A fonte da tirania
Data do post: 1 de fevereiro de 2010
Anthony Daniels (também conhecido como Theodore Dalrymple) fala o- que-todos-sabem-sobre-Ayn-Rand-mas-tinham-medo-de-pensar:
Rand’s virtues were as follows: she was highly intelligent; she was brave and uncompromising in defense of her ideas; she had a kind of iron integrity; and, though a fierce defender of capitalism, she was by no means avid for money herself. The propagation of truth as she saw it was far more important to her than her own material ease. Her vices, of course, were the mirror-image of her virtues, but, in my opinion, the mirror was a magnifying one. Her intelligence was narrow rather than broad. Though in theory a defender of freedom of thought and action, she was dogmatic, inflexible, and intolerant, not only in opinion but in behavior, and it led her to personal cruelty. In the name of her ideas, she was prepared to be deeply unpleasant. She hardened her ideas into ideology. Her integrity led to a lack of self-criticism; she frequently wrote twenty thou- sand words where one would do.
Rand believed all people to be possessed of equal rights, but she found relations of equality with others insupportable. Though she could be charming, it was not something she could keep up for long. She was deeply ungrateful to those who had helped her and many of her friendships ended in acrimony. Her biographer tells us that she sometimes told jokes, but, in the absence of any supportive evidence, I treat reports of her sense of humor much as I treat reports of sightings of the Loch Ness monster: apocryphal at best.
A passionate hater of religion, Rand founded a cult around her own person, complete with rituals of excommunication; a passionate believer in rationality and logic, she was incapable of seeing the contradictions in her own work. She was a rationalist who was not entirely rational; she could not distinguish between rationalism and rationality. Of narrow aesthetic sympathies, she laid down the law in matters of artistic judgment like a panjandrum; a believer in honesty, she was adept at self-deception and special pleading.
Comentários (1)
Uma biografia objetiva
Data do post: 31 de outubro de 2009
Como alguns posts recentes mostraram, muita gente aqui tem opiniões fortes, sejam positivas ou negativas, sobre a Ayn Rand. Vem em boa hora, portanto, uma nova biografia da filósofa e escritora; e, surpreendentemente, parece que a fundadora do objetivismo finalmente terá uma biografia objetiva.
Isso porque, até onde eu saiba, a única biografia existente dela foi escrita por uma fiel seguidora, muito parcial, e na década de 80, ou seja, antes que se pudesse ir ao país natal de Ayn Rand para colher informações: a URSS.
Pois Ayn Rand nasceu Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, judia de classe média, em S. Petersburgo, em 1905. A revolução veio quando ela tinha 12 anos, e ela só escapou da tirania soviética aos 21, tendo inclusive estudado na universidade de Petrogrado.
Da vida posterior dela, quase tudo o que é escrito adota um tom polêmico. Seguidores tecem louvores e detratores acusam-na de louca. Anne Heller, adotando um ponto de vista imparcial, parece ter conseguido um feito notável. Aguardo minha cópia ansiosamente.
Comentários (4)
Em que prova-se que Ayn Rand é uma estúpida
Data do post: 24 de setembro de 2009
Pelo menos segundo Whittaker Chambers, o Cabo Anselmo dos EUA (pela sua coragem moral e pela sua conversão em encarar a realidade como ela é, diga-se de passagem), em sua resenha devastadora sobre aquele tomo intragável chamado Atlas Shrugged. Ele vai ao ponto no seguinte trecho, além de ter um título que é a suprema ironia cortante: Big Sister is Watching You.
“(…) Atlas Shrugged can be called a novel only by devaluing the term. It is a massive tract for the times. Its story merely serves Miss Rand to get the customers inside the tent, and as a soapbox for delivering her Message. The Message is the thing. It is, in sum, a forthright philosophic materialism. Upperclassmen might incline to sniff and say that the author has, with vast effort, contrived a simple materialist system, one, intellectually, at about the stage of the oxcart, though without mastering the principle of the wheel. Like any consistent materialism, this one begins by rejecting God, religion, original sin, etc., etc. (This book’s aggressive atheism and rather unbuttoned “higher morality,” which chiefly outrage some readers, are, in fact, secondary ripples, and result inevitably from its underpinning premises.) Thus, Randian Man, like Marxian Man, is made the center of a godless world.
At that point, in any materialism, the main possibilities open up to Man. 1) His tragic fate becomes, without God, more tragic and much lonelier. In general, the tragedy deepens according to the degree of pessimism or stoicism with which he conducts his “hopeless encounter between human questioning and the silent universe.” Or, 2) Man’s fate ceases to be tragic at all. Tragedy is bypassed by the pursuit of happiness. Tragedy is henceforth pointless. Henceforth man’s fate, without God, is up to him, and to him alone. His happiness, in strict materialist terms, lies with his own workaday hands and ingenious brain. His happiness becomes, in Miss Rand’s words, “the moral purpose of his fife.”
