The Psychopathology of Ayn Rand

You've probably heard of Ayn Rand. Most people have these days. She was the author of such inexplicably widely-read "novels" (really, barely-disguised political diatribes) as "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged". Her books are currently enjoying something of a boom among those who misguidedly believe they would be in the self-righteous community of "Atlases" at Galt's Gulch. The novels themselves are of only passing interest, being long, melodramatic and mediocrely written. Rather, it is the "philosophy" at the core of the novels which bears attention.

Hear ye, hear ye, I come to bury Rand, not to praise her. While numerous conservative thinkers (and, oddly, Neil Peart) have lauded Rand as a philosopher, few academic institutions include Rand or Objectivism as a philosophical discipline. Conservatives, such as Chris Sciabarra, tend to believe that the academic left decries Rand due to her anti-communist, pro-capitalist slant. Like much of the witterings of conservatives who presume to know what the left thinks, that presumes firstly, more power than the academic left has had in decades; secondly, assumes that the left was universally pro-communist and anti-capitalist, something which has never been true and thirdly, that Rand was saying anything worth studying. She wasn't. Rand's "philosophy" was the same defence of endless greed which mankind has been engaged in for eternity, the same attempt to place a moral cover on pure selfishness that has long been pursued by any number of exploiters down the centuries. Nietzche was, and is, pilloried for saying "God is dead", Rand is lauded for effectively saying "the self is God". There is nothing new here, save perhaps for the self-delusion that allows so many professed "Christians" to adhere to a philosophy that glorifies greed and athieism. There is also a cult-like deification of Rand by her followers and "swarming" of those who dare criticise her which reminds one very strongly of Scientology (and Glenn Beck followers but that's another matter).

There is another name for those who hold that the only proper moral consideration is the happiness of the self; for those who view empathy and compassion as weakness; who view selfishness as the only virtue: Psychopaths.

Contrary to popular belief, the psychopath is not automatically violent. Rather, the psychopath is defined by a near-complete lack of empathy. Robert Hare (who created the widely used "Hare Psychopathy Checklist") describes psychopaths as "instraspecies predators" who use a combination of charisma, manipulation, intimidation, sexuality and violence to satisfy their own desires. The more human qualities of conscience, empathy, remorse or guilt are either completely absent or extremely limited. It must be repeated that the psychopath is not necessarily violent. Indeed, many are not because their lives have never placed them in a position where violence was the only means to satisfy their desires. Many businessmen (and therefore, many politicians) profile as psychopaths because they exhibit the core characteristics or some section thereof. Ayn Rand should also be considered a psychopath.

