Astral Codex Ten

Ayn Rand

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Ayn Rand

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Ayn Rand is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between March 25, 2021 and August 08, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “People tend to get surprised whenever libertarians differ from the most strawmannish version of Ayn Rand”; “haven’t I read this Ayn Rand book before?”; “Ultimate source is Ayn Rand, Return Of The Primitive”. It most often appears alongside US, 4chan, Achilles.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 6
  • Issue count: 6
  • First seen: March 25, 2021
  • Last seen: August 08, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

More Antifragile, Diversity Libertarianism, And Corporate Censorship
March 25, 2021 · Original source
But maybe it’s not bog-standard enough. People tend to get surprised whenever libertarians differ from the most strawmannish version of Ayn Rand. But I find my disagreements with her map pretty closely to this idea of “diversity libertarianism”. I'm less likely to object to things like taxing the rich, redistributing wealth, or removing externalities on carbon - none of those decrease diversity very much. And I’m more likely to care about conformist pressures from religions or mobs, even though technically those don’t involve government.
Prospectus On Próspera
April 14, 2021 · Original source
Patrick Schumacher is the Principal Architect of Zaha Hadid, a world-famous architectural firm that designed eg Beijing International Airport and the London Olympics’ Aquatics Center. He’s won some of architecture’s most prestigious prizes, but also faced controversy over views his Wikipedia page describes as “aligned with anarcho-capitalism in favour of complete decentralisation and radical privatisation of all aspects of architecture, planning and development”. He recently lost a court case over ownership of his architecture company, and…wait, haven’t I read this Ayn Rand book before?
Inline links: his Wikipedia page, lost a court case
HPI is getting some funding from Pronomos Capital, who are exactly the sort of people you would expect to see founding their own city. Pronomos is a group of Silicon Valley libertarians interested in competitive governance; their site predicts "crowd choice in governance providers, new startup societies approved by existing states, and completely new developments in unclaimed areas such as the high seas or celestial bodies". Some of them are veterans of the Seasteading Institute, who wanted to create charter cities on floating platforms in international waters. Pronomos is run by former SI head Patri Friedman (grandson of Milton Friedman, son of David Friedman), and their advisors include cryptocurrency mogul / VC / outspoken libertarian Balaji Srinivasan, legendary venture capitalist Naval Ravikant, and lots of other apparently rich and famous people who I know less about. I think we would all be disappointed in Peter Thiel if he were not involved in this somehow, and it looks like in fact he’s a major Pronomos funder.
Inline links: Pronomos Capital, he’s a major Pronomos funder
Interested parties who don’t want to move to Roatan can seek “virtual residency” / “e-residency”, a concept pioneered by Estonia in 2014. This mostly allows virtual residents to set up companies in Próspera, governed by Prósperan law. In keeping with their usual modus operandi, HPI has already hired Ott Vatter, the leader of the Estonian project, to design their system.
Inline links: “virtual residency” / “e-residency”
Book Review: Sadly, Porn
February 16, 2022 · Original source
Ultimate source is Ayn Rand, Return Of The Primitive. If you believe this, how close have you gotten to Teach’s theory of envy? Since this is theoretically a porn book, we should get back to things at least vaguely related to sex and romance: why is it so hard to ask someone else out? I spent about ten years miserable and romantically frustrated and wishing that I had a partner every single day. The total number of people I asked out during that time was one or two, I can’t remember. Even then, it was some kind of incredibly ambiguous form of asking out with five layers of plausible deniability. This was stupid and I know it was stupid. Still, when Teach comes with some psychological theory that purports to explain why I am “incapable of action”, I can’t plead completely innocent.
