Comic Strips

Taking advantage of an underclass

Nah this is just normal

Yeah, I'm familiar with them myself, I'm just saying in this case Ayn Rand is doubling as both the philosopher and the person with money, and in real life she was only a wannabe.

I mean, lots of people with terrible and damaging ideas came from backgrounds that explain their terrible and damaging ideas. She doesn't get a pass because the USSR was corrupt, nor does she get a pass because western capitalist society is also corrupt.

Then she got sick of it, emigrated and formed her own Iam14butthisisdeep philosophy.

No, you're being disingenuous. She formulated her philosophy moral objectivism from her experiences as a child.

This is what happened (from her wikipedia):

Rand was born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum on February 2, 1905, into a Jewish bourgeois family living in Saint Petersburg in what was then the Russian Empire. She was the eldest of three daughters of Zinovy Zakharovich Rosenbaum, a pharmacist, and Anna Borisovna (née Kaplan). She was 12 when the October Revolution and the rule of the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin disrupted her family's lives. Her father's pharmacy was nationalized, and the family fled to the city of Yevpatoria in Crimea, which was initially under the control of the White Army during the Russian Civil War. After graduating high school there in June 1921, she returned with her family to Petrograd (as Saint Petersburg was then named), where they faced desperate conditions, occasionally nearly starving.

When Russian universities were opened to women after the revolution, Rand was among the first to enroll at Petrograd State University. At 16, she began her studies in the department of social pedagogy, majoring in history. She was one of many bourgeois students purged from the university shortly before graduating. After complaints from a group of visiting foreign scientists, many purged students, including Rand, were reinstated. She completed her studies at the renamed Leningrad State University in October 1924. She then studied for a year at the State Technicum for Screen Arts in Leningrad. For an assignment, Rand wrote an essay about the Polish actress Pola Negri; it became her first published work. By this time, she had decided her professional surname for writing would be Rand, and she adopted the first name Ayn (pronounced /aɪn/).

Yes. Exactly. Being self absorbed is against rational self interest.

I have needed so many people in my life, and they’ve needed me. Even when I absolutely did not want to be there, I did it anyway because they’d do it for me.

It’s been a long time since I read those books, probably more than 20 years now. I probably can’t remember 99% of what I read. I remember the hero worship, I remember that town that fell apart after the factory closed, little things.

I was primed to fall right into that shit. Young, questioning my religion (Appalachian Pentecostal. Like, deeeeeply engrained in everything I was), and from the poorest part of the country and ashamed of it. I seen the hypocrisy of the people around me, the preachers living off of offerings while everyone around me starved, knowing very few people who weren’t dirt poor and living with chickens in their houses (like the town that lost the factory).

I thought that maybe the thing that was holding me back was my altruism, because I wanted to rise above that mess.

Altruism is the only way that people forgotten by the world survive. I wouldn’t have made it without food stamps. I wouldn’t have made it without the people who crawled under the house to fix the sewage and never charged my mother a dime. It didn’t matter how smart I was, I wasn’t on an even playing field. It didn’t matter how much I wanted better things. I wasn’t on an even playing field. So many people are worse off than me, and they come from harder backgrounds than me. Meeting the right people is what it takes to get out of it.

Sorry for the wall of text. I mean, maybe I needed to take that shit so seriously to become a better person by damaging myself trying to be selfish. I feel like I would have been better off without it though.

I was told by my first economics professor that if I could solve that problem, and eliminate the assumption of rationality, I'd be the richest man on earth over night.

It's a problem, they know it's a problem, they just don't have a better answer.

shrugs