“…Ayn Rand – of Fountainhead / Atlas Shrugged fame – hasn’t been in the news since one of her prize disciples, Alan Greenspan, proclaimed her as the inspiration for a way of thinking that brought the world financial system to wrack and ruin.
Rand spawned a juvenile creed of unmitigated selfishness that resounded for a while with young egoists who fantasized that they were ‘supermen’ who should disdain the social ethics that enslaved lesser men.
She, and her dogma, has now reemerged as the model for Paul Ryan’s inchoate thoughts about the evil of government, the gold standard, and the virtue of getting rich at any cost -
- among other brilliant ideas for rescinding the social policies of the 20th century.
The phenomenon’s significance lies not in the anthropological curiosity item that is the sociopathic Randian sect.
More compelling is its melding with atavistic elements of American tradition into a movement of the disaffected, the deluded self-styled heroes, the status deprived, and the cynical -
- that is endangering the humane decency of the country we have worked to perfect over 225 years…”
(cont..)
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