Does he claim that the books/movies/pornos he analyzes really mean what they say he means? That the author intended those meanings? That the authors’ unconscious minds did? That those meanings were a fortuitous and coincidental reaction between the authors’ unconscious minds and ours? Or is he using them the same way postrationalists use tarot cards - as a semirandom canvas that gives an excuse to speculate about ideas that realistically come entirely from your own mind? It has to be the latter, right? He doesn’t really think The Giving Tree means all that stuff? And yet when bringing up the anagram with I Get Even, Right?, he calls it “a solid example of the return of the repressed assuming it wasn’t on purpose”.
Although I’m impressed by Teach’s erudition, I’m - let’s call it “not as impressed as he is with himself”. It’s impressive how many facts he knows, but he warps them into Jenga towers of speculation that can’t possibly be true, almost compulsively, without bothering to justify himself. There’s an analysis of fishing-related words in the Gospels where he mentions he ran it by a bunch of Greek scholars and they all said it was nonsense. He seems to accept they’re right and his analysis is wrong, but - doesn’t care? Makes us read it anyway? Maybe it’s the semirandom canvas thing after all?
Book Review: A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis
April 26, 2022 · Original source
Obsession, in which someone pretends that the Other doesn’t exist, they’re self-contained and don’t need anybody else, there’s no such thing as the unconscious, and nothing can possibly go wrong. Fink describes Ayn Rand characters as a “perfect” example, which I found helpful. Obsessives deal with their fear of sex by focusing on a single aspect of the sex partner (eg breasts, penis) and desperately trying to pretend they’re not a real full person. If you doubt the utility or veracity of Lacanian psychoanalysis (Fink warns us), it probably means you’re obsessive and that’s your defense mechanism.
Lacan thinks infants don’t have a distinction between sexual and non-sexual pleasure, so in the grand psychoanalytic tradition of being creepy, he thinks of the pleasure the infant gets from its mother as being sexual. Whether or not you go for this interpretation, certainly a grown adult who had the same relationship with his mother as an infant does - breastfeeding and all - would be considered sexually inappropriate. So at some point, when the child is a few years old, it has to separate from its mother.
Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman
July 30, 2024 · Original source
These are obviously left-wing, in the sense that they’re literal Communist propaganda. But to the modern eye there’s something off about them, something that makes you want to call them right-wing or even fascist. They’re bold and optimistic. Even though the commissars who commissioned them probably rejected some traditional or capitalist conception of virtue, they still firmly insist that there’s something sort of like virtue or power which is attainable and good. I think these are first-form posters, and that most modern leftism is second-form. I think if you had to group barbarian warlords, Puritans, Soviet communists, and modern leftists on a Nietzschean/geneaological/aesthetic axis, it would go: (Barbarian warlords) | (Puritans, Soviet communists) | (modern leftists) So one very weak compromise - hardly even a compromise, since it predates Nietzsche - is to try to stick with first-form slave morality, in the hopes that most of the problems come from the second. VIII. Ayn Rand “Is Ayn Rand a Nietzschean?”- the greatest thread in the history of forums, locked by a moderator after 12239 pages of heated debate. There’s a real answer here. Rand started out respecting, maybe even loving Nietzsche. She once said that: [Nietzsche’s] Thus Spake Zarathustra is my Bible. I can never commit suicide while I have it. …which maybe reveals more about her psychological situation than I expected from the answer to a “who’s your favorite philosopher” questionnaire. But later on she broke from him. It’s hard to figure out her exact position - she has a bad habit of treating anyone who disagrees with her in any tiny detail as the Antichrist, such that it’s hard to figure out whether she thinks of someone as a 99% fellow traveler or an arch-enemy. Still, there are substantial differences. Nietzsche is more chaotic - he expects the superior man to defy all external rules in favor of his own glorious destiny. But Rand is attached to rules - most of all the epistemic rules of Reason, but also the usual moral tenets like “don’t kill” and “don’t steal”. Nietzsche’s masters take the Ron Swanson approach to justifying their actions: …whereas Rand’s masters are prone to giving twenty-page-long arguments for why whatever they’re doing is the right choice according to Objectively Correct Moral Law. Rand’s approach has lots of advantages. The