I am not a fan of Ayn Rand's novel, Atlas Shrugged. Or of her beliefs. As literature Atlas is overlong and repetitive; as philosophy it is pretentious and juvenile. This doorstop (at 1000+ pages) is a bizarre mixture of the fantastic and the banal. If I described it in one sentence, I'd say it is a preposterously bad quasi-science-fiction novel with a strange, 1930s retro feel to it, even though it was written in the middle '50s.
The worst thing about the novel is the narcissism, the scapegoating, and the leftism in it. Many people can't see this and instead see it as good instead of evil. Evil almost always disguises itself as good.
Unlike many, I read Atlas not as a teenager but in my middle twenties. I was far beyond Rand's siren call, and the potential of being trapped in the intellectual and emotional straightjacket that permanently imprisons some of her fans.
When her most rabid fans (known as "Randroids") identify with the former Alice Rosenbaum's fictional "heroes," I'm sure they feel self-confident, heroic, brilliant. It's why so many of the naive'--especially teenagers--fall for her writing. It takes them away from the suffering that society sometimes heaps on them. It frees them from the boring and the oppressive. In some ways, superficially, she had a radiant vision of reality. It's no wonder so many of her fans feel enlightened, and believe they have stumbled upon the key to life. Let's get rid of all this stupid, ridiculous, boring tradition and start anew!
Yet something about the novel made me feel uneasy. I did not feel what the it promised--joy and love of life. Toward her "looters" and "parasites" I felt--to use some of Rand's favorite trite words--"mocking contempt." I could easily judge them to be the cause of all the world's problems. Rand wants her readers to hate and despise them, and to wish for their deaths. There is a lot of sadism, cruelty and heartlessness in the novel.
She tries to instill in her readers the feeling of "I haven't been treated right by the world, the way I should have been, so I'm going to pay you all back." And: "I'm better than you." The whole novel comes across as a weird mixture of upbeat inspirational literature and Aztec-like human sacrifice.
Rand is tapping into some primitive, unconscious archetype. It puzzled me. I had mixed feelings. Some of felt almost right; it was a satisfaction at getting back at a world that didn't appreciate me and wasn't doing me it should. But some didn't feel right at all. It felt dark, sinister. "This is how the Nazis must have felt," I thought.
I read her philosophy and dismissed it (as a current critic, Scott Ryan, opines as "frightfully incompetent") because of the same disturbing feelings. And because it really is frightfully incompetent.
I know now she was tapping not into my "self-esteem" but my--and everyone else's--narcissism, my grandiosity, and my scapegoating. My, and everyone else's, desire for revenge. It's what she taps into in many people, maybe even most. (Her vaunted "self-esteem" is just fragile narcissistic grandiosity, which I will explain.)
Tllhe aforementioned is very bad Rand pitched a superficial philosophy of freedom, love and self-sufficiency to get you inside her tent. Inside there is the hate, vengeance and genocide. What she did is mix together great good (which she appropriated from others) with great evil, and called it good. But when you mix good and evil, you don't get good. You get evil.
Because of what she touches in some readers, she is not a philosopher but a philodoxer, and pure Objectivism is hazardous to her followers, to classical liberalism/libertarianism, and to any society that follows it.
Objectivism, rather than being a defense of free-market libertarianism, is a narcissistic, scapegoating, and leftist expression of Rand's Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Because of this, Objectivism shares with Nazism and Marxism the same narcissistic, scapegoating, and leftist psychology.
Specifically, Rand took her distortions of the rightist free market and political liberty and pasted them on top of a base of scapegoating and leftism. Looked at this way, it is no surprise that Objectivism only works in Rand's fiction. In reality it will never work.
Her fans will never believe this. It's hard to give up a fraudulent religion. Albert Ellis was right when he referred to Objectivism is a religion. A bad one.
When faced with criticisms of Rand, many of her fans suffer a painful cognitive dissonance that sends them into hyperscreech. To use Thomas Kuhn's metaphor, since it is outside their paradigm they refuse to see the criticisms.
My experience with her fans is that nearly all of them are pseudo-intellectuals. They remind me of what Mark Twain said,: "There is no end of feeling and calling it thinking." Or, to quote T.S. Elliot, they "illustrate that exaggerated faith in human reason to which people of undisciplined emotions are prone."
