I want to call your attention to an article entitled "Ayn Rand, Hugely Popular Author and Inspiration to Right-Wing Leaders, Was a Big Admirer of Serial Killer" that I discovered over on Alternet. Here's how it gets started:
Please do go read the rest of the article. It's truly an eye-opener.There's something deeply unsettling about living in a country where millions of people froth at the mouth at the idea of giving health care to the tens of millions of Americans who don't have it, or who take pleasure at the thought of privatizing and slashing bedrock social programs like Social Security or Medicare. It might not be as hard to stomach if other Western countries also had a large, vocal chunk of the population who thought like this, but the US is seemingly the only place where right-wing elites can openly share their distaste for the working poor. Where do they find their philosophical justification for this kind of attitude?It turns out, you can trace much of this thinking back to Ayn Rand, a popular cult-philosopher who exerts a huge influence over much of the right-wing and libertarian crowd, but whose influence is only starting to spread out of the US.
One reason why most countries don't find the time to embrace her thinking is that Ayn Rand is a textbook sociopath. Literally a sociopath: Ayn Rand, in her notebooks, worshiped a notorious serial murderer-dismemberer, and used this killer as an early model for the type of "ideal man" that Rand promoted in her more famous books -- ideas which were later picked up on and put into play by major right-wing figures of the past half decade, including the key architects of America's most recent economic catastrophe -- former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan and SEC Commissioner Chris Cox -- along with other notable right-wing Republicans such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Rush Limbaugh, and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.
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Trust me when I say that the rest of the world is shaking its collective head at these morons and the rest of the US for letting them get away with it.
ReplyDeleteWhen someone asked me about those supposedly patriotic americans, I've had to resort to saying, "They're rich, they've got theirs, and everyone else can go eff-off as far as they are concerned."
I have a hard time figuring out why their "base" keeps voting for rich corporate goons when they certainly don't have the voters interests at heart. And then I remember it's cus their preacher told them to.
Honest, I knew she was a very sick since College...she´s never been ok by me and when I run/ran into her followers I either dodge them or run for cover...afterall, it says quite a lot about a persons character if they ¨shrug¨ off the rest of humanity...and yes, the most recent matured crop is very selfsick indeed.
ReplyDeleteI always felt an instinctive distaste for Ayn Rand's thinking ... I too read some of her work in college ... and it struck me as icy cold. Now I understand more deeply why that was so ... Thanks, Ellie.
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