the virtue of selfishness

My older sister was not much of a book reader but somehow she glommed onto Atlas Shrugged.  Peculiar because not only is it a long book but it has a lot of fifteen page pauses in the action while the characters discuss Ayn Rand's philosophy.  Somehow she passed her fervor unto me and I swallowed it hook line and sinker.  I remember writing my parents in my freshman year how nobody should be dependent on anybody else and therefore as soon as I got out of college and got that high-paying job that that education entitled me to I would be reimbursing them for all their costs of putting me through college.  Surprisingly that did not fill my parents with joy.  Unsurprisingly that never happened. 

The fervor of objectivism left me as suddenly as it possessed me.  I can't really remember how it worked anymore.  The idea was you had to stand up for yourself and look after your own interests and you really didn't owe anybody else anything.  But if you were an objectivist you couldn't rape and pillage the way those viewpoints would lead to.  You had to be fair, you had to be honest, you couldn't do any double-dealing or take anything by force.  You had to follow a pretty strict moral code or else you didn't have the right to call yourself an objectivist, you were just a pirate.  Although I seem to recall there was a pirate in Galt's Gulch, but I think he did his pirating kind of morally.


I don't see either Ayn or Donald as reactionaries.  I always think of reactionaries as people who want to bring back royalty,  I think the term comes from the days of Napoleon where the people who wanted to bring back the king were reactionaries and the people who didn't were called liberals, although many of those liberals were quite conservative by present day standards. 

You may say Napoleon, and Ayn Rand, and Donald Trump want to be king, but not really.  They want to be the one and only ruler, like a dictator, but they don't want to bring back all that royalty crapola.  I would compare Ayn Rand to Stalin and Donald Trump to Hitler.  I'm sure that Ayn would have liked to be in charge (ethically of course) so that she could promulgate the tenets of objectivism, having said that maybe she was more like a libertarian in that she thought objectivism would just naturally occur, kind of like I used to believe in the Liberal Agenda.  Donald Trump of course has no ideology.  Even he is not an ideology because what he says today is not the same as what he will say tomorrow.  He just wants to do whatever he wants to do whenever he wants to.