Why do people hate ayn rand

From the Etsy merchant and the blogger to Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, the free enterprise system, more than any other system that has ever been tried, enables people to express their creativity and flourish by producing work that other people want and makes their lives better. This discourse is almost never heard in contemporary society, certainly not in the realm of culture.

And yet, for all its many shortcomings, it is found in proof form in the works of Ayn Rand. And I think this is a key reason why so many experience her books as a revelation, despite all their shortcomings. Skip to header Skip to main content Skip to footer Opinion.

AP Photo. Many of my fellow conservatives love Ayn Rand. And many of my liberal friends love to hate her. It's a wish-fulfillment fantasy In Ayn Rand's books, the main character is typically an implausibly awesome version of the person many conservatives would secretly like to be. It's possible to dissociate a book from its politics According to my totally nonscientific sense of things, the singlemost popular work of fiction among Silicon Valley geeks is The Lord of the Rings.

There are too few works of art in popular culture that have conservative values Progressives often obsess over the notion of "checking your privilege," and I believe by and large it is a healthy instinct, because many of us are indeed beneficiaries of privilege.

Rand's work does get at a crucial truth that almost everyone misses Again, as a Christian and as a conservative, I find Rand's Objectivism, to use a word she so liked, despicable. This means that, much like democracy, capitalism is a deeply morally righteous system. More From Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry. Read All. Liberals' Medicaid hypocrisy. The quiet intellectual push behind conservatives' court coup. What the Bible really says about government. Vladimir Putin's own goal. Biden owes his core voters student loan forgiveness.

Michael Arceneaux. Joel Mathis. Trump reveals he has an 'envoy ambassador'. Most Popular. So what was the outcome? Writer Edwin Lyngar described vacationing in Honduras in , an experience that turned him from Ayn Rand supporter to Ayn Rand debunker. In his words:. The greatest examples of libertarianism in action are the hundreds of men, women and children standing alongside the roads all over Honduras.

They then stand next to the filled-in pothole soliciting tips from grateful motorists. That is the wet dream of libertarian private sector innovation. On the mainland, there are two kinds of neighborhoods, slums that seem to go on forever and middle-class neighborhoods where every house is its own citadel. In San Pedro Sula, most houses are surrounded by high stone walls topped with either concertina wire or electric fence at the top.

As I strolled past these castle-like fortifications, all I could think about was how great this city would be during a zombie apocalypse.

Without collective effort, large infrastructure projects like road construction and repair languish. We walked through the gated walls and past a man in casual slacks with a pistol belt slung haphazardly around his waist.

Welcome to an Ayn Rand libertarian paradise, where your extra-large pepperoni pizza must also have an armed guard. Yet devotees of Ayn Rand still argue that unregulated self-interest is the American way, that government interference stifles individualism and free trade. One wonders whether these same people would champion the idea of removing all umpires and referees from sporting events. What would mixed martial arts or football or rugby be like, one wonders, without those pesky referees constantly getting in the way of competition and self-interest?

Perhaps another way to look at this is to ask why our species of hominid is the only one still in existence on the planet, despite there having been many other hominid species during the course of our own evolution. One explanation is that we were cleverer, more ruthless and more competitive than those who went extinct.

But anthropological archaeology tells a different story. Our very survival as a species depended on cooperation, and humans excel at cooperative effort. Rather than keeping knowledge, skills and goods ourselves, early humans exchanged them freely across cultural groups.

When people behave in ways that violate the axioms of rational choice, they are not behaving foolishly. They are giving researchers a glimpse of the prosocial tendencies that made it possible for our species to survive and thrive… then and today.

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World Agents for Change. Health Long-Term Care. But one of the names that is always mentioned is Ayn Rand. Many people adore her philosophy and have stated that her works are truly inspirational and have led people to achieve their highest potential. Whereas, in the world of philosophy, Rand is always criticized for being a poor philosopher and for some of her concepts to which philosophers say can bring modern society to its knees. So, who was Ayn Rand and Why is she hated and loved at the same time?

Petersburg in Russia. She studied at Leningrad University where she was acquainted with the works of Plato and Aristotle and the principles of those who well affected her writing. After graduating, she applied for a degree in Cinematography hoping to become a Screenwriter. She was invited to Chicago by her cousins and she took the opportunity to go there, now with a new name, Ayn Rand.

She then moved to Hollywood and worked jobs ranging from being a movie extra to becoming a screenwriter. The Fountainhead is a book that talks about an architect. This architect is shown as a handsome man with his strong principles of individualism and integrity which were also the reasons he considered for his happiness. When the design of a public project that he was assigned was destroyed by the government, he took it into his own hands to blow the project he had worked on for a long time.

He is taking to trial for his wrong doing where gives a long speech attacking altruism and trying to put his defense forward. Spoiler Alert: The jury unanimously acquits him of his crimes. According to Rand, a society is composed of several individuals, and in no way should an individual work for society should be compulsory, but rather voluntary. It's because they treat selfishness as a virtue.