'THE FOUNTAINHEAD' IS A GREATER PHILOSOPHICAL STAND-ALONE MASTERPIECE, THAN 'ATLAS SHRUGGED'
Posted by HARD_ROAR 6 years, 9 months ago to Philosophy
THIS IS ABOUT 100% INTEGRITY. FOR 'THE FOUNTAINHEAD' IS ABOUT ONE MAN ALWAYS STANDING ALONE AGAINST ALL MEN, VERSUS 'ATLAS SHRUGGED' BEING ABOUT A COLLECTIVE OF ALIKE-THINKING, HIGHLY CAPABLE MEN, BANDING TOGETHER TO SURVIVE, CONSTANT SIEGE OF MOOCHER MEN.
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I am surprised they have been able to delay everything this long. It has all been smoke and mirrors and the fire has gone out.
While China will be severely hampered because of their ignorant actions Russia because we keep applying sanctions has learned to be somewhat self sufficient.
Are you aware that the Chinese now own a huge portion of the US. Bought it all with those worthless pieces of fiat currency that have been collecting. They are no fools, turned all that worthless trash into real assets, property.
Greece can't do anything. If they left the EU they would be another Venezuela within 6 months.
The Euro is destined to fail anyway. Most of Europe is now in the process of reinstigating their currencies with of course Britain leading the way pretending to Brexit.
The world is bankrupt so just who is going to rescue whom?
which contain a moral philosophy and the new which supposedly about a man declared to be the son of god. What I like about the new is that it declares invalid many parts of the old, perhaps why the Jewish religion doesn't honor the new testament but ironically the Muslims do.
I like the bible for it philosophy but do not believe it was ever meant to be practiced as a religion. Jesus said to spread the word not enslave the people.
Now if one where to look at the philosophy of Rand for the metaphysical and epistemological, then the bible completes the trilogy for the ethical so long as you can separate out the parts about aggression.
Now on a side note, I much prefer George Carlin's rendition of the ten commandments over Deuteronomy.
In my opinion The Fountainhead is where Rand set the stage for her philosophy and Atlas Shrugged was the alarm bells for what was going on in the world at the time. With 12 years in the writing and a 1957 publish date then we would be talking the late 40s, right after WWII when no one was paying attention, all was well with the world.
As to Galt, I would do what he did. Long ago in a war far away I heard the sonic pop of a round just off my left ear. There is were I realized that if fate had deemed it so, I die, if not, I don't. It was then that I accepted that death was inevitable and not something I control. I lost my fear of dying.
deutsche bank right now has so many financial problems, there are already worldwide 'rescues' being applied to keep it afloat. why? because deutsche bank is HUGE. it is the 15TH LARGEST bank in the world. and if it fails... look out below, world. for the depressionary pit down is endless.
(did you know that deutsche bank was already rescued once before by the fed, in 2008? to the tune of 1.5 trillion dollars, i think. money created out of thin air, of course... and on the future back of your children, and your children's children..)
so i don't think it will fail. at least not alone. for the multiple 'rescues' must fail first, one by one.
personally, i've always felt a greek exit from the euro will be the trigger point. and if they smell that germans could fail first... they'll want to beat them to the punch, cancel all euro debt immediately, and return to the drachma. of course, this tiny action by a tiny country would collapse the euro overnight. and all it's nations with it, since not even switzerland will be immune to this, as all nations are loaded with debt due to decades of socialistic policiies.
However, this country is inexorably tied to the rest of the world. This means the trigger for collapse could be triggered by both internal as well as external actions.
Just on the internal side we have many impetuses to failure; housing bubble, the automotive bubble, the stock bubble, the financial bubble, and of course the currency bubble not to forget the civil unrest. And that is just to mention a few.
Now add that to all the other nations that are in the same boat and it just a matter of what goes first as all else will be tumbling down behind it. Externally Germany seems to be leading the pack as the trigger.
