"Ayn Rand's Revenge" - NYTimes Book Review of new Rand biography | Hacker News Reader

"Ayn Rand's Revenge" - NYTimes Book Review of new Rand biography

nytimes.com

20 pointsandrewpbrett38 comments

I purchased and attempted to read Atlas Shrugged a couple of years ago. I failed, because rarely have I ever come across a more tedious, sermonizing, simplistic and unconvincing philosophical treatise poorly disguised as a novel.

She could have distilled her viewpoint into a couple of paragraphs (it doesn't seem particularly subtle or complex), but that would probably have made it too easy to argue with her supporters, who can pointedly ask, "well, have you read it?"

No, I have not. I tried and it was terrible.

For great fiction with a healthy dose of philosophy, I'd recommend reading The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco instead.

Your opinions regarding Rand are not a justification to be insulting.

I enjoyed it as a novel, and find significant parts of the philosophy convincing, but I'm not going to fill my comment with insults that apply to you.

What would be better than insults is arguments. You haven't given any argument that someone who likes the book could find convincing. If you don't want to debate that's fine, then don't. But if you choose not to converse in a way that either side could change their mind, then you should at least be nice about it.

Hardly an insult, really, when the reviews of Atlas Shrugged of its publication period got far deeper into the thesaurus to describe how terrible the writing really is.

Besides, that's his honest reaction to the text. Why throw a fit over somebody else's aversion to the novel?

Because we're going to become socialists if he doesn't like it!!11!

What was YC come to when !!11! comments are being upvoted?

Somewhat ambiguously pro-socialist as well. YC used to be Rand-friendly, and had a capitalist slant since the start. Has the population changed? Or is it just the hostile original link coloring who comes here?

I think the population has changed dramatically -- very slowly perhaps, but it definitely seems different than it was a couple of years ago.

Wow, I speak for everyone on the site now? Awesome.

Anyway, I don't get the anti-socialism arguments. Thanks to socialism, the US has a road network that allows anyone to drive from any one point in the country to any other. Everyone has Internet access. There is 3G service practically everywhere. You can ship a package today and have it show up anywhere else in the country tomorrow. (OK, maybe not tomorrow. Monday.)

We didn't get that because of everyone looking to make a quick buck for their own personal gain, we got there because of capital influx from the government and from sane regulations.

Capitalism works pretty well too. The financial industry gambled their own hard-earned money on risky securities, failed, and bailed themselves out. Oh wait, no. The government bailed them out.

YC used to be Rand-friendly, and had a capitalist slant since the start. Has the population changed?

Really? My account is 902 days old, and yours is 297.

HN has a optimistic outlook. The reality is that you are as likely to get rich from your Twitter mashup as the banks were to profit from interest-only loans. The unifying factor is that "I am probably going to be lucky, unlike everyone else" attitude. That is not capitalism, though, just human nature.

My first account is 804 days old, plus I lurked a few months. Do you not remember the Rand-friendly threads of the past? I remember a number of long front page ones.

> Anyway, I don't get the anti-socialism arguments. Thanks to socialism, the US has a road network that allows anyone to drive from any one point in the country to any other.

Do you want to get them? Capitalism agrees that road networks are good. It says there are different methods of building them. Some are cheaper and more efficient, in particular voluntary methods. Capitalism claims that a less socialist road network (other things being equal) would have a better quality to cost ratio.

This claim isn't easy to evaluate, and the current state of our road networks and the current amount of socialism is in Government is largely irrelevant to evaluating it.

> We didn't get that because of everyone looking to make a quick buck for their own personal gain

This isn't what capitalists in general, or Rand, advocates. (e.g., drop the quick). If you genuinely want to understand the other side you'll have to try harder.

Why throw a fit over somebody else's aversion to the novel?

Because it's often assumed that anyone who complains about the writing actually dislikes the politics and is bashing the writing as a disingenuous cover for that; and that anyone who claims to have enjoyed her novels for their own sake is actually promoting the politics and only talking the novels up to serve that end.

In short, debating the quality of Ayn Rand's writing as fiction is a proxy battle for the associated politics, and we all know how enlightening political debates on the internet can be.

