Category Archives: Ayn Rand

After years of toiling against a culture that refused to recognize or celebrate the value of our hero's unique gifts, there was a possible breakthrough. A chance was seized. A microphone was commandeered. The nation's airwaves were unexpectedly filled with a message about the value of selfishness, individuality, and ambition.

I'm talking, of course, about the finale ofThe Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which concluded its five-season run on Amazon Prime last week.

"I want a big life. I want to experience everything. I want to break every single rule there is," Miriam "Midge" Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan) said, near the end of her final set, in a moment that effectively summed up the character's first principles over the course of the show's arc. "They say ambition is an unattractive trait in a womanmaybe. But you know what's really unattractive? Waiting around for something to happen. Staring out a window, thinking the life you should be living is out there somewhere, but not being willing to open the door and go out there and get it, even if someone tells you you can't."

It was a bit more terse than another famous speech delivered at the climax of a story that celebrates many of the same themes. Or perhaps it was a more verbose version of Howard Roark's famous declaration in The Fountainhead,after being informed that it's unlikely anyone will let him design buildings in the way he wanted: "That's not the point," he said. "The point is, who will stop me?"

Over the course of five seasons, no one stopped Midge Maisel. Not when she stormed onto the stage at New York City's famous Gaslight Cafe in a bathrobe to deliver her first impromptu set after discovering her husband's infidelity in the show's premiere. Not when she similarly broke away from an interview to deliver that monologue in the finale. It wasn't all smooth sailing in betweenindeed, one of the show's strengths was its willingness to let Midge struggle, even seem to fail at timesbut that's not the point, is it? The point is, no one stopped her.

More than most other shows on television,Mrs. Maisel celebrated the selfishness that is essential to success in comedy and show business at large. Midge was always a selfish character, but the show's final season leaned into that trait in a refreshing way. Rather than having her grow to be a better mother or romantic partner, or learn some self-sacrificial lesson about helping others succeed, the showrunners (Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino) put the spotlight on Midge's defining trait, while also acknowledging the trade-offs that come with it.

The final season culminated with Midge getting her long-sought-after breaka four-minute set on The Gordon Ford Show, which we're told is the highest-rated late-night program on television in the show's fictional version of 1962 Americaand used various flash-forwards to leave no doubt that it was, in fact, the springboard to a wildly successful career in show business. She got there by breaking the rules and by demanding to be first in line, yes, but also by refusing to compromise on who she was.

The show's celebration of selfishness extended beyond Midge herself and did so in a way that fits with Ayn Rand's conception of the term. While there is nothing wrongand plenty rightabout putting one's own needs first, Rand emphasized that selfishness also indicated moral first principles: Being selfish means, essentially, being true to one's self and refusing to subvert the individual to the desires of others.

Throughout the show, Midge repeatedly encountered supposedly successful people whose showbiz fame was predicated on committing the Randian cardinal sin of subverting their individualism for mass appeal. First and most apparent was Sophie Lennon (Jane Lynch), a snooty Manhattanite who donned a fake accent and fat suit to perform stand-up as a crass housewife from Queens. There was also Shy Baldwin (Leroy McClain), the closeted homosexual who performed as a womanizing pop singer. Finally, there was Ford, the late-night host with a fake marriage who didn't write his own jokes or have as much creative control over his own show as he liked to think. As the lies those characters lived were peeled back, Midge (and the audience) discovered them to beto varying degreespathetic, tragic, and pitiable.

Midge steadfastly refused to play that game, announcing early on that she would achieve fame on her own terms. Her comedy act was a reflection of that perspective, rooted as it was in the lived experience of a divorced Jewish mother from the Upper West Side. Her manager Susie Myerson (Alex Borstein) and real-life comic Lenny Bruce (Luke Kirby), fellow outsiders who disdained the phoniness of their industry, stood alone in recognizing and encouraging Midge's unique talent.

To be sure, there was plenty of the traditional form of selfishness in Midge's character too. Her big break came after she persuaded Myerson to apply a particularly nasty form of leverage over Ford so he would break his personal rule against allowing his writers to appear as guests on his show (which is, it should be said, a very reasonable rule). By doing so, she blatantly stepped to the front of the line ahead of other comedians who toiled in the obscurity of the writers' room far longer than she did.

But the show left no doubt that she deserved the break when it came. She wasn't just the one writer in Ford's bullpen who found the right leverage to make him break his ruleshe was also the best of the bunch, and therefore the one most deserving of special treatment in the show's Randian-tinged perspective. Her selfishness, in all its forms, was duly rewarded.

Still,Mrs. Maisel also demonstrated that the selfishness necessary for success is not without its trade-offs. In the fifth season's flash-forwards, we learned that Midge's strained and distant relationship with her two children continued even after both reached adulthood. If Midge's success was the result of never compromising on her individualism, then that same character trait naturally made her a poor mother, a role where self-sacrifice is fundamental. Her relationship with her parents was similarly difficult, though one might note that strained or absent family ties only reinforce the similarities between Midge and Rand's heroes, most of whom lack children or relatives who aren't portrayed as losers and leeches.

The dark side of Midge's ambition and selfishness was always part of the show's award-winning formula. Her inability to separate her real life and stage persona cost her friends and opportunities along the waymost prominently getting her canned from a tour as Baldwin's opening act after she inadvertently outed him during a set. There were lessons to be learned, but Midge never abandoned her individuality in order to set things right.

Over its five seasons, Mrs. Maisel veered into other libertarian-adjacent themes, including casting a critical eye toward the obscenity laws that limited free speech in 1950s/'60s New York Cityand which Midge got arrested for violating. The final season dealt in a small way with the tragic end of Bruce's career and placed the blame for his personal decline squarely on the persecution he suffered at the hands of government censors. "I can't step foot in any club east of the Grand Canyon," he lamented at the start of the final episode. Offered Myerson's help to get back on top, he selflessly declined, telling her to use her favors on someone else. There's a hint of a moral there.

But the hero and moral center of the show was always Midgeindeed, everything in the show revolved around herwho used her talents and shamelessly seized every favor offered to her. Even in flash-forwards to her later years, we saw her tireless work ethic continue. And while Midge would surely fall short of Rand's ideals about what defines an objectivist herodespite her propensity for delivering diatribes into a microphoneThe Marvelous Mrs. Maiselleft little doubt that she'd never have succeeded without putting herself first.

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'The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel' Celebrated Selfishness as a Virtue - Reason

It is not uncommon to blame victims for whatever problems or difficulties they may encounter. Often enough, it involves people who did not comply with police officers commands, never mind that different cops may be shouting out contradictory orders so that the person does not know who to listen to. More recently, Jordan Neely was tragically killed in New York because his strange behavior was threatening to other subway passengers. Luckily, someone stepped in to subdue him, and its just too bad that he lost his life for it. The person who choked him out cannot be blamed; it was all a bad accident, you know.

But lets pull back the lens a bit consider victim-blaming in a more general way.

The conversation starts with Achille Mbembe in Necropolitics (2019) when he discusses how capitalism and the economic imperative of profit-making remade the world system via colonialism and slavery. People were forcibly moved or coerced from the places where they once lived and then ended up being sent to places in order to satisfy demands for labor. They didnt want to move, but were enslaved. They did not want to work in plantation agriculture where monocultures replaced the self-sufficiency of small farmers planting and growing for their family and community, but that was not where the money was. Once moved, those same people are subjected to hatred and racism, as those in new lands argue that you dont belong here. At the same time, no one is allowed to utter the words, Capitalism brought me here.

In Cannibal Capitalism (2022), Nancy Fraser goes through a discussion of how social reproduction in capitalism has a chain effect wherein people from peripheral countries are recruited to provide household care in the developed world so that more privileged women can be allowed the freedom to work and to not be bound by their familial duties. But those caregiving tasks must still be fulfilled, and consequently women are recruited from peripheral countries to be those caregivers, in turn allowing them to send remittances back home, and helping their families back home. Entire economies like the Philippines are set up on this concept, including the broadened need to provide health care for the aged in wealthier countries where the population is at or below replacement rate. Womenmostly womenget work and are paid, all the while destroying their own family units in order to keep the upper classes of capitalist society intact.

So while caregiving becomes a necessity for women who want to work because they are made to feel independent, there is a parallel resentment of those who migrate and seek refugee status to take up those very roles in the heart of the global economic system. Women try to escape their own worlds of poverty and violence, as is currently the case with refugees coming from Central America to the US, but they are hated and scorned for responding to the very demands that capitalism has created. Again, lets not say the name of the system causing this predicament. Lets blame the victims instead.

More broadly than that, we can look at the implications of neoliberalism now spanning 50 years of history. If one were to believe the precepts of Ayn Rand before, Milton Friedman more recently, the effects of capitalism operating under a neoliberal system of accumulation were clear enough. The rich would get immensely richer, there was to be no governmental help for society because capitalism must incentivize individual performance and not compensate those who fail. If people did not survive in this dog-eat-dog environment, they would fail, and they would ultimately die. Their own failures in not being assertive and aggressive enough, made them unsuccessful. Theyre toast, and theyre supposed to be.

Back in the 1980s, sociologist Ulrich Beck talked about Risk Society (1986) and how capitalism in its neoliberal iteration now meant that individual achievement alone determined ones fate. No longer would there be a social safety net to catch those who failed. Presciently, Beck was right. Fortunately, the demise of this safety net has not been as rapid in Europe as it has in other parts of the world, North America included. But the risk is still on us even though the system generates or creates it.

