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Ayn Rand's Nihilistic Quality
00:04:47
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| And then you see Ayn Rand and people will say, how could Ayn Rand in any way be advancing some type of Soviet active measures, which is the way I actually see this, is that this is, I believe that the Soviets actually thought in this kind of time scale at this level of strategic deception. | |
| If we think about geopolitics as a chessboard, the Russian model is to win the battle by making your opponent lose their structure, by creating chaos in the middle of the board of your opponent. | |
| And so with Ayn Rand, I think we now see what the actual effect of this hyper individualism that is basically taking this some element, a really crucial element of the American system, which is individual rights. | |
| I think in many ways the Constitution and the Bill of Rights is probably the highest articulated philosophical structure that talks about the sovereignty and the dignity of the individual in relationship to the collective and the state. | |
| And so with Ayn Rand is that this whole idea of the sovereign sole individual, who's basically also a new man in some ways, is throwing off the burden of the society and rules and norms and all these kinds of things has ended up in a politics, | |
| I believe, of nihilism and an economics that ultimately has overthrown the American system because there's something really important at the core of the best of the American system, that it really is a dynamic equation between the individual and the body of the body politic or the collective or the nation. | |
| And it's in the framing documents. | |
| We talk about the commonwealth. | |
| We talk about we the people in relationship to we don't say we the persons, we say we the people. | |
| So there's some kind of directly implied philosophy that that it's not just hyper loan capitalism is really the American system. | |
| And so I really believe that we're at the end of this kind of equation, which then it manifests itself in so many different ways culturally and politically. | |
| Now, there's a whole set of different like deep geopolitics and espionage that I believe then actually go along with that that then ultimately end up in where we are today in terms of the Middle East. | |
| Let me back up a little bit just to make sure I understand what you're proposing. | |
| So when you say a sort of right-wing nihilist quality to Ayn Rand, here's some thoughts that come to mind. | |
| You can let me know if I'm on the right track. | |
| But in both of her two major novels, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, there is a nihilistic energy that comes at the culmination of these stories, including Howard Rourke. | |
| I haven't read these in a while, but he destroys a building because another architect screwed up his vision or the contractor or something like that. | |
| And there's a sort of sense of if it can't be right, if it can't be true to my ideals and it shouldn't even exist, we're just going to tear it down. | |
| I believe that's the culmination of the book. | |
| And then in Atlas Shrugged, she takes the germ of that idea and expands it further. | |
| So Atlas shrugging, Atlas is holding up the universe, of course, but he just shrugs. | |
| He lets it go. | |
| And all of these amazing capitalists and maybe artists as well, but she's focusing on the railroad magnets and so on. | |
| They just get up and go and they go to Gulf's Gulch and hang out and society just collapses without these great men running it. | |
| So I think what gives, what makes Ayn Rand in a way interesting is that there's a little bit of a nihilistic quality to it, that passive aggressive, you could even say quality. | |
| That's what sets her apart, in fact, from other libertarians. | |
| She's dark libertarian. | |
| I think that's probably the source of her continued popularity, even to this day. | |
| I would imagine undergraduates everywhere are buying a dog-eared copy of The Fountainhead in their local bookstore. | |
| And there's also something that I've noticed about her as well. | |
| I believe in the original edition of We the Living, there was a quotation from Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra or something like that, Beyond Good and Evil Chestnut. | |
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The Dark Libertarian Paradox
00:01:06
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| And she erased it from like subsequent manuscripts because Nietzsche was getting a little associated with Germany, of course, in the Nazis, fairly and unfairly, I would say. | |
| And there does seem to be an almost like in the aesthetic, even in the aesthetic of the book covers that came to define her works, there is this almost quasi-Bolshevik quality to it. | |
| If you look at the art that is inspired by Ayn Rand and Bolshevik propaganda, I think you'd find actually a lot of commonalities. | |
| So she was the anti-Bolshevik that was so anti, she became a Bolshevik. | |
| And she certainly was as in terms of her private life. | |
| We won't talk about her love life. | |
| That's another story altogether. | |
| But in terms of her private life, she is a cult leader. | |
| And all of the qualities you could associate with that sort of puritanical, purity spiraling, quasi-schizophrenic, you're not with me, you're against me type attitude. | |