John Gray reviews Ayn Rand’s book about Russia - We the Living:
Further reading:“The Nietzschean quality of the deleted passages is not accidental. She belonged to a generation of young Russians whose view of the world was shaped largely by Nietzsche. Just about every literate Russian teenager had read or heard about the excitable German thinker. Where Rand was original was in transmuting his ideas, in her later work, into an American myth. Nietzsche’s absurd Superman became a heroic entrepreneur – John Galt in Atlas Shrugged, for example – and an explicitly elitist ideology merged with the American folk religion of laissez-faire capitalism.
Reprocessed as Americanised myth, Rand’s vulgar-Nietzschean world-view fuelled a publishing phenomenon (Atlas Shrugged has sold millions). More significantly, her bizarre confection had some influence on US public policy. Greenspan may have deviated from the strict Randian faith, but he retained one of its craziest tenets: get rid of government interference, and freedom and prosperity will inevitably follow. As much as reckless greed, it was this ideology that led to the crash whose first act has been playing out over the past two years.”
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
It’s overman….not superman…
We get the joke, Merv.
I am Russian, never read Nietzsche but support Rand’s ideas which are unfortunately utopian in the world where the majority of humankind are lazy parasites.
Laissez-faire economy is not a “craziest tenet” but an impossible thing to achieve precisely because most people do not like to exercise their mind and for such economic regime to yield prosperity, a fundamental crisis must happen (Atlas Shrugged) i.e. to start from scratch, to let people of the mind be in control (the productive) as apposed to those who simply like to be in control (the government, because at the moment it seems that the government role is to cultivate the mindlessness and parasitism amongst its population-for what reason?). But of course, it is impossible.
An economic big bang together with the adoption of two idealogical ideas- man’s mind is its biggest tool and being rationally self interested is a dominant strategy, will lead to an equilibrium, but adopting Rands ideas sporadically is indeed useless at best and distructive at worst.