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The Essentiality of Reading Atlas

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TheEgoist

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Are you saing that, to make my mind up on the direct contents of Objectivism, processed via Reason was "mistaken"? Because that is what I did. I came to the same conclusions as I would have from reading ATLAS SHRUGGED. But then I was part there anyway. If you'd have presented me with the Primacy of Existence, being a person of sicience, I'd have said "of course". If you had presented me with the proprietary role of reason in knowldge: "Of course". However, I did not thinkof them as philosophy; I though of philosphy as a bit airy-fairy but expressing some truths, just a matter of scientific fact. I was far from a Rationaiist (too airy-fairy), If you had asked my to adopt a label, it would have been Empiricist (rooted in reality and staying there). It was THE FOUNTAINHEAD that jelled them to philosphical ideas with me (I was 22). Where the rub would come in is ethics; I was more psychologically oriented than philosphically so and had come to the conclsuion that man was by nataure, made to act in his interest since that was necssary to survive. THE FOUNTAINHEAD brought that to a philosphical matter. Also Individual Rights was to me a means to the end of productivity in a Skinnerian sense as with self-interext My economic approach was about that of Scientific Socialism, in which intellegent manipulation of the economy was seen as a benefit to all and in everyone's self interest. the most salient thing that I had in common with Rand was that were were both atheistic. At first encounter, I regarded capitalism as backward and conservative. Rand won her case on the logic of it pure and simple. The cure for that was Buckley's UP FROM LIBERALSM which showed that those charged with guiding the economy were much less than honest. Prior to Rand, my model for things was the Foundation trilogy.

it was true that in the early part of '68, just before and during the time I was reading THE FOUNTAINHEAD, I was studying Math Logic and generic philosphy on my own and had had a taste of it at a Catholic High school (De La Salle Academy, Nweport RI), which is how I came to think of myself as an Empiricist and two years earlier had used philosophy as what would turn out to be a tool of prediction. So I was beginning to understand its role before I focused on Objectivism. Therefore by the end of May of '68, I was ready. Also, this was the Psychedelic era which saw a blossoming of interest in larger matters before it was co-opted by the hippies.

As for the metaphysical aspects of this in particular. I mentioned my association with Science Fiction and the space shows and what they presented. Well what would be the metaphysics of such if not almost identical to those of ATLAS SHRUGGED? Certainly close enogh at the sense of life level to come up "Match". In fact, you could call them proto-Objectivist and certainly objectivist (Primacy of Existence and the Propriety of Reason as the Tool of Knowledge). Granted they were unstated. It goes like this: The various "cadet" organizations were a police and quasi-military force defending a specific type of society. The "starting position" was that this society was the good guys. This society was (implicity), ultimately, a reason-based (epistemolgically) utopia. Ergo, reason and rationality were proper. Now, at age 6 to 9, even had the been explicit, I would not have gotten them except at a superficial level, but it gets into you and is what I mean when I said "You never retire from the Space Patrol. the principles and values stay with you for a lifetime" and elsewhere "When I understood Objectivism enough to pass judgement on it, I said "Wow: Space Patrol come to life!". Don't forget, also, less than 10 years earlier, we had won a war via technology and productivity and that was in our culture for the post-war decade. What would be the cultural leitmotif of that? Later brought home by the surprise of Sputnik. the net result would be a fertile ground for Objectif=vism to grow like a weed. That's why I say I kind of cheated.

There is another issue here. How can I be mistaken about my own consciousness and its operation unless I am not "a creature of self-made soul"? So why go there? There is a saying: "it is better to let sleeping dogs lie". Also "What goes around, comes around". I never leave the gun I use to shoot someone lying around: It may be picked up and used on me and the claim that one does not know his own consciousness is a doomsday device. Hint: Miss Rand was fond of referencing "the mechanism of projection".

I think what we're having a problem with is understanding versus appreciation. Now, once I accepted Objectivism, reading ATLAS SHRUGGED was just a matter of time. So that can be argued. ATLAS gives a fuller appreciation that mey be essential. However that may not be testible since, if you accept Objectivism prior to reading AS, reading AS may be just a matter of time. Since I prwume that we'va all read it then there are no cases of someone being an Objectivist for more than a year and a half and not having read it so there's no control group here. However, to my way of thinking, the only reason to read anything is for its own sake.

