Ayn Rand is my hero, yet another student tells me during office hours. Her writings freed me. They taught me to rely on no one but myself.

As I look at the freshly scrubbed and very young face across my desk, I find myself wondering why Rands popularity among the young continues to grow. Thirty years after her death, her book sales still number in the hundreds of thousands annually having tripled since the 2008 economic meltdown. Among her devotees are highly influential celebrities, such as Brad Pitt and Eva Mendes, and politicos, such as current Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz.

The core of Rands philosophy which also constitutes the overarching theme of her novels is that unfettered self-interest is good and altruism is destructive. This, she believed, is the ultimate expression of human nature, the guiding principle by which one ought to live ones life. In Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, Rand put it this way:

Collectivism is the tribal premise of primordial savages who, unable to conceive of individual rights, believed that the tribe is a supreme, omnipotent ruler, that it owns the lives of its members and may sacrifice them whenever it pleases.

By this logic, religious and political controls that hinder individuals from pursuing self-interest should be removed. (It is perhaps worth noting here that the initial sex scene between the protagonists of Rands book The Fountainhead is a rape in which she fought like an animal.)

WATCH: Why do the rich get richer? French economist Piketty takes on inequality in Capital

The fly in the ointment of Rands philosophical objectivism is the plain fact that humans have a tendency to cooperate and to look out for each other, as noted by many anthropologists who study hunter-gatherers. These prosocial tendencies were problematic for Rand, because such behavior obviously mitigates against natural self-interest and therefore should not exist. She resolved this contradiction by claiming that humans are born as tabula rasa, a blank slate, (as many of her time believed) and prosocial tendencies, particularly altruism, are diseases imposed on us by society, insidious lies that cause us to betray biological reality. For example, in her journal entry dated May 9, 1934, Rand mused:

For instance, when discussing the social instinct does it matter whether it had existed in the early savages? Supposing men were born social (and even that is a question) does it mean that they have to remain so? If man started as a social animal isnt all progress and civilization directed toward making him an individual? Isnt that the only possible progress? If men are the highest of animals, isnt man the next step?

The hero of her most popular novel, Atlas Shrugged, personifies this highest of animals: John Galt is a ruthless captain of industry who struggles against stifling government regulations that stand in the way of commerce and profit. In a revolt, he and other captains of industry each close down production of their factories, bringing the world economy to its knees. You need us more than we need you is their message.

To many of Rands readers, a philosophy of supreme self-reliance devoted to the pursuit of supreme self-interest appears to be an idealized version of core American ideals: freedom from tyranny, hard work and individualism. It promises a better world if people are simply allowed to pursue their own self-interest without regard to the impact of their actions on others. After all, others are simply pursuing their own self-interest as well.

So what if people behaved according to Rands philosophy of objectivism? What if we indeed allowed ourselves to be blinded to all but our own self-interest?

Modern economic theory is based on exactly these principles. A rational agent is defined as an individual who is self-interested. A market is a collection of such rational agents, each of whom is also self-interested. Fairness does not enter into it. In a recent Planet Money episode, David Blanchflower, a Dartmouth professor of economics and former member of the Central Bank of England, laughed out loud when one of the hosts asked, Is that fair?

Economics is not about fairness, he said. Im not going there.

Economists alternately find alarming and amusing a large body of results from experimental studies showing that people dont behave according to the tenets of rational choice theory. We are far more cooperative and willing to trust than is predicted by the theory, and we retaliate vehemently when others behave selfishly. In fact, we are willing to pay a penalty for an opportunity to punish people who appear to be breaking implicit rules of fairness in economic transactions.

So what if people behaved according to Rands philosophy of objectivism? What if we indeed allowed ourselves to be blinded to all but our own self-interest?

In 2008, Sears CEO Eddie Lampert decided to restructure the company according to Rands principles.

Lampert broke the company into more than 30 individual units, each with its own management and each measured separately for profit and loss. The idea was to promote competition among the units, which Lampert assumed would lead to higher profits. Instead, this is what happened, as described by Mina Kimes, a reporter for Bloomberg Business:

An outspoken advocate of free-market economics and fan of the novelist Ayn Rand, he created the model because he expected the invisible hand of the market to drive better results. If the companys leaders were told to act selfishly, he argued, they would run their divisions in a rational manner, boosting overall performance.

Instead, the divisions turned against each other and Sears and Kmart, the overarching brands, suffered. Interviews with more than 40 former executives, many of whom sat at the highest levels of the company, paint a picture of a business thats ravaged by infighting as its divisions battle over fewer resources.

A close-up of the debacle was described by Lynn Stuart Parramore in a Salon article from 2013:

It got crazy. Executives started undermining other units because they knew their bonuses were tied to individual unit performance. They began to focus solely on the economic performance of their unit at the expense of the overall Sears brand.One unit, Kenmore, started selling the products of other companies and placed them more prominently than Sears own products. Units competed for ad space in Sears circularsUnits were no longer incentivized to make sacrifices, like offering discounts, to get shoppers into the store.

Sears became a miserable place to work, rife with infighting and screaming matches. Employees, focused solely on making money in their own unit, ceased to have any loyalty to the company or stake in its survival.

We all know the end of the story: Sears share prices fell, and the company appears to be headed toward bankruptcy. The moral of the story, in Parramores words:

What Lampert failed to see is that humans actually have a natural inclination to work for the mutual benefit of an organization. They like to cooperate and collaborate, and they often work more productively when they have shared goals. Take all of that away and you create a company that will destroy itself.

In 2009, Honduras experienced a coup dtat when the Honduran Army ousted President Manuel Zelaya on orders from the Honduran Supreme Court. What followed was succinctly summarized by Honduran attorney Oscar Cruz:

The coup in 2009 unleashed the voracity of the groups with real power in this country. It gave them free reins to take over everything. They started to reform the Constitution and many laws the ZEDE comes in this context and they made the Constitution into a tool for them to get rich.

As part of this process, the Honduran government passed a law in 2013 that created autonomous free-trade zones that are governed by corporations instead of the countries in which they exist. So what was the outcome? Writer Edwin Lyngar described vacationing in Honduras in 2015, an experience that turned him from Ayn Rand supporter to Ayn Rand debunker. In his words:

The greatest examples of libertarianism in action are the hundreds of men, women and children standing alongside the roads all over Honduras.The government wont fix the roads, so these desperate entrepreneurs fill in potholes with shovels of dirt or debris. They then stand next to the filled-in pothole soliciting tips from grateful motorists. That is the wet dream of libertarian private sector innovation.

He described the living conditions this way:

On the mainland, there are two kinds of neighborhoods, slums that seem to go on forever and middle-class neighborhoods where every house is its own citadel.In San Pedro Sula, most houses are surrounded by high stone walls topped with either concertina wire or electric fence at the top. As I strolled past these castle-like fortifications, all I could think about was how great this city would be during a zombie apocalypse.

Without collective effort, large infrastructure projects like road construction and repair languish. A resident pointed out a place for a new airport that could be the biggest in Central America, if only it could get built, but there is no private sector upside.

A trip to a local pizzeria was described this way:

We walked through the gated walls and past a man in casual slacks with a pistol belt slung haphazardly around his waist. Welcome to an Ayn Rand libertarian paradise, where your extra-large pepperoni pizza must also have an armed guard.

This is the inevitable outcome of unbridled self-interest set loose in unregulated markets.

Yet devotees of Ayn Rand still argue that unregulated self-interest is the American way, that government interference stifles individualism and free trade. One wonders whether these same people would champion the idea of removing all umpires and referees from sporting events. What would mixed martial arts or football or rugby be like, one wonders, without those pesky referees constantly getting in the way of competition and self-interest?

READ: Libertarian Charles Murray: The welfare state has denuded our civic culture

Perhaps another way to look at this is to ask why our species of hominid is the only one still in existence on the planet, despite there having been many other hominid species during the course of our own evolution. One explanation is that we were cleverer, more ruthless and more competitive than those who went extinct. But anthropological archaeology tells a different story. Our very survival as a species depended on cooperation, and humans excel at cooperative effort. Rather than keeping knowledge, skills and goods ourselves, early humans exchanged them freely across cultural groups.

When people behave in ways that violate the axioms of rational choice, they are not behaving foolishly. They are giving researchers a glimpse of the prosocial tendencies that made it possible for our species to survive and thrive then and today.

Editors note: This post has been updated to correct a previous statement that Sears went bankrupt. It has been updated to reflect that the retailer appears to be heading towards bankruptcy, as the companys earnings and share prices plummet.

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Column: This is what happens when you take Ayn Rand seriously ...

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By Wendy Milling

In a recent interview withRolling Stone, President Obama stated,Ayn Rand is one of those things that a lot of us, when we were 17 or 18 and feeling misunderstood, we'd pick up.

Im not trying to mock the President here he is just repeating an old propaganda line that was hatched by Rands opponents but I have to ask the adults who claim they outgrew Rand exactly what earth-shattering insight they have learned against her solution to the problem of universals? Against her solution to the is-ought problem? To her foundation of knowledge in the axiomatic validity of sense perception? To her theory of the locus of free will? How about her theory of aesthetics?

The reason I ask is that some of these issues and questions are more than two thousand years old, and no other philosopher has been able to crack them without ultimately lapsing into self-contradiction. So if anyone fancies that they are going to show up with their cracker barrel wisdom and invalidate her philosophy, even though no professional philosopher in half a century has been able to do so, I have to wonder what special knowledge they think they have. By all means, entertain us.

Perhaps these adults can also explain the part about feeling misunderstood, because it is rather opaque. When most of us feel misunderstood, we just restate our line of thinking until people understand it. In all seriousness, what on earth was that about? Are we to take that as some kind of psychological confession by leftists? What is an individual with such a mentality doing in the highest office in the land?

President Obama goes on to say, Then, as we get older, we realize that a world in which we're only thinking about ourselves and not thinking about anybody else, in which we're considering the entire project of developing ourselves as more important than our relationships to other people and making sure that everybody else has opportunity that that's a pretty narrow vision. It's not one that, I think, describes what's best in America.

This statement is so untethered from reality, it is hard to know where to begin. I will not begin by implicitly endorsing the notion that other people are the first or ultimate consideration in ethics by reassuring anyones crybaby sensibilities that Objectivism too cares about other peoples welfare. The good cops over at the Ayn Rand Institute, Yaron Brook and Don Watkins, have provided more than enough evidence over the years at their Forbes blog that Ayn Rands philosophy is eminently rational.

I am not affiliated with the Institute, so I have no such obligation. My preferred method is to take the billy club of logic to the opposite worldviews kneecaps and then beat it into the ground senseless. Anyone who makes everybody else the primary issue who needs upfront reassurance about the status of other people in a philosophical system isnt worth convincing. If someone is so hysterical about establishing the status of others that they insist on putting it before the question of their own, then they are weak, dependent, irrational, and, by their own admission, irrelevant.

Objectivism is a philosophy for winners, leaders, producers, creators, alpha males and females and those on their way. It is a philosophy for people with self-respect, self-loyalty, self-confidence, self-esteem, and independence. It is for those with a rugged individualist spirit. That is why Ayn Rand has an enormous reservoir of goodwill among the American people. America is a culture of winners. This is an exceptional nation, and Americans are still an exceptional people.

If you are an achiever, if you matter and you know it, why dont you give Ayn Rands nonfiction a serious read? Objectivism has answers. Lots and lots of rich, powerful answers.

