Hacker News Reader

Comment by pram | Hacker News Reader

Having personally read some of Rand’s fiction as a teen (from my high school library no less!) I think you’d be hard pressed to find a reason to “ban” them.

The narrative in Anthem, for example, is so hilariously over the top I’m not sure what the argument would be. It’s a Pol Pot “Year Zero” style civilization, and the randian superman subverts the established collectivist order by single handedly reinventing the lightbulb in a sewer.

Frankly anyone would be giving it more credibility than it deserves by saying it contains dangerous ideas.

View on HN

I really had Atlas Shrugged in mind, which is convincing enough to regularly show up on Republican booklists (and AFAIR at least one Supreme Court judge) and has all sorts of (my opinion) problematic views on ethical egoism and the like.

> hilariously over the top

These days I'm not sure anything can be so over-the-top that no-one will take it seriously.

Well, I'm glad to have read Atlas Shrugged, although I didn't find it philosophically convincing. It would be very frustrating to not be able to read it and just be stuck wondering what the Republicans seem to cite as an important text for understanding their worldview.

I think even Rand was aware of its limitation, which is why the book has an essentially magical ending -- the heroine arrives in utopia by accident when her plane crashes there. But having to reveal the actual process of getting there is precisely the failure of utopian ideologies.

What? Her landing in "utopia" is not nearly close to the ending, nor is it magical: at all times the heroine has the option to voluntarily join this utopia and she consciously chooses to remain in the "outside world" to fight its demise.

And she doesn't magically crash there, the actual process of her getting there is narrated in what is probably a good 30 pages.

Using an analogy from a false representation of the plot to imply that the author intentionally recognizes flaws with her philosophy is definitely not the most objective review of this book, to put it nicely.

Have you even read the book?

Admittedly, I read it a long time ago, as a teenager, and it didn't resonate with anything in my own experience. I would certainly defer to your analysis.

Did I imagine the plane crash, or mix it up with some other book?

While I didn't start this with the inclination to ban Ayn Rand, I think your first paragraph has convinced me that her writings should be in a library. If you think that her worldview is ethically bankrupt (and, fwiw, so do I), how do you expect the next generation of scholars to rebut that worldview, without being intimately familiar with it? If you think that a work should be made unavailable just because it's popular with people you are politically opposed to (and fwiw, so am I) then I strongly disagree, state censorship on political grounds is utterly intolerable. It's also completely untenable. Forbidden fruit is a siren song, and the article is specifically about people providing online workarounds to brick and mortar censorshop.

Rand's novels contain realistic villains and unrealistic heroes.

All I remembered of Atlas Shrugged when I read it in high school was the sex, tbh. Had someone said subscribing to Libertarianism would get me screwed the way Rearden screwed Dagny I’d have signed up then and there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com