Rand

The resurrection of Ayn Rand in U.S. politics is troubling to me as a humanist and as a person who believes in personal responsibility in society. Paul Ryan, the vice-presidential candidate, maintains he is a Roman Catholic Randian. This tells us most fundamentally that the man is a ball of inconsistency and intellectual confusion. These are major obstacles to personal integrity.

Rand ended her life maintaining, "I will not die. The world will end." A better definition of egoistic narcissism is hard to find.

This is a time of egoism and hedonism in the face of poverty, unemployment and decimation of the middle class by a greedy financial aristocracy. Media, controlled by the aristocrats, brainwashes the victims of exploitation into believing they can be aristocrats themselves with just the right idea, the right break, the right photo op. This is nonsense, of course.

Ayn Rand would smile on these developments. After all, she bemoaned the "horrors" of the Russian Revolution which displaced her from her privileged bourgeois life in Saint Petersburg. Her post-traumatic disorder blossomed into a media super-career with the rise of McCarthy-ism (Fascism) in the U.S.. Today's Bible-thumping, tax-hating, conformity-promoting Tea Party members are the grandchildren of Rand and Milton Friedman.

Watch these paragons at the links above. Listen carefully. Do they present the vision of a more equal, kinder world? Do they strike you as models for the future of the population of the United States?