The President or one of his fellow adults should also explain why, if it is wrong for us to spend our time how we wish and keep what we have earned, we are supposed to believe that it is right for others to take them. Ayn Rand, via John Galt, elaborates:

Why is it moral to serve the happiness of others, but not your own? If enjoyment is a value, why is it moral when experienced by others, but immoral when experienced by you? If the sensation of eating a cake is a value, why is it an immoral indulgence in your stomach, but a moral goal for you to achieve in the stomach of others? Why is it immoral for you to desire, but moral for others to do so? Why is it immoral to produce a value and keep it, but moral to give it away? And if it is not moral for you to keep a value, why is it moral for others to accept it? If you are selfless and virtuous when you give it, are they not selfish and vicious when they take it? Does virtue consist of serving vice? Is the moral purpose of those who are good, self-immolation for the sake of those who are evil?

In addition, President Obama should explain how his system of mutual self-sacrificing is supposed to work in practice. If everyone is stopping their own self-development to assist others, then who is excelling? Who is advancing to the point that they are creating the opportunities that others are supposed to be given?

Instead of trying to coddle economic losers, our culture had better concern itself with how to produce the next generation of geniuses to drive the wealth-creation process, because the productive geniuses are what keep 300 million people from starvation and exposure, not the government. They are not going to come from the ranks of the non-profit do-gooders who spend their days bleating about income inequality and redistributing wealth to the economically non-productive.

We can set the stage by accepting a proper code of ethics now one that teaches that rational selfishness is good and being productive is virtuous.

Wendy Milling is a contributor toRealClearMarkets.com.

Continued here:

President Obama Jabs At Ayn Rand, Knocks Himself Out

Ayn Rand was not only a schlock novelist, she was also the progenitor of a sweeping moral philosophy that justifies the privilege of the wealthy and demonizes not only the slothful, undeserving poor but the lackluster middle-classes as well.

Her books provided wide-ranging parables of parasites, looters and moochers using the levers of government to steal the fruits of her heroes labor. In the real world, however, Rand herself received Social Security payments and Medicare benefits under the name of Ann OConnor(her husband was Frank OConnor).

As Michael Ford of Xavier UniversitysCenter for the Study of the American Dream wrote, In the end, Miss Rand was a hypocrite but she could never be faulted for failing to act in her own self-interest.

Her ideas about government intervention in some idealized pristine marketplace serve as the basis for so much of the conservative rhetoric we see today. The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand, said Paul Ryan, the GOPs young budget star at a D.C. event honoring the author. On another occasion, he proclaimed, Rand makes the best case for the morality of democratic capitalism.

Morally and economically, wrote Rand in a 1972 newsletter, the welfare state creates an ever accelerating downward pull.

Journalist Patia Stephens wrote of Rand:

[She] called altruism a basic evil and referred to those who perpetuate the system of taxation and redistribution as looters and moochers. She wrote in her book The Virtue of Selfishness that accepting any government controls is delivering oneself into gradual enslavement.

Rand also believed that the scientific consensus on the dangers of tobacco was a hoax. By 1974, the two-pack-a-day smoker, then 69, required surgery for lung cancer. And it was at that moment of vulnerability that she succumbed to the lure of collectivism.

Evva Joan Pryor, who had been a social worker in New York in the 1970s, was interviewed in 1998 by Scott McConnell, who was then the director of communications for the Ayn Rand Institute. In his book, 100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand, McConnell basically portrays Rand as first standing on principle, but then being mugged by reality. Stephens points to this exchange between McConnell and Pryor.

She was coming to a point in her life where she was going to receive the very thing she didnt like, which was Medicare and Social Security, Pryor told McConnell. I remember telling her that this was going to be difficult. For me to do my job she had to recognize that there were exceptions to her theory. So that started our political discussions. From there on with gusto we argued all the time.

The initial argument was on greed, Pryor continued. She had to see that there was such a thing as greed in this world. Doctors could cost an awful lot more money than books earn, and she could be totally wiped out by medical bills if she didnt watch it. Since she had worked her entire life, and had paid into Social Security, she had a right to it. She didnt feel that an individual should take help.

Rand had paid into the system, so why not take the benefits? Its true, but according to Stephens, some of Rands fellow travelers remained true to their principles.

Rand is one of three women the Cato Institute calls founders of American libertarianism. The other two, Rose Wilder Lane and Isabel Pat Paterson, both rejected Social Security benefits on principle. Lane, with whom Rand corresponded for several years, once quit an editorial job in order to avoid paying Social Security taxes. The Cato Institute says Lane considered Social Security a Ponzi fraud and told friends that it would be immoral of her to take part in a system that would predictably collapse so catastrophically. Lane died in 1968.

Paterson would end up dying a pauper. Rand went a different way.

But at least she put up a fight before succumbing to the imperatives of the real world one in which people get sick, and old, and many who are perfectly decent and hardworking dont end up being independently wealthy.

The degree to which Ayn Rand has become a touchstone for the modern conservative movement is striking. She was a sexual libertine, and, according to writer Mark Ames, she modeled her heroic characters on one of the most despicable sociopaths of her time. Ames conclusion is important for understanding todays political economy. Whenever you hear politicians or Tea Partiers dividing up the world between producers and collectivism, he wrote, just know that those ideas and words more likely than not are derived from the deranged mind of a serial-killer groupie.And when you see them taking their razor blades to the last remaining programs protecting the middle class from total abject destitutionSocial Security, Medicare and Medicaidand bragging about how they are slashing these programs for moral reasons, just remember Rands morality and who inspired her.

Now we know that Rand was also just as hypocritical as the Tea Party freshman who railed against government health care to get elected and then whined that he had to wait a month before getting his own Cadillac plan courtesy of the taxpayers.

But, as I note in my book, The Fifteen Biggest Lies About the Economy, thats par for the course. A central rule of the U.S. political economy is that people are attracted to the idea of limited government in the abstractand certainly dont want the government intruding in their homesbut they really, really like living in a society with adequately funded public services.

Thats just as true for an icon of modern conservatism as it is for a poor mother getting public health care for her kids.

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Ayn Rand raged against government benefits but grabbed ...

In thisNew Idealvideo Q&A session, I respond to a question about Ayn Rands ethics from a reader named Sophia, who writes:

I am a high school student in 10th grade who has recently become interested in philosophy through writing an essay on the history of Western philosophy for my Latin class. After being recommended to Objectivism, I read through some of Ayn Rands essays such as The Objectivist Ethics and Introducing Objectivism in order to begin to acquaint myself with her philosophy. After much consideration and thought, I have become quite interested by her epistemology and ethics and would like to perform a more detailed analysis of her ideas in these areas. I am trying to find a step-by-step proof of her ethics in particular, but I have only found proofs outlining her ideas made by critics of hers. If any such accepted step-by-step proof of Objectivism exists, then I would be quite grateful if you could please provide me with the information on how to obtain it.

I hope you find my answers informative and thought-provoking. If you have follow-up questions on these issues, please dont hesitate to send them my way, using our New Ideal comment form.

To explore this topic further, listen to a lesson called An Inductive Approach to Philosophy onARI Campus.

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Is There a Proof of Ayn Rand's Ethics?

Ayn Rands philosophy is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society....To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil. Gore Vidal, 1961

Only rarely in U.S. history do writers transform us to become a more caring or less caring nation. In the 1850s, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) was a strong force in making the United States a more humane nation, one that would abolish slavery of African Americans. A century later, Ayn Rand (1905-1982) helped make the United States into one of the most uncaring nations in the industrialized world, a neo-Dickensian society where healthcare is only for those who can afford it, and where young people are coerced into huge student-loan debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.

Rands impact has been widespread and deep. At the icebergs visible tip is the influence shes had over major political figures who have shaped American society. In the 1950s, Ayn Rand read aloud drafts of what was later to become Atlas Shrugged to her Collective, Rands ironic nickname for her inner circle of young individualists, which included Alan Greenspan, who would serve as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board from 1987 to 2006.

In 1966, Ronald Reagan wrote in a personal letter, Am an admirer of Ayn Rand. Today, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) credits Rand for inspiring him to go into politics, and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) calls Atlas Shrugged his foundation book. Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) says Ayn Rand had a major influence on him, and his son Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is an even bigger fan. A short list of other Rand fans includes Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas; Christopher Cox, chairman of the Security and Exchange Commission in George W. Bushs second administration; and former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford.

But Rands impact on U.S. society and culture goes even deeper.

The Seduction of Nathan Blumenthal

Ayn Rands books such as The Virtue of Selfishness and her philosophy that celebrates self-interest and disdains altruism may well be, as Vidal assessed, nearly perfect in its immorality. But is Vidal right about evil? Charles Manson, who himself did not kill anyone, is the personification of evil for many of us because of his psychological success at exploiting the vulnerabilities of young people and seducing them to murder. What should we call Ayn Rands psychological ability to exploit the vulnerabilities of millions of young people so as to influence them not to care about anyone besides themselves?

While Greenspan (tagged A.G. by Rand)was the most famous name that would emerge from Rands Collective, the second most well-known name to emerge from the Collective was Nathaniel Branden, psychotherapist, author and self-esteem advocate. Before he was Nathaniel Branden, he was Nathan Blumenthal, a 14-year-old who read Rands The Fountainhead again and again. He later would say, I felt hypnotized. He describes how Rand gave him a sense that he could be powerful, that he could be a hero. He wrote one letter to his idol Rand, then a second. To his amazement, she telephoned him, and at age 20, Nathan received an invitation to Ayn Rands home. Shortly after, Nathan Blumenthal announced to the world that he was incorporating Rand in his new name: Nathaniel Branden. And in 1955, with Rand approaching her 50th birthday and Branden his 25th, and both in dissatisfying marriages, Ayn bedded Nathaniel.

What followed sounds straight out of Hollywood, but Rand was straight out of Hollywood, having worked for Cecil B. DeMille. Rand convened a meeting with Nathaniel, his wife Barbara (also a Collective member), and Rands own husband Frank. ToBranden'sastonishment, Rand convinced both spouses that a time-structured affairshe andBrandenwere to have one afternoon and one evening a week togetherwas reasonable. Within the Collective, Rand is purported to have never lost an argument. On his trysts at Rands New York City apartment,Brandenwould sometimes shake hands with Frank before he exited. Later, all discovered that Rands sweet but passive husband would leave for a bar, where he began his self-destructive affair with alcohol.

By 1964, the 34-year-old Nathaniel Brandenhad grown tired of the now 59-year-old Ayn Rand. Still sexually dissatisfied in his marriage to Barbara and afraid to end his affair with Rand,Brandenbegan sleeping with a married 24-year-old model, Patrecia Scott. Rand, now the woman scorned, calledBrandento appear before the Collective, whose nickname had by now lost its irony for both Barbara andBranden. Rands justice was swift. She humiliatedBrandenand then put a curse on him: If you have one ounce of morality left in you, an ounce of psychological healthyou'll be impotent for the next 20 years! And if you achieve potency sooner, you'll know its a sign of still worse moral degradation!

Rand completed the evening with two welt-producing slaps across Brandens face. Finally, in a move that Stalin and Hitler would have admired, Rand also expelled poor Barbara from the Collective, declaring her treasonous because Barbara, preoccupied by her own extramarital affair, had neglected to fill Rand in soon enough onBranden'sextra-extra-marital betrayal. (If anyone doubts Alan Greenspans political savvy, keep in mind that he somehow stayed in Rands good graces even though he, fixed up byBrandenwith Patrecias twin sister, had double-dated with the outlaws.)

