A summer with Ayn Rand
Why shouldn’t I be selfish?
Ayn Rand is largely viewed in philosophical circles as a hack. Her philosophy is not nuanced, or terribly original, it is simply the conclusions of a mind that has believed a single foundational premise and worked to eradicate all cognitive dissonance. The premise is simple but the application severe.
However, these aren’t the truly frightening effects of her literature. The truly terrifying moment will be when you begin to admire oil refineries and exalt industrial waste. These are necessary tools, but it is a twisted philosophy that makes them a standard of beauty, and a dangerously utilitarian worldview that makes only the productive have value.
If you take Rand’s ideas seriously, you will be driven to an aesthetic of steel and a strange fetish for railways. Her paradise is Tolkien’s hell. There are no birds and butterflies in Isengard. Her writing will not teach you to admire what is common to men, but, rather to love what is extraordinary about him. 
The power of her writing lies in her insight into human psychology. She taps into the most tenacious of human vices and calls it virtue. Pride is exalted and guilt defamed as a sick perversion.
Without consciously choosing to, I began questioning everything I had believed about altruism as I read the works of Rand this summer. The single greatest question in my mind became, “Why shouldn’t I be selfish?” I admit that this philosophy has its material benefits; in a culture consumed by confidence, selfishness reigns supreme and being told you are the single greatest thing in existence is quite a self-esteem boost.
But I’ve now realized that there is a problem with such rampant selfishness. That is, it takes a denial of reality to believe in it. I am no Henry Rearden or Dagny Taggart (two characters in Atlas Shrugged who cast off altruism and succeed by embracing their own selfishness). My own rationality is hampered and at times very weak. I would not survive if Atlas Shrugged.
This encounter with selfishness caused a reaction in me just as predicted by John Galt who, in the novel is portrayed as the ideal, individualist self-made man. At one point Galt states that those traitors who do not live according to the light of rationality will be put through “a self made night, in a desperate quest for a nameless fire, moved by a fading vision of a dawn I had seen and lost.”
And that was indeed the journey that I was taken through. But for me, the dawn was the dawn of unconditional love. Rand’s world is cold because it leaves no room for mercy. In her world everyone receives what they deserve, nothing more and nothing less.
The most revealing aspect of her philosophy is why her cornerstone piece (Atlas Shrugged) was written. It is said that Rand’s first book The Fountain Head was not well received. In her frustration she complained to her husband about how all of the talented people of the world should simply shrug off the leeches of society e.g. literary critics. He told her she should do it and a philosophical treatise/literary masterpiece was born from the womb of self pity. In the end our selfishness does not bring success, but simply frustration at those who do not “properly” value us.
David Parker
Contributor
Sorry, it takes more than a summer and your analysis is itself a “hack job”. I’ve studied her ideas for 55 years and find them to be quite profound and full of depth. They challenge 2000 years of philosophical corruption. In fact, the Fountainhead was quite well received in spite of the dominant philosophies that she challenged. A movie was made of it long before she began working on Atlas Shrugged. The genesis of Atlas Shrugged had been one of her earliest ideas that she developed as a child. You need more time.
I think if you read carefully you will realize I didn’t say she was a “hack job,” but, rather I that it can be assumed she is considered as such by the larger philosophical community. Men whose combinded experience vastly exceed both a summer of analsysis and, for that matter, fifty five years of study.
You say, “I would not survive if Atlas Shrugged.” This is precisely Ayn Rand’s point. Perhaps you mean the opposite.
I do not know how old you are, but if you are over 35 or 40, you are likely still surviving because the Atlases of the world did not shrug, the Atlases of science and industry who have doubled our life spans (and soon to be tripled) since the start of the Industrial Revolution. And you survive with the blessings of liberty because the Atlases of the Age of Reason established a rights-protecting country.
I am alive today (age 64) and free because of these Atlases.
You say, “My own rationality is hampered and at times very weak.” If so, you can repair and strengthen that faculty. If you are athletically weak or inept do you denigrate those who are athletically strong and skilled? Why not admire them and, as appropriate, become like them.