Hare's checklist lists certain personality factors as indicative of psychopathy. The average person will perhaps exhibit one or, at most, two. The psychopath will exhibit all but on or two. In no particular order, these items are Glibness/superficial charm. After her writings became popular, Rand collected around herself a group of cultists who virtually worshipped her. However, shallow affect, the psychopath's charm is only ever superficial. As one comes to know and understand the psychopath more fully, the charm which initially attracted one to them is revealed as only skin-deep. In this, Rand was entirely textbook. She was described by most who knew her best as a bitter, friendless child who grew into an equally bitter and acidic woman. Grandiose sense of self-worth would certainly fit Rand. A woman who names her beliefs "Objectivism" out of a belief that any reasoning person who observes the objective truths of the world would necessarily come to full agreement with her would probably qualify. The fact that her little cult were required to memorise her works and discounted as "imbecilic" and "anti-life" if they asked questions simply seals the deal. Her sincere belief was that thinking freely would automatically lead to total agreement with her views. The ruthless policing of her cult would also qualify her under the Cunning/manipulative qualifier. Patholigical lying is one that Rand is probably innocent of. So far as we know, there is no reason to believe she was a pathological liar. Lack of remorse or guilt and Callous/lack of empathy could be described as "Ayn Rand syndrome". These two qualifiers are really the core of her books, philosophhy and worldview. In one of her books (The Fountainhead), her "hero", Howard Roarke, blows up a housing project he designed when a minor alteration is made and then orders the jury to acquit him (the fact that, as an architect, Roarke was presumably contracted for his work and therefore, it wasn't "his" anymore piddles all over the supposed respect for property too). In Atlas Shrugged, her ode to the super-rich which imagines them going on strike against progressive taxation, Rand describes the rest of the world (without whom, let us not forget, the super-rich would be unable to make anything) in such niceties as "savages", "refuse" and "immitations of living beings". When one of the strikers engineers a train crash (because they don't just strike but commit acts of terrorism too), Rand makes it clear that she believes the murdered victims deserved their fate because they supported progressive taxation. A stewing hymn of Nietzchean will-to-power, misanthropy, failure to understand economics, feudalism and sexual politics verging on the obscene, Atlas Shrugged is full of this stuff. Her heroes spend their time both insisting that they are the heroic producers (and without labour, what are they producing exactly?) and bemoaning that others do not worship them as such. In her spare time, Rand was an admirer of serail killer William Hickman (I'll spare you the details of his crimes save to say that they were brutal even by serial killer standards), describing him as "a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy"; "other people do not exist for him and he does not see why they should" was her evaluation of his crimes and Rand considered this worthy of praise. Finally, on the personality factor, there is Failure to accept responsibility for one's actions. Since our record of Rand's life isn't fully detailed, it's difficult to say how much she satisfied this one. Certainly, when her lover Nathaniel Branden found another partner, she blamed him rather than herself or her increasingly poisonous views. We shouldn't sympathise with Rand as injured party too much here, she was herslelf married to someone entirely different and cruel enough to carry on the affair without regard to discretion. Indeed, if the only duty of the superman is to please himself, Brendan was acting according to Rand's ideals and she should have applauded him. She once said the the USA should be a "democracy of superiors only" with "superior" being defined as "rich". One scarcely needs to point out that such a system wouldn't be democracy at all but oligarchy and interestingly elitist for all her followers claim to despise elitism.

One doesn't need to work very hard to diagnose Rand. Her life and writings paint a vivid picture of psychopathy so clear and obvious that it is only surprising so many miss it. She was a phonomenally damaged woman for whom one can feel an element of pity (an emotion that disgusted her) even while aware of how terrifically dangerous she and her philosophy was and are. Rand herself died alone except for a hired nurse. Her deranged views had driven away anyone who might have been close to her. Like L. Ron Hubbard, however, her lunatic ideas have spawned a cult that would turn all of us into happy little psychopaths; a cult that includes many of the world's foremost economists, politicians and rabble-rousers (Beck again, although "intellectual terrorist" might be more appropriate). Like George Orwell, Rand imagined a dystopian world characterised by the powerful's exploitation of the powerless. Unlike Orwell, Rand wanted to live there.

The goggles do nothing!

It's funny qua funny!

A classic!

--d!

So bad, that there's a rule on /lit/ prohibiting the discussion of any Ayn Rand book or novel.

Any time there's any criticism of Rand published (or, as I said, of Glenn Beck), her followers swarm, attacking the contrarian.

I'll swear the Church of St. Ayn has people working 24/7 sniffing out negative comments about their cult leader on blogs etc. so that they can flood the comboxes with their "philosophy". They always come across like the crowd in Life of Brian ("YES! WE'RE ALL INDIVIDUALS!").

Only time I've ever seen anything remotely similar is when HuffPo does a story on Glenn Beck.

No blog seems too obscure to attract an infestation of Randroids whenever Rand or Objectivism are criticised.

In the last century it was especially Stalin and Pol Pot who wanted to create utopian communist societies where all workers were happy. Hitler wanted to create a utopian empire populated by a pure aryan super-race.

These ideas have been put on the scrapheap of humanity, but i fear that Ayn Rands ideas is this century's dangerous utopian thinking. We have politicians today who would initiate policy that would be damaging to the country, such as lowering taxes and removing social safety nets as a step towards reaching this utopia, even if it is damaging in the short term (something they HAVE to know). I see Globalization as a part of this, because what is happening right now is that industrialized nations are essentially exporting all their manufacturing jobs elsewhere leaving the working class with no option but to work in service sector jobs serving the upper class, whom has access to cheaper and cheaper goods manufactured overseas.
This is especially apparent in America where the middle class has been slowly eroded since Reagan. That's why people should not be blinded by the foreign policy ideas of people like Ron Paul, who is a complete and utter Ayn Rand nutjob.

