Outside in » Rand http://www.xenosystems.net Involvements with reality Thu, 05 Feb 2015 01:26:08 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1 Atlas Mugged http://www.xenosystems.net/atlas-mugged/ http://www.xenosystems.net/atlas-mugged/#comments Wed, 08 Jan 2014 06:57:50 +0000 http://www.xenosystems.net/?p=1899 As part of the ongoing celebrations of Prophecy Month at Outside in, we present a (short) three part series by Lars Seier Christensen of Saxo Bank on the historical prescience of Ayn Rand (one, two, three). While some distance from high theory, even the most Rand-averse should be able to take something interesting away from this series, whether by considering it as a significant ethnographic — and even religious — phenomenon, or by appraising it as a structured forecast. The foundations (laid in part one) certainly seem realistic enough: “… free capitalism has not really been experienced by many people alive today. […] The strange hybrid of western societies … allows only limited capitalism to create enough wealth to support a wider range of political and social ambitions, largely controlled by anti-capitalists.”

Christensen asks: does the world look increasingly like the politically saturated, anti-capitalist stagnatopia she envisaged? If the evaluation of Rand is restricted to these terms, her claim to attention seems assured.  The conclusion:

If we don’t succeed in changing the values and direction of at least the next generation, I fear the full prediction of Atlas Shrugged will become reality and while that may hold some promise for the distant future, it is not something that I think people of my age feel like going through if we can avoid it.

Given the Cathedral — which is to say, pedagogical (and propagandistic) anti-capitalism in power — Christensen’s hope for a generational shift in “values and direction” sounds like a prayer to a dead God. That leaves only Cassandra, and tragic truths.

(Via.)

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