Nietzschean master, like Andrew Tate, is an awful guy to have around. It’s hard to fit him into a functioning civilization, except maybe an autocracy with him as autocrat. Nietzsche’s pitch is “hey excellent people, you should try to become this guy”, never “hey normal people, you should support my project of creating these guys, out of your own self-interest.” The latter wouldn’t pass the laugh test. Rand’s masters, while still probably very stressful to be around, have been tamed. They follow civilized rules of honesty and nonviolence - not, of course, because they’re too weak to defy them, but because following civilized rules is objectively the coolest thing of all. Instead of competing in battle and leaving a trail of bloody corpses, they compete in Capitalism and leave a trail of high-paying jobs and excellent consumer goods. They’re not doing to serve you - “I should serve the little guy” is slave moralist bulls**t. But, by coincidence, their excellent actions are doing you a service. They might only invent rocket ships to enact their Promethean conquest of nature and prove their own greatness. But you still get to ride in one. Rand also spares more of a thought (or at least an afterthought) for the little guy. Capitalism needs all types - even the company janitor genuinely contributes to whatever glorious accomplishments are going on, and deserves to feel good about themselves. She wants everyone to be the best, most ambitious, and most fighting-for-their-own-aesthetic/moral-vision they can be. But if that means being the company janitor, that’s fine. And if you love rockets and you consummate that love by becoming the janitor for a rocket company, the Objectively Correct Moral Law is 100% on board. I am not a Nietzsche scholar, but I think this is a more productive answer than Nietzsche has for this question. The disadvantage of Rand’s approach compared to Nietzsche’s is that it only works if you believe her proofs about why the Objectively Correct Moral Law is definitely objective and correct - most of which seem to me to be either hand-wavy or balderdash. Otherwise the whole thing breaks down - why is the most masterful thing to be a positive-sum capitalist instead of a negative-sum warlord? Rand really really wants to justify a peaceful, glorious, positive-sum society, to the exact people most capable of benefiting from defecting against it, without bringing in altruism or the common good at any point. It’s an extremely sympathetic goal. But I don’t think she makes it. Still, this is why I’m fond of her. If you really read her books - as opposed to skimming them while subvocalizing “this is that evil woman who loves selfishness” under your breath the whole time - it’s obvious that she believes, with a deep and burning belief, that good things are good. She really really wants to think that you can objectively convince people to support a peaceful, glorious, positive-sum society, without any hint of the psychologically-toxic slave morality that typified the USSR she grew up in. When people react to her books with loathing - without even a hint of fondness - I get suspicious that they’ve gotten so deep into slave morality that thy can’t recognize goodness when it hits them over the head with a sledgehammer. Elsewhere, I wrote: Edward Teach (Sadly, Porn) is famous for making up fake novels to criticize, and it is a little known fact that the "Ayn Rand" character along with all her novels are 100% his work. They operate as a diagnostic test based on his psychodynamic theory of envy. The instrument presents a picture of some exceptional people achieving great things who don't apologize for their greatness, and doesn’t explicitly ask the patient - I mean, reader - for their opinion. If the reader has no strong opinion, or says something like "Good for them, I guess," she passes the test. "I like these people and will use them as a role model" also passes. Some specific criticisms (see below) may also pass. If the reader says "Ah, people who are better than the pathetic sheep around them, just like I'm better than all the pathetic sheep around me!", she . . . still passes the test. That's not what it's testing for! You fail the test if you absolutely freak out about some combination of the Rand characters themselves and the potential existence of arrogant people who identify with the Rand characters. The secret is that it's not a screening test for the kind of people who would get featured on /r/iamverysmart. It's a screening test for the kind of people who would comment on /r/iamverysmart, ie the self-designated Tall Poppy Police, ie the people who build their ego off being the enforcers of the rule that you're not allowed to look better than anyone else. These people's basic mental stance is to hate people who seem too excellent. They don't think of it in these terms. They think of it as calling out arrogance, although if you look too closely you'll find their definition