If this were a perfect world, to be a boy and 17-years-old would be banned, or somehow made illegal, anyway. I say this from experience, some of which is outlined in this story.
Guys who got beaten up a lot in the schoolyard for being sniveling, entitled jerks usually end up quoting Ayn Rand and Nietzsche a lot in their manifestos. It sort of goes with the territory.
And the guys who couldn’t get laid for the same obvious reasons cloak their discomfort around women in all this survival of the fittest crap. Silicon valley is the epicenter of disgusting behavior toward women.
They couldn't even explain what Darwin or Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory means by "fittest," it's completely void of teleology and certainly not one that would see them as some kind of huge "world-historical advance for the human species"!
Edit: For example, with our species and others on this third planet from the local sun now seriously endangered by the kind of predictable consequences we might immediately recognize as plausible in an episode of "Star Trek," i.e., that for human enterprises and other natural processes (primarily volcanoes) to keep spewing billions and billions of tons of heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the planet's atmosphere has consequences: warming that cannot perpetually be mitigated by the oceans, seas, wetlands, and rainforests acting as massive "heat sinks," for one, so that an evolved sense of cooperation, cooperative, coordinated activities is to be "fit for this environment and helps us and other species, including plants, to survive" - and to transition from burning fossil fuels for energy, to cleaner, renewable sources like wind , geothermal and solar, to "clean up our messes," cut back on waste, be more strategically frugal (such as reusing and repurposing already existing goods), engage vigorously in urban planning that updates building codes to help conserve heat in the cold weather, and cooling in the hotter weather - some of which has been going since well before the first "Earth Day" in 1969, just not at nearly the scale we require - again, that's "survival of the fittest," not privileging the economic elite, and certainly not privileging mega-billionaires with no special insights into ethical behavior on the grand scale, or planning for humans as a species, as opposed to a talent for some smart (even "brilliant and prescient") investments.
Fitness, in the Darwinian constructs, is not analogous to dominance. In fact, often, optimal subsistence strategies (foraging, mating, hazard avoidance, shelter location...) penalize overly aggressive behavior, and reward thoughtfulness, caution, or - especially, for Homo Sapiens, cooperation.
Exactly, not only that, but one type of the earliest, non-religious critiques - that is, not the people irate that it "contradicts the Holy Bible's word of God account of creation in Genesis," but more scientific thinkers weighing in - was based on just those considerations.
Note to self: research DARWIN'S OWN RESPONSE to this, I wonder if he was ever even remotely committed to the uses Herbert Spencer put his theory in the first place!
Could start right there, with Herbert Spencer, from my "go to online source on philosophy":
Even better than that, it's Spencer who had the most crass kind of "survival of the fittest" theorizing foisted on him unjustly, according to this article - much too long to quote from except for opening paragraphs (although readable in around 45 minutes to an hour, not that many "buzz words" or turgid, unclear passages - in fact really none at all of the latter and very few of the former that don't become clear enough through just continuing to read the article) :
" Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) is typically, though quite wrongly, considered a coarse social Darwinist. After all, Spencer, and not Darwin, coined the infamous expression “survival of the fittest”, leading G. E. Moore to conclude erroneously in Principia Ethica (1903) that Spencer committed the naturalistic fallacy. According to Moore, Spencer’s practical reasoning was deeply flawed insofar as he purportedly conflated mere survivability (a natural property) with goodness itself (a non-natural property).
Roughly fifty years later, Richard Hofstadter devoted an entire chapter of Social Darwinism in American Thought (1955) to Spencer, arguing that Spencer’s unfortunate vogue in late nineteenth-century America inspired Andrew Carnegie and William Graham Sumner’s visions of unbridled and unrepentant capitalism. For Hofstadter, Spencer was an “ultra-conservative” for whom the poor were so much unfit detritus. His social philosophy “walked hand in hand” with reaction, making it little more than a “biological apology for laissez-faire” (Hofstadter, 1955: 41 and 46). But just because Carnegie interpreted Spencer’s social theory as justifying merciless economic competition, we shouldn’t automatically attribute such justificatory ambitions to Spencer. Otherwise, we risk uncritically reading the fact that Spencer happened to influence popularizers of social Darwinism into our interpretation of him."
The brief takeaway from the complete article is that Spencer insisted that cooperative societies were bound to evolve "naturally," that they had a huge advantage over less integrated and more divided social groupings, and that a complete, absolute commitment to protecting individual human rights must never, under any circumstances, "let the heavens fall," be callously sacrificed based on purely utilitarian considerations, i.e., "the greatest good of the greatest number," so Spencer leaves himself open to the objection that he "wants to have his liberal / libertarian / liberty-valorizing cake and eat his utilitarian goodies, too," so to speak. He claims valuing the former without swerving, no matter what considerations tempt us to sacrifice someone's rights in a crisis, will "eventually," if not proximately, cause a more perfect society to evolve. Anyway, it's all very interesting but doesn't seem to help with the questions about what Darwin made of all this. Have to recur to that when I have time.