Here occurs a little rub whose effects are just as observable in a free-enterprise system, which is in practice materialist (whatever else it claims or supposes itself to be), as they would be under an atheist socialism, if one were ever to deliver that material abundance that all promise. The rub is that the pursuit of happiness, as an end in itself, tends automatically, and widely, to be replaced by the pursuit of pleasure, with a consequent general softening of the fibers of will, intelligence, spirit. No doubt, Miss Rand has brooded upon that little rub. Hence in part, I presume, her insistence on man as a heroic being” With productive achievement as his noblest activity.” For, if Man’s heroism” (some will prefer to say: human dignity”) no longer derives from God, or is not a function of that godless integrity which was a root of Nietzsche’s anguish, then Man becomes merely the most consuming of animals, with glut as the condition of his happiness and its replenishment his foremost activity. So Randian Man, at least in his ruling caste, has to be held “heroic” in order not to be beastly. And this, of course, suits the author’s economics and the politics that must arise from them. For politics, of course, arise, though the author of Atlas Shrugged stares stonily past them, as if this book were not what, in fact, it is, essentially — a political book. And here begins mischief. Systems of philosophic materialism, so long as they merely circle outside this world’s atmosphere, matter little to most of us. The trouble is that they keep coming down to earth. It is when a system of materialist ideas presumes to give positive answers to real problems of our real life that mischief starts. In an age like ours, in which a highly complex technological society is everywhere in a high state of instability, such answers, however philosophic, translate quickly into political realities. And in the degree to which problems of complexity and instability are most bewildering to masses of men, a temptation sets in to let some species of Big Brother solve and supervise them.
One Big Brother is, of course, a socializing elite (as we know, several cut-rate brands are on the shelves). Miss Rand, as the enemy of any socializing force, calls in a Big Brother of her own contriving to do battle with the other. In the name of free enterprise, therefore, she plumps for a technocratic elite (I find no more inclusive word than technocratic to bracket the industrial-financial-engineering caste she seems to have in mind). When she calls “productive achievement” man’s noblest activity,” she means, almost exclusively, technological achievement, supervised by such a managerial political bureau. She might object that she means much, much more; and we can freely entertain her objections. But, in sum, that is just what she means. For that is what, in reality, it works out to. And in reality, too, by contrast with fiction, this can only head into a dictatorship, however benign, living and acting beyond good and evil, a law unto itself (as Miss Rand believes it should be), and feeling any restraint on itself as, in practice, criminal, and, in morals, vicious (as Miss Rand clearly feels it to be). Of course, Miss Rand nowhere calls for a dictatorship. I take her to be calling for an aristocracy of talents. We cannot labor here why, in the modern world, the pre-conditions for aristocracy, an organic growth, no longer exist, so that the impulse toward aristocracy always emerges now in the form of dictatorship”.
Detalhe de bastidores: quando este texto foi publicado na National Review, então sob a direção do próprio Chambers e de William F. Buckley, Rand dizia-se muito amiga do último. Depois deste evento, Rand simplesmente passou a ignorar Buckley em ocasiões públicas e fazia questão de falar mal de sua pessoa pelas costas. Segundo conhecidos, ela não suportou o fato do amigo ter autorizado uma resenha tão virulenta contra o seu livro.
Isso sim que é tolerância e liberalismo, hem?
Ah, sim, para quem não sabe quem é Whittaker Chambers (eu também não sabia; foi uma indicação do nosso colaborador Túlio Borges), aí vai mais um texto de Daniel P. Mahoney que explica tudo direitinho e mostra que, na comparação, o que Ayn Rand queria mesmo era criar a sua própria ditadura – sonho que, aliás, muitos liberais e libertários soi disant também querem implantar nessas plagas, algo tão idiota quanto um totalitarismo de esquerda.
(Observação aos incautos e maliciosos: eu respeito ainda mais o meu amigo Joel Pinheiro pela provocação acima. Portanto, sem comentários ao estilo Contigo, ok?)
Comentários (12)
What do you think of Alexander Solzhenitsyn?
Data do post:
AYN RAND: I regard him ideologically as lower than the rulers of Russia. He is the worst public caricature of a monster that has emerged in this age, which displays an awful lot of public caricatures and unappetizing characters. Before you speak of Solzhenitsyn or ask anything about him, please read the letter that he sent to the Soviet authorities shortly before he was deported. Read that letter. It has been published; it has been translated. I read it in the original Russian. In it, that man proclaims, in effect, that he is a totalitarian collectivist. He says so openly – though not in those words. He is merely against Marxism. He wants Russia to remain a dictatorship, but a dictatorship run by the Russian Church. He wants Russian religion, the Greek Orthodox Church, to be a substitute for Marxism. In other words, he wants to take Russia back to the stage before Peter the Great, to the seventeenth century or earlier. He is anti-industrial and wants to take Russia back to being an agrarian country. And that horrible, pretentious person is held as some kind of hero of liberation. He doesn’t want to free the world. He is denouncing the West; he is denouncing Western civilization. He is that ancient, chauvinistic aberration: a Slavophile. He says, in that letter of his, that he wants the Russian government – the Communist Party – to keep all its economic and political power; he lists specifically the power over production, trade, and distribution, over foreign relationships, over the army. All he wants is that the government allow people to speak and write freely. Now remember, he’s a writer.
And in the conclusion of this unspeakable document, he says the following (I am quoting from memory): I want nothing for myself, I am sure that you, the rulers, have never seen and cannot imagine a man who is not asking something for himself – well here I am, please look at me. Is this a “selfless” person? Or is this an example of the worst kind of conventional “selfishness” and vanity? Well, that’s as much of a motive as any religious mystic-altruist would ever project. That’s all that his disinterested “selflessness” means: give me freedom to write, and the other human activities and professions can be enslaved, I’m quite willing to put up with it. With ideas of that kind, to come here and posture as a prophet of freedom is really adding insult to injury. Sure, what Solzhenitsyn wrote about the Soviet concentration camps is true. Better people have said it before. We should consider them, not a man who is philosophically the exact opposite of everything the West stands for or should stand for – a man who is a profound enemy of individualism and of reason. That is my opinion of Mr. Solzhenitsyn.
Boston, Ford Hall Forum, 1976.
Comentários (3)
