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Ayn Rand who lived through most of the twentieth century is known for her philosophy of Objectivism and her figurative novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged as well as film-work, teaching etc.
I've finished a biography about her by Barbara Branden and have been struck with many similarities in her life and words to the public image of Morrissey. To whit:
- She was an across-the-board thespian, writing short-stories, essays, scripts for cinema, theatre, TV, and enjoying music and art.
- Her hero Roark finds that "it is Society, with all its boggled chaos of selflessness, compromise, servility and lies, that stands in [his] way...every conceivable form of 'second-hand living'...To every second-hand creature he stands as a contrast, a reproach and a lesson."
- A primary moral concept for her was the evil of 'the sanction of the victim'. "She saw that it is the victims, the men of virtue and ability, who make the triumph of evil possible by their willingness to let their virtues be used against them; their willingness to bear injustice, to sacrifice their own interests, to concede moral validity to the claims of their own destroyers" (people who are nice?);
- In encountering a soul-mate her heroine Taggart muses:" This was their world, she thought, this was the way men were meant to be and to face their existence - and all the rest of it, all the years of uglinesss and struggle were only someone's senseless joke".
- In a speech by her hero Galt: “Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice—and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man—by choice; he has to hold his life as a value—by choice; he has to learn to sustain it—by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues—by choice. A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.”
- Innumerable accounts have been recorded from people who read her books that they changed/saved their lives.
- When she appeared at talks, events, crowds would gather just to see her. She was extremely magnetic and daunting at once.
- An introduction to her interview with Playboy magazine observed: "Despite her successes, the literary establishment considers her an outsider. Almost to a man, critics have either ignored or denounced the book..."
- A close friend noted, "A tendency, present in her psychology since childhood, had grown and hardened over the years into an unquestionable absolute: that in any conflict between herself and another, the guilt, the blame, the responsibility could lie only with the other".
- Her success was built at grass-roots level in a sporadic organic way: "It was as if an underground stream flowed through the country and broke out in sudden springs that shot to the surface at random, in unpredictable places". Her books continue to sell steadily and her ideas are taught all over the world.
She was a Russian woman who died the year The Smiths formed. In her dogged individualism; her pulling herself by her bootstraps despite resistance; her bravery in naming what others would not, and in the longevity and richness of her influence she is another 'ultimate rebel'.
Anyone agree with the resemblence on these points?
I've finished a biography about her by Barbara Branden and have been struck with many similarities in her life and words to the public image of Morrissey. To whit:
- She was an across-the-board thespian, writing short-stories, essays, scripts for cinema, theatre, TV, and enjoying music and art.
- Her hero Roark finds that "it is Society, with all its boggled chaos of selflessness, compromise, servility and lies, that stands in [his] way...every conceivable form of 'second-hand living'...To every second-hand creature he stands as a contrast, a reproach and a lesson."
- A primary moral concept for her was the evil of 'the sanction of the victim'. "She saw that it is the victims, the men of virtue and ability, who make the triumph of evil possible by their willingness to let their virtues be used against them; their willingness to bear injustice, to sacrifice their own interests, to concede moral validity to the claims of their own destroyers" (people who are nice?);
- In encountering a soul-mate her heroine Taggart muses:" This was their world, she thought, this was the way men were meant to be and to face their existence - and all the rest of it, all the years of uglinesss and struggle were only someone's senseless joke".
- In a speech by her hero Galt: “Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice—and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man—by choice; he has to hold his life as a value—by choice; he has to learn to sustain it—by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues—by choice. A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.”
- Innumerable accounts have been recorded from people who read her books that they changed/saved their lives.
- When she appeared at talks, events, crowds would gather just to see her. She was extremely magnetic and daunting at once.
- An introduction to her interview with Playboy magazine observed: "Despite her successes, the literary establishment considers her an outsider. Almost to a man, critics have either ignored or denounced the book..."
- A close friend noted, "A tendency, present in her psychology since childhood, had grown and hardened over the years into an unquestionable absolute: that in any conflict between herself and another, the guilt, the blame, the responsibility could lie only with the other".
- Her success was built at grass-roots level in a sporadic organic way: "It was as if an underground stream flowed through the country and broke out in sudden springs that shot to the surface at random, in unpredictable places". Her books continue to sell steadily and her ideas are taught all over the world.
She was a Russian woman who died the year The Smiths formed. In her dogged individualism; her pulling herself by her bootstraps despite resistance; her bravery in naming what others would not, and in the longevity and richness of her influence she is another 'ultimate rebel'.
Anyone agree with the resemblence on these points?
(Jesse Tobias must know that one. See that other thread 
.)