Forgive me if I've posted this before, but here goes. Here's what you have to believe to be a libertarian. John Galt, while working a full time janitor's graveyard shift in Pittsburgh, commuted by train and back every weekend to Galt's Gulch in the Colorado wilderness (2000 miles one way) where he and his fellow millionaires built mansions, from scratch, so they on their own chopped down all the trees and then milled all the lumber and mined and smelted the copper and lead then manufactured water pipes and electric wires and again just a few dozen millionaires built a sewage system and fabricated all the fixtures and every other component that goes into building a mansion, also incidentally performed all the labor too, then did the same for a power plant and a railroad, including the locomotive, and then to top it off they mined 20 tons of gold ore and cast a giant solid gold dollar sign and by the way they built a huge crane first to hoist it up. They also probably killed a Al Queda or two with their bare hands at some point. So while I appreciate the commitment to a philosophy so completely at odds with reality, I cannot afford it even one iota of credibility. The point is we are all every one of us inextricably tied to and dependent on each other. It's no wonder Ayn Rand died alone and dependent on Social Security. I don't know if she resides in an unmarked pauper's grave, but if ever someone deserved that fate, it's her.
I read Ayn Rand while in college (in the late 70’s). I thought it was a great read. Way more interesting than the Harlequin romances most of my friends read at the time. I never imagined anyone would think it was an organizing manifesto for society.
Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged,and The Virtue of Selfishness is the kind of preposterously shallow tripe that immature, philosophically illiterate teenage boys consider profound thinking, and trust me, these same people quoting Nietzsche relentlessly out of context have no idea what his ethical ideals or overall philosophical views are, either, having never even tried to expend the effort of reading his books and studying them in some depth to realize that.
Nietzsche is far too complex and multi-faceted for a simplistic summary of his views, but on antisemitism it's easily shown he published some of the most scathing criticisms in the entire nineteenth century, and when Wagner's noxious views began to move beyond and have influence beyond a fairly narrow circle within which Nietzsche had become a part, Nietzsche"went public" against Wagner with devastating essays, something never seen in the like of a hack like Ayn Rand - "admitting you were wrong" - as Nietzsche confessed he had not worked out the full implications of his admiration for Wagner's music and theatrical aspirations.
Some of his other theories are far more nuanced than his "bomb-throwing" aphorisms convey, too, particular his statements about women and other philosophers, where he indulges in some rhetorical hyperbole which is contradicted elsewhere, in some other book, by a noticeably different approach, or just an unexplained inconsistency because his own views had perhaps changed over time, one can see that as a weakness in his thinking or a clever way to get people to "wake up from their dogmatic slumbers," or just ignore him, of course.
I wonder if Mr. G was possibly cynical or Machiavellian enough to realize Rand had an adoring fan base, that he could convey his admiration for her ideas figuring he was extremely unlikely to ever have to defend them versus someone opposed to him and those "free market capitalism solves everything it's possible to solve" sweeping generalizations, at least in any kind of relatively fair debate setting, and that even in that unlikely contingency he could hem and haw and state he was limiting his enthusiasm for her to those economic postulates blah blah blah.
Come to think of it, that doesn't sound implausible at all!
When I was a freshman in a conservative midwestern liberal arts college, some of the kids walked around campus win "Atlas Shrugged" prominently displayed on top of their stack of books. I took on some of these worthies in dorm hallway bull sessions but I never changed anyone's mind.
It isn't just teenaged boys and their testosterone-addled brains.
I was a furniture thief.
While I was in the college drama club, I took a directing class. For this, I needed to write a paper, but there was a severe lack of relevant books on Acting & Directing in the college library because at that time, the school had no Drama major. (It does now, but I think it's called something bogus like Communication Arts Technology in the mistaken belief that extra syllables equal heightened significance.)
However, another local and much wealthier college allowed students from my school to borrow books from their library as a kind of good neighbor policy -- a privilege I was soon to abuse.
Here, I found the books I needed, but what really caught my attention were the library chairs that were scattered throughout the stacks. Rock-solid maple Windsor chairs that caressed the back (and the backside) perfectly. Soooo comfortable... I wanted one. Desperately. But I knew I'd never get a piece of furniture that bulky past the circulation desk even if I covered it with my cape. (I wore a cape back then.)
For days, I brooded over those wonderful chairs – how to get one? Eventually, I concluded that: (1) I probably wasn't the only one who craved one of those chairs; so (2) I was pretty sure that one or three of them had "migrated" to other buildings.
So. One dark evening, I drove my tiny two-door Datsun to The Other College and parked on the street near the classroom buildings that were closest to the library. (If anyone asked, I was looking for a lost notebook.)
No one asked. Oh those dear, dead days when classroom buildings weren't locked at night. I simply opened the door, walked in, and looked in every classroom. And in the very last classroom... there sat one of the coveted chairs.
I carried it out of the building but realized that if I used the well-lit sidewalks, I would be seen and if I crossed the yard, the rustling sound made by walking through fallen leaves would possibly wake the dead.
I chose the yard. The dead may have remained undisturbed, but I was shaking like the noisy tattletale leaves that proclaimed every footstep.
There was a hemlock tree near where I had parked -- the branches drooped to the ground and I hid the chair there. Then I went to my car and spent the next half-hour trying to work up the nerve to transfer the chair to the car.
Finally, I got out, moved the passenger seat as far forward as it would go and pushed the back down, in preparation for the purloined furniture. Incidentally, my car was a VERY small two-door subcompact.
Next, I climbed the bank, removed the chair from underneath the tree, slid the chair down a handy gully, opened the passenger door, tried to insert the chair... and ... IT WOULDN"T GO IN. (classic wedding night problem)
Actually, it only took a few sweaty minutes or so for me to twist and turn the wretched chair so I could close the passenger door but it seemed much longer. I managed it at last.
I thought I had been remarkably calm throughout this inglorious heist ... right up until the moment that I shut the door on my foot.
