Did organized Objectivist activism, at least in some of its nuttier phases, offer to turn its adherents who get it right into a kind of superhuman entity? I guess you could call such enhanced people “Operating Objectivists,” analogous to the enhanced state promised by another cult.
Interestingly enough Rand seems to make a disclaimer about that in her novel Atlas Shrugged. The philosophy professor character Hugh Akston says of his star students, Ragnar Danneskjold, John Galt and Francisco d’Anconia:
“Don’t be astonished, Miss Taggart,” said Dr. Akston, smiling, “and don’t make the mistake of thinking that these three pupils of mine are some sort of superhuman creatures. They’re something much greater and more astounding than that: they’re normal men—a thing the world has never seen—and their feat is that they managed to survive as such. It does take an exceptional mind and a still more exceptional integrity to remain untouched by the brain-destroying influences of the world’s doctrines, the accumulated evil of centuries—to remain human, since the human is the rational.”
But then look at what Rand shows these allegedly “normal men” can do as Operating Objectivists:
Hank Rearden, a kind of self-trained Operating Objectivist who never studied under Akston, can design a new kind of railroad bridge in his mind which exploits the characteristics of his new alloy, even though he has never built a bridge before.
Francisco d’Anconia can deceive the whole world as he depletes his inherited fortune while making everyone believe that he spends his days as a playboy pickup artist, when he in fact he has lived without sex since his youthful sexual relationship with Dagny.
John Galt can build a motor which violates the conservation of energy and the laws of thermodynamics. Oh, and he can also confidently master Dagny’s unexpected intrusion into Galt’s Gulch despite his secret crush her, his implied adult virginity and his lack of an adult man’s skill set for handling women. (You need life experience for that, not education in philosophy.) On top of that, he can survive torture without suffering from post-traumatic stress symptoms.
So despite Rand’s disclaimer, if you view Atlas Shrugged as “advertising” for the abilities Rand’s philosophy promises as it unlocks your potentials as a “normal man,” then the Objectivist organizations which work with this idea implicitly do seem to offer to turn you into a “superhuman creature.”
Seems to me that Rand’s model is similar to LessWrong’s “rationality as non-self-destruction”.
Objectivism in the novels doesn’t give the heroes any positive powers. It merely helps them avoid some harmful beliefs and behaviors, which are extremely common. Not burdened by these negative beliefs and behaviors, these “normal men” can fully focus on what they are good at, and if they have high intelligence and make the right choices, they can achieve impressive results.
(The harmful beliefs and behaviors include: feeling guilty for being good at something, focusing on exploiting other people instead of developing one’s own skills.)
Hank Rearden’s design of a new railroad bridge was completely unrelated to his political beliefs. It was a consequence of his natural talent and hard work, perhaps some luck. The political beliefs only influenced his decision of what to do with the invented technology. I don’t remember what exactly were his options, but I think one of them was “archive the technology, to prevent changes in the industry, to preserve existing social order”, and as a consequence of his beliefs he refused to consider this option. And even this was before he became a full Objectivist. (The only perfect Objectivist in the novel is Galt; and perhaps the people who later accept Galt’s views.)
Francisco d’Anconia’s fortune, as you wrote, was inherited. That’s a random factor, unrelated to Objectivism.
John Galt’s “magical” motor was also a result of his natural talent and hard work, plus some luck. The political beliefs only influenced his decision to hide the motor from public, using a private investor and a secret place.
Violating the law of thermodynamics, and surviving the torture without damage… that’s fairy-tale stuff. But I think none of them is an in-universe consequence of Objectivism.
So, what exactly does Objectivism (or Hank Rearden’s beliefs, which are partial Objectivism plus some compartmentalization) cause, in-universe?
It makes the heroes focus on their technical skills, and the more enlightened heroes on keeping their technical inventions for themselves. As opposed to attempting a political carreer or serving the existing political powers. Instead of networking, Rearden focuses on studying metal. Instead of donating the magical machine to the government, Galt keeps it secret. Instead of having his fortune taken by government, d’Anconia destroys it… probably because of a lack of smarter alternative (or maybe he somehow secretly preserves a part of his fortune, and ostentatiously destroys the rest to draw away attention; I don’t remember the details here).
