Jesus Christ: You can’t impeach Him and He ain’t gonna resign.
Entertaining read. More a critique of Branden and Rand than his obit.
Rand was a cougar? Ick.
There is the “Atlas Shrugged” anti-collectivist mentality as part of the Tea Party - but much of the Randian philosophy is not relevant at all.
Tea Party Indeed.
Will they have us beleiving Ayn Rand was the Godmother of the Tea Party movement?
~sheesh~
Rand hated libertarians and hated being called a libertarian. Ninety percent of the people initially attracted to Rand’s orbit ended up leaving and becoming libertarians. This just drove her nuts. But then her whole agree-with-me-or-you-are-evil mantra was nuts to begin with.
:: the bestselling author of The Fountainhead (1943), a torrid ideological melodrama of Nietzschean individualism ::
No! Absolutely no relativistic agenda here. None at all.
Move along, people...
The Rand cult is profoundly WEIRD.
Rand reminds me of Madalyn Murray O’Hair as an atheist who became her own god. She’s fortunate that she didn’t meet the same fate. They both seemed like miserable people.
AFAIK, Ayn Rand’s problem isn’t so much that she is libertarian. She got it so right on the economic and capitalist idea.
She fell short because of her atheism and self-centeredness (is that a word?) in her philosophy.
I wish she would have acknowledged that we are creative and working beings because we are made in our Creator’s image. Somehow that denial of our uniqueness in the universe—that tenant of communism—stuck with her after she left the Bolsheviks in Russia.
Rand ping please.
I love British writers!
The Ministry of Propaganda is going to love this hit piece.
Ann was a twisted freak
Inspiring? Wait. I thought the TEA Party was inspired by the Boston Tea party?
The "inspiration" was when a bunch of people got sick of being TAXED ENOUGH ALREADY.
Good Lord! Can't anyone get it through their thick heads that it is a natural desire to not have a huge government boot stuck on your wallet sucking out every penny you own?
I am not motivated by Ayn Rand in the least.
Nothing in Rand’s philosophy prevents charity. Objectivism is the American Way, which is also completely misunderstood.
PING
Right up your ally.
Uh...what? You don't have to be an Objectivist or any sort of cultist to suspect that Atlas may be shrugging. The author is profoundly confused as to the Tea Party. I doubt if 20% of its adherents have read Atlas Shrugged and I'm not sure the author of this piece did either.
That said, it was a strange little group. A thing that Publius and I pointed out in Who Is John Galt? is that even within the novel her heroes and heroines espouse philosophical doctrines that their actions do not follow in the fictional narrative. That is, in fact, one of the more interesting things about the book IMHO. It would have been easy for Rand to simply make them all perfect little Objectivist automata, but she didn't.
Alan Greenspan was in that circle, incidentally, and he also departed due to Rand's doctrinaire tendencies. And that is the real curiosity: like her characters, her actual behavior found itself in opposition to her stated principles and upon being pointed out her invariable reply was that the critic simply didn't have a proper understanding of those principles. That's where we approach cultism: it isn't even how Objectivism is supposed to work.
RIP, Nathaniel Branden.
Jesus Christ: You can’t impeach Him and He ain’t gonna resign.
Seems Rand never caught on to the idea that there is no rational basis for a philosophy of individual sovereignty apart from Christianity.
The father to the self-esteem movement is a leftist hero. This major piece of junk science makes the mistake that correlation is causation. People are not successful from high self-esteem but the other way around. Pumping people full of unrealistic opinions of themselves makes them vain, and worse, envious of others. Vanity is the source of all evil in the world, including leftism. Because of Branden the world is badly in need of a humility movement.