The implications are staggering. It's all one big group of dominoes in a circle, trigger one and all the rest fall with it.
for true christians, the bible is it. the end all be all book for their belief, faith, trust and love.
and their greatest hero is jesus, whom they'll follow to the end, even to be eaten in the lions' den.
but for serious, diehard randians---like one seldom finds anywhere else, except on specific websites like this one we are on---for some of us, like myself:
the randian bible is the fountainhead.
period.
and atlas shrugged,
a great (but flawed) attempt at expanding the fountainead's pure individualistic concept, into a group of alike independent creative men, that abandon the collective world, to live out their lives in a private, idealistic, laissez-faire world. and all this made possible, solely from the brilliance of one young man, john galt (imo, rand's inspiration for galt was tesla, who came close to creating truly amazing inventions in the energy field).
without galt, there is no strike of the men of the mind and also no hidden gulch. he is it. the jesus figure of this fantastical, brilliant story, which is filled with more crystally-clear, rock-solid philosophy than you can shake a stick at.
the jesus-figure mentality of galt is further strengthened by his last scene, when he is strapped down waiting to be electrocuted. yet his clumsy -wannabe-torturers, are so incompetent, they can't get the machinery to work. and instead of just looking at them and smiling at their lack of ability, galt proceeds to tell them how to solve the electrical problem, so then they can fry him!! i mean, hahaha, who the hell finds this realistic?? and even more unrealistic, is that then they don't fry the fool before leaving, they just simply run away!
bottomline, i found the ending of atlas quite muddled and unbelievable. it felt to me like rand was tired of writing, and just wanted to finish the damn thing. maybe she had a publishing deadline, who knows.
for roark would never have been dumb enough to do what galt did at the end, of helping his torturers kill him. so i reiterate, this makes galt fall more in the category of jesus, and not of roark. and this was another flaw i found, that rand's core self-loving philosophy is abandoned at the end, due to a sacrificial jesus-like attitude being embraced by galt.
and this is one more of many other reasons why, that once again, i consider the fountaihhead rand's most pure individualistic masterpiece---over the highly ambitious, yet quite flawed, the great atlas shrugged, a masterful companion-piece to the fountainhead.
for first and foremost, that da vinci you cite, was a lifetime pedophile, so who cares what he made. wonder why a supposed super dude like da vinci, not one movie has ever been made of his life? well, simple. you'd have to start his story with all the little boy 'assistants' that lived with him throughout his entire life, and he lived to an old age.
and i only bring this up, since you cited him, it sort of shows you don't look under the surface of things, because that citation indicates your level of naivete, in believing in the 'great men" you were taught about in school, and still cite.
also, in wholeheartedly believing that the world is changing today, into a randian atlas way; when what is truly occurring, is the direct opposite of that. and dude, you have zero idea, on just how directly opposite that is. but just wait until they close your bank, atm, etc. then you'll see just how asleep you have been, to true modern-day reality,1984-style.
atlas shrugged is a happy, dreamy cartoon (compared to 1984), made for naive, highly idealistic people like yourself. but... could i be wrong? could a galt gulch really exist conceptually inside the u.s. (as you suggest), and save selected people like you? imo, no chance. for as long as you make statements like the one below, you have no idea of what's really going on:
tuner38: ""disappearing" that isn't necessary at present. There is still a degree of freedom..."
huh? degree of freedom?? damn. are you surely naive, friend.
because your freedom is tightly being further strangulated every year. slowly, yet surely.
listen, i am just trying to wake you up from your way overly-optimistic pipedream that you cite above, so when the direct opposite of what you believe occurs, you don't die of shock..
To say that something to do with nations happens in a day is absurd.
The fall of a republic takes on a destiny of 240 to 250 years through gradual decay.
Ancient Greece's failure was well documented in his work "Republic"
"Just as the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides often dramatized the fall of a great house (that of Atreus or Oedipus or Theseus), so Plato’s non-dramatic prose tragedy illustrates the natural cycle of political decay from aristocracy to timocracy to oligarchy to democracy to tyranny in terms of a five-generation royal family. In Plato’s telling, an aristocratic father is followed by a timocratic son, who is himself succeeded in turn by an oligarch, a democrat, and a tyrant." - http://www.theimaginativeconservative...
