http://www.slate.com/id/2233966/
I have had a few people I know get into Ayn Rand, which I consider a sign of their mental and emotional weakness. I am not kidding and I am not underplaying my assessment of their character. It has been my observation that Rand fans are, alas, often essentially parasitic in their capacities. Learning as I go that Rand was an amphetamine addict and prone to paranoia hardly endears her to me. As a friend of mine put it, Rand's mistake was to react to radical collectivism with a radical individualism that is simply the mirror image of the communist problem. And, as Hari observes it as well, it is hardly unusual to notice that more than one person considers that over-reaction significant.
A woman who trafficked in ad hominems regarding those she regarded as lesser people vitiates the power of her critique by having been an amphetamine addict. A woman who died of lung cancer and dismissed research that suggested the harmful effects of smoking vitiates her position of saying that people should only act toward rational self-interest. A woman who claims that sexual bonds are based on intellectual agreement could not abide her lover (25 years younger) falling in love with another woman (10 years younger than he) is someone who did not, perhaps, adequately realize that we have bodies as well as minds. Despite an attempt to articulate that there is no separation between mind and body Rand may have missed the boat when a man twenty-five years younger than she was responsive to a younger and (very probably) more physically attractive and emotionally stable woman.
The ways in which Rand's addictions and paranoia ravaged her reveal that the gap between her convictions and her life was pretty big in the end. Rather than stop smoking because there was evidence it was killing her she dismissed as communist propaganda? That might be comparable to someone going on and on about despising the weakness and lack of discipline about others while eating his way into diabetes. It's the same sort of hypocrisy and it is only hypocrisy because there is no room for graciousness or sympathy for those who are mastered by their appetites. A person who does what they don't really want to do is just someone caught in the vise of what Paul describes in Romans 7, and that's just basically almost anyone. Dying alone but for someone who is only there to care for you because you pay them to might have been success to Rand but it is not heroism in the end, was it?
Even a cursory examination of her life reveals that she was in essential respects a sociopath and her assessment of the human condition marred by a form of class resentment she never overcome. As more than a few people noted Rand was profoundly immoral and, as some have noted, a hypocrite. Her capacity for unfettered dualism and rancor has been surpassed, I suppose, but she is emblematic of a person whose ideas are as bad as the intellectual disease she proposed to cure.
What I have found sad about the admirers of Rand I have known in my relatively short life is how their lives are at odds with their admiration of her work and the values they claim to adhere to. I have seen people who have homes because of the generosity of other people, who have places to stay and in some cases jobs because of the gestures of family and friends. Christians embracing Rand's philosophy is an exercise in peculiarity since Rand's philosophy does not seem to have any use for children and would appear to condone abortion of convenience. If, as some of my Rand-swilling associates contend, integrity and dignity are not inherent and must be earned then there is no basis for allowing a fetus to survive into adulthood if there are "rational" goals for which it is better to sacrifice the unborn. Indeed, the very nature of parenting itself suggests that Rand completely misunderstood the strange and mysterious nexus of selfishness and selflessness.
Most Rand fans I have met are, frankly, the kinds of "looters" who live off the generosity of others and are not particularly productive people that Rand would have despised. They are useless as artists, as writers, and work at relatively menial tasks that can easily be done by others, yet they seem to aspire to being greater than that even though it is not in them. They find comfort in looking down on people who are actually better than them while thinking the roles are reversed.
I don't say this as though I were someone great but because I have observed these people for enough years to see that their convictions of being better than the average herdm, or even merely their belief that they ASPIRE to be better than the common herd, are so manifestly refuted by their wretchedness in actual living that if I were an actual Randian I would be obliged to tell them they are losers whose self-delusion about even their mere competence dooms them to lives of useless parasitism rather than productive work. I am, however, a Christian who thinks that even if this assessment about those people is true I'd rather let them discover their smallness through their attempts at propounding their greatness. I don't need to tell them they are nobodies, the power of the market and their more or less insignificant place within it will eventually tell them that! They will be destroyed by their own folly. We all are eventually. Rand certainly was.
As a review in the National Review put it so long ago, even where one can agree with Rand's assessment of problems, her solution is tantamount to proposing that the way to ensure the failures of doctors are dealt with is by renouncing the Hippocratic oath. Liberals have been claiming for years that the current economic meltdown we are facing is because Rand fans were allowed to have their day during the administration of Bush 2. I am not sure that is all there is to be said on the subject.
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