Convinced that I was being followed and expecting flashing lights and shrieking sirens at any moment, I took an extremely convoluted route back to my apartment.
But at last, I had the chair. What I didn’t have (I realized) was the nerve for theft. I vowed I would never do such a thing again.
Because, crime does not pay.
Eventually the chair came home with me to my parents' house. My mother saw it and immediately fixed me with her glittering eye, saying "You did NOT get that at Goodwill."
I then made a serious mistake. I told her the truth. (See story above)
Having described this shameful episode, I awaited rebuke. I was sure I'd be told to either return the chair or make an anonymous donation to the Library Furniture Fund, if the college had such a thing. In addition, I fully expected my mother to weep and wail something like "Oh how could you DO such a thing? You weren’t raised to think this kind of thing was even REMOTELY all right..."
She did not say anything like that.
What she DID say was "Steal me three more."
Me: Steal YOU three more?
Mom: Yes. This is a perfect kitchen chair for your father, he'll never be able to destroy it like he did all the other chairs. (Please note: my father was not a furniture abuser, he was merely a big heavy man who sat down hard.) And I’d like a matched set.
She WAS right in that it was a perfect chair for my father - indestructible as it turned out, but that had NOT been my purpose in stealing it.
I eventually moved back to the dorm, a gracious building with a beautiful lobby bedecked with many marvelously comfy wing chairs. When my mother visited, she would gaze lovingly at this furniture, sit down in one, and embarrass the hell out of me by saying loudly and without a shred of irony "Oh, these are nice. Why don't you steal me a couple of THESE?" "MOTH-ERRR..."
She must have been descended from Fagin.
And... it was thirty years before I regained custody of the original purloined chair.
As always, thank you for your indulgence. I realize this has nothing to do with Ayn Rand or any of the others mentioned in the article, but your shoplifting story "triggered" this memory.
Thank you for bringing some levity into a world beset by horror. Your description of your mother's response to your criminal behavior is hilarious. I'm starting my day with laughter!
When I dream I am driving a car. I am always driving my 1966 Volkswagen with the sunroof and the flower stickers. I was an early adopter of flower stickers. How I loved that car. Coming home from college one weekend, I ran out of gas on a desolate stretch of Route 22 in Pennsylvania. It was late at night and I had a box of five mewing kittens in the back seat. There wasn't a town, a Stuckey's, or a phone box for miles. Very few cars passed by, due to the lateness of the hour and the gas crisis. I had never dared to hitchhike, but when a youngish man stopped to offer assistance, I accepted a ride from the stranger. But he refused to take the kittens! I got in his car anyway, knowing I'd come right back for the kittens. Thankfully he was not Ted Bundy and he drove me to my parents' door. My poor Dad had to come out at midnight to drive me nearly 30 miles (with a gas can) to retrieve my car and the kittens. They were fine. My parents were initially horrified by the box full of kittens, but by the next evening they had fallen in love with a gray one and she lived with them her whole life. I found good homes for the others.
I’m a little late reading your thoroughly enjoyable story, but I’m so glad I read the comments today and didn’t just skip through. So funny! My morning reading is off to a great start. Steal me some pancakes! Lol.
Thank you and I appreciate all the feedback I've gotten from you and the others.
It is a true story. And there was a lot of that kind of thing going on -- most of my friends (those who had left the dorm for an apartment) had the Commonwealth the Pennsylvania flatware pattern. (AKA knives/forks/spoons "liberated" from the college cafeteria.)
My Mom would have had the same reaction, despite being a devout Catholic. She also did volunteer work for the Church including fundraising for their hospital and nursing home. The nuns all loved her. Go figure. Really reminded me of my Mom.
I read Klein’s column and just shook my head at the juvenile, self-satisfied ego leaking hubris from every pore. As a high school teacher said to our class, “Just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean you’re good at everything.”
Interesting, if depressing ("our heroes in uniform?" Petty teenage thieves?). That's a stage I and my teenage pals skipped, somehow. Our transgressions were milder. This philosophical bit always confounds me -- Nietzsche: “If you gaze for long into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you.” -- because I don't interpret it in the same way these neo-Randian, Libertarian uber-mensch (self-proclaimed) do. To me that signals a warning akin to the "Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster" phrase that comes just before that statement.
Ah you pesky readers who read closely and with a more open-minded sense of context - the bane of would-be doctrinaire dogmatists with YOU as the wictim o' their cunning wiles!
Well you’re right about not knowing what I’m gonna get when I read your essays Lucian. Like a lot of us, you did just fine, that’s a classic example of why the courts need to have a lenient attitude when it comes to young non-violent offenders. I had no idea that I would write that sentence when I got up today, 🤷♂️ what a long strange trip it’s been, huh man. At least you had friends.
Incredible how idiotic young men can be. I say this recalling as I watched in awe as one hairbrained decision after another didn’t manage to kill my brother and his friends.
As for Klein et al it remains to be seen what self inflicted chaos may yet visit them. Peter Pans who never grow up seem to garner to themselves what their carelessness and deluded egos spawn.
A superb and troubling essay in memoir form. Brilliant in fact.
The only thing I wish to expound on is the Shop lifting epidemic that is not limited to one area of this country. Pretty simple, POVERTY.
It’s overwhelming in the richest country on earth. Most of inflation is due to price gouging by are rapacious corporations. So we have CRIME in response to the the haves and the expanding population of have nots. Shame on this country.
