My Affair with Ayn Rand

I know some of my friends will be shocked, but I have been flirting with Ayn Rand lately.  It started with a training I attended in which the presenter expressed his admiration for Objectivist economics and, of course, Adam Curry has been raving about Rand for years on No Agenda. . While I was in Texas, I picked up Atlas Shrugged and read about a hundred pages.  I stopped to listen to an unabridged reading of Ayn Rand and the World She Created and this weekend, I watched the movie, The Passion of Ayn Rand with Helen Mirren in the title role.  So now I am poised to listen to the unabridged reading of Atlas Shrugged which looks like it will take me months of commutes to work, based on the number of hours.

I am sure that I had heard of Ayn Rand when I was in school, but naturally I was travelling in other circles at the time.  I have friends (and relatives, I learned last weekend) who felt moved by her books and philosophy, as many do now, I think.  With the resurgence of Right-wing, Nativist, Free Market Capitalists in the form of the Tea Party, the notion of going to the roots is intriguing.  I wonder, however, if her philosophy will have the same effect on me now as it might have had when I was twenty?  O how the notion of the misunderstood genius, persecuted for his virtues, rings so true when you are young!  Whether on the left or the right, being misunderstood seems to be the norm for young people.  What about a person in middle age, jaded by a lifetime of real world experiences? Will I be moved in the same way?   I'll let you know.

Part of John Galt's speech, from Atlas Shrugged

In the name of the best within you.
do not sacrifice this world
                                            to those who are its worst.

In the name of values
                                           that keep you alive,
do not let your vision of man
be distorted by the ugly,
                                         the cowardly,
                                                     the mindless
in those who have never achieved
his title.

Do not lose your knowledge
that man's proper estate
                                          is an upright posture,
an intransigent mind and
                                                        a step that travels
unlimited roads.

Do not let your fire go out,
                                                           spark by irreplacable spark,
in hopeless swamps of the approximate,
  the not-quite,
                            the not-yet,
                                                  the not-at all.

Do not let the hero in your soul perish,
in lonely frustration for the life you
deserved,
but have never been able to reach.

Check your road
                and the nature
of your battle.

The world you desired can be won,
it exists,
it is real,
it is possible,

it's yours.