Way back, somewhere between becoming a short-term Buddhist, living on a hippie commune and worshiping  the Carlos Castaneda books for their profoundness, (HA!) I discovered Ayn Rand. I read her first real popular book, Fountainhead, and became a fan.  Her hero was Howard Roark a guy who kept his self-confidence in his abilities above all things.  He appealed to me as he was anything but a "sellout" which was a perfect theme for a young guy trying to find his way in the world.  The "second-raters"  Rand called those around this guy, were portrayed as disgusting people.   I liked that also. But I was off to other things. 

 A few years later, my Aunt Liz and I showed up at my parent's home for a visit at the same time.  She was a voracious reader and presented me with a copy of Atlas Shrugged, a thick old thing.  "Everyone should read this," she told me.  The year was 1982, I think.  I remembered Rand, admired Auntie Liz so off I went.  I read the entire thing.  I can still remember my first thought as I finished.  "What happened to her?" I recall saying aloud.  I was still trying to process a vivid  train crash  death scene and her rationalization for all in the train who died.  I thought that scene to be quite mentally ill.  That was the end of my experience with her until her name popped up again while I was teaching high school.  

I got a packet of information and a book, Anthem,  in the mail.  It encouraged me to have my students write an essay and enter it in a contest.  Nobody was much interested in my upper classes so I started to read it but it seemed like another high school essay to me. I gathered up the packet of stuff, lesson plans, essay requirements, the colorful box and started to put it all in one of my closets when I noticed it was sent to me from the Ayn Rand Institute. “The Ayn Rand Institute (ARI), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in Irvine, California, works to introduce young people to Ayn Rand's Books.” I recalled enough from Atlas Shrugged to know that was an contradiction of enormous proportions. The biggest screamer for free market capitalism in the 20^th century has a non-profit site? I never thought about her again.

I was watching some coverage of one of the Tea Party protests and noticed a sign that said Who is John Galt?  ( the first sentence in Atlas Shrugged). This sparked a memory so I went home and started some research on Ayn Rand and was surprised to find that she was the Golden Girl of the right-wing and Libertarians.  I found some old YouTube interviews and listened to her in action.  I found out that she had created a sort of philosophy called, Objectivism, which had become a near religion for many.  What?  I just remembered her as fiction author who had some entertainment value but a political guru?  How had I missed all this? Here are the reviews of her Bible released in 1957.

• "Even the horse, it appears, cannot survive when liberals flourish" — The New Yorker. The context was a scene in which a farmer must draft a team of human laborers to pull a plow because draft animals are not available.

• "It would be hard to find such a display of grotesque eccentricity outside an asylum. Galt is really arguing for a dictatorship." — Adam Kirsch, The Los Angeles Times

• "Perfect in its immorality" — Gore Vidal

• "Longer than life and twice as preposterous" — anonymous.

•   "Makes well-poisoning seem like one of the kindlier arts" — anonymous.
•  Would you cut the Bible?” snapped Ayn Rand to her publisher who wanted her to shorten the book.

To counter this wave of intense criticism, her  heir apparent, Nathaniel Brandon,  started  the Brandon Institute (NBI) and set off traveling around the country giving lectures and seminars on the book and Objectivism. 

 After reading one of her essays entitled The Virtue of Selfishness,  it occurred to me that what she so ardently proposed was everything I had been fighting against for my entire life. Of course, I was able to see that she had a big kernel of truth as the core.  This morsel was a very simple and appealing thing-Individualism.  Heck, who doesn't support taking care of your family and yourself as a key priority?  Who doesn't want to be left alone in one's pursuit of happiness?  But she took this appealing concept and expanded it to a point of simple idealism that had all the maturity of an 18-year old mind.  Basically, her philosophy ignores human nature, psychology and is as old as the hills. 

Allow a small group of go-getters to dominate and rule.  The others in society who are  struggling?  They are not anyone's concern and a drain on those who are  the successful ones.  A totally anti-Christian, anti-humanitarian and anti-American approach to the world. The bedrock of our new country was the phrase, never uttered before in the history of man by so many, of “ We the People” was to Rand a phrase to mock.

 A summary of her “philosophy” of Objectivism.  

