Today's Lesson From The Ayn Rand Cult by Jeff Walker
Science destroys myth, but doesn't create the kind of personal values or meanings that myth provides. So even when a worldview fades, for most former believers the sustaining morality it produced lingers, while for others, a replacement myth or religion is sought, even a cult or some ideological 'ism'. But just as the 'isms' of the twentieth century from communism to feminism and environmentalism--all at-least-partly irrationalist reactions against the transformations wrought by industrial capitalism--have been found spiritually wanting by a great many adherents, so too psychoanalysis and other pseudoscientific therapies and new religions rose up against the overwhelming dominant ethos of lingering nineteenth-century rationalism. Objectivism is a reassertion of the beliefs and values of industrial capitalism and rationalism in response to so much negative fallout from the ideologies, pseudosciences, therapies, and religions that pretend to replace them. In other words, Objectivism is the proffered cure for the side-effects of prior failed cures for capitalism-rationalism. It consists of what we began with, though with presumed impurities removed, and is propagandized with the same fervent religiosity as characterized by those creeds which once had success in opposing capitalism-rationalism.
