Ah... Ayn Rand. Well, I'm glad you asked. My feelings about Ayn Rand are a little conflicted. On the one hand, I hate her. On the other hand, the hatred is so pure, so righteous, so complete and so entirely justified that it energizes me, brightens my mood and fuels a rich, satisfying inner life of revenge fantasies so baroque in their cruelty and lurid in their detail that I would feel a little diminished without them.
Which is to say that I consider her to be not so much a terrible writer or a bad thinker (though she certainly is those) but a uniquely monstrous human being, a soul so bereft of the basic empathy and compassion necessary for a healthy emotional life that I am certain she never truly loved anyone, not even herself, and was certainly incapable and undeserving of receiving love from another person.
However, my sentiment towards her would be pity and contempt if that were the extent of her offences, but rather than living out a bitter, solitary life as an empty husk passing as a human being, she produced this massive corpus of literature which went on to become enormously and destructively influential, kind of like an entire library of economic-political Mein Kampfs. She is famous for declaring altruism to be evil (indeed the root of all evil), selfishness to be good (indeed the root of all good), capitalist-entrepreneurs to be hero-saints from whom all progress emanates and whom we should all venerate, coddle and flatter. Note that this is not a utilitarian argument, but one she makes from first principles, so that by definition anything that plutocrats do is noble, even if their business plan calls for poisoning babies, destroying the Earth's climate or trafficking in sex slaves (because, after all, if the free market didn't want you to be chained to a bed raped by passing truckers for $30/throw, Samantha, then you wouldn't be here) then it is just, while conversely everything that the state does, be it provide healthcare and education, build and maintain public works, or enforce standards for consumer protection, is a monstrous tyranny on par with the Holocaust. Her ideal government would consist merely of a powerful military to keep out other meddling states and a court system where business could hash out contractual disputes. Everything else would be provided - or withheld - at the whim of the ultra-wealthy, who would render to the rest of us with what they saw fit, and which would certainly be more than we deserved, gaggle of "moochers and looters" that we are.
If any of this seems familiar, it is because she has become the official philosopher of the capitalist-libertarian strain of American Republicanism, as well as asshole bankers 'round the world. Rand Paul, Republican senator from Kentucky, is named after her. Alan Greenspan, intellectual fraud/Wall Street crony/got-away-with-it corrupt Fed chairman, was a personal disciple of hers, spending years attending meetings of her cult-like inner circle, and referencing her work throughout his public career.
As a bibliophile and a lover of knowledge, I find this an odd thing to say, but I wish that her books would all be burned and her ideas suppressed through brutal, vicious, exemplary violence. I am imagining auto-da-fé of fraudster bankers dragged up in chains to be burned on pyres of Atlas Shrugged. Atlas Shrugged is a terrible book, incidentally, with absurdly rendered characters that resemble human beings in the way that the moon crater Petavius resembles the Great Rift Valley; over-wrought turgid prose whose misanthropy almost qualifies it as hate speech; sex scenes that read as celebrations of anal rape; and all this spread over a flabby and self-indulgent 1000-page expanse.
So... yeah. That's what I think of Ayn Rand. If I could wish away the existence of a single historical figure, it would be Adolf Hitler. If I got two, it would be Hitler and Ayn Rand.
much love (but not for Ayn Rand),
Kuba Wrzesniewski
