• • • Keep looking out for the self during college years (the pitt news) 
Giles Howard, Pitt News (U of Pittsburgh) Altruism  Egoism  Dr. Allan Gotthelf, a visiting professor in Pitt’s Department of History and Philosophy of Science and an expert on Rand’s philosophy of objectivism, explained the relevant part of Rand’s view of morality in two principles: First, “Each person has a right to pursue his own rational self-interest,” and second, “We will benefit from [others] pursuing their own self-interest, just as they will [benefit] from our pursuing ours,” Gotthelf said. These pillars of objectivism constitute the morality of that segment of the political Right that values individual responsibility, free markets and small government. It is this morality that is largely absent from college campuses today whereas the Leftist morality of altruism pervades higher education.     Share on Facebook

• • • Morality of war 
Patti Roscoe, The Rotator (Rotary Club of San Diego) Ayn Rand Institute  Yaron Brook  (Link is to PDF file.)It’s been a long time since a speaker evoked such a buzz once we were adjourned. [....] When Dr. Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute began his presentation with a quote from General Sherman – War is Hell – we knew we were in for quite a ride. [....] “Provocative, challenging, offensive, infuriating, thought provoking and bone chilling” were just some of the words and impressions I heard and felt as I walked from the room. Groups of people, in twos and fours, were in serious discussion everywhere, agreeing and disagreeing; expressing their beliefs or disbelief in the speech; or just trying to grasp the concept of it all.     Share on Facebook

• • • Bring it on, Ayn Rand geeks 
Michael Lind, Salon Atheism  Capitalism  The public has repeatedly rejected any attempts to privatize Social Security or slash Medicare benefits. Reagan denounced both entitlements, but as president he raised taxes to support Social Security and refused to touch Medicare. Under George W. Bush, a Republican Congress passed the Medicare drug benefit, which, for all its concessions to the pharma lobby, was the biggest expansion of socialized medicine in the U.S. since Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare into law. [....] So bring it on, geeky disciples of Ayn Rand. Gird thy loins and put on thy Spock ears. Demand the abolition of Social Security and Medicare! Call for reducing the U.S. military to the Coast Guard! Insist on tolling every highway and street in America and selling America's infrastructure assets to foreign corporations and foreign sovereign wealth funds! Go Galt! Bring it on! Even confined to a wheelchair, Franklin Roosevelt can defeat Ayn Rand.     Share on Facebook

• • • Who is John Galt? No, really. 
Stephen Herrington, Huffington Post Atheism  Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism  Egoism  Personal life  Ayn Rand was a drawing room capitalist, a theorist on a subject with which she had no practical experience (other than with its opposite). She could not understand, or ignored, the fact that the stifling of creativity and the seizure of work product is not the exclusive prerogative of communism. It happens every day in capitalism. Corporate monopolies act to break the will of competition. Corporations stifle creativity with things like planned obsolescence and the withholding of known solutions from markets in all fields. Corporations buy legislation, passing the cost on to consumers, and stack the legal deck against the public interest with impunity. Corrupt bureaucracy can be found at Wal Mart as easily as the Politburo.     Share on Facebook

• • • Who is Ayn Rand? 
Gillis J. Harp, Review Messenger (Sebeka, MN) Atheism  Atlas Shrugged  Personal life  Inaccurate  Review of Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, by Jennifer Burns.Rand and her circle consistently demonized the state as the principal source of evil in the world. Such a caricature has been alien to Christian political theology from Thomas Aquinas, to Richard Hooker, to Leo XIII and Reinhold Niebuhr. Rand's anti-government stance can lead to troubling contradictions in a representative democracy, and Burns notes how Rand often slipped into an arrogant elitism. The rational faculty she increasingly emphasized in her thought was best exhibited by "the better species, the Superman," and not by that group of mindless citizens she dismissed as mere "human ballast."     Share on Facebook

• • • Ayn Rand in Uganda 
Scott Noble, Dissident Voice Altruism  Ayn Rand Institute  Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  The Virtue of Selfishness  Capitalism  Personal life  Inaccurate  Rand’s philosophy represents a revolt against human nature. Not only are we hard-wired to feel emotions like empathy, it is precisely our ability to share, commiserate and act collectively that allows us to survive as a species. Moreover, recent data suggests that the great bugaboo of libertarianism – equality of outcome – is actually the single most important determinant of health and happiness in society.     Share on Facebook