I must say that a gift wrapped box with an altered bottom with which to boost items in a store struck me as clever. But then I thought: Who carries gift wrapped boxes *into* a store? My guess is you turkeys weren't clever enough to use the gift wrapping of the particular stores targeted for the heist, am I right? You were four lucky teenagers not to have gotten caught.
I'd blush but it would be disingenuous, besides I decided sometime around age 20, who knows why, that I would NEVER make a compliment that was insincere, somehow it struck me as worse than saying nothing and just being civil, polite, at the stage of a relationship where you don't know someone very well anyway - one of those things that has had they advantage that, whatever ever mistakes I have made (plenty of those!) at least I wouldn't have to look back and regret false compliments.
Now on the other hand (!) I could see just as well that in some lines of work, some fields that you were in, it could be different, not that one would become some kind of "insufferable phony glad-hander," but just more a bantering bestower of harmless, just slightly exaggerated compliments, that's very different, though. Not the same thing as the classic "empty compliment" from someone who is always coming up with more and more false charm.
Thanks Lucian. I laughed and laughed at the saga of the "three thieves" and your testosterone fueled capers. I didn't risk as you three did; my teenage risk management failure let me to do crazy crazy things on homemade water skis and a homemade ski jump made from a flat-bottomed fishing boat turned over, with metal siding for a surface. We escaped broken bones and had no serious injuries. The last part of tonight's essay reveals the sickness that is poisoning the world in which we live. These people are, at best, totally lacking in any moral sense, not to mention self-knowledge. I heard a sermon focused on "love your neighbor" today (also "love your God," but fewer people are into that these days)--and for this church, loving the neighbor means running a program that feeds about 100 people a full meal 5 days a week, all year. Tragic that a rich country like the US needs programs like that. Silicon Valley "geniuses" prattling on about they have "earned" are like a cancer..... (But what can be done about it in this current condition?..........) Sorry to rattle on a bit... The "state of the world' is tragic, scary, and much much more. Your post on the many wars now being fought (and killing far more people that I had realized) put a focus on what one (I include myself) can forget by focusing on what the MSM is "featuring' . Again thanks for the laughs and for the deeper stuff about shallow people. Now reading HCR's Democracy Awakening and waiting for what you have to say tomorrow.
It's time for everyone to re-read McLuhan. The best way to do tht is in a collection of 20 essays by smart people of 1966 in the book "McLuhan Hot & Cool" These essays (interpreting / explaining McLuhan's ideas far better than Mc himself) are amazingly prescient and help get a very big picture of what these silicon menches are up to.
Richard Buckminster Fuller (/ˈfʊlər/; July 12, 1895 – July 1, 1983)[1] was an American architect, systems theorist, writer, designer, inventor, philosopher, and futurist. He styled his name as R. Buckminster Fuller in his writings, publishing more than 30 books and coining or popularizing such terms as "Spaceship Earth", "Dymaxion" (e.g., Dymaxion house, Dymaxion car, Dymaxion map), "ephemeralization", "synergetics", and "tensegrity".
Fuller developed numerous inventions, mainly architectural designs, and popularized the widely known geodesic dome; carbon molecules known as fullerenes were later named by scientists for their structural and mathematical resemblance to geodesic spheres. He also served as the second World President of Mensa International from 1974 to 1983.[2][3]
Fuller was awarded 28 United States patents[4] and many honorary doctorates...*****
1964, Washington DC: same time and place as Lucian’s story. A friend and I riding in our family’s grey VW Beetle cruised from Chevy Chase downtown to check things out. We ended up parked somewhere between the Washington Monument and the White House. Sidewalks, in those days,around the aforementioned Presidents home were open to the public. They were empty at 1100 at night. Fooling around I pretended to climb over the fence on the South Lawn. Long story-short, the Uniformed Secret Service did not approve, caught us interrogated us and basically scared the shit out of us. We both figured we had managed to have our dads fired from the Department of State where they worked......
Funny that about seven years I often flew over that fence as a co-pilot on Marine-1 as we provided air taxi service to Dick and Pat.
Fun to read, personal revelations, honesty. Thanks. My freshman creative writing professor said my stuff read like a technical manual. I thought, perfect. I was shy and afraid to reveal myself for no good reason. He was an army demolition guy in Vietnam. I learned a lot from him.
Guys who got beaten up a lot in the schoolyard for being sniveling, entitled jerks usually end up quoting Ayn Rand and Nietzsche a lot in their manifestos. It sort of goes with the territory.
And the guys who couldn’t get laid for the same obvious reasons cloak their discomfort around women in all this survival of the fittest crap. Silicon valley is the epicenter of disgusting behavior toward women.
They couldn't even explain what Darwin or Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory means by "fittest," it's completely void of teleology and certainly not one that would see them as some kind of huge "world-historical advance for the human species"!
Edit: For example, with our species and others on this third planet from the local sun now seriously endangered by the kind of predictable consequences we might immediately recognize as plausible in an episode of "Star Trek," i.e., that for human enterprises and other natural processes (primarily volcanoes) to keep spewing billions and billions of tons of heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the planet's atmosphere has consequences: warming that cannot perpetually be mitigated by the oceans, seas, wetlands, and rainforests acting as massive "heat sinks," for one, so that an evolved sense of cooperation, cooperative, coordinated activities is to be "fit for this environment and helps us and other species, including plants, to survive" - and to transition from burning fossil fuels for energy, to cleaner, renewable sources like wind , geothermal and solar, to "clean up our messes," cut back on waste, be more strategically frugal (such as reusing and repurposing already existing goods), engage vigorously in urban planning that updates building codes to help conserve heat in the cold weather, and cooling in the hotter weather - some of which has been going since well before the first "Earth Day" in 1969, just not at nearly the scale we require - again, that's "survival of the fittest," not privileging the economic elite, and certainly not privileging mega-billionaires with no special insights into ethical behavior on the grand scale, or planning for humans as a species, as opposed to a talent for some smart (even "brilliant and prescient") investments.
