| The Myth She died of lung cancer,alone and miserable in a hotel room. | |
| The Truth:"Ayn Rand died on March 6, 1982, in her New York City apartment." aynrandlexicon.com Copyright © 2010 Ayn Rand® Institute "Ayn Rand died on March 6, 1982, of heart failure. She was buried in Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, N.Y., next to her husband Frank O’Connor (who died in 1979)." See also: “To the Reader,” by Harry Binswanger, The Objectivist Forum, Vol. 3, No. 1. As to her being alone and miserable, Leonard Peikoff described her final hours in a talk at Boston's Ford Hall Forum. "Ayn Rand did NOT die “alone and bitter.” I know, I was among her best friends at the end of her life. She was working on a screenplay for Atlas Shrugged, until she got very ill (heart disease) and died 6 weeks later. She planned to produce the movie herself and move to Hollywood to get it done (she lived at 120 E. 34th St. in NYC). She held the same philosophy up to the end, and had the same love of life as the fictional heroes she created." Comment by Harry Binswanger — November 7, 2011 @ 7:56 pm |
| The Myth Alan Greenspan, long time Chairman of the Fed, was a great admirer, in fact an accolade, of Ayn Rand, and his attempt to implement her ideas destroyed the U.S. economy. | |
| The Truth: He abandoned her ideas long before becoming Fed Chairman. "There were 51,000 NEW regulations added over the last 12 years. Banking, housing, and insurance are the most regulated areas of the economy. They are strangled by regulations. "This is the failure of the regulatory state. "As to Greenspan, this is the penalty of betraying Ayn Rand's philosophy. "To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen's famous riposte: Dr. Greenspan, I (Dr. Harry Binswanger) knew Ayn Rand, and you're no Objectivist." Dr. Harry Binswanger, The Harry Binswanger List, October 27, 2008 |
| The Myth She was a Fascist | |
| The Truth: She was an opponent of fascism and communism and wrote... "The basic political principle of the Objectivist ethics is: no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. No man—or group or society or government—has the right to assume the role of a criminal and initiate the use of physical compulsion against any man. Men have the right to use physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. The ethical principle involved is simple and clear-cut: it is the difference between murder and self-defense. A holdup man seeks to gain a value, wealth, by killing his victim; the victim does not grow richer by killing a holdup man. The principle is: no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force." “The Objectivist Ethics,” The Virtue of Selfishness, 32.
and
"It is obvious what the fraudulent issue of fascism versus communism accomplishes: it sets up, as opposites, two variants of the same political system; it eliminates the possibility of considering capitalism; it switches the choice of “Freedom or dictatorship?” into “Which kind of dictatorship?”—thus establishing dictatorship as an inevitable fact and offering only a choice of rulers. The choice—according to the proponents of that fraud—is: a dictatorship of the rich (fascism) or a dictatorship of the poor (communism).
"That fraud collapsed in the 1940’s, in the aftermath of World War II. It is too obvious, too easily demonstrable that fascism and communism are not two opposites, but two rival gangs fighting over the same territory—that both are variants of statism, based on the collectivist principle that man is the rightless slave of the state—that both are socialistic, in theory, in practice, and in the explicit statements of their leaders—that under both systems, the poor are enslaved and the rich are expropriated in favor of a ruling clique—that fascism is not the product of the political “right,” but of the “left”—that the basic issue is not “rich versus poor,” but man versus the state, or: individual rights versus totalitarian government—which means: capitalism versus socialism."“‘Extremism,’ or The Art of Smearing,” Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 180. | |
| The Myth She was selfish. | ||||
| The Truth: In the popular sense of the way the word selfishness is used, no this is not true. She held that rational self interest was a virtue, which is the opposite idea. See this short explanation.
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The above is just the cream of the crop of debunked and disproved myths about Mrs. Rand available from the magnificent website Ayn Rand Myrh. Which can be found at www.aynrandmyths.com and all content above is copyright to them with no infringement intended. This article is intended as an educational look at some of the top myths and all rights belong to the respected site and its own sources linked within.
