So Ayn Rand built a whole philosophy, and a literary career, around the cold-heartedness that comes naturally to a sociopath/psychopath, redefining this lack of feeling as a character strength worthy of praise and emulation. She called her philosophy Objectivism -- why?
AR based her Objectivist philosophy on her assertion that all human subjectivity is an artificial construct created out of each individual's desperate need to avoid facing the objective reality of their own mortality. When I say all human subjectivity, I mean all. You might think, if you only know Ms. Rand's work tangentially, that I've chosen to simplify her concept for the sake of brevity and blog necessity, but not so -- her entire philosophy flows from this very simple fountainhead.
Along her philosophic journey, AR asserts that the enemy of every belief system is the true believer, because only a true believer will actually care enough to uncover and reveal the flaws of that system, and I agree with her on that -- in the few months when I circled her star, I began to feel more and more the pull of the gravity of reality, as the complexities of life moved me beyond her simplistic orbit. If a few short months I concluded that life was actually about 90% objective and 90% subjective, by which, I explained in answer to the quizzical looks, I meant that each quality occupies a 10% area at opposite ends of the spectrum and shares an 80% zone in the middle.
Take, for example, the matter of room temperature, and the difference between how I feel it and how a certain female acquaintance feels it: I tolerate warm temperatures quite well, and she does not. Certainly, as the Objectivist in the room will tell you, there is an objective reality to the temperature, and that reality is knowable, but so what? Knowing the Fahrenheit number will probably not make me more uncomfortable, and it certainly won't make her less uncomfortable. So, according to the Objectivist idea, has one of us created a purely-subjective reality out of the need to do so? Is the woman's sensitivity to the heat actually a sign of weakness of character, and my lack of it an objective sign of my superior personal character?
Well, before I get too comfortable in my objective superiority, we need to have tea together on a cooler afternoon. I might tolerate the slight chill a bit better than my female friend, but when the hot tea arrives, she can drink it down right away, and it gives her some welcome relief from the cold. I, however, have to let that cup sit still in front of me for a good ten minutes or more before I dare to sip it, or else it'll burn my tongue. So, once again, there is an objective reality to the temperature of the hot tea, and the woman seems to objectively tolerate it pretty well, but have I constructed a subjective tea reality out of my need to avoid seeing my own mortality too clearly?
Contrary to Ms. Rand's philosophy, what about the possibility of two different people naturally experiencing the same objective reality in subjectively very different ways? I have noticed the woman's father also showing signs of discomfort in the heat, and I well remember my mother having a sensitivity to hot and cold foods very much like my own, so those observations tell me that our subjective responses to room and food temperatures come as a result of our different genetics, rather than from some murky, primal fear of death. These subjective temperature realities have provided me with a concise example of how Objectivism quickly falls apart in the face of life's complexities, if you study it and try to apply it to the world that turns us all around every day. Not that long after I had dropped into Atlas Shrugged, I crawled out, concluding, in a vaguely-Shakespearean way, that there are many more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in Ayn Rand's philosophy.