| Friday January 31st 2003 Look out - I'm about to turn philosophical. It occured to me as I was tidying up my October archives and noticed Ayn Rand get mentioned that I've never once, since starting this site, dedicated a single entry to this person who I feel has had the biggest influence on my life of anyone. It's high time I did so and, for the sake of defining myself, to show where I draw the lines. Ayn Rand was an author and self-styled philosopher of the early 20th century. Her most famous fiction works were 'The Fountainhead' and 'Atlas Shrugged', after which she devoted herself to non-fiction describing the premises and conclusions of her philosophy. To extremely oversimplify her ideas: Ayn Rand believed that selfishness was inevitable, and therefore to be accepted and no longer condemned. Her line of thought demonstrated why selfishness actually promotes the best interests of mankind as one of its side effects. She believed that all which supports life is good; all which inhibits it is bad. That productivity and self-sufficiency were therefore life's ultimate goals, and that rules or laws which inhibit either are therefore evil (eg. antitrust laws; the welfare state; etc.). That's probably not the best summary I could write, but it'll do. Her arguments extended logically into all aspects of life. The purpose of one's life is ultimately to find happiness, and one finds happiness through acknowledged self-worth. Each of us is our own highest value, and without ourselves at the top of the pyramid structure of values, everything below us would be without worth - since it is we who put value on those things, according to their importance to ourselves. Without an acknowledged 'myself', their importance is lost. Unfortunately, despite her adamant promotion of happiness Ayn Rand herself was (she died in '82), by all truly objective accounts, a miserably unhappy - and miserable to be with - person. This gets into where I disagree with her: the topics of emotion, romance and art, especially. I think emotions can not always come second, happiness (the ultimate goal) being one of them. I'm much less hard-line about her than I was in university, and I regard her philosophy as largely unfinished. She made some mistakes. But a lot of my self-confidence and determination to think for myself, I have her legacy to thank for. |