Cogburn on Leiter’s Ayn Rand thread

I think I’m more or less with Jon Cogburn in his views on Ayn Rand. She’s not a completely worthless figure in all respects as some academics like to say. For instance, her novels can be very effective inspiration for alienated American high school teens, and I really got a kick out of them myself at 16-17 and still like rereading them once in a blue moon. Even Žižek, jokingly or not, claimed The Fountainhead would be his “desert island” book, though his calling it “proto-fascist” was a bit over the top: more like elitist meritocratic individualism, which is politically unpopular in our circles but by no means the same thing as fascism.

Rand’s philosophy and politics are another matter; the former I find bland and the latter incredibly simplistic.

But since I had stopped paying attention to the whole group decades ago, I was shocked to read around (prodded by some of Cogburn’s complaints) and discover how far Rand’s intellectual heir Leonard Peikoff has gone off the deep end. For instance:

“Peikoff further argues that all Middle Eastern oil reserves are the rightful property of the West, ‘whose science, technology, and capital made its discovery and use possible.’ He advocates the outright destruction of ‘terrorist states,’ especially Iran, ‘as quickly as possible and with the fewest U.S. casualties, regardless of the countless innocents caught in the line of fire,’ not ruling out the use of nuclear weapons, arguing that moral responsibility for innocent deaths would lie with their governments rather than the United States.”

I’ve never said this on the blog before, but WTF?

They’ve come a long way. I seem to remember Ayn Rand herself as being anti-Vietnam War. I believe she even quoted Noam Chomsky’s position approvingly at the time, with a few caveats added. As is well known, the heirs are always more extreme and inflexible than the original models, and Rand was never that flexible in the first place, so Peikoff really had to go to the fringes to become more royalist than the queen.