By Brigid
Many people misinterpret Ayn Rand to suit their own agendas, to give themselves a free pass to behave as transactional savages in their own lives.
How could Keith Raniere lay any claim to Rand, when her primary thesis is that no one has the right to demand the labor or the fruits of that labor from any one else? Good grief, he did the exact opposite!
He demanded that he be given the Bronfman’s wealth that he did not earn. He demanded the labor and lives of other people completely unearned.
The one Rand quote all should know is, “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”
Raniere is the least self-sufficient man I’ve ever seen. Hobos and hermits are more self-sufficient than he is. Even now, he needs others to defend him and still others to pay for that defense.
One of my favorite TV appearances is Ayn talking about love with Mike Wallace: “And in love the currency is virtue. You love people not for what you do for them, or what they do for you. You love them for their values, their virtues, which they have achieved in their own character. If a man wants love he should correct his weaknesses, or his flaws, and he may deserve it. But he cannot expect the unearned, neither in love, nor in money, neither in matter, nor spirit.”
In other words, love yourself before you can claim to love someone else, that is accepted as conventional wisdom for the emotionally healthy person today.
Raniere demanded devotion, calling it love absent any notion of virtue for himself or them. He felt himself entitled to ownership of women through enslavement, servitude, humiliation, degradation of those women, reducing them to sex toys and nothing else. He can lay no claim to any philosophy of any sort, he simply threw around names and terms he stole from others to appear to be well-read, when in fact he couldn’t bother to even read books himself. He ordered his slaves to do the reading and write book reports for him.
Ayn Rand would have stubbed out her cigarette on his forehead and kept on walking, in her clunky but sensible shoes.
18 commentsOn Brigid: Ayn Rand Would Have Stubbed out Her Cigarette on Raniere’s Forehead
“Ayn Rand would have stubbed out her cigarette on his forehead and kept on walking, in her clunky but sensible shoes.”
One should not idolize Ayn Rand.
She was as sexually predatory as Keith Raniere.
“In 1954 Rand’s close relationship with the younger Nathaniel Branden turned into a romantic affair, with the consent of their spouses.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand
In other words if Ayn Rand wanted a boy friend, she got him regardless of whether he was married or not.
And when Nathaniel Branden decided to get a new girl friend Ayn Rand was as vindictive as Keith Raniere.
“In 1964, Nathaniel Branden began an affair with the young actress Patrecia Scott, whom he later married. Nathaniel and Barbara Branden kept the affair hidden from Rand. When she learned of it in 1968, though her romantic relationship with Branden had already ended,[92] Rand terminated her relationship with both Brandens, which led to the closure of NBI.[93] Rand published an article in The Objectivist repudiating Nathaniel Branden for dishonesty and other “irrational behavior in his private life”.[94] Branden later apologized in an interview to “every student of Objectivism” for “perpetuating the Ayn Rand mystique” and for “contributing to that dreadful atmosphere of intellectual repressiveness that pervades the Objectivist movement”.[95] In subsequent years, Rand and several more of her closest associates parted company.”
In other words if you did not LOVE AYN RAND you were dishonest and irrational.
Sounds like Keith Raniere to me.
Ayn Rand created a Cult of Personality based on Conformity and Intellectual Rigidity every bit as bad as the Communism she fled from in the Soviet Union.
“Critics, including some former NBI students and Branden himself, later described the culture of NBI as one of intellectual conformity and excessive reverence for Rand, with some describing NBI or the Objectivist movement itself as a cult or religion.”
“Some of her followers mimicked her preferences, wearing clothes to match characters from her novels and buying furniture like hers.”
“Some of her followers mimicked her preferences.”
Monkey see, monkey do.
Sounds to me like Ayn Rand was running an ultra- conservative version of North Korea.
In my opinion the Ayn Rand cult is mainly for the rebellious children of Socialist parents who rebel by going to the other extreme.
In my experience many of the most devout followers of Ayn Rand are Jewish kids who revolt against Socialism by creating an equally obnoxious rigid Conservatism.
And many of Ayn Rand’s followers equate wealth with virtue.
Clare and Sara Bronfman have great wealth even after dealing with Keith Raniere for 15 years.
Are Clare and Sara Bronfman virtuous?
Clare and Sara might have been virtuous, Shadow, if they weren’t blindly suckered into NXIVM for Sara to wind up “framed” in a hot tub with a high rinpoche (monk) and making an “offering” of herself to every knight who appeared in Camelot until they married her off to the pauper prince Basit Igtet who wants to revolutionize Libya with KAR’s guidance.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they had Clare sucking horsedick next like that Russian Queen after she wasn’t allowed to ride anymore.
