An Ode to Ayn Rand

Well, explain why Wyatt blew up his oil refinery, despite the obvious danger to the public, and why what's his name set out to wreck his copper mines. What impressed me was the protagonists' compulsion to destroy that  which they could not control, what  they could not  turn into a source  of  power over other people. Actions speak louder than words. The high-minded speeches of Josef Stalin are much less important  than the Great Terror. I tend to think of  Rand as a kind of reverse image of Stalin, like a photographic negative, or a plaster cast. That, of course, was what the conservative writer Whitaker Chambers was picking up on, when he coined his famous description. Of course, Rand  never had very much power, and was never able to do  real  damage.

I don't know if you've ever read William Morris, especially _News From  Nowhere_. Discuss.

I'll probably shock  you again, when I say that I believe Ayn Rand was a closet technophobe.  Yes, she rhapsodized about technological _artifacts_, but she is  profoundly hostile to the underlying philosophy of technology.

Technological secrets leak. Most  fundamentally, they leak by the evidence of their use. If you start selling something, someone will obtain small quantities by black-market methods, and take it apart to find out how it works. The  method  by which it works will not be a bolt out of the blue, but an under-appreciated possibility: "so _that's_ how he's doing it." Beyond reverse engineering, there is industrial espionage. In wartime, captured war  materiel is sent to laboratories which analyze it, not  from  the point of view of blind ignorance,  but again, from that  of  under-appreciated possibility.

Let's take one example, the  metallic property of stainlessness. A metallurgist thinks of stainlessness by treating an alloy as a kind of battery which puts a  positive charge on some of  its metallic constituents, and a  negative charge on  others. The respective metals have oxides which may be durable (aluminum, chromium), or non-durable (iron, copper, silver), with this understanding, a quick program of testing can systematically identify  the possible stainless alloys of various different  metals.

The book of nature is ultimately open to all, and given an  approximate idea how something works, one can construct experiments to work out the details. Unless one thinks that one can economically exploit something within a short period of time, it is generally considered prudent to  get a  patent if feasible, even though that  requires publishing a written description. Ayn Rand seems to  think of technology as something  which is inherent in the inventor's personality, a measure of his selfishness, which  cannot be copied without the  inventor's will. (*) One way or another, the other  steel companies would have discovered what Rearden Metal was, and how to  make it. Without a patent,  they would have started producing Rearden Metal, and the dispute would have been whether Rearden was entitled to a patent or not, and if so, how extensive and enforceable a patent. Obviously, if  you thumb your nose at society,  you cannot expect much in the way of grants of legal privileges.

(*) This explains the  passage in which Dagny goes searching all over the  country for the mysterious inventor  of the  mysterious  engine she had discovered in an abandoned factory.

(04/03/2011 03:03 AM)