Final Ayn Rand Rant (don't think I didn't hear the sighs of relief)

I've reached the part in Atlas Shrugged whereby Dagny Taggert has finally found the promised land to which all brilliant industrialists have disappeared over the previous months. Answers to all mysteries pending. Very Exciting.

I have decided that Ayn Rand is a hypocrite. She's constantly touting reason and rational thought and emotionless logic as the pinnacle of humanness. Yet all these selfish industrialists are so in love with themselves and each other, it's almost pornographic. They somehow recognize each other on sight--ah, here is a man with the gleam of understanding in his eye, here is a woman who shows with her clothing and her posture that she is "one of us". She has crafted creatures that are outside of the human realm--that is the issue.

There are times I've met someone and thought, "A-HA!!", excited at the prospect of a mind quick and wordy and sentimental as my own, conversations of logic and philosophy, equal parts silly and serious. In the Real World, the result is what I expected, sometimes not. But even if I receive what I covet, it is not ALL of the time nor does it deliver itself in some prescripted idealized way. It is never so perfectly, preternaturally the alignment of two souls.

That is a relationship you can only have with yourself: to know exactly what you want and attempt to give it to yourself. Even then fatigue, stress, capacity for introspection and self-knowledge, a variety of fleshly and interpersonal concerns can lead you astray at times from self-care, utter selfishness.

So in the end what Ms. Rand describes are aliens. They are not honestly human. The "bad guys" are so relentlessly incompetent and wrong in every choice. The heroes, despite their insistent on the rational/objective/concrete, experience an almost psychic bond symptomized with heart palpitations, swooning, a reeling of the mind; very romantic, this idealist meets idealist.

It's allegorical, then--personifications of various attributes that we all have warring inside us daily, masquerading as actual humans. These are stories about internal struggles--do I live only for my own pleasure? Does my life have a purpose and how much integrity have I displayed in living up to that purpose? What do I expect of other people?

There is little application for this in interpersonal, political realities. While she does take a razor disdain to the hypocrisies practiced within the capitalist system, I'm afraid her recommendations of no government oversight work only with CHARACTERS, not people. She can recommend no governing body for these paperdolls because they are firmly in her control. She can suggest no laws regarding commerce, because as the author, SHE herself is the law guiding her heroes to ethical business transactions.

Isn't that what all stringent, off-kilter idealists say? The world would be so much better for everyone, if everyone just did what I say. History teaches us the bloody, traumatic, dehumanizing results of one person or group saying, "Do it my way" because there is always attached the threat of some insane "or else".

The world is not a controlled experiment. Humanity is messy and chaotic and varied. There is give and take, compromise, having enough empathy to understand another's point of view whether you end in agreement or not.

So good luck to Ms. Taggert in Rand-land in a hidden valley in a fierce mountain range. I'm sure she'll find the bliss as predetermined by Ms. Rand. But this is no manifesto on laissez faire as current Libertarians tout it. This is a fairy tale; one that interests me and entertains me, now that I've realized it has no bearing outside my own psyche. It is only the lessons of letting your little light shine, of Doing Your Best and practicing your gifts that I'm bearing witness to. The rest is delusional--the world doesn't work like a book, because the author excercises decidedly more control than whatever deity granted us free will (or, for the atheist, the mysterious course of biology).