Objectivism: Its Rise & Fall
Insanity has been defined for us many times. It is the repetition of the same action with the expectation of a different result. I know of many instances in which I behaved in a way that was "insane," especially in the time before I believed in Christ. Objectivism is insanity. It's a worldview that later turned into a cult created in the 1950s by Alisa Rosenbaum. Rosenbaum adopted the pseudonym of Ayn Rand after moving to the United States in her twenties. A -----: "My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute." All the emotional events that lead to Objectivism add to its logical outcome. To understand why she and many worshippers believe this is to understand Rand and her past.
The Rosenbaums were Jews living in Russia when the Soviet state took root in Russia's governmental framework. With their business stolen, their livelihood undone, and their child left to fend for herself, Rand's family was in peril. This, however, was not the least of her problems. She was also without friendship. Rosenbaum/Rand was left with nothing but her impressive wits. She pondered because she had no one to speak to, and those thoughts drove her into mental handicap, a personality disorder called "narcissism." Like all personality disorders, narcissism keeps someone from retaining simple human relations. She developed in solitude, not believing she needed any others to help her. Once she was an adolescent, she moved to the United States looking for her next "productive achievement." Ayn Rand began to build her reputation by writing many fictional books, novels that proclaim her - Of Objectivism, which was well received by many American people; it was also horribly rejected. Her book, Anthem, focuses in on a man named Equality. He lives in a dystopian world overrun with collectivists and without self, only the great "WE." The notion of "I" has been forgotten in this fictional world. Equality soon discovers the "wonder" of individuality and leaves the former society behind entirely. However, Equality swings to the pendulum’s opposite extreme, and he outlaws the word "we." In this, he makes the same mistake as the old world. These pretend people, however, weren't very fictional to their maker. In fact, they were a part of her. Ayn Rand saw herself as the protagonists in her books. What is ironic about this is the fictionalization of these characters. In Fountainhead, another one of Rand's novels, the main character, Howard Roark, says this: “Don’t ask me about my family, my childhood, my friends or my feelings. Ask me about the things I think.” As the New York Magazine puts it "The things she thought, it turns out, were very much dependent on her family, her childhood, her friends, and her feelings—or at least on her relative lack of all that." The worlds and thoughts shaped by Ayn's imagination were often critiqued by the public. Rand was once in the audience of a speech about Objectivism and the incongruence of its beliefs. After hearing about how improbable and impossible the settings and characters within her stories were, Rand arose in anger. With zeal, she cried out: "Am I unreal? Am I a character who can't possibly exist?" In her mind, she was Equality, and she was Howard Roark. All the thoughts she had made to compensate for the hurt she felt had been exploited by a stranger in front of a myriad of people she believed she was better than. Those two sentences, I believe, show the result of a lifetime of irony and tribulation. Ayn Rand believed that only those who could achieve had value, but it was this very thinking, notions about subjective merit that ruined her family’s life in Russia. A childhood scar regurgitated into an adulthood mistake. Objectivism rose when Alisa Rosenbaum was born. It cultivated within her, awaiting its release. Every evil within her derived from, and in the likeness of, the evil she hated: communism or collectivism. Objectivism is a part of Ayn Rand. It is her remedy to a personal contradiction found within her personality disorder. Objectivism never really worked, so the moment it rose, it fell.
