lovely.

Great collection of excerpts from Any Rand. I love her writing.

Айн Ранд дефинира новия интелектуалец
http://www.knigolandia.info/2010/06/b...

Произведенията на Айн Ранд определено ме въведоха в едно различно измерение на светоусещане и отношение към живота. Най-силно влияние ми оказаха, разбира се, романите й “Атлас изправи рамене” “Изворът” и “Ние, живите”, както и есетата от сборника “Капитализмът: непознатия идеал”.

“За новия интелектуалец” е синтез на тезите й от горните произведения. Основната посока е дефинирането на досегашната човешка история като следствие от щенията на две фигури – Атила и Шамана, в чиито образи тя припознава военни/политически и религиозни лидери, които са налагали своята воля над обикновените хора или чрез сила, или чрез заблуди. А обединението между двете неща според нея е най-опасното нещо.

First off, Ayn Rand is heavy duty. It's not for the majority.

The first 58 pages are "new" material. The rest are excerpts from her novels. Half the book are quotes from Atlas Shrugged, including John Galt's speech. I've already read Atlas Shrugged. This book seems almost.. unnecessary.

Ayn Rand is still my hero. Not that I agree with everything she said, she was an extremest. She was an intellectual powerhouse, and she was ballsy. The new material in the book criticized other philosophers, including Marx, Nietzsche, Bentham, Spencer. And she made very convincing arguments.

A woman butting heads with intellectual men in the 1950s and publicly poking holes in their rationale. She was ballsy! And her philosophy resonates with me. Reading her work makes me think deeply about my own life philosophy.

Another one that I read when I was in the Ayn Rand frame of mind.

I have read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead but it was nice to review excerpts. I am therefore I must think. I’m not sure I agree with Ayn but I do enjoy her work. I wonder what she would think of DOGE?

Anthem I should check out someday.

The intellectuals share the philosophers' guilt. The intellectuals all those whose professions deal with the "humani-ties" and require a firm philosophical base have known for a long time that no such base existed. They knew that they were functioning in a philosophical vacuum and that the currency they were passing was rubber checks which would bounce, some day, wrecking their culture.
One can never know, only surmise, what tragedies, de spair and silent devastation have been going on for over a century in the invisible underground of the intellectual professions in the souls of their practitioners nor what incalculable potential of human ability and integrity perished in those hidden, lonely conflicts. The young minds who came to the field of the intellect with the inarticulate sense of a crusade, seeking rational answers to the problems of achieving a meaningful human existence, found a philosophical con game in place of guidance and leadership. Some of them gave up the field of ideas, in hopeless, indignant frustration, and vanished into the silence of subjectivity. Others gave in, and saw their eagerness turn into bitterness, their quest into apathy, their crusade into a cynical racket. They condemned themselves to the chronic anxiety of a con man dreading exposure when they accepted the roles of enlightened leaders, while knowing that their knowledge rested on nothing but fog and that its only validation was somebody's feelings.
They, the standard bearers of the mind, found themselves dreading reason as an enemy, logic as a pursuer, thought as an avenger. They, the proponents of ideas, found themselves clinging to the belief that ideas were impotent: their choice was the futility of a charlatan or the guilt of a traitor. They were not mediocrities when they began their careers; they were pretentious mediocrities when they ended. The exceptions are growing rarer with every generation. No one can accept with psychological impunity the function of a Witch Doctor under the banner of the intellect.

"Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your rec ognition of the fact that you choose to live that productive work is the process by which man's consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one's purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one's values-that all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others-that your work is yours to choose, and the choice is as wide as your mind, that nothing more is possible to you and nothing less is human—-that to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a fear-corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time, and to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind's full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay-that your work is the process of achieving your values, and to lose your ambition for values is to lose your ambition to live that your body is a machine, but your mind is its driver, and you must drive as far as your mind will take you, with achievement as the goal of your road-that the man who has no purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to crash in the first chance ditch, that the man who stifles his mind is a stalled machine slowly going to rust, that the man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap, and the man who makes another man his goal is a hitchhiker no driver should ever pick up that your work is the purpose of your life, and you must speed past any killer who assumes the right to stop you, that any value you might find outside your work, any other loyalty or love, can be only travelers you choose to share your journey and must be travelers going on their own power in the same direction.