Fitness, in the Darwinian constructs, is not analogous to dominance. In fact, often, optimal subsistence strategies (foraging, mating, hazard avoidance, shelter location...) penalize overly aggressive behavior, and reward thoughtfulness, caution, or - especially, for Homo Sapiens, cooperation.
Exactly, not only that, but one type of the earliest, non-religious critiques - that is, not the people irate that it "contradicts the Holy Bible's word of God account of creation in Genesis," but more scientific thinkers weighing in - was based on just those considerations.
Note to self: research DARWIN'S OWN RESPONSE to this, I wonder if he was ever even remotely committed to the uses Herbert Spencer put his theory in the first place!
Could start right there, with Herbert Spencer, from my "go to online source on philosophy":
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spencer/
Even better than that, it's Spencer who had the most crass kind of "survival of the fittest" theorizing foisted on him unjustly, according to this article - much too long to quote from except for opening paragraphs (although readable in around 45 minutes to an hour, not that many "buzz words" or turgid, unclear passages - in fact really none at all of the latter and very few of the former that don't become clear enough through just continuing to read the article) :
" Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) is typically, though quite wrongly, considered a coarse social Darwinist. After all, Spencer, and not Darwin, coined the infamous expression “survival of the fittest”, leading G. E. Moore to conclude erroneously in Principia Ethica (1903) that Spencer committed the naturalistic fallacy. According to Moore, Spencer’s practical reasoning was deeply flawed insofar as he purportedly conflated mere survivability (a natural property) with goodness itself (a non-natural property).
Roughly fifty years later, Richard Hofstadter devoted an entire chapter of Social Darwinism in American Thought (1955) to Spencer, arguing that Spencer’s unfortunate vogue in late nineteenth-century America inspired Andrew Carnegie and William Graham Sumner’s visions of unbridled and unrepentant capitalism. For Hofstadter, Spencer was an “ultra-conservative” for whom the poor were so much unfit detritus. His social philosophy “walked hand in hand” with reaction, making it little more than a “biological apology for laissez-faire” (Hofstadter, 1955: 41 and 46). But just because Carnegie interpreted Spencer’s social theory as justifying merciless economic competition, we shouldn’t automatically attribute such justificatory ambitions to Spencer. Otherwise, we risk uncritically reading the fact that Spencer happened to influence popularizers of social Darwinism into our interpretation of him."
The brief takeaway from the complete article is that Spencer insisted that cooperative societies were bound to evolve "naturally," that they had a huge advantage over less integrated and more divided social groupings, and that a complete, absolute commitment to protecting individual human rights must never, under any circumstances, "let the heavens fall," be callously sacrificed based on purely utilitarian considerations, i.e., "the greatest good of the greatest number," so Spencer leaves himself open to the objection that he "wants to have his liberal / libertarian / liberty-valorizing cake and eat his utilitarian goodies, too," so to speak. He claims valuing the former without swerving, no matter what considerations tempt us to sacrifice someone's rights in a crisis, will "eventually," if not proximately, cause a more perfect society to evolve. Anyway, it's all very interesting but doesn't seem to help with the questions about what Darwin made of all this. Have to recur to that when I have time.
Yes. It's also the epicenter of arrested development.
Misquoting and/or misconstruing Nietzsche, yes.
Forgive me if I've posted this before, but here goes. Here's what you have to believe to be a libertarian. John Galt, while working a full time janitor's graveyard shift in Pittsburgh, commuted by train and back every weekend to Galt's Gulch in the Colorado wilderness (2000 miles one way) where he and his fellow millionaires built mansions, from scratch, so they on their own chopped down all the trees and then milled all the lumber and mined and smelted the copper and lead then manufactured water pipes and electric wires and again just a few dozen millionaires built a sewage system and fabricated all the fixtures and every other component that goes into building a mansion, also incidentally performed all the labor too, then did the same for a power plant and a railroad, including the locomotive, and then to top it off they mined 20 tons of gold ore and cast a giant solid gold dollar sign and by the way they built a huge crane first to hoist it up. They also probably killed a Al Queda or two with their bare hands at some point. So while I appreciate the commitment to a philosophy so completely at odds with reality, I cannot afford it even one iota of credibility. The point is we are all every one of us inextricably tied to and dependent on each other. It's no wonder Ayn Rand died alone and dependent on Social Security. I don't know if she resides in an unmarked pauper's grave, but if ever someone deserved that fate, it's her.
I read Ayn Rand while in college (in the late 70’s). I thought it was a great read. Way more interesting than the Harlequin romances most of my friends read at the time. I never imagined anyone would think it was an organizing manifesto for society.
Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged,and The Virtue of Selfishness is the kind of preposterously shallow tripe that immature, philosophically illiterate teenage boys consider profound thinking, and trust me, these same people quoting Nietzsche relentlessly out of context have no idea what his ethical ideals or overall philosophical views are, either, having never even tried to expend the effort of reading his books and studying them in some depth to realize that.
Republican economist, Alan Greenspan was as an avid admirer and friend of Ayan Rand, the Russian-born advocate of self-interest.
Be careful who you befriend, especially if your idea of fun is counter-intuitive.