After being banished by Rand, Nathaniel Branden was worried that he might be assassinated by other members of the Collective, so he moved from New York to Los Angeles, where Rand fans were less fanatical. Branden established a lucrative psychotherapy practice and authored approximately 20 books, 10 of them with either Self or Self-Esteem in the title. Rand and Branden never reconciled, but he remained an admirer of her philosophy of self-interest until his recent death in December 2014.

Ayn Rands personal life was consistent with her philosophy of not giving a shit about anybody but herself. Rand was an ardent two-pack-a-day smoker, and when questioned about the dangers of smoking, she loved to light up with a defiant flourish and then scold her young questioners on the unscientific and irrational nature of the statistical evidence. After an x-ray showed that she had lung cancer, Rand quit smoking and had surgery for her cancer. Collective members explained to her that many people still smoked because they respected her and her assessment of the evidence; and that since she no longer smoked, she ought to tell them. They told her that she neednt mention her lung cancer, that she could simply say she had reconsidered the evidence. Rand refused.

How Rands Philosophy Seduced Young Minds

When I was a kid, my reading included comic books and Rands The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. There wasnt much difference between the comic books and Rands novels in terms of the simplicity of the heroes. What was different was that unlike Superman or Batman, Rand made selfishness heroic, and she made caring about others weakness.

Rand said, Capitalism and altruism are incompatible....The choice is clear-cut: either a new morality of rational self-interest, with its consequences of freedom, justice, progress and mans happiness on earthor the primordial morality of altruism, with its consequences of slavery, brute force, stagnant terror and sacrificial furnaces. For many young people, hearing that it is moral to care only about oneself can be intoxicating, and some get addicted to this idea for life.

I have known several people, professionally and socially, whose lives have been changed by those close to them who became infatuated with Ayn Rand. A common theme is something like this: My ex-husband wasnt a bad guy until he started reading Ayn Rand. Then he became a completely selfish jerk who destroyed our family, and our children no longer even talk to him.

To wow her young admirers, Rand would often tell a story of how a smart-aleck book salesman had once challenged her to explain her philosophy while standing on one leg. She replied: Metaphysicsobjective reality. Epistemologyreason. Ethicsself-interest. Politicscapitalism. How did that philosophy capture young minds?

Metaphysicsobjective reality. Rand offered a narcotic for confused young people: complete certainty and a relief from their anxiety. Rand believed that an objective reality existed, and she knew exactly what that objective reality was. It included skyscrapers, industries, railroads, and ideasat least her ideas. Rands objective reality did not include anxiety or sadness. Nor did it include much humor, at least the kind where one pokes fun at oneself. Rand assured her Collective that objective reality did not include Beethovens, Rembrandts, and Shakespeares realitiesthey were too gloomy and too tragic, basically buzzkillers. Rand preferred Mickey Spillane and, towards the end of her life, Charlie's Angels.

Epistemologyreason. Rands kind of reason was a cool-tool to control the universe. Rand demonized Plato, and her youthful Collective members were taught to despise him. If Rand really believed that the Socratic Method described by Plato of discovering accurate definitions and clear thinking did not qualify as reason, why then did she regularly attempt it with her Collective? Also oddly, while Rand mocked dark moods and despair, her reasoning directed that Collective members should admire Dostoyevsky, whose novels are filled with dark moods and despair. A demagogue, in addition to hypnotic glibness, must also be intellectually inconsistent, sometimes boldly so. This eliminates challenges to authority by weeding out clear-thinking young people from the flock.

Ethicsself-interest. For Rand, all altruists were manipulators. What could be more seductive to kids who discerned the motives of martyr parents, Christian missionaries and U.S. foreign aiders? Her champions, Nathaniel Branden still among them, feel that Rands view of self-interest has been horribly misrepresented. For them, self-interest is her hero architect Howard Roark turning down a commission because he couldnt do it exactly his way. Some of Rands novel heroes did have integrity, however, for Rand there is no struggle to discover the distinction between true integrity and childish vanity. Rands integrity was her vanity, and it consisted of getting as much money and control as possible, copulating with whomever she wanted regardless of who would get hurt, and her always being right. To equate ones selfishness, vanity, and egotism with ones integrity liberates young people from the struggle to distinguish integrity from selfishness, vanity, and egotism.

Politicscapitalism. While Rand often disparaged Soviet totalitarian collectivism, she had little to say about corporate totalitarian collectivism, as she conveniently neglected the reality that giant U.S. corporations, like the Soviet Union, do not exactly celebrate individualism, freedom, or courage. Rand was clever and hypocritical enough to know that you dont get rich in the United States talking about compliance and conformity within corporate America. Rather, Rand gave lectures titled: Americas Persecuted Minority: Big Business. So, young careerist corporatists could embrace Rands self-styled radical capitalism and feel radical radical without risk.

Rands Legacy

In recent years, we have entered a phase where it is apparently okay for major political figures to publicly embrace Rand despite her contempt for Christianity. In contrast, during Ayn Rands life, her philosophy that celebrated self-interest was a private pleasure for the 1 percent but she was a public embarrassment for them. They used her books to congratulate themselves on the morality of their selfishness, but they publicly steered clear of Rand because of her views on religion and God. Rand, for example, had stated on national television, I am against God. I dont approve of religion. It is a sign of a psychological weakness. I regard it as an evil.

Actually, again inconsistent, Rand did have a God. It was herself. She said:

I am done with the monster of we, the word of serfdom, of plunder, of misery, falsehood and shame. And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: I.

While Harriet Beecher Stowe shamed Americans about the United States' dehumanization of African Americans and slavery, Ayn Rand removed Americans guilt for being selfish and uncaring about anyone except themselves. Not only did Rand make it moral for the wealthy not to pay their fair share of taxes, she liberated millions of other Americans from caring about the suffering of others, even the suffering of their own children.

The good news is that Ive seen ex-Rand fans grasp the damage that Rands philosophy has done to their lives and to then exorcize it from their psyche. Can the United States as a nation do the same thing?

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Here's how Ayn Rand helped turn the US into a selfish and ...

Details February 26, 2015

Ayn Rand is Americas most controversial individualist. She was a bold woman who produced brilliant worksfusing fiction and philosophy. Her best-selling novels, like Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, have sold millions of copies and continue to influence independent thinkers and celebrities the world over, from Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales to Angelina Jolie and Hugh Hefner.

Rand cut a striking figure, with her long-stemmed cigarette holder and intense gaze. Known for her fearless denunciations of irrationalism, Rand issued blistering critiques of powerful leaders, from the Pope to President Nixon. She could not be pigeon-holed as Right or Left, although she was known for her scathing attacks on Communism and all forms of collectivism.

She penned philosophical non-fiction works of such originality and power that she was credited by a small group of stunned intellectuals as having single-handedly solved an ancient philosophical puzzle. Yet the elite of her day refused to accept her as a legitimate philosopher. She derided them and their ideas; they returned the favor.

The new philosophy which she founded through her books andessays is called Objectivism. It is a philosophy that celebrates the power and potential of the individual, and reveals the principles necessary for developing a flourishing

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Ayn Rand, Objectivism - The Atlas Society

Featured Product Freedom of speech is indispensable to a free and civilized society, yet this precious right is increasingly under attack today. Islamic totalitarians repeatedly threaten and kill those deemed blasphemers, while our political leaders stand idly by, and many intellectuals blame the victims. College students seek trigger warnings and safe spaces from controversial ideas and fly into fits of rage at the slightest offense. The government harasses tea party groups, preventing them from speaking out during an election, and it investigates oil companies and advocacy groups for the crime of dissenting from climate change orthodoxy. Why is this happening? What can be done? This hard-hitting collection provides answers. Applying Ayn Rands philosophy of Objectivism to the most pressing free speech issues of the day, the essays in this book reveal the attacks on free speech to be the product of destructive ideasideas that are eroding Western culture at its foundation. They expose those ideas and the individuals who hold them, and, importantly, they identify the only ideas on which Western civilization can be sustained: reason, egoism, and individual rights.

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Liberals are constantly begging for more female authors and female lead characters in literature, but one woman author and philosopher remains stubbornly absent from progressive reading lists. Her name is Ayn Rand, and she is responsible for a theory called Objectivism, which holds that reality exists independently of consciousness and that rational self-interest is the proper moral purpose of life.

Of all the tiresomely self-satisfied rituals played out regularly in the liberal blogosphere, competitive Rand-hating is among the most fatuous and infuriating. But why do the chattering classes hate her so much? I sense that the reasons givenher alleged psychopathy, selfishness, lack of literary talent, and hypocrisy, among othersare much less compelling than the real motivations driving their criticisms.

Last week, the previously lost novel version of Rand's play Ideal was published. It is short, little more than a novella really, sparing readers passages like the infamous 100-page radio-hack exposition at the end of Atlas Shrugged. It's a thriller, set in Los Angeles about 80 years ago, in which golden-era heroine Kay Gonda, on the run from the police, attempts to find sanctuary with six of her most devoted fans.

To her horror, the men don't live up to their professed admiration by providing her a berth, which, as the story unfolds, becomes ever more depressing as we realize that most of us would probably behave the same way. The nature of celebrity has changed dramatically since the classic Hollywood period in which the novel's action takes place, but if Rihanna showed up at my front door, I'm not entirely sure I'd behave any better to her than the fans in Ideal do to Gonda.

This partially epistolary novel provides a secular account of a question more often posed by faith: If God showed up in disguise, would the faithful live up to their professed values, or would the encounter reveal a baser nature? Unlike Rand's later works, in which reason and faith are irreconcilable, these waters are muddied in Ideal, which describes its heroine in Virgin Marylike terms. Even the final revelation has, as one reviewer for the New Republic noted, a distinctively Christian virtuosic flourish to it.

According to Michael Paxton, who directed the world premiere of the play in 1989, Ideal gives readers an insight into Rand's state of mind in the early 1930s: Her first novel, We The Living, had been rejected by publishers for being "too intellectual," and the writer was struggling with odd jobs, having recently moved to the United States.

"It examines the artist's process," Paxton told me from his hotel room in North Carolina, where he was set to give a talk at the Ayn Rand Institute's Objectivist Summer Conference. "How do you be an artist and live in the world at the same time? It's amazing how, once you've lived a little in the world, you can really understand these characters and the issues they're dealing withnot being understood, thinking the world doesn't care whether you live or die."

His assessment is not universal. Perhaps predictably, the New York Times hated the play when it premiered off-Broadway in 2010, concluding that, "the show's clumsy mix of long bursts of theory and a laborious plot would test the endurance of even Alan Greenspan, a famous Rand admirer and veteran of long, boring meetings."

As a play, Ideal went unperformed for 60 years after its writing, and was never seen on stage in Rand's lifetime, though Paxton says that may have something to do with its practical demands: The play has 37 characters and tons of set changes. But he thinks it's worth the effort: "What's surprising about the play is that it has a lot of humour, and a lot of satire in how it makes fun of organized religion. It's subtle, and very funny."

The good news is the new edition also includes the entire play script. So you can gather 37 of your closest right-wing nutcase alliesor lefty culture jammers, as you preferand stage it yourself to find out.

Related: An Elegant Evening With Ayn Rand's Free-Market Revolutionaries

Ideal the novel, which Rand herself set aside as unsatisfactory, is less polished than the stage version, and, despite flashes of Randian flair, there is evidence that the author was still struggling to find her voice. Readers familiar with the Fountainhead will recognize the seeds of that work in this early effort. Thankfully, though, Ideal is not one of those works of juvenilia that ought to have remained lost.

