I love how the Americans say they're "making money". That's exactly what you're doing. Money is the product of people who create something of value. Don't think of it as "the root of all evil" ;-)
You got me curious. I don't have the fortitude to read through all of that but I dipped in here and there. What leapt out at me is how utterly Russian it is. The speech reads like an English translation of an ideological Russian novel, which I suppose in some sense it is. Rand comes across as a shrill and graphomanic anti-Dostoevsky. (Dostoevsky was a polar opposite kind of conservative to AR, if she can be called conservative, and boy would he have had a field day with this.)
Rand's desire to take her idea as far as it can possibly go, in classic can't-make-an-omelette-without-breaking-eggs style, is as Russian as vodka. Think Bazarov the nihilist in "Fathers and Sons". Or better, Chernyshevsky's "What is to be Done?" which is famous for two things: having inspired generations of Russian revolutionaries and being a bit of a literary embarrassment.
Here's an example. This is interesting and at least plausible:
No other language or nation had ever used these words ["to make
money"] before; men had always thought of wealth as a static
quantity [...] Americans were the first to understand that wealth
has to be created.
But she follows it with a non sequitur so stupid that one wonders whether it is parody:
The words ‘to make money’ hold the essence of human morality.
This kind of totalism isn't particularly American; there are no checks and balances for miles. Rather, it's a foreign species that has flourished in certain American soils. It's easy to see why the greed-is-good financialization crowd would go in for someone who writes things like "Money is the product of virtue". Much more interesting is the question of its popular appeal. There I think you have to look at what Steinbeck famously pointed out, that America doesn't have poor, it has temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
There's an awesome novel to be written by someone with the ability to grasp all this at its root. Rand didn't write such a novel but she would make a great character in it.
> The speech reads like an English translation of an ideological Russian novel, which I suppose in some sense it is. Rand comes across as a shrill and graphomanic anti-Dostoevsky. (Dostoevsky was a polar opposite kind of conservative to AR, if she can be called conservative, and boy would he have had a field day with this.)
Rand was a fan of Dostoevsky (see The Romantic Manifestohttp://www.amazon.com/dp/0451149165). (By comparison, she couldn't stand Tolstoy, and considered Anna Karenina one of the (morally) worst books ever written.)
Sciabarra's Ayn Rand: The Russian Radicalhttp://www.amazon.com/dp/0271014415 considers her from a perspective that sounds similar to yours. (I haven't read it myself.)
That's emotionally unsurprising but ideologically weird, since for Dostoevsky money is anything but "the product of virtue" and wealth creation is the last thing his characters are interested in. They kill for money, gamble for it, burn it, tear it up and throw it away, but the one thing they never do is rationally invest it.
Dostoevsky lived on the edge financially until late in life and thought that a society based on "wealth creation" was vulgar and spiritually dead. He critiqued it hilariously in The Gambler.
a perspective that sounds similar to yours
Yes, what I'm saying is that Ayn Rand was probably a Russian radical who merely flipped the high-order ideological bit. In other words, she's closer to Stalin than to Adam Smith.
If you're at all interested in her aesthetic principles, give The Romantic Manifesto a try--it's an essay collection, and quite short (by her standards at least--about 200 pages).
My point is that she had at least as much cause to reject Dostoevsky on "moral" grounds as Tolstoy. I'd bet a fiver that she has to twist herself into quite some contortion to justify that one.
Ayn Rand is interesting, in my opinion, as a pathological case. In that respect she's very interesting - like, super weird. As I said, she and the social ripples around her would make a brilliant subject for a great comic novelist, if there were one around with the depth to get it right psychologically. But I'm not going to work on anything like that, so I have little reason to read her. Sorry if I'm offending you by being so dismissive. I do appreciate your comments.
Thanks for the rather punchy, refreshing literary and ideological analysis of Rand in this thread. It's a pity you're not going to contribute more words to a critique of her ideas, but I can certainly understand why.
In one brief excursion you've managed to survey the land of Rand and come away with the essence of what I found so absurd about Atlas Shrugged, the only book of hers I've read.
As a young pup I found it enjoyable, and her relentless romanticism did manage to cultivate within me an appreciation of capitalism, industry, and money at some emotional level (that was not unlike jaysonelliot's experience with more traditional financial self-help books).
However I left the novel amused by its absurdity and extremism and promptly discovered the world of Objectivists and the cult of Rand. At that point amusement turned to bemusement at the ideological adoration heaped on her by what seemed to be a whole intellectual movement. Eek.