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Are you saing that, to make my mind up on the direct contents of Objectivism, processed via Reason was "mistaken"? Because that is what I did. I came to the same conclusions as I would have from reading ATLAS SHRUGGED. But then I was part there anyway. If you'd have presented me with the Primacy of Existence, being a person of sicience, I'd have said "of course". If you had presented me with the proprietary role of reason in knowldge: "Of course". However, I did not thinkof them as philosophy; I though of philosphy as a bit airy-fairy but expressing some truths, just a matter of scientific fact. I was far from a Rationaiist (too airy-fairy), If you had asked my to adopt a label, it would have been Empiricist (rooted in reality and staying there). It was THE FOUNTAINHEAD that jelled them to philosphical ideas with me (I was 22). Where the rub would come in is ethics; I was more psychologically oriented than philosphically so and had come to the conclsuion that man was by nataure, made to act in his interest since that was necssary to survive. THE FOUNTAINHEAD brought that to a philosphical matter. Also Individual Rights was to me a means to the end of productivity in a Skinnerian sense as with self-interext My economic approach was about that of Scientific Socialism, in which intellegent manipulation of the economy was seen as a benefit to all and in everyone's self interest. the most salient thing that I had in common with Rand was that were were both atheistic. At first encounter, I regarded capitalism as backward and conservative. Rand won her case on the logic of it pure and simple. The cure for that was Buckley's UP FROM LIBERALSM which showed that those charged with guiding the economy were much less than honest. Prior to Rand, my model for things was the Foundation trilogy.

it was true that in the early part of '68, just before and during the time I was reading THE FOUNTAINHEAD, I was studying Math Logic and generic philosphy on my own and had had a taste of it at a Catholic High school (De La Salle Academy, Nweport RI), which is how I came to think of myself as an Empiricist and two years earlier had used philosophy as what would turn out to be a tool of prediction. So I was beginning to understand its role before I focused on Objectivism. Therefore by the end of May of '68, I was ready. Also, this was the Psychedelic era which saw a blossoming of interest in larger matters before it was co-opted by the hippies.

As for the metaphysical aspects of this in particular. I mentioned my association with Science Fiction and the space shows and what they presented. Well what would be the metaphysics of such if not almost identical to those of ATLAS SHRUGGED? Certainly close enogh at the sense of life level to come up "Match". In fact, you could call them proto-Objectivist and certainly objectivist (Primacy of Existence and the Propriety of Reason as the Tool of Knowledge). Granted they were unstated. It goes like this: The various "cadet" organizations were a police and quasi-military force defending a specific type of society. The "starting position" was that this society was the good guys. This society was (implicity), ultimately, a reason-based (epistemolgically) utopia. Ergo, reason and rationality were proper. Now, at age 6 to 9, even had the been explicit, I would not have gotten them except at a superficial level, but it gets into you and is what I mean when I said "You never retire from the Space Patrol. the principles and values stay with you for a lifetime" and elsewhere "When I understood Objectivism enough to pass judgement on it, I said "Wow: Space Patrol come to life!". Don't forget, also, less than 10 years earlier, we had won a war via technology and productivity and that was in our culture for the post-war decade. What would be the cultural leitmotif of that? Later brought home by the surprise of Sputnik. the net result would be a fertile ground for Objectif=vism to grow like a weed. That's why I say I kind of cheated.

There is another issue here. How can I be mistaken about my own consciousness and its operation unless I am not "a creature of self-made soul"? So why go there? There is a saying: "it is better to let sleeping dogs lie". Also "What goes around, comes around". I never leave the gun I use to shoot someone lying around: It may be picked up and used on me and the claim that one does not know his own consciousness is a doomsday device. Hint: Miss Rand was fond of referencing "the mechanism of projection".

I think what we're having a problem with is understanding versus appreciation. Now, once I accepted Objectivism, reading ATLAS SHRUGGED was just a matter of time. So that can be argued. ATLAS gives a fuller appreciation that mey be essential. However that may not be testible since, if you accept Objectivism prior to reading AS, reading AS may be just a matter of time. Since I presume that we'va all read it then there are no cases of someone being an Objectivist for more than a year and a half and not having read it so there's no control group here. However, to my way of thinking, the only reason to read anything is for its own sake.

Edited by Space Patroller
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AS is Objectivism applied in totality to an imaginary, author-controlled place and time.

The non-fiction works apply Objectivism to the real world.

Tying the unmistakable trajectory of AS' world to the occasionally recognized segments and points of an apparently similar trajectory in the real world allows one to capture the overall essence of the truth of Objectivism as it applies to the large scale workings of reality. AS provides a unifying analogy, and in its details, analogies to individual persons and events, that allow one to organize the integration of one's perceptions, and of the concepts contained within the non-fiction. But also contained within AS is a complete, running conceptual development of Objectivist philosophy in the context of the story.