Rand's critics, often humourless literalists, will find plenty in Ideal to gnaw on: There's the classically Randian was-it-rape-or-wasn't-it sex scene and a blisteringly heartless remark after a death that will have fans sniggering and detractors drumming up all the manufactured fury they can muster. And, yes, Rand's writing can be a bit... much.

But profound, existential loneliness, coupled with a Buffy the Vampire Slayeresque sense of ordained personal greatness is why so many cheerleaders for capitalism relate to Rand's lead characters, from Gonda to the Fountainhead's Dominique Francon.

Shoshana Milgram Knapp, an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech, said that these two characters are "to some extent reflections of Ayn Rand herself... Ayn Rand said that Dominique was herself in a bad mood." This is perhaps why Rand's literary agent, Alan Collins, said Ideal was a novel that only she could have written: In 1946, he wrote to Rand, "Had I come on a copy of this play in the midst of the Fiji Islands I would have had no doubt as to the authorship, as the writing, theme, and conception of the characters are uniquely yours."

Critics never pass up the opportunity to be cruel about Rand fans. "Rand's fan club has always been filled out not by committed literary critics but by insecure sulkers," the New Republic wrote. Given how many books Rand has sold, though, that's an awful lot of sulky people.

Let's be honest, though, Randroids are idiosyncratic, to put it mildly. In fact, and I say this with love, Objectivists are the most thin-skinned fandom in existence. The vaguest hint of implied criticism of their grande dame is enough to trigger endless tweetstorms, crossly worded blog posts, and YouTube commentary. Seriously: Bitcoin-obsessed cryptoanalysts, Directioners and even the Beyhive have nothing on these guys.

There's just one problem with all the preening and posturing this author is subjected to: In order to sneer at Rand, you have to read her. That's why you'll sometimes see ridiculous social media spectacles of angsty liberal bloggers and overwrought students burning copies of the Fountainhead. And just how many Vox bloggers have made it all the way through Atlas Shrugged ? The next time someone is rude about that novel in your earshot, ask him to name a single character besides John Galt and you'll see what I mean.

In a sense, Ayn Rand is a victim of her own totemic success. By appealing to such atavistic human drives, she has become shorthand for a whole range of gauche, aspirational working-class anxieties about other people that the liberal left likes to sneer at. Mock Ayn Rand and you are mocking the entire value system of the right-wing media, the Koch brothers, Wall Street, the Tea Party, and whomever else you don't likein a manner every bit as mean-spirited as anything Rand ever wrote.

Which is not to say that Ayn Rand was a particularly nice person in print. She is ruthlessly unforgiving in her mocking portraits of spoiled middle-class train wrecks. And if there's one thing earnest socialists hate, it's being mocked. Rand skewers the preoccupations and hypocrisies of metropolitan liberals with such ferocity that their only response is slack-jawed horror and social ostracism.

Another reason people get upset about Rand and sex is that her ideal intimate encounters always seem to be pseudo-rapes. Naturally, the sex-negative, authoritarian modern feminist movement gasps in shock at the suggestion that consensually ambiguous encounters might be thrilling for both parties. But I'm biased, because, reading between the lines, I think I have the same fantasies Rand does about arrogant, overbearing masculine men. And nothing quite gets me off like a Goldman Sachs quarterly earnings report.

History can be unkind to progressives, so their impotent fury is understandable. It has a habit of reminding us that, regardless of noble intentions, progressivism tends to make the world a worse place to live and further impoverish the poor. Rand predicted almost everything that ordinary people loathe about state-sponsored late capitalism, in particular the rampant corruption and bailout cronyism of an overweening government. Far from being pleased at the power Wall Street wields, if Rand were alive today she'd pull her hair out over the state of the state. Atlas Shrugged is no longer fanciful; if anything, it was a conservative prediction.

Rand's critics might argue that she appeals to the worst of human naturethat her writing plays on our jealousies, our insecurities, our most antagonistic impulses. Ayn Rand is right-wing porn: capitalism, self-reliance and self-interest at their most outrageously unapologetic. But that, of course, is what makes her so fabulously readable.

And she is readable, for all her well-advertised faults as a prose stylist. I don't mean to say that her prose shines with glistering metaphorobviously, it doesn'tbut her books do have that unputdownable quality of all great popular fiction. Even her critics admit that there's something about Rand's books you just can't turn away from, however clunky her writing. It's what she shares with Dan Brown and E. L. James, though, no doubt, both would hate the comparison.

Of course, the fact that Rand is so enduringly and phenomenally popular is what annoys people most about her (apart from her supposedly odious philosophies and thunderous rage, of course). She has sold more than 25 million copies of fiction works alone.

Rand was a woman who went "off script," so the left punished her with precisely the tactics it reserves the ultimate horror for when victims are political allies. Much hay was made during the GamerGate controversy about the criticism feminist Anita Sarkeesian received, and the undue attention given to game developer Zoe Quinn's relationships. But you do not need to look hard to find censorious snickering and some surprisingly detailed discussions of Ayn Rand's sex life.

Not that the woman herself would care. Rand never worried about critics because she simply didn't need them: Like the heroes in her books, she was anti-fragile, free to believe, say, and do what she pleased because she created something of value that those around her wished to trade for capital. And like Jon Stewart, she dresses up her fact as fiction, and so can get away with saying far more fiendishly wicked stuff than her ideological associates.

To put it another way, Rand recognized that politics is downstream from culture. So she went for the jugular as an author and philosopher, rather than fannying about treating the symptoms as a journalist or political commentator. Ideal is a fascinating early glimpse into how that realization began to take root in her mind.

Ayn Rand's great achievement, from a conservative point of view, present in embryonic form in Ideal, was to recognize that the battle for man's soul would be fought in the studios of Hollywood, the newsrooms of New York, and the lecture halls of Massachusetts, not in the stultifying round tables of Washington, DC. It's a lesson the GOP has yet to learn.

Milo Yiannopoulos is a British journalist and entrepreneur. Follow him on Twitter.

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In Defense of Ayn Rand, Monster Under the Progressive Bed

"...Architecture, my friends, is a great art based on two cosmic principles: Beauty and Utility. In a broader sense, these are but part of the three eternal entities: Truth, Love and Beauty. Truth to the traditions of our Art, Love for our fellow men whom we are to serve, Beauty ah, Beauty is a compelling goddess to all artists, be it in the shape of a lovely woman or a building....Hm....Yes....In conclusion, I should like to say to you, who are about to embark upon your careers in architecture, that you are now the custodians of a sacred heritage....Hm....Yes....So, go forth into the world, armed with the three eternal enti armed with courage and vision, loyal to the standards this great school has represented for many years. May you all serve faithfully, neither as slaves to the past nor as those parvenus who preach originality for its own sake, which attitude is only ignorant vanity. May you all have many rich, active years before you and leave, as you depart from this world, your mark on the sands of time!"

Guy Francon ended with a flourish, raising his right arm in a sweeping salute; informal, but with an air, that gay, swaggering air which Guy Francon could always permit himself. The huge hall before him came to life in applause and approval.

A sea of faces, young, perspiring and eager, had been raised solemnly for forty-five minutes to the platform where Guy Francon had held forth as the speaker at the commencement exercises of the Stanton Institute of Technology, Guy Francon who had brought his own person from New York for the occasion; Guy Francon, of the illustrious firm of Francon & Heyer, vice-president of the Architects' Guild of America, member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, member of the National Fine Arts Commission, Secretary of the Arts and Crafts League of New York, chairman of the Society for Architectural Enlightenment of the U.S.A.; Guy Francon, knight of the Legion of Honor of France, decorated by the governments of Great Britain, Belgium, Monaco and Siam; Guy Francon, Stanton's greatest alumnus, who had designed the famous Frink National Bank Building of New York City, on the top of which, twenty-five floors above the pavements, there burned in a miniature replica of the Hadrian Mausoleum a wind-blown torch made of glass and the best General Electric bulbs.

Guy Francon descended from the platform, fully conscious of his timing and movements. He was of medium height and not too heavy, with just an unfortunate tendency to stoutness. Nobody, he knew, would give him his real age, which was fifty-one. His face bore not a wrinkle nor a single straight line; it was an artful composition in globes, circles, arcs and ellipses, with bright little eyes twinkling wittily. His clothes displayed an artist's infinite attention to details. He wished, as he descended the steps, that this were a co-educational school.

The hall before him, he thought, was a splendid specimen of architecture, made a bit stuffy today by the crowd and by the neglected problem of ventilation. But it boasted green marble dados, Corinthian columns of cast iron painted gold, and garlands of gilded fruit on the walls; the pineapples particularly, thought Guy Francon, had stood the test of years very well. It is, thought Guy Francon, touching; it was I who built this annex and this very hall, twenty years ago; and here I am.

The hall was packed with bodies and faces, so tightly that one could not distinguish at a glance which faces belonged to which bodies. It was like a soft, shivering aspic made of mixed arms, shoulders, chests and stomachs. One of the heads, pale, dark haired and beautiful, belonged to Peter Keating.

He sat, well in front, trying to keep his eyes on the platform, because he knew that many people were looking at him and would look at him later. He did not glance back, but the consciousness of those centered glances never left him. His eyes were dark, alert, intelligent. His mouth, a small upturned crescent faultlessly traced, was gentle and generous, and warm with the faint promise of a smile. His head had a certain classical perfection in the shape of the skull, in the natural wave of black ringlets about finely hollowed temples. He held his head in the manner of one who takes his beauty for granted, but knows that others do not. He was Peter Keating, star student of Stanton, president of the student body, captain of the track team, member of the most important fraternity, voted the most popular man on the campus.

The crowd was there, thought Peter Keating, to see him graduate,and he tried to estimate the capacity of the hall. They knew of his scholastic record and no one would beat his record today. Oh, well, there was Shlinker. Shlinker had given him stiff competition, but he had beaten Shlinker this last year. He had worked like a dog, because he had wanted to beat Shlinker. He had no rivals today....Then he felt suddenly as if something had fallen down, inside his throat, to his stomach, something cold and empty, a blank hole rolling down and leaving that feeling on its way: not a thought, just the hint of a question asking him whether he was really as great as this day would proclaim him to be. He looked for Shlinker in the crowd; he saw his yellow face and gold-rimmed glasses. He stared at Shlinker warmly, in relief, in reassurance, in gratitude. It was obvious that Shlinker could never hope to equal his own appearance or ability; he had nothing to doubt; he would always beat Shlinker and all the Shlinkers of the world; he would let no one achieve what he could not achieve. Let them all watch him. He would give them good reason to stare. He felt the hot breaths about him and the expectation, like a tonic. It was wonderful, thought Peter Keating, to be alive.

His head was beginning to reel a little. It was a pleasant feeling. The feeling carried him, unresisting and unremembering, to the platform in front of all those faces. He stood slender, trim, athletic and let the deluge break upon his head. He gathered from its roar that he had graduated with honors, that the Architects' Guild of America had presented him with a gold medal and that he had been awarded the Prix de Paris by the Society for Architectural Enlightenment of the U.S.A. a four-year scholarship at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris.

Then he was shaking hands, scratching the perspiration off his face with the end of a rolled parchment, nodding, smiling, suffocating in his black gown and hoping that people would not notice his mother sobbing with her arms about him. The President of the Institute shook his hand, booming: "Stanton will be proud of you, my boy." The Dean shook his hand, repeating: "...a glorious future...a glorious future...a glorious future..." Professor Peterkin shook his hand, and patted his shoulder, saying: "...and you'll find it absolutely essential; for example, I had the experience when I built the Peabody Post Office..." Keating did not listen to the rest, because he had heard the story of the Peabody Post Office many times. It was the only structure anyone had ever known Professor Peterkin to have erected, before he sacrificed his practice to the responsibilities of teaching. A great deal was said about Keating's final project a Palace of Fine Arts. For the life of him, Keating could not remember at the moment what that project was.