As you mention, it's easy to see why the greed-is-good financialization crowd go in for Rand - she provides a satisfactorily-sized ideological fig-leaf for naked greed.
In that case I've done some good! If you want his critique of capitalism, The Gambler is pretty good. But if you want sheer entertainment, I think The Double is one of the best things Dostoevsky ever wrote. It was only his second novel, and before he was sent to Siberia. His first novel Poor Folk had made him a huge star (even though it's no longer thought to be very good). So he thought he'd top that and came out with The Double which was so weird and out-there that everybody immediately pronounced him a has-been. It's complete genius, though, and very funny.
Edit: if on the other hand you want the classics then Crime and Punishment is likely your best bet. It's all about what happens when someone takes an idea to its extreme conclusion and acts on it. And it's his easiest big novel from a story point of view.
Apropos citation. Would've been an even better one without the disclaimer.
The money speech contains the essence of the overriding philosophy in the novel at large; I'm curious what you found ridiculous in the rest of the book that isn't stated here (at least in its logical precepts).
The money speech helped me get over an irrational, subconscious distaste for money but at the same time I recognized it for the capitalist fairytale that it is. So I suppose it helped me in a way that "The Automatic Millionaire" and other books helped jaysonelliot.
Gruseom has apparently never read Rand, but manages a brief, wonderful analysis of Rand's flaws and absurdities above that captures the essence of what I found more absurd as the novel progresses to its conclusion.
However I still keep the concept of moochers and looters in my head, and think of them as we lurch from one global financial crisis to another.
"The money speech helped me get over an irrational, subconscious distaste for money but at the same time I recognized it for the capitalist fairytale that it is."
Funny, the best summary of Rand I've read (maybe on Samizdata - I can't find the exact quote though) is that her writing is a really good antidote to certain ideologies, but it shouldn't be mistaken for food.
Religion is a pretext. Greed is a cause. Wars that were driven by leaders' economic motivations used religion as a justification. As religion became less effective as a pretext in the 20th century, other pretexts came along ("progress", "economic justice", etc.) to justify expansionist greed.
I'll expand that a bit. In the same way that there is nothing inherently wrong with money, but there is with 'love of money', I would argue that there is nothing inherently wrong with religion, but that the 'love of religion' that could cause something like the crusades or jihad is definitely evil.
I don't think that's what you were going for, though.
The whole "the root of all evil" comes from bad translation in the King James. Modern translations usually translate it as "the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil" (NIV) or "the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils" (ESV).
Here's a parallel comparison of the NIV, ESV, KJV, and the NKJV[1]. Note that the New King James even updated the phrase to be more accurate, and it now mirrors the other translations.
Since I can no longer edit: In fact, a better translation is probably "of all these evils", referring to those mentioned in the preceding context. The NASB notes that the literal is "the evils", and that's exactly how Young's Literal Translation translates it[1]. The Aramaic Bible in Plain English, which I've never heard of, has a great translation of this[2].
Here's Clarke's commentary[3] as well:
> The love of money is the root of all evil - Perhaps it would be better to translate παντων των κακων, of all these evils; i.e. the evils enumerated above...
Anyway, sorry for the diversion from "hacker news" territory but I think it's interesting to know that not only is this widely-quoted verse not as widely applicable as is usually quoted ("money (or love of money) is the root of all evil"), nor is it even a general statement about love of money ("love of money is a root of all kinds of evil"), but it seems to be specifically just about the evils mentioned in the immediate context ("love of money is the root of all these evils").
Yes for the Aramaic plain english: those who desire to be rich fall into temptations and into traps, and into many foolish and harmful desires, and they sink the children of men into corruption and destruction. But the root of all these evils is the love of money, and there are some who have desired it and have erred from the faith and have brought themselves many miseries.
I don't think the quote is meant to be anti-money. I think a true "love of money" would be recognizes it for what it is: a vehicle.
The root of all evil is an obsessive/addictive love of money. Any addiction is classically considered evil, but love of money is the most dangerous because it is the most formless and abstract.
Workaholism is pretty abstract, but at least you need to appear to be doing something. In our times as in all others, it is possible to chase money by doing nothing of value at all.
Traditionally speaking (i.e. in the historical context of the Bible a la Dante et al) the only way for something to be bad is to take something good and twist it out of it's shape, or pull it from it's right place.
Money is not the root of all evil. The love of money is the root of all evil. This is something like being obsessed with money, or reifying the "symbol" of money.
