I am currently mulling over the sheer generosity and heartfelt sentiment from the goose-stepping Ayn Rand Institute: U.S. Should Not Help Tsunami Victims
The argument being that all money should come from individual donations. Only there is no donation box for Tsunami victims on the Rand website. Tsunami victims are presumably from ‘primitive nations’ where ‘the mere fact that they needed help should not have created a claim ‘as simultaneously Isolationist and Jingoist Ed Locke says of Vietnam, in another classic muddle headed Rand Institute Op Ed.
By extension, should all Iraq rebuilding money come from donations from those who were in favor of invasion? Should the invasion itself have been funded from donations? It’s a nice thought, perhaps the Iraq war would have never happened if people had to put their money where their mouth is. But democracy ain’t like that, you can’t hold a referendum for everything.
Society is a flawed but necessary and emergent phenomenon. If there were enough followers of Rand, presumably they could declare independence and avoid taxes. But it wouldn’t be long before the donation system failed and Randyland started to raise taxes. The creed of extreme libertarianism will always fail by reductio ad absurdum.
My main problem with Randys is that they like to think of themselves as members of an elite club of successful rationalists, promoting charity and voluntary donation over tax, not a cult for self-righteous, mediocre people with uncharitable instincts – a ‘banality’ of evil.
In a reverse form of ambulance chasing, when Moreover received $22M in funding, I received an invitation to join the Ayn Rand Institute and give them all my supposed money – which I declined graciously (‘you and your cryptofascist friends can shove your invitation up your shrunken sphincters’).
The Ayn Rand institute is ironic because it follows exactly the same trajectory as the appropriation of Nietzsche by Hitler (only Rand was decidedly B league as a philosopher). Like Nietzche, Rand was an atheist, or more specifically, like myself, she was an anti-theist.
Rand in Playboy: “in the sense of blind belief, belief unsupported by, or contrary to, the facts of reality and conclusions of reason. Faith, as such, is extremely detrimental to human life: it is the negation of reason”.
More ironic is that an anti-theist institute should bear all the hallmarks of a religion or ideology. Belief systems may inevitably lead to wicked people failing to have to justify their actions, but foundations such as the Rand institute, which are supposedly based upon ‘reason’, should surely fare better.
Apparently not. It seems that the human instinct to idolize is so strong that even a society formed around an atheist amateur philosopher will become a cult.
By deifying its leader and sanctifying its texts, bitter, intellectually challenged Rand devotees such as David Holcberg are freed to write with misanthropy terrifyingly reminiscent of Nazism.
In response to the millions of people suffering as a result of the Indonesian earthquake, David Holcberg writes:
“Americans–the wealthiest people on earth–are expected to sacrifice (voluntarily or by force) the wealth they have earned to provide for the needs of those who did not earn it”
Happy Holidays Mr. Holcberg.