Isaiah Berlin has written some good stuff on the subject of political utopian ideas.

Her ideal of a world controlled by and for a small class of the rich doesn't strike me as utopian because she seems aware of how objectionable it would be to the plebians. She just doesn't think the plebs have any moral right to complain. Really, her arguments read more like the justifications of slave owners. That kind of "We have a duty to rule them" thinking.

I'll confess that globalisation isn't my area but, from what I do understand of it, it can hardly be considered a force for the good. I mean, I like my cheap cigarettes (which are made in Virginia, looking at the pack) but not at the expense of driving wages toward some global lowest common denominator or shipping my neighbour's jobs overseas. In American Theocracy (I forget the author's name), the author advances the theory that any nation where the largest sector of the economy is people moving money around rather than actually making things is a nation in decline.

My impression is that they believe that any people who deserve it will suceed and be happy, so there is no need to worry about the people who fail to succeed. It's like a utopia where everyone fullfills their potential and get what they deserve, ultimate justice. It's a terrible prospect. That's my impression anyway.

Either way it seems clear to me that living through the bolshevik revolution in Russia messed her up.

He was a former Nixon speechwriter, who has spent the intervening decades warning that: "The rich are taking over."

maybe Hitler must have been demented enough to operate on his illusions of grandeur, but that may have more to do with him suffering of tertiary syphilis (there is no doubt that for most of WWII the guy was for all intents and purposes suffering the last throes of a syphilis infection which had turned his brain to mush and was probably utterly insane, in the actual sense of the word).

Stalin and Pol Pot were simply blood thirsty narcissistic personalities running amok, they could have been communist as they could have been nazis so long as that was their path to their totalitarian dreams.

Ayn Rand was a mediocre thinker, who basically made a living from her perennial temper tantrum because the commies took her family's toys away. Frankly the main reason why she got any traction in the US at all, has more to do with the fact that there has never been much of a philosophical tradition in this country at all. She was never took seriously anywhere else in the world. Her ideas are shallow to the extreme, and she was never able to actually write a book under the guise of producing a philosophical treaty, simply because she was not that smart to begin with. As I said, she was a very mediocre thinker.

There is something to be said about someone who writes childish fiction novels, where she does create her own "convenient" reality. And then used the fiction she created as proof of her own philosophical ideas. The fact that some people in this country took her seriously speaks volumes in regards to the appalling lack of education and anything resembling capacity for developed thought and reasoning among large portions of our society.

In that regard Rand was also a pioneer for the conservative movement in this country. If you look at most conservative figures, they seem to display a total lack of regard for reality as soon as facts interfere with their interests or narrative. The penchant that some conservatives have to create their own facts/reality, is in no small part due to Ms. Rands capacity to use her own demented "novels" as proof of a reality which never existed, but which was orders of magnitude easier to sell and market than having to address the very problems reality was throwing their way. In other words, conservatives in order to become a "legend" just have to think it in their minds, they don't necessarily have to be one (that is hard work, don't you know?).

But you may well be right. Conservatives tend to adhere to ideas which sound great on paper but, having been tried, simply do not work in reality (amusingly, much the same could be said of the communism they disdain). And yet, they continue to push the same ideas regardless, as if reality will conform to their expectations if they just wish hard enough.

Throw in some deity and you have "religion".

by the independent do it yourself flavor and the individualistic go-it-alone loner Galt character.

Until I realized that her characters were parasites feeding off the dead carcass of a society that they helped destroy. Her book seems to conspire to inspire a sense of "hey, this could work". Much like a manifesto diatribe. Her characters seem to reject the idea of collective good while at the same time needing each other for their specialized skills, abilities and knowledge.

Her work is rife with contradiction and inconsistencies and long untethered departures from sanity. I could not get through it a second time because it repelled me so. Had to read it in research mode. It certainly was not enjoyable.

Many people talk of "market fundamentalism". It may be more accurate to talk of "market totalitarianism". The American system of government has prevented totalitarianism in government through checks and balances.

