Our most notorious export product: the Ayn Rand novel ... corrosive article at VICE about the current slick promotion of Rand in the UK.
On Tuesday, I went to a talk held by the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) titled "Ayn Rand: More Relevant Now than Ever" in London's luxurious Goldsmiths' Hall, a grand old building near St Paul's Cathedral.
The crowd was mostly white, male, and wearing sharp suits, as you'd expect at an event devoted to Rand—the novelist-philosopher who came up with "the morality of rational self-interest," a worldview that says you should pretty much do whatever benefits you and if that results in someone else getting screwed over, well, fuck them anyway.
It was the second annual Ayn Rand lecture hosted by the Adam Smith Institute, a libertarian think tank. I was in a temple of the free market.
London’s objectivists are coming out of the woodwork, eager to wage a moral war on those who denounce the evils of capitalism. They are a strange army—a horde of pale men in patent leather shoes, pink-eyed political wonks and traders, investment bankers and IT nerds. It’s difficult to be terrified, but this could be the new breed of ubermensch.Perhaps a new breed of uber-morons... doesn't sound like this young woman who is the author at VICE is buying any of the Rand psycopathy at least; our MNE readers may think this is a fun read.