Watching news network a handful of nights ago, there was an extended report about how homelessness had reached epidemic levels, particularly in blue cities where Democratic mayors had not done anything to address the situation. Especially useful in this reporting is that People of Color and/or women are behind the inability to resolve the problem: the mayor of New York is Eric Adams, Brandon Johnson is in Chicago, Los Angeles has Karen Bass, and London Breed is in San Francisco. The implied meaning is clear: they get elected because of this mad desire to support inclusiveness, then fail because they dont know what theyre doing.

What is to be done? In a neoliberal world where any and every action made by government is treated with suspicion, wrath, or both, the answer is, nothing. So in doing nothing, the grand neoliberal vision of a divided world between some winners and many losers is realized. The winners get to celebrate on Mont Pelerin, or maybe its in Davos these days, while the rest of society must navigate around tents and people shooting up fentanyl on the sidewalks of San Francisco. For Rand, Atlas Shrugged because thats how its supposed to be. If you are wealthy, you deserve everything you have.

There are two victims here. First, the homeless and the unwillingness to do anything about helping them involving outlays of money for housing and for health care (both physical and mental) that most people do not have. When it comes to refugees desperate to leave where they came from due to circumstances beyond their control, those problems lie with the governments and the states that they came from. Their labor is needed, and yet few people are willing to take them in. One can only wonder what will happen when streams of people number in the hundreds of millions once climate change makes certain parts of the planet no longer livable. Do the gates swing open for refugees? Not in a dog-eat-dog world, they dont. Second, the public officials themselves fall victim to criticism because theyre not doing anything. Well, you know what? No one wants them to do anything. Thats neoliberalism for you. But lets not talk about that.

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Blaming the Victim - CounterPunch.org - CounterPunch

A statement issued today and signed by more than 375 computer scientists, academics and business leaders warns of profound risks of artificial intelligence misuse and says the potential problems posed by the technology be given the same urgency as pandemics and nuclear war.

Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war, said the statement issued by the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit organization dedicated to reducing AI risk.

The statement caps a flurry of recent calls by AI researchers and companies developing AI-based technologies to impose some form of government regulation on models to prevent them from being misused or creating unintended negative consequences.

Earlier this month, OpenAI LLC Sam Altman told the Senate Judiciary subcommittee that the U.S. government should consider licensing or registration requirements on AI models and that companies developing them should adhere to an appropriate set of safety requirements, including internal and external testing prior to release and publication of evaluation results.

Microsoft Corp. last week called for a set of regulations to be imposed on systems used in critical infrastructure as well as expanded laws clarifying the legal obligations of AI models and labels that make it clear when a computer produces an image or video.

Altman and OpenAI Co-Founder Ilya Sutskever were among the signatories to todays statement. Others include Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google LLCs DeepMind; Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott; cybersecurity expert Bruce Schneier; and the co-founders of safe AI unicorn Anthropic PBC. Geoffrey Hinton, a Turing Award winner who earlier this month left Google over concerns about AIs potential for misuse, also signed the statement.

The Center for AI Safety sites eight principal risks that are inherent in AI. These include military weaponization, malicious misinformation and enfeeblement, in which humanity loses the ability to self-govern and becomes completely dependent on machines, similar to the scenario portrayed in the film WALL-E.

The center also expresses concerns that highly competent systems could give small groups of people too much power, exhibit unexplainable behavior and even intentionally deceive humans.

All this activity comes after the public release last November of OpenAIs ChatGPT intelligent chatbot. The uncanny humanlike interactive capabilities of the generative model have galvanized attention around AIs potential to replace human labor and have given birth to a host of competitors.

However, subsequent media reports detailing the tendency of models to sometimes also exhibit bizarre and hallucinatory behavior have also raised concerns about the black box nature of some AI models and sparked calls for better transparency and accountability.

The statement drew praise from many quarters. If large language models continue to advance, they will surpass human ability tenfold, wrote Nimrod Partush, vice president of AI and data science at cybersecurity analytics firm Cyesec Ltd., in emailed comments. There is potential for a real existential risk for mankind. I am leaning toward seeing AI as a benevolent force for humanity, but I would still recommend extreme precautions.

Philosophically I believe the private sector should take care of AI governance but thats not going to happen, saidKen Cox, president of web hosting service Hostirian LLC. Unfortunately, I believe the government should have some regulations on AI, but they need to be minimal and we need great leaders stepping up and educating through the process.

However, not everyone is convinced of AIs doomsday potential and some questioned the groups motives in publicizing the statement so aggressively.

If thetop executives of the top AI companies believe AI creates a risk of human extinction, why dont they stop working on it instead of publishing press releases? wrote software developerDare Obasanjo on Bluesky Social.

Their macho chest-thumping is pure marketing, wrotemedia pundit Jeff Jarvis.

To the extent these risks are real, and many of them are, its up to them, the developers and companies that own this technology and will use it, to come together and create industry standards,tweetedYaron Brook, chairman of the board at the Ayn Rand Institute. Stop running to government to solve your issues.

Business executives have been transfixed by the topic. A recent survey of senior executives by Gartner, Inc. found that AI is the technology they believe will most significantly impact their industries over the next three years.

THANK YOU

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Coalition of AI leaders sees 'societal-scale risks' from the ... - SiliconANGLE News

Highly anticipated returns, family drama, and literary invention feature in this falls notable fiction.

Top 10

The Bee Sting

Paul Murray. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Aug. 15 ($30, ISBN 978-0-374-60030-3)

Irish novelist Murray, who recently toured Metas virtual reality platform for New York magazine, conveys the bleakness of a territory closer to homehis countrys Midland Regionin this family drama.

Come and Get It

Kiley Reid. Putnam, Jan. 9 ($28, ISBN 978-0-593-32820-0)

Campus hijinks ensue with the story of a University of Arkansas resident assistant who takes on extra work in hopes of buying a house after graduation and deals with pranks from dorm residents.

Devil Makes Three

Ben Fountain. Flatiron, Sept. 26 ($30.99, ISBN 978-1-250-77651-8)

Fountains second novel comes 11 years after the NBCC-winning Billy Lynns Long Halftime Walk. The setting is Haiti, where an American expat adjusts to the new normal after the 1991 coup.

Family Meal

Bryan Washington. Riverhead, Oct. 10 ($28, ISBN 978-0-593-42109-3)

Washington continues writing about food, which he did so well in Memorial, with a story of a bakery in Houston and two friends whose bond helps one of them get through the death of his lover.

Happiness Falls

Angie Kim. Hogarth, Sept. 5 ($28, ISBN 978-0-593-44820-5)

A young Korean American woman frantically tries to determine what happened to her father after her younger brother returns from a park near their Virginia home without him, covered in blood and unable to speak.

The Maniac

Benjamin Labatut. Penguin Press, Oct. 3 ($28, ISBN 978-0-593-65447-7)

Chilean writer Labatut, author of the International Bookershortlisted When We Cease to Understand the World, unspools a story involving Hungarian polymath John von Neumann and the roots of AI.

My Work

Olga Ravn, trans. by Jennifer Russell. New Directions, Sept. 4 ($18.95, ISBN 978-0-8112-3471-9)

Danish writer Ravn returns after the speculative workplace novel The Employees with a hefty mixed-genre meditation on birth, motherhood, and writing.

Tom Lake

Ann Patchett. Harper, Aug. 1 ($30, ISBN 978-0-06-332752-8)

Set in Northern Michigan in the spring of 2020, Patchetts latest centers on a woman and her three adult daughters as they pepper her with questions about her past during a visit home.

The Unsettled

Ayana Mathis. Knopf, Oct. 24 ($29, ISBN 978-0-525-51993-5)

In another long-awaited return, Mathis follows up 2012s The Twelve Tribes of Hattie with the story of a familys resilience after moving from Alabama to Philadelphia in the 1980s.

The Wren, the Wren

Anne Enright. Norton, Sept. 19 ($27, ISBN 978-1-324-00568-1)

A young writer, the descendant of a famous Irish poet, has a much different relationship with her maternal grandfathers poems than her mother does, setting the stage for a story about great art by a perhaps not-so-great man.

Literary Fiction longlist

Algonquin

The New Naturals by Gabriel Bump (Nov. 14, $27, ISBN 978-1-61620-880-6). Bumps sophomore novel is a tragicomedy of an underground Black utopia in western Massachusetts, where a young woman from Boston settles, hoping for a sense of community and a better life.

Astra House

Do You Remember Being Born? by Sean Michaels (Sept. 5, $27, ISBN 978-1-66260-232-0). An acclaimed 70-something poet of modest means takes up an unexpected new career with a tech company, where she collaborates with an AI program to write poetry.

Avid Reader

One Woman Show by Christine Coulson (Oct. 17, $25, ISBN 978-1-66802-778-3) follows up Coulsons collection, Metropolitan Stories, with another book inspired by her work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this time a novel with a character portrait in the form of gallery wall text.

Ballantine

The Bookbinder by Pip Williams (Aug. 1, $28, ISBN 978-0-593-60044-3). After The Dictionary of Lost Words, Williams chronicles two sisters working as bookbinders in 1914 Oxford whose horizons are expanded as WWI draws the men away from home.

Berkley

All You Have to Do Is Call by Kerri Maher (Sept. 19, $28, ISBN 978-0-593-10221-3) draws on the true story of the Jane Collective, which helped women gain access to abortions before the Roe v. Wade decision.

Bloomsbury

The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng (Oct. 17, $28.99, ISBN 978-1-63973-193-0). Malaysian writer Tan is back 11 years after the Booker Prizeshortlisted The Garden of Evening Mists with the tale of a married couple visited in 1921 Penang by author Somerset Maugham, who picks up on his friends unhappiness.

