Third time lucky. My Body Shop Christmas present to Heidi went back to L’Oréal after Christmas and then last month’s birthday present Chocolat…the book by Joanna Harris...was immediately remaindered as Heidi had read it months before…and seen the film. But Ayn Rand was gratefully accepted. What Heidi will make of The Strike is something else…this was its working title before Atlas Shrugged. Ayn Rand should be at the forefront of women’s claims for intellectual equality. She is a philosopher of top rank who crafted her novels to articulate her Objectivist philosophy in action. She stands head and shoulders above literary heroines like Virginia Woolf and Jane Austin.

In my digital filing cabinet…distinct from my digital library as it contains my writing and not everybody elses…there are some preliminary notes written (I remember) at my ex-wife’s house in Uppsala Sweden 12 years ago and entitled Ayn Rand’s World. Here they are. Ayn Rand sees two forms of tyranny…public and private…where the Public Tyranny refers to Topside, Taggart, Dog Eats Dog, etc. while Private Tyranny refers to Nearside...wife, family, etc.

Two key concepts are needed to understand Ayn Rand´s thought in these two domains: looting or expropriation by fear and mooching or expropriation by guilt. Ayn Rand´s basic premise is that the First Rater must struggle against both Topside and Nearside looters and moochers at all times. There is an implicit assumption that the little individual First Rater cannot achieve anything individually once the First Raters have lost power. From this derives the unstated premise that the only hope is for all First Raters to form their own brother- and sisterhoods, withdrawing from the non-producers into Galt´s Gulch where ironically they live in a socialist paradise.

Ayn Rand´s Socialist Club is open to all First Raters but entry must be earned. Nobody has an automatic right to participate in somebody else’s Socialist Paradise. Lunch tickets are not free but are earned by developing a value that can be exchanged. This is a very Jewish idea, the Talmud insisting: ‘the father who does not teach his son a trade, teaches him to steal’. Catholic Christianity seeks to trump this Talmudic doctrine with Altruism. Objectivism does not mix well with the doctrines of the Jesuits. The Virtue of Selfishness is the title of one of her collection of essays.

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An interesting question is what happens in a Randian world to those who can’t or won’t deliver value for exchange. Perhaps like Nietzsche she would eliminate them. Tom Lethbridge speculates in The Legend of The Sons of God about two races...one with the blood of gods and one without...We The Dying as a sequel to We The Living? Perhaps pastoralising Lesser Breeds is another option...the original plan for Germany after the Kaiser War...with paternalistic policies towards Second Raters like Dagny Taggart’s right-hand man Eddie Withers in Atlas Shrugged.

My note ended with two remarks. The first was that Liberalism...and some strains of Catholicism...are the western theologies that elevate Toleration above all else and see an individual’s right to do their own thing as a virtue when it is not at someone else’s expense. Taoism takes a similar line. The second remark was that there is a Puritan streak in Ayn Rand. Her heroines and heroes have no humour...traits often associated with the Certainty of the Intolerant.

American Legalistic Feminists like Katharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin have airbrushed Ayn Rand out of their herstories. But the more practical and effective…but heretical…approach of British Socialist Feminists with their focus on redressing real world grievances right now…domestic violence, prostitution, female circumcision, poor pay, undervalued work, pension rights etc…should have found a way to embrace Ayn Rand’s gendered society of noble karlmen and wyfmen. Is the future female? as Lynne Segal asks in her ‘troubled thoughts on contemporary feminism’. For me this is the wrong question. Our future Sane Humane Ecological (SHE) Future will be in Gendered Societies…and not neutered ones. Ivan Illich’s Jesuit tract Gender and Ayn Rand’s John Galt could become key writings in the development of Feminist Thought in Europe and Asia…although America may be beyond the pale.