Wednesday, 2 February 2005

Rand, rand everywhere

As a recovering Randroid—well, it was a phase of mine about fifteen years ago and it lasted less than a year—I thought I should comment on all of the recent attention that’s been given to Rand. Cass has a good post that explores it, and she even mentions my love of Rush!!

First on Rand. Cass has asked if the world we live in now—the values we claim to hold—is Rand or Rand-lite. Definitely Rand-lite, as I see it. Rand considered things as mundane, and necessary, as taxation to be slavery of one to another. If I recall correctly, she was trying to come up with a way for the government to operate without taxes, such as charging people for access to the courts and police protection. Similarly, she was quite dogmatic about, well, everything. She considered self-sacrifice repulsive, even though Cass gives the matter a more thoughtful reading. One passage I recall is her trying to figure out if one should risk his life to save another’s. I believe she used the lifeboat scenario and concluded that in an emergency, self-sacrifice might be appropriate.

Ultimately, what turned me off of Rand was the coldness of her philosophy. Her philosophy could be taken straight out of the Declaration of Independence, but she takes it to an extreme that is unsatisfying. Don’t get me wrong: “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” is a very basic, even foundational, description of liberty and one which I whole-heartedly endorse. In fact, The Declaration is as close to a holy book as I have. However, I see it more as defining the role of government than telling me how to live my life.

Now to Rush. My love for them pre-dates the Randroid period by seven or eight years. My first exposure to them was through the album Moving Pictures and if you listen to the lyrics to Tom Sawyer, it’s pretty clear that they were influenced by Rand. One blurb: “his mind is not for rent; to any God or government”. Sounds like her to me.

The other songs that I can think of, off the top of my head, that were influenced by her include Free Will and all of the album 2112. The title song is several things, one of which is a rant against totalitarianism and is also about human aspirations. IIRC, the first words are “And the meek shall inherit the Earth”, though the meaning isn’t the same as the Bible. In fact, it means the opposite. The meek will be trapped on Earth while the brave and adventurous will capture the solar system, though they will have to continue their battle against totalitarianism.

Lately, though, my favorite Rush song has been Red Sector A. It’s a story about the horrors of gulags, or concentration camps, and is quite moving. I can still remember the arguments about Rush starting to use synthesizers in their music (it happened a few years before Grace Under Pressure, which has Red Sector A, but I was a bit young to appreciate Rush when they made the switch; I was still hung up on Blondie and Rapper’s Delight).

Rush is still my favorite group, though Rand has been replaced by Hayek and Friedman.

See also these posts (here and here) at Marginal Revolution.

OTB Traffic Jam

3 comments:

Any views expressed in these comments are solely those of their authors; they do not reflect the views of the authors of Signifying Nothing, unless attributed to one of us.
[Permalink] 1. flaime wrote @ Wed, 2 Feb 2005, 9:20 am CST:

I prefer Heinlein, myself…He’s more accessable than Rand to me…

 

I don’t know who I was on the phone with (probably my brother) recently, but we were discussing Heinlein. Some of his books are just priceless and then some of his work (like Rand’s) is so uneven. He really went off the deep end at one point.

But if I had to leave one Heinlein book to my kids, it would be Time Enough For Love. It’s in with The Fountainhead on the List of Pivotal Books That Changed My Outlook On Life. Mad book, but great fun—sort of a wit-and-wisdom of Heinlein. And one of my favorite novels of all time, with all its flaws.

The Notebooks of Lazarus Long is worth the purchase price alone.

Robert, this dates me horribly, but I’ve never been shy about revealing my age (ye Gods… 45 – I pre-date the dinosaurs). Rush reminds me of junior high and I can’t get away from lumping them in with Barry White for some reason, horrid as that sounds :) Music has a powerful ability to evoke memory, and Rush… well, let’s just say it’s tied in with first dating memories and leave it at that.

I find that “today’s Tom Sawyer” song hard to forgive, I must say.

 
[Permalink] 3. flaime wrote @ Thu, 3 Feb 2005, 10:27 am CST:

Stranger in a Strange Land in my ultimate Heinlein choice, but I enjoyed Time Enough For Love. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is also one of my favorites, for all it’s unevenness. And his posthumously published For Us, The Living.

 
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