They are convinced they are rational, and those who disagree with them are not only not rational, but guided by blind, irrational faith. In reality, Objectivists have such an infantile view of rationality they can barely be considered rational at all. That was a huge problem with Rand (and with her modern followers): they are not rational enough. Since they are leftists, they are ruled by their feelings. Of this they have no comprehension, and never will.
I came to my conclusions by using one of Rand's favorite tactics: checking premises. Checking her premises. For someone who prided herself on an obsessive checking of other philosophers' premises, and almost always "deducing" the wrong conclusions, she was incapable of checking her own. If she had, she might have realized Objectivism is (to use her words against her) a system of rationalization and therefore evil.
As she wrote: "Since an emotion is experienced as an immediate primary, but is in fact a complex, derivative sum, it permits men to practice one of the ugliest of psychological phenomena: rationalization. Rationalization is a cover-up, a process of providing one's emotions with a false identity, of giving them spurious explanations and justifications-- in order to hide one's motives, not just from others, but primarily from oneself. The price of rationalizing is the hampering, the distortion, and, ultimately the destruction of one's cognitive facility. Rationalization is the process not of perceiving reality, but of attempting to make reality fit one's emotions...evil philosophies are systems of rationalization."
Her overpowering narcissism, self-deception and rationalization blinded her to realizing her comments are easily applied to her writings.
Objectivism is little more than an expression of Rand's character, and therefore a rationalization, an attempt to make reality fit her personal whims. Being rationalizing, narcissistic, scapegoating and leftist, Objectivism is psychologically and philosophically--but not economically-- the blood brother of Nazism and Marxism.
It is beyond dispute that Rand was a walking chapter on psychiatric disorders. Any humorless, drug-addicted, cruel, vicious, paranoid, sadistic, power-mad adulteress who referred to herself as "the perfect woman" and "the second-greatest philosopher in history" is severely disturbed, whether officially diagnosed or not.
Her long-time friend, the psychologist Alan Blumenthal, diagnosed her as afflicted with, at the least, Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Even if he had not it's easy to see the narcissism in her life and writings.
Understanding her narcissism and her scapegoating is essential to understanding Objectivism. They are so integral to her beliefs that were it removed they would collapse. It is, to use a Biblical phrase that Rand never got around to misquoting, a philosophy erected not on rock but on sand. As she wrote, "If the foundation does not hold, neither will anything else." Her foundation won't hold her philosophy.
Other popular Biblical sayings spring to mind: "false prophet," "wolf in sheep's clothing," and "the blind leading the blind." Like all false prophets, she used, to paraphrase Doestoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov, "miracle, mystery and authority" to seduce her followers.
Narcissism is a character (or personality) disorder. It's a disorder of responsibility. A character disorder blames his problems on other people: it's not my fault; it's my parents', or society's, or [fill-in-the -blank]. A neurotic, taking too much reponsibility, feels too much guilt; a character disorder, not taking enough responsibility, doesn't feel enough guilt. A joke about this is dogs are neurotic because they always think it's their fault; cats are character disorders because they always think it's your fault.
Denying responsibility and narcissistically blaming other people is scapegoating. Everyone in greater or lesser degree is prone to the denying reponsibilty. To scapegoat. It is the Original Sin of humanity.
In the story of "The Garden of Eden," after Adam and Eve are discovered having eaten the forbidden fruit, Adam blames Eve, and Eve blames the serpent. Adam scapegoats Eve; Eve scapegoats the serpent. Each denies responsibility, each projects blame elsewhere, each tries to sacrifice the other. In the most accurate version of the story, their scapegoating is what gets them kicked out of the Garden, bringing evil into the world (the reason the serpent tempted them is because of his envy--he wanted to 'bring them down').
In the original version of the Garden of Eden Adam more sensibly came out of Eve's side. For that matter, since they are naked and don't know it, they should be better portrayed as children and not adults, especially since children become aware that they're not supposed to run around naked--going from "unconsciousness" to "consciousness"--at about five. Then of course there is the five-year-old finger-pointing at others when Daddy catches them breaking the rules.
This ancient myth was often misconstrued to scapegoat women for "bringing evil into the world," showing a complete lack of understanding of what the story means, and engaging in what is forbidden. For the past few decades feminists have in turn foolishly scapegoated men, as a rather silly modern book suggests, as "Demon Males." So it works both ways, back and forth, ad nauseum, ad infinitum.
