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| Hearsay: |
The corporate love affair with Ayn Rand continues unabated. Watch out when you look into this pit of snakes. There might be something looking back.
For years, Rand’s message was attacked by intellectuals whom her circle labeled “do-gooders,” who argued that individuals should also work in the service of others. Her book was dismissed as an homage to greed. Gore Vidal described its philosophy as “nearly perfect in its immorality.”
But the book attracted a coterie of fans, some of them top corporate executives, who dared not speak of its impact except in private. When they read the book, often as college students, they now say, it gave form and substance to their inchoate thoughts, showing there is no conflict between private ambition and public benefit.
“I know from talking to a lot of Fortune 500 C.E.O.’s that ‘Atlas Shrugged’ has had a significant effect on their business decisions, even if they don’t agree with all of Ayn Rand’s ideas,” said John A. Allison, the chief executive of BB&T, one of the largest banks in the United States.
“It offers something other books don’t: the principles that apply to business and to life in general. I would call it complete,” he said.
There is so much that’s wrong with this, I am forced to start my shudder from a level somewhere below my diaphragm and allow it to course through my body in a Kramer-esque convulsion of disgust and dispair.
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September 18th, 2007 at 10:47 am
I guess that’s about the same reaction I used to get when I finally read the novel after being inundated with flyers trying to attract students to write essays for the Ayn Rand Foundation.
Needless to say, after that the flyers quickly found themselves in the round file!
It still seems strange to me that so many Americans are willing to take lessons in democracy form an escapee of Czarist Russia.
September 18th, 2007 at 12:23 pm
My revised ending to The Fountainhead stayed up on the Wikipedia site for 5 days before somebody changed it back:
‘At the trial, Roark seems doomed, but he rouses the courtroom with a statement about the value of selfishness and the need to remain true to oneself. Roark describes the triumphant role of creators and the price they pay at the hands of corrupt societies. The jury finds him not guilty. Roark marries Dominique. Wynand asks Roark to design one last building, a skyscraper that will testify to the supremacy of man.The skyscraper is blown up by a disgruntled engineer, who says that the surfaces weren’t perfectly level. In court, the engineer defends the virtues of selfishness and is found not guilt.’
There’s still evidence of my alteration on the Talk Pages, where somebody writes:
‘Here are a few problems with the synopsis off the top of my head… 4. The thing about the engineer blowing up the building at the end is bunk, unless my version has an alternate ending…’
I find it interesting that the commenter would have accepted my plot change, despite its blatant absurdity, if it could have been proven that Rand wrote it.
September 18th, 2007 at 1:22 pm
Interesting symmetry that Alan Greenspan, the recently-published former US Federal Reserve Chairman and rampant Randiphile, is only now realising that the “free markets” mantra he used so belligerently is a crock.
September 19th, 2007 at 12:14 pm
Ayn Rand only works if one assumes that people, when given money and power, are not complete and utter assholes.