MovieChat Forums > Atlas Shrugged: Part III (2014) Discussion > The fundamental contradiction in Rand

The fundamental contradiction in Rand

posted 9 years ago by tgemberl
2 replies | jump to latest

There is a contradiction in the position of Ayn Rand. On the one hand, she's arguing for self-reliance. On the other, she's promoting a victim mentality. That tends towards refusing responsibility for your own choices.

Let me give an example of this. I have a friend who is an admirer of Rand. He thinks of himself as an individualist swimming against the tide of our evil society. But he's never really taken responsibility for the choices he made. While he's intelligent, he never got his act together to finish his college degree or determine what kind of job he could do. So now he claims that his failed life is the fault of immigrants and corrupt government. If we had no immigration in America, he would've had a job and a decent life. He yearns for an Adolf Hitler to bring justice to the country. He even fantasizes that he would be one of Hitler's advisors.

Now, you'd think that would be a pretty untenable contradiction. He'd look himself in the mirror and think, "I screwed up." But once you think of yourself as a victim, you can justify almost anything. Even murder.

The contradiction in Rand's own life wasn't quite as bad because she did take chances and stretch herself to do creative work. She "found her calling." But still there is an overwhelming sense in her thought of victimization. She was a victim of the Russian Revolution, but all her life she seems to have imagined the government was going to come and seize her hard-earned wealth. There was never any danger of that in America.

[–] tgemberl 9 years ago

Last night I watched the scene where John Galt asks Dagny to decide whether to go back to save the railroad. He says, "if you have to choose between your heart and your mind, choose your mind." Now, that grossly underestimates the difficulty of determining what your mind says. Our brains are flooded with massive amounts of information that lead us in many directions. There isn't any obvious course of action our minds give us.

Rand can only imagine that the mind's verdict would be unambiguous because she imagines the only valid personality type is her own. In Myers-Briggs terms, I assume she would be a strong T (Thinking over Feeling) and J (Judging over Perceiving). Most likely she would also be an S (Sensing over Intuiting), but I'm not sure. So she puts very little value on feeling and thinks you have to make up your mind about things fast. But a lot of people would find that orientation alien. If we only had strong Thinking and Judging people in this world, it would be a pretty cold place. If we only had strong Feeling and Perceiving people, we wouldn't get much work done. We need both types of people.

Rand called Kant a "mystic" because he recognized how complex these issues were. I think he would've been a Thinking and Perceiving (not Judging) type, as well as Intuiting instead of Sensing. But he would've recognized that not everyone could be like himself.

[–] ejonconrad 9 years ago

Rand can only imagine that the mind's verdict would be unambiguous because she imagines the only valid personality type is her own.

Rand's image of herself and the reality were quite different. For example, when she and Nathan Branden decided to have an affair, they expected both of their spouses; however, when Branden decided to go back to his wife, Rand behaved like a lovesick middle schooler - nothing at all like the characters in her novels.