To the Libertarian the market contains its own checks and balances. There is no need to for checks and balances against the market. Nor against its most powerful participants.

Of course many "Libertarian" businessmen freely dispose themselves of the "cancerous" "Progressive" Sherman Anti-Trust Act against their equally "Libertarian" brothers when their ass is on the line. (re Microsoft and now Google).

They're fundementally wrong about that too, as any examination of history will show. The phrase caveat emptor ("buyer beware") wasn't coined for nothing.

and other conservatives tend to put all manners of faith and stock on invisible, abstract entities, with no validation provided (or possible). Be it the invisible hand of god or the market, these same people who feel such disregard for reality... are the same ones who feel entitled to rule and dictate it.

Re - a neocon being a liberal who has been mugged.

A big government conservative - a libertarian whose ass is on the line.

excellent post.

But even very early on I did not like the characters in her books. She paints a landscape that is unwelcoming to human mammals. I would not leave my dog with any of her characters. Her characters make me feel all yucky.

Recommended.

Reaganomics and most of the GOP economic platform is based on Rand, what Rand's "idea's" depend on to be actualized is the nonGalts never ever realize that in reality Galt is entirely dependent on them and their cooperation, a principle that has worked for the Repub's on more than a few occasions

That's why there's been a deliberate effort to delegitimise unions, since they act as a brake on the actions of the "Galt's".

what is the difference between the two?

Ever heard of William Edward Hickman?

He was Rand's "hero"... perhaps even a model for the Galt character.

check it out:

http://www.michaelprescott.net/hickman.htm

I know she admired Hickman. In fact, I just mentioned that in the post you replied to.

And teh difference between psychopath and sociopath is purely one of causes. The symptoms are identical (and the current DSM classifies both under Antisocial Personality Disorder). The difference is that one is born and the other is made.

seems a bit dismissive to cast someone you don't agree with as a pyscho to discredit their works. Karl Marx wasn't a psycho but I imagine if anyone on DU met him in person they would think he was insane. It doesn't mean all of his ideas should be discredited (or credited for that matter.) Picking up a copy of "Pyschology Today" and labelling a public figure doesn't strike me as a particularly useful exercise.

I never understood the fascination with the anti-Rand people. Who cares? I read Mein Kempf and didn't become a Nazi. I read the New Testament and didn't become a Christian. I read the Fountainhead and didn't rape anyone.

She had some interesting thoughts to add to the marketplace of ideas and I'm glad I read her. I have not read Atlas Shrugged but its on my list. It's ALWAYS a good idea to challenge your set of beliefs and read things you don't think you believe in. A while back I read the Origin of Species, the Bible and some Creationist literature (not at once). Guess what? I believe in the theory of natural selection more than ever now. That's how it should be. You challenge your assumptions, you prod and poke around, and hopefully you will understand the material even better than you did before. It's called critical thinking and we need more of that these days, not less.

Well bully for you. There are other people who read those books and DID go out and do terrible things based on them. For Rand, those people were people like Alan Greenspan. Just because YOU are capable of exerting self-control doesn't mean that everyone else is. People are free to read whatever they wish, and that's a good thing. But we are also free to argue with ideas like Rand's, and to point out that her mental illness probably played a big part in WHY she believed those things--just like Hitler's mental illness played a big part in HIS ideologies.

Reading something and considering the ideas it presents is a good thing, but that's assuming that you're willing to consider contrary points of view. The Rand-worshipers don't read Rand to consider her ideas. They read Rand the way that fundies read Leviticus, and then they try to change OUR lives by manipulating our economy and social structure, with ZERO regard for anyone else's well-being. I think that pointing out her obvious psychosis is fair play, in that context.

Rand would be appalled at the 'followers' she generated...and even more appalled at religious, racist republicans/teabaggers that wave her (unread) books around at their kooky rallies.

It is unwise to turn Ayn Rand into some kind of two dimensional figure, then proceed to perform a Rush Limbaugh style strawman hatchet job against her with slander/hate. For people who never read her, some of the comments/cartoons on here make her out to be some kind of Nazi.

They are just as inaccurate as the religious/racist republicans who wave her books (they obviously haven't read) around at their stupid rallies.

