Broad Speculations | About the origin of life, the fate of the universe, and the future evolution of humanity.
Dystopian Movie Society - You'll be given the works until you confess.
Description: where past meets future
I’ve never been all that interested in Ayn Rand either as a novelist or a thinker, though she’s existed out there in the periphery of my awareness of intellectual currents for almost as long as I knew what an intellectual was. I can remember way back in high school a girl I had a thing for suggesting that I read Atlas Shrugged . I ended up buying Rand’s book Philosophy: Who Needs It? instead ( probably because it was cheaper, or maybe because I wasn’t in a novel reading period at the time). The only thing I
In the eons since then I’ve studiously avoided any of Rand’s books even when I thought they might help me understand some person (such as Peter Theil) or trend, (as in right-wing transhumanism), though I did manage to survive the 1949 film version of The Fountainhead starring Gary Cooper. It might seem weird, then, that I’m turning to the subject of Rand so late, at the very moment where the movement the woman stood for has seemingly lost all relevance. Libertarian individualism doesn’t seem to have much of
The late 20th century revolt against the state has revealed itself to be a failure, and individualism has fared no better. Laissez-fairehas brought us what anyone even superficially familiar with Victorian era history knew it would: robber barons, surging inequality and class war. As for individualism, rather than replace twentieth century mass society with liberated individuals free to decide on their own definition of the Good (as was promised by the sexual and cultural revolutions of the 1960’s and 70’s
Broad Speculations | About the origin of life, the fate of the universe, and the future evolution of humanity.
Dystopian Movie Society - You'll be given the works until you confess.