There is a tendency in the world of ideas to divide thinkers into saints and witches. Some are singled out for a hagiographic treatment. When others discover issues with their thoughts or lives, the switch is flipped and they become worthy of being burned. They are either valorized or demonized. This has happened to countless intellectuals: Voltaire, Jefferson, Darwin, Marx, Freud, Heidegger, and thousands more.
It’s all quite infantile. The better approach is one born of maturity. Read everything and everyone and learn what you can and toss out what’s wrong. Of course this requires work and thought. In fact, the saint/witch dichotomy is merely a mask for laziness. It’s a way of finding a fast track to truth that dispenses with the arduous task of actual research.
Few have been victimized by this habit as much as the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand. People might encounter her work in high school and decide to adopt it as a personal credo, only to find out later in life that the world is more complicated than she describes and they turn against her.
This is all unfortunate. She was a singularly insightful intellectual from whom there is a vast amount to learn. And yes, she is guilty too of ridiculous excesses, as brilliant minds are.
That said, there are precise contributions she has made that make her writings an indispensable guide to understanding modern life, both the problems and many of the answers.
1. Economic Freedom. Have you heard that so much of our times reminds one of “Atlas Shrugged”? Indeed it is uncanny. In the novel, the state exercises overweening power and attempts to centrally manage economic life in all aspects big and small. Rand explains with evocative detail the cascading effects of such bureaucratic control and how it wrecks supply chains, demoralizes workers, puts aside innovations on behalf of incumbent technologies, and puts lives in grave danger. It forces a growing impoverishment on society by curbing the exercise of human ingenuity. Lesser minds rule great ones, spreading ignorance and brutality far and wide.