You are making the same assumption as Rand herself: That those who think her ideas are repugnant simply haven't read or don't understand them.

People fully understand Rand. Which is why she is so readily dismissed by actual thinking people.

Oh please! That was before the parties did a complete flip flop. All those "Dems" would be (and are) Repugs today. "The Southern Strategy" y'know.

Ayn Rand was a mentally disturbed bitter warped individual and with all the wonderful books people could choose from to improve their minds; why would one waste time with her nonsense?

... should not be lecturing other people.

Rand was a mediocre thinker, pissed off because the commies took her toys away.


There was nothing to get in regards to Ayn Rand, in the same sense that there was nothing to extra to "get" regarding the context of Mussolini, because he had made the trains run on time for the first and only time in Italy. From a literary standpoint, her books are mediocre to the extreme. From a philosophical standpoint, none of her works can even be considered remotely philosophical in nature (never mind in content). Her personal life was a mess. She has (and never did) no credibility at an international level, none. It beats me why people still discuss this hack. She was an unremarkable thinker, who may have been right about a couple of issues... in the same sense that a stopped watch is not the most energy efficient way of telling time twice a day.

In the same sense, it is no coincidence that todays Randian acolites, be it Ron Paul or Greenspan... are equally demented and flawed characters, who feel entitled to a sense of validation which is completely undeserved. And it is fueled by the same "being right twice a day" rate of correct time telling in a 24 hr period as a brocken grandpa clock.

There are far better thinkers and authors from her generation, which had to suffer obscurity due to all the spot light reserved for this hack. Sad really...

If she was such a seeker of virtue, as you try to claim. Her words today would be to tell us to stop wasting our time and effort parsing her mediocre prose, and would direct us to far worthier authors. Isn't put words on dead people fun?

I read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged in college. For me, the appeal/inspiration was that of intellect and reason, that "man can do anything" attitude of the Galts and Roarks. And yes, I agree with you 100% that Rand would be appalled by her more vocal "followers" of today. (The fact that someone so focused on the individual self would have a following is kinda humorous...)

That being said, this article is, as you wrote below, a hatchet job:

"Rather, it is the "philosophy" at the core of the novels which bears attention."

Why then is the majority** of this article about the author, not her philosophy?

** "Ayn Rand should also be considered a psychopath...Rand collected around herself...Rand was entirely textbook...certainly fit Rand...Rand is probably innocent...Rand was an...Rand's life...diagnose Rand..."

"...defence of endless greed..."

Actually, the antagonists (James Taggart, for example), were greedy too. They just weren't capable of fulfilling their greed on their own, and thus became "looters." So I don't think it's an apt description to say her philosophy was a defense of endless greed.

"who view selfishness as the only virtue"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivism_%28Ayn_Rand%29">"The primary virtue in Objectivist ethics is rationality ... Since reason is man's means of knowledge, it is also his greatest value, and its exercise his greatest virtue."

"So far as we know, there is no reason to believe she was a pathological liar"

So far as we know, she never clubbed any baby seals either, right? This smear immediately reminded me of Bertram Scudder's hatchet-job on Rearden Steel...

Mein Kampf has been discredited, the concept of Christian theocracy has been discredited. There are still people attempting to run the world by Objectivist principles.

Secondly, the idea that someone is labelled a "psycho" because someone disagrees with them is used by psychos too. The first excuse any genuinely insane person comes up with is something along the lines of "you're just labelling me because you disagree with me". I used diagnostic criteria and the content of Rand's freely available works. This is no different than has been done with hundreds of other public figures.

since when? I know a few billion people who would disagree with your assertion. You don't believe in it, I don't believe in it, but it's a jump to say it's been "discredited".

... else "eat shit because 10 billion flies can't be wrong" would be a winning argument every time.

Two crappier writers never put pen to paper than Hitler and Rand. One wrote incomprehensible, verbose garbage; the other wrote boring, verbose garbage. (You decide which is which.)

Tucker

even though that was by far the most brilliantly written piece of literature I've ever come across. Every sentence was perfect. But it was too much to process and I didn't have much free time at that point, so I gave up. Did they ever catch that whale??

