Ayn Rand, Orwell & Privacy
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Former House member and occasional friend to libertartianism (and gays) Bob Barr:
The dystopic vision of the villains of The Fountainhead was cultural in nature: one might call it "compulsory humility." But Roark's apartment wasn't bugged.
Atlas Shrugged, meanwhile, was mostly about the tyranny of economic regulation and the implausibility of reconciling central planning with the Politics of Pull and the Politics of the Warm Fuzzy Feeling -- with Project X thrown in for flavor. But other than a passing reference to the government tracking down all the men named "John Galt" after the Speech, I can't think of any "Orwellian" scenes in the book. No one's spying on Dagny or monitoring Rearden's every movement.
The other works of fiction also present villains and ignoble societies in various ways, but "privacy abuses" were simply not major, or even minor, components of her plots. Nothing distinctly "anti-privacy" jumps out.
Of course Rand would have stood aghast at our eroding privacy rights in the wake of the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. But it was simply not an agenda item for her. In this I think Barr is overreaching.
Am I fogetting something? Any acolytes care to chime in?
(Via LP Blog.)
Whether in Bentham's world, or Plato's or Orwell's, the central task is to modify behavior by convincing people that the government -- that entity with power over their lives -- may be watching them all the time or at any particular time. As 20th-century American philosopher and advocate of personal freedom Ayn Rand noted, taking away a person's privacy renders to the government the ability to control absolutely that person.Praiseworthy commentary to be sure, but I have one minor question: Where did Ayn Rand ever rail against privacy abuses?
The dystopic vision of the villains of The Fountainhead was cultural in nature: one might call it "compulsory humility." But Roark's apartment wasn't bugged.
Atlas Shrugged, meanwhile, was mostly about the tyranny of economic regulation and the implausibility of reconciling central planning with the Politics of Pull and the Politics of the Warm Fuzzy Feeling -- with Project X thrown in for flavor. But other than a passing reference to the government tracking down all the men named "John Galt" after the Speech, I can't think of any "Orwellian" scenes in the book. No one's spying on Dagny or monitoring Rearden's every movement.
The other works of fiction also present villains and ignoble societies in various ways, but "privacy abuses" were simply not major, or even minor, components of her plots. Nothing distinctly "anti-privacy" jumps out.
Of course Rand would have stood aghast at our eroding privacy rights in the wake of the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. But it was simply not an agenda item for her. In this I think Barr is overreaching.
Am I fogetting something? Any acolytes care to chime in?
(Via LP Blog.)
Posted by Kip on
12 August 2007
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