The first new dogmatism I embraced after rejecting the Marxist BS
(belief system) was Ayn Rand's philosophy (not yet called Objectivism in
those days). The Fountainhead had exactly the appeal for me that it has
retained, decade after decade, with alienated adolescents of all ages.
(The average youthful reader of Thus Spake Zarathustra decides he is the
Superman, and the average youthful Randroid decides she is an Alienated
Genius.) Like most Randroids, I went around for a few years mindlessly
parroting all the Rand dogma and imagining I was an "individualist."
Some years later, after becoming a published writer, I actually was
invited to meet Ayn Rand once. (I was "summoned to the Presence," Arlen
said.) I confessed my doubts about certain of the Rand dogmas and was
Cast Out Into the Darkness forever to wail and gnash my teeth in the
Realm of Thud. It was weird. I thought the Trots and Catholic priests
were dogmatic, but Ayn Rand made both groups look like models of
tolerance by comparison.
I thought she was a clinical paranoid. It was nearly 30 years later that
I found out Rand was merely on Speed all the time, which creates an
effect so much like paranoia that even trained clinicians cannot always
tell the difference, and some even claim there is no difference.
--Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger II: Down to Earth
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/1561840114/ref=nosim/thedanclorenecro
--
Dan Clore
New book: _Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon_:
http://tinyurl.com/yd3bxkw
My collected fiction, _The Unspeakable and Others_:
http://tinyurl.com/3tyj9cq
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Strange pleasures are known to him who flaunts the
immarcescible purple of poetry before the color-blind.
-- Clark Ashton Smith, "Epigrams and Apothegms"