Via Battlepanda, I found this personal analysis of smart children extremely interesting and saw a lot of my experiences in it. The killer quote is at the end, though:
There is one sure way to ruin a smart kid. If you take a smart, hurt kid, and give him anything by Ayn Rand, all hope is lost. I haven't read any Rand, so I can't argue content with anyone. But I can tell you how Rand works as a black box. You put a hurt, smart kid through Rand, and you get out an insufferable, pleased-with-himself Libertarian. It is a loss to all of us, of course, but more of a personal tragedy for the kid. You can hope that one day that kid will want to get laid enough to rejoin society, but too many of those kids are irrecoverably lost.
I do understand where she's coming from. Objectivism has come between some libertarian friends and me - even ones whom I greatly admired. They can be snotty, self-important, and completely devoid of any reflective ability. There are, however, two problems I have with her analysis:
- Her observation is hardly unique to progressives, as Battlepanda seems to imply. Spend some time on LewRockwell.com or the Mutualist blog and you'll hear the same thing. These attempts to differentiate personality types by ideology will never work. Right and wrong people come in many different shapes and sizes - you'd think so called "liberals" would be able to wrap their heads around that kind of diversity.
- While Rand has affected just about all the libertarians I know - including left libertarians - die-hard Randists usually grow out of it. I've seen it happen time and time again. Smart people are usually smart enough to see their own flaws, and if they don't, sometimes that's not a result of being hurt but simply being unreflective. If I were to conjecture on this phenomenon, I'd have to say that those who embrace objectivism for a lifetime fall into two camps:
- People who are naturally arrogant and find objectivism as a tidy way to sum their identity up. These people would be assholes no matter what they believed in.
- People who have another passion in their life and for whom objectivism is a convenient but not all-encompassing obsession. I've met some engineer types who are objectivist, yet they hardly shove it down my throat because they recognize there's more interesting things to talk about.
While the latter isn't annoying and is respectable, the former is more visible. Yet, this phenomenon occurs in every ideology. As if progressives had the market cornered on not being abrasive. Heh.
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