Heidi:
“that Russian Queen after she wasn’t allowed to ride anymore.”
That Russian Queen was Empress Catherine the Great who was ethnically German..
A popular rumor in Russia was that Catherine the Great died while having sex with a horse.
“The rumors even extended into the circumstances surrounding her death, with one tale claiming she died while having sexual relations with a horse, when she actually died from a stroke.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legends_of_Catherine_the_Great
Actually Catherine did have many male lovers, as many as 22 boyfriends but they were all of the human kind.
“Catherine had 22 male lovers throughout her life, ”
My Russian History Professor was David Ransel and the first thing he told us when lecturing about Catherine the Great was that she did not die while having sex with a horse.
But it’s an amusing story all the same.
http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news-archive/13921.html
Heidi leave Catherine the Great out of this. What did she ever do to you ? 😉
At least Raniere would have looked more like Manson, with a scar on his forehead.
🙂
In love the currency sure as fuck ain’t virtue.
It’s usually money, dummy.
Women love for money. They fuck for money.
Not virtue. 🙂
Ayn Rand is doling out bullshit like a street whore addicted to crack.
That’s as shallow an analysis as saying all men love for nothing more than physical relationships. Ok, there’s a lot of shallow people in the world. Considering your perspective, maybe you’re one of them.
There’s also plenty of real women in America, and the world who work themselves every day of the week to the point of failure, in order to hold together their families and support deadbeat partners. Their currency is love, sincere love of family and the hope that someday, their children may not have to struggle as they have.
According to Google, 80% of the world lives on less than $10 per day. Your perspective disrespects the daily struggle of the majority of humanity.
What an uncaring, soulless individual you must be to willy-nilly write such ignorant garbage.
So true are your words, Anonymous! *sad face*
Again, you are disgusting.
Why Frank allows you to post is beyond me.
Clearly, he’s just here to use people and egg them on. Try and ignore him/her/it.
Bangkok,
I believe if you keep expounding such worldly insightful quips the very sensuous Lauren Salzman may pick as her next Svengali…..
…..just imagine….
I agree that Raniere is the ultimate, hapless hypocritical “parasite,” and that Rand would have made him run to hide in the bathroom in any real encounter, and battle of the wits.
Rand was also was ultimately a shoddy philosopher, and became quite the hypocritical guru herself when given the chance, indulged her penchant for open marriage, sponged off wealthy followers, and ultimately signed up for social welfare benefits when the gravy train ran out. I’ve actually wondered if, for instance, Raniere’s father might have been part of Rand’s authoritarian ideological community in New York City, or if there is some other direct connection between it and NXIVM – there are a lot of similarities in the organizational dysfunctions and abuses, as well as the philosophy.
‘Ayn Rand would have stubbed out her cigarette on his forehead and kept on walking, in her clunky but sensible shoes.’
That is a great powerful v. f*cking funny image, Brigid – I hope Frank photoshops it or MK10, Thanks.
Rand is a parody of Nietzsche, and a poor parody at that. Nietzsche can be infuriating, but he’s difficult to refute, and he can be taken seriously as a philosopher for that very reason. What Rand had wasn’t really a philosophy, she had opinions.
Rand’s vision didn’t extend beyond the ambitions of her petty bourgeois upbringing: make some money and hang on to it. Nietzsche’s vision was of man becoming god. Absurd, sure, but noble and grand. He was a classics scholar and a brilliant literary mind; his knowledge of Homeric Epic was extensive and deep, he took to heart the Classical idea of the god-like hero. He combined those ideas with 19th century Romanticism and created a grand vision. Rand read Nietzsche and watered it down to appeal to a shopkeeper’s mentality.
She sold lots and lots of books (mis-)using another man’s ideas. If that’s not living off the fruits of another man’s labor, what is? And it’s not just a matter of her personal hypocrisy either, because without all those book buyers, how would any author make a living? We’re all interdependent on each other. For all her commitment to capitalism, she failed to understand how capitalism works. How shopkeeping works. Her so-called philosophy falls apart at the seams at the slightest inspection. And in that, she was very like Raniere. Take a good hard look at what either of them was selling, and should be obvious to the meanest intelligence that they’re selling shoddy goods.
V.proud of my lumpen proletariat ==>petit bourgeois roots. We are legion. We are majority!!!!
People misinterpret Ayn Rand?
People misinterpret Nietzsche, Aristotle,Bacon, and just about every Philosophical concept ever published.
Ayn Rand in her final days was a self absorbed c*nt just like almost every other male philosopher dickhead.
The pages of Atlas Shrugged make great toilet paper or kindling.
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