TORONTO, June 24, 2003 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In the June 2003 Interim, philosopher Dr. Donald DeMarco exposes the deadly flaws of popular novelist Ayn Rand’s cult philosophy of extreme individualism. Highly regarded among university students and social elites, Rand ended her days isolated and miserable, says DeMarco, as the inevitable result of her self-practiced theories. Dr. Demarco relates that Rand said man has a “right to life” but that she did not “mean by this statement that he has a ‘right to life’ that others have a duty to defend and support. Such a concept of ‘right to life’ implies a form of ‘altruism,’ and consequently is contrary to the good of the individual”(according to Rand). “In fact, for Rand, it constitutes a form of slavery.” Demarco continues “she firmly denies that groups such as the ‘unborn,’ ‘farmers,’ ‘businessmen,’ and so forth, have any rights whatsoever.”
For Ayn Rand, “Making sacrifices for one’s born or unborn children, one’s elderly parents or other family members becomes anathema”. She wants a perverse type of “Culture of Life to emerge, but she envisions that culture solely in terms of individuals choosing selfishly, the private goods of their own existence. If ever the anthem for a pro-choice philosophy has been recorded”, concludes DeMarco, “it comes from the pen of Ayn Rand”. “Rand managed to make the lives of everyone around her miserable”, says DeMarco and “when her life was over, she had barely a friend in the world. She was contemptuous even of her followers”. At her funeral in 1983 a six-foot replica of a dollar sign was placed on her coffin.
Although Rand’s well-crafted novels, based on her philosophy, have been fascinating and even attractive to many, DeMarco warns, “It was inevitable… that a philosophy that centred on the self to the exclusion of all others would leave its practitioner in isolation and intensely lonely… Ayn Rand’s philosophy is unlivable, either by her or anyone else”.
See the complete Interim article on LifeSite at https://www.lifesitenews.com/interim/2003/june/index.html