And it is indeed a fine book.

Theres a very good case being made in the OP. Which you do not address at all.

I'll judge my art (in this case literature) regardless of the creator's psychosis, real or imagined.

... nobody is bitching with people reading Rand. It is those who read and WORSHIP her ideas that some people here may have an issue with. Pretty simple concept really, even an MBA could be able to wrap their heads around that.

how should they react? what if I read Howard Zinn? Am I allowed to worship him? how about the New Testament? Can I have your permission to worship Jesus?

Please tell me what kind of acceptable impact a book may or may not have on my life.

It's a free country, if somebody wants to masturbate to Anthem, have at it. I don't care.

The whole article boils down to the fallacy of "Ayn Rand was a bad person, therefore her philosophy is bad."

liar" bit covered as well. Part of the recent bio ("Ayn Rand and the World She Made") suggest she was less than honest about her educational background and the various websites devoted to her history (including the Objectivist-minded Wikpedia's entry) gloss over her early failures as a screenwriter. How could a "genius" fail?

Nothing objective about "Objectivism." Just another klutzy, intellectually dishonest attempt to rationalize why society should be a one-way street, where the "special" people receive, but do not give. It belongs on the trash heap with other excuses of the resource-hungry like "The divine right of kings," "The White Man's Burden," "Manifest Destiny," the "Ayran Reich," Chicago-school Free Market fundamentalism and the more recent-but-just-as-obnoxious Fundamentalist Christian Dominionism and Dick Cheney's creed of "American exceptionalism."

It all really just boils down to, "Me and my friends deserve whatever we can screw you out of." She might have spared us all the melodrama and just written that.

:)

Mankind has a long history of attempting to find moral excuses for naked greed.

"Mediocrely written?"

Howabout "execrably, incoherently, virtually unreadably written."

helpfully,
Bright

Literary critique isn't really my area :)

...it's a pretty safe call.

delicately,
Bright

When I read the books, I had this feeling like "Bright people, people I admire, rave over this; is there something wrong with me that I think it's diabolical?".

Talking on and on about virtuous people. When it was painfully obvious, that an actually virtuous person could have made her very same point in a short story spanning a few pages... not a 1000+ page incoherent rant. I was masochistic enough and I had to read The Fountainhead for school and Philosophy Who Needs It just for shit and giggles (yeah, I love the pain).

I tend to not have any admiration for people who feel that 1000 pages of "fuck you I got mine, and yours" while exalting the romantic virtues of rape... are in any sense shape or form ground breaking literary works, never mind philosophical ones. In fact, I tend to view adoration for Rand's works as a big fucking red flag.

...wouldn't have written the book.

And decided that she was, at the very least, an asshole, many years ago. Currently, it seems as though the pathologically self absorbed or self serving use her to excuse their own damage and delusions--- As well as the ones so frightened of life they can barely get through it unless they are somehow causing harm to someone, or something, else.

That's because it's "atheism" like Stalin's "atheism"...where you just replace the god with yourself and/or some Party. Religion is just ancient government anyway. Some charismatic cave man figured out if he razzle -dazzled the ignorant and credulous and claimed he was somehow divine (descended from or had a special relationship/understanding of a supernatural force) he could get them to do what he wanted. Theatre helps... costumes, incense, music, chanting.... tomes about the triumph of such nonsense....

She IS just like a religion. Far from thinking rational atheism. The Scientology connection is ripe.

Ayn Rand, Hugely Popular Author and Inspiration to Right-Wing Leaders, Was a Big Admirer of Serial Killer
Today her works treated as gospel by right-wing powerhouses like Alan Greenspan and Clarence Thomas, but Ayn Rand found early inspiration in 1920's murderer William Hickman.

So what, and who, was Ayn Rand for and against? The best way to get to the bottom of it is to take a look at how she developed the superhero of her novel, Atlas Shrugged, John Galt. Back in the late 1920s, as Ayn Rand was working out her philosophy, she became enthralled by a real-life American serial killer, William Edward Hickman, whose gruesome, sadistic dismemberment of 12-year-old girl named Marion Parker in 1927 shocked the nation. Rand filled her early notebooks with worshipful praise of Hickman. According to biographer Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market, Rand was so smitten by Hickman that she modeled her first literary creation -- Danny Renahan, the protagonist of her unfinished first novel, The Little Street -- on him.

