Centenary of that ideologist unto the sophomores, Ayn Rand. Like all great pseudo-theoreticians of the 20th century, Rand had no discernible sense of humor and a monomaniacal sense of personal destiny. Really honestly, she was MADE for the American market in that respect. An embittered refugee from Lenin’s USSR, Rand was the first true “counter-marxist” creating a creed she thought was sufficiently potent to supplant sub-rational marxism-leninism.
What she came up with was called “objectivism” a mish-mash of atheism, market-worship, greed, and quaint 19th century Wagnerian elitism. Thanks to it’s religious skepticism and elitist pretensions, objectivism is just bohemian enough to attract a large following among the autistic and software engineers. Otherwise its a standard counter-marxist cult whose insistant atheism parallels Leninism in some respects.
Objectivists are inexplicably haughty in a EST-like fashion. They think they are “on to something” the serfs just don’t get. Their chronic posturing reaches such an absurd degree one wonders why they bother with politics and political theory at all?
Greed, oligarchy, the secular veneration of the late Ayn Rand, and atheism just isn’t a program destined for mass popularity in America when you think about it. Very little of their ideology contains any discernible public good at all. Somehow shrinking government down to the size of a postage stamp and handing power to a tiny cadre of super intelligent individualists is somehow supposed improve the lives of the masses in some vague indefinite fashion. Clearly for all their revolt against modernity, objectivism is still paradoxically stuck on Jeremy Bentham’s great-good-for-the-greatest-number doctrine.
However, their hyper-libertarian ethos does contain a strong element of personal self transformation. Hard core objectivists regularly write long toadying articles about how that one book by Ms. Rand changed their whole world view at age fourteen. Allegedly, just reading one of Ayn’s unbelievably turgid novels (“Atlas Shrugged” “The Fountainhead”) is enough to turn your life around much akin to being smacked in the face by Jesus’ own personal shovel. They ought to reconfigure the whole mishaugas as a personal self help dogma. Communism and Fascism both required a political context in which to function, but Rand’s objectivism is little more than a humorless self improvement program a’la Dale Carnegie.
Otherwise the only use one has for her long obtuse novels is as a brickbat to toss at your little sister when she takes to filching your comics.
Happy Birthday Ms. Rand. Too bad the cigarettes got you, too bad you couldn’t credit the surgeon general’s report as anything else but bureaucratic snoopery of the worst kind.
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