Nietzsche is far too complex and multi-faceted for a simplistic summary of his views, but on antisemitism it's easily shown he published some of the most scathing criticisms in the entire nineteenth century, and when Wagner's noxious views began to move beyond and have influence beyond a fairly narrow circle within which Nietzsche had become a part, Nietzsche"went public" against Wagner with devastating essays, something never seen in the like of a hack like Ayn Rand - "admitting you were wrong" - as Nietzsche confessed he had not worked out the full implications of his admiration for Wagner's music and theatrical aspirations.
Some of his other theories are far more nuanced than his "bomb-throwing" aphorisms convey, too, particular his statements about women and other philosophers, where he indulges in some rhetorical hyperbole which is contradicted elsewhere, in some other book, by a noticeably different approach, or just an unexplained inconsistency because his own views had perhaps changed over time, one can see that as a weakness in his thinking or a clever way to get people to "wake up from their dogmatic slumbers," or just ignore him, of course.
I wonder about Mrs. Greenspan: was she an acolyte, as well?
Not when I knew her in the 70's, she wasn't.
If so, she has never hinted at it. She sounds much smarter than that.
I wonder if Mr. G was possibly cynical or Machiavellian enough to realize Rand had an adoring fan base, that he could convey his admiration for her ideas figuring he was extremely unlikely to ever have to defend them versus someone opposed to him and those "free market capitalism solves everything it's possible to solve" sweeping generalizations, at least in any kind of relatively fair debate setting, and that even in that unlikely contingency he could hem and haw and state he was limiting his enthusiasm for her to those economic postulates blah blah blah.
Come to think of it, that doesn't sound implausible at all!
When I was a freshman in a conservative midwestern liberal arts college, some of the kids walked around campus win "Atlas Shrugged" prominently displayed on top of their stack of books. I took on some of these worthies in dorm hallway bull sessions but I never changed anyone's mind.
She lies in a conventional grave in Westchester Co., NY, evidently. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/851/ayn-rand
That's an expensive tombstone. I wonder who paid?
Ron Paul?
that gave me a laugh.
Lolololololol
Did they buried Nathaniel on top of her.?
Wet Dreamers are not Philosophers. Full Stop.
Ayn Rand had 2 things going for her: She had no use for religion and she liked sex.
It isn't just teenaged boys and their testosterone-addled brains.
I was a furniture thief.
While I was in the college drama club, I took a directing class. For this, I needed to write a paper, but there was a severe lack of relevant books on Acting & Directing in the college library because at that time, the school had no Drama major. (It does now, but I think it's called something bogus like Communication Arts Technology in the mistaken belief that extra syllables equal heightened significance.)
However, another local and much wealthier college allowed students from my school to borrow books from their library as a kind of good neighbor policy -- a privilege I was soon to abuse.
Here, I found the books I needed, but what really caught my attention were the library chairs that were scattered throughout the stacks. Rock-solid maple Windsor chairs that caressed the back (and the backside) perfectly. Soooo comfortable... I wanted one. Desperately. But I knew I'd never get a piece of furniture that bulky past the circulation desk even if I covered it with my cape. (I wore a cape back then.)
For days, I brooded over those wonderful chairs – how to get one? Eventually, I concluded that: (1) I probably wasn't the only one who craved one of those chairs; so (2) I was pretty sure that one or three of them had "migrated" to other buildings.
So. One dark evening, I drove my tiny two-door Datsun to The Other College and parked on the street near the classroom buildings that were closest to the library. (If anyone asked, I was looking for a lost notebook.)
No one asked. Oh those dear, dead days when classroom buildings weren't locked at night. I simply opened the door, walked in, and looked in every classroom. And in the very last classroom... there sat one of the coveted chairs.
I carried it out of the building but realized that if I used the well-lit sidewalks, I would be seen and if I crossed the yard, the rustling sound made by walking through fallen leaves would possibly wake the dead.
I chose the yard. The dead may have remained undisturbed, but I was shaking like the noisy tattletale leaves that proclaimed every footstep.
There was a hemlock tree near where I had parked -- the branches drooped to the ground and I hid the chair there. Then I went to my car and spent the next half-hour trying to work up the nerve to transfer the chair to the car.
Finally, I got out, moved the passenger seat as far forward as it would go and pushed the back down, in preparation for the purloined furniture. Incidentally, my car was a VERY small two-door subcompact.
Next, I climbed the bank, removed the chair from underneath the tree, slid the chair down a handy gully, opened the passenger door, tried to insert the chair... and ... IT WOULDN"T GO IN. (classic wedding night problem)
Actually, it only took a few sweaty minutes or so for me to twist and turn the wretched chair so I could close the passenger door but it seemed much longer. I managed it at last.
I thought I had been remarkably calm throughout this inglorious heist ... right up until the moment that I shut the door on my foot.
Convinced that I was being followed and expecting flashing lights and shrieking sirens at any moment, I took an extremely convoluted route back to my apartment.
But at last, I had the chair. What I didn’t have (I realized) was the nerve for theft. I vowed I would never do such a thing again.
Because, crime does not pay.
Eventually the chair came home with me to my parents' house. My mother saw it and immediately fixed me with her glittering eye, saying "You did NOT get that at Goodwill."
I then made a serious mistake. I told her the truth. (See story above)
Having described this shameful episode, I awaited rebuke. I was sure I'd be told to either return the chair or make an anonymous donation to the Library Furniture Fund, if the college had such a thing. In addition, I fully expected my mother to weep and wail something like "Oh how could you DO such a thing? You weren’t raised to think this kind of thing was even REMOTELY all right..."