My philosophy, Objectivism, holds that:

1. Reality exists as an objective absolute—facts are facts, independent of man’s feelings, wishes, hopes or fears.

2. Reason (the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses) is man’s only means of perceiving reality, his only source of knowledge, his only guide to action, and his basic means of survival.

3. Man—every man—is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.

4. The ideal political-economic system is laissez-faire capitalism. It is a system where men deal with one another, not as victims and executioners, nor as masters and slaves, but as traders, by free, voluntary exchange to mutual benefit. It is a system where no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force, and no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. The government acts only as a policeman that protects man’s rights; it uses physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use, such as criminals or foreign invaders. In a system of full capitalism, there should be (but, historically, has not yet been) a complete separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church. 

   (Ayn Rand)

Copyright © 1962 by Times-Mirror Co.

 Now, some of her concepts are very appealing.  Being independent, having happiness as a primary goal, being an individual, taking pride in your accomplishments, striving for high goals and personal excellence are captivating concepts. I am for individualism! Of course it got attention. But, to me, it is like going around and telling people this. I love petting little kittens and puppies, too. Or perhaps equivalent with a classmate running for class president who claims he will demand longer recesses and lunchtimes.  

Don't like how things are going? Then blow it up. The basic message of this book is that you can be as much of an asshole as you want as long as you are an individual. 

Her philosophy is very dogmatic in practice. Disagree with her, a cardinal sin in her isolated world, and one was shouted down as being irrational.  Try to take into account intuitions, instincts, feelings or emotions and she would call you evil, one of her all-time most often used words, for being irrational.  Her followers treated her like a cult figurehead or Supreme Ruler.  To her,  there were only absolutes,  be it on what was good art, music or views of the world.  

Her rejection of all things religious including the mocking of basic Christian values that I hold dear, is too radical for me and I am not all that religious.

But the one item that many grabbed and cherry-picked was her economic believe in pure laissez-faire capitalism.  A thought that any reader of history and admirer of our early leaders, especially Teddy Roosevelt, would find appalling.  Here are some quotes from the mouth of the Ayn Rand who thought herself as one of the greatest people who had ever lived and at least equal with Aristotle.

 " If you separate the government from economics.  If you do not regulate production and trade, you will have peaceful cooperation, and peace and harmony and justice among free men."  ( This may be the most naive thing ever spoken)

"I don't believe society has any responsibility toward anyone."

"Private charities are the answer to problems--not the government."

"It is all or none."  (this was her requirement for anyone who wanted to follow her beliefs.)

"If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject." 

For more Rand quotes go here--

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/a/ayn_rand.html

As quoted by the The Ayn Rand Institute from Ford Hall Forum 1972: "A Nation's Unity"

Q: "What should be done about the killing of innocent people in war?"

Ayn Rand: "This is a major reason people should be concerned about the nature of their government. If by neglect, ignorance, or helplessness, they couldn't overturn their bad government and choose a better one, then they have to pay the price for the sins of their government—as all of us are paying for the sins of ours.

That's why we have to be interested in the philosophy of government and in seeing, to the extent we can, that we have a good government. A government is not an independent entity: it's supposed to represent the people of a nation.

If some people put up with dictatorship—as some do in Soviet Russia and as they did in Germany—they deserve whatever their government deserves."

Notes: "If by neglect, ignorance, or helplessness, they couldn't overturn their bad government...they deserve whatever their government deserves." Thus Ayn Rand literally believed that "helplessness" is a death penalty offence.

Since the rulers of Nazi Germany were executed, the logical result of her opinion would be to imprison or execute anyone who lived in occupied Europe who wasn't an active member of the resistance - a policy that was carried out by Joseph Stalin.

Capitalism Magazine added their agreement to this opinion, quoting it in this article: http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=4367

 She opposed public education; welfare legislation; unemployment compensation; regulations, even in times of stress and the labor movement including child labor laws. And of course taxes. 

She blew off any concerns of corruption, embellishment,  fraud or greed.  Her answer was all these things are caused by  government interference.  If it was pure laissez-faire capitalism they would not be issues. 

In her books she paints ordinary people as "second-raters", ignorant irrationals,  parasites,  looters, and  moochers  who live off the creative  Supermen. (Hmm... wonder what she thought about the ordinary people who purchased her books?)

