quote:
Ayn Rand had it so figured out that she ended up a wretched woman who died alone. That's what happen when you spend your life rationalizing a system that is designed to increase your own happiness and treats empathy and compassion as immoral. You end up a selfish miserable hag that nobody wanted to be around.

Sure, she said you were free to be empathetic and compassionate if that was your thing, but you were essentially wasting your time in her world. I suppose she's right in a vaccum where your mission in existence is to simply keep breathing, but reality proves different. We are social creatures and depend on our interactions and leveraging off each other for survival and happiness. If it's all about me, you are going to run into problems.

Disagreeing her doesn't make you a commie simply because she opposed communism. What kind of logic is that? Her extreme of individualism can be just as dangerous as the other extreme of communism. The common denominator between both is man - who can be a selfish greedy bastard and make life terrible for the masses by colluding with other selfish greedy bastards under the guise of "liberty" or by colluding with selfish greedy bastards and call it "government".

Actually Rand ended up a lot happier than a lot of great philosophers. Marx was miserable as was Neitzsche. Rand only died "alone" because her husband died before her. She still had friends and followers in her later years. She had a messed up personal life because she had some bizarre ideas about open marriage and had some lesbian tendencies and honestly I think some of the demons she had from growing up in Russia never left her.

I agree taking her ideas about only doing what is in your self interest too far are a bad idea. I also agree it is foolish to call someone who disagrees with her a communist. I do think she exemplifies the ideal that Rand saw man for who he was and tried to design a philosophy and system based around human nature while communism is based on an ideal that runs counter to man and human nature.