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.
\nUnlike Paul Ryan, however, I outgrew Rand\u2019s 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.
\nFor 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.
\nPlus, there\u2019s an old Chinese proverb that claims a man\u2019s midlife journey is to sit on the mountaintop with his hands on his thighs pointing up in a \u2018yes\u2019 position, thus opening to all he has said no to in order to focus on his career. But a woman\u2019s midlife journey is to sit on the mountaintop with her hands on her hands pointing down, in the closed position, saying a great \u2018no\u2019 to all the demands on her made by others and thus reclaiming her energy for her own path. Rand got that right!
\nFor \u2018selfishness\u2019 is a spiritual virtue for women, while \u2018selflessness\u2019 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\u2026the \u2018sin\u2019 of greed warned about by virtually every world religious tradition.
\nSpeaking 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.
\nI keep wondering what she would feel, I mean think, about her newest self-proclaimed prodigy so entangled in Catholic roots.
\nI am also wondering how the RNC and NRA intend to deal with her famously persistent claim: \u201cA gun is not an argument.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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\u2019s rigid world-view before I turned […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-introduction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=856"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":866,"href":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856\/revisions\/866"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}