A Reader: “Goddess of the Market” by Jennifer Burns

As always, this is not a book report. Rather, it is an opportunity to discuss some ideas that stuck with me while reading “Goddess of the Market” by Jennifer Burns.

What Does Influence Mean?

I find myself fascinated by Ayn Rand. The fascination grows out of intrigue and not a devout belief in her ideas. I find Ayn Rand compelling for the same reason I find Scientology interesting; the fact that a movement was born in our lifetime is something that I find curious. Unlike Scientology, Ayn Rand’s ideas have taken hold on our society. While reading this book, I spent a lot of time thinking about the power she wields and wielded over her devotees. It made me question the very nature and meaning of influence. From genesis to widespread public support, what does it take for an idea to move masses? Is it timing? Circumstances? Luck? Or a combination? When you look at the entirety of her life, it is hard to believe that it isn’t some combination. More than anything, I believe this is the overarching point that this book tries to drive home.

A Cult of Personality

Reading this book, the devotees of Ayn Rand come across as fanatical. They swallow every word, clamor to be in her presence, and defend her honor without question. This forced me to spend some time thinking about a cult of personality and what blindly following someone does to a person. As a human being, I am prone to such a fault. I have aligned myself with people who see the world as I do, but rarely question where these beliefs I hold dear came from or how they became true for me. I see this as a cautionary sign to slow down, pause, analyze, and spend some time with what I truly believe.

Modern Philosophy

In my mind, philosophy tries to find order in chaos. For Ayn Rand, Objectivism is an attempt to create order out of a past in communist Russia, the Great Depression, and the growing role of the government under President Franklin Roosevelt. While I disagree with the vast majority of Rand’s worldview, I do appreciate the attempt to bring some sense to the world. While I am no philosophy student, I hesitate to say that no philosophical idea has had a greater impact during my lifetime than those ideas expressed by Ayn Rand. How that makes us feel and what it means for our world is for us to decide.

The Future

I am not sure if the philosophy of Objectivism is built to last. Objectivists would argue that the world has never seen a capitalist system like the one proposed by Rand, therefore it is still too early to say. I do see a world where more and more wealth is concentrated at the top and the gap between the classes continues to widen. I can’t see how a system such as this can continue. This new economy is creating too many losers and too few winners. It is leading to increases in homelessness and a way of life that we hold as purely American to become further and further out of reach. The system has to either redistribute wealth in an effort to lift more ships up or it has to become fine with larger and larger amounts of people being left behind. Beyond those two ideas, I am not sure where we go from here, but it is something I would love to discuss with anyone that is willing.

Be good to each other,

-Nathan

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Quotes That Move Me

"Nobody can tell what the course of a country's future may be. It is not a matter of calculable trends, but a chaos subject to the rule of the moment, in which anything is possible." -Ayn Rand

"Every one of those girders has a limit to the load it can carry. What's yours?" -Ayn Rand

"Look around you," he said. A city is the frozen shape of human courage - the courage of those men who thought for the first time of every bolt, rivet and power generator that went to make it. The courage to say, not 'It seems to me,' but 'It is' - and to stake one's life on one's judgment. You're not alone. Those men exist. They have always existed. There was a time when human being crouched in caves, at the mercy of any pestilence and any storm."

"She had found reassurance, for two days, in the sight of the cities moving past her window - the factories, the bridges, the electric signs, the billboards pressing down upon the roofs of homes - the crowded, grimy, active, living conflux of the industrial East.

But the cities had been left behind. The train was now diving into the prairies of Nebraska, the rattle of its couplers sounding as if it were shivering cold: She saw lonely shapes that had been farmhouses in the vacant stretches that had been fields. But the great burst of energy, in the East, generations ago, had splattered bright trickles to run through the emptiness; some were gone, but some still lived. She was startled when the lights of a small town swept across her car and, vanishing, left it darker than it had been before. She would not move to turn on the light. She sat still, watching the rare towns. Whenever an electric beam went flashing briefly at her face, it was like a moment's greeting." -Ayn Rand

"She looked at him across the living room from the threshold of her door. In the windows behind him, the mountains had that tinge of silver-pink which seems brighter than daylight, with the promise of a light to come." -Ayn Rand

"She raised her eyebrows to the plane. She watched the spread of its wings grow smaller in the sky, draining away in its wake the sound of its motor. It kept rising, wings first, like a long silver cross; then the curve of its motion went following the sky, dropping slowly closer to the earth; then it seemed not to move any longer, but only to shrink. She watched it like a star in the process of extinction, while it shrank from cross to dot to a burning spark which she was no longer certain of seeing. When she saw that the spread of the sky was strewn with such parks all over, she knew the plane was gone." -Ayn Rand

The only value men can offer me is the work of their mind. When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit." -Ayn Rand

"And as he now crawls through the wreckage, groping blindly for a way to live, your teachers offer him the help of a morality that proclaims that he'll find no solution and must seek no fulfillment on Earth. Real existence, they tell him, is that which he cannot perceive, true consciousness is the faculty percieving the non-existent - and if he is unable to understand it, that is the proof that his existence is evil and his consciousness impotent." -Ayn Rand

Be good to each other, 

-Nathan

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