A reader writes…

I have noticed the astonishing hold Randian “philosophy” has on people’s minds; it does seem to capture, imprison and close the mind.

One of the reason I left the Democratic Party is I saw Marxist philosophy infecting old-style Democratic policies, especially social policies. Old-style Democrats seemed ill-suited to offer defenses … and didn’t know their tolerance and civility of these Marxist-based postmodern philosophies, which metastatized from James’ pragmatism and Dewey’s progressivism, was going to come back and bite them. It did.The reason they had trouble offering defenses was twofold, IMHO: 1. The defenses were borrowed from a Christian tradition that they no longer felt comfortable articulating, because they were based on faith. They had already cut their epistemological legs out from under them. 2. The defenses would sound like it came from the right, which could cause confusion.

Now, having moved to the Republicans, I’m seeing Randism, if you will, simiilarly infecting the right. Rand is the flip side of Marx, but both are made from the same stuff. With Randism, there is the same struggle on the Right — if anything, Randians are even more close-minded than Marxists. Randians are infecting the right, and it can’t metastasize like Marxism did on the Left.

I wonder if there is such a thing as a thought virus — something that has the potential to infect and close the mind if you don’t have the proper intellectual or spiritual immunization.

Yeah. I’ve noticed the same. It’s as if a large bloc of people in both camps just can’t be bothered to think, so they want a large, simple, all explaining theory of everything which can rapidly digest complicated human situations and process them in black and white formulae. Randroids typically tend to show up in my comboxes if I say that her philosophy will damn you to the fires of everlasting Hell (which it will) and offer dimestore atheist arguments and sophomore homilies on the virtue of selfishness. As with most things attractive to adolescents, Objectivism manages to notice What’s Wrong with Those Guys Over There (in this case, the tribe of fourteen year olds who read Marx and decided *he* had the All Explaining Theory of Everything), but then proposes a remedy as deadly as the disease.

As with all adolescents incapable of nuance, the Randian sees all paradox as “contradiction” and so can’t fathom statements like “You must lose your life to save it”, even though this is, as Chesterton notes “not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying.”

The Randian vision of courageous selfishness is essentially pagan, for it literally worships and serves a created thing–the self–and it will end in a culture of suicide if taken seriously. Not the suicide of the victim oppressed by the suffering and terrors of this world and scarcely culpable, in his interior agonies, for his actions. No, it will result in the proud suicide–the suicide who takes his own life because he believes it is his to take and he spits on any God who tells him otherwise and any human being who imagines that a claim of love or responsibility to someone else can impinge on his right to end his life where and when he likes. Objectivism, like Marxism, is an export of Hell’s Philosophy Department. It’s True Believers are as in love with the Pride of Satan as any Communist who imagines himself qualified to murder millions in order to achieve his Grand Vision.