The Inhumanity of Ayn Rand’s Libertarian Mythos
Why progress requires saying “No” to nature
Judging from the documentary “Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life,” Rand’s heart seems to have been in the right place when she first conceived of her philosophy of life, which she called “Objectivism.” Living in soviet Russia until she left for the United States when she was 21, Rand despised the oppressive results of Russia’s mysticism and communism.
Moreover, she worked hard and stood up for her beliefs, including her atheism and her anti-communism at a time when women weren’t expected to be intellectuals and when those beliefs were unpopular in the US in the 1930s as American elites were attracted to socialism in response to the Great Depression. She wrote two giant philosophical novels that eventually sold phenomenally well, she practiced what she preached, and she was happily married for over 50 years, so her life was in many ways a great success story.
Nevertheless, the moral upshot of her philosophy is appalling, and her main argument itself is specious. As a philosophy, then, Objectivism fails, but where it’s succeeded is in bolstering the American libertarian ethos. Just as Augustine and Aquinas prettified Christian dogma by assimilating the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle to Christian theology, Rand dressed American libertarianism in…
