“So long as we have not yet reached the state of censorship of ideas,” she once said, “one does not have to leave a society in the way the characters did in Atlas Shrugged. . . . But you know what one does have to do? One has to break relationships with the culture. . . . [D]iscard all the ideas—the entire cultural philosophy which is dominant today.”Thoughts on that?
Economics is often used in literary studies, but rarely free market economics. Austrian economics, with its emphasis on subjective value (Menger), human action (Mises), spontaneous order and knowledge (Hayek), and entrepreneurship (Kirzner), seems a particularly fruitful source of ideas for literary studies.
Thursday, November 3, 2011
Atlas Shrugged
A nice little piece on Atlas Shrugged. Of note:
Not only do I believe it, I've done it. (Evidence on my blog, but I guess that's a cheap plug.)
ReplyDeleteIf an entire culture is leading you in the wrong direction, the only sensible thing to do is to march in the opposite one.
Maybe it's just me, but I've always figured that if everyone is going North, it's time to go South. Part of that is the entrepreneur in me: You can't make the highest profit by doing what everyone else is doing, you have to innovate.
But the other part of it is one of the best aphorisms I have ever heard: "Truth isn't a popularity contest."