Topic: parents

Salon is featuring a fascinating article about how a woman’s father embraced Ayn Rand’s philosophy and, as Ashley points out, subsequently began to suck at Dadding. He suggested his daughter file for legal emancipation so she could pay to live at home as a teenager, and now communicates with her mostly by forwarding on objectivist e-mails. The author offers a definition for objectivism which runs: What is objectivism? If you’d asked me that question as a child, I could have trotted to the foyer of my father’s home and referenced a framed quote by Rand that hung there like a cross. It read: “My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.” As a little kid I interpreted this to mean: Love yourself. Nowadays, Rand’s bit is best summed up by the rapper Drake, who sang: “Imma do me.” More »