Ayn Rand 100

It turns out that not only did 1905 usher in the first Russian Revolution, Dada, Einsteins Theory of Relativity, the IWW, Modernism and the avante garde as I wrote of here earlier, but it was also the year that Ayn Rand was born.

She was the ideologist of glorious unbridled individualist capitalism, sometimes mistaken for Libertarianism; the individualist ideology of Stirner, Netizche, Tucker, and Emma Goldman.

Such was not the case, hers was philosophy for Engineers who never took a liberal arts course. Her novels, dull and pedantic were seen by these same Engineers as great literature.

Her novel the Fountainhead was made into a forgetable movie, at the time that America began the Cold War, and mass consumerism abolished the memories of the pre war Depression. Her hero an architect was her ideal self sufficient individual, of course it helped he was rich and had lots of others to work for him.

Born in Russia she left in 1926. Her writing was influenced by the great Russian writer and individualist Eugene Zamaytin, whom she copied but never surpassed or even matched.

Hers was a materialist philosophy called Objectivism,a radical subjective psychology of making others into objects of appropriation for her selfish indvidual.

In normal situations, each man is responsible for himself and his own life, and that, socially, he should deal with others as a trader, meaning trading value for value, and dealing with others only by mutual voluntary consent. Never initiating force against another human being. Never sacrificing himself to others, or others to himself. That, in very brief, is the essence of the Objectivist ethics.

"Morality, And Why Man Requires It"

As a result her individualist psychology (morality) was that of happy adulter, her individualist morality that of the wife swapper, or in her case the husband swapper. For Ayn liked to wear the pants in the relationship. Her lifestyle like her philosophy was De Sadean. She dominated her circle of friends and students and partners.

She asked in her novel Atlas Shrugged; Who is John Galt? To which the reply is; Who Cares.

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Tags
Ayn Rand
capitalism
individualism
objectivism
psychology
Atlas Shrugged
The Fountainhead
libertarian