Another myth that clearly demonstrates the destructive power of envy is "Snow White," a story in which the Evil Queen envies and hates Snow White because she is more beautiful than the Queen. The Queen's envy and hate leads her to spend her life trying to murder Snow White, even though in the end it costs the Queen her life.
The aforementioned myths recognizes the prevalance and enormity of scapegoating. Such Myths don't survive for millenia unless they are universally true.
M. Scott Peck, in his book, The People of the Lie, writes that scapegoating is involved in "the genesis of human evil." "Scapegoating works through a mechanism psychiatrists call projection...[people] project evil onto the world," he writes.
It sounds insignificant. But he is right: the main cause of evil in history is scapegoating. In this century, the two best-known narcissistic, scapegoating ideologies have been Nazism and Marxism. The death toll: possibly up to 200 million people.
Scapegoating is a hostile psychological--and social--attempt to discredit, demonize, ostracize and often murder people by moving blame and responsibility away from the scapegoater and towards a target person or group. Rage, hate and envy are projected onto from one person to a nation. Distortion and rationalization are always features, and envy is the defining characteristic. For example, when the unattractive Rand was near an attractive woman people said they could feel her envy radiating from her.
The school of psychology dealing with narcissism is called Object Relations Theory. From it comes explanations for character disorders such as Narcissistic, Borderline, and Anti-Social Personality Disorders. All are different variations of the same disorder: narcissism.
Object Relations explains narcissism; narcissism explains scapegoating, and scapegoating explains evil. Since people do these things unconsiously, this means some kind of "unconscious" really does exist.
Narcissism is inherent in everyone. The basics are fairly simple: theorists believe that starting soon after birth babies split their selves into an "all-good" one and an "all-bad" one. The "all-good" self is grandiose and god-like; the "all-bad" one is envious, hating and rageful.
Psychoanalysts Melanie Klein and Joan Riviere believe the origins of rage, hate, envy and the desire to destroy are rooted in the initial relationship between the infant's self and what could be called "the primary caregiver" (usually but not necessarily the mother). They write, "For the infant child, the mother is the the original and most complete source of satisfaction. Yet this total pleasure is inevitably frustrated."
Theorists believe infants experience this frustration as a threatened destruction of the entire self, since their existence at this age depends completely the care-giver/mother. This frustration generates rage, hatred and a wish to annihilate the "bad object."
In the Garden of Eden myth, Eve doesn't scapegoat Adam; Adam scapegoats Eve, mythologically the mother of all. Eve then scapegoats the serpent, a symbol not only of envy, but of evil. This means not only is envy evil, but that it is so primitive that it is associated not with animals, but something much less evolved It also means that envy comes before scapegoating, and leads to it.
This isn't the only scapegoating in the Bible. In the Gospels the Pharisees scapegoat the outcasts, although they certainly didn't engage in the horrific child sacifice of Moloch-worshippers. (Children were sacrificed to Moloch in a valley known as Gehenna, the place which Jesus spoke of and which is usually mistranslated as "hell." He was actually speaking about scapegoating and human sacrifice. 'Hel' is a Norse pagan goddess who was ruler of the Underworld. The word has no place whatsoever in the Bible. I prefer C.S. Lewis' version of Hell: "a state where everone is perpetually concerned about his dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance and resentment.")
Primitive defenses are generated at the aforementioned stage, the main one being splitting and projection: the object (and the infant's self) and divided into good and bad parts. This way, feelings of rage can be projected onto the "bad object" without the risk of destroying the "good object."
Riviere writes, "The first and the most fundamental of our insurances or safety measures against feelings of pain, of being attacked, or of helplessness--one from which so many others spring--is that device we call projection. All painful and unpleasant sensations and feelings in the mind are by this device automatically relegated outside oneself...[W}e blame them on someone else. [Insofar] as such destructive forces are recognized in ourselves we claim that they have come there arbitrarily and by some external agency....[P}rojection is the baby's first reaction to pain and it probably remains the most spontaneous reaction in all of us to any painful feeling thoughout our lives."
Some of the "safety measures"--psychological defenses--that Rand engaged in, besides projection, were rationalization, denial (self-deceit), and represssion.
