Cosmic Reflections

Like the Republican Vice Presidential nominee, I too studied the works of Ayn Rand in my youth. I read all her books, took courses on her philosophy, attended workshops around her ideas; I even heard her lecture in person in Boston in 1968.
Unlike Paul Ryan, however, I outgrew Rand’s rigid world-view before I turned thirty, and moved on. Yet many of her insights remain in my psyche because she made some important points.
For instance, selfishness is indeed a virtue when taken in the context of where she was coming from. As a woman who fled Russia in the face of the vicious, violent Soviet takeover, of course Ayn Rand would value self-reliance and responsibility.
Plus, there’s an old Chinese proverb that claims a man’s midlife journey is to sit on the mountaintop with his hands on his thighs pointing up in a ‘yes’ position, thus opening to all he has said no to in order to focus on his career. But a woman’s midlife journey is to sit on the mountaintop with her hands on her hands pointing down, in the closed position, saying a great ‘no’ to all the demands on her made by others and thus reclaiming her energy for her own path. Rand got that right!
For ‘selfishness’ is a spiritual virtue for women, while ‘selflessness’ is a spiritual virtue for men. But when the (white, western, patriarchal) male ego embraces and enshrines selfishness as a virtue, it becomes a vice…the ‘sin’ of greed warned about by virtually every world religious tradition.
Speaking of religion, Ayn Rand made a brilliant case for the separation of church and state in her essays around Attila and the Witch Doctor: both religion in the service of politics and politics in the service of religion have co-created some of the worst horrors in human history.
I keep wondering what she would feel, I mean think, about her newest self-proclaimed prodigy so entangled in Catholic roots.
I am also wondering how the RNC and NRA intend to deal with her famously persistent claim: “A gun is not an argument.”