Catapult

The Book of Ayn by Lexi Freiman (Nov. 14, $27, ISBN 978-1-64622-192-9). In this satire, Ayn Rand becomes a source of inspiration for a disillusioned debut writer after her novel is dismissed by critics.

Coffee House

Nefando by Mnica Ojeda, trans. by Sarah Booker (Oct. 24, $17.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-56689-689-4) combines a morality tale with a deep dive into the gamer world, as a group of Barcelona artists gets sucked into a horror game called Nefando that blurs their sense of reality.

Counterpoint

The Premonition by Banana Yoshimoto, trans. by Asa Yoneda (Oct. 3, $24, ISBN 978-1-64009-371-3). Japanese writer Yoshimotos 1988 novel, translated for the first time, involves a young woman struck by an unsettling feeling about her childhood.

Crooked Media Reads

Mobility by Lydia Kiesling (Aug. 1, $28, ISBN 978-1-63893-056-3). The daughter of an American diplomat has written a novel about privilege and the Caspian Sea oil boom, centered on a teenage girl growing up with her foreign service family in 1998 Azerbaijan.

Doubleday

Normal Rules Dont Apply: Stories by Kate Atkinson (Sept. 12, $28, ISBN 978-0-385-54950-9) is a thematically linked collection featuring protagonists as diverse as a queen, a secretary, and a gambler.

Ecco

Brooklyn Crime Novel by Jonathan Lethem (Oct. 3, $30, ISBN 978-0-06-293882-4) returns to the terrain of Lethems most celebrated work and covers five decades of a Brooklyn neighborhoods economic upheaval and racial tensions.

Family Lore by Elizabeth Acevedo (Aug. 1, $30, ISBN 978-0-06-320726-4). The YA authors adult debut follows a clairvoyant woman and her Dominican American family in Santo Domingo and New York.

Europa

A Volga Tale by Guzel Yakhina, trans. by Polly Gannon (Sept. 19, $28, ISBN 978-1-60945-934-5). Russian writer Yakhina draws on the history of a 17th-century German settlement in Russia with a love story involving the composer Jakob Bach, who spins a series of fairy tales for his daughter.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Absolution by Alice McDermott (Nov. 7, $28, ISBN 978-0-374-61048-7). The National Book Award winner chronicles two women who meet in Vietnam during that war, where one of their husbands is a Navy lawyer and the other a corporate bigwig. In the present day, they reexamine their commitment to their husbands work.

Blackouts by Justin Torres (Oct. 10, $27, ISBN 978-0-374-29357-4). The author of We the Animals draws on an early-20th-century book called Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns in this tale of a young man caring for an older man at the end of his life.

Feminist Press

The Singularity by Balsam Karam, trans. by Saskia Vogel (Jan. 24, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-55861-193-1). A woman takes care of a family of refugee children after their mother dies by suicide in Swedish writer Karams latest.

Graywolf

Im a Fan by Sheena Patel (Sept. 5, $17 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-64445-245-5) is told from the perspective of an unnamed young woman as she strikes up an unbalanced relationship with a powerful married man.

Grove

So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men by Claire Keegan (Nov. 14, $20, ISBN 978-0-8021-6085-0). The title story of this triptych on regret and secrets has already appeared in the New Yorker, which previously ran Keegans novella Foster.

Grove/Gay

Hot Springs Drive by Lindsay Hunter (Nov. 7, $27, ISBN 978-0-8021-6145-1) delves into themes of body issues and hunger in a tale of friendship and jealousy based on a real murder.

Harpervia

People Collide by Isle McElroy (Sept. 26, $28.99, ISBN 978-0-06-328375-6) follows up their hit debut, The Atmospherians, with a fantastical novel about a man who wakes up in his wifes body.

Hogarth

Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham (Jan. 23, $27, ISBN 978-0-593-44823-6). Theater critic Cunningham makes his fiction debut with a bildungsroman about a Black man working on an Obama-like senators presidential campaign.

Kensington

When the Jessamine Grows by Donna Everhart (Jan. 23, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-4967-4070-0). A North Carolina woman tries to keep her family out of the Civil War.

Knopf

Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri, trans. by the author and Todd Portnowitz (Oct. 10, $27, ISBN 978-0-593-53632-2). Originally written in Italian, Pulitzer winner Lahiris stories convey a series of perspectives on Italys capital from locals and tourists alike.

Wellness by Nathan Hill (Sept. 26, $30, ISBN 978-0-593-53611-7) centers on a married couple dealing with the 21st centurys rapid cultural changes 20 years after meeting in college in the 1990s.

Little, Brown

The Apology by Jimin Han (Aug. 1, $28, ISBN 978-0-316-36708-0) is a South Korean ghost story set over several decades of the countrys history. It features a late matriarch tasked in the afterlife with reversing her familys curse.

Liveright

The Pole by J.M. Coetzee (Sept. 19, $26, ISBN 978-1-324-09386-2). A journeyman Polish pianist attempts to seduce a wealthy Spanish patron of the arts in the Nobel Prize winners latest, which poses questions about the pairs shifting power dynamic.

Mariner

America Fantastica by Tim OBrien (Oct. 24, $32, ISBN 978-0-06-331850-2). The National Book Award winner returns to fictionafter the memoir Dads Maybe Bookwith a picaresque of a down-and-out journalist who commits a bank robbery and becomes a fugitive.

Morrow

The Leftover Woman by Jean Kwok (Oct. 10, $30, ISBN 978-0-06-303146-3). A mother travels from China to New York City to search for her daughter, who was taken away from her as a result of Chinas one-child policy.

New York Review Books

Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt (Sept. 19, $17.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-68137-781-0). British writer Boyt makes her U.S. debut with a novel about a woman who takes care of her granddaughter while her daughter deals with a drug addiction.

One World

The Golem of Brooklyn by Adam Mansbach (Sept. 26, $18 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-593-72982-3). The author of Go the F**k to Sleep returns to adult fiction with a tale of antifascists who reanimate a golem to help fight white supremacists after a rally in Charlottesville, Va., reminiscent of Unite the Right.

Overlook

The Men Cant Be Saved by Ben Purkert (Aug. 1, $26, ISBN 978-1-4197-6713-5) traces the rise, fall, and reinvention of a young copywriter for an ad agency, who, after he gets fired, burrows into the kabbalah and abuses prescription pills.

Pantheon

A House for Alice by Diana Evans (Sept. 12, $28, ISBN 978-0-593-70108-9) draws on the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire in London for an account of a British Nigerian family affected by the disaster.

Penguin Press

The Fraud by Zadie Smith (Sept. 5, $29, ISBN 978-0-525-55896-5) gathers a disparate set of characters in 1873 London for the trial of an Australian man accused of fraud.

The Wolves of Eternity by Karl Ove Knausgrd (Sept. 19, $35, ISBN 978-0-593-49083-9) takes another step away from My Struggle with a dual-timeline narrative involving a Norwegian man in the mid-1980s who wonders about his fathers identity and a woman working as a biologist in present-day Russia.

Random House

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Fall 2023 Adult Announcements: Literary Fiction - Publishers Weekly

Movie sequels are always an exciting venture, both for filmmakers and audiences. Studios often greenlight these follow-ups based solely on the financial potential, even if the previous installment failed to truly connect with viewers. After all, the first rule of Hollywood is to make money, so box office receipts often matter more than critic reviews or audience scores.

Some films underperform upon release but become cult classics years later after growing on the audience. These movies inspire studios to take another stab at the material. Other times, a mediocre entry from a franchise, even after stumbling at the box office, attempts to rise from the ashes and land a resurrection from producers who simply cannot bear the idea of letting go.

Related: 11 Movies That Were Expected to Be Huge Box Office Hits, but Bombed Instead

Either way, as you scroll through this list of box office bombs that were granted second chances, try to consider what exactly was it that drove studio executives to renew a failing formula. Perhaps it was blind optimism, a refusal to accept defeat. Or it was the magic of better marketing, a hope that next time, with more explosive trailers and fancy stunts, a dud could be reborn as a hit. Perhaps its simply the nostalgia of rebooting a once-beloved brand or characters that filmmakers want to play with. Whatever the motivation, these sequels showcase Hollywoods credo that in show business, no bomb is too big to ignore. These cinematic reincarnations of box office bombs remind us that a sequel, like any other story, lives or dies on the intangible heart, spirit, and the magic of meaning.

Starring Keanu Reeves as Kai, a devoted disciple, this action-adventure flick from 2013 tells the story of a band of samurai who seek revenge against the treacherous overlord who hurt their master, Lord Kira, and falsely banished them. Regardless of bringing feudal Japan to life with some jaw-dropping sets and true-to-picture costume design, the movie was a commercial flop.

As a half-Japanese-half-British outcast, Reeves' character was all about loyalty and honor as the band of warriors faced off against the enemy and ultimately pulled off an extensive plan to take down Lord Asano. Without a doubt, 47 Ronin had talent involved, but the movie still failed to capture hearts and box office success. A sequel, Blade of the 47 Ronin, was recently released on Netflix, resulting in another underrated movie with stylized cinematography and action scenes.

Donnie Darko is a cult classic if there ever was one, and yet fans are confused as to how they feel about to date. Richard Kelly's mind-bending debut follows the surreal journey of a troubled teenage boy named Donnie Darko, who sees visions of an ominous 6-foot rabbit named Frank. Frank warns Donnie that the world will end in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, and 12 seconds, and meanwhile, he oversees everybodys path to doom.

