Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism

[CapnAwesome]

In some ways, she was an awful woman. However, her heroes largely didn't inherit their wealth, they created it. I'm not sure what many people having inherited their wealth has to do with Ayn Rand, she was not an admirer of inherited wealth. In her novel, blue collar workers are held in high regard, they are part of the revolution in Atlas Shrugged. Honest labor was a virtue in her book (literally).

I find it awkward to have to continually correct criticisms of her. Why is it so  hard to criticize her for what she actually said instead of a strawman notions about it? I realize not everyone has read her work, but I would think those who haven't would be a little more shy in expounding on it. I've read pretty much everything she's written and wound up not agreeing with her on fundamental issues. She was bitter and extreme and ironically formed a cult of personality around herself; she had a very unseemly at least half admiration for a killer, and didn't comprehend that the kind of people she was portraying as heroes had elements of sociopathy.

But she didn't regard 'the people at the top' as the only makers, didn't hold ordinary hard-working people as lowly or unnecessary or objects of exploitation. She saw productive work itself as a virtuous endeavor. She was for good wages and working conditions...but she thought that those arise naturally from increased productivity and voluntary negotiations between workers and owners. She wrote Atlas Shrugged in 1957, when the economy was humming and wages were rising. Almost sixty years later we can see that it doesn't always play out that way. She was wrong, but she wasn't for exploiting the working class. Mao was wrong for encouraging a high birth rate that contributed to famine that led to millions of people starving to death; but if you said Mao encouraged people to have children so they could starve to death later, I would have to disagree. That's what this conversation is like to me. I'm not a big fan of Mao, but he did not set out to starve his own people to death. I'm not a big fan of Rand, but she did not regard workers as robots to be exploited, she thought they had a dignity that surpassed bureaucrats and those who lived off the wealth of their predecessors. But following her misguided suggested policies (to the very limited extend that they were followed) was not good for labor in the long run.

Yeah, I agree so much. So many criticisms of Ayn Rand are attacks on her personal life (who's personal life is without flaws?) and strawmanning of her philosophy. This is despite the fact that there is so so so much of her philosophy that is easy to criticize in it's own right and not the strawman version of it that most people have. I think mostly the reason that people do so is because it's easy. It's far easier to criticize a strawrand, then it is to read Atlas Shrugged, which I personally found to be extremely dull and tedious.