I read AS first, but I did not "get" the philosophy from the book. Rather, I found a desire to learn what that philosophy was. I've read and re-read, re-listened virtually all of Rand's works. Each time I reread a work, I find that I can better integrate the concepts in the context of the overall conceptual framework. Each time I reread AS in this context, I am better able to grasp the significance of that work.

I guess you could call yourself an "Objectivist" without having read AS, in the sense that the philosophy might guide your choices and sense of life. But I don't believe you could, with a straight face, claim to thoroughly understand Objectivism without having read the single unifying explanation of it.

One might just as well ask if one must read any of Rand's work to consider oneself an Objectivist: You might be, but how would you know???

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There is a pneonomenon parallel to this discussion and it is covered in "What To Do With the Idiots Who Agree With US" and the "going Galt" threads.

That is reading ATLAS SHRUGGED without understadning Objectivism. If you have seen some of the things that I have since the middle '70's then you'd know why I used "Objectivism" in a very circuscribed manner. In that era the "going Galt" pheomenon was the 'Bits and Pieced of Ayn Rand" phenomenon to which she said "If they need Ayn Rand to tell them this then things are worse than I thought" or something like that. How about the claim that the Talmud is a "proto-Objectivist" document? or that cetain kinds of socialism are "....compatible with Ayn Rand", or that Objectivism is a kind of "social Darwinism" or compatible with Utilitarianism's "greatest good for the greatest number"?

This is what you get when you have ATLAS SHRUGGED without more a deeper and precise knowledge of Objectivism. Soon, "Objectivism" came to mean so many, often incoherent and conflictiong, things that the term is now almost meaningless except around here. and the antics of some of the so-called Objectivists have been, in the last 35 years, on the order of "Get a load of that". My ex-best friend was one such.

Also conditions have changed. The Pro-Choice movement that has co-opted abortion rights is so anti-philosophical that a rational person would almost be required to support the "Pro-Life" side under the aegis of Rand's "a person with principles, even the wrong ones, is better than a person with none" and many persons here would not like Rand's attitude on homosexuality expressed in a comment about Womens' Lib and about which she was vehement enough to imply that it was antithetical to Objectivism (unfortunately, she did not state her reasons at the time but I suspect I could figure out what they were, she treated it as a given, the comment being in the late 1960's/very early '70's).

Hence...

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  • 5 months later...
Is it essential, as an Objectivist, to read through all of Atlas Shrugged? Do you think someone is missing a necessary component of the philosophy by not doing so?

I ask because I have a friend who very much is into Objectivism and Rand's philosophy but who does not want to read through Atlas. He says he has read Galt's speech, and that besides the plot points within, he understood it but he just doesn't think he can read it all. Perhaps it is because he is not that good of a reader, or that he does not like the style and way it flows. I know I sat it down for a very long time before completing it, while in the meantime reading most of her non-fiction.

So, I don't think it is essential. If you don't enjoy Rand's style of fiction writing, I can't imagine going through 1200 pages of it.

It's hard for me to relate to this as I blew through the book - reading nothing else and watching very little TV in the meantime. I have read it three times now.

I actually started with Fountainhead (still my favorite). I found the dog-eared paperback in my girlfriend's book collection. I was vaguely aware of Rand`s reputation as an evil, greedy, capitalist but decided to see for myself what she was all about. I liked Fountainhead so much that I read AS immediately after. I found it a great actualization of that which I had suspected about reality.

It makes me sad to think that people refuse to read it because it`s long. I don`t see the difference between reading a single 1200 page book and four 300-page books.

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  • 3 years later...

No, you don't have to read the damn book!  It's an absolutely unsurpassed masterpiece and you SHOULD read it for your own enjoyment, but if reading isn't your thing then you don't have to!!

Since when did AS become the sole source of arcane wisdom in the world?  Read her nonfiction, think about it and try to imagine her principles in action.  Better yet. . . I know I'm completely insane. . . Watch the movies?

 

The fact is that if someone's seriously dedicated to the truth and truly honest with themselves, eventually, they can piece together John Galt from the nonfiction.  Not the character John Galt; the ideal to achieve.  Normal people CAN come to the right answers themselves, if they actually want to, and anyone who says otherwise should reread the book, themselves!!

And if he read John Galt's speech then your friend already has all of the necessary pieces.  He'll have to assemble them himself, which might take a while and quite a bit of effort (definitely much more than just reading it) but he can figure it out on his own!!!

 

Ayn Rand isn't the only source of objective truth in the world.  The potential is in each rational human being.  Ayn Rand is the shortcut, without which each rational person would have to spend a lifetime pondering their own philosophy before they could perfect it.

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