Sometimes there are some things on this forum that I just don't get. One of them is the hate and ridicule on Ayn Rand. I don't know that much about her other than she was a famous author who wrote some seminal works that made her stand out from the crowd.
I tried to read Atlas Shrugged in high school as an assignment but got bored, skimmed through enough to get a C on a book report. From Wiki-ing her she seemed to be famous for the philosophy of Objectivism.
Objectivism is a philosophy created by the Russian-American philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand (1905–1982). Objectivism holds that reality exists independent of consciousness, that human beings have direct contact with reality through sense perception, that one can attain objective knowledge from perception through the process of concept formation and inductive and deductive logic, that the proper moral purpose of one's life is the pursuit of one's own happiness or rational self-interest, that the only social system consistent with this morality is full respect for individual rights, embodied in pure laissez faire capitalism, and that the role of art in human life is to transform man's widest metaphysical ideas, by selective reproduction of reality, into a physical form—a work of art—that he can comprehend and to which he can respond emotionally.
So what's all the fuss about?
From my perspective, Ayn Rand's political philosophy can be quite seductive on the surface, but gets problematic on a deeper, more ethical level.
Jeff Walker, a biographer, found this entry in one of her personal journals: "One puts oneself above all and crushes everything in one's way to get the best for oneself. Fine!" To me, that's the core of Objectivism. Of course, publicly she put it more poetically. In
Atlas Shrugged, for example, she writes, "My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."
Same idea, but the latter is far more attractive. Hell, I'd even agree with it if I didn't understand what it actually boiled down to! It sounds good in theory, but in practice it's not hard to find examples of people doing things in their 'best interest' and harming others in the process. Ideally, we want people to desire what's best for themselves and then do things that benefit themselves and society at the same time, but when you rely solely on rational self-interest (read 'greed') as a motivating factor, many of those things will likely be harmful to someone else.
I agree with Rand to a certain extent about personal responsibility and the idea that we're responsible for making good decisions and should reap the fruits of our labour. But I also think that, as a society, we have a collective responsibility to one another as well. We should work together in the spirit of social cooperation, helping each other make good decisions along the way in support of the common good. While societies are composed of individuals, all you have to do is look around and see that the individual is anything but independent in a civil society; they depend on a number of factors for their survival, and I'd argue that one of those factors is the cooperation and mutual well-being of other individuals in that society.
For what it's worth, I don't see one political ideology or philosophy as inherently right or wrong, I've simply sided with the one I think is geared more towards taking the needs of society as its primary focus. I used to be more of an individualist, but for whatever reason I found myself unable to not take the needs and suffering of others into consideration, which is why I've come to adopt more socialist-leaning views. Everyone's mileage may vary, of course.
As a side note, I think Edward Bellamy humourously illustrates the ideological difference between individualism and socialism quite well in his 1887 utopian novel,
Looking Backward, when he writes:
A heavy rainstorm came up during the day, and I had concluded that the condition of the streets would be such that my hosts would have to give up the idea of going out to dinner, although the dining-hall I had understood to be quite near. I was much surprised when at the dinner hour the ladies appeared prepared to go out, but without either rubbers or umbrellas.
The mystery was explained when we found ourselves on the street, for a continuous waterproof covering had been let down so as to inclose the sidewalk and turn it into a well lighted and perfectly dry corridor, which was filled with a stream of ladies and gentlemen dressed for dinner. At the comers the entire open space was similarly roofed in. Edith Leete, with whom I walked, seemed much interested in learning what appeared to be entirely new to her, that in the stormy weather the streets of the Boston of my day had been impassable, except to persons protected by umbrellas, boots, and heavy clothing. "Were sidewalk coverings not used at all?" she asked. They were used, I explained, but in a scattered and utterly unsystematic way, being private enterprises. She said to me that at the present time all the streets were provided against inclement weather in the manner I saw, the apparatus being rolled out of the way when it was unnecessary. She intimated that it would be considered an extraordinary imbecility to permit the weather to have any effect on the social movements of the people.
Dr. Leete, who was walking ahead, overhearing something of our talk, turned to say that the difference between the age of individualism and that of concert was well characterized by the fact that, in the nineteenth century, when it rained, the people of Boston put up three hundred thousand umbrellas over as many heads, and in the twentieth century they put up one umbrella over all the heads.
As we walked on, Edith said, "The private umbrella is father's favorite figure to illustrate the old way when everybody lived for himself and his family. There is a nineteenth century painting at the Art Gallery representing a crowd of people in the rain, each one holding his umbrella over himself and his wife, and giving his neighbors the drippings, which he claims must have been meant by the artist as a satire on his times."