The movie meshes elements of sci-fi, horror, and dark comedy to create a psychological thriller that bombed upon release but found new life on DVD and VHS. Donnie Darko attracted a devoted fanbase for its brilliantly weird tone and themes of existentialism. Eventually spawning a directors cut and a much-maligned sequel, S. Darko, the original remains an underground treasure.

Way before CGI and extreme special effects dominated popcorn cinema, Disney made an attempt to bless the big screen with an imaginative feat of practical effects and storytelling. The aim was to whisk away the audience into a computer mainframe for an adventure of light cycles and matchbox-sized programs bringing the machine world to life. But unfortunately, the visual spectacle of Tron could not compete with an audience that was accustomed to Star Wars groundbreaking effects.

Despite a compelling storytelling involving a hero and an ally defeating a malevolent software, the movie received mixed reviews. It gradually (and deservedly) gained a following of tech enthusiasts and animation buffs who recognized how awesome it was for its time, keeping the film alive until the visually stunning sequel Tron: Legacy arrived nearly 30 years later, showing how even a box office dud can launch a successful franchise.

Not a rare example of a movie trying to outshine its predecessor, The Chronicles of Riddick is a sci-fi thriller that picked up the story of Vin Diesels antihero Riddick a decade later after the modest cult hit Pitch Black. Boasting a $105 million budget, elaborate production design, and expansive world-building, Chronicles also brought stars like Karl Urban, Thandiwe Newton, and Keith David into the mix.

While the movie aimed to increase the scope of the franchise, it stumbled to match mainstream audiences tastes. But because Vin Diesel and director David Twohy collectively thought to keep the crook-turned-reluctant-messiahs saga alive, they returned with another charming, sci-fi-bent film titled Riddick in 2013. This time, keeping the spending low, the franchise earned a place among the most unlikely and strangely satisfying sequel stories ever told.

Another modest entry starring Vin Diesel that put XXX on the map; it wasnt until the film franchise returned with Ice Cube taking up the role of a new agent Darius Stone sent to Washington D.C. to protect the President of the United States that fans finally gave up. Thanks to its turgid plot, tedious action sequences, and overall fading feeling of the narrative, XXX: State Of The Union's attempt at succeeding at the box office was a huge no-no.

That isnt to say director Lee Tamahori didnt try. There were elements of spy cynicism and political commentary, but there were subpar at best and ended up alienating all but the most diehard XXX fans. So, even though the State of the Union crashed and burned at the box office, Paramount refused to scrap this property. The result was XXX: Return of Xander Cage, a disastrous threequel that came years later.

As surprising as it seems today, the Coen Brothers' stoner comedy classic about "The Dude" and his White Russian-fueled bowls bowling adventures arrived dead at the box office, making a little over double its $15M budget. Yet through late night-night showings and word-of-mouth, Lebowski grew into a cultural phenomenon rivaling only a few other such feats. Besides, The Big Lebowski stars Jeff Bridges as the lead, who is considered one of the greatest actors of the generation.

The movie gave us countless catchphrases, costumes, and rituals that seemed to work in transforming the films lovable losers into self-styled heroes. Nearly two decades passed before rumors about a long-awaited sequel began swirling, and in 2019, the studio gave us The Jesus Rolls, which followed John Turturro's Jesus. Regardless of tapping a timeless vein of counter-culture cool, it seems like the movie is just another commercially failed comedy.

Related: The Big Lebowski: A Look Back at One of the Coen Brothers' Most Underrated Films

Starring Christopher Lambert as Connor Macleod, an ancient Scottish immortal warring through the centuries, Highlander bursts in through the doors as a very promising sword-swinging action adventure with a dash of fantasy. For the time, the narrative and the visuals were clearly fresh. While the B-movie tried taking itself to higher highest by using a legendary Queen soundtrack, neat visuals, and attractive leads, it still could not make up for the weak writing and uneven tone, and deadpan delivery.

The audiences were left cold, and they simply demoted Highlander to a bargain movie. However, in 1991, the studio decided to go big for some reason and dropped Highlander II: The Quickening, which again was a failure. Even after keeping the franchise with increasingly ridiculous sequels, comics, and TV shows, there never seemed to be an influx of Highlanders, showing that sometimes passion isnt enough to make an idea live through the years.

Irish twin brothers on a righteous crusade against Bostons underworld evildoers whats not to love? Boondock Saints introduced an unusual mix of dark comedy and vigilante justice featuring Norman Reedus and co-starring Sean Patrick Flannery and Willem Dafoe before any of them were too famous. But Troy Duffy's directorial debut flopped upon release. Whether it was the scattered plot or the rough technical aspects, the movie just could not break through on the commercial front, and it has since served mainly as a cautionary tale for indie filmmakers.

Yet, over a decade later, a poorly received sequel snuck out in the form of Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day. The movie upped its marketing game and managed to endure. The brothers, now retired, returned to Boston after being accused of murder, proving that maybe Boondock Saints' powders were still wet.

Wet Hot American Summer was a pitch-black satire of 80s camp movies that naturally became a belly flop of epic proportions. Propelling the careers of stars like Amy Poehler, Bradley Cooper, and Paul Rudd, the movie followed a group of counselors at a summer camp, filled with so much pent-up energy, impatiently waiting for the talent show to go well so they can all go home. It commits entirely to its silliness and humor, but watching it becomes a test of endurance.

But if the movie is popular at all, it is purely through the power of home video services because beneath the calamities was a genuinely sweet story that founds its audience a bit too late. In 2015, the messy magic returned with Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp, which proved to be more hilarious than the original. Honestly, it kinda grows on you.

Another example of a high-profile box office bomb that granted an unlikely sequel over two decades later, the Ivan Reitman sequel to the inaugural movie in the franchise that came out in 1989, was a weirder entry in the classic franchise. Fans thought Ghostbusters II otherwise essentially trod the same waters as the first, with the retired party returning for some fun-filled supernatural mission involving an ectoplasmic slime threat.

The movie was also followed up by another entry in 2016, chronicling the adventures of Abby, Erin, Jillian, and Patty as they try to stop an apocalypse in New York City. The comedy and spectacle had nothing to do with the franchise except a few references here and there, and the backlash only demonstrated how the reboot could have only ever succeeded had it followed the same trajectory as its original. Only recently, the comedic cast returned to grace viewers with nostalgia and a healthy mix of heart and humor with Ghostbusters: Afterlife as an unlikely sequel.

Often hailed as one of the greatest films ever made, it may come as a surprise to many that MGMs classic musical fantasy was initially dismissed as a box office bomb upon its release. Even though the cost of production was extremely high, The Wizard of Oz received indifferent reviews from critics. Plus, there was competition from 1940's Gone with the Wind, and the technical difficulties of making Ozs fantasy world come to life seemed to conspire against the movie at first.

It wasnt until after multiple TV earrings over decades that Oz came to capture the hearts of generation after generation. From its charming fable teaching morals to its iconic characters like the Cowardly Lion and the Wicked Witch, every aspect worked together to make it a timeless work of magic that has entertained audiences for over 80 years. The sequel, Return to Oz, took a darker tone but did nothing to diminish the formers appeal.

Related: The Wizard of Oz: The Real Story of the Famous Production

A midnight movie that graced the big screen decades before the term even existed, The Rocky Horror Picture Show was a campy musical parody of 1950s B-movies. The story revolves around a transvestite alien named Frank N Furter, who provides refuge to Brad and Janet on a stormy night. The movie seems very compelling to horror fans right now, but it failed spectacularly upon release, closing within a week of its premiere.

After goth became popular and counterculture rose in the following decade, Rocky Horror grew into an underground phenomenon. The audience would participate in rituals formed around the film's strange characters and sing along to Richard O'Briens campy songs. In 1981, Shock Treatment came out and followed Brad and Janet returning to their hometown and playing along with the folks in their reality television drama. Although odd, the sequel never diminished the inaugural movies glow.

Based on Rhode Islands beloved Hasbro toy franchise, this big-budget adaptation hoped to launch a billion-dollar movie universe just like Transformers. But alas, it disappointed both critics and fans with a bloated mess of nonsensical storytelling and one-dimensional characters. Despite having a star-studded cast led by Channing Tatum, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Sienna Miller, the film sputtered at the box office. It spelled only doom for G.I. Joe on the silver screen.

Yet, Hasbro held fast to their most prized military action figure property and remained undaunted by the failure of G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. It was determined to bring him back with bigger ambitions, and 2013's G.I. Joe: Retaliation was a strangely self-aware sequel that somehow managed to improve upon the first film. Where big brands and childhood icons joined hands, the name alone was enough to spark an interest.

Despite featuring a high-caliber cast including Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Kathy Najimy, this Halloween comedy about witch sisters wreaking havoc in Salem failed to cast a spell on audiences when it was released. Hocus Pocus may have become one of the greatest holiday fantasies now, gradually enchanting a new generation of kids who embrace it as a campy, feel-good staple.

Still, in 1993, the movie was a surprising bomb. Whether it was the infectious energy, Sarah Sanderson's iconic cackle, or the amusing nature of Midler's outrageous Winifred, the film continued to inspire everything from Halloween costumes to parodies. The box office dud was resurrected in 2022 with a sequel titled Hocus Pocus 2, which premiered on Disney+.

Probably the most famous box office bomb turned beloved classic, Its A Wonderful Life was Frank Capra's heartwarming Christmas tale that has served as an inspiration for audiences and filmmakers alike for almost eight decades. The movie follows a man named George Bailey, who is shown the value of his life by a guardian angel. Its philosophical nature and poignant themes of life failed to resonate with the public back then, but its repeated screenings on television earned the film a whole new life.

