Re:How the West Got China Wrong
by soundwave106 on Friday March 02, 2018 @11:12AM
(#16502712)
Yeah, to clarify, the review is more implying naivety than straightforward advocacy. As in, the review believes Rand is "calling for an aristocracy of talents". But in the real modern world, this is a naive viewpoint, and "the impulse toward aristocracy always emerges now in the form of dictatorship."
The naivete ultimately comes from the failure to define "talent." The talent that yields advancement (in nearly any large scale society, not just capitalism) is often deception and primate dominance gestures. An aristocracy of talents becomes an aristocracy of narcissists and sociopaths.
Rand's heroes all look like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. People like that are notable because they are rare. Most of the ultra-wealthy more closely resemble Rand's villains.
Real creators are too busy creating to play the kind of dominance games that most often lead to political and business success. You can succeed by creating, but doing so is many orders of magnitude harder than succeeding through manipulation and so you get a smaller pool of people who can pull it off.
I sometimes compare Rand to Marx. Both were very astute critics -- Marx of capitalism and Rand of socialism/communism. Unfortunately neither had practical ideas of what to do about it. Both advocated some version of "put certain ideas into practice and then (magic happens here) and then the evil state withers away." The magic is what doesn't happen. We're now able to see that the real world endpoint of communism is mafia rule and that the real world endpoint of capitalism is techno-feudalism.