"I've been Ayn Randed and nearly branded a Communist because I'm left-handed" -Paul Simon. I learned that lyric very well as a teenager, listening to Simon and Garfunkel's A Simple Desultory Philippic, but I didn't know how it really felt until nearly a decade later, when, in my early 20s, I swallowed all of Atlas Shrugged, along with a few other Ayn Rand appetizers. At first I felt quite full, but not long after, I started noticing a bitter taste in my mouth that didn't quite fit with my own personal attraction to kisses and other sweets.
Over a few months, conversations with friends began to reveal some flawed logic and loose ends, and when I learned from The Valachi Papers that Cosa Nostra members would refer to law-abiding citizens as the weak, the implications of that phrase sounded oddly similar, in a troubling way, to Ms. Rand's basic ethic that interprets empathy and concern for fellow human beings as a sign of weakness. In fairness to AR, she advocates indifference to others rather than criminality, and indeed, she also focuses on the importance of essential honesty to oneself and others as the foundation of self-respect, recognizing the importance of this concept as a necessary element of a healthy human psychology. Criminals hunger for self-respect, as she pointed out, with a hunger that can never find satisfaction, and on reading that, I soon confirmed it with observed reality.
Ultimately, for me, the objectivist philosophy fell apart due to its simplistic construction. For a few months, I could believe that it offered a reasonable outlook on life, but soon enough, experience taught me otherwise. Ms. Rand would have everyone believe, as she clearly did, that the drowning man got into the water as a result of his own actions, and therefore no one needs to feel any obligation to throw him a rope, or to try to swim out to him and bring him to shore.
Some of us, when we see someone in trouble, instinctively feel the urge to want to offer help, if we can. Others, such as the objectivists, and the Cosa Nostra bunch, don't feel anything at all (or, with the Costra Nostra gang, might even feel pleasure). Ayn Rand turned that emotional vacuum into a complete philosophy which assumes, among other things, that those of us who have altruistic urges don't actually feel something genuine for our fellow human beings -- we're just pretending, and/or fooling ourselves and others. Her philosophy tells us that we're acting out of societal expectations that have trained us to work against our own best self-interests, but the Randians don't know me and what I feel -- what I hear from the objectivists tells me more about them than it does about me.
I had learned the phrase Do unto others as you would have them do unto you at an early age, and while I moved away from the religious context in young adulthood, after a few years, I came back around to that same moral compass. I may or may not know how the drowning man got there, but if I can reasonably do something to help him, I will. When I feel the urge to help someone in need, I recognize that feeling as being genuine, no matter what objectivism might try to tell me.