Without Objectivism, the heroes would most likely become clueless nerds serving the elite, because they couldn’t win at the political fight (requires a completely different set of skills that people like Mouch are experts in), but they also wouldn’t understand that the system is intentionally designed against them, so they would spend their energy in a futile fight, winning a few battles but losing the war.
Understanding the system allows one to focus on finding an “out of the box” solution. John Galt’s victory is his ability to use his natural talent and work to devise a solution where he can live without political masters. He is economically independent, thanks to his magical motor, but also mentally independent. (If we removed the magic, his victory would be understanding the system, and the ability to resist its emotional blackmail and optimize for himself.)
The lack of this understanding made Rearden vulnerable to blackmail from his wife, and in a way cost Eddie Willers his life. (And James Taggart his sanity, if I remember correctly.)
tl;dr: (According to Rand) Objectivism makes you able to understand how the system works, so you can more realistically optimize for your values. Objectivism doesn’t give you talent, skills, or luck; but it gives you a chance to use them more efficiently, instead of wasting them in a fight you cannot win.
EDIT: In real life, I expect that an Objectivist training could make people be more aware of their goals and negotiate harder. Maybe increase work ethics.
Did organized Objectivist activism, at least in some of its nuttier phases, offer to turn its adherents who get it right into a kind of superhuman entity? I guess you could call such enhanced people “Operating Objectivists,” analogous to the enhanced state promised by another cult.
Not that I’m aware of, but you might also be interested in A. E. Van Vogt’s “Null-A” novels, which attempted to do this for a fictionalized version of Korzybski’s General Semantics.
(Van Vogt later did become involved in Scientology, as did his (and Hubbard’s) editor John W. Campbell.)
On top of that, he can survive torture without suffering from post-traumatic stress symptoms.
PTSS almost seems like a culture-bound syndrome of the modern West. In particular there don’t seem to be any references to it before WWI and even there (and in subsequent wars) all the references seem to be from the western allies. Furthermore, the reaction to “shell shock”, as it was then called, during WWI suggests that this was something new that the established structures didn’t know how to deal with.
The scientists have a theory, and it has to do with the root causes of PTSD, previously undocumented. As compared with the resilient Danish soldiers, all those who developed PTSD were much more likely to have suffered emotional problems and traumatic events prior to deployment. In fact, the onset of PTSD was not predicted by traumatic war experiences but rather by childhood experiences of violence, especially punishment severe enough to cause bruises, cuts, burns and broken bones. PTSD sufferers were also more likely to have witnessed family violence and to have experienced physical attacks, stalking or death threats by a spouse. They also more often had past experiences that they could not, or would not, talk about.
PTSS almost seems like a culture-bound syndrome of the modern West.
There are significant confounders here, as modern science-based psychology got started around the same time—and WWI really was very different from earlier conflicts, not least in its sheer scale. But the idea is nonetheless intriguing; the West really is quite different from traditional societies, along lines that could plausibly make folks more vulnerable to traumatic shock.
For what it’s worth, Rand was an unusually capable person in her specialty (she wrote two popular, and somewhat politically influential novels in her second language), but still not in the same class as her heroes.
I’m not sure you’ve got the bit about Rearden right. I don’t think there’s any evidence that he came up with the final design for the bridge. There’s a mention that he worked with a team to discover Rearden metal, and presumably he also had an engineering team. The point was that he (presumably) knew enough engineering to come up with something plausible, and that he was fascinated by producing great things enough to be distracted from something major going wrong that I don’t remember.
I have no idea whether Rand knew Galt’s engine was physically impossible, though I think she should have, considering that other parts of the book were well-researched. Dagny’s situation at Taggart Transcontinental was probably typical for an Operations vice-president in a family owned business. The description of her doing cementless masonry matched with a book on the subject. Atlas Shrugged was the only place I saw the possibility of shale oil mentioned until, decades later, it turned out to be a possible technology.
