Randex

Silicon Valley seems to have more than its share of companies behaving badly. … is Uber’s much-criticized “bro culture” just part of the package, a reason even, for its meteoric rise and ability to go after smaller rivals and the taxi establishment? Or is it a liability for the company, its Ayn Rand-loving CEO and its backers?

My mother was, in her modest way, an Ayn Rand villain, someone who lived by the moral principle that John Galt mockingly summarized: “It is your need that gives you a claim to rewards.” She believed that being poor gave one a warrant to exploit any situation to one’s own material benefit.

In video interviews recorded before the competition, the groups were asked about Rembacher, the competition’s namesake. One claimed that Rembacher was Salieri’s hamster and also, somehow, simultaneously, Ayn Rand. Another said she was an elderly cat lady living in Shadyside.

Rembacher is not an actual person or thing; it’s “chamber” scrambled, with an “-er” added for good measure.

Rational Man takes his cues from the Rational Actor model in economics, and indeed, from philosophers who’ve argued since ancient times that man’s nature is to maximize his own good whenever possible. Generations of Philosophy 101 students have been arguing about the nature of man ever since. Ayn Rand was Rational Woman. Gordon Gekko, who said “Greed is good,” was a movie Rational Man.

Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead (some would call it infamous) was, besides being a game-changer, a book that could be, and has been too, accused of celebrating rape, in the brief scene where Roark forces himself on Dominique. On re-reading, the sex is violent.

“Picture it: the engines of capitalism unleashed, no longer burdened by having to pay their share. And then I’ll privatize and corporatize everything! Jiminy Cricket! I get tears in my eyes just thinking about it.”

The Tooth Fairy, having drunk too much punch, hovered like a surly hummingbird inches from my nose. “Have you read any of Ayn Rand’s fairy tales about the magical wonders of the free market? Hiccup! What’s the matter with you? Don’t you love a good fairy tale?”

Pollitt masterfully employs an eye-popping history of abortion rights to track the trajectory of our nation’s current obsession with the private lives of women. Abortion, she reminds us, is at least 4,000 years old, and we didn’t always condemn women who sought one. Ayn Rand and Barry Goldwater were pro-choice, as was California Gov. Ronald Reagan, who signed what was “the most liberal abortion law in the country” at the time.

Born in a comfortable middle-class London home marinated in Home Counties conservatism, Bell joined the Young Conservatives as a teenager. From the start he had an unwavering revulsion for socialism: “The aim of the left is to motivate people by making everyone the same.” The book is punctuated with similar sentiments, and Bell reveals a devotion to the ultralibertarian Ayn Rand, whose philosophy of extreme self-reliance he endorses.

You claim to be a gun-worshipping, Ayn Rand-style rugged individualist, and you may live out on some scrap of what remains of the “frontier” in your part of rural America, and you may even have a picture on your wall of a cowboy or, grotesquely, a Native American, yet you vote Republican, the very group that…fosters the soulless corporate automaton subordinated entirely to corporate greed, with your corporate gods operating largely in big cities, Wall St., or even abroad.

The Question, who saw the world in black and white (in a nod to his Ditkoesque Randian comic book origins) in his earlier superhero days, explains the “spectrum of choices” and how they relate to the development of society…

…admiration for the ruthless individualist is reflected in Rand’s two major novels, The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957). In these two massive volumes of fiction, the protagonists are brilliant, driven men who single-mindedly pursue their visions of excellence — one as an architect, the other as a steel magnate — while having to fight off the efforts of weaker, smaller-minded individuals and governments to prevent them from realizing their dreams.

Small wonder, then, that Rand’s followers see environmentalism not as an effort to save and preserve the only planet we have for future generations, but as a sinister, communist inspired plot…

I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.

“Bad news, detective. We got a situation.”

“What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?”

“Worse. Somebody just stole four hundred and forty-seven million dollars’ worth of bitcoins.”