Shrugging Off Ayn Rand

It's been a really productive day in the pursuit of my newest hobby, debunking Ayn Rand's Objectivism. ( I also played a little golf,
That didn't go as well ). It's a pretty small club that pursues this fine art, but that's OK. Despite being considered a Collectivest, Statist Scum and Insect by some, I like to think of myself as an individualist. Anyway in my search for the perfect Anti-Ayn quotations, I hit paydirt today. I discovered an article by: New York Times bestselling author Michael Prescott entitled: Shrugging Off Ayn Rand.
It's incredible how germane the topics touched in the article are to recent discussions on this blog.

The article begins with:

"Years ago, if anybody ever asked me about my intellectual views, I had a ready answer. I was an Objectivist. In fact, I had a ready answer for just about any intellectual, metaphysical, political, ethical, or aesthetic question that might come up. I had read Ayn Rand's books - novels like The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, nonfiction works like The Virtue of Selfishness and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal - and I had absorbed her philosophy, Objectivism. I believed it, I advocated it, and I tried to live by it.

And now, two decades later, I find that Ayn Rand plays almost no role in my thinking, that I never look at her books, and that her ideas strike me as irrelevant and, in certain respects, downright disagreeable."

What was it that gradually altered my point of view? The simplest answer is that while practicing Objectivism, I didn't attain the contentment, the sense of being comfortable with myself, that ought to be the hallmark of a successful philosophy of life. Instead, I found I'd developed character traits that made me unhappy - and which were probably unhealthy, to boot.

Then there was my attitude toward new ideas and alternative points of view - an attitude that was, in a word, unreceptive. I had become inflexible, intolerant, narrow in my outlook, with ready-made opinions set in stone. Rand had explained the world with such clarity, in such bright colors and vivid images, that I could see no merit in any contrary opinion. I became judgmental, stubborn, and a bit self-righteous - hardly qualities likely to "win friends and influence people."