Food for Thought: A passage on altruism

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I see Ayn Rand's philosophy as the result of a complete unwillingness to look beyond the self and see the value in other-selves, and as such it limits the development of the self in the way the one interacts with and find meaning in relationships with others. I've always found her philosophy kind of childish, and without any basis in reality. In fact her philosophy of self-reliance is difficult if not impossible for one to abide by in human society, as can be seen by the fact that in her later years Ayn herself signed up for both Social Assistance and Medicare, becoming the exact sort of "social parasite" that she criticized so much in her books, as a result of illness. Her sickness itself was a reflection of her bullheaded denial of reality: she smoked two packs a day her whole life and refused to believe studies that showed cigarettes caused cancer, saying they were the result of the “unscientific and irrational nature of the statistical evidence.” She stopped smoking only when shown an x-ray of her lungs showing cancer, yet when approached by her collective about telling some of her fans that still smoked about the dangers of smoking she still refused the evidence as unscientific.

To find more evidence of Ayn's hypocrisy and it's effects on her personal life you just have to look at her love life. for someone who found emotionality to be irrational, she sure had a lot of intense lovers spats with the young men she would seduce.

What's scary to me is that her philosophy was and is so intoxicating to young minds, and has had such a strong impact on our society. Generations of men and women seduced by the selfish desire for power have sought government office or high positions in the financial system, the most notable perhaps would be Ayn's protege Alan Greenspan who ran Wall Street for decades. Ayn's influence can be seen in how uncaring and impersonal our society has become, how we see emotion and caring as weaknesses. And mirroring her own dysfunction, our nations have become highly dysfunctional.

tl;dr I feel that it is a strength to care for others and it makes our society strong and I cannot wait for us to move out of Ayn Rand's shadow.