The "good" and "bad" selves are projected onto the world. The world--and all people--are split into "all-good" and "all-bad." All problems are projected onto the "all-bad." This projection is scapegoating.
This splitting and projection--scapegoating--and it the first, the most primitive and important defense that all people engage in. It persists in all into adulthood, even if they have no idea they are doing it. Rand surely didn't.
If things go relatively well, infants, as they develop into adults, mostly integrate these two views. However, most people never do it completely. We are prone, especially under stress, to splitting things into all-good or all-bad, and to scapegoating--to. seeing ourselves as good, even grandiose, and to projecting our rage, hate and envy onto--whatever we perceive, however incorrectly--as the bad. You need look no further than O.J. Simpson to see how this works.
Richard Restak writes in his book, The Self Seekers, "In instances of extreme stress...the developing infant is unable to synthesize contradictory experiences with others and attempts to make up for this by splitting its internal world into tight compartments of all 'good' and all 'bad'...later the child and adult... tends to view the world as filled with people who are all 'good' or all 'bad'...there is no room for compromise or shades of meaning in this all-or-none world."
Since we are all prone to scapegoating, narcissism can range from one person to groups of any size, up to and including nations. It can include families, ethnic groups, and religions--one group scapegoats another. Erich Fromm, whose life's work was studying narcissism, called this "group narcissism."
Group narcissism is why throughout history all "tribes"--today, nations--have grandiosely referred to themselves as "The Humans," "All Men," "The People," "The Fatherland," "The Motherland," "God's Chosen People," or "God and Nation," relegating those outside to scapegoat. This is why, traditionally, religion has considered the attempt of people to be "perfect" or found "perfect" societies to be blasphemy.
This is why nations, during war, can easily scapegoat the enemy, turning them into evil sub-humans. Spielberg's scapegoating of German soldiers in Saving Private Ryan is a good example. They are brutal, murdering, cowardly shaven-headed thugs, not a drop of humanity in any of them. And being shaven-headed they are interchangeable and identical as cogs. And cogs are things, not people.
Two movies that do portray the "enemy" as human are The Thin Red Line and All Quiet on the Western Front (as does Remarque's novel). Compare these works with Saving Private Ryan and you'll easily see the differences.
War is the greatest scapegoating and human sacrifice that exists: scapegoat the enemy and then sacrifice soldiers for what almost always has turned out to be nothing.
The ancient Greeks called their sea the Mediterranean (the Middle Sea-- the middle of the world). Foreigners were mocked as barbarians because of the way they talked (bar bar bar). The Chinese called China "The Middle Kingdom"--the Middle of the World. Fromm was right. Everyone does it, and has through history. And it's easy, being a natural thing for us to do. Something being "natural" doesn't make it right.
Those who cannot integrate their two selves as adults are afflicted with what psychologists call Narcissistic Personality Disorder. To these people, everything is either all-good or all-bad, pure good or pure evil, black or white, with no shades of grey. Each self is literally not aware of the other; they are separated by a nearly inpenetrable wall of self-deception. These selves can flip-flop, leading to people often finding the narcissist nearly incomprehensible.
They are self-centered people who quite often cannot conceive of others people and not things. Because they lack a conscience, or have only a little of one, they are deficient in guilt and remorse. They believe they are special. They are often insatiably greedy; they always feel they never have enough. Others always have something more, something better.
Being deficient in compassion and empathy, they can take but cannot give. Barely understanding the concept of giving," they agree with John Galt's comment about Galt's Galch, "...one word...is forbidden in this valley: the word 'give.'"
Narcissists rarely know anything is wrong with them since they are convinced problems lie completely with other people.
Ruled by selfishness, they do what they believe is right for them only. But since they are so rationalizing and self-deceptive, they don't know what is right for them. If Rand had known what was right for her, her life would not have been as it was.
Narcissists' relationships with almost everyone fall into what Martin Buber called "I-It" relationships--others are things. At best they can have what he called an "I-I" relationship--they project their own idealized self onto the other person. But they can never have his "I-Thou" relationship, in which the other person is seen as human. As Barbara Branden commented, Rand only saw people as abstractions, collections of psychological traits. Never as people.
Even though they don't know it, and can never admit it, their dependence on other people is immense. Not only do they project all evil onto the bad, they project the source of their happiness onto the good. They are selfish but certainly not independent. They rarely if ever show gratitude; they often don't understand the concept. Because of the way they attempt to consciously and unconsciously exploit and manipulate people, they can, emotionally, be considered "looters" and "parasites."
