Reviews for All about you

The average rating for All about you based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-01-22 00:00:00 Jalbert Levesque This fascinating book reinforces an observation I have made over the years: that the ideas of individuals once institutionalized, become perverted and reinvented by those who claim to be the authentic followers of the guru who invented them. Certainly this is true of most religious leaders from Christ to Joseph Smith. It is happening to Robert Greenleaf, and it certainly happened to Ayn Rand, although in the case of the latter she may have had a hand in encouraging the transformation and idolatry. Heresy and orthodoxy become important concepts once ideas have been codified and institutionalized: anyone with the temerity to suggest revisions or alternatives becomes a heretic and traitor. (Interestingly, the word traitor has religious roots. It comes from a Latin word meaning "handers-over," those Christians who obeyed the Diocletian order to hand over the Scriptures so they could be destroyed. Whether these traditores could receive communion again caused a major schism in the church. Of course one has to belong to an organization and to believe its basic tenets in order to be heretical or a traitor. Hence the difference between heretic and infidel.) Walker is no fan, but I think he makes the same error Philip Johnson did in his attack on intellectuals, condemning their philosophies because they were unable personally to live a blameless life. Walker denounces Rand because the did not often live the life she expounded in her books and he blames her for the iconographic adoration of her adolescent followers. Walker insists that only adolescents looking for a philosophical underpinning were susceptible to her beliefs, perhaps a questionable assumption, but one difficult to challenge given a paucity of data. More to the point he criticizes her for being essentially a derivative thinker (haven't most philosophers derived or based their thinking on the work of others?) and he says her books have little literary value. Ayn Rand, according to virtually everyone who knew her, was charismatic and unconflicted in her beliefs and that alone attracted many, often the young, to her. If she had a major flaw, it was her adoption of an orthodox position that considered views other than hers to be "unreasonable" and "unobjective," and to prevent the movement from developing its own orthodoxy. There is an apparently inherent contradiction between her celebration of individualism and self-reliance and the Objectivist movement itself, but that is in the nature of all movements and perhaps a great reason to avoid them, be they religious or philosophical. Ayn Rand's heroes were the antithesis of followers, but I suspect that humans are biologically programmed to want to adhere to groups and to define themselves by that group, and to identify too closely with the set of beliefs, the orthodoxy of the group, and to want to exclude and brand as heretics those who refuse to adhere to the group's principles. It's true of the religious right and the radical left. The irony is that most movements eventually become so enamored of the trappings of their orthodoxy that they lose sight of the original beliefs of the founder, in fact, they often become irrelevant. But that's why we have libraries, to help everyone challenge their assumptions. Clearly, the book is a vindictive, personal attack that will be ignored by Objectivists (who should read it, if only for the discussions of orthodoxy and heresy) and lauded by those who can't stand Rand. I found it a lively, if shrill, examination of the history of a movement founded by a passionate, if personally flawed, individual who, rightly or wrongly, has influenced a large number of people through a body of interesting novels; an examination of a movement to came to practice the opposite of the principles its leader espoused. **I know "their" is incorrect here, but it seems a nice gender-neutral compromise, surely much better than his/her or just "her" or "his", so I think it's time for the English orthodox police (of which I am one when reading my kids' stuff) to admit this use of "their." minor corrections 1/15/10

Review # 2 was written on 2015-01-24 00:00:00 Debbie Ukarish Ayn Rand was an idiot. But anyone who takes her seriously is a bigger idiot.