The research fail that jumped out at me hardest in Atlas Shrugged was the idea that so many people would consider a metal both stronger and lighter than steel physically impossible. By the time the book was published, not only was titanium fairly well understood, it was also being widely used in military and (some; what could be spared from Cold War efforts) commercial purposes. Its properties don’t exactly match Rearden Metal (even ignoring the color and other mostly-unimportant characteristic) but they’re close enough that it should be obvious that such materials are completely possible. Of course, that part of the book also talks about making steel rails last longer by making them denser, which seems completely bizarre to me; there are ways to increase the hardness of steel, but they involve things like heat-treating it.
TL;DR: I’m not sure I’d call the book “well-researched” as a whole, though some parts may well have been.
The book exists in a deliberately timeless setting—it has elements of everything from about a century of span. Railroads weren’t exactly building massive new lines in 1957, either.
The three people Akston was talking about didn’t include Rearden. They were D’Anconia, Galt, and Danneskjold (the mostly off-stage pirate). I feel as though I’ve lost, not just geek points, but objectivist points both for forgetting something from the book, but also because I went along with everyone else who got it wrong.
The remarkable thing about Galt and torture isn’t that he didn’t get PTSD, it’s that he completely kept his head, and over-awed his torturers. He broke James Taggart’s mind, not that Taggart’s mind was in such great shape to begin with.
A number of these matters seem more narrative or genre conveniences : Francisco acts a playboy in the same way Bruce Wayne does, Rearden’s bridge development passes a lot of work to his specialist engineers (similarly to Rearden metal having a team of scientists skeptically helping him) and pretends that the man is still a one-man designer (among other handwaves). At the same time, Batman is not described as a superhuman engineer or playboy, nor would he act as those types of heroes. I’m also not sure we can know the long-term negative repercussions John Galt experiences given the length of the book, and not all people who experience torture display clinically relevant post-traumatic stress symptoms and many who do show them only sporadically. His engine is based on now-debunked theories of physics that weren’t so obviously thermodynamics-violating at the time, similarly to Project Xylophone.
These men are intended to be top-of-field capability from the perspective of a post-Soviet writer who knew little about their fields and could easily research less. Many of the people who show up under Galt’s tutelage are similarly exceptionally skilled, but even more are not so hugely capable.
On the other hand, the ability of her protagonists to persuade others and evaluate the risk of getting shot starts at superhuman and quickly becomes ridiculous.
On the gripping hand, I’m a little cautious about emphasizing fictional characters and acknowledgedly Heroic abilities as evidence, especially when the author wrote a number of non-fiction philosophy texts related to this topic.
Not quite in the spirit of admitting ignorance, but since it’s in this thread, I’ll answer it.
Did organized Objectivist activism, at least in some of its nuttier phases, offer to turn its adherents who get it right into a kind of superhuman entity?
… another cult
No.
So despite Rand’s disclaimer, if you view....
So despite what Rand or any Objectivist ever said or did, if you choose to view Objectivism as a nutty cult, you can.
If you were actually interested in why Rand’s characters are the way they are, you could read her book on art, “The Romantic Manifesto”. Probably a quick google search on the book would give you your answer.
Did organized Objectivist activism, at least in some of its nuttier phases, offer to turn its adherents who get it right into a kind of superhuman entity? I guess you could call such enhanced people “Operating Objectivists,” analogous to the enhanced state promised by another cult.
Interestingly enough Rand seems to make a disclaimer about that in her novel Atlas Shrugged. The philosophy professor character Hugh Akston says of his star students, Ragnar Danneskjold, John Galt and Francisco d’Anconia:
But then look at what Rand shows these allegedly “normal men” can do as Operating Objectivists:
Hank Rearden, a kind of self-trained Operating Objectivist who never studied under Akston, can design a new kind of railroad bridge in his mind which exploits the characteristics of his new alloy, even though he has never built a bridge before.
Francisco d’Anconia can deceive the whole world as he depletes his inherited fortune while making everyone believe that he spends his days as a playboy pickup artist, when he in fact he has lived without sex since his youthful sexual relationship with Dagny.
John Galt can build a motor which violates the conservation of energy and the laws of thermodynamics. Oh, and he can also confidently master Dagny’s unexpected intrusion into Galt’s Gulch despite his secret crush her, his implied adult virginity and his lack of an adult man’s skill set for handling women. (You need life experience for that, not education in philosophy.) On top of that, he can survive torture without suffering from post-traumatic stress symptoms.