Through all this, his eyes held the vision of Guy Francon shaking his hand, and his ears held the sounds of Francon's mellow voice: "...as I have told you, it is still open, my boy. Of course, now that you have this scholarship...you will have to decide...a Beaux-Arts diploma is very important to a young man...but I should be delighted to have you in our office...."

The banquet of the class of '22 was long and solemn. Keating listened to the speeches with interest; when he heard the endless sentences about "young men as the hope of American Architecture" and "the future opening its golden gates," he knew that he was the hope and his was the future, and it was pleasant to hear this confirmation from so many eminent lips. He looked at the gray-haired orators and thought of how much younger he would be when he reached their positions, theirs and beyond them.

Then he thought suddenly of Howard Roark. He was surprised to find that the flash of that name in his memory gave him a sharp little twinge of pleasure, before he could know why. Then then he remembered: Howard Roark had been expelled this morning. He reproached himself silently; he made a determined effort to feel sorry. But the secret glow came back, whenever he thought of that expulsion. The event proved conclusively that he had been a fool to imagine Roark a dangerous rival; at one time, he had worried about Roark more than about Shlinker, even though Roark was two years younger and one class below him. If he had ever entertained any doubts on their respective gifts, hadn't this day settled it all? And, he remembered, Roark had been very nice to him, helping him whenever he was stuck on a problem...not stuck, really, just did not have the time to think it out, a plan or something. Christ! how Roark could untangle a plan, like pulling a string and it was open...well, what if he could? What did it get him? He was done for now. And knowing this, Peter Keating experienced at last a satisfying pang of sympathy for Howard Roark.

When Keating was called upon to speak, he rose confidently. He could not show that he was terrified. He had nothing to say about architecture. But he spoke, his head high, as an equal among equals, just subtly diffident, so that no great name present could take offense. He remembered saying: "Architecture is a great art...with our eyes to the future and the reverence of the past in our hearts...of all the crafts, the most important one sociologically...and, as the man who is an inspiration to us all has said today, the three eternal entities are: Truth, Love and Beauty...."

Then, in the corridors outside, in the noisy confusion of leave-taking, a boy had thrown an arm about Keating's shoulders and whispered: "Run on home and get out of the soup-and-fish, Pete, and it's Boston for us tonight, just our own gang; I'll pick you up in an hour." Ted Shlinker had urged: "Of course you're coming, Pete. No fun without you. And, by the way, congratulations and all that sort of thing. No hard feelings. May the best man win." Keating had thrown his arm about Shlinker's shoulders; Keating's eyes had glowed with an insistent kind of warmth, as if Shlinker were his most precious friend; Keating's eyes glowed like that on everybody. He had said: "Thanks, Ted, old man. I really do feel awful about that A.G.A. medal I think you were the one for it, but you never can tell what possesses those old fogies." And now Keating was on his way home through the soft darkness, wondering how to get away from his mother for the night.

His mother, he thought, had done a great deal for him. As she pointed out frequently, she was a lady and had graduated from high school; yet she had worked hard, had taken boarders into their home, a concession unprecedented in her family.

His father had owned a stationery store in Stanton. Changing times had ended the business and a hernia had ended Peter Keating, Sr., twelve years ago. Louisa Keating had been left with the home that stood at the end of a respectable street, an annuity from an insurance kept up accurately she had seen to that and her son. The annuity was a modest one, but with the help of the boarders and of a tenacious purpose Mrs. Keating had managed. In the summers her son helped, clerking in hotels or posing for hat advertisements. Her son, Mrs. Keating had decided, would assume his rightful place in the world, and she had clung to this as softly, as inexorably as a leech....It's funny, Keating remembered, at one time he had wanted to be an artist. It was his mother who had chosen a better field in which to exercise his talent for drawing. "Architecture," she had said, "is such a respectable profession. Besides, you meet the best people in it." She had pushed him into his career, he had never known when or how. It's funny, thought Keating, he had not remembered that youthful ambition of his for years. It's funny that it should hurt him now to remember. Well, this was the night to remember it and to forget it forever.

Architects, he thought, always made brilliant careers. And once on top, did they ever fail? Suddenly, he recalled Henry Cameron; builder of skyscrapers twenty years ago; old drunkard with offices on some waterfront today. Keating shuddered and walked faster.

He wondered,as he walked, whether people were looking at him. He watched the rectangles of lighted windows; when a curtain fluttered and a head leaned out, he tried to guess whether it had leaned to watch his passing; if it hadn't, some day it would; some day, they all would.

Howard Roark was sitting on the porch steps when Keating approached the house. He was leaning back against the steps, propped up on his elbows, his long legs stretched out. A morning-glory climbed over the porch pillars, as a curtain between the house and the light of a lamppost on the corner.

It was strange to see an electric globe in the air of a spring night. It made the street darker and softer; it hung alone, like a gap, and left nothing to be seen but a few branches heavy with leaves, standing still at the gap's edges. The small hint became immense, as if the darkness held nothing but a flood of leaves. The mechanical ball of glass made the leaves seem more living; it took away their color and gave the promise that in daylight they would be a brighter green than had ever existed; it took away one's sight and left a new sense instead, neither smell nor touch, yet both, a sense of spring and space.

Keating stopped when he recognized the preposterous orange hair in the darkness of the porch. It was the one person whom he had wanted to see tonight. He was glad to find Roark alone, and a little afraid of it.

"Congratulations, Peter," said Roark.

"Oh...Oh, thanks...." Keating was surprised to find that he felt more pleasure than from any other compliment he had received today. He was timidly glad that Roark approved, and he called himself inwardly a fool for it. "...I mean...do you know or..." He added sharply: "Has mother been telling you?"

"She has."

"She shouldn't have!"

"Why not?"

"Look, Howard, you know that I'm terribly sorry about your being..."

Roark threw his head back and looked up at him.

"Forget it," said Roark.

"I...there's something I want to speak to you about, Howard, to ask your advice. Mind if I sit down?"

"What is it?"

Keating sat down on the steps beside him. There was no part that he could ever play in Roark's presence. Besides, he did not feel like playing a part now. He heard a leaf rustling in its fall to the earth; it was a thin, glassy, spring sound.

He knew, for the moment, that he felt affection for Roark; an affection that held pain, astonishment and helplessness.

"You won't think," said Keating gently, in complete sincerity, "that it's awful of me to be asking about my business, when you've just been...?"

"I said forget about that. What is it?"

"You know," said Keating honestly and unexpectedly even to himself, "I've often thought that you're crazy. But I know that you know many things about it architecture, I mean which those fools never knew. And I know that you love it as they never will."

"Well?"

"Well, I don't know why I should come to you, but Howard, I've never said it before, but you see, I'd rather have your opinion on things than the Dean's I'd probably follow the Dean's, but it's just that yours means more to me myself, I don't know why. I don't know why I'm saying this, either."

Roark turned over on his side, looked at him, and laughed. It was a young, kind, friendly laughter, a thing so rare to hear from Roark that Keating felt as if someone had taken his hand in reassurance; and he forgot that he had a party in Boston waiting for him.

"Come on," said Roark, "you're not being afraid of me, are you? What do you want to ask about?"

"It's about my scholarship. The Paris prize I got."

"Yes?"

"It's for four years. But, on the other hand, Guy Francon offered me a job with him some time ago. Today he said it's still open. And I don't know which to take."

Roark looked at him; Roark's fingers moved in slow rotation, beating against the steps.

"If you want my advice, Peter," he said at last, "you've made a mistake already. By asking me. By asking anyone. Never ask people. Not about your work. Don't you know what you want? How can you stand it, not to know?"

"You see, that's what I admire about you, Howard. You always know."

"Drop the compliments."

"But I mean it. How do you always manage to decide?"

"How can you let others decide for you?"

"But you see, I'm not sure, Howard. I'm never sure of myself. I don't know whether I'm as good as they all tell me I am. I wouldn't admit that to anyone but you. I think it's because you're always so sure that I..."

"Petey!" Mrs. Keating's voice exploded behind them. "Petey, sweetheart! What are you doing there?"

She stood in the doorway, in her best dress of burgundy taffeta, happy and angry.

"And here I've been sitting all alone, waiting for you! What on earth are you doing on those filthy steps in your dress suit? Get up this minute! Come on in the house, boys. I've got hot chocolate and cookies ready for you."

"But, Mother, I wanted to speak to Howard about something important," said Keating. But he rose to his feet.

She seemed not to have heard. She walked into the house. Keating followed.

Roark looked after them, shrugged, rose and went in also.

Mrs. Keating settled down in an armchair, her stiff skirt crackling.

"Well?" she asked. "What were you two discussing out there?"

Keating fingered an ash tray, picked up a matchbox and dropped it, then, ignoring her, turned to Roark.

"Look, Howard, drop the pose," he said, his voice high. "Shall I junk the scholarship and go to work, or let Francon wait and grab the Beaux-Arts to impress the yokels? What do you think?"

Something was gone. The one moment was lost.

"Now, Petey, let me get this straight..." began Mrs. Keating.

"Oh, wait a minute, Mother!...Howard, I've got to weigh it carefully. It isn't everyone who can get a scholarship like that. You're pretty good when you rate that. A course at the Beaux Arts you know how important that is."

"I don't," said Roark.

"Oh, hell, I know your crazy ideas, but I'm speaking practically, for a man in my position. Ideals aside for a moment, it certainly is..."

"You don't want my advice," said Roark.

"Of course I do! I'm asking you!"

But Keating could never be the same when he had an audience, any audience. Something was gone. He did not know it, but he felt that Roark knew; Roark's eyes made him uncomfortable and that made him angry.

"I want to practice architecture," snapped Keating, "not talk about it! Gives you a great prestige the old Ecole. Puts you above the rank and file of the ex-plumbers who think they can build. On the other hand, an opening with Francon Guy Francon himself offering it!"

Roark turned away.

"How many boys will match that?" Keating went on blindly. "A year from now they'll be boasting they're working for Smith or Jones if they find work at all. While I'll be with Francon & Heyer!"

"You're quite right, Peter," said Mrs. Keating, rising. "On a question like that you don't want to consult your mother. It's too important. I'll leave you to settle it with Mr. Roark."

He looked at his mother. He did not want to hear what she thought of this; he knew that his only chance to decide was to make the decision before he heard her; she had stopped, looking at him, ready to turn and leave the room; he knew it was not a pose she would leave if he wished it; he wanted her to go; he wanted it desperately. He said:

"Why, Mother, how can you say that? Of course I want your opinion. What...what do you think?"

She ignored the raw irritation in his voice. She smiled.

"Petey, I never think anything. It's up to you. It's always been up to you."

"Well..." he began hesitantly, watching her, "if I go to the Beaux-Arts..."

"Fine," said Mrs. Keating, "go to the Beaux-Arts. It's a grand place. A whole ocean away from your home. Of course, if you go, Mr. Francon will take somebody else. People will talk about that. Everybody knows that Mr. Francon picks out the best boy from Stanton every year for his office. I wonder how it'll look if some other boy gets the job? But I guess that doesn't matter."

"What...what will people say?"

"Nothing much, I guess. Only that the other boy was the best man of his class. I guess he'll take Shlinker."

"No!" he gulped furiously. "Not Shlinker!"