Respond to what he wrote, not to what you've inferred him to have thought.

To read any text is to attempt to infer its meaning. This is English, not C.

I was mostly trying to suggest that, just maybe, it'd be a good idea to not turn the whole conversation into one about politics, but apparently that's inevitable. There seem to be a lot of people on HN whose feelings about libertarianism (either for or against) are a core part of their self-image, and that makes discussing anything related perilous.

In the future I think I'll just flag any article that mentions Rand and I encourage others to do the same, regardless of what they think of her ideas.

Do you also plan to flag every article mentioning Marx, socialism, Chomsky, environmentalism (for or against), etc, etc?

I don't think flagging is the answer. Just don't read it.

Sure, thanks for the suggestions. I guess I might give Chomsky a pass if it was purely about linguistics and didn't involve his politics at all.

Look, I'm not out to push my politics here, if that's what you're thinking. I read HN because of the high-quality discussions about technology and related matters. If I want to see flame wars over libertarianism, environmentalism, or whatever else there's an entire internet full of that dreck, and the amount of political content usually has a pretty direct negative correlation to the quality of discussion at a site.

"a more tedious, sermonizing, simplistic and unconvincing ... poorly disguised"

You don't see any insults?

Well I guess you wouldn't: you're the one who considered it appropriate to demean my comment as "a fit".

In any case, your argument about "honest reactions" being good defends my comment just as much as his. Yet you don't seem to be considering our comments equally valid. And I don't either, since it's just not true that all honest reactions make good comments.

Rand herself was famous for being insulting and dismissive, which I think is the main reason people react so strongly against her. In the introduction to anthem, she basically states that if you don't agree with her views on capitalism, then you are in favor of gulags and concentration camps. She, herself, leaves no room for middle ground, nuance, or civilized discussion. That isn't an excuse to resort to insults when talking about her, but if you are honestly wondering why people react so emotionally against her, it might have something to do with her assaulting other people's beliefs on such an emotional level.

He didn't say anything about her beliefs. He said the book sucked. For all you know, he's a libertarian.

I have performed a side-channels attack on the original comment, and have determined it is unintentionally leaking information about the author's political views. It turns out he's not a libertarian.

We're now talking about the author of the comment and not the comment itself. Can we stop?

Maybe you were. I was talking about how comments contain inexplicit information, and drawing an analogy to the computer security field (which I figured is more on topic).

It's also a field which, IIRC, you know a lot more about than I do. Perhaps you can improve the analogy.

I'm not a libertarian, but your point stands - it wasn't her philosophy that bothered me, it's the book and how poorly it is written. To use an example from the book I mentioned, The Name of the Rose has long sections where people argue over obscure religious matters (such as whether or not God has a sense of humour). As an atheist, if I reacted to books simply on the basis of my beliefs, I'd hate it, since what's more pointless than reading dialogue about a non-existent entity?

But I found it fascinating, because it's well done, well-written, and intellectually rigorous.

That said, the quality of her writing did impact my opinion of her philosophy. I was open-minded about Rand and her ideas until I started reading Atlas Shrugged, at which point I decided that if her writing was that poor, I really didn't see how I could embrace her ideas, especially since so many of her supporters seem to think it's a really fine novel.

The Name Of The Rose is a fabulously underrated hacker book.

> tedious, sermonizing, simplistic and unconvincing

Astonishing. You weren't able to finish a long, wordy book describing a philosophy you don't agree with?

> She could have distilled her viewpoint into a couple of paragraphs

Wow, you mean as she did plenty of times, which you can easily find by doing a cursory search?

The idea that you shouldn't support your central thesis with as much evidence as you can muster is faintly preposterous.

I don't find Marx to be subtle or complex. I think his viewpoint can be summed up in one sentence, "From each according to ability, to each according to need." Nevertheless, I don't begrudge him writing many giant volumes of "tedious, sermonizing, simplistic, and unconvincing" supporting text.

Atlas Shrugged wasn't supposed to be subtle or reflect complex realities or any other thing you imagine is a requirement for being a great novel. It was written to express Ayn Rand's philosophy and obviously was hugely successful at doing so.

As much as I don't like Marx, he's still more complex than that.