The audiences were captivated by its emotions, small-town charm, and profound message of cherishing life's simple joys and making every moment count. Whats more surprising is that Wonderful Life's overnight success decades later brought in a sequel. Unbeknownst to many, Clarence was told from the guardian angels perspective, and it follows almost the same storyline.

While the violently subversive sci-fi action of the original Robocop filled theaters with blood-soaked glee, RoboCop 2 threw its cyborg hero into a dystopian crime war in Detroit where hes supposed to save the day. The movies plot may seem wildly appealing, but the truth is that it bored the audience and flopped at the box office. Even for the most devoted fans, Robocop 2's racier R rating, larger body count, and over-the-top villains did nothing but represent a true adaptation of Frank Miller's graphic novels.

Action junkies do consider it a favorite and embrace its unfiltered excess, but the mainstream audiences always turn up their noses. The sequel that came out in 1993, RoboCop 3, also crashed, proving the sagas second life less commercially successful even after cranking up everything that would have made the original successful.

Related: RoboCop 2: Why Its One of the Best Sci-Fi Sequels of All Time

Nobody attempted to bring back this 1998 monster for over two decades. But the latest iteration in Warner Bros monster universe tried to pit Godzilla against Mothra, Rodan, and King Ghidorah. The movie, written and directed by Michael Dougherty, promised epic visual spectacle and a starry cast. And it delivered both, but the critics and audiences were both unfazed.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters had an unnecessarily long runtime and a convoluted plot that failed to match the simple fun of previous Godzilla outings. So much that it threatened to derail the franchises revival before it truly began. But for some moviegoers, the film's monster mayhem and jaw-dropping creature designs breathed new life into the classic kaiju, ensuring another cinematic showdown looming on the horizon. Godzilla vs. Kong was first delayed, but it did provide some action in the form of giants stomping cities and breathing fire.

Adapted from Mike Mignola's beloved graphic novel titled Dark Horse Comics, Guillermo del Toro's vision of a gruff, cigar-smoking demon who fights monsters for a secret government agency may have won over critics, but it surely failed to set the box office ablaze. There have long been fans of the character his mix of horror, humor, and engrossing pulp action.

And so, when Hellboyblended del Toro's inventive visual style and Ron Perlman's swaggering lead performance, the franchise made sure to stay back as an underrated fantasy. Way before the movie was even announced, del Toro was already preparing a sequel. The release was moved from 2006 to 2008, but Hellboy II: The Golden Army was again poorly received by the new generation. After all, the DIY spirit that sometimes powers the world of comic books does not suffice for a great franchise.

Narrowing it down to an honest opinion, some literary material simply resists the alchemy of moviemaking. And even though Ayn Rand's libertarian dystopian novel seems an unlikely candidate for a box office bomb-turned-sequel, writer-director Paul Johansson's passion project managed to bring the text-heavy volume to the screen. The movie seemed lazy in its obscurity and was harshly criticized for butchering Rand's complex themes.

Atlas Shrugged: Part I greatly disappointed fans of the novel, but its political allegory sparked enough controversy for a sequel to emerge the following year. Needless to say, Atlas Shrugged: Part II fared no better critically or commercially. This type of misguided persistence only reminds us that some box office bombs are less cinematic failures and more victims of their own dogma.

Ridley Scott's neo-noir sci-fi cult classic came out the same year as Tron. And it underperformed at the box office despite groundbreaking production design, sleek visuals, and a picture-perfect portrayal of a dystopian future. Rick Deckards mission to obliterate the army of androids and save the day was anchored by poor marketing and received with mixed criticism. Plus, there was also competition from blockbusters like E.T.

Naturally, Blade Runner was doomed commercially at first. But over time, its visionary world-building, thoughtful examination of what it means to be human and iconic performances by Harrison Ford and Rutger Hauer cemented its status as a science fiction masterpiece that influenced a genre and was imitated countless times. Thirty-five years later, a sequel, Blade Runner 2049, arrived to renewed interest and proved that some box office bombs are destined to become timeless hits.

Link:

20 Box Office Bombs That Got Sequels - MovieWeb

When I was a teenager, I went from being a devout Catholic to questioning all religion in the space of just under a year. Entering high school, I made some Jewish and Muslim friends. As I started to explore their belief systems, I couldnt help but think that the only reason I considered myself Catholic was that Id been raised by Catholic parents, not because Id done a rational survey of the major religious alternatives. Since I also knew that most of my peers hadnt done much more thinking than that, I became generally skeptical of religious belief.

I came to this conclusion because Id discovered a simple version of an argument thats been employed with great success by many critics of religion, from David Hume to Julia Sweeney.1 It works by pointing to the worlds vast diversity of religious belief as evidence that familiarity with ones own religious tradition doesnt rationally justify preferring it to the alternatives. These different religions cant all be true, so familiarity is no rational guide to the truth.

I know many who have had the courage to abandon religious belief when they too realized the provincialism of their own religious upbringing. I want to encourage them to take one more step. Too few secular people have thought to extend the same skeptical attitude toward another set of beliefs that is just as crucial to the way we live our lives, even though it is often packaged along with beliefs about deities. Im referring to our basic beliefs about moral values. Its time that more secular people decided to challenge the moral doctrines theyve absorbed from religion along with the rest of its theology.

We can choose whether or not to believe in God, but we have no choice about our need for some view about the universe if we are to navigate our way through it. The most scientific secularists reject a belief in the miraculous and adopt a naturalistic commitment to the law of causality, knowing that science relies on it to help uncover natures secrets. But should physicists use their knowledge to build an atom bomb for their government? Should biologists use their knowledge to clone human beings? Should political theorists use their knowledge to redistribute wealth to feed the worlds poor? In each case, its not enough to know the means to the end, the end itself needs to be evaluated. To navigate life, we need more than scientific principles of cause and effect; we also need scientific principles of ethics.

Many secular people who have thrown off the religion of their parents have scrutinized at least some of their most provincial beliefs about ethics. For instance, its likely that the Kinsey reports revelation of the diversity of sexual practices helped weaken the hold of conventional Christian doctrines in favor of chastity and against homosexuality. Its not an accident that as European cultures began to discover more about cultures around the world (and about their own ancient history), Enlightenment philosophers began to question traditional European moralities.

But sadly, this willingness to challenge traditional morality has not extended much further. Secular people will challenge the idea that God is the ultimate source of morality, but they are less clear about an alternative principle on which to base their ethics. Too often, it seems their moral views default to what they learned from a religious culture. For instance, those who reject a morality of chastity might still regard money-making as vicious on the principle that selflessness is a moral ideal. Yet that is the same ideal that Christians celebrate when they praise Christ for casting the money changers out of the temple and sacrificing himself on the cross. How confident are secular people that this is a doctrine they can neatly separate from the religious baggage usually associated with it?

We know that those who abandon religion dont automatically abandon everything they picked up from religion. How many ex-believers still feel crestfallen that they might never experience an afterlife? I did. We also know that there are powerful incentives to hold on to religious views when alternatives are not available. Prominently, people have to make life choices and need some code of values to guide them.

If so, we should fully expect that religious ethics should continue to hold sway even for ex-believers whove rejected other elements of religious doctrine.

Unfortunately, those searching for a truly secular ethical alternative will find that there are few prominent options. At least when we look to what prominent secular intellectuals have had to offer, I would argue that they themselves continue to be under the sway of religious ethics.

Some noteworthy critics of religion have lately made an attempt to offer secular alternatives in ethics. Admirably, New Atheist thinkers and other secular public intellectuals like Sam Harris and Michael Shermer have devoted significant attention to the question of how science can ground morality. But their approach amounts to looking for ways to reconcile most of our existing basic moral beliefs with science. A truly scientific approach does not seek reconciliation. Atheists dont reconcile the idea of God with science, they reject the idea. And yet even the most serious defenders of science arent up to radically rejecting our cultures morality.

The basic moral belief the New Atheists take from our culture is that morality consists in impartial rules that guide our behavior with others. In his recent book Rationality, Steven Pinker describes this as the idea that the perspective of an individual on his interests is morally irrelevant, the idea that any argument that privileges my well-being over yours or his or hers . . . is irrational. Its an idea that is not far from the ideal of selflessness at the heart of Christian ethics.

Pinker is not the only popular secularist to make the claim. Harris writes a whole book that turns on the assumption that we are not, by nature, impartial and much of our moral reasoning must be applied to situations in which there is tension between our concern for ourselves . . . and our sense that it would be better to be more committed to helping others.2 Likewise Shermers book on morality begins by invoking Peter Singers principle of impartial consideration of interests and goes on to quote Pinkers endorsement of the same.3

Whats interesting about Pinkers discussion of impartiality is the way he is self-conscious about the affinity between impartiality and Christian ethics. But rather than seeing this as a sign of parochial thinking about ethics, he presents that affinity as a strength. He suggests that variations of the impartial Golden Rule were independently discovered by Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Islam, Bah as well as by a multitude of philosophers (Spinoza, Kant, and Rawls among others). By portraying different religions as having made this independent discovery, Pinker implies that even unsophisticated mystics were in a position to observe some obvious fact that secular philosophers had otherwise studied more systematically.

This interpretation of the affinity is, frankly, ridiculous. For one thing, its not at all obvious that each of these religions would really agree to the same impartiality principle he has in mind.4 Even if they did, theres little reason to consider their views as based on independent discoveries. No social scientist would treat these as independent data, since we know they influenced each other (e.g., Judaism influenced both Christianity and Islam, Hinduism influenced Buddhism, etc.). Most importantly, Pinker gives no indication what rational methods these notably faith-based movements would have used or what facts they would have been observing to make their discoveries.