• • • The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism (1964) 
David Wilson, South China Morning Post The Virtue of Selfishness  Egoism  Personal life  (Requires subscription.)Nowhere in Rand's ascendant nicety-free canon is her take on politics expressed with more verve and venom than the essay collection The Virtue of Selfishness. The Neocon bible expounds Rand's philosophy, which she called "objectivist" in a foretaste of the equally dubious Fox News slogan: "The Spin stops here". About as objective as The Narnia Chronicles, Rand's gut-instinct tract exalts egotism as a rational code of ethics and slams socialism as a vice. A selfish, non-sacrificial way of life is possible and the only way to be, according to Rand, whose individualist take on how to live could be seen as an affront to Christianity, Confucianism and several other belief systems that place hope in community. Rand's Darwinian outlook, which makes Britain's Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher appear warm and fuzzy, must stem from her upbringing in Soviet Russia. [....] Rand can be so short on rigour that she resembles a crazed cult leader. Her claim that extremity equates with consistency is just one example of her borderline lunacy, which can be toxic. Elsewhere in the book, she is even more virulent. Despite Rand's fanaticism, The Virtue of Selfishness remains a compelling reflection of her spectacularly dysfunctional mind and a masterclass in the waspish art of polemic. Stinging.     Share on Facebook

• • • The Ayn Rand follies 
The New Criterion Altruism  Atlas Shrugged  The Virtue of Selfishness  Capitalism  Egoism  Inaccurate  It was always, we suspect, Rand’s effort to make a “virtue of selfishness” (as she puts it in the title of a collection of essays) that accounted for a large part of her appeal. The shocking quality of advocating something so widely deprecated guaranteed an eager audience. Most human beings do not need special encouragement to be selfish. They come by it naturally enough. How welcome, then, to stumble upon a writer of long books who, far from criticizing selfishness, as everyone from your mother on down has done, tells you that you should be as selfish as possible.     Share on Facebook

• • • Exploring “The Moral Foundations of Capitalism” … at Stanford? 
Autumn Carter, Stanford Review - Fiat Lux (Stanford U, CA) Capitalism  Image  This quarter, I took one of the best classes I’ve taken in my 8 quarters here at Stanford. “The Moral Foundations of Capitalism,” an Ethics in Society course, was featured in campus news, mired in a bit of controversy, and filled beyond capacity within days of its enrollment opening. [....] I learned so much history, so much philosophy, and so much about myself. The course’s cornerstone was Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Rand, an Objectivist, championed Capitalism as a social system that leaves man free to use his mind to reason and determine what is best for his own life.     Share on Facebook

• • • Ayn Rand, Chapman University and serial killer love 
Matt Coker, Orange County Weekly - Navel Gazing (CA) The Fountainhead  Image  Inaccurate  The Mother of Objectivism and author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged "is the 28th notable figure to have a bust dedicated on the campus of Chapman University," reports Chapman Now. [....] [I]t's a good bet Rand is the only Chapman bustee whose first love dismembered little girls.     Share on Facebook

• • • Internal affairs: How Ayn Rand followers rationalize “welcomed” rape 
Amanda Hess, Washington City Paper - The Sexist (DC) Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  Capitalism  Egoism  Rand reportedly had this to say about the [rape] scene [in The Fountainhead]: “If it was rape, it was rape by engraved invitation.” But for young people with no practical experience with sex, Rand doesn’t provide any instruction on how exactly to seal the note. If your sex partner is biting you and beating you in the face, how can you be sure they’ve consented “internally”? Between Rand’s idealized heroes and heroines, why is the ideal sexual scenario a violent rape that the woman only privately desires? And for Rand, who was fond of invoking the tautological principle that “A is A,” when is rape not rape?     Share on Facebook

• • • Yevgeny Zamyatin: Libertarian novelist 
Jeff Riggenbach, Mises.org Daily Article Anthem  Atlas Shrugged  We The Living  Personal life  Whatever we decide about whether Rand read We in the '20s or '30s, there's simply no getting around the obvious similarities between Zamyatin's novel and Rand's Anthem. Both are set in the far future in a completely collectivized totalitarian society. Both are told in the first person by their main characters, in We by the mathematician and engineer D-503, in Anthem by the engineer Equality 7-2521. Anthem is the only work of fiction written by Rand to be written in the first person. In We, D-503 meets a woman, I-330, and is led inexorably down a path to rebellion against the government of the society in which he lives. In Anthem, Equality 7-2521 meets a woman, Liberty 5-3000, and is led inexorably down a path to rebellion against the government of the society in which he lives.     Share on Facebook

