Últimamente, têm surgido
reacções escritas provocadas pelo desaparecimento de António Borges, que têm
desenvolvido uma interpretação ideológica do Neo - Liberalismo baseada numa
polarização convencional e extrema entre a “Esquerda”e a “Direita”.
Esta perspectiva
de aproximação turva o discernimento e impede uma crítica verdadeiramente
abrangente do problema ideológico.
Sim, porque ao
falarmos do Neo-Liberalismo estamos a falar de uma Ideologia com contornos
messiânicos e que pretende uma Revolução / Utopia baseada em premissas Filosóficas.
A perspectiva de
análise correcta a meu ver tem que portanto formular a seguinte pergunta:
Qual era a base
Filosófica/ Ideológica que motivava Alan Greenspan ?
Quem era Ayn Rand
e o que pretendia Ayn Rand ?
Ao pormos estas
questões numa perspectiva Ëtica / Humanista, numa perspectiva determinada pela
essência dos nossos Valores Civilizacionais que defendem o Altruísmo, a
Solidariedade, a Compaixão, a empatia pelo sofrimento dos outros e o Amor pelo
próximo, aí teremos uma aproximação crítica
do fenómeno muito mais abrangente e esclarecedora.
Basta sabermos
que Atlas Shrugged publicado nos anos 50 por Rand é o livro mais
lido nos Estados Unidos a seguir à Biblia, facto já por si mais do que
preocupante e apercebermo-nos que Rand é prácticamente desconhecida e raramente
comentada na Europa, isto, quando ela foi a “Guru” determinante para o
pensamento e visão de Greenspan e toda uma geração pós -Hayek e Friedman.
A suprema ironia é
que a visão determinada por Marx, onde a Economia é Omnipotente/Omnipresente
motivada por uma perspectiva exclusivamente Materialista da Existência no plano
Filosófico, obteve uma Victória Absoluta na Visão Neo Liberal da mesma Existência,
mas agora movida pela Ganância, Arrogância e indiferença ou mesmo desprezo pelos
valores fundamentais do Humanismo na sua relação com a herança Judeo-Cristã que
determina a nossa Civilização.
Pessoalmente,
nunca fui Marxista precisamente porque considero o seu Materialismo – Dialéctico filosóficamente
inaceitável na sua recusa da tensão Dialéctica – Metafísica perante o Mistério
da Existência.
A minha profunda
crítica à essência filosófica do Neo-Liberalismo é motivada pela Ética e pelo
Humanismo, e por uma consciência Ecológica, pois o Planeta nunca poderá
sustentar e integrar os ideais de Crescimento permanente e Ilimitado e a Visão
de Capacidade Ilimitada de absorção da Natureza, intrísecamente, mas vagamente,
a eles ligada.
É portanto,
absolutamente necessário aproximar o problema numa perspectiva Universal da Moral / Filosofia / Humanismo/ Ecologia, e não através de uma extrema polarização anacronista
e motivada por eventuais necessidades psicológicas e subjectivas / pessoais de
contrição.
António Sérgio
Rosa de Carvalho.
 |
| "It has a fair claim to be the ugliest philosophy the postwar world has produced. Selfishness, it contends, is good, altruism evil, empathy and compassion are irrational and destructive. The poor deserve to die; the rich deserve unmediated power. It has already been tested, and has failed spectacularly and catastrophically. Yet the belief system constructed by Ayn Rand, who died 30 years ago today, has never been more popular or influential."
How Ayn Rand became the new right's version of Marx
Her psychopathic ideas made billionaires feel like victims and turned millions of followers into their doormats
George Monbiot
The Guardian, Monday 5 March 2012 /
It has a fair claim to be the ugliest philosophy the postwar world has produced. Selfishness, it contends, is good, altruism evil, empathy and compassion are irrational and destructive. The poor deserve to die; the rich deserve unmediated power. It has already been tested, and has failed spectacularly and catastrophically. Yet the belief system constructed by Ayn Rand, who died 30 years ago today, has never been more popular or influential.
Rand was a Russian from a prosperous family who emigrated to the United States. Through her novels (such as Atlas Shrugged) and her nonfiction (such as The Virtue of Selfishness) she explained a philosophy she called Objectivism. This holds that the only moral course is pure self-interest. We owe nothing, she insists, to anyone, even to members of our own families. She described the poor and weak as "refuse" and "parasites", and excoriated anyone seeking to assist them. Apart from the police, the courts and the armed forces, there should be no role for government: no social security, no public health or education, no public infrastructure or transport, no fire service, no regulations, no income tax.
Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957, depicts a United States crippled by government intervention in which heroic millionaires struggle against a nation of spongers. The millionaires, whom she portrays as Atlas holding the world aloft, withdraw their labour, with the result that the nation collapses. It is rescued, through unregulated greed and selfishness, by one of the heroic plutocrats, John Galt.
The poor die like flies as a result of government programmes and their own sloth and fecklessness. Those who try to help them are gassed. In a notorious passage, she argues that all the passengers in a train filled with poisoned fumes deserved their fate. One, for instance, was a teacher who taught children to be team players; one was a mother married to a civil servant, who cared for her children; one was a housewife "who believed that she had the right to elect politicians, of whom she knew nothing".
Rand's is the philosophy of the psychopath, a misanthropic fantasy of cruelty, revenge and greed. Yet, as Gary Weiss shows in his new book, Ayn Rand Nation, she has become to the new right what Karl Marx once was to the left: a demigod at the head of a chiliastic cult. Almost one third of Americans, according to a recent poll, have read Atlas Shrugged, and it now sells hundreds of thousands of copies every year.
Ignoring Rand's evangelical atheism, the Tea Party movement has taken her to its heart. No rally of theirs is complete without placards reading "Who is John Galt?" and "Rand was right". Rand, Weiss argues, provides the unifying ideology which has "distilled vague anger and unhappiness into a sense of purpose". She is energetically promoted by the broadcasters Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santelli. She is the guiding spirit of the Republicans in Congress.
Like all philosophies, Objectivism is absorbed, secondhand, by people who have never read it. I believe it is making itself felt on this side of the Atlantic: in the clamorous new demands to remove the 50p tax band for the very rich, for instance; or among the sneering, jeering bloggers who write for the Telegraph and the Spectator, mocking compassion and empathy, attacking efforts to make the word a kinder place.
It is not hard to see why Rand appeals to billionaires. She offers them something that is crucial to every successful political movement: a sense of victimhood. She tells them that they are parasitised by the ungrateful poor and oppressed by intrusive, controlling governments.
It is harder to see what it gives the ordinary teabaggers, who would suffer grievously from a withdrawal of government. But such is the degree of misinformation which saturates this movement and so prevalent in the US is Willy Loman syndrome (the gulf between reality and expectations) that millions blithely volunteer themselves as billionaires' doormats. I wonder how many would continue to worship at the shrine of Ayn Rand if they knew that towards the end of her life she signed on for both Medicare and social security. She had railed furiously against both programmes, as they represented everything she despised about the intrusive state. Her belief system was no match for the realities of age and ill health.
But they have a still more powerful reason to reject her philosophy: as Adam Curtis's BBC documentary showed last year, the most devoted member of her inner circle was Alan Greenspan, former head of the US Federal Reserve. Among the essays he wrote for Rand were those published in a book he co-edited with her called Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal. Here, starkly explained, you'll find the philosophy he brought into government. There is no need for the regulation of business – even builders or Big Pharma – he argued, as "the 'greed' of the businessman or, more appropriately, his profit-seeking … is the unexcelled protector of the consumer". As for bankers, their need to win the trust of their clients guarantees that they will act with honour and integrity. Unregulated capitalism, he maintains, is a "superlatively moral system".
Once in government, Greenspan applied his guru's philosophy to the letter, cutting taxes for the rich, repealing the laws constraining banks, refusing to regulate the predatory lending and the derivatives trading which eventually brought the system down. Much of this is already documented, but Weiss shows that in the US, Greenspan has successfully airbrushed history.
Despite the many years he spent at her side, despite his previous admission that it was Rand who persuaded him that "capitalism is not only efficient and practical but also moral", he mentioned her in his memoirs only to suggest that it was a youthful indiscretion – and this, it seems, is now the official version. Weiss presents powerful evidence that even today Greenspan remains her loyal disciple, having renounced his partial admission of failure to Congress.
Saturated in her philosophy, the new right on both sides of the Atlantic continues to demand the rollback of the state, even as the wreckage of that policy lies all around. The poor go down, the ultra-rich survive and prosper. Ayn Rand would have approved.
Twitter: @georgemonbiot
|
( …) The negative reviews produced responses from some
of Rand's admirers, including a letter by Alan Greenspan to The New York Times
Book Review, in which he responded to Hicks' claim that "the book was
written out of hate" by saying, "... Atlas Shrugged is a celebration
of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and
undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who
persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should."
