Interesting CB. Thanks for that. Being aliterate, I had never heard of Ayn Rand until I applied for a job as a salesman with Radio Liberty in Auckland in 1995 and when I was given the job by Lindsay Perigo, he gave me a copy of "Atlas Shrugged".
I said I'd have a look through it, which I did. It was a dated book, but interesting for all that. It was not in the slightest a revelation to me and seemed rather stilted [which is not surprising since I guess english was a second language for her].
It's amusing that she is so adamant that "Objectivism" ideas were hers. Such ideas seemed natural to me. They were hardly on the level of inventing CDMA, or Globalstar's photovoltaic wings. In fact, the job application I wrote must have seemed to Lindsay like a rabid Objectivist's and Libertarian aficionado's [I realized in retrospect].
My understanding of Libertarian political ideology is that it closely matches [better than others] her philosophy. libertarianz.org.nz
Interestingly, Lindsay Perigo, who was the Libertarianz Party leader for some time, used to get into furious arguments with other "like-minded" people. I suppose apostates are always more contemptible than outright infidels who can't be expected to be any better.
I think the meaning of the word Libertarian has probably changed significantly since the 1970s. Not that I have any idea what they were about at the time. Maybe they were simply immoral anarchist barbarians as she said.
<the Libertarians aren’t worthy of being the means to any end, let alone the end of spreading Objectivism. >
Apart from my previous comments about "reality", fun house mirrors etc, spreading Objectivism is like spreading physics. Physics isn't an ideology, it's an explanation for how things work. Physics is intrinsic to everything, whether anyone understands that or not. Gravity and photons do what they do, whether anyone understands that or not. Similarly Objectivism just explains how things work - it's not really an ideology, though I suppose it's considered as such by people who believe in magic. Though I disagree with her on "creating our own reality", which is what we do and I'd go so far as to say it looks suspiciously teleological in nature [though a string theorist description of how things work is that that's an illusion because we happen to be in that dimension of how things are and hidden from us are all other possibilities - or something like that].
Amusingly, I was so on the tail end of it all, that I didn't know she'd lived, let alone died or written some books before it was fashionable to disparage Ayn Rand, which seems funny to me. It's like another pathetic little club of 'we the cognoscenti'. I didn't even get to be an acolyte before the trendies had moved on.
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