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Was Ayn Rand a Prophet?

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For lack of a non-mystic word, AR was a prophet. She predicted too many issues of the day to dismiss her greatness as a prophet; it goes beyond a vague re-interprantingism which heralded Nostradamus.

It's atonishing.

She forsaw Reagan becoming President while he was still a first-term governer. And a lot of the fictional legislation in the futuristic "fantasy," AS, has become law. I could cite more. I hope you'll cite some I might be unaware of.

She wasn't a psychic, but her statements could easily trick people into thinking she was. AR was simply able to extend the philosophies and actions of Man (@ her point in time) into its eventual effects.

Edited by theestevearnold
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I'm curious why you use that word when: 1) the word "prophet" is usually associated with the mystics, and 2) it reinforces the notion of Objectivism being cult-like.

 

Wouldn't it be more honest to simply say something like: "Ayn Rand was beyond her time, she predicted many occurrences of the present," rather than labeling her a prophet? 

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Ayn Rand often reminded her audience that she was not a determinist. The troubles of our time are the continuation of the troubles of her time. I think the term "prophet" would not apply, if only for the obvious reason that she would disapprove of the mystical inference. Certainly, she had optimism that enough people would recognize the truth of her vision, and that the worst of the worst Atlas Shrugged-type scenario could be averted. It is a curiosity worth noting that the 1950s-60s era is considered by most people who remember those times as America's Golden Age. And yet to my knowledge, she was the only one to recognize the trouble coming, and accurately articulate the causes.

I would call it "gifted insight."

Edited by Repairman
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Rand had a mixed record in this respect.  She knew the workings and consequences of a mixed economy better sixty years ago than most people do today.  Ellis Wyatt invented fracking.  New York city had its first major power failure in 1965.  Remarkably topical for 2014 is this from "The Student 'Rebellion'" in 1965:

 

Collectivism has lost the two crucial weapons that raised it to world power and made all its victories possible: intellectuality and idealism, or reason and morality.  It had to lose them precisely at the height of its success, since its claim to both was a fraud: the full, actual reality of socialist-communist-fascist states has demonstrated the brute irrationality of collectivist systems and the inhumanity of altruism as a moral code.

 

 

In fact the whole, long essay is worth reading in connection with the news in 2014.

 

This wasn't all prophecy; the petty corruptions and dislocations in the early part of Atlas Shrugged are just what Americans were living through as a result of wartime price controls.

 

She could be wrong, too, as a result of undue cultural pessimism.  One that I've mentioned in an earlier thread is in the second paragraph of "What is Capitalism?" (1965), wherein she claimed that the decadent state of the philosophy of science was about to lead to a shutdown of technological progress:

 

Today's frantic development in the field of technology has a quality reminiscent of the days preceding the economic crash of 1929: riding on the momentum of the past, on the unacknowledged remnants of an Aristotelian epistemology, it is a hectic, feverish expansion, heedless of the fact that its theoretical account is long since overdrawn...

 

 

The proliferation of Peoples' States in Atlas Shrugged reflects the expectation, widespread enough in the early postwar years but obsolete by 1957, that the USSR was going to roll over western Europe.

 

Her 1959 intro to We the Living mentions America in 1975 as a (possible) instance of "any dictatorship, anywhere."  In the lead essay to Who is Ayn Rand? (1962), Branden sets Galt's speech, with the collapse that brought it about, "twelve years from tonight".  These are indications that they expected full-blown doom to have arrived forty years ago.  "Is Atlas Shrugging?" a year or two later found the decline well underway.  Greenspan, in the NBI era, had a reputation for alarming predictions of imminent banking blowouts, which even the faithful (correctly as things turned out) found hard to take.

 

I'm not convinced that she really foresaw the Reagan presidency.  She said, shortly after he became governor, that he showed promise and was worth watching.  Any governor of California gets some presidential buzz.  Even Schwarezenegger got it, despite his constitutional ineligibility (his popularity would suffice to push an amendment through).  Rand was speculating along with everybody else, and she came to oppose him by the time he started up a serious bid for the office.

Edited by Reidy
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Prophet was the wrong word. AR predicted (based on Reasoning) that price fixing would occur (AS), which Nixon did with petrol. There's so many instances where she saw things coming, all I can say is she was a genius. But Reidy has a point, the price fixing was already in progress in WW 2.

Hey Skylab, did you meet her as you claim? Tell me more...........

Edited by theestevearnold
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