So despite Rand’s disclaimer, if you view Atlas Shrugged as “advertising” for the abilities Rand’s philosophy promises as it unlocks your potentials as a “normal man,” then the Objectivist organizations which work with this idea implicitly do seem to offer to turn you into a “superhuman creature.”
Seems to me that Rand’s model is similar to LessWrong’s “rationality as non-self-destruction”.
Objectivism in the novels doesn’t give the heroes any positive powers. It merely helps them avoid some harmful beliefs and behaviors, which are extremely common. Not burdened by these negative beliefs and behaviors, these “normal men” can fully focus on what they are good at, and if they have high intelligence and make the right choices, they can achieve impressive results.
(The harmful beliefs and behaviors include: feeling guilty for being good at something, focusing on exploiting other people instead of developing one’s own skills.)
Hank Rearden’s design of a new railroad bridge was completely unrelated to his political beliefs. It was a consequence of his natural talent and hard work, perhaps some luck. The political beliefs only influenced his decision of what to do with the invented technology. I don’t remember what exactly were his options, but I think one of them was “archive the technology, to prevent changes in the industry, to preserve existing social order”, and as a consequence of his beliefs he refused to consider this option. And even this was before he became a full Objectivist. (The only perfect Objectivist in the novel is Galt; and perhaps the people who later accept Galt’s views.)
Francisco d’Anconia’s fortune, as you wrote, was inherited. That’s a random factor, unrelated to Objectivism.
John Galt’s “magical” motor was also a result of his natural talent and hard work, plus some luck. The political beliefs only influenced his decision to hide the motor from public, using a private investor and a secret place.
Violating the law of thermodynamics, and surviving the torture without damage… that’s fairy-tale stuff. But I think none of them is an in-universe consequence of Objectivism.
So, what exactly does Objectivism (or Hank Rearden’s beliefs, which are partial Objectivism plus some compartmentalization) cause, in-universe?
It makes the heroes focus on their technical skills, and the more enlightened heroes on keeping their technical inventions for themselves. As opposed to attempting a political carreer or serving the existing political powers. Instead of networking, Rearden focuses on studying metal. Instead of donating the magical machine to the government, Galt keeps it secret. Instead of having his fortune taken by government, d’Anconia destroys it… probably because of a lack of smarter alternative (or maybe he somehow secretly preserves a part of his fortune, and ostentatiously destroys the rest to draw away attention; I don’t remember the details here).
Without Objectivism, the heroes would most likely become clueless nerds serving the elite, because they couldn’t win at the political fight (requires a completely different set of skills that people like Mouch are experts in), but they also wouldn’t understand that the system is intentionally designed against them, so they would spend their energy in a futile fight, winning a few battles but losing the war.
Understanding the system allows one to focus on finding an “out of the box” solution. John Galt’s victory is his ability to use his natural talent and work to devise a solution where he can live without political masters. He is economically independent, thanks to his magical motor, but also mentally independent. (If we removed the magic, his victory would be understanding the system, and the ability to resist its emotional blackmail and optimize for himself.)
The lack of this understanding made Rearden vulnerable to blackmail from his wife, and in a way cost Eddie Willers his life. (And James Taggart his sanity, if I remember correctly.)
tl;dr: (According to Rand) Objectivism makes you able to understand how the system works, so you can more realistically optimize for your values. Objectivism doesn’t give you talent, skills, or luck; but it gives you a chance to use them more efficiently, instead of wasting them in a fight you cannot win.
EDIT: In real life, I expect that an Objectivist training could make people be more aware of their goals and negotiate harder. Maybe increase work ethics.
Not that I’m aware of, but you might also be interested in A. E. Van Vogt’s “Null-A” novels, which attempted to do this for a fictionalized version of Korzybski’s General Semantics.
(Van Vogt later did become involved in Scientology, as did his (and Hubbard’s) editor John W. Campbell.)
PTSS almost seems like a culture-bound syndrome of the modern West. In particular there don’t seem to be any references to it before WWI and even there (and in subsequent wars) all the references seem to be from the western allies. Furthermore, the reaction to “shell shock”, as it was then called, during WWI suggests that this was something new that the established structures didn’t know how to deal with.
Not everyone who’s had traumatic experiences has PTSD.
