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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
26 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Prophetic and accurate analyses,
By
This review is from: The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (Paperback)
In these essays from the 1960s and early 1970s, Ayn Rand identifies the underlying nihilism of the Left and the student movement of the time. Already back then, she warned of the toxic influence of the left and pointed out that the intellectual battle does not consist of opposing, denouncing or evading, but of exposing and disproving evil ideas and proclaiming a consistent alternative to the left's bankrupt philosophy.
In the essay Apollo and Dionysus, she compares the 1 million people that converged on Cape Kennedy on July 16, 1969 to witness the launch of Apollo 11 with the 300 000 that gathered at Woodstock on August 15 that year. Rand explores these events in the light of Nietzsche's metaphysical principles of reason and emotion as observed in Greek theatre. Whilst denying that reason and emotion are irreconcilable antagonists, she shows how the media virtually ignored the one event while blowing the significance of the other out of all proportion. On the one hand, decent people were sharing an event of great achievement and on the other, self-indulgent hedonists behaving like pigs. As she explains so eloquently, it is irrational emotions that drag people down into the mud, and it is reason that lifts us up to the stars. In the essay The Left: Old And New, Rand predicted that the issue of the environment would be the next big crusade of the Leftists, after Vietnam. In this, as on so many other issues, she was correct and we still have the EnviroNuts with us and they are shriller than ever before with their self-serving tooth fairy tales of global warming. The short essay "Political Crimes" looks at the dangerous notion that there could be a distinction between political and non-political criminals. Crime is a violation of the rights of others by force of fraud, thus there is no such thing as a political crime. The essay The Chicken's Homecoming discusses the results of promulgating doctrines like Pragmatism, Logical Positivism and Linguistic Analysis, and how these doctrines disarmed the best and unleashed the nihilists. In this regard, see The Anti-Chomsky Reader, edited by David Horowitz and Peter Collier. The Age Of Envy is one of the very best in this collection. In it, Rand claims that the Age of Reason and the Age of Enlightenment had been followed by ours, the Age of Envy. She takes envy to mean: The hatred of the good for being the good. Here too, she nails down the left, old and new, with keen insight and prescience. She demonstrates how the appeasement of evil has been an undertow of mankind's cultural stream down the ages. The Comprachicos is the disturbing essay that concludes the collection. It warns against the hijacking of the minds of children and students by the leftist, collectivist educational establishment. This even more true now than it was then: the modern seats of leftism are the universities and the Old Media which Rand exposes throughout the book. To show how right Ayn Rand has been, I highly recommend the following books: The New Thought Police and The Death Of Right And Wrong by Tammy Bruce, Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Unholy Alliance by David Horowitz, treason by Ann Coulter and Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild by Michelle Malkin.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Prophetic and prescient,
By
This review is from: The New Left. The anti-industrial revolution (Mass Market Paperback)
In these essays from the 1960s and early 1970s, Ayn Rand identifies the underlying nihilism of the Left and the destructive student movement of the time. Already back then, she warned of the toxic influence of the left and pointed out that the intellectual battle does not consist of opposing, denouncing or evading, but of exposing and disproving evil ideas and proclaiming a consistent alternative to the left's bankrupt philosophy.
In the essay Apollo and Dionysus, she compares the 1 million people that converged on Cape Kennedy on July 16, 1969 to witness the launch of Apollo 11 with the 300 000 that gathered at Woodstock on August 15 that year. Rand explores these events in the light of Nietzsche's metaphysical principles of reason and emotion as observed in Greek theatre. Whilst denying that reason and emotion are irreconcilable antagonists, she shows how the media virtually ignored the one event while blowing the significance of the other out of all proportion. On the one hand, decent people were sharing an event of great achievement and on the other, self-indulgent hedonists were behaving like pigs. As she explains so eloquently, it is irrational emotions that drag people down into the mud, and it is reason that lifts us up to the stars. In the essay The Left: Old And New, Rand predicted that the issue of the environment would be the next big crusade of the Leftists, after Vietnam. In this, as on so many other issues, she was correct and we still have the EnviroNuts with us and they are shriller than ever before with their self-serving fairy tales of global warming/climate change. The short essay "Political Crimes" looks at the dangerous notion that there could be a distinction between political and non-political criminals. Crime is a violation of the rights of others by force of fraud, thus there is no such thing as a political crime. The essay The Chicken's Homecoming discusses the results of promulgating doctrines like Pragmatism, Logical Positivism and Linguistic Analysis, and how these doctrines disarmed the best and unleashed the nihilists. In this regard, see The Anti-Chomsky Reader, edited by David Horowitz and Peter Collier. The Age Of Envy is one of the very best essays in this collection. In it, Rand claims that the Age of Reason and the Age of Enlightenment had been followed by ours, the Age of Envy. She takes envy to mean: The hatred of the good for being the good. Here too, she nails down the left, old and new, with keen insight and prescience. She demonstrates how the appeasement of evil has been an undertow of mankind's cultural stream down the ages. The Comprachicos is the disturbing concludingessay. It warns against the hijacking of the minds of children and students by the leftist, collectivist educational establishment. This is even more true now than it was then: the modern seats of leftism are the universities and the Old Media which Rand exposes throughout the book. See The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America by David Horowitz. To show how right Ayn Rand has been, I highly recommend the following books: The New Thought Police: Inside the Left's Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds and The Death Of Right And Wrong by Tammy Bruce, Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left by David Horowitz, Treason by Ann Coulter and Unhinged by Michelle Malkin. Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey
17 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Didn't Know Enough To Come In Out Of The Rain,
By J. Reynolds (Houston, TX United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (Paperback)
The star of this book is Rand's essay "Apollo and Dionysus," a comparison of the near-simultaneous events Woodstock and the first lunar landing. I was in high school at the time, and I remember the Woodstock explosion that occurred during the school year following the August concert, the remarkable number of classmates who adopted the hippie lifestyle and pretty much stopped doing any work whatever. One guy who'd been a valedictory prospect dropped right off the academic radar, probably due to drugs. Rand's suggestion that Woodstock represented an abandonment of reason is supported by on-scene reports of concert-goers who simply showed up with the clothes on their backs -- no plans for food, water, lodgings or anything, and the fact that concert organizers also neglected such essential considerations. The Woodstock army completely trashed the place, ending up wallowing in a big muddy mess while standing stupidly outside in the rain.On the other hand, the lunar mission was a sterling example of human achievement driven by rationality, the culmination of the application of brainpower to a problem, and the success which resulted therefrom. Oh certainly, Rand drew (and draws) a lot of fire, but she was absolutely correct in her belief that upgrades of our human condition will only be developed by people who think and act, and not by herds of hippies standing in the rain.
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