasons.

Framing work as only-profit-seeking encourages a viewpoint aligned with shareholder values, which I don’t think is a great idea.

As something of a nit-pick, Ayn Rand did not self-identify as a libertarian, and most libertarians are not followers of hers, thus "Atlas Shrugged" is not really a 'libertarian bible'. Rand self-identified as an 'objectivist', but she and her followers are often identified as 'Randians', though the latter may be seen as pejorative.

> most libertarians are not followers of hers

This does not match my experience

Just to counter-nit-pick, the word "bible" is very often used as meaning "the most popular book about a certain thing", the book doesn't have to be accepted by everyone in the movement. And Atlas Shrugged is almost certainly the most popular libertarian book.

It sounds like you're saying she wasn't a libertarian because she labeled herself as an objectivist but a) it doesn't matter what she labeled herself as and b) it can be seen as just a subset, I struggle to think of any incompatibilities between the two, especially since libertarianism is used with much looser meaning.

Ayn Rand wanted to go beyond creating a political ideology and was trying to create a fully fleshed-out philosophy (with political implications).

The politics of Objectivism are basically Anarcho-Capitalism though, and you could think of Libertarians as more moderate, pragmatic Anarcho-Capitalists with achievable policy goals.

Basically, Objectivists largely support Libertarian policies, but argue that they don't go far enough.

She had many supporter, but not many academics for she was under a lot of criticism, like friedrich n. a very controversial figure

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