Gary Potter looks at "the goddess"

There is a line of Scripture politicians commonly recite when American warriors killed in action or law-enforcement officers killed in the line of duty are commemorated. They may refrain from identifying the New Testament as its source lest they risk breaching our liberal republic’s sacred “wall of separation” between Church and state, but we can do so. It is John 15:13: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

We recall this saying of Our Lord on self-sacrifice because our subject here is Ayn Rand, author of phenomenally-successful best-selling novels (The Fountainhead, first published in 1943, and Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957) and leading light of a brand of philosophy cobbled together by her and that she and her disciples called Objectivism. Some have described it as “romantic selfishness.” Moral anarchy would be a better description.

A celebrity in her day, Rand was frequently interviewed on television and in print media. Numerous of the TV interviews can be found on YouTube by those who are interested. They will hear that she had a stock answer for responding to any interviewer who asked, “What is Objectivism?” or “What exactly do you believe?”

She gave the same answer in a Playboy magazine interview in 1964. She held that “man exists for his own sake, that the pursuit of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose, that he must not sacrifice himself for others, nor others to himself.”

That’s quite a contrast to John 15:13.

If the notion that the pursuit of our own happiness is our highest moral purpose strikes us as an idea that would have special appeal to a self-absorbed adolescent, we shall ignore it that it is also proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, the republic’s foundational document, as one of three “unalienable rights,” together with life and liberty. What interests us is that Rand’s philosophy figures in the thinking, and perforce the actions, of men of power today who are old enough that they ought long ago to have outgrown the self-centeredness of adolescence.

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