There seem to be a lot of potential Howard Roarks and Dagney Taggarts around here so I thought I would just ask how many have read Rand’s big sellers. We’ll even count the movie version of “The Fountainhead”. Russell Crowe and Angelina Jolie were set to star in “Atlas Shrugged”, but it looks like the project is on hold…again. Anyway just a fun question. 
Multiple choices allowed!
EDIT: her name came up in the “Political Compass” test and made me think of this.
If you are a Rand fan, maybe you’ld like the PC/XBox game Bioshock. I would say it’s neither pro- nor “anti-” Randian, though an Objectivist who didn’t have an open-mind might find it offensive. It’s really a non-polemical game with a quasi-Objectivist backdrop, and the antagonist is not an Objectivist.
I’ll be frank. Objectivism does do anything for me, though I should probably watch “The Fountainhead” one of these days just to say I did it. Best parts of Nietzsche mixed with the worst of Plato. I think the strongest part of Objectivism is the aesthetic sense, but even then, aesthetics are highly debatable. But… that’s just my 2 cents. I tend to think reality is far more subjective, maybe even insubstantial, with possibly a few objective truths, though I’m not going to get into that arguement
I think you need to read philosophy in small doses, too. Otherwise it’s very trippy. I tried reading Being and Nothingness once and almost felt like I was losing my mind
I have found internally self-consistent world views to be empty.
Powerful, but empty.
History, and the 20th century in particular, shows the detrimental effects on humanity of such ideologies.
Atlas Shrugged… great book… objectivism is a somewhat dangerous philosophy IMO - I can understand her passion for allowing individuals to be great, and the idea that no matter how generous, a truely unhappy individual cannot affect positive change to society… but to go the extreme and say that the highest moral achievement is one’s own happinesss… well EEP.
I don’t think Angelina Jolie would be a very good actress for Dagny - my feeling is that Dagny’s character looks rather unexceptional - She is a workhorse not a jumping horse, I’m thinking Hillary Swank or something like that - I like Russell Crowe for the steel maker
Jedi Knights, I mean this in only the friendliest terms so please take it as such and educate me…What the heck is “internally self consistent”? I googled it and all I can figure is that it’s a buzz term that indicates that something is not self contradicting. It’s been awhile but when I took inductive logic 101 if something was self contradicting you could throw it out as irrational…I guess what I’m saying is “You lost me.”
Rand’s ideas are fine, and probably kind of fun, if only a few people apply them at a time. But if everyone did, we’d be living in Thunderdome.
I could not follow the Fountainhead movie at all. The hero is the ultimate architectural genius, but he works in a rock quarry, and some chick wearing jodhpurs keeps bugging him and whacks him on the head with a riding crop, dude rapes (!) the chick and then moves to NY and becomes the world’s foremost skyscraper builder. Respectfully, if there’s a message in there besides, “give genius architects lots of money to build stuff,” I missed it.
No, It’s not self contradicting, Objectivism is logical.
I see that you too are an INTP. Ever take a good look at the inferior function for an INTP? Emotions are suspect and to be subject to pure reason. Hmmmm. I wonder, how many Objectivists are INTs?
How does one break out of that shell??
Anyway, an internally self-consistent ideology is just that. It is a worldview that appears to be encompassing all within itself - and sometimes they have room to expand as the human knowledge base does.
Objectivism is an excellent example. John Galt’s speech, laying the foundational axiom and the derivation of the virtues of Reason, Purpose and Self-Esteem is indeed a beautiful piece of work. And of course the adherents set forth to propagate it just like any other structured meme. Powerful stuff! Knowledge is possible!
The name Kurt Godel comed to mind here for some reason. 
…for any self-consistent system powerful enough to describe …someting about truths for which can not be proved from the axiom…
I was an ‘adherent’ from about 1971 to 1982 – Libertarian Party member and all that. Saw a recent Reason magazine a couple of weeks ago – that was an interesting read and as I was wearing Instant Honesty, it brought on a couple of good chuckles and memories.
