The whole feud with Nicholas Branden and how it split the Objectivists pretty much showed just how unrealistic Rand’s grasp of human nature and emotion was…even Objectivism’s creator and resident god couldn’t excise it from her system. And the whole “superman” theory underlying it was troublesome. I agreed with most of her ideas about individual choice and striving for excellence, but I think Alan Moore basically said it best when he dismissed objectivism itself as a laughable ideal. “The Fountainhead” meant a lot more to me.

Let me describe the part that put me off. My memory may disserve me, so please correct any errors on my part. The protagonist is on the train. It stops in the middle of nowhere. She inquires why; the train engineer explains that the safety communications system has broken down and he does not have verification that the way ahead is safe, so regulations require him to stop. She asks him if he can see any oncoming trains. He says no. She orders him to proceed with care, and then goes off on a long rant about how safety considerations can lead to the most irrational results.

What Ms. Rand failed to understand was the moral treatment of low-probability, high-consequence accidents. The regulations that the engineer was respecting keep the probability of high-consequence accidents close to zero. Ms. Rand preferred an approach that had a low but nonzero probability of an accident. Let’s say that the odds of a head-on collision with another train in such a situation are only one in a thousand. That sounds pretty safe. But a head-on train collision could kill dozens of people, incurring net costs of millions of dollars. Let’s say that such an accident would have cost $10 million. Then the decision to proceed cost the company (in probability terms) $10,000. If the time thereby saved generated more than $10,000 in profit, then the decision was a good business decision; if less, then it was a bad business decision. But Ms. Rand did not address any of these considerations; she just ranted away at how costly safety regulations are. I found her treatment of an interesting moral problem to be childish, so I set the book aside and never looked at it again.

Well, I did look at the last page, on somebody’s recommendation. There I found this ludicrous scene where somebody “blesses” the world with “the sign of the dollar”. I burst out laughing when I read that. Sheesh, this lady is pretty simple-minded, I thought.

1. Embracing the heroic side of man and encouraging others to pursue it.

2. Outlining the way that abstract philosophy can make a real difference in people’s lives.

Epistemology is interesting, but it doesn’t instruct anyone on what to do or how to live. Objectivism does, which is why