Greenspan had read unpublished drafts of the work in Rand's salon at least
three years earlier.
"Both conservatives and liberals were unstinting
in disparaging the book; the right saw promotion of godlessness, and the left
saw a message of greed is good. Rand is said to have cried every day as the
reviews came out."
–
Harriet Rubin (2007) in The New York Times
( …)‘Besides Paul Krugman, conservatives, such as
William Buckley, Jr., strongly disapproved of Ayn Rand and her objectivist
message. Russell Kirk called objectivism an “inverted religion”, Frank Meyer
accused Rand of “calculated cruelties” and her message, an “arid subhuman image
of man”, Garry Wills regarded Rand a “fanatic” and Whittaker Chambers
considered the story of Atlas Shrugged "preposterous, its characters crude
caricatures, its message 'dictatorial'".
The story of Atlas Shrugged dramatically expresses Rand's
philosophy of Objectivism: Rand's ethical egoism, her advocacy of
"rational selfishness", is perhaps her most well-known position. For
Rand, all of the principal virtues and vices are applications of the role of
reason as man's basic tool of survival (or a failure to apply it): rationality,
honesty, justice, independence, integrity, productiveness, and pride — each of
which she explains in some detail in "The Objectivist Ethics". Rand's
characters often personify her view of the archetypes of various schools of
philosophy for living and working in the world. Robert James Bidinotto wrote,
"Rand rejected the literary convention that depth and plausibility demand
characters who are naturalistic replicas of the kinds of people we meet in
everyday life, uttering everyday dialogue and pursuing everyday values. But she
also rejected the notion that characters should be symbolic rather than
realistic." and Rand herself stated, "My characters are never
symbols, they are merely men in sharper focus than the audience can see with
unaided sight. . . . My characters are
persons in whom certain human attributes are focused more sharply and
consistently than in average human beings."
In addition to the plot's more obvious statements about the
significance of industrialists to society, and the sharp contrast it provides
to the Marxist version of exploitation and the labor theory of value, this
explicit conflict is used by Rand to draw wider philosophical conclusions, both
implicit in the plot and via the characters' own statements. Atlas Shrugged
caricatures fascism, socialism and communism — any form of state intervention
in society — as fatally flawed. This includes any form of a welfare state: Rand
suggests that every individual has to take complete responsibility for
themselves. All government assistance is depicted as creating
"moochers" by allowing poor people to "leech" the hard
earned wealth of the rich and powerful. In addition, positions are expressed on
a variety of other topics, including sex, politics, friendship, charity,
childhood, and many others. Rand contends that the outcome of any individual's
life is purely a function of their ability, and that any individual could
overcome adverse circumstances, given ability and intelligence. Rand said it is
not a fundamentally political book, but a demonstration of the individual
mind's position and value in society.
Rand argues that independence and individual achievement
enable society to survive and thrive, and should be embraced. But this requires
a rational moral code. She argues that, over time, coerced self-sacrifice must
cause any society to self-destruct.
Similarly, Rand rejects faith (that "short-cut to
knowledge", she writes in the novel), along with belief in divinity —
apart from the absolute of existence, itself. The book positions itself against
religion specifically, often within the characters' dialogue.
Atlas Shrugged was generally disliked by critics, despite
being a popular success. The book was dismissed by some as an "homage to
greed", while author Gore Vidal described its philosophy as "nearly
perfect in its immorality". Helen Beal Woodward, reviewing Atlas Shrugged
for The Saturday Review, opined that the novel was written with "dazzling
virtuosity" but that it was "shot through with hatred". This was
echoed by Granville Hicks, writing for The New York Times Book Review, who also
stated that the book was "written out of hate". The reviewer for Time
magazine asked: "Is it a novel? Is it a nightmare? Is it Superman – in the
comic strip or the Nietzschean version?" In the magazine National Review,
Whittaker Chambers called Atlas Shrugged "sophomoric" and "remarkably
silly", and said it "can be called a novel only by devaluing the
term". Chambers argued against the novel's implicit endorsement of
atheism, whereby "Randian man, like Marxian man is made the center of a
godless world". Chambers also wrote that the implicit message of the novel
is akin to "Hitler's National Socialism and Stalin's brand of
Communism" ("To a gas chamber — go!").
