…her radicalism went further, rejecting the age-old ethic of altruism and self-sacrifice. While she was hardly the first philosopher to advocate a morality of individualism and rational self-interest, she formulated it in a uniquely accessible way and a uniquely passionate one, not as a dry economic construct but as a bold vision of struggle, creative achievement and romanticism.
All this accounts for much of Ayn Rand’s appeal. But that appeal is severely limited by the flaws of her worldview.
One of those flaws is her unwillingness to consider the possibility that the values of the free market can coexist with other, non-individualistic and non-market-based virtues ”“ those of family and community, for example. Instead, Ms. Rand frames even human relations in terms of trade (our concern for loved ones is based on the positive things they bring to our lives) and offered at best lukewarm support for charitable aid. When charity is mentioned in her fiction, it is nearly always in a negative context. In Atlas Shrugged, a club providing shelter to needy young women is ridiculed for offering help to alcoholics, drug users and unwed mothers-to-be.
Family fares even worse in Ms. Rand’s universe. In her 1964 Playboy interview, she flatly declared that it was “immoral” to place family ties and friendship above productive work; in her fiction, family life is depicted as a stifling swamp.
Ayn Rand’s big sales point is her indictment of incompetence; indeed, I find most compelling her description of the fall of Peter Keating in [i]The Fountainhead[/i]. By the same token, Howard Roark in that novel is a fantasy of what every geek and nerd wishes they were: omnicompetent and unerring, held down only by the idiots around them.