"The precept: "Judge not, that ye be not judged" . . . is an abdication of moral responsibility: it is a moral blank check one gives to others in exchange for a moral blank check one expects for oneself.

There is no escape from the fact that men have to make choices; so long as men have to make choices, there is no escape from moral values; so long as moral values are at stake, no moral neutrality is possible. To abstain from condemning a torturer, is to become an accessory to the torture and murder of his victims.

The moral principle to adopt . . . is: "Judge, and be prepared to be judged."(Rand)

(Think about that statement for a moment. She was correcting Jesus Christ whom she claimed was a fool for sacrificing his life for parasites.)

She hated almost all politicians equally.  She denounced Reagan for his anti-abortion stance and for soliciting the support of the religious right.  She called the New Frontier and the Great Society programs of JFK and LBJ moves toward fascism.  She only worked for one politician, Wendell Willkie,  because of her hatred of the FDR's New Deal.

 She testified as a friendly guest speaker at the McCarthy hearings to share the evils of the Soviet Union. During House Un-American Affairs committee hearings in which she testified that the Hollywood movies MISSION TO MOSCOW and SONG OF RUSSIA were pro-Russian propaganda. (Washington, DC, November 1947.)

She was roundly criticized by the religious establishment for her disdain for all things religious.  She said she had become an atheist at age 13.  She fought with those on the left for her radical  anti-communist statements and her opposition to all social programs. 

She was pro-abortion rights. But one of her former supporters explains her view of women: “For decades I have been defending her importance as a philosopher, while simultaneously trying to understand what is wrong about the parts of her philosophy which seem mistaken. As a young Student of Objectivism (Rand's name for her loyal followers), I did not question the truth of her ideas until 1970, when she gave her infamous interview to Cosmopolitan magazine.

In the Cosmopolitan interview Rand mentioned that she thought no woman should ever be president of the United States. She said that the natural psychological reaction of (right-thinking) women is to worship men, and that the psychological burden of having to command and direct men would therefore be crushing for a woman president.

http://home.ca.inter.net/~grantsky/re-evaluating.html

She took amphetamines daily for nearly three decades that were prescribed for energy and weight control.  She smoked incessantly and was known for her famous cigarette holder.  She mocked those who suggested tobacco caused health problems. ( Are taking prescription speed and smoking rational?  Her followers scream if you say she was addicted to amphetamines but her daily use for years and years is documented in many places.  Smoking was strongly encouraged, almost required, among her followers.)

Her writings were panned by critics whom she hated.  She hated the academic world and even threatened to sue one professor who wanted to write a positive review on one of her philosophy essays.

(For someone whose believed in being happy as a top priority she certainly had a lot of people to hate.)

This one is quite interesting.

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 with 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.'"

AlterNet / By Mark Ames

"Rand's particular genius has always been her ability to turn upside down traditional hierarchies and recast the wealthy, the talented, and the powerful as the oppressed. This topsy-turvy philosophy has echoed through the blame-the-victim ranting of CNBC host Rick Santelli and the tax-day tea parties. In this world, it is not possible to admit that the rich and the Republicans may have been undone by their own greed and cluelessness. Instead, the Galters have rewritten the story of how we got here with a dash of idealistic fantasy and a side of empty rebellion."

http://motherjones.com/media/2009/07/and-rand-played

Her philosophy in action: 

For ten years, 1958-1968, she ruled over a group of admirers who met almost every night in her New York apartment.  

 “But to the inner circle surrounding and protecting Rand (in ironic humor they called themselves the "Collective"), their leader soon became more than just extremely influential. She was venerated as their leader. Her seemingly omniscient ideas were inerrant. The power of her personality made her so persuasive that no one dared to challenge her. And her philosophy of Objectivism, since it was derived through pure reason, revealed final Truth and dictated absolute morality.

One of the closest to Rand was Nathaniel Branden, a young philosophy student who joined the Collective in the early days before Atlas Shrugged was published. In his autobiographical memoirs entitled Judgment Day (1989), Branden recalled: "There were implicit premises in our world to which everyone in our circle subscribed, and which we transmitted to our students at NBI." Incredibly, and here is where the philosophical movement became a cult, they came to believe that (B. Brandon pp. 255-256):

• Ayn Rand is the greatest human being who has ever lived.

