The Fountainhead was a mess, but the follow-up, Atlas Shrugged, is a two-hundred-car freeway pileup. It is quite possibly the single worst successful novel ever written, a work of Edward D. Wood-ian awfulness that doesn't have the saving grace of being good-naturedly funny. Loathing of humanity drips from every page.

Fascism is also about the worship of force as the prime motive of life, rather than reason or cooperation. Hitler renamed it "will," but force it remained. Rand claimed to abhor violence, yet advocated that the state (the state she also abhorred for having the nerve to collect taxes!) be the final repository for force. This little internal contradiction never bothered her, apparently. Presumably she was talking about a rational, Objectivist state, nothing like the ones we have now -- although we're left without a word as to how such a state could be formed or maintained. I guess she never figured it was her problem to tell us how to do that.

Internal contradictions were the stock-in-trade with Objectivism. It was impossible to avoid them, since the whole thing was not about creating a sustainable way of life or even a philosophy to defend free trade and free thought. Objectivism consists of selfishness for dubious present gains, rather than altruism for a more sustainable future gains for both yourself and others. In game theory, such a strategy would be discarded, since it would leave everyone dead fairly quickly.


www.thegline.com/thought/2...1-2001.htm