From: Olga Bourlin (fauxever@sprynet.com)
Date: Mon Jun 03 2002 - 02:08:24 MDT
From: E. Shaun Russell
Olga wrote:
I've admitted it to the list before - I have this problem with Ayn Rand. I break out (tears? laughter? hives?) when I see her name. I just poked my head into the new Extropians List Guidelines, and saw Ayn's name there again, keeping company with all the other erudite recommended books.
First of all, I have no idea where you saw Ayn Rand in the list guidelines. I was baffled to read this, and upon checking, I don't see it anywhere. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
***When I accessed the new Guidelines link you sent recently, I poked around and went to "Shop Extropy," where the list of books can be found.***
Secondly, while I understand how there are probably about as many people who feel negatively towards Rand as there are who feel positively, I must admit that I don't know why her presence in any extropian document (I'm assuming you saw the "recommended reading" list on the Principles page) would be surprising or out of the question. I'm pretty sure that most extropians have had a Rand influence at one point or another, whether or not they think that all of her words are great. I'm no Randroid myself, but I have no problem claiming that _Atlas Shrugged_ changed my life. It led me to see the world in a different way...a way that showed me the limitations that most people impose upon themselves (as a side note, I view Objectivism itself a self-imposed limitation...). It is this same shared sense of logic that makes a lot of extropians extropians.
***Don't know, I'm not an extropian. I did read Atlas Shrugged when I was 17 - it appealed to my still unsophisticated black/white sense of the world, and even though my critical thinking abilities were at the tricycle stage then (and I've only gotten to the training-wheels stage since then - decades later!) - there was something stilted about the lady, her group, and her writing that gave me the creeps, even back then. The more I read Rand, the more her writing, her philosophy seemed bizarre. What world did she inhabit? - a world without children, without shades of grey, a world where the compromised were the bad guys, and the uncompromised were the heroes and heroines, and, as they say - "that's (essentially) all she wrote." Ayn had the luxury of sitting around smoking and philosophizing with her group, affectionately known as The Collective (elbow in rib, get it? ha ha), and writing about whether the Dominiques of the world should hold out until they could be taken by force by the Roarks of the world (isn't it romantic?), while black children in parts of the United States were being humiliated and sometimes bombed to death. If any of you have read Nathaniel Branden's book: "Judgment Day" (came out in the 1980s sometime), you may have gotten a sense of what a hypocritical, petty, and self-absorbed woman Ayn Rand was ... even if only if one-sixteenth of the book is true!***
Rand was by no means perfect, but she did provide a great starting point.
***I remember reading somewhere where Ayn was asked what books she would recommend to people. Ayn was stumped - she could hardly think of recommending any books other than her own. I'm not certain if Ayn Rand meant to provide a starting point. In Ayn's universe, all roads led to Ayn's Doghouse (this last sentence may be unintelligible to anyone who was not acquainted with Seattle in the 1980s (or before)).***
Olga
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