Usually the gist of existentialcomics (great comic btw if you haven’t read it) is taking well-known philosophers from humanity’s history and pitting them against each other to play with ideas and crack philosophical jokes. With that in mind Ayn Rand’s and her book “Atlas Shrugged” is presented as a philosophy, which may clear up why she is here.
Yeah, I’m familiar with them myself, I’m just saying in this case Ayn Rand is doubling as both the philosopher and the person with money, and in real life she was only a wannabe.
I think everyone understands that people are dicked over and have to participate in the system as it is. However, if you’re going to be the poster child for why meat is murder or how god is fake or how public assistance is evil, it’s also not unfair for people to think you’re a hypocrite if they find you eating a turkey leg, preaching in church or taking public assistance.
She was hypocritical because she thought Medicare and Social Security shouldn’t exist. And was extremely vocal about it. Yet she took them anyhow.
Also, those programs aren’t some kind of retirement savings plan. The money you pay into Social Security today gets paid out to those who are receiving it today. The first people to ever receive Social Security and Medicare never paid a dime into it because it didn’t exist while they were in the workforce.
We need to stop thinking about how the taxes we pay in directly benefits us. Taxes pay to keep our government and society functioning on an even keel. It isn’t a pay in and get your kicks out system. And when people like Ayn Rand go about criticizing it as if it’s a travesty that they had to pay taxes so that other people can live comfortable lives they are showing what kind of self serving fanatics they are.
The state always has the final say.
In a liberal democracy all we can do is vote, campaign & support the best (or least worst) people to make these decisions.
I think people do not understand where Ayn Rand was coming from. She came from the Soviet Union, a highly collectivist society. Everyone is expected to conform and be all the same economically. Then she got sick of it, emigrated and formed her own Iam14butthisisdeep philosophy. Unfortunately, some rich American asshats saw that her ideas have self-serving utility to justify their ultra-capitalist beliefs and privileges and continue exploitation, and then spread her nonsensical “objectivist” ideas around. Not many people actually believe the philosophy, although we unconsciously apply this especially with middle class NIMBYISM.
“Oh, poor homeless people. I hope they could be housed. But I will elect a politician who will not build social housing because it will bring down the value of my property.”
“I support mitigating climate change. But I do not want windfarms nearby. They are eye sores.”
I mean, lots of people with terrible and damaging ideas came from backgrounds that explain their terrible and damaging ideas. She doesn’t get a pass because the USSR was corrupt, nor does she get a pass because western capitalist society is also corrupt.
Then she got sick of it, emigrated and formed her own Iam14butthisisdeep philosophy.
No, you’re being disingenuous. She formulated her philosophy moral objectivism from her experiences as a child.
This is what happened (from her wikipedia):
Rand was born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum on February 2, 1905, into a Jewish bourgeois family living in Saint Petersburg in what was then the Russian Empire. She was the eldest of three daughters of Zinovy Zakharovich Rosenbaum, a pharmacist, and Anna Borisovna (née Kaplan). She was 12 when the October Revolution and the rule of the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin disrupted her family’s lives. Her father’s pharmacy was nationalized, and the family fled to the city of Yevpatoria in Crimea, which was initially under the control of the White Army during the Russian Civil War. After graduating high school there in June 1921, she returned with her family to Petrograd (as Saint Petersburg was then named), where they faced desperate conditions, occasionally nearly starving.
When Russian universities were opened to women after the revolution, Rand was among the first to enroll at Petrograd State University. At 16, she began her studies in the department of social pedagogy, majoring in history. She was one of many bourgeois students purged from the university shortly before graduating. After complaints from a group of visiting foreign scientists, many purged students, including Rand, were reinstated. She completed her studies at the renamed Leningrad State University in October 1924. She then studied for a year at the State Technicum for Screen Arts in Leningrad. For an assignment, Rand wrote an essay about the Polish actress Pola Negri; it became her first published work. By this time, she had decided her professional surname for writing would be Rand, and she adopted the first name Ayn (pronounced /aɪn/).
In late 1925 Rand was granted a visa to visit relatives in Chicago. She arrived in New York City on February 19, 1926. Intent on staying in the United States to become a screenwriter, she lived for a few months with her relatives learning English before leaving for Hollywood, California.
