Why a Pinko New Ager Loves Ayn Rand
And Why the Capitalist Icon Deserves a Second Look
The website Big Think recently ran a beautifully illustrated and fairly predictable assault on writer Ayn Rand on the grounds that she’s not a “serious” philosopher.
I am not a follower of Rand’s economic ideas: I believe in a mildly redistributive social democratic state with single-payer healthcare, labor unions, and consumer regulations with teeth — if you rip off mortgage payers or working people, you join a chain gang. I am also a historian of mysticism and the occult, topics that the ardently materialist Rand dismissed as delusive.
Yet I read and defend Rand. Why?
I believe that the writer has been misunderstood and misappropriated. In an aspect of Rand’s career that is largely unseen, she was, in many ways, an avant-garde intellectual whose greatest act of creation was herself.
Not unlike another Russian malcontent and seeker of an earlier generation, occultist Madame HP Blavatsky (1831–1891), Rand, born in 1905 as Alisa Rosenbaum, used a combination of wit and careful planning to escape from the gravitational pull of her…
