Ayn Rand - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
What are your thoughts on Ayn Rand as a philosopher?

Should the individual exist for his/her own sake?

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Rand is required reading in Satanic communities. I find her dry, but somewhat on the ball. Her book, "The Virtue of Selfishness" is fantastic, but if you read enough of her writings you quickly discover her clandestine sense of racism. This I don't approve of. I don't subscribe to "we are all created equal" philosophy, and firmly believe we are products of our environment, society, socio-economic status, and culture. To me, we should all be judged on our actions...that's how I judge people.

Her objectivism is doomed to failure, as are all "isms," but I find her writings to be insightful and inspiring in some respects. She's definitely worth the time if you're looking for some interesting reading. Pick up "Atlas Shrugged" as a good intro to her ideals and writings...it's one of her few works of fiction.

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"The Lord can make you tumble, the Lord can make you turn, the Lord can make you overflow...but the Lord can't make you burn." - Randy Newman

In terms of her fiction, I think "The Fountainhead" is a better story. But "Atlas Shrugged" is essential for seeing how her philosophy plays out.

My biggest grudge against Rand is that she and her followers have turned a beautiful word (and ideal) into a cuss word. The term in question is "altruism".

I can understand, given her early life in Stalin's Soviet Union, that Rand was naturally suspicious of dictatorships dressed up in fine-sounding noble language. But her American followers don't have that excuse.

The latest example I have run across is Terry Goodkind. In some of his Sword of Truth series he presents a dictatorial empire in which the army freely appropriates the goods produced and earned by ordinary folk without compensation under the pretext that the victims of their theft are fulfilling their moral duty to "share" with others. And he calls this an "altruistic" system.

Meanwhile his heroic protagonists do exactly what Rand says people ought not to do: sacrifice themselves over and over again for the good of others. They are epitomes of altruism in its original sense. But if one uses the Rand concept of "altruism" as a bad thing, what vocabulary does one have for these ideal heroes?

So far, this distortion of language seems to be confined to Rand aficionados. I hope it stays that way.

Rand was a smart woman but I find the thought process behind her philosophy to be decidedly monological and overly idealistic. Therefore it's use in the real world should be limited to that of a philosophical "outlier" much in the same way that Marxism can be used to describe the other monological extreme.

My goldfish is a better philosopher.The question assumes the validity of individual existence.

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"Esse est percipii."