To a secular, scientifically minded thinker, the similarity between religious and contemporary secular moral views should generate at least some provisional skepticism. When we find out that most people in Poland have similar Catholic beliefs, we dont assume that they must have all independently discovered some facts about the local water supply that make Catholicism true. We ask what cultural forces affected this part of Europe, but not Belarus, to lead uncritical people to absorb one dogma rather than another. And if a Polish secular figure comes along who supports Catholic antipathy to homosexuality and abortion, most secularists would not likely sympathize with the idea that he and the Catholics have independently converged on the same independent facts.

Of course, its easy to criticize Polish parochialism from non-Polish soil. Its harder to see a blind spot that one shares with an entire intellectual culture that crisscrosses national boundaries. But theres reason to think the coalition of religions and secular viewpoints that Pinker mentions, while extensive, is not exhaustive. The moral doctrine of impartiality is far from being universally accepted in the long history of ethics. Pinker and other secularists who equate morality with impartiality completely ignore a major contrary data point: the entire moral philosophy of ancient Greece.

Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle founded the discipline of philosophical ethics and had an enormous influence on its history. Aristotle, for example, thought that the virtuous man is a lover of self or even selfish in some translations.5 He thinks that beneficence towards others is most praiseworthy when it is towards friends, friends being those one loves when they are like another self.6 There is nothing like the impartiality principle in his and other ancient Greek theories.7 On the contrary, all of the major thinkers in the ancient Greek tradition see a persons own eudaemonia (flourishing) as the end of ethics.

That the Greeks held this view doesnt mean they had the correct moral theory. But it does mean that we cant take the more modern view of impartiality, which various religions share with other more recent philosophers, as expressive of a transparently self-evident truth. Just as encountering rival religious beliefs should lead us to question our devotion to ours, recognizing that not just others but some of historys greatest philosophers had a different conception of ethics should cause a similar reckoning. Thats especially true when theres a decent chance that the secular philosophers who adopt this theory of impartiality actually got it from religion.

Sometimes scientists do vindicate ideas superficially similar to those first entertained by thinkers who lack scientific rigor. The atomic theory and the theory of evolution by natural selection both had predecessors in ancient Greece which had only a weak basis in the evidence. Far from being disqualified by this similarity, we think modern atomic and evolutionary theory are some of the best confirmed scientific theories available. But here its crucial that the modern theories are based on a wide array of converging well-substantiated evidence. What can be said for modern arguments in ethics?

We can find a dizzying array of such arguments in modern philosophy. Eminent philosophers like Immanuel Kant, Henry Sidgwick, John Rawls and Derek Parfit (among many others) all give laborious, abstruse arguments for their conceptions of morality as impartiality.8 We cant examine all of these in our limited space, but there are reasons to be skeptical that theres an unconditional need to survey the entire dizzying array if we are interested in finding a scientific account of morality.

When we examine the most influential philosophical arguments in ethics, we find that many of their most prominent advocates share the conviction that scientific evidence about natural facts is simply irrelevant to questions of value. Figures like Kant, Sidgwick, Rawls and Parfit all agree, in one way or another, with David Humes idea that scientific observations about what factually is the case have no logical relationship to what ethically ought to be practiced. This should raise red flags for the arguments they go on to offer: if theyre not scientific, fact-based arguments, what are they based on and why should secular people otherwise committed to scientific naturalism care about this alleged basis?

Much of the time, the arguments are said to rest on what the philosophers call intuitions. In one use of intuitions, the philosopher considers a series of artificial imaginary cases (say, one in which various runaway trolleys careen toward unsuspecting victims tied to the track) and their unfiltered reactions to them.9 Its thought that because intuitions are used in thought experiments which compare two cases with many variables held constant save for one crucial difference, they provide a test for various ethical theories.

But the method of intuitions is far from an approach that involves anything like the scientific method.10 A sign of this is how the reactions popular with Anglo-American philosophers turn out not to be the same as those of respondents from other cultures.11 One critic of philosophers reliance on intuitions notes that when intuitions conflict, theres no way to dismiss some as artifacts while holding others as authentic, not if we dont think there are observed facts that intuitions answer to. Its more likely that all of them are artifacts of our theoretical commitments, of what weve come to believe through education and socialization, etc.12 To repeat the lesson I learned in high school, familiarity is no rational guide to the truth.

Throwing up their hands about the unreliability of our intuitions about cases such as a runaway trolley, other philosophers propose that we should instead rely on our intuitions about very abstract principles (like about the rule of impartiality itself). But this ignores the centuries of Western philosophers who would have disagreed with these principles, let alone treated them as givens. Its a classic case of explaining the already obscure by the even more obscure. Here again, the point is not that ancient philosophers disprove the modern view. Its that if the modern view seems intuitive to many philosophers, it may stem from a parochial familiarity that is no rational guide to the truth.

READ ALSO: Effective Altruisms Faith-Based Sacrifice for the Future

An example of how a familiar-sounding principle may derive from something other than commitment to the truth can be seen in Kant. Pinker cites Kants idea of the categorical imperative as yet another instance of the doctrine of impartiality that Kant had independently discovered with the rest of its advocates: Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. But Pinker does not cite Kants own explanation for what Kant himself thinks explains the intuitiveness of his idea of impartiality. His explanation doesnt sound like a sincere attempt to put himself in touch with anything resembling reality. He thinks that when we act according to rules in which one has no personal interest, one is thereby acting with a will free of sensuous impulses [by which] he transfers himself in thought into an order of things entirely different from that of his desires in the field of sensibility. Kant thinks that only insofar as we are a noumenal being in a world beyond the senses do we have the true freedom of a rational being, whose dictates somehow provide the ground of the world of sense and therefore also the ground of its laws.13

Does that sound like scientific rationality, or overly verbose storytelling about how an immortal soul somehow channels divinely inspired commandments?

When we encounter arguments for conclusions like Kants, its worth keeping in mind a lesson from debates in theology. Before critically analyzing various arguments for the existence of God, religious skeptics will often point out that almost no one believes in God because they were first persuaded by the arguments. Most theists simply adopt the same beliefs as their parents or peers, which means that the arguments are almost without exception post hoc rationalizations of beliefs already held, as the atheist thinker A.C. Grayling, puts it.

Graylings point by itself doesnt vindicate atheism. But it does point to a reason to suspect the rationality of theistic arguments. Because of what we know about how most people form their religious views, we know that many have a motive to find excuses for beliefs theyd have held even if they had no evidence or arguments. And to the extent that secular moral ideas resemble religious ones, when we know their secular advocates were raised in a religious culture, we should have a similar suspicion that they are just offering an excuse for something they want to believe, not making some independent discovery on the basis of intuitive data. (As it happens, Kant was raised and educated in a particularly devout sect of Lutheranism.14)

When philosophers treat their hot takes on controversial cases or even controversial principles as though they were scientific data, and work to systematize or make coherent as many of their hot takes as possible, all without reference to actual observed facts, it really does look like post hoc rationalization of something they want to believe because its familiar. Thats more akin to theological speculation than it is to scientific discoveries, such as the atomic theory and the theory of evolution.

But, you may say, we have to make important life decisions and so weve got to start somewhere. So, we cant just throw out everything we believe about ethics and start afresh, like some kind of Cartesian skeptic practicing methodological doubt! We might not know where our intuitions come from, but theyre all weve got.

Its true we need moral guidance, but its not true that hot takes are all weve got to work with. Before the ancient Greek project of moral philosophy was interrupted by religions millennia of monopoly on ethics, the Greeks drew their theories from real observations, observations about human nature, about the impact that different choices have on our character and our lives. The very fact that we know we need to make choices is itself a crucial observation to take into account when formulating an ethics that can help guide those very choices.

Later Charles Darwin observed another fact that has important consequences for a modern scientific ethics: for living creatures, even slightly different courses of action can make a difference for whether they remain in existence or not (which explains why small mutations can make a difference for whether a species survives or goes extinct). This isnt the conventional pop-sci claim that our knowledge of morality itself is somehow a product of evolution. If that were true wed have no need to rethink it. Its the point that if were going to rethink it, we should do so knowing that the kind of person we become can make a life-or-death difference.

READ ALSO: The Old Morality of the New Religions

I think one can assemble quite a rationally defensible ethical code on the basis of observations like these. But dont take my word for it; continue your exploration of philosophical ethics by considering a few who make this case. Check out the modern-day thinkers who ground their ethics in naturalistic observations. You would do well to consider neo-Aristotelian thinkers like Philippa Foot and Michael Thompson who challenge Humes is-ought distinction and explore the important connection between biological requirements of survival and the nature of value. You would do even better to consider the work of Ayn Rand, who anticipated the Foot/Thompson point and integrated it with the fact that human beings live by reason and need guidance for the choices they make.

When I abandoned my parents religion as a teenager, I took quite seriously that my moral worldview was also a product of that same religion. For a period of time, I was thrown into something resembling Cartesian doubt about everything. But I knew I needed some kind of worldview to get by and my agnosticism did not last long, either about a godless reality or a rational morality. I encourage those who have taken the first step of challenging their belief in God to take the next step.

As Jefferson wrote to a young friend, fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.15 I want to add to that: question with boldness even the strictures of your morality. And if you value a homage to reason, the morality you abandon can be replaced by one that treats reason as our fundamental value, our guide to making the choices we need to remain in existence as human beings.

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Footnotes

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Religious Skeptics Should Question Their Moral Theology - New Ideal

We recently recognized Valentines Day: a holiday dedicated to amorous love.

