Why is ayn rand so popular

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?

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. Denise D. More about her can be found at denisecummins. Support Provided By: Learn more. Friday, Nov The Latest. World Agents for Change. Health Long-Term Care. For Teachers. NewsHour Shop. About Feedback Funders Support Jobs. Close Menu. Email Address Subscribe. She was also famous for saying we are not, after all, our brother's keeper.

And money isn't the root of all evil — but altruism might be. These brief insights into Rand's thoughts and personality make it easy to see why she is either reviled or worshipped by so many. Her books often appear on readers' lists of the ones that have most influenced them. Rand, who died in , is famous for writing the best-selling novels "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged. She also created a philosophy she dubbed "objectivism," which as Will notes, says, "Man is a heroic being whose own happiness is the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity and reason as his only absolute.

Selfish behavior is moral behavior. Rand was born Alisa Rosenbaum in in St. Petersburg, Russia to a wealthy family that lost everything in the Russian Revolution.

As a young woman she came to the United States, where she eventually made a name as a novelist, philosopher, playwright and screenwriter. Her in-your-face words and actions pleased some, but made others squirm. Rand preached that the only goal of government was to protect individual rights. People seem to be buying it for the story, and finding a convincing philosophy neatly packaged within, which they absorb almost without thinking.

The Fountainhead is still a bestseller, 75 years since first publication. It should be easy to show what is wrong with her thinking, and also to recognise, as John Stuart Mill did in On Liberty , that a largely mistaken position can still contain some small elements of truth, as well as serving as a stimulus to thought by provoking us to demonstrate what is wrong with it.

Imagine if a writer could persuade the millions who are reading Rand today to come to different, kinder and more compassionate conclusions, to see through her self-serving egoism rather than be seduced by her prose. We need to treat the Ayn Rand phenomenon seriously. Its effects are pernicious.

The emergence of the Tea Party - a wing of the Republican Party which favours a shrinking of the state - appears to be driving her recent resurgence.

John Galt is often referred to on placards and T-shirts. In Rand's later life, her followers turned away from her - some were appalled to learn she had been conducting a year affair with her associate Nathaniel Branden, apparently with the consent of her own husband and Branden's wife, Rand's close friend Barbara.

Others were put off for other reasons. One former acolyte, Jerome Tuccille, recalls supporters being "robotic" in their admiration and after two or three years, he turned his attention to less "flawed" libertarian causes. She wasn't open to debate but trounced them as irrational, altruistic and hopeless.

You are either all good or all bad. Her world is a good fictional representation but it doesn't work in reality in terms of human beings. This difficulty was most clearly illuminated in Rand's final, lonely years when she claimed social security - an act her critics saw as inherently hypocritical but others said was her due. Timothy Stanley.