What did Rand admire so much about Hickman? His sociopathic qualities: "Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should," she wrote, gushing that Hickman had "no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel 'other people.'"

This echoes almost word for word Rand's later description of her character Howard Roark, the hero of her novel The Fountainhead: "He was born without the ability to consider others."

The Fountainhead is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's favorite book -- he even requires his clerks to read it.

http://www.alternet.org/books/145819/ayn_rand%2C_hugely_popular_author_and_inspiration_to_right-wing_leaders%2C_was_a_big_admirer_of_serial_killer

... to read a book which makes a case for the blaming of one's failures on others while exalting the destruction of other people's property and rape as virtues.

I thought his favorite book was "Office Sex Party".

"Two novels can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other involves orcs."

Thank you.

I would love nothing more than for Rand to be a largely forgotten figure, studied only as a minor curiosity in philosophical history. However, you have heard the expression that a person's life is merely one part of their existence? Rand may be dead but her theories are still considered gospel-truth by some of the most important economists and legislators in the world. One SCOTUS justice even requires his clerks to read her work. If, through the long chain of ideas, I can contribute in even a tiny way to slaughtering this particular sacred cow, I'll be more than happy with that.

left the room, the stench often remains, sometimes for generations, even centuries.

Rand has cadres of loyalists and they litter the political and social landscape.

I think it's so funny that the right wing fully depends on their 'owning' Christianity and YET have Randian underpinnings.

Not being a Christian, her countless condemnation of Christian ideals (sacrifice, altruism, etc) rolled off my back. That was a long time ago, however, and I don't care to invite her back into my head.

It's incredible, IMO, how there can be a party which caters to both people wanting to legislate morality and those who don't believe in "morals".

When Ron Paul, et. al. gets to answer questions, I would like them to be asked if they think that Jesus was a fool.

Let's see what that does to their party unity.

and my department had an unusually large cabal of Randroids, for the simple reason that she had written a book with an architect (by some accounts, a fictionalized Frank Lloyd Wright) as its "hero." People put stuff up on walls and whatnot, prompting graffitti from contrarians like "mickey mouse philospheress," although that might not be fair to Mickey Mouse.

not knowing anything about Rand's philosophy or rather sickness. The entire depiction on how buildings get built is totally bogus. There is nothing that even remotely approaches reality in this piece of crap novel.

Some of this crap might apply to doing sketches in architecture school or a fantasy world with Google Sketch up, but have absolutely nothing to do with the real world.

The same goes for the libertarian idealism, fine on paper, but no basis in the real world.

it is funny in the field of high tech, I have seen 2 distinct types of randbots:

Randbot #1 those which make monumentally bad design decisions/mistakes or real sloppy execution, and who to this day continue thinking it is not their designs/work which could possibly be sloppy but rather than our reality plane and the laws of physics in general aren't prepared or are too mediocre to fully comprehend the magnitude of their genius.

Randbot #2 those who were aware of the magnitude of their special gift from the get go, and figured that no educational institution would be able to capture or comprehend their geniuns, so decided to skip the whole time wasting experience of getting an actual degree in the subject they profess to master.


Both are "fun" to deal with, because thanks to their virtues my experiments tend to take twice as long and become an insufferable and agonizing experience. It gets really taxing of having to clean up over and over after the same people who keep fucking up and yet think they are better than anyone else. It gets even more fun, when the person I just felt sorry for and I had o make a case to the higher ups not to include his position in the cost-saving cuts, goes around uttering some of the most callous and sociopathic in nature statements regarding the worthiness of his co-workers to continue being employed in the same work place as his "libertarian holiness."

Although I must confess, mixing different types of randbots can be thought of mixing anti-mater particles, and very interesting dynamics and reactions can be observed.

...this article rocks. Thanks so much!!!

Hobbesian fony phuckers. effemall

Don't conflate atheism with selfishness and greed.

And if I somehow gave that impression, I apologise.