Food for Thought: A passage on altruism

[reeay]

If we look at people from different stages of development in life (from 0 to adults), Ayn Rand's take on the virtues of selfishness is akin to late childhood stage. Perhaps this is the appeal of Atlas Shrugged among youth and why we've seen narcissism (not as a clinical disorder but as a personality trait) become very prominent in our society. By adolescence and even pre-adolescence you do observe how teens are able to share resources with each other and think beyond 'what would be pleasurable to me and satisfy my own needs'. When we see how narcissism and selfishness is justified, really, we're dealing with teens who misunderstand authority and autonomy from this childhood tendency towards satisfying their own needs. We're entitled to satisfying our own pleasures and pursuing our pleasures without consideration for how we affect others. Whereas, those adolescents who moved on are more apt to realize that the world doesn't revolve around their needs and pleasures.

What Rand does is to attempt to reject the blue vmeme value of following authority and structure (which she learned via her own experience w/ dictatorial and oppressive communist Russia) by elevating the orange vmeme that has to do with personal achievement and individualism. Only when we begin to understand how we interact with each other and value our connection with others do we get to the next stage of development (pluralism - the acknowledgment that there are other ways of being and doing, that there are other people!) - the green vmeme. So Rand's philosophy is very much regressive and reactionary. Her critics have even gone as far as suggesting the sociopathic nature of her philosophy lol but you can't be a sociopath unless you actually violate other people's human rights and have gone to jail for it (sociopathy is a 'mild' version of something more serious like psychopathy).