More information
There are significant confounders here, as modern science-based psychology got started around the same time—and WWI really was very different from earlier conflicts, not least in its sheer scale. But the idea is nonetheless intriguing; the West really is quite different from traditional societies, along lines that could plausibly make folks more vulnerable to traumatic shock.
For what it’s worth, Rand was an unusually capable person in her specialty (she wrote two popular, and somewhat politically influential novels in her second language), but still not in the same class as her heroes.
I’m not sure you’ve got the bit about Rearden right. I don’t think there’s any evidence that he came up with the final design for the bridge. There’s a mention that he worked with a team to discover Rearden metal, and presumably he also had an engineering team. The point was that he (presumably) knew enough engineering to come up with something plausible, and that he was fascinated by producing great things enough to be distracted from something major going wrong that I don’t remember.
I have no idea whether Rand knew Galt’s engine was physically impossible, though I think she should have, considering that other parts of the book were well-researched. Dagny’s situation at Taggart Transcontinental was probably typical for an Operations vice-president in a family owned business. The description of her doing cementless masonry matched with a book on the subject. Atlas Shrugged was the only place I saw the possibility of shale oil mentioned until, decades later, it turned out to be a possible technology.
The research fail that jumped out at me hardest in Atlas Shrugged was the idea that so many people would consider a metal both stronger and lighter than steel physically impossible. By the time the book was published, not only was titanium fairly well understood, it was also being widely used in military and (some; what could be spared from Cold War efforts) commercial purposes. Its properties don’t exactly match Rearden Metal (even ignoring the color and other mostly-unimportant characteristic) but they’re close enough that it should be obvious that such materials are completely possible. Of course, that part of the book also talks about making steel rails last longer by making them denser, which seems completely bizarre to me; there are ways to increase the hardness of steel, but they involve things like heat-treating it.
TL;DR: I’m not sure I’d call the book “well-researched” as a whole, though some parts may well have been.
The book exists in a deliberately timeless setting—it has elements of everything from about a century of span. Railroads weren’t exactly building massive new lines in 1957, either.
The three people Akston was talking about didn’t include Rearden. They were D’Anconia, Galt, and Danneskjold (the mostly off-stage pirate). I feel as though I’ve lost, not just geek points, but objectivist points both for forgetting something from the book, but also because I went along with everyone else who got it wrong.
The remarkable thing about Galt and torture isn’t that he didn’t get PTSD, it’s that he completely kept his head, and over-awed his torturers. He broke James Taggart’s mind, not that Taggart’s mind was in such great shape to begin with.
A number of these matters seem more narrative or genre conveniences : Francisco acts a playboy in the same way Bruce Wayne does, Rearden’s bridge development passes a lot of work to his specialist engineers (similarly to Rearden metal having a team of scientists skeptically helping him) and pretends that the man is still a one-man designer (among other handwaves). At the same time, Batman is not described as a superhuman engineer or playboy, nor would he act as those types of heroes. I’m also not sure we can know the long-term negative repercussions John Galt experiences given the length of the book, and not all people who experience torture display clinically relevant post-traumatic stress symptoms and many who do show them only sporadically. His engine is based on now-debunked theories of physics that weren’t so obviously thermodynamics-violating at the time, similarly to Project Xylophone.
These men are intended to be top-of-field capability from the perspective of a post-Soviet writer who knew little about their fields and could easily research less. Many of the people who show up under Galt’s tutelage are similarly exceptionally skilled, but even more are not so hugely capable.
On the other hand, the ability of her protagonists to persuade others and evaluate the risk of getting shot starts at superhuman and quickly becomes ridiculous.
On the gripping hand, I’m a little cautious about emphasizing fictional characters and acknowledgedly Heroic abilities as evidence, especially when the author wrote a number of non-fiction philosophy texts related to this topic.
Not to my knowledge, but they should have! PM me..
Not quite in the spirit of admitting ignorance, but since it’s in this thread, I’ll answer it.
No.
So despite what Rand or any Objectivist ever said or did, if you choose to view Objectivism as a nutty cult, you can.
If you were actually interested in why Rand’s characters are the way they are, you could read her book on art, “The Romantic Manifesto”. Probably a quick google search on the book would give you your answer.