Jubbergun wrote:
Based on old-school American Protestant thinking and certain parts of Randian Objectivist philosophy, the pursuit of profit shouldn't be the primary goal.
I was thinking about this a bit more.
The thing is, Randian Objectivist philosophy isn't really a philosophy, because it doesn't meet the definition as such, which is to rationally explain that which lays within its purview.
What Rand's works really are is mythology.
Societies that cannot outgrow their limitations will always turn to visions of an idealized past that never really existed. This is a constant in history.
De Republica.
Gone With The Wind.
Jena Oder Sedan.
Dracula. People turn to Rand now because she offers a similar vision of an American idealized past that never really existed.
Like all mythology, Rand's works are about human virtues as portrayed in abstract settings divorced from a specific place and time. She focuses on the most trite and idealized aspects of American enterprise such as virility, mass production, big business, and the building of transcontinental railroad. But in doing so, she cuts a jagged path around the prickly issues that a "philosophy" would have to address. Issues such as land ownership, racism, environmentalism, the nefarious effects of mass automation and "efficiency", and basic human nature. To all this, she offers no real answer other than "it will work itself out somehow".
The protagonists in the
Iliad put food on the table by raiding helpless villages near their staging area. Moses commanded the Hebrews to slaughter the Canaanite men and take their women. The sole spokesperson for the disgruntled working class in the
Iliad is Thersites, a shallow and unflattering character. We forgive these faults in the mythological vision because the mythology is not a philosophy, we don't seek to use those works as the lens through which we see the world - a philosophy - but vice versa. And by the same token, that Rand doesn't address the nasty points of the world she alludes to makes her work mythology, not philosophy.
The building of the transcontinental railroad is an important part of California's state history. You can go to almost any train station in the state and see huge murals of that same heroic image of engineers from both sides of the country, flanked by teams of workers, shaking hands as two trains from the two rail networks meet. But what you don't see in that picture, are the Chinese coolies who did most of the difficult and dangerous work, the backbreaking labor of dynamiting and tunneling through mountains.
When I was a child, my family liked to vacation at this retreat in Nevada City. It is situated in the Sierra Nevada, in a clearing just at the edge of the forests around Grass Valley. There's an old staging area from the building of the railroad nearby, with some ancient machines and supplies that were left behind. And atop a nearby hill made of moved earth, partially regrown over with trees, are dozens of shallow, unmarked graves where the Chinese workers who died building the railroad were buried.
The "American Protestant thinking" you allude was never really Protestant nor was it thinking. Most obviously, the Jews have been in the business of business, making something out of nothing, since before Protestantism even existed. Long enough to know what a raw deal it is, which is why they see no contradiction in making a fortune in business then funding socialist movements. The protagonist of the
The Jungle is Lithuanian, and the protagonist of
A Streetcar Named Desire is Polish. Both are Orthodox, even though they take contrary positions on that "American thinking". And then there's the Irish and Germans.
My point is not that the "thinking" in question was not Protestant, my point is that it never really existed. The appeal of Rand's mythology is the substitution of a fantasy for a reality, pretend that the problems we have now are new and novel and not problems that have always been festering since the
Mayflower laid anchor. The blacks, the Jews, the Catholics and Orthodox, they've always been here, fighting for their slice of the pie.
What has changed, bringing our nation's problems to a head, are the very issues that Rand doesn't address. Diminishing natural resources. The inherent social and economic limits of a society built on greed. Good old-fashioned American ignorance. Without unlimited natural resources, wide-open third-world markets, and an EU wracked by war and poverty, America can't just grow, employ and spend its way out of its problems that have
always existed.
Those Rand would lionize - captains of industry - were never truly awesome people bent on doing good in this world, proof being they never saw fit to work these problems out. Being good at making a million bucks means one is good at making a million bucks - not possessed of virtues suitable for the basis of a philosophy. Certainly not the wisdom to understand and fix America's problems.
The issues that Rand does address - mass conspiracy of the incompetent against the competent - is not itself the problem, it is a symptom of the deeper problems that a real philosophy would address.