A quote from Peck about those who consider themselves "perfect" is relevant: "Since [narcissists] deep down, feel themselves to be faultless, it is inevitable that when they are in conflict with the world they will invariably perceive the conflict as the world's fault. Since they must deny their own badness, they must perceive others as bad. They project their own evil onto the world. They never think of themselves as evil, on the other hand, they consequently see much evil in others."
Since the "all-bad" is scapegoated as the source of all evil, it has to be destroyed. To the narcissist, then only the "all-good"--the outside source of their happiness--will be left.
Rand was severely narcissistic, so much so it jumps off the page at her readers. Her philosophy is little more than a rationalized expression of her narcissism. Barbara Branden was dimly aware of this in her Passion of Ayn Rand when she wrote, that to Rand, even as a child, everything was either "I value or I despise."
Rather than Objectivism being a true description of reality, it is a projection of Rand's sickness. She thought, like Karl Marx, that she was discovering the true nature of things. In reality, she was, like Marx, projecting her own whims, rationalizations and distortions onto the world.
"It is a fact, and in some ways a melancholy fact," writes Paul Johnson in his book, Intellectuals, "that massive works of the intellect do not spring from the abstract workings of the brain and the imagination; they are deeply rooted in the personality."
There are physical reasons for this. Our brains are so structured that perceptions travel through the instinctive and emotional parts before they go to the rational part. Because of this, there is no thought divorced from emotion; there is no "objectivity." All "philosophy" is influenced by our character. When Rand claimed "reason is an abolute" she either didn't understand the definition of "absolute" or else tried to redefine it. Reason is at least connected to feeling and instinct.
Johnson's quote was about Karl Marx, but it applies to Rand. Much in his book applies to her. David Hume's comment about the nearly-insane Jean-Jacques Rousseau--"a monster who saw himself as the only important being in the universe"--is applicable to her, as does Johnson's comment about "social engineering is the creation of millenarian intellectuals who believe they can refashion the universe by the light of their unaided reason." She could easily have been a chapter in his book.Some will claim the message should be criticized, not the messenger. But when the message is the messenger, you can't criticize one without criticizing the other.
There are two other myths that apply to Rand beyond the story of the Garden of Eden. The first is the Greek myth of Narcissus, who became so enthralled by his reflection that he wasted away and died. Had Rand paid any attention to this myth, she might have seen how her life was going to turn out: she died alone, having through the years becoming more and more narcissistic, losing her tenuous hold on reality, until, absorbed in her self, she drove everyone away.
The second myth is the story of Satan, a grandiose, envious, hate-filled psychopath who, because he couldn't be God, rebelled and wanted to destroy the world and everyone in it. Even millenia ago, people understood the enormity of malignant narcissism. "The urge to rebellion," writes Nancy Friday in her book, Jealousy, "so that the denial of the other's power and the assertion of one's own at any price, is in us all. We will gain primacy even if it brings the world down about our ears."
Because of our projection, people have, instead of understanding that the only satanic exists within us, often projected Satan onto reality. This is literally scapegoating Satan. ("It's not my fault; the evil is not in me; it's out there.") And considering Satan "real" is the worst thing that can be done. It allows believers to scapegoat opponents by projecting evil onto them. Consider all "holy" wars, for example.
The word "Satan" has two meanings: "adversary" and "accuser." He is also called "the father of lies." Looked at as something within us, we are dealing with an adversary that accuses (scapegoats) others through lies.
The pure myth deals with the effects of psychopaths on society. In a lesser sense, it deals with the feelings created in us when we aren't treated as we think we should be; the hate, anger and envy we feel toward those who have what we don't, or are treated as we aren't. This creates the desire for revenge. These feelings are often unbearable, and it is no wonder we project them onto others.
The myth of Satan applies to both Rand and Marx, who were much alike in character. Both were envious, rage-filled haters who wished to see the world destroyed; both believed in an earthly Utopia; both had philosophies that weren't much more than expressions of their characters; and both distorted every fact they could get their hands on, because they thought, in their grandiose infantile omnipotence, they could change reality to suit their views. This is what psychologists refer to as "magical thinking."
