Ayn Rand was buried in 1982, wrapped in a black dress with a gold broach. The broach was her favorite symbol: a dollar sign. Her best-known novel, The Fountainhead, was published in the 1940’s and continues to sell 100,000 copies a year, most of them to people under 25. For many adult assholes, it’s just about the only book they remember fondly from those years, besides maybe that thing in the Guiness Book of World Records about the fat guy in the piano case.
What makes Rand the quintessential asshole philosopher? For one thing, she’s easy to read. Someone ran a program and figured out the reading level of her novels was around 8th grade. Beyond that, her heroes are basically major dicks with a lot of excuses. Rand’s philosophy is one long defense of rudeness.
Ayn Rand Plot (all works): “Genius hero is beset by idiots, refuses to compromise, triumphs.”
Assholes, too, believe other people are basically unbelievable fools who richly deserve a beating. They also tend to think they’re geniuses. Whether this genius is in any area that so-called standardized tests or those bullshit liberal academics would recognize doesn’t matter. The asshole knows they’re special because, well, that’s what they tell themselves.
More than one person in The Fountainhead notices that the genius hero, Howard Roark, was the kind of guy who “made people feel as if they did not exist.” To an asshole, that’s a compliment.
7 Comments
June 21, 2008 at 10:23 pm
Ayn Rand rocks!
June 24, 2008 at 11:24 pm
ayn rand: rocks in the head; stones in the heart, cigarette-caused carcinoma in the lung. (But she believed that scientific evidence of smoking causing cancer was just collectivist propaganda; and she also thought major theories of 20th-century physics –relativity, quantum mechanics–were false because they seemed to undermine her philosophy.) Rand is to philosophy what Warhol and Lichtenstein are to art–except Warhol and Lichtenstein knew they were being shallow, and were at least somewhat ironic about it.
July 8, 2008 at 7:21 pm
Ayn Rand’s philosophy is simple, it is based on simple objectivism as the basis for thought, and value as the basis for collaboration between humans. Either this is too hard to understand in her complex writings, or poeple just want things for free, without having to think or work for them, and believe what ever they want to believe, whether it makes sense or not.
Most liberals hate Rand because they do not understand that value for value is the only fair system, and no one deserves a free ride on the back of others, the conservatives hate her because objectivism, by definition, cannot support the concept of a “God”. This pits her directly against the two greatest hoaxes, the two greatest lies of all time, that you need to give your mind to a ghost in the sky and just have “faith”, or to turn over ones mind to the collective, the socialists who claim you need to live for your brother, while the leaders take their share off the top.
Now choose.
August 28, 2008 at 2:35 pm
[...] @mariemondieu for the Mad Men fans out there: http://stuffassholeslike.com/2008/06/19/8-ayn-rand/ Oh, Bert… « előző | jdenkmire — 2008. 08. 28. [...]
August 29, 2008 at 12:17 am
“Most liberals hate Rand because they” like other people.
You live up a mountain, Frank? If not, shut the fuck up. Without us, you’d starve.
November 25, 2008 at 7:27 pm
asshole
January 17, 2009 at 8:18 pm
frank most of us hate rand because she was a shallow selfish narcissistic sociopath.