Sociopathy on the Right: Ayn Rand and the Triumph of Conservative Cultism

By Tim Wise

At first it seemed little more than a bizarre rant, only slightly worse than those to which we've grown accustomed, given the source. To wit, Rush Limbaugh, who on September 11 condemned President Obama for speaking that day about community service, and encouraging young people to become involved in service projects as a way to help make America a better place. Far from seeing such a call as a positive request to take personal responsibility for improving one's nation, to Limbaugh, it was little more than the "first step toward fascism," intended to conscript the young into a volunteer army, bent on helping to carry out the President's political agenda.
Community service, Limbaugh explained, was something that should be done by convicts. Specifically, he offered: "Let prisoners do it, let prisoners pick up the trash. Let prisoners mow some highway grass. This -- this community service, folks, it's insidious. It is nothing more than a well-sounding compassionate label. But it means something entirely different. It means turning you into a robot." Yes, of course. That's not insane at all.

These people are fucking insane. How can so many folks be enamored of such a blowhard? Lizard brained Reptoid Limbots.
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This is what the Ayn Rand-bots are reading, the vision of society they endorse: one comprised of better people, and decided inferiors, sub-humans even, who are worthy of death for their laziness, their sloth, their lack of industriousness. No wonder people imbued with such a truly sadistic mindset as this would oppose health care reform. To this way of thought, those without health care deserve their suffering, and that suffering should be of no concern to the rest of us.
Those who have written biographies of Rand--including former acolytes--paint a uniformly disturbing picture. Rand, according to Nathaniel Branden's My Years with Ayn Rand, Barbara Branden's The Passion of Ayn Rand, and Jeff Walker's The Ayn Rand Cult was narcissistic in the extreme, incapable of empathy, often cruel--going so far as to have an affair in full view of her husband--as well as paranoid, addicted to amphetamines, and obsessed with her belief that average people were "ugly, stupid and irrational." Read Tim Wise's entire blogpost here.