Ayn Rand’s false philosophy

Katie van Schaijik | Feb 9, 2010 | 2 cmts

Anthony Daniels (who also writes under the lovable penname Theodore Dalrymple) has a devastating critique of Ayn Rand’s godless individualism in the latest issue of New Criterion. Rand’s work is apparently enjoying a kind of renaissance in these days of exploding government and deepening debt. Though she has worthwhile insights into the errors and dangers of collectivism, her ideas are repulsively inhumane and as far as can be from the Christian personalism we are about here.

Humanity, according to Rand, is divided into heroes, creators, and geniuses on the one hand, and weaklings, parasites, and the feeble-minded on the other. Needless to say, the latter outnumber the former by a very wide margin, but only the former are truly human in the full sense of the word.

See also Whittaker Chamber’s 1957 take down of Atlas Shrugged.

Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal. In addition, the mind which finds this tone natural to it shares other characteristics of its type. 1) It consistently mistakes raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before it. 2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked. There are ways of dealing with such wickedness, and, in fact, right reason itself enjoins them. From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: “To a gas chamber — go!”