Skip to main content

Selfishness is not a virtue

The movie Atlas Shrugged (pt. 1 of a trilogy apparently) came out this weekend. I've tried to read the book before but it's really badly written and very boring. However neither of those things have dented its influence. It has been hailed as by Conservatives as one of the most important books after the bible. In what I believe is a bout of self-reassurance. The main thesis of this book, and mind you this book has a didactic thesis in it, is that there is no higher virtue than selfishness. In the world where this story takes place selfishness has become unacceptable socially (not spiritually btw) so in a rather comical exchange (well comical for me) a successful big brother industrialist donates money to his conceited little brother's cause and the brother will only accept it if he can hide where it came from so as not to be embarrassed by the selfish industrialist brother. Now this is funny because the big brother is doing something very altruistic, very unselfish. He is not only supporting his brother with his money, he is also donating a large amount to his brother's cause. While his brother who pretends to be altruistic and generous is a selfish prick who wont accept a gracious gift because it may make he look bad.

This book seems to be the progenitor of Gordon Gecko's "Greed is good" speech in the movie Wall Street, but like with that speech where people overlook the fact that Gordon is a thief whose speech is meant to allow him to fleece his investors, people also overlook how far-fetched the characters in Atlas Shrugged are:

A self-less capitalist, that willingly (with no promise of tax-breaks or even his name attached to the gift) gives of his money. Incompetent lazy people who won't fix a train change problem until they are scared their jobs might be in jeopardy (I mean there are lazy people out there, but this is an extreme to the point of caricature, the fix is stupidly simple).

You see, here is the problem with this book, it somehow portrays self-less capitalist as selfish. But they are self-less. The woman who runs the train doesn't do it to make herself rich, she wants a business (that by the way employs people) to run well (do a good job) and makes her clients happy. She doesn't seem so much selfish as wanting to be proud of her work. I don't know, maybe they become selfish later on on the book, but the book is so long and so poorly written I'll just catch the movie(s).

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

My Fake Resume

Inspired by the over aggrandized bio of Joseph Rakofsky I want to write my own. If you don't know who he is; Joseph Rakofsky is a lawyer who earned a mistrial for a criminal client due to his (alleged) incompetence as reported on the Washington Post . There has been quite a few commentaries on his "Streisand-house" approach of suing all the bloggers and even the Washington Post and American Bar Association for reporting his (alleged) ineptitude. ("Streisand-house" is what happened to Barbara Streisand who wanted to have a picture of her mansion removed from the internet and she sued to have it removed. Unfortunately suing requires the filing of public documents with a picture of her house. The lawsuit had the direct opposite effect it intended. Everybody now could see legally, since it was a public document, a picture of her house.) But all that internet gossip aside I'm most impressed by his resume. Here is a quote from the website: Prior t...

Setting JRuby to run in 1.9.2 mode by default

JRuby comes with both 1.8.7 and 1.9.2 (currently) and the default is 1.8.7. If you want to change it you have to feed an option at the command line: $jruby --1.9 This weekend I had to migrate a rails program that I hadn't written and the author used 1.9.2 notation so it would not run on JRuby with the default settings. So I had to add the version option with every command which gets old quick. I looked online for a way to make this automatic (and on my JRuby books) but could only found the way to do it on a Mac or Linux but all Windows references just mentioned nebulous concepts such as environmental variables and seemed to be different from which version of Windows you are using. Here is how to do it. Windows 7: Got to Control Panel, System. Wine (Crossover 10): Java 6 version 21 will run on Wine (at least on Crossover 10) and you can install JRuby on top of that. To set environmental variables you have to go to regedit and set it there manually. Follow th...

Coca-confusion, it comes and goes...

Recently Latin American countries have voiced their opposition to prop 19 (it would legalize recreational marijuana use) because it will cause confusion. This is hogwash. While it might be a little curious to a Columbian that he can go to jail for growing pot while a Californian will not; it's no more confusing than a Bolivian growing coca legally and a Californian not. Wasn't Evo Morales a coca grower? Legalizing Marijuana if anything will lead to less confusion not more.