of arrogance covers anyone who seems excellent and but doesn't spend all their time apologizing and abasing themselves and denying it. The brilliance of Teach-Rand is how he-she draws this tendency to the foreground For example, why the whole "Objectivism" thing? Not because value is necessarily completely objective, but because the idea that any value might ever be even partially objective freaks out the Tall Poppy Syndrome people. Mention value at all, and they say you must be trying to secretly smuggle in the assumption that you are more valuable than other people (and therefore you are less valuable than other people, and therefore they are better than you). The same is true of Reason. Mention that Reason exists, and they'll interpret it as a claim that you, the only rational person, are claiming to always be right and infallible. But (they retort) actually nobody knows anything, and the only wise people are the people like them who humbly admit this. (how do you decide what's true without Reason? By bias-based-reasoning - "You say X, but I can imagine a way that would come from a place of believing you're better than other people, therefore, Not-X is true. You say that's a logical fallacy? That must come from a place of believing you're smarter than everyone else and the only person who can use Facts and Logic.") The Teach-Rand test is designed to catch the sort of person who, if someone says that on a right triangle a^2 + b^2 = c^2, responds with "Oh, so you're claiming to be some kind of right triangle expert who's better than the rest of us? You really need to work on that arrogance problem! Super cringe!" Any criticism of the book that doesn't come from this particular place is irrelevant to the test and doesn't count against your grade. (which is good, because the books are bad in a lot of ways. But that's fine - Rorschach blots don't also have to be great art!) Still, I don’t think she’s the superman (superwoman?) who successfully transcends the dichotomy Her philosophy is only as strong as its proofs of Objective Correctness, which I consider weak. Without those, you need some subjective motivation to glue things together - of which altruism is the most popular. But also, don’t we like altruism? When we’re bestriding the Earth like colossi, working on our glorious rocket ships to colonize the universe, isn’t part of what we’re thinking “this is going to revolutionize humankind and make everybody better off?” If you force yourself to reject that motivation, to just repeat “no no no, I’m only doing this because rockets are really big and make cool explosions”, aren’t you cutting out a part of yourself, in exactly the way Nietzschean masters are supposed to try to avoid doing? I find something very compelling about Rand. I think she goes some of the way to answering the Andrew Tate objection to master morality. But she’s a means and not an end. A real superman would have to figure out some way to reintroduce basic human kindness. IX. Matt Yglesias Yglesias’s mantra - “good things are good” - is too perfect and profound to come from anyone other than an esoteric master of Nietzschean philosophy. Good Straussians ignore the title and focus on the subtitle. Nietzsche wrote in the 1890s. There were still real nobles and emperors walking around; communists had not yet started calling capitalism “late capitalism”. Sure, his world was probably some sort of weak compromise between master and slave morality, but it was different from our weak compromise. Our weak compromise was forged through dialogue and warfare with fascism’s novel take on master morality and socialism’s novel take on slave morality. I think of Yglesias - who combines an insistence that good things are good and a proclivity for embiggenment with commitments to democracy, the welfare state, and the poorest among us - as one of its most self-conscious proponents. When I first titled this post, I didn’t know that Richard Hanania had come to the same conclusion and created this face-mash-up of Matt Yglesias and Nietzsche. The compromise goes something like: Everyone is equal before the law, before the metaphorical throne of metaphorical God, and in some poorly defined philosophical sense. This is very important. It’s our headline result. Everything else should be interpreted in light of this central fact.
Inline links: a real answer here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!OtNv!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6ae1aaf2-6cc3-488c-b0a7-5df62eee457b_225x225.jpeg, Elsewhere, Sadly, Porn, /r/iamverysmart, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!MzIr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff03d1a9d-5ffc-45ff-84bc-db3388915bbc_259x390.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!hYvV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd0f9b152-da12-4525-b062-b4c14d8b8005_383x373.png
I think? But see the section on Ayn Rand for a possible counterexample.