• Atlas Shrugged is the greatest human achievement in the history of the world.

• Ayn Rand, by virtue of her philosophical genius, is the supreme arbiter in any issue pertaining to what is rational, moral, or appropriate to man's life on earth.

• Once one is acquainted with Ayn Rand and/or her work, the measure of one's virtue is intrinsically tied to the position one takes regarding her and/or it.

• No one can be a good Objectivist who does not admire what Ayn Rand admires and condemn what Ayn Rand condemns.

• No one can be a fully consistent individualist who disagrees with Ayn Rand on any fundamental issue.

• Since Ayn Rand has designated Nathaniel Branden as her "intellectual heir," and has repeatedly proclaimed him to be an ideal exponent of her philosophy, he is to be accorded only marginally less reverence than Ayn Rand herself.

• But it is best not to say most of these things explicitly (excepting, perhaps, the first two items). One must always maintain that one arrives at one's beliefs solely by reason.

In what has become the most scandalous (and now oft-told) story in the brief history of the Objectivist movement, starting in 1953 and lasting until 1958 (and on and off for another decade after), Ayn Rand and her "intellectual heir" Nathaniel Branden, 25 years her junior, carried on a secret love affair known only to their respective spouses. The falling in love was not planned, but it was ultimately "reasonable" since the two of them were, de facto, the two greatest humans on the planet. "By the total logic of who we are--by the total logic of what love and sex mean--we had to love each other," Rand told Barbara Branden and her own husband, Frank O'Connor. It was a classic display of a brilliant mind intellectualizing a purely emotional response, and another example of reason carried to absurd heights. "Whatever the two of you may be feeling," Rand rationalized, "I know your intelligence, I know you recognize the rationality of what we feel for each other, and that you hold no value higher than reason" (B. Brandon, p. 258).

Unbelievably, both Barbara and Frank accepted the affair, and agreed to allow Ayn and Nathaniel an afternoon and evening of sex and love twice a week. "And so," Barbara explained, "we all careened toward disaster." The "rational" justification and its consequences continued year after year, as the tale of interpersonal and group deceit grew broader and deeper. The disaster finally came in 1968 when it became known to Rand that Branden had fallen in love with yet another woman, and had begun an affair with her. Even though the affair between Rand and Branden had long since dwindled, the master of the absolutist moral double-standard would not tolerate such a breach of ethical conduct.

"Get that bastard down here!," Rand screamed upon hearing the news, "or I'll drag him here myself!" Branden, according to Barbara, slunk into Rand's apartment to face the judgment day. "It's finished, your whole act!" she told him. "I'll tear down your facade as I built it up! I'll denounce you publicly, I'll destroy you as I created you! I don't even care what it does to me. You won't have the career I gave you, or the name, or the wealth, or the prestige. You'll have nothing . . . ." The barrage continued for several minutes until she pronounced her final curse: "If you have an ounce of morality left in you, an ounce of psychological health--you'll be impotent for the next twenty years!" (pp. 345-347).

It was the beginning of the long decline and fall of Rand's tight grip over the Collective. One by one they sinned, the transgressions becoming more minor as the condemnations grew in  intensity until the meetings ended.

"Wit and humor, as might be gathered from this incident, were verboten in the Randian movement. The philosophical rationale was that humor demonstrates that one "is not serious about one’s values." The actual reason, of course, is that no cult can withstand the piercing and sobering effect, the sane perspective, provided by humor. One was permitted to sneer at one’s enemies, but that was the only humor allowed, if humor that be.

Personal enjoyment, indeed, was also frowned upon in the movement and denounced as hedonistic "whim-worship." In particular, nothing could be enjoyed for its own sake – every activity had to serve some indirect, "rational" function. Thus, food was not to be savored, but only eaten joylessly as a necessary means of one’s survival; sex was not to be enjoyed for its own sake, but only to be engaged in grimly as a reflection and reaffirmation of one’s "highest values"; painting or movies only to be enjoyed if one could find "rational values" in doing so. All of these values were not simply to be discovered quietly by each person – the heresy of "subjectivism" – but had to be proven to the rest of the cult. In practice, as will be seen further below, the only safe aesthetic or romantic "values" or objects for the member were those explicitly sanctioned by Ayn Rand or other top disciples"http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard23.html

