Maria Bustillos: The failures of Ayn Rand (Popula)
For those who are inclined to find such ideas ludicrous, the book will fail, and utterly; its premises betray a bottomless ignorance of the deep interconnectedness of humankind, the needs — economic, social, emotional, intellectual — of human beings for one another, and of the ultimate inalienable reality of life on Earth as a whole, the totality of which each is a part, and our need to live in this wholeness.
Rand is 100% pro-inequality; she preaches the intellectual and moral superiority of wealth, and scorn and hatred of those who have “less.” Objectivism actively praises inequality. But nobody has “less,” because all have the same, of the only thing that matters—life, for a moment, and then?—something, nothing, nobody knows. Equality is not a fantasy, nor even a goal; it is just a fact.
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Rand’s books have sold nonstop from the moment they were published because people love hearing how not only can they get away with being totally selfish, it’s absolutely the right way to be. The best way to be, as in, morally the best.
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The real looters, it increasingly appears, are the self-styled Objectivist “elites,” rabidly pursuing their own “happiness” at the cost of our social safety net, the prosperity and well-being of the world’s people and even, quite possibly, of this planet’s capacity to sustain life. So much for the triumph of individualism.