You may like to read _The Open Society and Its Enemies_ by Karl Popper. It is a strong critique of Marx (and Plato and Hegel). But it also goes into some detail about what Marx's views are (which is an important part of criticizing them). Marx was wrong, and can be criticized a lot more thoroughly than that brief summary of his views allows.

One thing your summary of Marx misses, for example, is his historicism: his ideas about being able to predict the future of society, in a scientific manner, based on history. This is a bad mistake: it's an attempt to legitimize prophecy and call it science.

Well, no kidding. Which was part of my point. A summary of someone's views is not a substitute for the real thing. This is true for Ayn Rand as well, but folks who hate her don't like to admit this.

(Disclosure: I'm not remotely a Randian. I'm just sick of the bias I see here.)

If you're going to criticize the book, at least consider the time in which it was written, don't just say "it was bad and tedious and I couldn't get through it". Atlas Shrugged was written in the 40s and 50s as a response to Communism, which was the new cool philosophy at the time. Objectivism and laissez-faire capitalism certainly have their flaws, and they're the same as for any other philosophical solution-to-everything that starts with, "if only everyone in the world would.."

There are some ideas in there worth reading, and plenty that today seem dated. Anyway, it's healthy to read things that you disagree with..

Thanks for the suggestion of The Name of the Rose, added it to my wish list.

Yes exactly. It's a product of its time. Many people consider Asimov or Heinlein equally impenetrable. Hell, many people consider Joyce and Proust tedious. And I wouldn't be at all surprised in a few years if Atlas Shrugged is attacked for glorifying smoking and pollution too...

Publication date of 1984: 1949. Bad writing is bad writing.

Indeed. I read the book, and was struck by how effective it is as an inoculation against fundamentalist libertarianism.

"But Cerf offered Rand an alternative: if she gave up 7 cents per copy in royalties, she could have the extra paper needed to print Galt’s oration. That she agreed is a sign of the great contradiction that haunts her writing and especially her life."

On the contrary, actually. The idea of artistic integrity is a _very_ central point of her preceding novel, The Fountainhead. The book's main protagonist, Howard Roark, is constantly refusing to compromise with his artistic vision.

I think it's even simpler than that. She wanted something (more pages) and she paid for it. There's nothing even slightly uncapitalist about resolving a disagreement by paying to get your way. It's the epitome of capitalism.

Agreed. The conclusions from the reviewer in that section didn't make much sense to me either. I'm also glad to see that some people are actually focusing on the content of the submission instead of the usual politics. There are some interesting tidbits in the review (and no doubt the book as well).

True, but the amount of money Rorck gave up was minuscule compared to the amount Hank Rearden gave up to keep Readen Metal as product rather than a scientific curiosity. Did the reviewer even read the book?

"... if she gave up 7 cents per copy in royalties, she could have the extra paper needed to print Galt’s oration. That she agreed is a sign of the great contradiction that haunts her writing and especially her life."

Nonsense. She may just as well have concluded that adulterating her work would have made it less potent and thus reduced its impact, resulting in fewer sales.

That the reviewer believes conceding to accept less money in the short term contradicts capitalism betrays his or her understanding of capitalism.

Disclosure: I've never read any of Rand's writings.

Rand's ideas are about maximizing personal freedom, with money only a means to that end. Most of the characters in Atlas Shrugged give up fortunes that they've either earned or inherited when they realize that holding onto them limits their personal freedom. So there is actually no contradiction at all.

"Giving up her royalties to preserve her vision is something that no genuine capitalist, and few popular novelists, would have done. It is the act of an intellectual, of someone who believes that ideas matter more than lucre."

I don't agree that recognizing that money is a means to an end and is not to be put before that end disqualifies you from being a genuine capitalist, or that being a capitalist and an intellectual are mutually exclusive. I also don't agree with the subtle denigration of capitalism slipped in with the synonym "lucre."

Yeah -- the quoted comment reflects a remarkable ignorance of the intellectual content of Rand's novels.

The NYT's book review of a Rand biography seems to be little more than a tedious, sermonizing, simplistic, and unconvincing ad hominem against Rand herself. This is what qualifies as journalism these days?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com