The first time I saw her she was a little girl on a swing. As I passed her, she drew close to me, drawing nearer with every second until she kicked me on the butt.

"Sorry!"
She was a little angel. Taller than me. Fair with big, black eyes.
I smiled and drawing myself up to meet her tall frame, drew myself away. She was walking towards me.
"Sorry. Are you hurt?"
"No." That was all I could manage.

Ayn Rand: A Criticism

I was fourteen when I read The Fountainhead and read Atlas Shrugged shortly after. It was one the most thrilling and emotionally powerful reading experience of my life. But this is not about why I like Ayn Rand's writing but about why I outgrew her ideas after a brief adolescence phase.

Ayn Rand was a champion of reason and extremely averse to any idea that reeked of any sort of mysticism or irrationalism. But probably, she had so little patience for anything she suspected to be irrational that she dismissed without actually understanding the fine difference between the reason as a process and what is considered at a given point of time and by a given number of people as reasonable. We do not exist in a vacuum and are never immune to notions of what is reasonable. It’s always important to remember that reason or rationality, and what people may regard as reasonable, don’t mean the same thing.

The consequence of failing to make this distinction is evident in the case of Ayn Rand in that if someone disagreed with her notion of “the reasonable,” it was very convenient to accuse him of being irrational or against reason. It is almost disturbing the frequency and ease with which she branded any viewpoint she did not share as not merely mistaken but irrational or mystical. In other words, anything that challenged her particular model of reality was not merely wrong but “irrational” and “mystical”—to say nothing, of course, of its being “evil,” another word she loved to use with extraordinary frequency.

In fact the degree of moralising she resorted to in her novels was almost appalling. Few clergymen in the Dark Ages, let alone novelists must have used the word “evil” with such frequency. She left you with the impression that life is a tightrope and that it is all too easy to fall off into moral depravity. In other words, while on the one hand she preached a morality of joy, personal happiness, and individual fulfillment; on the other hand, she was also very likely to scare the hell out of you if you respected and admired her and wanted to apply her philosophy to your own life.

The most devastating single omission in her system and the one that has probably caused the maximum damage to an impressionable reader was a complete lack of understanding of how human beings evolve and how they can change. The recipe prescribed by her was a severely disciplined one. You either choose to be rational or you don’t. You’re honest or you’re not. You choose the right values or you don’t. Her followers are left in a dreadful position: If their responses aren’t the right ones, what are they to do? How are they to change? No answer from Ayn Rand. Therein lies the tragedy.

Every philosopher must be understood in the historical context in which they functioned. Rand, born in Russia in the pre-revolution days was a relentless rationalist perhaps in reaction to “a mystical country in the very worst sense of the word, a country that never really passed through the Age of Reason or the Enlightenment in the way that Western Europe did.” Perhaps this should be the footnote to her ideas providing some insight into her fiercely uncompromising outlook.

Part time lover and full time friend

In the web of human relationships, so rigidly marked with tags and classifications, there are times when lines are blurred and categories are irrelevant. But are they, really ever? Don’t we always desire to define our relationships within the set labels? I do, I know. Even though it sound much more mysterious to say with a shrug, “We are..umm well, I don’t really know what we actually are”, I still always have this nagging question at the back of my head.

But, sometimes maybe it’s best to do away with labels. We should just enjoy what we have and not spoil it by subjecting it to constant pressure to belong to one of the many categories.

I can't write..atleast not tonight