The Cult of Ayn Rand

I read The Fountainhead in college and loved it immensely. Not because I bought into Rand's idea of the Superman who were destined to rule over the pitiful masses. I actually detested the character of Ellsworth Toohey, who was Rand's mouthpiece throughout the novel. I didn't much like Howard Roark either, since he seemed to be self-destructive to the point of absurdity. to me, it was always better to reshape a system while being part of the system. Being apart from the system meant being small potatoes, unheralded, and basically art-for-art's-sake. I liked the book because it taught me about compromise and the fine line one must walk in life to preserve one's core terms as a human being while actually getting along with others.

Well, here come two new Rand biographies -- Goddess of the Market by Jennifer Burns and Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne Heller -- to figure out where her "philosophy" of objectivism fits into today's world.

A profile of Rand on Slate by Johann Hari tackles this "damaged woman" thusly:

We all live every day with the victory of this fifth-rate Nietzsche of the mini-malls. Alan Greenspan was one of her strongest cult followers and even invited her to the Oval Office to witness his swearing-in when he joined the Ford administration. You can see how he carried this philosophy into the 1990s: Why should the Supermen of Wall Street be regulated to protected the lice of Main Street?

The figure Ayn Rand most resembles in American life is L. Ron Hubbard, another crazed, pitiable charlatan who used trashy potboilers to whip up a cult. Unfortunately, Rand's cult isn't confined to Tom Cruise and a rash of Hollywood dimwits. No, its ideas and its impulses have, by drilling into the basest human instincts, captured one of America's major political parties.