09-17-2018, 06:49 AM
(09-17-2018, 03:57 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:(09-16-2018, 06:49 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Ayn Rand, the definitive anti-collectivist.
Her rationalism and support for technology is, however, very G.I.
I know of no generation going back to the 1600s that didn't support some technology for some purpose. The use could be for building big (GI leadership) or doing using technology to get subtle effects with huge consequences (Boom). But this said, Ayn Rand's rationalism atomizes people except in their servile relationship to the Master Class.
GI leadership tended (except among Southern agrarian racists) to hold that the common man needed a stake in the system, and that was consumerism. Rand has had audiences far more accepting as readers and policy-makers among Boomers (like Newt Gingrich and Donald Trump) and X (like Paul Ryan) who seem to believe that the social optimum is wretched excess in elite indulgence that overpowers the proles by dazzling them with castles and palaces (even if the edifices are only McMansions).
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.