The USA will not cease to exist, it will just be returned to the rightful owners like in 1776.
Well got to run for now, got to go secure the chickens form all those things that go bump in the night.
I am under the impression that I still have not read the greatest novel ever written but it's out there somewhere waiting to be discovered but I doubt I will ever get to it. My proclivity at this point in life leans more toward non-fiction especially the common law.
I'm at a point where it takes more and more work to maintain short term memory. That is why I love the art of the argument as it keeps the mind in shape. The mind needs exercise just as much as the physical body.
I look forward to engagement as I love your style.
The drums of war are a beating. It is time for the blood of tyrants and patriots to stain the land in the infamous words of Thomas Jefferson.
Throughout time the lifespan of a republic is between 240 and 250 years, so the inevitable is upon us. I am just hoping I can live to experience what the signers of the Declaration of Independence experienced even though I will be among the founders that did not make it to see the freedom they so desired but I will exit this experience with a smile on my face.
a fairy tale you love and read repeatedly.
but that is all it is. for room 101 is still there.
finally. an honest man.
so now i will give you a scarier lesson.
'1984' is more realistic about ANY human world, not just today's.
'1984' is about how the world has ALWAYS been run---past, present, future.
and that is the horror if it.
for all else is 'velvet glove' illusion.
and that is why i consider it the greatest novel ever written.
I also have a copy of The Fountainhead in the early 80s which has stood up to time much better because it is not so large.
I cannot say one is better or worse than the other, They both have their unique approach to the saga of Objectivism.
I have just recently obtained the trilogy of Atlas Shrugged but was sorely disappointed with the part III, "Who is John Galt?" What should have been the climax was poorly done and anticlimactic.
I read "1984" for the first time a couple of years ago borrowed from a friend and as a result had to own a copy.
As to reality, Rand's stories are based on reality as she lived through the Russian Revolution of 1917 when she was 12. At that young age she got to face the horrors of the Bolsheviks. Imagine her horror when she escapes Russia and arrives in the US to discover to her horror this nation was headed in the same direction. Her novels and other works are a rendition of that experience.
"1984" that book was scary, In 1948 TV was just beginning. I remember our first TV which was a little round screen in black and white. The book should have been fiction, but it wasn't, was it?
However, I treasure all three as a window on history that has now manifested. If I had to choose which one was a more realistic about today's world, I would have to choose "1984".
i've read atlas shrugged twice, when i was much much younger, and loved it both times. so do not mistake me there. yet in the 2nd reading, i began to see the flaws in it. it is still great, but flawed. for starters, beside the absurd oversight of no major hero in the story having any children, there is the huge flaw of it being way too long, for this 1,100 page, tiny print novel could have 2 or 3 hundred pages trimmed out of it, and benefit mightily from a quality editing.
and i won't discuss '1984', since you obviously do not understand it. for it deals with true reality, while atlas deals with the romanticized vision of rand, of twisting reality so her heroes can win by doing something fantastical, like 'disappearing' into an unseen gulch.
so tell me, which of you has 'disappeared' lately? because pretty soon, if things get bad enough, even the national exit doors may get locked up, so you achievers and providers, can serve the socialist nanny state, forever.
look. take atlas shrugged for what it solely is. a complex, romanticized, intellectual concept, from a sage, a wise writer, having a great time for 13 years, writing it.. but realistic? you answer that for yourself.
this is what most of her critics cling to, her characters were all one dimensional, with little if no basis in reality. well, children are real, right? and that is just one argument, re logical flaws in atlas.
but what else more do i need as evidence, than the 3 sequential films made of atlas,each one a much worse mickey mouse stinker, than the prior? and it's not just about the cheap rotten actors or the rotten directing. IT'S JUST NOT BASED ON REALITY.
so yes, what she wrote was GREAT philosophically, but NOT real, like she wanted. hence, her heroes fly about in space, meanwhile, the moochers keep gaining ground on Earth, as each decade passes.
you want to talk about great novels, based on reality? so let's talk about '1984,' probably the greatest novel ever written, about true existence on Earth.
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