The negative reviews produced responses from some of Rand's
admirers, including a letter by Alan Greenspan to The New York Times Book
Review, in which he responded to Hicks' claim that "the book was written
out of hate" by saying, "... Atlas Shrugged is a celebration of life
and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose
and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid
either purpose or reason perish as they should." Greenspan had read
unpublished drafts of the work in Rand's salon at least three years earlier. In
an unpublished letter to the National Review, Leonard Peikoff wrote, "...
Mr. Chambers is an ex-Communist. He has attacked Atlas Shrugged in the best
tradition of the Communists — by lies, smears, and cowardly misrepresentations.
Mr. Chambers may have changed a few of his political views; he has not changed
the method of intellectual analysis and evaluation of the Party to which he
belonged."
Positive reviews appeared in a number of publications.
Richard McLaughlin, reviewing the novel for The American Mercury, compared it
to Uncle Tom's Cabin in importance.Well-known journalist and book reviewer John
Chamberlain, writing in The New York Herald Tribune, found Atlas Shrugged
satisfying on many levels: science fiction, a "Dostoevsky" detective
story and, most importantly, a "profound political parable". However,
Mimi Reisel Gladstein writes that reviewers who have "appreciated not only
Rand's writing style but also her message" have been "far outweighed
by those who have been everything from hysterically hostile to merely uncomprehending".
Former Rand friend, associate, business partner and lover
Nathaniel Branden, to whom the book was originally dedicated, has had differing
views of Atlas Shrugged in his life. He was initially quite favorable to it,
praising it in the book he and Barbara Branden wrote in 1962 called Who Is Ayn
Rand? After he and Rand ended their relationship in 1968, both he and Barbara
Branden repudiated their book in praise of Rand and her novels. As of 1971
though, in an interview he gave to Reason he listed some critiques, but
concluded, "But what the hell, so there are a few things one can quarrel
with in the book, so what? Atlas Shrugged is the greatest novel that has ever
been written, in my judgment, so let's let it go at that."
But years later, in 1984, two years after Rand's death, he
argued that Atlas Shrugged "encourages emotional repression and
self-disowning" and that her works contained contradictory messages.
Branden claimed that the characters rarely talk "on a simple, human level
without launching into philosophical sermons". He criticized the potential
psychological impact of the novel, stating that John Galt's recommendation to
respond to wrongdoing with "contempt and moral condemnation" clashes
with the view of psychologists who say this only causes the wrongdoing to
repeat itself. Rand herself, however, would not have regarded a novel as
needing to portray such "ordinary" human interaction at all, even if
an entire philosophy of life does need to address this.
The film was met with a generally negative reception from
professional critics, getting an 11% (rotten) rating on movie review aggregator
Rotten Tomatoes, and had less than $5 million in total box office receipts. The
producer and screenwriter John Aglialoro blamed critics for the film's paltry
box office take and said he might go on strike.
However, on February 2, 2012, Kaslow and Aglialoro announced
Atlas Shrugged: Part II was fully funded and that principal photography was
tentatively scheduled to commence in early April 2012. The film was released on
October 12, 2012, without a special screening for critics.It suffered one of
the worst openings ever, 98th worst according to Box Office Mojo, among films
in wide release. Final box office take was $3.3 million, well under that of
Part I despite the doubling of the budget to $20 million according to the Daily
Caller. Those figures should be treated as tentative as the Internet Movie
Database estimates Part 1 budget at $20 million and the Part II budget at $10
million, while Box Office Mojo says Part 1 cost $20 million and Part 2 data is
"NA".Critics gave the film a 5% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 21
reviews.
The third part in the series, Atlas Shrugged: Part III, is
scheduled to be released on July 4, 2014.
in wikipedia
Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 (2011)
A Utopian Society
Made Up of Business Moguls in Fedoras
By CARINA CHOCANO
Published: April 28, 2011 / http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/04/29/movies/atlas-shrugged-part-i-ayn-rands-opus-review.html?_r=0
Could anyone have guessed, way back when it was published in
1957, that “Atlas Shrugged,” Ayn Rand’s grandiloquent doorstop of a masterwork,
would one day reach the big screen as high-camp comedy? Because stilted prose
and silly plotting notwithstanding, Rand’s unrelentingly popular book has
exerted a powerful ideological hold on the culture, an influence that has only
intensified in recent years with the emergence of the Tea Party. Still, for
unintentional yet somehow boring hilarity, the novel can’t touch the cinematic
adaptation, which shifts the action to 2016 and presents Rand’s ham-fisted
fable of laissez-faire capitalism as something C-Span might make if it ever set
out to create a futuristic, proto-libertarian nighttime soap. In the 1980s.
