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<\/a><\/div>\nAbout a month ago, I wrote a wee post around a television interview Mike Wallace did with Ayn Rand<\/a> back in 1959. I just as easily could have used an interview she did later on. Same story, same selfish pseudo-philosophy.<\/p>\n You see, being selfish is easy and being a Christian is hard. And being really, and truly Christian is almost never even attempted. The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.<\/em><\/p>\n So why am I posting this now? A reader sent me the following story from the current issue of Salon Magazine<\/em> about a family\u2019s real life experience with Ayn Rand\u2019s Objectivist ideal, taken to it\u2019s literal extreme. An Objectivist Fundamentalist? Lord, have mercy!<\/p>\n How Ayn Rand Ruined My Childhood: My Dad Saw Objectivism As a Logical Philosophy to Live By, But It Tore My Family Apart My parents split up when I was 4. My father, a lawyer, wrote the divorce papers himself and included one specific rule: My mother was forbidden to raise my brother and me religiously. She agreed, dissolving Sunday church and Bible study with one swift signature. Mom didn\u2019t mind; she was agnostic and knew we didn\u2019t need religion to be good people. But a disdain for faith wasn\u2019t the only reason he wrote God out of my childhood. There was simply no room in our household for both Jesus Christ and my father\u2019s one true love: Ayn Rand.<\/p>\n You might be familiar with Rand from a high school reading assignment. Perhaps a Tea Partyer acquaintance name-dropped her in a debate on individual rights. Or maybe you\u2019ve heard the film adaptation of her magnum opus \u201cAtlas Shrugged\u201d<\/a> is due out April 15. In short, she is a Russian-born American novelist who championed her self-taught philosophy of objectivism through her many works of fiction. Conservatives are known to praise her for her support of laissez-faire economics and meritocracy. Liberals tend to criticize her for being too simplistic. I know her more intimately as the woman whose philosophy dictates my father\u2019s every decision.<\/p>\n What is objectivism? If you\u2019d asked me that question as a child, I could have trotted to the foyer of my father\u2019s home and referenced a framed quote by Rand that hung there like a cross. It read: \u201cMy 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.\u201d As a little kid I interpreted this to mean: Love yourself. Nowadays, Rand\u2019s bit is best summed up by the rapper Drake, who sang: \u201cImma do me.\u201d<\/p>\n Dad wasn\u2019t always a Rand zealot. He was raised in a Catholic family and went to church every week. After he and my mother got married in 1982, they shopped around for a church. He was looking for something to live by, but he couldn\u2019t find it in traditional organized religion.<\/p>\n Needless to say, Dad\u2019s newfound obsession with the individual didn\u2019t pan out so well with the woman he married. He was always controlling, but he became even more so. In the end, my mother moved out, but objectivism stayed. My brother and I switched off living at each parent\u2019s house once a week.<\/p>\n It was odd growing up, at least part-time, in an objectivist house. My father reserved long weekends to attend Ayn Rand Institute conferences held in Orange County, California. He would return with a tan and a pile of new reading material for my brother and me. While other kids my age were going to Bible study, I took evening classes from the institute via phone. (I half-listened while clicking through lolcat photos.)<\/p>\n Our objectivist education, however, was not confined to lectures and books. One time, at dinner, I complained that my brother was hogging all the food.<\/p>\n \u201cHe\u2019s being selfish!\u201d I whined to my father.<\/p>\n \u201cBeing selfish is a good thing,\u201d he said. \u201cTo be selfless is to deny one\u2019s self. To be selfish is to embrace the self, and accept your wants and needs.\u201d<\/p>\n It was my dad\u2019s classic response \u2014 a grandiose philosophical answer to a simple real-world problem. But who cared about logic? All I wanted was another serving of mashed potatoes.<\/p>\n Go read the rest here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Look, I\u2019m a realist like St. Thomas Aquinas OK? Just as many horror stories about growing up in a religious household can probably be written. Many children will turn away from whatever their parents are teaching them. It seems to be the natural order to rebel when you\u2019re young.<\/p>\n However, to teach our children Christianity in the Catholic Tradition is as far from teaching them a prideful, self-absorbed, self-as-idol Objectivism as the letter A is to Z. The former is Truth <\/em>while the latter is a train wreck. Sadly,\u00a0\u00a0I have Christian friends who oddly look up to Ayn Rand because they like the 10% of what she has to say about Libertarian freedoms (Laissez-faire economics, for example) vs. the 90% of the rest of her horror show ideals.<\/p>\n For an antidote, may I suggest they spend some time with the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church<\/a><\/em>, and Pope Benedict XVI\u2019s encyclical Caritas in Veritate<\/a>?<\/em> Not to mention the lives of the Saints<\/a>. Or maybe I should introduce them to my friend Blaise Pascal.<\/a><\/p>\n But first, just start with a close reading of Our Lord and Savior\u2019s\u00a0Sermon on the Mount<\/a>.<\/p>\n UPDATE:<\/em><\/strong> P.J. O\u2019Rourke issues a reality check<\/a> when he reviews the film Atlas Shrugged<\/em>.<\/p>\n
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\nRemember what G.K. Chesterton said,<\/p>\n
\nby Alyssa Bereznak<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/a>Then he discovered objectivism. I don\u2019t know exactly why he sparked to Rand. He claimed the philosophy appealed to him because it\u2019s based solely on logic. It also conveniently quenched his lawyer\u2019s thirst to always be right. It\u2019s not uncommon for people to seek out belief systems, whether political or spiritual, that make them feel good about how they already live their lives. Ultimately, I suspect Dad was drawn to objectivism because, unlike so many altruistic faiths, it made him feel good about being selfish.<\/p>\n