/lit/ - Literature

You're all missing the point to Ayn Rand. It's baffling. Really, instead of enumerating all the sorts of people who would misunderstand her books or merely use them as a justification for crooked morals, why don't you try and refute her moral code? And try not to be the smartass saying she's got none.

Try to refute this:

“People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked"

Or this:

“Devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality; there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.”

Or this:

“Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality. An error of knowledge is not a moral flaw, provided you are willing to correct it; only a mystic would judge human beings by the standard of an impossible, automatic omniscience. But a breach of morality is the conscious choice of an action you know to be evil, or a willful evasion of knowledge, a suspension of sight and of thought. That which you do not know, is not a moral charge against you; but that which you refuse to know, is an account of infamy growing in your soul. Make every allowance for errors of knowledge; do not forgive or accept any break of morality.”

Tl;dr She's no Kant, that's for sure, but really, being judgmental and oblivious about her message doesn't make up for a serious argument.