Compilado de fragmentos de novelas de Rand. El conjunto es una especie de antología retórica de la filosofía personal de Anita. Incluye grandes hits sobre la razón, la moral, la industria, el estado, el sexo, el egoísmo, y el nodo que todo lo entrelaza: el socialismo. Impresiona la mezcla de torpeza con lucidez de este libro. Torpe por maniqueo, por sobresimplificador, por caricaturesco, por sentencioso, por dogmático, por cerrado a cualquier contraste filosófico, científico, histórico, político, económico, y así. Reclama razón, pero impone doctrina. Es una especie de adoctrinamiento peronista, pero en dirección opuesta. Promueve la libertad, pero reparte restricciones. Es torpe. Pero también tiene muchos momentos lúcidos. Aunque simplifique hasta la exageración, conserva un núcleo conceptual que le permite hacer inferencias interesantes. Creo que vienen de una mezcla de aristotelismo con vehemencia personal como rasgo de personalidad. Su crítica al socialismo tiene muchas iluminaciones. La enajenación de lo individual en lo colectivo, que Anita exagera como canibalismo. El elogio del egoísmo que Anita lleva hasta la racionalización en un raro altruismo egoísta (aunque un poco de Rand no le vendría mal al pseudo Welfare State de los socialismos latinoamericanos). La insistencia en que A es A, cuando la lógica moderna, que ya había avanzado bastante en tiempos de Anita, había perdido esa seguridad (las lógicas multivalentes que jaquean la identidad formal). La insistencia ciega en el libre mercado cuando hay demasiados contraejemplos trágicos. Y sigue. Contra todo, a pesar de tantas falencias, Anita infiere bien porque deriva corolarios desde núcleos conceptuales inmensos. El horror del socialismo que describe en clave novelesca es demasiado parecido a los socialismos históricos. Inclusive a los socialismos actuales de Latinoamérica. Por eso muchas páginas de este libro son escalofriantes. Son actuales. Se sufren cada día, por ejemplo, en Argentina. Acierta en pronósticos sobre la corrupción, la pobreza, la descomposición de las instituciones desde dentro, la destrucción de la sociedad, el sabotaje a cualquier proyecto de honestidad, trabajo y superación. Pareciera que Anita leyó la teoría de la hegemonía de Laclau un siglo antes de que Laclau la vomite. Y la noveló. De la estética de este libro no hay mucho para comentar. Es retórica rústica. Parece elaborada por el increíble Hulk. Asume la ausencia total de crítica en el lector. Más todavía, exige avidez por recibir doctrina. Varios pasajes parecen discursos fanáticos de personajes de Flannery O´Connor en versión secular. La condensación del negativo de una imaginaria Flannery con sus profetas fanáticos se ha integrado en los discursos de Rand. John Galt es un imposible. No por lo que Anita rechaza, sino por lo que ignora. Las cosas son mucho más complejas. Entonces, de nuevo tiene poco (hay más en los liberales clásicos), y de intelectual tiene nada (repele el pensamiento libre). Lo que tiene este libro es vehemencia.

I couldn't fully agree or disagree with all points, as it covers a wide range of ideas and applies Rand's moral framework to different fields (politics, economics, psychology, etc.). However, I'd say it's quite a good introduction to the work of Ayn Rand.

The ideas in this book are as relevant today—perhaps more so—than they were when written. The problems and contradictions of progressive ideology were evident to the author in the middle of the 20th century. One wonders what she would say today. Probably much of the same.

One caveat—the 86-page speech of John Galt that closes the book is not easy to get through. It took three sessions for me to get through it, and I read quite a bit. It’s unnecessarily repetitive, but it is still good stuff.

Absolute garbage. The woman and the book. That is all.

Good stuff but mostly contains excerpts from Rand's novels.

She mostly writes sentences about other philosophers that are false. But, A = A. Bubble gum metaphysics.