Post-Randianism

Objectivism was birthed out of hate for the USSR. Specifically, the deep longings of a disillusioned immigrant for a Utopian autonomy – a romanticized West of hunky entrepreneurs wearing Stetsons and spurs. It is a political ideology akin to Anne Frank getting teary-eyed over boobs. It’s horny idealism disguised as serious philosophy; it’s a fevered dream. The great irony, of course, is that the only real glimmer of romance, of humanity, of heroic egoism in Rand’s work came not from her rationalism, but from that burning ache – that outsider’s dreams about skyscrapers. And like all myths, it devoured its creator. Rand’s own desperate attempt to live that pipe-dream ended with her husband drinking himself to death – because alcoholism, in its brutal honesty, is true romance. To love and lose, to suffer mute beneath indifferent stars, to play the hand you’re dealt – to get fucked by God. Where Rand saw heroism in economic triumph, her progeny discern only cold economic rape – opportunity turned opportunism, and opportunism begets systemic inequality. It’s almost funny. In a completely irrational dogmatic-conservatism, she would have been appalled by Nick Land. She would have called him a spiritual communist. You will never find a John Galt in China. With a population in the billions, no shuffle of the deck can conjure the Western romance necessary to build anew. The deck is too thick, too worn, too crudely stacked, too… yellow. It needs a very specific Faustian perspective – a lovely, irrational one. Today’s “colorblind meritocracy” would have been met with inscrutable, inexorable, insensate racism. The true descendants of Objectivism aren’t Silicon Valley data cultists or Austrian school Redditors – they’re the American National Libertarianism movement, a paradoxical desire to “just grill for God’s sake”. She would have seen “LessWrong” and trashed it with the same dismissive venom she trashed Kant – too abstract, too evasive, too “European”. All of this – the techno-optimistic billionaires, the kleptocratic, the plutocratic, the corporatocratic – everything, out of a fetish for well-dressed, well-educated cowboys. This woman’s fetish birthed the Matrix. It birthed the CCRU. It birthed CEOs and their killers. It is 1984 with Art–Deco. It’s aesthetic worship of Blade Runner. It is hell on Earth.