In his highly critical 1999 book The Ayn Rand Cult, Jeff Walker notes the following similarities between Ayn Rand's Objectivism and L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics:

• both claim to be science and logic based

• both treat the brain as a machine

• both present a higher mind reprogramming the rest of humanity

• both recommended the uprooting of irrational premises (engrams)

• both assume that rationality permit people to enjoy healthy emotional lives

• both relate immorality to decreased potential for survival

• both perceive striving for goals as the important motivator in life

• both oppose coercion, even by government

• both assume that rational people have no real conflicts of interest

• both attach mail-in cards in their books to connect readers to the apparatus of movement recruitment

Walker notes however that only Ayn Rand's followers claim that hers was the greatest novel ever written.

 Her lasting influence on American Politics

"Perhaps the best-known member of Rand's inner circle—officially, and perversely, dubbed the Collective—was a young economist named Alan Greenspan. As the head of the Federal Reserve for two decades, he embraced his mentor's belief that markets work best when corporations are free to pursue their own selfish interests. We know how that story ended. Other avowed Rand fans include Hugh Hefner, Clarence Thomas, and Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. Greenspan was one of the members of her early Collective." http://motherjones.com/media/2009/07/and-rand-played

Phil Graham used Rand's concepts of the free market to justify the removal of regulatory oversights of energy companies, large corporations and banks.  

"These ideas were later picked up on and put into play by major right-wing figures of the past half decade, including the key architects of America's most recent economic catastrophe -- former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan and SEC Commissioner Chris Cox -- along with other notable right-wing Republicans such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Rush Limbaugh and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford."

Ron Paul's son is named Rand.  He is currently the frontrunner in the Senate primary in Kentucky to replace Jim Bunning.^[1]

The Rand Stamp

Rand's free market beliefs are cherry-picked by the Republicans who conveniently ignore her pro-abortion and anti-religious views. Libertarians base much of their philosophy on her free market writings even though she called them "lazy hippies of the right." http://motherjones.com/media/2009/07/and-rand-played

Greenspan found out what happens when you allow real life capitalists to enter his fairy-tale land of Rand economics and set off the dynamite.  He and his Rand theories are directly responsible for this latest depression.  All the Rand followers of her utopian  free-market will not use reason, the core of Objectivism, to see that her theories have disastrous results when put into action.  You can't ignore greed.  Their response, which is totally irrational, is that Greenspan didn't go far enough.  What?  Basically, he didn't allow the thieves and crooks enough latitude to steal even more is the line from these people who worship reason over all things.  Can you say CRAZY?  

What is ironic, sad and almost hilarious is that these people holding these signs would be mocked as "looters" and "moochers" by Rand and her followers.  

Now, one can see how people can use her words and philosophy to attack Democrats and any who want to help others who are suffering in life.  It is her legacy. Her words have given people a reason to be more selfish in a world where selfishness and lack of concern for others has always been the problem.  

 "Objectivism was declared dead in the last week of October, 2008: Alan Greenspan, a devotee (and disciple) of Ayn Rand admitted before congress and the world that the ideas he'd pursued for 40 years failed, and, as a result, the economy was collapsing, the US government was being asked to bail out Wall Street, and the banking system was being fully Socialized -- a series of events no one from any political persuasion desired. The bug that bit the banks was very clearly a lack of regulation, and it happened so quickly, no one had time to spin it any other way. Stunned market-worshipers paused and said, "greed is NOT good?"

In response to a 1958 New York Times book review slamming Atlas Shrugged, Greenspan, defending his mentor, published a letter to the editor that ends: "Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should. Alan Greenspan."

 Here is the story of her once closest ally and heir to be, Nathaniel Branden :

"I was fourteen years old when I read Ayn Rand’s novel “The Fountainhead” for the first time. It was the most thrilling and emotionally powerful reading experience of my life. The only rival to that event might be the experience, some years later, of reading “Atlas Shrugged” in manuscript.

I wrote Miss Rand a letter in 1949 when I was studying psychology at UCLA and she was living in San Fernando Valley and was writing “Atlas Shrugged” The purpose of my letter was to ask her a number of philosophical questions suggested to me by “The Fountainhead” and by her earlier novel, We The Living. The letter intrigued her; I was invited to her home for a personal meeting in March, 1950, a month before I turned twenty. Read more here.

http://www.nathanielbranden.com/catalog/rand.php#

 Who was Ayn Rand?

