Hi Mike:)
To me, Rand made the difference between looking at the latest news stories
with a bemused numb expression upon my heroic cheeks and instead having a
serious understanding of the way things happen. I loved the way she railed at
the moochers and the looters while praising the producers, though that way of
depicting society was formulated before her time, as I recall. However, the way
she integrates it with a clear formulation of "free will" ( clarified still
further by Branden) is unique, I believe. The thing is there is so much that is
true and good in Rand's work, the only way I can see to critique it is by
inference, the way Branden did when he pointed out that the way Galt was
depicted encouraged others to repress those feelings that were *not* portrayed
by Rand as "heroic." I have observed many who critique Rand without really
knowing the philosophy they are so bent upon critiquing. I wish that a
philosopher of Hosper's stature would critique Rand's philosophy in
depth. Then we'd have something we could all learn from. Instead we have an
"objectivist" Peikoff who seems to understand part of Rand's ideas, one moment,
and patches together Rand's saying without understanding them the next moment:(
Branden has made serious observations about Objectivism in a number of his later
psychological tomes, but I haven't seen much beyond that.
As for serious deleterious effects, I have seen none. I have seen Randian
cultists, even a Randian psychologist who asked to be taken on faith!, but folks
who understood Rand's ideas in a mature sense--I haven't yet observed
deleterious effects. I'm certainly open to this, however.

best wishes,
Mike Rael

Michael Lee <mikelee.home@...> wrote:
Mr Rael asks a great question:

> What part of Rand's thinking, specifically, was deleterious, in your
> opinion?

I would love to see some thoughtful, specific answers in this forum to this
question.

God knows I've been quite willing to be quite critical of the old girl. But
are any of my criticisms that important?

I had a girlfriend I turned on to Atlas Shrugged. One day at work, she
evicted an IT guy from her cubicle with pointed finger, trembling anger and
the epithet "whim-worshipping looter!" He had come to inventory her Sun box.
(That's a computer, not a Japanese haiku name for vagina.) So definitely
Rand made this girl go a little overboard, and I've had several friends tell
me stories about blossoming outrage getting them into embarrassing
situations after reading Rand. But I suspect that even this Sun-worshipping
Unix-geek girl would look back at her outburst more with amusement and pride
than real chagrin.

I can think of lots of things about Rand and her work that I don't like or I
disagree with, but I'm having a pretty hard time pointing to real harm done
me. Of course, I'm not everyone.

Of course, you look at Lenny the Peikoff, and it's pretty obvious that he
was molested by a duck, not by Ayn Rand.

Even doctrinaire Objectivists don't seem to me to be particularly good
examples of Rand-damaged goods. For all we know, they'd have gone Virginia
Tech by now without Ayn's soothing influence. I do believe that Rand herself
was saved from being a garden-variety psycho bitch by her intellectual
prowess. People who think that intelligence is a morally neutral capacity
have never been mauled by a lion, but should be.

As far as the good she's done, Rand was the best ever at speaking truth to
power, for real, not like Nazi Pelosi and her fellow grovelers.

In my life, Rand was an intellectual terrorista. She's the Tarantino of
philosophy: the conversion of the conventionally evil to the righteous, the
Ezekiel 25:17 sense of vengeance and redemption, the sympathy for people who
are confused and aren't making it in the world they're supposed to thrive
in.

On balance, way overbalanced, Rand helped me, not harmed me.

Mike Lee
Do you see a sign on my lawn that says dead Imus storage?






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