She did not say anything like that.
What she DID say was "Steal me three more."
Me: Steal YOU three more?
Mom: Yes. This is a perfect kitchen chair for your father, he'll never be able to destroy it like he did all the other chairs. (Please note: my father was not a furniture abuser, he was merely a big heavy man who sat down hard.) And I’d like a matched set.
She WAS right in that it was a perfect chair for my father - indestructible as it turned out, but that had NOT been my purpose in stealing it.
I eventually moved back to the dorm, a gracious building with a beautiful lobby bedecked with many marvelously comfy wing chairs. When my mother visited, she would gaze lovingly at this furniture, sit down in one, and embarrass the hell out of me by saying loudly and without a shred of irony "Oh, these are nice. Why don't you steal me a couple of THESE?" "MOTH-ERRR..."
She must have been descended from Fagin.
And... it was thirty years before I regained custody of the original purloined chair.
As always, thank you for your indulgence. I realize this has nothing to do with Ayn Rand or any of the others mentioned in the article, but your shoplifting story "triggered" this memory.
Love your story! Got a good laugh.
I'm laughing until I cry. Thanks for sharing!
Thank you for bringing some levity into a world beset by horror. Your description of your mother's response to your criminal behavior is hilarious. I'm starting my day with laughter!
Wonderful. Where is the chair now?
In my kitchen. I can see it from where I'm sitting at the desk!
SOL (Smile Out Loud). Still being put to good use.
Oh, my goodness!! Too many good memories of my college days, especially one involving a toilet, 4 girls and a Volkswagen. 😂
When I dream I am driving a car. I am always driving my 1966 Volkswagen with the sunroof and the flower stickers. I was an early adopter of flower stickers. How I loved that car. Coming home from college one weekend, I ran out of gas on a desolate stretch of Route 22 in Pennsylvania. It was late at night and I had a box of five mewing kittens in the back seat. There wasn't a town, a Stuckey's, or a phone box for miles. Very few cars passed by, due to the lateness of the hour and the gas crisis. I had never dared to hitchhike, but when a youngish man stopped to offer assistance, I accepted a ride from the stranger. But he refused to take the kittens! I got in his car anyway, knowing I'd come right back for the kittens. Thankfully he was not Ted Bundy and he drove me to my parents' door. My poor Dad had to come out at midnight to drive me nearly 30 miles (with a gas can) to retrieve my car and the kittens. They were fine. My parents were initially horrified by the box full of kittens, but by the next evening they had fallen in love with a gray one and she lived with them her whole life. I found good homes for the others.
That’s a great chair story.
I’m a little late reading your thoroughly enjoyable story, but I’m so glad I read the comments today and didn’t just skip through. So funny! My morning reading is off to a great start. Steal me some pancakes! Lol.
Thank you and I appreciate all the feedback I've gotten from you and the others.
It is a true story. And there was a lot of that kind of thing going on -- most of my friends (those who had left the dorm for an apartment) had the Commonwealth the Pennsylvania flatware pattern. (AKA knives/forks/spoons "liberated" from the college cafeteria.)
My Mom would have had the same reaction, despite being a devout Catholic. She also did volunteer work for the Church including fundraising for their hospital and nursing home. The nuns all loved her. Go figure. Really reminded me of my Mom.
I read Klein’s column and just shook my head at the juvenile, self-satisfied ego leaking hubris from every pore. As a high school teacher said to our class, “Just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean you’re good at everything.”
One of our teachers was harsh. She said, "How can you kids live so long (16!) and be so stupid?"
Interesting, if depressing ("our heroes in uniform?" Petty teenage thieves?). That's a stage I and my teenage pals skipped, somehow. Our transgressions were milder. This philosophical bit always confounds me -- Nietzsche: “If you gaze for long into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you.” -- because I don't interpret it in the same way these neo-Randian, Libertarian uber-mensch (self-proclaimed) do. To me that signals a warning akin to the "Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster" phrase that comes just before that statement.
Exactly the way I interpreted Nietzsche’s quote.
Ah you pesky readers who read closely and with a more open-minded sense of context - the bane of would-be doctrinaire dogmatists with YOU as the wictim o' their cunning wiles!
Well you’re right about not knowing what I’m gonna get when I read your essays Lucian. Like a lot of us, you did just fine, that’s a classic example of why the courts need to have a lenient attitude when it comes to young non-violent offenders. I had no idea that I would write that sentence when I got up today, 🤷♂️ what a long strange trip it’s been, huh man. At least you had friends.
Incredible how idiotic young men can be. I say this recalling as I watched in awe as one hairbrained decision after another didn’t manage to kill my brother and his friends.
As for Klein et al it remains to be seen what self inflicted chaos may yet visit them. Peter Pans who never grow up seem to garner to themselves what their carelessness and deluded egos spawn.
A superb and troubling essay in memoir form. Brilliant in fact.
The only thing I wish to expound on is the Shop lifting epidemic that is not limited to one area of this country. Pretty simple, POVERTY.
It’s overwhelming in the richest country on earth. Most of inflation is due to price gouging by are rapacious corporations. So we have CRIME in response to the the haves and the expanding population of have nots. Shame on this country.
I intend to save the above missive.
So current to todays class warfare.
Respect.