Ayn Rand was a genius. She taught herself to read at age six and was writing full novels by age ten.  She wrote books in English, her second language, that have sold millions of copies and still sell hundreds of thousands of copies today even though she died in 1982.    She experienced the Russian revolution up close and personal while growing up with  her Jewish family in Russian and lived through it and the horror of World War I.  This made her a fierce, combative anti-communist.  The trauma  of her childhood convinced her that all things resembling "collectivism" were inherently evil. She was an odd, cranky, lonely woman who used her fiction to create and promote her philosophy.  Even her most vocal critics must admit that what she did with her writing was indeed quite remarkable.  If she had been just an author then one could  observe her entertaining writing and shrug off her strange lifestyle and personal quirks.  I mean, many authors have been odd ducks.  Take Edgar Allen Poe,  for example.  He created his mostly dark, scary  stories while smoking opium and sitting off in isolation.  But there is a big difference. 

Edgar Allen Poe did not go around telling everyone that if they would only put a pit and pendulum in their basement then they would be forever happy.  Rand did this when she moved from being an author and tried to move into the world of philosophy. Her Objectivism is a radical and mostly unoriginal conglomeration of old ideas pieced together and filled with contractions.  The most glaring of these contractions is that she took individualism which would seem to encourage all types of thought and questioning and turned it into a simplistic black and white way of intrepreting the world.  She reminds me of a combination of my grandmother and Green Bay Packer football coach Vince Lombardi.  

One time my brother and I were visiting at grandma's little farm home.  We were told by mom to go do the dishes.  We started but grandma stopped us.  "No, no, no!  You do it this way!  You always do the silverware first!"  She was simply horrified that we had dumped in the plates, bowls, coffee cups and silverware into the hot, soapy water at the same time.  In grandma's world there was a specific, step-by-step single way to do the dishes properly.  Ayn Rand was the same way in her rigidity.  

In her world, there were the top elite of people who were productive and always rational.  All others were parasites, looters, second-raters, irrational ones who lived off the fruit of the productive, intelligent ones.  No gray areas with her.  Always black and white with no room for disagreement. John Galt or Howard Roark, her two most famous literary perfect  supermen, would have never joined her collective group if they had magically come alive.  Rand did not tolerate individualism in her inner circle.  If you liked Mozart, you were gone.  If you had any questions about the concepts of Objectivism you were labeled irrational and scorned.  All knowledge came from Ayn Rand, case closed.  

Many of her followers claim how inspired they were by her writings.  But this is irrational according to Rand herself as inspiration is based on emotion and emotions and feelings are themselves irrational. She lived a lonely, isolated life personally which is a contradiction for one who claimed her way was the best and only  way to personal happiness.  She despised all things mystical or religious yet her followers worshiped her which she not only accepted but demanded.  Her Objectivism became more than a philosophy but a religion if not a simple cult.  

She was like Vince Lombardi as his players said: "Vince Lombardi treated us all the same -- like dogs." This was Rand.  She was perfectly consistent in her hate of most people.  She hated all liberals and liberal causes.  She hated almost all politicians.  She hated anyone who disagreed with her including conservative idol William F. Buckley.  She hated the academic world yet wanted to be accepted by that same world.  She hated Christians and Christianity with a vengence.  She scorned Libertarians. 

Rand also despised democracy, writing that, "Democracy, in short, is a form of collectivism, which denies individual rights: the majority can do whatever it wants with no restrictions. In principle, the democratic government is all-powerful. Democracy is a totalitarian manifestation; it is not a form of freedom."

"The truly odd part is that Ayn Rand’s objectivism has been conflated with libertarianism and the ’social liberal’/anarchist libertarians have been forgotten about (surviving only by the force of Chomsky’s intellect).  Then the confused mixing of ideologies was somehow used as rhetoric for the rising religious right which, in response to Cold War Imperialism, ended up as evangelical neoconservatism.  Sadly, Rand’s idealism of rational self-interest and individualism became the justification of the neocons and their imperialistic military-industrial complex. 

