A book like this has never been more important. Would love to see schools wake up and embrace something like this, and perhaps Atlas Shrugged or the Fountainhead, among other philosophical masterpieces.
Agreed about Huxley. Neil Postman covers many of the same themes in his non-fiction work. Technopoly in particular is a good read.
Atlas Shrugged is _not_ a message I think our age is lacking however. I enjoyed it as a kid, but it's pretty clear capitalism and selfishness are enjoying the commanding heights. It's status as a philosophical masterpiece...that's the easiest way to troll a philosophy major.
As a Rand fan, let me tell you: the world is not Randian. The overwhelming majority of the "capitalists" of today are not the kind I or Rand would approve it. We'd be more inclined to call them socialists than to say they are in accord with Rand's message.
If you think Rand's message is widespread then you simply have not understood it. For example Rand is sometimes accused of supporting big business. Maybe you have that misconception and think all the big businesses and their supporters are Randians. This is extremely false. Rand was very clear about how she hated many types of businessmen, and a lot of the bad guys in her books were big businessmen.
USA I suppose. But I haven't really researched Hong Kong or a few other smaller countries I've heard are good in terms of free market.
It's easy to complain about the US, and plenty of the complaints are true, but that doesn't mean the US isn't the greatest country of all time. And the US is getting better not worse -- for example if you read about the history of the railroads the amount of Government corruption and unethical business practices 100 years ago is really quite amazing and shows how far we've come. And if you go back another 100 years, then the UK was the best country, but it was really really really bad compared to the modern world -- it's hard to express how bad it was in any short statement. Gay sex was punished by hanging, there was slavery, women were property of their husbands (not 100% property, but ugh), racism was the norm, and being rich and powerful was usually about political power and achieved by methods like land grants from the Government as favors for military service; there may be quite a few bad businesses today and people rich due to crime or Government favors, but we have cut down on that stuff, and also we have far more people who earned their money as entrepreneurs, far more middle class, etc
And besides her novels she wrote books like _Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal_ where she, for example, discusses the history of the railroads, and how many of them took government money, and her objections to that, and how unfair/dumb it is that those people -- those Government suckups -- got called capitalists/industrialists and the free market gets blamed for their misdeeds.
Rand covered a lot of ground. She was big on there being objective truth -- it's not all just opinion. She was big on reason -- she wanted human civilization to make progress by people using their minds. She liked science but criticized scientists overly concerned with funding, for example, at the expense of boldly seeking potentially unpopular truths. She liked entrepreneurs because they transform the world for the better, and lead the way for progress. She liked heros who do great things, and encouraged people not to settle for mediocre lives.
She hated pseudo-intellectuals who espouse unclear, socialist, altruist/sacrificial, or subjectivist philosophy. She hated people who wanted to power over other men, and favored those who wished power only over nature. She hated collectivism; it does things like take away individual responsibility, and also sacrifice some individuals for the sake of the collective. She hated sacrifice and the altruism that advocates self-sacrifice. She wanted individual people to be able to have lives that matter if they merit it, with no one to stop them.
Disclaimer: I've read quite a bit of Postman's work: Amusing Ourselves to Death, The Disappearance of Childhood, How to Watch TV News, and part of Technopoly.
I do agree with Postman's observation that much of our society is moving more towards a BNW distopia vs. 1984. However, I really have a hard time coming to the same conclusions regarding the cause of the problem, and solutions that he seems to present. Overall Postman ends up coming across as a whiny evangelical who seem to conclude that the prudish victorian era was the height of society, discourse, and learning, that we should all strive to recreate. I feel that for someone who claims to have drawn on the ideas of McLuhan, he rather seems to have missed McLuhan's main points. If Postman had observed McLuhan's message more closely he might have seen that the only way around the issues with TV and modern media are to embrace it and actively take time out in public education to demonstrate exactly what it is, why it captivates us so much, and what tricks are used in the media to try to deceive us. I still believe that is our only hope for overcoming the issues American society faces with satiating itself with media and gossip.
Even though the tactics in place are changing, thanks to the BNW approach to appeasing society, the majority seem to be blind to the 1984 tactics that are being setup around us.
If you wanted to relate to the topic in the article you should have said Anthem. It gets most of Rand's ideas on collectivism into digestible form (which is surprising, considering Rand might be one of the most long-winded writers I've read). I made it through that one, Atlas Shrugged, started on The Virtue of Selfishness and decided I'd had enough. While Anthem is easy enough, I couldn't suspend disbelief for Atlas Shrugged, and it just would not end. After reading it, I had no desire to read the Fountainhead...as I wasn't sure what else Rand could write that wasn't both new and contradictory to something she wrote down in Atlas Shrugged. To me, the whole thing felt like a religion than it did a philosophy, where the God was an amalgam of wealth, actualization, satisfaction, indulgence, personal growth, and whatever else Rand said was good. Is the book without any merit? Of course not. Can you get that merit somewhere else? Probably.
My Feelings on Atlas Shrugged in Retrospect:
WARNING SPOILER ALERT. I AM NOT JOHN GALT.
Unbelievably perfect protagonists (your disbelief probably won't be suspended) battle for personal freedom by sticking it to a group of bumbling antagonists bent on taking their toys (read livelihood) away. Insert lots of dialog for the author to repeat what she wrote in her non-fiction pieces where stupid antagonists can't come up with decent comebacks from buddies of protagonists who don't ever seem to shut up. All the while another protagonist is constantly mentioned by everybody in the book, yet nobody knows who he is, but he's chilling underneath some kind of holographic forcefield in the mountains somewhere WHILE HIS BUDDY floats around on a pirate ship (wait, what time period are we in?) blowing up shipments of copper. The main characters are either trying to build a railroad or trying to drive fast trains while wearing simple, yet elegantly fitted clothing. All of this boils down to a speech that lasts a hundred pages and put me to sleep multiple times because anybody can see where the book is going from three miles away (it's a huge book, like 1200 pages or something). The ending flips from some film noir type scene to something out of the Twilight Zone and I could no longer stay interested.