While I spent the evening covering a campus fashion show for the Dartmouth Review all alone, Id like to share some of my favorite quotes from Ayn Rand on the subject. While Rand is perhaps most renowned for her political and moral philosophy, Objectivism constitutes a full philosophical system that includes a beautiful theory of love.

Many people conceive of love as unconditional and selfless. While this sounds sweet and wholesome prima facie, Rands fiction and philosophy reveal why this conception of love is far from the ideal. In Rands breakthrough 1943 novel, The Fountainhead, the protagonist (Howard Roark) issues one of the pithiest, most impactful and memorable lines in all of her fiction:

To say I love you one must know first how to say the I.

What does Roark mean by this? Love is not something that exists abstractly but as the union between two individuals. For this love to mean something, both individuals involved in the romance, a subspecies of the happy commerce of friendship, must have a robust sense of self. That is, each person must possess values independently and demonstrate the requisite virtues to achieve them. Love is not a substitute for self-esteem but a consequence thereof.

Hank Rearden, in Rands seminal 1957 tome Atlas Shrugged, expounds upon the role of romantic love in relation to ones highest values:

[Lovers] can be only travelers you choose to share your journey and must be travelers going on their own power in the same direction.

To lose oneself, i.e., ones values, virtues, and self-esteem, in the ecstasy of romance is to consign ones relationship to the same fate ones consigned his individuality: oblivion. Such is the natural and inexorable consequence of treating love as a substitute instead of a complement to the self.

The following line, uttered by Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, strikes many as antithetical to the widely accepted conception of love as sacrificial:

"I love you, Dominique. As selfishly as the fact that I exist. As selfishly as my lungs breathe air. I breathe for my own necessity, for the fuel of my body, for my survival. Ive given you, not my sacrifice or my pity, but my ego and my naked need.

To demonstrate the truthfulness of love as selfish, one can do a simple proof by contrapositive. In other words, is it true that the opposite of selfishness implies the opposite of love? I believe so. Imagine, if you will, your loved one informing you that they love you selflessly, i.e., they love you not for their survival, not out of their ego and naked need, but because they know you need them for your survival and out of your ego and naked need? I predict that you would be aghast by such an admission and properly regard their feelings towards you as altruistic and well-intentioned but not as love. It follows, then, that true love is a reflection of mutual selfish satisfaction that both partners derive from each others company.

Rand expounded upon her theory of love as selfish in a 1964 interview for a rather unlikely publication: Playboy.

It is for your own happiness that you need the person you love, Rand said, and that is the greatest compliment, the greatest tribute you can pay to that person.

So next year on February 14, a day dedicated to true love, I encourage you to express to your significant other that you love them as selfishly as [you] lungs breathe air.

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What Ayn Rand Understood about Romantic Love That so Many Fail ... - Foundation for Economic Education

James Minchin III/Paramount+

Yellowstone may have been shut out at the 2022 Emmys, but Paramount+s Western spinoff 1923 is hoping to break that cycle.

Creator Taylor Sheridan, who wrote the entire first season of the freshman series, has chosen to submit the premiere episode, titled 1923, for Emmy consideration, Variety can exclusively confirm. In addition, the same kickoff episode will serve as Ben Richardsons official submission for outstanding directing for a drama.

ReadVarietysAwards Circuit for the latest Emmy predictions in all categories.

The eight-episode prequel to Paramount Networks Yellowstone and sequel to Paramount+s 1883 follows a generation of the Dutton family during various hardships, including prohibition, drought and the early stages of the Great Depression.

With the star power of veteran actors Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren, the duo will be vying for the lead actor and lead actress drama prizes.

Ford, 80, has never received an Emmy nom and this year, could get two. The other is for his career-best performance as a senior therapist with Parkinsons disease in Shrinking from Apple TV, which hes submitted for supporting comedy actor.

Mirren, on the other hand, has been an Emmy darling going back to her recognition for Prime Suspect in 1996 and her return to the character in 2007, with two other wins in between for The Passion of Ayn Rand in 1999 and Elizabeth I in 2006. Mirren is also wickedly close to achieving EGOT status after winning best actress for The Queen (2006) and a Tony Award in 2015 for The Audience. All that is needed is a Grammy prize (spoken word album incoming?).

In addition, the network has opted to submit an onslaught of supporting players.

Supporting drama actor will have Timothy Dalton, Brandon Sklenar, Darren Mann, Jerome Flynn, Brian Geraghty, Sebastian Roch and Robert Patrick up for consideration, while supporting drama actress hopes to include Aminah Nieves, Julia Schlaepfer, Michelle Randolph, Jennifer Ehle and Marley Shelton.

Paramount announced a second season in February after the show became a hit as the most-watched Paramount+ premiere of all time in the U.S., with 7.4 million viewers. It also received positive reviews, withVarietycritic Joshua Alstonwriting that Mirren and Ford both 80-ish, neither a stranger to action badassery make for such a potent pairing, their chemistry alone is enough to make 1923 feel like an elevated version of Sheridans neo-Western fare.

Emmy voting begins on June 15.

1923 Emmy Submissions

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1923 Emmy Submissions Revealed for Harrison Ford, Helen Mirren and More (EXCLUSIVE) - Variety

Ayn Rand is my hero, yet another student tells me during office hours. Her writings freed me. They taught me to rely on no one but myself.

As I look at the freshly scrubbed and very young face across my desk, I find myself wondering why Rands popularity among the young continues to grow. Thirty years after her death, her book sales still number in the hundreds of thousands annually having tripled since the 2008 economic meltdown. Among her devotees are highly influential celebrities, such as Brad Pitt and Eva Mendes, and politicos, such as current Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz.

The core of Rands philosophy which also constitutes the overarching theme of her novels is that unfettered self-interest is good and altruism is destructive. This, she believed, is the ultimate expression of human nature, the guiding principle by which one ought to live ones life. In Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, Rand put it this way:

Collectivism is the tribal premise of primordial savages who, unable to conceive of individual rights, believed that the tribe is a supreme, omnipotent ruler, that it owns the lives of its members and may sacrifice them whenever it pleases.

By this logic, religious and political controls that hinder individuals from pursuing self-interest should be removed. (It is perhaps worth noting here that the initial sex scene between the protagonists of Rands book The Fountainhead is a rape in which she fought like an animal.)

WATCH: Why do the rich get richer? French economist Piketty takes on inequality in Capital

The fly in the ointment of Rands philosophical objectivism is the plain fact that humans have a tendency to cooperate and to look out for each other, as noted by many anthropologists who study hunter-gatherers. These prosocial tendencies were problematic for Rand, because such behavior obviously mitigates against natural self-interest and therefore should not exist. She resolved this contradiction by claiming that humans are born as tabula rasa, a blank slate, (as many of her time believed) and prosocial tendencies, particularly altruism, are diseases imposed on us by society, insidious lies that cause us to betray biological reality. For example, in her journal entry dated May 9, 1934, Rand mused:

For instance, when discussing the social instinct does it matter whether it had existed in the early savages? Supposing men were born social (and even that is a question) does it mean that they have to remain so? If man started as a social animal isnt all progress and civilization directed toward making him an individual? Isnt that the only possible progress? If men are the highest of animals, isnt man the next step?

The hero of her most popular novel, Atlas Shrugged, personifies this highest of animals: John Galt is a ruthless captain of industry who struggles against stifling government regulations that stand in the way of commerce and profit. In a revolt, he and other captains of industry each close down production of their factories, bringing the world economy to its knees. You need us more than we need you is their message.

To many of Rands readers, a philosophy of supreme self-reliance devoted to the pursuit of supreme self-interest appears to be an idealized version of core American ideals: freedom from tyranny, hard work and individualism. It promises a better world if people are simply allowed to pursue their own self-interest without regard to the impact of their actions on others. After all, others are simply pursuing their own self-interest as well.

So what if people behaved according to Rands philosophy of objectivism? What if we indeed allowed ourselves to be blinded to all but our own self-interest?

Modern economic theory is based on exactly these principles. A rational agent is defined as an individual who is self-interested. A market is a collection of such rational agents, each of whom is also self-interested. Fairness does not enter into it. In a recent Planet Money episode, David Blanchflower, a Dartmouth professor of economics and former member of the Central Bank of England, laughed out loud when one of the hosts asked, Is that fair?

Economics is not about fairness, he said. Im not going there.

Economists alternately find alarming and amusing a large body of results from experimental studies showing that people dont behave according to the tenets of rational choice theory. We are far more cooperative and willing to trust than is predicted by the theory, and we retaliate vehemently when others behave selfishly. In fact, we are willing to pay a penalty for an opportunity to punish people who appear to be breaking implicit rules of fairness in economic transactions.

So what if people behaved according to Rands philosophy of objectivism? What if we indeed allowed ourselves to be blinded to all but our own self-interest?

In 2008, Sears CEO Eddie Lampert decided to restructure the company according to Rands principles.

Lampert broke the company into more than 30 individual units, each with its own management and each measured separately for profit and loss. The idea was to promote competition among the units, which Lampert assumed would lead to higher profits. Instead, this is what happened, as described by Mina Kimes, a reporter for Bloomberg Business:

An outspoken advocate of free-market economics and fan of the novelist Ayn Rand, he created the model because he expected the invisible hand of the market to drive better results. If the companys leaders were told to act selfishly, he argued, they would run their divisions in a rational manner, boosting overall performance.

Instead, the divisions turned against each other and Sears and Kmart, the overarching brands, suffered. Interviews with more than 40 former executives, many of whom sat at the highest levels of the company, paint a picture of a business thats ravaged by infighting as its divisions battle over fewer resources.

