Comment on ‘They’ve pickled each others’ brains’
ArgumentativeMonotheist@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Imagine reading Peter Thiel’s books as anything besides a sociological analysis of the postmodern, capitalist West (I haven’t, btw, I’m just assuming it’s about ideology and not a cook book). Goddamn. I bet even Ayn Rand makes more sense…
ReallyActuallyFrankenstein@lemmynsfw.com 1 week ago
I’m not a believer in Ayn Rand or objectivism, she was wrong on the fundamentals, but she’s excellent brain exercise. It’s vanishingly rare to find anyone who can meaningfully explain an organized, recursively-coherent single-idea philosophy for 70 pages (the Atlas Shrugged monologue) without clear contradiction if you accept her flawed premises. She truly, viscerally believed, and spent the time thinking about it to prove it (even if, again, she’s wrong).
This manifesto is just someone who made some money post-facto rationalizing it with grade-school logic.
ArgumentativeMonotheist@lemmy.world 1 week ago
You have to have been absent from the world and basically just a brain in a vat that was just turned on to somehow believe in the idea of the “moral, altruistic, genius, persecuted and taken advantage of” greedy and proud capitalist when reality shows the entire opposite: the selfless have nothing, often not even their lives, the rich ones took from everyone, often even their lives. I liked Atlas Shrugged and felt like a real smart cookie halfway in when I was in my early teens reading it in my living room but the characters had already felt a bit, uh, unrealistic and then the monologue/rant came about and it was just ehhhhh. My favourite philosophical exploration/manifesto is the one in Dune, it doesn’t even feel blurted out because it’s in every book, in every page even, you just absorb it. 👍