• • • Individuality, freedom, and superiority: Returning to Ayn Rand’s problems 
Gus diZerega, Beliefnet.com - A Pagan’s Blog Rand's model of the individual is lacking in depth because it does not address how each of us as individuals came to be who we are. She simply takes them for granted as elemental forces of nature. As the African proverb puts it: "I am because we are."     Share on Facebook

• • • Ayn Rand’s books are deliciously anti-statist, but her philosophy is borderline Nazi 
James Delingpole, The Spectator Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  Inaccurate  What I find most off-putting about Rand is her hardness of heart. She has a Nietzschean (indeed, borderline Nazi) contempt for human frailty and a total lack of sympathy for the underdog. In her weltanschauung, you’re either a hero (rare) or — much more likely — a mere filler of latrines. Any form of charity, she suggests, is a kind of grotesque liberal indulgence towards people who really aren’t worth saving.     Share on Facebook

• • • Ayn Rand, the philosophy of freedom, and a serial killer 
Gus diZerega, Beliefnet.com - A Pagan’s Blog Atheism  Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  We The Living  Egoism  Rand's admiration for a sociopathic murderer is an eye-opener as to the moral sensibility that appeals to all too many 'conservative' and 'libertarian' Americans. She was one very disturbed and deeply wounded person, as her biographies show.     Share on Facebook

• • • Ayn Rand’s excellent proposal 
Ernest Partridge, Online Journal Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism  Egoism  In Ayn Rand’s sprawling novel, Atlas Shrugged, ubermensch industrialist, John Galt, infuriated over the “theft” of his property by the parasitic government, calls upon his fellow “captains of industry” -- the “producers of wealth” -- to go on strike which, we read, brings down the entire economy. He then proposes that these elite “producers” leave the wreckage of the old “collectivist” order behind and establish their own utopian society. What a splendid idea! I’m all for it! So let’s suppose that each and every CEO of the fortune 500 companies suddenly disappeared, along with Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, Robert Benmosche of AIG, and all those other bankster executives who claimed $150 billion in bonuses last year. (Supplied, by the way, by us taxpayers). Would the US economy collapse? Well, maybe not.     Share on Facebook

• • • Beast of conviction would be much better protagonist 
Claire Luchette, The Doings Hinsdale (IL) The Fountainhead  Capitalism  Egoism  Emerson wrote, "...believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men -- that is genius." Howard Roark, then, according to Emerson's criteria, was a genius. He saw his own principles as the only ones fit for architecture and mankind. He sacrificed the need to be admired and took upon himself the burden of originality. In exclusive settings, the one who is outcast but not downcast is the one I find most respectable.     Share on Facebook

• • • Debating merits of Ayn Rand philosophy 
Spencer Case, Idaho State Journal (Pocatello, ID) Anthem  Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  Capitalism  Egoism  I think of Objectivism as a kind of intellectual chicken pox; most smart people get it when they're young, but usually it runs its course before causing any permanent damage. Don't get me wrong, I think "Atlas Shrugged" is well worth reading , just not as Holy Scripture.     Share on Facebook

• • • Apple vs. GM: Ayn Rand knew the difference. Do you? 
Don Watkins and Yaron Brook, Christian Science Monitor Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism  Since the advent of capitalism, businessmen have been denounced for the corrupt actions of a few political profiteers. To help understand that there is a distinction, consider two characters in Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel “Atlas Shrugged.” In the book, Rand describes two opposite kinds of businessmen – those she calls the “producers” and those she calls the “looters.” The producers, such as Hank Rearden, inventor of a new metal stronger and cheaper than steel, work tirelessly to create products that improve human life. The looters are basically pseudobusinessmen, like the incompetent steel executive Orren Boyle, who get unearned riches by getting special favors from politicians. Their business isn’t business, but political pull.     Share on Facebook

• • • Ayn Rand’s character model of a “real man” was child killing sociopath 
Tim McCown, The Examiner Altruism  Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  Inaccurate  Ayn Rand's writings have no more business being the guiding principles of our political and economic policy than do Marx's. Sadly a brilliant but extremely mentally ill woman never got the help she needed. But sociopathy is not a solution but a mental illness to be treated. Rand's ideas were given very little credibility when she wrote them and they deserve even less creditability now.     Share on Facebook