We should use checks, balances, vetocracy, and redistribution to limit the power of any individual to some ceiling, although people can disagree on how high the ceiling will be and right now it’s pretty high. Slave morality hates power/excellence and refuses to justify it. Master morality says power/excellence is its own justification, and the rest of us have to justify ourselves to it. Liberalism says that sure, we can probably justify power/excellence, as long as it stays within reasonable bounds and doesn’t cause trouble. Slave morality ignores benefits and sets the importance of harms at infinity. Master morality ignores harms, and sets the value of “benefits” (not that it would think of it in these terms - greatness doesn’t exist to benefit others) at infinity. Liberalism accepts the normal, finite utilitarian calculus and tries to balance benefits against harms. A final secret of this compromise is that master morality and slave morality aren’t perfect opposites. Master morality wants to embiggen itself. Slave morality wants to feel secure that everyone agrees embiggening is bad. The compromise is that we all agree embiggening is bad, but leave people free to do it anyway. So half of Western intellectual output is criticisms of capitalism and neoliberalism, yet capitalism and neoliberalism remain hegemonic5. Everybody agrees to hate billionaires; also, billionaires are richer than ever. This isn’t a complete solution - sure, we’re a free country, but we’re also a democracy, and if people hate something too much they can ban it. But add in the utilitarian justifications above, and it sort of hangs together. X. Richard Hanania So liberal democracy is an uneasy compromise between slave and master morality. One natural interpretation is that the left is the party of slave morality, and the right of master morality. I appreciate how directly Richard Hanania proves that wrong. Richard is an honest-to-goodness Nietzschean master moralist, one of the last you’ll find. Like Rand, he tries to combine Nietzschean master morality with a civilized society and obedience to law. Unlike Rand, he’s not obsessed with presenting a bunch of multi-step proofs showing exactly how it works, and honestly I’m not sure of the exact details. I find him interesting insofar as it clearly works inside his own head and he’s clearly coming from a place of aesthetic coherence. He writes: We can call my philosophy Nietzschean Liberalism. The Nietzschean part consists of the following beliefs. Just as intelligence, a moral sense, aesthetic appreciation, and other factors place humans above animals, some humans are in a very deep sense better than other humans.
Inline links: 5
Highlights From The Comments On Nietzsche
August 08, 2024 · Original source
>>[Ayn Rand] really really wants to think that you can objectively convince people to support a peaceful, glorious, positive-sum society, without any hint of the psychologically-toxic slave morality that typified the USSR she grew up in.
I also have to object to "toxic slave morality of USSR". I know it's still popular to dunk on Soviet Russia, since it has failed in the end, but it seems like most people get their knowledge of Soviet culture from Cold War sources tinted with a heavy dose of propaganda. Or Ayn Rand herself. Soviet society always celebrated unique individuals - actors, scientists, sportsmen, no less than its Western counterpart. It just denied hyper-rewards for such individuals: top Soviet actors, for example, still lived in apartments (if a bit nicer than your ordinary worker), not in mansions behind high walls and security. Frankly, I can't say their acting was worse off for all that.
Something that's always puzzled me a bit is girl-power pop-feminism. They've internalized a lot of Randian/Nietzschean/master-morality ideas (be strong/powerful, don't apologize for who you are, make time for yourself, don't make yourself smaller to make other people feel better, etc.). And yet their ideal doesn't look very much like Dagny Taggart. Instead of building rocket trains to Mars out of magic green metal that cures cancer or whatever, it seems like the idealized girl-boss is just leading a few Zoom meetings and then going home to do yoga and meditate on how liberated she is, and possibly writing a pop anthem about the experience. So there seems to be some kind of strange disconnect (juxtaposition?) going on there.