“Atlas Shrugged: Part I” may be set only five years from
now, but the world it portrays is completely unrecognizable. It imagines an
America in the stranglehold of a Soviet-style government, given to legislating
equal opportunity and making it illegal for profitable corporations to lay off
employees. An opening TV news panic montage lets us know that the country is in
the grip of an economic crisis and plagued by oil shortages and rampant
unemployment. It’s also apparently beset with bizarre aesthetic forays into the
past, when mysterious men in fedoras skulked past hobo trashcan fires on their
way into diners where waitresses served homemade pie, and socialites took their
hair-styling cues from Aaron Spelling.
In this backward-glancing world, it makes sense that trains
should once again become the preferred mode of transport of the future. This
anachronism should mean good news for the steely blond railroad executive Dagny
Taggart (Taylor Schilling) of Taggart Transcontinental, if only her spineless
brother James (Matthew Marsden) didn’t insist on letting his friends in
Washington tell him how to run his business.
Finally tiring of James’s incompetence, Dagny teams up with
the visionary metallurgist Hank Rearden (Grant Bowler) and the blustery oil
magnate Ellis Wyatt (Graham Beckel) to update an old railway line through
Colorado. Meanwhile, magnates, moguls, business titans and captains of industry
are vanishing, each fresh disappearance marked with a murmured question, “Who
is John Galt?”
“Atlas Shrugged: Part I” never flinches from its mission to
portray those more fortunate as victims of a lazy, parasitic society that would
bleed them dry and leave them for dead, given the chance. (“Why all these
stupid altruistic urges?” Dagny asks Hank at one point. “What’s wrong with
people today?” Hank doesn’t know. He’s just happy to be with someone who hates
humanity as attractively as he does.) It’s a hard sell, and you’ve got to
admire the gumption and the commitment, but it would take a far smarter, more
subtle movie than this even to approach pulling it off.
This project was in development for 18 years, and was
finally rushed into being by one of its producers, John Aglialoro, who wrote
the script with Brian Patrick O’Toole and reportedly spent about $10 million of
his own money, before the option ran out. (The movie, which is envisioned as
part of a trilogy, opened on April 15.)
The resulting film, directed by Paul Johansson, feels
rushed, amateurish and clumsy. It’s not just the ideologies that feel oddly out
of step with the present day, but the clothes, hairstyles and interiors — which
are meant to register as lavish — instead come across as low-rent and sad. The
idea that a billionaire industrialist like Hank Rearden would submit to the
mean-spirited harping of a frigid, frizzy-haired wife who despises him feels
like a relic from another era, before trophy wives were invented. If this is
how the mega-rich live in Ayn Rand’s America, they might want to take a tip or
two from the Russian oligarchs.
“I’m simply cultivating a world that celebrates individual achievement,”
says John Galt, the Pied Piper of the business-class set, as he lures away yet
another top business leader to his utopian society consisting entirely of, uh,
top business leaders — and if that sounds appealing to you, you may form part
of the intended audience. Because it takes some serious brand identity to get
away with dialogue like that, or this:
“Midas Mulligan!” a man in a fedora calls out to a passing
banker on a shadowy street.
“Who’s asking?” says the banker.
“Someone who knows what it’s like to work for himself and
not let others feed off the profit of his energy!”
“That’s funny,” replies the banker. “Exactly what I’ve been
thinking.”
It is funny, especially considering the derivative nature of
his job. But “Atlas Shrugged: Part I” is in many ways charmingly oblivious to
its inherent contradictions and the fact that its capitalist titans appear to
be squatting in old, abandoned “Dynasty” sets, eating food-court baked
potatoes.
“Atlas Shrugged: Part I” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly
cautioned). Some very bland sexuality and near-lethal levels of exposition.
ATLAS SHRUGGED
Part I
Opened on April 15 nationwide.
Directed by Paul Johansson; written by John Aglialoro and
Brian Patrick O’Toole, based on the novel by Ayn Rand; director of photography,
Ross Berryman; edited by Jim Flynn and Sherril Schlesinger; music by Elia
Cmiral; production design by John Mott; costumes by Jennifer L. Soulages;
produced by John Aglialoro and Harmon Kaslow. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes.
WITH: Taylor Schilling (Dagny Taggart), Grant Bowler (Hank
Rearden), Matthew Marsden (James Taggart), Graham Beckel (Ellis Wyatt) and Edi
Gathegi (Eddie Willers).
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