Saturday 10 December 2005

The FBI were 'on to' Ayn Rand

An FBI probe into Ayn Rand concluded that Rand the arch-capitalist could actually have been a communist. (Full file here in PDF.) "If Miss Rand is not a communist as she says she is not, then she has been lead down the rosy path and is guilty of very incomplete thinking, because a careful reader can see the suds still clinging to the brain," says an FBI analysis so full of holes and doubletalk that the suds are spilling out on all sides.

Diana Hsieh at 'Noodle Food' describes "the coup de grace, here's how the [FBI's laughable summary of Rand's ideas] ends":
"Freedom is the right of the individual to react to his perceptions without being restricted to a particular view or a particular reaction.

"Physical freedom is impossible without mental freedom.

"Objectivism and communism are both mental and physical slavery because they restrict the individual to a particular view."
That's just too perfect [laughs Hsieh]. Communists are slaves to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Objectivists are slaves to reality. It's all the same, right?
Objectivists are slaves to reality: at least the FBI got that much right. As Objectivists are wont to say, "You can't fake reality." You couldn't fake this kind of FBI silliness either. If you want to see by what distance the FBI fucked it up, have a look at some of the links below.

Linked Articles: FBI File by Diana Hsieh
What is Objectivism by Lindsay Perigo
Online Lectures on Objectivism by Leonard Peikoff and Gary Hull
Suggested Readings on Objectivism

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Huh?! I thought the "analysis" of her ideas was by some nutter writing to the newspaper, not by the FBI itself.

The nutter says he's sending her books to the FBI and his congressman. Of course, he could be FBI and trying to shake the reader off his trail, ala Peron writing about picking up his son from Sydney Airport on the LookingInNZ blog.

Captain Calculus said...

Remember the time that this comes from.

IN those days in the FBI the only person who wasn't a suspect for being a communist was J Edgar Hoover.

Everyone (and that means pretty much everyone) was a suspect and had a file.

G

Anonymous said...

That FBI summary of Rand's works sounds very similar in tone to the statements that poor reviewer on Amazon who's read virtually every work of hers.

That aside, though. If an objectivist is slave to reality, doesn't that imply a necessary stimmying of imagination?

Perhaps we're automatically slaves to reality (or existence), but I'm not a slave to the assumption of a fixed or limited nature thereof.