Atlas Shrugged
I finally got around to reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand which has been on my reading list for over ten years now. It's touted as a master piece by libertarians and anarchists the world over mainly for it's strong support for the free market with no state intervention. It certainly is an amazing book in many ways, and I agree with a lot of her ideals such as being against forced redistribution of wealth, and being repulsed by this modern attitude of rejecting rational thought. But I also had many strong criticisms and actually found myself feeling angry with her at times! Here's a summary of the things I found wrong with her model.
No thought at all about the problem of the profit based model on the environment - e.g. standing in awe of the "battery of smoke stacks". The fact that it was in the 50's when environmental awareness was not widely thought of is no excuse considering that Ayn Rand a philospher who should be no stranger to holsitic thinking and full cost accounting. On a more subtle level, I have a general criticism with the whole market paradigm which it has the economic bottom-line problem built in to it, which leads to ever-expanding inequality and centralisation of power. Even though there are proposed reasons to be found elsewhere as to why a "true free market" wouldn't suffer from these problems (which I don't accept) such as is described by Samuel Edward Konken III, I believe it's very important for any work that's advocating the free market ideal to address this problem explicitly.
Her whole perspective is extreme materialism, disregarding anything else as being in support of the irrational, believing that rational thought is the absolute highest quality of being. She has no respect or even the slightest understanding of the incredible power of mind that the Taoist, Buddhist and some other spiritual traditions have attained through their intensive investigation of the nature of mind and being over thousands of years. These traditions have realised through thorough investigation and direct experience that thought is just a superficial product of the "course mind", and that there are many more subtle levels to mind which lead to a much deeper understanding of the universe and our being than that which can be obtained by mere rational thought.
in progress...