"Yes," she said sweetly. "Shlinker."

"But..."

"But why should you care what people will say? All you have to do is please yourself."

"And you think that Francon..."

"Why should I think of Mr. Francon? It's nothing to me."

"Mother, you want me to take the job with Francon?"

"I don't want anything, Petey. You're the boss."

He wondered whether he really liked his mother. But she was his mother and this fact was recognized by everybody as meaning automatically that he loved her, and so he took for granted that whatever he felt for her was love. He did not know whether there was any reason why he should respect her judgment. She was his mother; this was supposed to take the place of reasons.

"Yes, of course, Mother....But...Yes, I know, but...Howard?"

It was a plea for help. Roark was there, on a davenport in the corner, half lying, sprawled limply like a kitten. It had often astonished Keating; he had seen Roark moving with the soundless tension, the control, the precision of a cat; he had seen him relaxed, like a cat, in shapeless ease, as if his body held no single solid bone. Roark glanced up at him. He said:

"Peter, you know how I feel about either one of your opportunities. Take your choice of the lesser evil. What will you learn at the Beaux-Arts? Only more Renaissance palaces and operetta settings. They'll kill everything you might have in you. You do good work, once in a while, when somebody lets you. If you really want to learn, go to work. Francon is a bastard and a fool, but you will be building. It will prepare you for going on your own that much sooner."

"Even Mr. Roark can talk sense sometimes," said Mrs. Keating, "even if he does talk like a truck driver."

"Do you really think that I do good work?" Keating looked at him, as if his eyes still held the reflection of that one sentence and nothing else mattered.

"Occasionally," said Roark. "Not often."

"Now that it's all settled..." began Mrs. Keating.

"I...I'll have to think it over, Mother."

"Now that it's all settled, how about the hot chocolate? I'll have it out to you in a jiffy!"

She smiled at her son, an innocent smile that declared her obedience and gratitude, and she rustled out of the room.

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The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, Paperback | Barnes & Noble

Ayn Rand wrote volumes urging people to be selfishThe Objectivist ethics proudly advocates and upholds rational selfishnesswhich means: the values required for mans survival qua manwhich means: the values required for human survivalnot the values produced by the desires, the emotions, the aspirations, the feelings, the whims or the needs of irrational brutes, who have never outgrown the primordial practice of human sacrifices, have never discovered an industrial society and can conceive of no self-interest but that of grabbing the loot of the moment...The Objectivist Ethics, 31View Full Lexicon Entry.

What? Arent people already too selfish? Just do whatever you feel like, be a thoughtless jerk, and exploit people to get ahead. Easy, right? Except that acting thoughtlessly and victimizing others, Rand claims, is not in your self-interest.

What Rand advocates is an approach to life thats unlike anything youve ever heard before. Selfishness, in her philosophy, means:

At the dawn of our lives, writes Rand, we seek a noble vision of mans nature and of lifes potential. Rands philosophy is that vision. Explore it for yourself.

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Ayn Rand's Ideas - An Overview | AynRand.org

The Hillary Unplugged tour made it to India this week, where the former presidential candidate modified her theory as to why she lost the 2016 election. This time, it wasnt James Comey, or even the Russians" that did her in. In fact, it was the Americans. Here is what she said:

Forget the untoward spectacle of Clinton casting all of her opponents as people opposing black people getting rights. (There is a staff editorial about that on this website.) What I find particularly interesting is the bizarre strand of Ayn Rand-ism in Clintons sentiments.

She boasts, after all, that the areas she won represent two thirds of Americas gross domestic product. Thats true: The Democrats have in many respects become the party of Americas economic winners. But whats odd is that Clintons economic analysis quickly becomes a moral judgment. Those Americans stuck in the parts of the country with flagging GDP (those forgotten Americans, as Donald Trump called them) arent just economically struggling. They are backwards, and opposed to civil and womens rights.

In other words, Clintons remarks represent nothing so much as a bizarre strand of Ayn Randism. Clinton, like Rand, seems to be suggesting that high GDP peoplea.k.a. Americas producerspeople dont just have more money than the rest of us. Shes saying theyre better people, too. And as for the Trumpian masses out in low GDP America? What a bunch of takers!

Continued here:

How Hillary Clinton Is Like Ayn Rand | The Weekly Standard

Cuban is also a reader of Rand's work, but favors her 1943 novel "The Fountainhead."

He's read the book, "three complete times, and untold number of little snippets and segments," he tells C-Span in a 2006 interview. "I'll pick it up when I need motivation, but then if I read too far I get too much motivation, and I get too jittery so I have to put it down."

To him, the dedication of the characters to overcome challenges is encouraging.

"Anybody who started a business and built a business knows there's going to be lots of times when you feel beaten down, and you need some motivation, and that's when I turn to that book among others," Cuban continues.

"The Fountainhead" similarly explores topics of "rational selfishness," an ideology that later became known as objectivism. Cuban says he didn't read into the political message of Rand's work but found motivation in her characters.

"I didn't buy into her political philosophy, like 'all government is bad,' and pure libertarianism," Cuban explains on a 2017 episode of "The Jamie Weinstein Show" podcast.

"When you have a protagonist like Howard Roark, that just fired me up," Cuban says about the book, "He was true to himself. And to me, that was the message that I took home."

Don't miss: Mark Cuban: The 3 best tips to save more money in 2018

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Why Mark Cuban and Kevin O'Leary read Ayn Rand

By Ann HornadayThe Washington Post

In the lowlife picaresque "Good Time," Robert Pattinson delivers what some will surely call a career-making performance, especially if they've missed his impressive turns in such similarly non-"Twilight" indies as "The Rover," "Maps to the Stars," "Queen of the Desert" and "The Lost City of Z."

No matter. Connie Nikas, Pattinson's stumblebum character in "Good Time," feels reverse-engineered to allow the former teen screen idol the attention he deserves for serious-acting chops, checking every box from aggressively antisocial tendencies to a startling physical transformation. As "Good Time" opens, Connie bursts into an office where his hearing-impaired and cognitively delayed brother Nick (Ben Safdie) is being questioned by a well-meaning therapist. Connie arrives just at the moment when a seemingly long-buried trauma is surfacing, which alerts the audience to the multivalent irony of the film's title: No matter how noble the intentions of even the most optimistic protagonist, there's something to be said for good timing.

And some old-fashioned smarts and self-awareness wouldn't hurt either.

As Connie leads Nick on what begins as a caper and ends in his own increasingly hallucinatory journey through the neon-lit underworld of Queens, "Good Time" takes the shape of movies we've seen before. One scene elicits memories of "Dog Day Afternoon," while others recall "Midnight Cowboy," "Mean Streets" and "Panic in Needle Park." In a manic, dead-eyed rendition of an antihero who's one part Charlie Manson and one part Kurt Cobain (especially after an ill-advised dye job), Pattinson infuses Connie with both charm and malevolence. He'll do anything to get what he wants in the course of a fateful night of his own misbegotten making. In the name of fraternal loyalty, he'll manipulate himself into the pocketbooks and good graces of anyone whose path he crosses, whether it's the frowzy, magical-thinking woman he's dating (played with ditsy pathos by Jennifer Jason Leigh) or the wised-up but clearly vulnerable teenage granddaughter of a Haitian immigrant (Taliah Webster).

Co-directed by Safdie with his brother Josh, "Good Time" bears some resemblance to their previous films, "Daddy Longlegs" and "Heaven Knows What," both of which gave viewers an unsettlingly intimate glimpse of overwhelming love borne of dysfunction and dead ends. "Good Time" traffics in the same sentiments, but it also represents an artistic leap forward, both in its debt to canonical thrillers and its improbably rich look. Sean Price Williams, who shot "Heaven Knows What" as a gritty vrit-like piece of street art, here embraces a far more elegant, composed sense of visual beauty, occasionally leaving behind tight, jangly close-ups to take to the skies and deliver exhilarating views of the Queens streets down below. ("Good Time" was shot on 35 mm film, and it has the texture and translucence to show for it.)

As Connie trips the night fatalistic, a shaggy-dog story turns out to contain yet another shaggy-dog story, with the fablelike weirdness of "Good Time" taking on a harder edge by way of the assaultive, techno score (by Daniel Lopatin, under the recording alias of Oneohtrix Point Never) and Connie's own increasingly off-putting sense of exceptionalism. At one point, now conspiring with a hangdog miscreant named Ray (Buddy Duress), Connie delivers a screed against dependency that somehow mashes up Freud and Ayn Rand with his own supreme hypocrisy. He has a way of saying "God bless you" just before he tricks yet another mark into helping him down his particular road to hell.

Many of those victims are immigrants, making "Good Time" feel authentically of its time and place, especially when two black characters and not Connie are reflexively apprehended by the police. But the filmmakers choose to keep the film's politics buried under the surface of Connie's lunkhead-on-the-lam hop from bail bond office to bodega to pizza joint to hospital. (Josh Safdie wrote the script with his longtime collaborator Ronald Bronstein.) A climax set in a hellish after-hours amusement park pushes "Good Time's" visuals and the audience's patience to their limit. What starts out as an invigorating odyssey winds up becoming an enervating series of postures. For all of the Safdies' prowess, and Pattinson's willingness to tarnish and rough up his own celebrity persona, there's little by way of deeper meaning to a pulp thrill ride that turns out to be as petty as Connie's crimes.

**

"Good Time"

Starring:Robert Pattinson, Benny Safdie, Taliah Webster

Rating: R for crude language throughout, violence, drug use and sexuality

Running time: 1:40

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Movie Review: In Pattinson, 'Twilight' sidles up to Ratso Rizzo - The Providence Journal

Stephen K. Bannon, the recently deposed architect ofPresident Trumps nonexistent populist agenda, wishes it was the 1930s.

That, of course, is what he promised to do: to make things as exciting now as they were back then. Now, he might not have been talking about the war or the depression or the fascists in other countries, but what he did mean was a politics where racial resentment and economic populism could once again exist side-by-side. Where Republicans could targetMuslims for special restrictionsand raise the top marginal tax rate to 44 percent; could cut legal immigration in half and undo free trade deals; could stick up for white supremacistsand spend $1 trillion on infrastructure. In other words, where the ideological heirs of the Dixiecrats were the ones calling the shots.

They havent been for a long time now.

Why not? Well, because our parties have sorted themselves based on race first and economics second. The political history of the past 100 years, you see, has really been the story of the rise and fall of the New Deal coalition. Franklin D. Roosevelts response to the Great Depression brought blacks, liberals, Northern ethnics and Southern whites all together until the civil rights movement drove them apart. Its true that the Dixiecrats the Jim Crow-supporting Southerners who left the Democratic Party to form their own, before eventually migrating over to the Republican one werent all in favor of big government, but a lot of them were. Forced to choose between that and racial backlash, however, they chose racial backlash, whether that wascalls for law and order or denunciations of welfare queens or, in the past few years, chants of build the wall.

Bannon didnt want them to choose anymore. He understood that a lot of Republicans dont care about Ayn Rand-inspired odes to heroic entrepreneurs, or paeans to the Schumpeterian beauty of creative destruction, or how much capital gains are taxed. They want their Social Security and their Medicare. Theyre called Trump voters, and they arent really represented in Washington. Thats because the money men and interest groups that members of Congress rely on ensure complete ideological conformity on the issue nearest and dearest to the hearts or rather the wallets of the donor class: how much theyre taxed. Bannon wanted to change that so people could get Democratic economic policies together with a Republican brand of racial pandering.

