— God, I just love this. It reminds me a lot of Mormon paintings of the Prophet translating the Golden Plates envisioning the exploits of the Lost Tribes in the New World. Or a Scientology tract.
The Great Chain of Ayn Rand
10 thoughts on “The Great Chain of Ayn Rand”
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Will Wilkinson 
“richly embroidered but intellectually vulgar”
A surprisingly accurate general summary of David Brook’s writing.
Palmer dealt with David Brooks and others on this a while back:
http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/cpr-18n5-1.html
“that’s just the sort of surprise that makes David Brooks such a consistently interesting thinker.”
Well-played.
Will, I’d like to know your view of Haidt’s essay on what makes people vote Republican (see http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt08/haidt08_index.html). Haidt’s argument is based on a view of Republicans that appears to be the opposite of Brooks’.
I suggest to read the comments to Haidt’s essay that follow it in the same archive.
It’s a shame that Republicans deny their social nature, which obviously is a need that can only be filled by government telling people how to relate to one another. Instead, Republicans are all hermits, rarely marrying or seeking to gather in groups according to how they individually see fit — er, since one can’t individually see fit to gather in groups. Obviously.
On the other hand, at least I agree with Sen. McCain that Buy American provisions by the US government are “shameful.” Sen. Obama is willing to make the charge that being again protectionism is unpatriotic:
Ugh. That service forum didn’t make me happy about either candidate, certainly.
There is no individual without the social. All individuals are the product of individuals combined with a broad and deep social temporal (historical) and spatial network of ideas, techniques, morals, myths, and manners.
Let me quibble one little bit. The “line” of liberty, “Paine, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Garrison, Spooner, Tucker, Twain, Mencken, Hayek, Friedman, Rand,” neglects the one libertarian thinker who addressed sociality straight on, and as a foundation for his ethics of freedom: Herbert Spencer.
Rand and many of the others under-emphasized sociality. Indeed, it is Rand’s goofy take on “selfishness” that has allows so many loopy collectivists to pretend that individualism is all about atomism and conflict.
Spencer was much better on the subject. He did, indeed, go on about sociality and sympathy. And what he said made sense.
Mark Twain was a determinist and advocated egalitarianism (see: What is Man?) so I don’t see how he fits in any ideological line with Rand.
Well interesting, alot to think about.