In Hollywood a chance meeting with director Cecil B. DeMille led to work as an extra in his film The King of Kings and a subsequent job as a junior screenwriter. While working on The King of Kings, she met the aspiring actor Frank O’Connor; they married on April 15, 1929. She became a permanent American resident in July 1929 and an American citizen on March 3, 1931. She tried to bring her parents and sisters to the United States, but they could not obtain permission to emigrate.
Where is your objection? She formed her philosophy after experiencing a collectivist dystopia. Her family’s business was nationalised. That is part and parcel of such extreme collectivist socio-economics and thus enamoured by hyperindividualist extreme counterpart.
Lol! The US nationalizes stuff all the damn time - Obama essentially nationalized the auto industry after the 2008 crash (right before handing it back to the billionaire parasites after their debt had been shouldered by the US people).
Yet I don’t see anybody calling the US “collectivist.”
Centralised but everyone is expected to value the group over the individual. The property in the Soviet Union belongs to the people albeit managed by the state. Therefore, collectivist.
Centralisation does not mean either just means individualism or collectivism.
I saw it… and just looking at it made it fall apart like an upside-down house of cards in a whirlwind. Strange… this seems to happen every time anyone looks at (so-called) “anarcho-capitalism” a bit too closely. Have you had better luck with it, perhaps?
That’s every working class capitalist behaviour I’ve ever met. The average family guy with 4 kids barely able to make ends meet but god forbid if you ever make a disparaging point against Elon musk as if he’s in the same category out there fighting the good fight for the average working joe.
Blind hypocrisy seems to be a necessity in capitalism ideals.
I understand why Ayn Rand is in this comic, but she never financed a damn thing. She was working class herself and on welfare at the end of her life.
So, on top of everything else, she was a hypocrite, but she was not a capitalist, despite her obvious longing to be one.
Usually the gist of existentialcomics (great comic btw if you haven’t read it) is taking well-known philosophers from humanity’s history and pitting them against each other to play with ideas and crack philosophical jokes. With that in mind Ayn Rand’s and her book “Atlas Shrugged” is presented as a philosophy, which may clear up why she is here.
Yeah, I’m familiar with them myself, I’m just saying in this case Ayn Rand is doubling as both the philosopher and the person with money, and in real life she was only a wannabe.
A fair point that more people should know
You are just repeating what others have stated online without looking into this claim yourself.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ayn-rand-social-security/
She took Social Security and Medicare benefits. She also paid into those. She also paid taxes.
It is morally defensible for those who decry publicly-funded scholarships, Social Security benefits,
and unemployment insurance to turn around and accept them, Rand argued, because the government
had taken money from them by force (via taxes). There’s only one catch: the recipient must regard the
receipt of said benefits as restitution, not a social entitlement.
If she paid into Social Security and Medicare and paid taxes then what is the issue? The paragraph above states
that she did not believe her actions to be hypocrisy because she had paid taxes.
I think everyone understands that people are dicked over and have to participate in the system as it is. However, if you’re going to be the poster child for why meat is murder or how god is fake or how public assistance is evil, it’s also not unfair for people to think you’re a hypocrite if they find you eating a turkey leg, preaching in church or taking public assistance.
Oh, so magic thought games change the nature of reality. Got it!
She was hypocritical because she thought Medicare and Social Security shouldn’t exist. And was extremely vocal about it. Yet she took them anyhow.
Also, those programs aren’t some kind of retirement savings plan. The money you pay into Social Security today gets paid out to those who are receiving it today. The first people to ever receive Social Security and Medicare never paid a dime into it because it didn’t exist while they were in the workforce.
We need to stop thinking about how the taxes we pay in directly benefits us. Taxes pay to keep our government and society functioning on an even keel. It isn’t a pay in and get your kicks out system. And when people like Ayn Rand go about criticizing it as if it’s a travesty that they had to pay taxes so that other people can live comfortable lives they are showing what kind of self serving fanatics they are.
I don’t think Rand longed to be a capitalist… but it really does seem as if she longed to be owned by one.
To be fair the owning class are even bigger welfare queens
Socialism for me, lasseiz-fare capitalism for thee.
The are the only welfare queens.
Also, in that reality, in panel 5 Rand’s private paramilitary security team would show up and start clubbing the workers.
In the real reality, Rand would borrow the state’s police and/or national guard, just as it has historically happened.
The state always has the final say. In a liberal democracy all we can do is vote, campaign & support the best (or least worst) people to make these decisions.