A close-up of the debacle was described by Lynn Stuart Parramore in a Salon article from 2013:

It got crazy. Executives started undermining other units because they knew their bonuses were tied to individual unit performance. They began to focus solely on the economic performance of their unit at the expense of the overall Sears brand.One unit, Kenmore, started selling the products of other companies and placed them more prominently than Sears own products. Units competed for ad space in Sears circularsUnits were no longer incentivized to make sacrifices, like offering discounts, to get shoppers into the store.

Sears became a miserable place to work, rife with infighting and screaming matches. Employees, focused solely on making money in their own unit, ceased to have any loyalty to the company or stake in its survival.

We all know the end of the story: Sears share prices fell, and the company appears to be headed toward bankruptcy. The moral of the story, in Parramores words:

What Lampert failed to see is that humans actually have a natural inclination to work for the mutual benefit of an organization. They like to cooperate and collaborate, and they often work more productively when they have shared goals. Take all of that away and you create a company that will destroy itself.

In 2009, Honduras experienced a coup dtat when the Honduran Army ousted President Manuel Zelaya on orders from the Honduran Supreme Court. What followed was succinctly summarized by Honduran attorney Oscar Cruz:

The coup in 2009 unleashed the voracity of the groups with real power in this country. It gave them free reins to take over everything. They started to reform the Constitution and many laws the ZEDE comes in this context and they made the Constitution into a tool for them to get rich.

As part of this process, the Honduran government passed a law in 2013 that created autonomous free-trade zones that are governed by corporations instead of the countries in which they exist. So what was the outcome? Writer Edwin Lyngar described vacationing in Honduras in 2015, an experience that turned him from Ayn Rand supporter to Ayn Rand debunker. In his words:

The greatest examples of libertarianism in action are the hundreds of men, women and children standing alongside the roads all over Honduras.The government wont fix the roads, so these desperate entrepreneurs fill in potholes with shovels of dirt or debris. They then stand next to the filled-in pothole soliciting tips from grateful motorists. That is the wet dream of libertarian private sector innovation.

He described the living conditions this way:

On the mainland, there are two kinds of neighborhoods, slums that seem to go on forever and middle-class neighborhoods where every house is its own citadel.In San Pedro Sula, most houses are surrounded by high stone walls topped with either concertina wire or electric fence at the top. As I strolled past these castle-like fortifications, all I could think about was how great this city would be during a zombie apocalypse.

Without collective effort, large infrastructure projects like road construction and repair languish. A resident pointed out a place for a new airport that could be the biggest in Central America, if only it could get built, but there is no private sector upside.

A trip to a local pizzeria was described this way:

We walked through the gated walls and past a man in casual slacks with a pistol belt slung haphazardly around his waist. Welcome to an Ayn Rand libertarian paradise, where your extra-large pepperoni pizza must also have an armed guard.

This is the inevitable outcome of unbridled self-interest set loose in unregulated markets.

Yet devotees of Ayn Rand still argue that unregulated self-interest is the American way, that government interference stifles individualism and free trade. One wonders whether these same people would champion the idea of removing all umpires and referees from sporting events. What would mixed martial arts or football or rugby be like, one wonders, without those pesky referees constantly getting in the way of competition and self-interest?

READ: Libertarian Charles Murray: The welfare state has denuded our civic culture

Perhaps another way to look at this is to ask why our species of hominid is the only one still in existence on the planet, despite there having been many other hominid species during the course of our own evolution. One explanation is that we were cleverer, more ruthless and more competitive than those who went extinct. But anthropological archaeology tells a different story. Our very survival as a species depended on cooperation, and humans excel at cooperative effort. Rather than keeping knowledge, skills and goods ourselves, early humans exchanged them freely across cultural groups.

When people behave in ways that violate the axioms of rational choice, they are not behaving foolishly. They are giving researchers a glimpse of the prosocial tendencies that made it possible for our species to survive and thrive then and today.

Editors note: This post has been updated to correct a previous statement that Sears went bankrupt. It has been updated to reflect that the retailer appears to be heading towards bankruptcy, as the companys earnings and share prices plummet.

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Column: This is what happens when you take Ayn Rand seriously

Ayn Rand on the set of The Today Show, 1961. Photo by Getty Images

By Dan FriedmanApril 4, 2023

Living upstate and away from her people at the onset of the pandemic, Alissa Quartfound community in a Passover zoom Seder. In the face of a contemporary plague, finding thoughtful company to discuss ancient and modern hardships was a natural move for a Jewish social justice crusader. After all, no one wants to face unforeseeable calamities alone.

In her new book, Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream, Quart lays bare the laughable linguistic roots of the term bootstrapped and its dangerous contemporary sociological ramifications. It may originally have been coined to show that, just like blowing your own sails, lifting yourself up by your bootstraps is actually impossible. But today the myth of the self-made man is twisted through modern society, feeding off the American Dream and scorning everything thats not self-reliance.

Part of the reason that Jews, more than any other ethnic group, continue to vote for Democrats, is that one of our decisive annual ceremonies is the Passover Seder. During the recounting of that story of the Exodus, Jews of all stripes are reminded that they began as slaves, became immigrants alongside a crowd of non-Jews (the Erev Rav), and narrowly escaped death in the wilderness only to be feared as foreigners in the Promised Land which their leader cannot enter because of his own hubris.

In terms of both theme and diet, Passover sets a tone for a community. It is no season to be puffed up about ones own singular achievement. Even the feast itself is a celebration of the group coming together to achieve a communal gathering. Traditionally, though presented as a group undertaking, the preparations are overshadowed by the noisy Seder itself. The feast, the cleaning of the home and the exorcism of any leavened products has been a task taken for granted and performed laboriously, by women.

These types of domestic labor along with other forms of privilege are exactly the things that Quart accuses Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson of erasing from their accounts of their own ideas of self reliance. She skewers their pomposity in ignoring the role of wealth, gender, race, inherited property and a whole cache of related opportunities. Indeed, she connects some compelling dots between the storytelling of the transcendentalists that she had so admired as an English major and the pernicious parable of the deserving rich.

These admired writers from history lying or providing cover for a broken society feels like a particular betrayal for Quart a poet, journalist and author of such books as Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers and Squeezed: Why Our Families Cant Afford America. As the executive director of the not-for-profit Economic Hardship Reporting Project, she is in particular touch with the types of erased, obscured and ignored stories of Americans living in precarity. And, in Bootstrapped, she explains the history of the American myth of self-reliance and how it endangers tens of millions of Americans today.

Her implication is that whatever the good intentions of people in the C-suite may be, they are fighting against a myth bent on rewarding the personally lucky and the historically privileged. Noting that over $625 million had been raised for health care through GoFundMe, Quart quotes its former CEO Rob Solomon saying that We werent ever set up to be a health-care company and we still are not.

However, in 2016, while he was still CEO, Solomon wrote about the mission of GoFundMe as a type of tikkun olam that each person should work towards making the lives of others and those of future generations better through acts of loving kindness. His motive seems genuine and aligned with GoFundMes mission, but Quarts point is that even the millions of dollar bills it raises are little more than Band-Aids. To her mind, and mine, it is an admission of gross social failure when tens of thousands of people in the richest society the world has ever known need to turn to a private fundraising company to raise cash for emergency medical procedures.

Fascinatingly, after Emerson and Thoreau, Quart presents Alisa Rosenbaum as the key proponent of American solipsism. Better known as Ayn Rand, Rosenbaums novels are the most widespread modern source of the brutal social myth that I am not my brothers keeper. It is fascinating to speculate on how a Russian-Jewish immigrant like her, whose success was so dependent on family, education and Hollywood networking was able to focus and amplify such a gospel of privilege.

It may be that it was precisely the elements of dependency that Rosenbaum wanted to escape. Perhaps for Rosenbaum and other self-proclaimed self-made Americans, shame and disgust come from the feeling of owing your success to the others who have built the roads, the lines of communication and the freedom for Jewish women to publish fiction.

In her bestselling novel The Fountainhead, Rosenbaum hides her name, heritage and gender as author. And, tellingly, her protagonist and stand-in Howard Roark is a healthy, young, white, male atheist with no minority affiliations. She even chooses a nom-de-plume that means nothing in Hebrew to demonstrate her absolute lack of connection to what comes before. Quart notes that, as Rosenbaums luck faded and she needed the help she had not while riding her wave of health and fortune, so in absolute contradiction to the values she spent her life peddling, Rand turned to Social Security there are freedom of information act documents that confirm she received the assistance.

Rands story is a particular case of disavowal, but Quart is thinking about the general psychological attraction of the bootstrapping myth to a broader audience and quotes theorist Jacqueline Rose saying that motherhood is the ultimate scapegoat for our personal and political failings, for everything that is wrong with the world. The myth of self-making is not only systemically misguided and injurious but also one that cuts at the heart of the family. Perhaps too, the strength of the myth of the Yiddishe Mama in the Ashkenazi community has inoculated American Jewry somewhat from the inherent social disavowal of the mother as part of the American Dream.

A significant part of the book, though, is not spent in critique. Quart is committed, both literarily and professionally, to describing how things can be made better. She goes deeply into the myth and the system it has helped to build, but she makes real concrete policy suggestions which lie beyond the scope of this essay, though readers should feel free to discuss their merits over the Seder Table. In Bootstrapped, Quart does not just ridicule the idea of raising a society up by its bootstraps but presents ways like cooperatives, collectives and mutual aid societies by which we might indeed raise our standard of living. After all, theres no point in critiquing Pharaoh if you dont actually have a plan of how to reach the promised land.

See the article here:

How Ayn Rand, Emerson and Thoreau perverted the American Dream