Ayn Rand is one of the most popular novelists of the 20th century and her books have sold around 40+ million copies as of 2016 and her sales increase year by year, astonishing the publishing world.
She was voted also as the second most influential author after the bible, in the US.
She is championed by countless people who are convinced of her OBJECTIVIST philosophy and strive to lead a far more meaningful and happy life.
Most of the great leaders whether they are business magnates, inventors, actors, directors, musicians, politicians, writers etc have been greatly influenced by Ayn Rand according to various surveys carried out.
The greatest of thinkers and the commonest man have been influenced by Ayn Rand.
Who is Ayn Rand?
What is her philosophy and why did she capture the minds of millions of people?
What did she really stand for?
Ayn Rand stood for man at his highest possible.
She believed all the good things that any one would believe. She said that Man should live for himself, not sacrifice himself to others nor sacrifice others to himself. She said that faith is not good as it tampers with thinking and she knew that reason, our supreme tool to live and function was man’s greatest asset and value.
She was an atheist but not a militant one; she was an atheist by implication because she did not posit a super nature above the evidence provided by the senses. For her Existence was absolute. Existence exists and only existence exists. The nothing is literally nothing.
She said that Man is a value and his own life is the standard of value. Thus she being a supreme individualist championed Selfishness and Capitalism, the simple deep, egoism of the rational kind.
Man should live his whole life with a purpose and practice rational self interest. She held that reason, purpose and self esteem were supreme values for which thinking were the means.
Thus, she advocated man’s inalienable rights and loved the American Founding principles. All this she held with a blinding and binding certainty and she explored every single issue that concerned life, here on earth.
Who can deny any of the above?
But Ayn Rand’s distinction was her courage to uphold the above as absolute, to fashion the above in beautiful life affirming stories with deadly conflicts and man emerging as the hero and winner.
She believed that man was a heroic being with reason as his tool and his own purpose as the rule of living.
Thus each of her famous novels were received with shock, deep admiration because each of her novels, whether it was “Fountainhead”, “Atlas Shrugged” or “We the Living” etc, had in it plots that were interesting and exciting, value conflicts that were deep and significant, and the writing part was a full expression of a mind that thought and valued at the same time with seam less integrity, clear and deeply passionate together. Her mind went on and formulated a whole philosophy of living on earth and she named her philosophy OBJECTIVISM and wrote and taught that through many landmark non-fiction books too.
Her certainty stung the reader and that “Ayn Rand Effect” would leave you a completely transformed person.
The full Ayn Rand inaugurated a way of thought that has the possibility to bring complete peace to the world, solve each of the problems of the world and the exposing of the ills and madness of the word would pave the way for that ideal that is the practical- each man living for himself with 100% rights, each happy and productive working to the best of ability and each free, the government merely an agency to protect man’s rights.
Thus Ayn Rand is the future world which can be, should be and must be if we love Life and Man.