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Too bad Objectivists are totally unable to provide any guidance on child rearing. I wouldn’t think that having babies would exclude one from being deemed rational – but hey, the Vulcans have babies. Ooops! The Vulcans aren’t real. j/k
Wow… never talk Ayn Rand/Objectivisim with a hippy/Vegan/semi-marxist - It’s like talking evolution to a creationist.
“I can’t believe they would teach Ayn Rand in High School” - were the words that came out of her mouth… and some pretty nasty derision w.r.t. any discussion of the the philosophy which is not entirely negative.
Aren’t Vegan/Hippy’s supposed to be open-minded and enlightened?
(Woo stereotyping!)
Wrlprchnx, I think it’s the semi-marxist part that hates Rand…my guess is that a lot of semi-marxists adopt veganism because prime rib is just so incredibly symbolic of capitalist decadence. By the way, you are so right about Hillary Swank making a better Dagney.
They let us subscribe to the newsletter but they won’t let us become members because of the whole iNtuition/Sensing thing…Vulcans on the other hand find us quite “fascinating”.
OK, the Godel reference helped a lot. I can see how the competing ideologies of the 20 century caused harm, war, genocide ect. I would argue that humanity as a whole is much better off than it was in 1900. I’ll also add that I think “men of mind” “acting in their own rational self interest” were responsible for much of that advance.
As a person of some faith, I can’t accept Objectivism outright but I do find much about the novels that I like and I hope that “Atlas Shrugged” makes it to the theater some day in a form true to Rand’s vision.
I read about half of Atlas Shrugged. I don’t know why I stopped but I remember liking it.
I can’t believe Jolie was considered for the part! When I read books I attach Hollywood folks to the characters & Jolie was the one I had in Atlas Shrugged…wow
How did you know renny is an INTP???
Rational egoism is highly debatable. Not all Western philosophers would agree that the “self” for instance, has independent existance or substance. If the self lacks substance, then it is not a source for ethical behavior. Even Language-Realists would have to argue that if you can say anything in words about the substance of the self, it would only be an abstraction. So you’ld end up with abstract ethics, an ethics with approximations.
Of course, Objectivists are free to argue the point otherwise.
I read his journal.
mens-journals/outta-my-shell-8815.html
Ah, silly me. And here I thought… well, you don’t really want to know.
Actually Copycat we INTPs lace our posts with secret pass phrases…we have to change them a lot cuz the ENTJs are always sussing them out and telling the ESFJs…can’t we all just get along?
The last time I took that test (many years ago), I too was an INTP, or something like that. Now days I have no idea what I’d be… peoples’ personalities can change.
You are very right about that Daedelus, Meyers-Briggs or any other personality predictor is not the be all and end all of ones humanity. I hope that anyone who read the back and forth between jedi and myself can see that we were being a little bit tongue in cheek about it. I put it in my journal for the same reason I put my age and where I live and what I do for a living…it gives readers a small piece of the very large puzzle of who I am.
Now about the neurotic part 
. If we loosely define that as having a tendency to be excessively emotionally defensive, that is not a function of the INTP personality type. While we may appear less emotionally involved to the outside world or to suffer some disengagement from the emotional state of others, we are no more or less likely to be neurotic than anyone else.
To bring this back to Ayn Rand…I think the perfect objectivist would be “the doer”…ESTP…the person of action.
Yuk yuk! I’m an ENFP/J: no super-top-secret code words here. 
I seem to remember some psychology scale years ago that measured neuroticism. It was definitely not the MB. Maybe the Eysenck scale. That’s why I edited it out. I was confused. I was definitely an INTP, though. According to those Jungian scales that try to find your archetype, I am a warrior. Not a strongly identified warrior, though.
I’m the same one as Gandhi . But I can’t member the letters for it.