More correctly, narcissists cannot differentiate their thoughts and feelings from reality outside. They unconsciously believe what they think and feel is how external reality truly is. If you ask them if what they feel is coming from the inside of them, or from the outside, they often don't know. This is why Rand believed that any philosopher who disagreed with her, or said something she didn't understand, must have been either evil or intellectually dishonest; she, having solved all philosophical problems in the world, of course was not the source of conflict: those who disagreed with her were, so she scapegoated them. Hence her bizarre hatred as Kant as "the most evil man who ever lived."
Marx was the same: since he had "discovered" the truth he could tolerate no disagreement. Anyone who did disagree with him was subject to fits of towering rage and shouted threats of "I will annihiliate you!" The American senator Carl Schnurs wrote about him: "Anybody who contradicted him was treated with hardly veiled contempt...he denounced anybody who dared to contradict his views."
Atlas Shrugged is an example of her projecting her character onto the world while claiming she was describing reality. In this retelling of the myth of Noah's Ark, a vanishingly small group (maybe three dozen?) of perfect, god-like "all-good producers" are menaced by the "all-bad" looters and parasites, who, envious and hating, are the cause of all evil.
Rand splits everyone into all-good and all-bad, projects her own grandiosity onto her "perfect" producers, then projects her own hate, rage and envy onto her "looters" and "parasites," scapegoats them, and then engages in a sadistic Hitlerian orgy of hate and destruction and kills off nearly the whole world. Alan Blumenthal was correct when he described Objectivism as a a system of psychotherapy for Rand. One that didn't work.
About the two characters Rand didn't scapegoat were Eddie Willers, (who can do little more than worship the goddess Dagny his whole life before wandering into the desert to die, and Cheryl, who commits suicide because of Rand's distortions of philosophical Idealism. And that suicide-because- reality-is-all-gooey, is, probably, about the only original thing Rand ever did. But, as the saying goes, "What is good is not original, and what is original is not good."
Like Hitler and Marx, Rand believed that her apocalyptic vision of the world would lead to Utopia: destroy "evil" and reclaim the Garden of Eden. An Eden in which there is light, color and happiness; the outside world is a darkness referred to as a "hell" populated by "sub-humans."
A Utopia always involves destruction. It may be of the "old," but it's still catastrophic destruction. What would happen if this Utopia was so remote from reality as to be unrealizable, as Galt's Gulch is? As Leszek Kolakowski has written, "the wish to enforce it would be grotesque," leading to a "monstrous deformation" threatening the very freedom of mankind. He was speaking of the Left. But more about that later.
The most famous line from Atlas is worth exploring: "I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine." The line is fiction, and always will be. Because of the narcissism inherent in human nature, the line translates into reality this way: "I will live my life for myself only, and you will also live your life for me only." This is how Rand led her life. It is how all narcissists attempt to lead their lives.
At the end of the novel, she literally stamps her foot and exclaims, "And I mean it!" She applauded genocide, She said she meant it.This was not a sane woman--this was a loon. Such eruptions of viciousness and hate are rare in best-selling books. But there are others.
One example of well-known hate-filled "literature" that splits and projects is the infamous Turner Diaries, which scapegoats blacks and Jews. Another, Mein Kampf, scapegoats Jews and Marxists (actually Jewish Marxists). Although Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery" is considered the finest example of scapegoating, I prefer Saki's "Sredni Vashtar".
For all their superficial differences in plot, all three books have the same despicable psychology in common: we will be happy after we get rid of these dangerous, threatening people.
Readers will protest that Rand correctly blamed "evil" on socialists. Not quite. She blames evil on everyone not in Galt's Gulch, socialist or not. She gleefully murders innocent children in a train-tunnel collapse (I wonder if Rand had any abortions, and if so, how many?) and then has Dagny slowly and sadistically murder a hapless guard who has proven himself, to her rationalizing satisfaction, to be not quite human I also wonder how many people read this scene and cheer? And, for that matter, cheer all the destruction and genocide in the novel?
There is a grain of truth in her writings: socialism is the cause of a horrendous amount of evil in the world. This is what fools so many people. Her observation is not the slightest original with her; she cribbed it from such people as Isabel Paterson and Ludwig von Mises, without attribution. But she fails to make the distinction between earned and unearned guilt; she punishes the innocent with the "guilty."