The only problem is you cant. Just look at Bannons proposal to increase the top tax rate to 44 percent. Who was ever going to vote for that? Republicans never would when their partys entire raison detre for the past 40 years has been keeping taxes as low as possible on the rich. And neither would Democrats when Bannon had alienated them about as much as possible with his barely disguised attempt to ban Muslims. The same was true of infrastructure. Republicans didnt really want to do it, and Democrats didnt want to with Trump. It reduced Bannon to being able to do little more than alternately insist that he wanted to build a rainbow coalition of populists we'll get 60 percent of the white vote and 40 percent of the black and Hispanic vote, and well govern for 50 years, he rather modestly claimed and cheer, for example, when Trump said last Fridays neo-Nazi rally was full of very fine people. Bannon never understood that one made the other impossible.

Bannon thought he was a revolutionary, but he was just whistling Dixie.

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Why Stephen K. Bannon was such a failure - The Washington Post - Washington Post

So with Trump, whats wrong with us? How did we get to this point? What can we do about it? These are the great questions historically associated with the outdated existentialism of an angst-dominated post-World War II world when the (highly overrated) danger of Soviet subversion and the threat of a nuclear war disturbed the sleep of millions on almost a nightly basis.

We used to ask such questions about ourselves as individuals, as well as more collectively as a nation. Herbert Marcuse (remember him?) made his career addressing such anxieties from a theoretical-existentialist perspective. The stress associated with it helped give rise to the what me worry? and do it! 100 years from now, no one will know the difference era of the 1960s so-called hippie drugs, sex and rock and roll counterculture, at least among younger people.

There was the bomb. Some of us remember the days of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when the planet came perilously close to an unloading of mutual and assured destruction. This writer as a lad had routine nightmares of mushroom clouds appearing on the horizon in those days and an associated horrid sensation of raw fear.

Movies like Dr.Stangelove and On the Beach didnt help to relieve the stress. Then there were the assassinations, of JFK, of Malcolm X, of Martin Luther King and of Bobby Kennedy. Then came the inner city riots. Then came the Vietnam War and with it, the universal draft. It was the last American war involving a draft, because the powers that be recognized that it was the singularly-greatest cause of the national domestic revolt against that war. My brother amazingly survived two tours of duty up the Mekong Delta on swift boats and I had two close friends, old high school baseball buddies, who died there, one by stepping on a mine the first day he was there.

Then there was the pervasive atmosphere of angry discrimination that saturated the culture, snarling at radical social disruptions like interracial marriage and, God forbid, pride in being LGBT. In the 1970s, cults exploded as remnants of the rudderless young people were lured by authoritative charlatans with answers. They were of the flower child variety on one end of the spectrum, and then of the human potential movement variety on the other, the nastier form of sensory deprivation and ego-stripping behavior modification techniques that became all the rage. Corporate America bought into it big time, ordering their employees to drink that Kool-Aid, so to speak, with the aim of improving productivity and justifying low wages by brainwashing their minions into repudiating any moral responsibility for anything beyond their own selfish self-interests.

This dovetailed with the selfish philosophies of the followers of Ayn Rand and the rise of so-called postmodern realism that set about ridiculing and discrediting any notions of love and romance. Postmodernism respects only pleasure and power and its philosophical constructs pervaded American university campuses and the arts, alike. Michel Foucault, theories of the selfish genes being like invisible hands governing all behavior, human sapien humorless advances toward immortality and the proliferation of remarkably dystopian scenarios of the future dominated.

On the flip side, religion became fundamentalist to a degree never so pervasive before, and blindly political.

Our great national sin has become selfish self-entitlement. Without excuse, people now demand to do it their way, with commitments to social bonds, reasonable compromises and covenants of mutual interests seen as the enemy.

I Want It, And I Want It Now! This is now the national mantra, more relevant and valid than E Pluribus Unum.

This drove the national economy into the ditch in the Great Recession, and there are signs that another one is on the way. It has led to the opioid epidemic, a nation hooked on drugs far more potent than heroin.

It has given rise to the Roman Empire-like bread and circuses, the common national religion being the rituals associated with wildly popular socially-sanctioned manslaughter in the form of football. Destroying brains is now our national pastime, in the face of the overwhelming scientific and medical evidence of how serious it is.

So, whats wrong with America? Try its people.

Nicholas Benton may be emailed at nfbenton@fcnp.com.

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What's Wrong With America? - Falls Church News Press

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Nigeria Niue Norfolk Island Northern Mariana Islands Norway Oman Pakistan Palau Palestinian Territory, Occupied Panama Papua New Guinea Paraguay Peru Philippines Pitcairn Poland Portugal Qatar Runion Romania Russian Federation Rwanda Saint Barthlemy Saint Helena Saint Kitts And Nevis Saint Lucia Saint Martin Saint Pierre And Miquelon Saint Vincent And The Grenadines Samoa San Marino Sao Tome And Principe Saudi Arabia Senegal Serbia Seychelles Sierra Leone Singapore Slovakia Slovenia Solomon Islands Somalia South Africa South Georgia And The South Sandwich Islands Spain Sri Lanka Sudan Suriname Svalbard And Jan Mayen Swaziland Sweden Switzerland Syrian Arab Republic Taiwan Tajikistan Tanzania, United Republic Of Thailand Timor-leste Togo Tokelau Tonga Trinidad And Tobago Tunisia Turkey Turkmenistan Turks And Caicos Islands Tuvalu Uganda Ukraine United Arab Emirates United Kingdom Uruguay Uzbekistan Vanuatu Vatican City State Venezuela Viet Nam Virgin Islands, British Virgin Islands, U.S. Wallis And Futuna Western Sahara Yemen Zambia Zimbabwe Name of the teacher who assigned the essay (if applicable) Your Essay Please select the topic question your essay addresses Topic 1: Anthem depicts a world of the future, a collectivist dictatorship in which Topic 2: In Anthem, the City has numerous rules and controls. Why do these exist? Topic 3: Contrast Equalitys view of morality at the end of the novel to the morality exemplified

Anthem depicts a world of the future, a collectivist dictatorship in which even the word I has vanished. Discuss the heros struggle to free himself from collectivism. What makes his victory possible? In your essay, consider what Ayn Rand has to say in The Soul Of An Individualist excerpt from her novel The Fountainhead.

In Anthem, the City has numerous rules and controls. Why do these exist? What is their purpose? Do you think the society that Equality envisions creating at the end of the story would include any of these rules and controls? Explain why or why not.

Contrast Equalitys view of morality at the end of the novel to the morality exemplified by his societys institutions, practices and officials. In your essay, consider what Ayn Rand has to say in these excerpts from her writings.

Have you checked to ensure that all personally identifiable information has been removed from your essay?

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Anthem Essay Contest Ayn Rand Education

That was the summer of 1963, begins the voiceover that opens Dirty Dancing.When everybody called me Baby, and it didnt occur to me to mind.

But boy, does it occur to her by the end of the summer! After just a few weeks at Kellermans resort, Baby grows up, falls in love, and, most importantly, learns to dance and learns to dance dirty. Babys coming-of-age in 1987s seminal romanceDirty Dancinghas had audiences swooning and trying to nail that lift for 30 years now, teaching three decades worth of impressionable teenagers some hard truths about life that sheltered Baby never discovered for herself until that fateful summer in the Catskills.

In celebration of the 30th anniversary of Dirty Dancing, here are 30 important lessons that we learned from watching Baby have the time of her life, starting at the very beginning, with

1. If people call you Baby, you should mind (unless that is how you introduced yourself to them, in which case, its kind of on you).

2. Your dad is not as great as you think he is.

3. Your sister is just as dumb as you think she is.

4. The following things qualify as tragic: Three men trapped in a mine, a police dog used in Birmingham, monks burning themselves in protest. The following things do not: Insufficient footwear.

5. God wouldnt have given you maracas if he didnt want you to shaaake theeeem!

6. The 60s were basically the same thing as the 80s, except abortion was illegal, and occasionally people played Motown.

7. Never volunteer to take part in a magic show.

8. Always volunteer to carry a watermelon (but, like, try to be cool about it after the fact).

9. Neil Kellerman is the catch of the county, did you know that?

10. Neil Kellerman once stole the lifeguards girlfriend, pass it on.

11. Neil Kellerman has two hotels.

12. People who love Ayn Rand are sleazy and bad, and not to be trusted.

13. Men are in charge on the dance floor (if nowhere else, am I right, ladies?).

14. There is no worse look than beige iridescent lipstick.

15. No spaghetti arms!!!!!!!

16. Want to learn a skill that takes great physical coordination? Do it standing on a log over a body of water.

17. If possible, lose your virginity to someone that you sort of love, or whatever, but more importantly, to someone who can dance really, really well.

18. If you call your lover boy and he doesnt answer, and then you call him again and he still doesnt answer, then simply say, Baby, oh baby, my sweet baby, youre the one.

19. If you cant take your honeymoon at Niagara Falls, the only other option is Acapulco.

20. The one thing Lisa learned all summer: Do NOT open a door with a towel hanging on the doorknob.

21. All rich people are thieves; all poor people can dance.

22. If you ever get fired, just march right back in there and publicly declare that you always do the last dance of the season, and those sorry fools will be helpless to stop you.

23. Dont sit in the corner?

24. If you want people to stop calling you Baby, wear baby pink.

25. If you want people to stop calling you Baby, tell them that your name is actually Frances.

26. The most impressive kind of performance is one set to music that wont come out for another two decades.

27. Always have a group flash mob dirty-dance routine ready to whip out, in case the time comes to stage an end-of-summer mutiny.

28. Just do the lift already.

29. The best way to win back someones trust after you lied to their face is to dazzle them with the power of dance.

30. If your boyfriend has been kicked out of summer camp and your sister is maybe sleeping with an Ayn Rand disciple and your dad doesnt like you anymore, dont lose hope, all is not lost but you should still wear a really swishy skirt just in case.

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30 important life lessons Dirty Dancing taught us - EW.com

Progressives must reclaim the tradition of Thoreau, Gandhi and King and deny the right the moral high ground

A Democratic candidate has already thrown his hat into the ring to oppose the House Speaker

Despite promises to the rural working class, the Republican Party is still under the influence of Rand's elitism

No, Donald Trump hasn't really read "Atlas Shrugged." Sad! But he's surrounding himself with Ayn Rand superfans

The value-neutral media "ideal" has left us with a society drained of kindness and mutual responsibility

My father believed in two things, which deeply informed his parenting: making money and doing whatever he pleased

The HBO show's creator may or may not be a Randian, but a version of her philosophy runs through his body of work

Carl Barney has run a lucrative nonprofit education empire under the principles of the libertarian figurehead

The Uber model just doesn't work for other industries. The price points always fail -- and that's a good thing

Yesterday, the House Speaker apologized for calling America's impoverished "takers." But he hasn't changed a bit

Snyder working on an adaptation of Rand's novel makes perfect sensejust look at his body of work VIDEO

John Boehner is laying the groundwork for a "Draft Ryan" campaign at the GOP convention. The whole thing is absurd

Values voters, Tea Party conservatives, faux-populists grifting for book deals and Fox spots -- meet today's GOP

Fans feel "so betrayed" seeing the "Star Wars" heartthrob in an "Atlas Shrugged" shirt

The brilliant critic Evgeny Morozov discusses the myths Silicon Valley tells about itself, and why we believe them

The most effective ways to expose their contradictions and faulty logic

A stern, serious Krugman says anyone who doesn't believe the GOP's real gold standard fervor is deluding themselves

Freedom now means winner-take-all capitalism, and it's slowly morphing our political system into a plutocracy

We've been a fed a myth about heroic individuals -- and that allows the 1 percent to prosper at everyone's expense

The Wisconsin congressman may be a radical, but he's also a product of the insider cronyism the Tea Party abhors

Page 1 of 7 in Ayn Rand

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Ayn Rand - Salon.com

Daily Beast"Libertarianism has an alt-right problem," writes Matt Lewis over at The Daily Beast. "It seems observably true that libertarianism is disproportionately a gateway drug to the alt-right."