I think people do not understand where Ayn Rand was coming from. She came from the Soviet Union, a highly collectivist society. Everyone is expected to conform and be all the same economically. Then she got sick of it, emigrated and formed her own Iam14butthisisdeep philosophy. Unfortunately, some rich American asshats saw that her ideas have self-serving utility to justify their ultra-capitalist beliefs and privileges and continue exploitation, and then spread her nonsensical “objectivist” ideas around. Not many people actually believe the philosophy, although we unconsciously apply this especially with middle class NIMBYISM.
“Oh, poor homeless people. I hope they could be housed. But I will elect a politician who will not build social housing because it will bring down the value of my property.”
“I support mitigating climate change. But I do not want windfarms nearby. They are eye sores.”
she was just mad that her privileges were distributed fairly for once
I mean, lots of people with terrible and damaging ideas came from backgrounds that explain their terrible and damaging ideas. She doesn’t get a pass because the USSR was corrupt, nor does she get a pass because western capitalist society is also corrupt.
She came to the West and made it more corrupt with her half-baked ideas by amplifying the excessive use of individualist values.
I’m just a dumbass redneck, but we call it selfishness around here.
No, you’re being disingenuous. She formulated her philosophy moral objectivism from her experiences as a child.
This is what happened (from her wikipedia):
When Russian universities were opened to women after the revolution, Rand was among the first to enroll at Petrograd State University. At 16, she began her studies in the department of social pedagogy, majoring in history. She was one of many bourgeois students purged from the university shortly before graduating. After complaints from a group of visiting foreign scientists, many purged students, including Rand, were reinstated. She completed her studies at the renamed Leningrad State University in October 1924. She then studied for a year at the State Technicum for Screen Arts in Leningrad. For an assignment, Rand wrote an essay about the Polish actress Pola Negri; it became her first published work. By this time, she had decided her professional surname for writing would be Rand, and she adopted the first name Ayn (pronounced /aɪn/).
In late 1925 Rand was granted a visa to visit relatives in Chicago. She arrived in New York City on February 19, 1926. Intent on staying in the United States to become a screenwriter, she lived for a few months with her relatives learning English before leaving for Hollywood, California.
In Hollywood a chance meeting with director Cecil B. DeMille led to work as an extra in his film The King of Kings and a subsequent job as a junior screenwriter. While working on The King of Kings, she met the aspiring actor Frank O’Connor; they married on April 15, 1929. She became a permanent American resident in July 1929 and an American citizen on March 3, 1931. She tried to bring her parents and sisters to the United States, but they could not obtain permission to emigrate.
Where is your objection? She formed her philosophy after experiencing a collectivist dystopia. Her family’s business was nationalised. That is part and parcel of such extreme collectivist socio-economics and thus enamoured by hyperindividualist extreme counterpart.
Lol! The US nationalizes stuff all the damn time - Obama essentially nationalized the auto industry after the 2008 crash (right before handing it back to the billionaire parasites after their debt had been shouldered by the US people).
Yet I don’t see anybody calling the US “collectivist.”
How much of US economy is nationalised compared to the Soviet Union?
Dystopia in her experience. The peasants going to uni would have had a different perspective.
The USSR wasn’t a collectivist society - it was a centalized one. There’s a vast difference. Nobody calls the US military “collectivist,” do they now?
deleted by creator
Centralised but everyone is expected to value the group over the individual. The property in the Soviet Union belongs to the people albeit managed by the state. Therefore, collectivist.
Centralisation does not mean either just means individualism or collectivism.
So you are now claiming that centralization isn’t inherently collectivist?
So you are now claiming nothing in the Soviet Union was nationalized?
You can be centralised but not collectivist. See the theory of anarcho-capitalism.
I’m guessing you’re operating from different sensibility of political philosophy. Define collectivism then we can talk.
I saw it… and just looking at it made it fall apart like an upside-down house of cards in a whirlwind. Strange… this seems to happen every time anyone looks at (so-called) “anarcho-capitalism” a bit too closely. Have you had better luck with it, perhaps?
Anarcho-capitalism doesn’t work, yes. What’s your point?
Have you any luck yet trying to answer me how would you define collectivism?
That’s every working class capitalist behaviour I’ve ever met. The average family guy with 4 kids barely able to make ends meet but god forbid if you ever make a disparaging point against Elon musk as if he’s in the same category out there fighting the good fight for the average working joe.
Blind hypocrisy seems to be a necessity in capitalism ideals.