Bush jr’s administration saw the full flowering of this trend.  And, more recently, the paranoid religious fringe, by way of Glenn Beck, has attempted to coopt Ayn Rand into their patriotic moral conservatism… somehow attempting to fit rational self-interest into the frame of submission to ideological fundamentalism with it’s concept of the fallen self.  Buckley supposedly was responsible for kicking out of the libertarian movement the racists and conspiracy theorists, but I’m getting the sense they might be sneaking back in now that he isn’t on watch.

I don’t know what Ayn Rand would think of it all, but she would not be happy.  Despite her criticisms of liberals, it was the conservatives that she thought would destroy America and she might turn out to be correct.  She had such opposition to the idea of a ‘moral majority’ that she considered starting a party called the ‘immoral minority’."

"Rand has this extremist, intolerant, dogmatic antigovernment stance," says Brink Lindsey of the libertarian Cato Institute, "and it pushes free-market supporters toward a purist, radical vision that undermines their capacity to get anything done." The Rev. Robert Sirico, head of the free-market Acton Institute, agrees. "If you want to offend, Rand accomplishes that. But if you want to convert—well, for instance, who could imagine Rand debating a health-care bill? I wouldn't want to take an order from her in a restaurant, let alone negotiate a political point."

In short, this skilled wordsmith generates heat and controversy not so much with her books but with her philosophy which was  the purpose of her books.  But this last bit here told me all I wanted to know about this person.  Read how she treated her husband at the end of his life.  

"Rand treats the physically ill as if their misfortunes were always their own fault, and a sign of their moral and human worthlessness. In The Fountainhead, for example, she compares “the bright, the strong, the able boys” of Ellsworth Toohey’s class during his childhood with Skinny Dix, who “got infantile paralysis, and would lie in bed.” This comparison is indicative of a truly loathsome and disgusting hardness of heart and lack of compassion as well as a crude intellectual error (made, no doubt, partly as a result of her loathing for Roosevelt—infantile paralysis does not affect the intelligence and therefore cannot be taken as a symbolic opposite of ability).

Rand’s hardness of heart was not only confined to the page. There is a chilling account in the biography of how she treated her long-suffering husband, Frank O’Connor, when he suffered from dementia:

She nagged at him continually, to onlookers’ distress. “Don’t humor him,” she [said]. “Make him try to remember.” She insisted that his mental lapses were “psycho-epistemological,” and she gave him long, grueling lessons in how to think and remember. She assigned him papers on aspects of his mental functioning, which he was entirely unable to write.

This downright cruelty (as well as downright stupidity) derived from her overvaluation of supposed intellectual consistency in the conduct of daily life. She believed that it was more important to adhere to a principle than to behave well. Among her many bad ideas was the compatibility of all human desiderata, and that any conflict of a man’s interests was merely the consequence of his not having thought through his situation sufficiently, and applied a fundamental and indubitable principle correctly and consistently. For Rand, there was no ambiguity in the world: if it is true that man has free will and is responsible for his conduct, it cannot also be that there is a condition such as dementia that robs a man of his capacity for choice. Hence her husband’s lapses were wilful and deliberate, to be corrected by Randian brainwashing. This is authentically horrible."

 http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Ayn-Rand--engineer-of-souls-4385

 In short, I have to use Ayn Rand's own words.  Although, I was attracted to her words and thoughts on individualism, high achievement and having high self-esteem I cannot be a follower because as she put it, "It is all or nothing."  You take everything she says or nothing.  Okay, I chose nothing then.  

"Every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly . . . just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a rotter above a hero ." (Rand)

 Great, Ayn Rand is the mirror evil reflection of my two favorite authors, Charles Dickens and John Steinbeck.  They told stories of the common man and their plights.  The very men and women Rand feels she has a natural superiority to and mocks as parasites.   

I believe in these words also: 

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.
Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.
Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." (Matt. 5:3-10.)

Ayn Rand stands for hate. Her words and philosophy give haters an excuse, a justification to hate.  She believes she was bringing light to the word with her wisdom.  She did nothing of the sort.  Her premise is laughable.  To her, there is not enough selfishness in the world.  She claims that she and she alone, has more knowledge than Jesus, Mohammed, Confucius, the Buddhists, Shakespeare, Plato and all the other minds in the history of the world.  For this she gets her books put in the classic section of the bookstore, has a stamp made for her and creates a blood-thirsty mob of followers.  She is the antithesis of the dream of America.  She may have left Russia but Russia never left her.  