He notes that a number of high-profile leaders of the alt-rightMilo Yiannopoulis, Richard Spencer, Christopher Cantwell, among otherseither flirted with or explicitly identified as libertarian at some point in their stumblebum hegiras toward anti-Semitism, white supremacism, reactionary sexism, and/or neo-Nazism.

For instance, Cantwell, who can barely complete a sentence or a crying jag without slagging "the Jews," was part of the Free State Project before he rightly got bounced after advocating the indiscriminate killing of "government agents." Milo flirted with the term too before concluding that "libertarians are children...obsessed with weed, Bitcoin, and hacking." Richard Spencer apparently attended Reason's 2007 "Very Secular Christmas Party" at which Christopher Hitchens led a sing-along of Tom Lehrer's "Christmas Song" (I organized that event, which drew a couple of hundred people but had no idea that such a future thug was among the crowd).

Lewis notes that libertarianism and the alt-right tend to non-interventionism when it comes foreign policy and that

libertarianism is somewhat unique in its unflinching support of free speech. In some cases, this free speech is unsavory. If you're anti-political correctness, libertarianism might seem like a good place to landeven if you don't buy into the whole libertarian philosophy.

Along the same lines, libertarians mostly believe that private actors have a right of association that would allow businesses to refuse customers even for racist, homophobic, or sexist reasons. That is in no way an endorsement of such behavior, but it clearly creates space for alt-right haters to catch their fetid breath.

Lewis' article (in which I appear, more on that in a moment) builds on a recent post at Hot Air by Tyler Millard, a libertarian contributor to that conservative site. Millard argues that the loose coalition of libertarians and conservatives needs to "purge White Supremacist Leaders, Ideology," from our midst.

The problem is these Richard Spencers and Peter Brimelows [the founder of the racist site Vdare.com who wrote anti-immigration articles for National Review in the 1990s] got their start in "the movement," under the guise of paleoconservatism, while others are part of the Hans-Hermann Hoppe bloc of libertarianism. They are the wolves in sheep clothing looking to draw more and more people into their pack while ripping away at the foundation of freedom and liberty at the same time.

So there is definitely some mingling going on. But does any of this add up to a "pipeline"? I don't think so, for reasons I explained to Lewis.

"These people [may] start off calling themselves libertarian, but they are the antithesis of everything that the libertarian project stands forwhich is cosmopolitanism versus parochialism, individualism vs. group identity, and libertarianism or autonomy versus authoritarianism," Nick Gillespie, editor in chief of Reason.com tells me....This affinity for libertarianism "wears off when they realize that we're principled, that no, we're not just trolling," says Gillespie.

The Cato Institute's David Boaz reminds Lewis that Jason Kessler, the organizer of the fascistic and deadly "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, was originally a member of the Occupy movement while granting that "some libertarians become conservatives, some become welfarist liberals, a few drift into creepy extremes." And Lewis himself admits "that many of today's alt-righters are disaffected conservatives." So it's an overstatement at the very least to characterize the alt-right as mostly former libertarians.

Yet there is no question that some elements in the broadly defined libertarian movement articulate policy positions almost indistinguishable from those of the alt-right and Donald Trump. This is especially true when it comes to issues such as immigration. From Lewis' story:

On a post-Charlottesville blog post, Cantwell discussed his conversion from libertarianism to the alt-right. "As immigration became a leading news story in America and Europe," he writes, "Lew Rockwell gave a talk titled 'Open Borders Are an Assault on Private Property.' From here, I decided to read Hans Hermann Hoppe's 'Democracy: The God That Failed.' From these, I realized that the libertine vision of a free society was quite distorted. The society we sought actually would provide far more order and control than [would] modern democratic governments. It would encourage more socially conservative behavior and less compulsory association. Just when I thought I had everything figured out, I was once again reminded of my naivety."

I told Lewis that Ron Paul's high-profile presidential runs in 2008 and 2012 played a role too. When I started at Reason in the fall of 1993, I'd say that most people came to libertarianism via exposure to some mix of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman, along with some Robert Heinlein, F.A. Hayek, Murray Rothbard, and institutions such as Cato, the Foundation for Economic Education, the Institute for Humane Studies, and Reason. But over the past decade or so, there's no question in my mind that Dr. No is probably more responsible than any individual for raising libertarianism's visibility and reach.

"In a way, Ron Paul is the guy who lit the fuse," Nick Gillespie says. "And he embodies some of those contradictions [between libertarianism and the alt-right]." Gillespie tells me that Richard Spencer came up to him at the Republican National Convention in 2016 and said that he was activated into politics because of Paul. Gillespie sees Paul's legacy as very mixed, as someone who was "simultaneously positing this very libertarian worldview, but then he's also speaking to people's fears and anxieties." If one were looking for the missing link to explain this phenomenon, Ron Paul (and his paleolibertarian allies) would be a good place to start.

Paul really did simultaneously embody an attractive, idealistic version of libertarianism and an appeal to populist paranoia that is very evident in alt-right fears about porous borders, encroaching Sharia law, and foreign control of America's economic and cultural life. As Brian Doherty reported in 2008, Paul was packing college auditoriums with a basic stump speech that went something like this:

He wraps up the speech with three things he doesn't want to do that sum up the Ron Paul message. First: "I don't want to run your life. We all have different values. I wouldn't know how to do it, I don't have the authority under the Constitution, and I don't have the moral right." Second: "I don't want to run the economy. People run the economy in a free society." And third: "I don't want to run the world....We don't need to be imposing ourselves around the world."

Paul does not mention abortion or immigrationareas where his views are more conventionally conservative and not of great appeal to this age group. He's against abortion and thinks the fetus is a human life deserving of state protection, but he also thinks that like all such crimes against persons, abortion is a matter for states to decide without federal interference. He thinks that border defense is a legitimate function of government, and that government has been doing a bad job of it. He wants tougher border enforcement, including a border wall; he wants to eliminate birthright citizenship; and he wants to end the public subsidies that might attract illegal immigrants. Paul's style of libertarianism includes a populist streak of distrust for foreign forces overwhelming our sovereignty, whether through the United Nations, international trade pacts, immigration, or a feared "North American Union" between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.

If you bleach out the libertarian aspects of Ron Paul's 2008 stump speech, you're pretty much left with the agenda pushed by Donald Trump and the alt-right, both of which seem comfortable with a welfare state as long as the welfare is going to the right kind of people. Paul also eschews the sort of "Make America Great Again" rhetoric, which undergirds Trump's and the alt-right's fetishizing of masculine virtues and an overbuilt military.

Which is to reiterate that there is no "pipeline" between libertarianism and the alt-right. The alt-rightand Trumpism, too, to the extent that it has any coherenceis an explicit rejection of foundational libertarian beliefs in "free trade and free migration" along with experiments in living that make a mess of rigid categories that appeal to racists, sexists, protectionists, and other reactionaries. In that sense, the call by Hot Air's Taylor Millard for libertarians to purge white supremacists, anti-Semites, and living, breathing Nazis from our movement is misdirected since such people by definition are not libertarian. But he is surely right that alt-righters need to be called out wherever we find them espousing their anti-modern, tribalistic, anti-individualistic, and anti-freedom agenda.

Go here to see the original:

Is There Really an 'Insidious Libertarian-To-Alt-Right Pipeline'? - Reason (blog)

When it comes to political violence such as we witnessed in Charlottesville, Virginia, last weekend, there are no partisan sides to the issue. In an enlightened society, you either believe violence is an acceptable means to an end, or you do not. In this parity, there is no room for equivocation, where the perceived nobleness or virtue of ones agenda can excuse it. Initiating force against any group or individual for the sake of achieving a political goal or simply making a political statement, is morally and legally wrong. Full stop.

Last weekend was a national embarrassment in every sense of the word; from the pathetic display of a bunch of wimps carrying Tiki torches trying to look tough, to yet another appearance of masked antifa thugs sucker-punching anyone with whom they disagree. Initially too, President Trump, missing what could have been a defining moment for his young presidency, tip-toed over the violence rather than offering a dose of his trademark blustering and rage to blast the neo-Nazis who reflect the worst side of humanity. Instead, Trump, like so many others on the Left and Right, once again attempted to distill the deplorable conduct into a political blame game, insinuating one side would have been right if not for the provocation of the other.

Attempting to ascribe degrees of blame to the protest groups in Charlottesville misses the point entirely about todays political violence. The alt-rights venomous racism is no more, or less, contemptible than the alt-lefts belief that offensive speech must be banned at any price. Violence is violence, regardless of the politics behind it.

If there is a side to the violence in Charlottesville, both of these groups are on it and deserve our scorn as practitioners of a toxic, post-modern mindset that there is no objective truth other than how they see it, and that protecting their truth is the true public good. In fact, aside from differing political agendas, these neo-Nazis and antifa-ites are cut from the same cloth. Both wallow in delusions of self-righteousness, and embrace violence as an acceptable, if not noble, means of achieving their political goals. Most of all, they suffer from the same paranoia of oppression that drive them into virulent tribalism.

Tribalism is a product of fear, declared philosopher Ayn Rand, and fear is the dominant emotion of any person, culture or society that rejects reason. The reality is that our true enemy today is not a Nazi flag or a black balaclava; those are only physical manifestations of tribalism. Rather, our real enemy is the philosophy of those who use such symbols. It is the rejection of reason in favor of emotional sophistry driven by fear and designed to produce more of it. This is the source of todays violence, and reflects the fact that only violence can exist in the vacuum of reason.

We can point fingers at one side or the other, but neither liberals nor conservatives are blameless in allowing such an un-American, anti-enlightenment philosophy to take root. Liberals traded free thinkers for professors who indoctrinate students to feel (rather than to reason), and government officials who went from filling potholes to piously tearing down statues. Meanwhile, conservatives traded the thoughtful punditry of Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley for a 24-hour news cycle of talking heads regurgitating just enough soundbites to excuse viewers from having to think for themselves. Over the years, both the Right and the Left were enabled by lazy party leaders fostering the idea that to win you simply yell louder, not think harder.

What is the result of this nonsense? Gunning down congressmen during a baseball practice, ramming cars into protesters, sucker-punching people with whom you disagree, and mass protests every time one tribe feels slighted by another. You dont see advocates of reason and science clogging a street in the belief that using their bodies to stop traffic, will solve any problem, Rand reminds us. That this most recent display of non-reason occurred just steps from the university founded by one of historys greatest and most reasoned minds, is a sad irony.

The roots of the violence in Charlottesville last week, in Berkeley last April, and in other cities and campuses across America in recent months, go far deeper than a few statues; and removing them will in the end solve nothing. The only solution lies in reigniting a true belief in, and advocacy of reason throughout our culture, to replace the toxic environment of tribalism and violence that has taken hold. And that is far more difficult than tearing down a few statues.

Bob Barr is a former federal prosecutor and a former Congressman. He represented Georgias 7th congressional district as a Republican from 1995 to 2003.

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BOB BARR: Violent tribalism on display in Charlottesville - MDJOnline.com