It occurs to me that the most basic refutation of Ayn Rand is what would happen if all people everywhere were passionate “objectivists” (her incredibly self-congratulatory name for her “system”). It would be a planet of arrogant lizards hissing at each other.
Rand’s philosophy requires a world pre-populated with the rich and poor already in place so she can align herself with the one and spit on the other. Her own lifestyle, the one she oddly evangelized, requires losers to step on and revile. Besides communists and such though, these losers include everyone who shows some societal concerns and compassion. It includes mother love, family love, friendship, and any impulse toward generosity. Rand and her followers are philosophical and emotional day-traders shorting human relationships. She is the Donald Trump of philosophers, a humorless solipsist locked in combat against growth. Ego death is the ultimate terror. Transformation is failure. Compromise is weakness. Generosity is a character defect.
Her protagonists are epic narcissists held aloft by their contempt for the less self-involved. They don’t grow, they are complete and perfect glittering egos, high on self-righteous indignation at the idea of ever sublimating their hunger for the good of another. The only character arcs of her cardboard thespians are pauses to listen in awe for seven or eight pages to grinding monologues that transform them into perfect compliance with her philosophy. Her stories are a wish-fulfillment Inferno/Paradiso of punishing those who disagree and rewarding those in perfect compliance.
Ayn Rand produced only one consumable that anyone would pay for: That product is a greasy intellectual lotion to be rubbed upon the rich leaving them with a golden glow of complete satisfaction with the status quo. It has a secondary property of encouraging some people who aren’t rich to assert complete justification in behaving like assholes any time they feel like it.
As a totally selfish asshole, Rand realized that a product niche existed and she could fill it very lucratively. The delicious malicious truth is that in her purest, most “objective” thinking she is utterly dependent upon the small change of other people, the dollar fifty contributions of the boring, needy, prosaic people she despised. Her “philosophy/literature” is the artistic portrait of a furious toddler foot stamping or a mean teenage sister with no friends who calls everyone “loser”. Her “art” is the furious muttering self-justification of wounded self-importance lifted out of internal monologue and dribbled across endless pages.
Ayn Rand was Veruca Salt as a 3rd-semester college freshman…every single minute of her life. Her story is the loveless tragedy of a person perfectly applying the philosophy of Ayn Rand to their own life.
One of my favorite philosophers, Robert Anton Wilson on meeting Ayn Rand: “The first new dogmatism I embraced after rejecting the Marxist BS (belief system) was Ayn Rand’s philosophy (not yet called Objectivism in those days.) The Fountainhead had exactly the appeal for me that it has retained, decade after decade, with alienated adolescents of all ages. (The average youthful reader of Thus Spake Zarathustra decides he is the Superman, and the average youthful Randroid decides she is an Alienated Super Genius.) Like most Randroids, I went around for a few years mindlessly parroting all the Rand dogma and imagining I was an ‘individualist.’ “Some years later, after becoming a published writer, I actually was invited to meet Ayn Rand once. (I was ‘summoned to the Presence,’ as Arlen said.) I confessed my doubts about certain Rand dogmas and was Cast Out Into the Darkness forever to wail and gnash my teeth in the Realm of Thud. It was weird. I thought the Trots and Catholic priests were dogmatic, but Ayn Rand made both groups look like models of tolerance by comparison. “I thought she was a clinical paranoid. It was nearly 30 years later that I found out Rand was merely on Speed all the time, which creates an effect so much like paranoia that even trained clinicians cannot always tell the difference, and some even claim there is no difference.”
