Another reading on Ayn Rand

By Mark Sells

For the Salisbury Post

It seems a lot of people are talking these days about Ayn Rand and her 1,000-plus paged book “Atlas Shrugged.” Someone went and made a movie. This always gets people excited. We have to take a book seriously once it’s made into movie.

What is surprising about all of this, however, is just how many Christians seem to be excited about “Atlas Shrugged” the movie. It turns out, they’ve heard about it on Fox News. They’ve seen picket signs at Tea Party rallies bearing the cryptic words “Who is John Galt?” (Galt is the messianic figure lurking around in Rand’s overblown novel.) They’ve even heard such luminaries as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck speak of Rand as if she were some kind of prophet. She was some kind of prophet, by the way. She was the false kind, just as Galt is a false messiah. The harm her “prophetic” ideas have caused is prominently featured in one of the chapters of a 2004 book from Ignatius Press called “Architects of the Culture of Death.” (Now that would make an interesting movie.)

To help you understand my strong feelings on this subject, I should tell you that Ayn Rand and I go way back. I’ve read and own all of her novels and a lot of her nonfiction. (She intended for the novels to be the primary means of conveying her philosophy.) I was an atheist from the age of 17 to the age of 23, and for a lot of that time, I was somewhat of a disciple of Ayn Rand. As you may have guessed, I have a different view of her and her work now. Ayn Rand publicly boasted that she was the greatest philosopher since Aristotle. Needless to say, she wasn’t. She pretended that her philosophy, objectivism, sprang as an original system without precedent entirely from her own mind. It didn’t. It was, instead, a wholesale rehashing of, among others, Friedrich Nietzsche, the man who declared that God was dead and posited a kind of Superman in His place.

In claiming to have invented the one perfect and true philosophy in the whole history of man (objectivism) in the middle of the 20th century, Rand is a lot like L. Ron Hubbard, who claimed to have invented the one perfect and true religion in the whole history of man (Scientology), conveniently enough also in the middle of the 20th century. Both writers were essentially science fiction novelists who deliberately cultivated a religious following.

Ayn Rand viewed “Atlas Shrugged” as her magnum opus, as the embodiment of objectivism. It was. It is also a perfect antithesis of Christianity. The Christian virtues of humility and mercy are vices to Ayn Rand. The paradox that the first shall be last and the last first is an abomination to her. Like Friedrich Nietzsche and like the satanist Anton LaVey, she proposed an inversion of all true values into vices and all vices into virtues. Her chief virtue, by her own admission, is the vice pride, which she saw as a noble impulse that had been maligned by Christianity. Pride was also LaVey’s chief virtue in his “Satanic Bible.” (Yes, such a book exists, and though LaVey was trying full-tilt to be the antagonist of everything good and holy, he was a carnival sideshow at this compared to the disturbingly influential Rand.

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