Want to know why the Right is crazy?  Well, here you go.  They follow the preachings of a narcissistic  personality who against all reason worshiped reason.  She denied emotions, feelings, psychology, faith, intitutions as irrational, which in itself is irrational and damn stupid. I hate everything about her and her followers.  

Caution:  You cannot be a Christian and follow her teachings.  She would not allow it.  You cannot pull out her free market thoughts and ignore the rest of her thinking.  She forbid it.  She hated the Left but hated the Right more.  She claimed to have wanted to start the "immoral minority" in response to Reagan.  She must be rolling in her grave when she hears Glenn Beck and others of the Right quoting her.

The fact that the Ayn Rand Institute is a non-profit is unbelievable to me.   What is also unbelievable is that this non-profit  place has put in a million copies of her books into our schools this year.  

 References:

I watched the Mike Wallace television interviews with Rand from 1959. I watched all of Phil Donahue's shows where she was featured.  I watched her interviews with Tom Synder.  All of these can be found on YouTube with little problem.  

I read Anne C. Heller's newly released biography:  Ayn Rand and the World She Made.(2009)

I reread several sections of Atlas Shrugged and all of the Fountainhead.  I simply could not read Anthem.  I have never read  her other books. 

I read her essay: The Virtue of Selfishness.  

I read both from both supporters and critics.  

Here are many web links:

 http://online.wsj.com/article abs%3Darticle

 http://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2010/01/02/william-f-buckley-jr-the-witch-doctor-is-dead/

http://www.jeffcomp.com/faq/wrong.html

a well-thought out criticism of Objectivisim.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard23.html

The best summary of her sociology

http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Ayn-Rand--engineer-of-souls-4385

http://www.2think.org/02_2_she.shtml

Some insight and history of Rand and her movement.

http://world.std.com/~mhuben/hodges

Former Rand follower's thoughts

http://www.esquire.com/features/gore-vidal-archive/comment-0761

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_?page=entire

http://motherjones.com/media/2009/07/and-rand-played

http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=ari_ayn_rand_the_objectivist_ethics

http://www.peikoff.com/opar/altruism.htm

http://freedomkeys.com/paradox.htm

The Ultimate Absurdity
"During the 1990's politicians and journalists alike heaped scorn on Microsoft Founder Bill Gates for not giving "enough" to charity.  Here is a man who could be called the greatest benefactor of mankind in our lifetimes who, by the nature of his business, doubled, tripled, and even QUADRUPLED the productivity of millions of people.  Yet these philosophical barbarians could measure his value only by what he had or hadn't given away to whomever THEY thought should receive his attention.  Beyond disgusting.  Sadly, the philosophically crippled Mr. Gates finally gave upwards of 20 Billion dollars to charities which likely did less than ten percent as much good as his donating it to his friend Warren Buffett could have done.  The investment genius Buffett, of course, could have invested it in vastly more wisely in tremendously more productive, and thus life-improving, enterprises if Gates couldn't invest the money in his own business.  Philosophy does matter."  (quote from Objectivist blog mocking Gates for giving away some of his fortune.)

http://incertus.blogspot.com/2008/12/zombie-objectivism.html

http://www.noblesoul.com/orc/critics/index.html

http://folk.uio.no/thomas/po/perversion-of-libertarianism.html

http://www.jrnyquist.com/peikoff%27s_genocidal_campaign.htm

http://www.barbarabranden.com/answer-nathaniel.html

http://authormichaelprescott.blogspot.com/2005/03/was-ayn-rand-evil.html

http://www.la-articles.org.uk/alice.htm

http://www.ariwatch.com/

http://michaelprescott.net/reversalism.htm

http://aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/?widgetType=BlogArchive&widgetId=BlogArchive1&action=toggle&dir=open&toggle=MONTHLY-1191222000000&toggleopen=MONTHLY-1233475200000

http://www.nathanielbranden.com/catalog/rand.php#

Defend Rand all you want.  How can the head of the Ayn Rand Institute be defended?  Watch this for insanity in action.  The second video shows a clip from Stephen Colbert.  For the entire clip of Colbert go to his website and type in The Rand Illusion.