I must say that a gift wrapped box with an altered bottom with which to boost items in a store struck me as clever. But then I thought: Who carries gift wrapped boxes *into* a store? My guess is you turkeys weren't clever enough to use the gift wrapping of the particular stores targeted for the heist, am I right? You were four lucky teenagers not to have gotten caught.
It's lucky for society you weren't a crook or a gangster's moll, Margo!
I think ... that's a compliment, so thank you.
Oh yeah, it's definitely that, your intelligence alone would have raised the collective IQ of crooks and gun molls of all kinds!
I gotta tell you, that is one swell compliment, and I've received a few.
I'd blush but it would be disingenuous, besides I decided sometime around age 20, who knows why, that I would NEVER make a compliment that was insincere, somehow it struck me as worse than saying nothing and just being civil, polite, at the stage of a relationship where you don't know someone very well anyway - one of those things that has had they advantage that, whatever ever mistakes I have made (plenty of those!) at least I wouldn't have to look back and regret false compliments.
Now on the other hand (!) I could see just as well that in some lines of work, some fields that you were in, it could be different, not that one would become some kind of "insufferable phony glad-hander," but just more a bantering bestower of harmless, just slightly exaggerated compliments, that's very different, though. Not the same thing as the classic "empty compliment" from someone who is always coming up with more and more false charm.
Anyway I think it's accurate as can be!
Thanks Lucian. I laughed and laughed at the saga of the "three thieves" and your testosterone fueled capers. I didn't risk as you three did; my teenage risk management failure let me to do crazy crazy things on homemade water skis and a homemade ski jump made from a flat-bottomed fishing boat turned over, with metal siding for a surface. We escaped broken bones and had no serious injuries. The last part of tonight's essay reveals the sickness that is poisoning the world in which we live. These people are, at best, totally lacking in any moral sense, not to mention self-knowledge. I heard a sermon focused on "love your neighbor" today (also "love your God," but fewer people are into that these days)--and for this church, loving the neighbor means running a program that feeds about 100 people a full meal 5 days a week, all year. Tragic that a rich country like the US needs programs like that. Silicon Valley "geniuses" prattling on about they have "earned" are like a cancer..... (But what can be done about it in this current condition?..........) Sorry to rattle on a bit... The "state of the world' is tragic, scary, and much much more. Your post on the many wars now being fought (and killing far more people that I had realized) put a focus on what one (I include myself) can forget by focusing on what the MSM is "featuring' . Again thanks for the laughs and for the deeper stuff about shallow people. Now reading HCR's Democracy Awakening and waiting for what you have to say tomorrow.
Thanks for this. You do Andreesen a favor, however, in not bringing up explicitly that he's 52, not 18.
(Not meant as a criticism, btw, though I now see my comment might be taken that way. More sarcasm re Andreesen than anything else.)
It's time for everyone to re-read McLuhan. The best way to do tht is in a collection of 20 essays by smart people of 1966 in the book "McLuhan Hot & Cool" These essays (interpreting / explaining McLuhan's ideas far better than Mc himself) are amazingly prescient and help get a very big picture of what these silicon menches are up to.
And I Seem To Be A Verb by Buckminster Fuller:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller
Richard Buckminster Fuller (/ˈfʊlər/; July 12, 1895 – July 1, 1983)[1] was an American architect, systems theorist, writer, designer, inventor, philosopher, and futurist. He styled his name as R. Buckminster Fuller in his writings, publishing more than 30 books and coining or popularizing such terms as "Spaceship Earth", "Dymaxion" (e.g., Dymaxion house, Dymaxion car, Dymaxion map), "ephemeralization", "synergetics", and "tensegrity".
Fuller developed numerous inventions, mainly architectural designs, and popularized the widely known geodesic dome; carbon molecules known as fullerenes were later named by scientists for their structural and mathematical resemblance to geodesic spheres. He also served as the second World President of Mensa International from 1974 to 1983.[2][3]
Fuller was awarded 28 United States patents[4] and many honorary doctorates...*****
Wiki bio continues....
That makes so much sense. Thanks Lucian.
1964, Washington DC: same time and place as Lucian’s story. A friend and I riding in our family’s grey VW Beetle cruised from Chevy Chase downtown to check things out. We ended up parked somewhere between the Washington Monument and the White House. Sidewalks, in those days,around the aforementioned Presidents home were open to the public. They were empty at 1100 at night. Fooling around I pretended to climb over the fence on the South Lawn. Long story-short, the Uniformed Secret Service did not approve, caught us interrogated us and basically scared the shit out of us. We both figured we had managed to have our dads fired from the Department of State where they worked......
Funny that about seven years I often flew over that fence as a co-pilot on Marine-1 as we provided air taxi service to Dick and Pat.
PS: I believe I was wearing a Madras shirt and Old Spice.
well-played. well-played, indeed.
Did no one wear Timberline? Maybe that one was for artsy boys. I liked it.
Never heard of Timberline. But did wear Timberland boots in college.
It was made by English Leather. It smelled woodsier, but not in a sasquatchy kind of way. A lot of boys smelled like sasquatch without even trying.
I always felt English Leather could gag o maggot. Old Spice boy here! “Old Spice, Old Spice, Look for the lotion with the ship that sailed the ocean”
Fun to read, personal revelations, honesty. Thanks. My freshman creative writing professor said my stuff read like a technical manual. I thought, perfect. I was shy and afraid to reveal myself for no good reason. He was an army demolition guy in Vietnam. I learned a lot from him.
I love your personal stories, Lucian. I wonder if I can re-title your column tonight as “Boys Will Be Boys”? 😃