Just as you don't have too look to hard to find, or come in contact with, religious hypocrites (and I don't say this as any kind of comment on religion), you also don't have to spend much time searching for Objectivist hypocrites, if you understand the basic philosophy well enough. In my case, the Objectivist hypocrites came to me. How did I get so lucky? Perhaps it was just the karma I accrued from having accepted the philosophy for a brief time in my younger years.
So what makes an Objectivist a hypocrite?
As I outlined in Part 2 from last week, Ayn Rand's core philosophical principle is that all human subjectivity is an artificial construct created by weak-minded people in order to avoid the harsh objective reality of seeing their own mortality too clearly. Therefore, the number one sin under Objectivism is choosing to avoid reality. So, as I found out soon enough, the two Objectivists that I met in quick succession from different social circles, back around the turn of the '90s, had one thing in common -- they both got drunk a lot. They didn't readily admit this to me, but I picked it up from casual conversation with mutual friends at moments when they weren't around.
I had concluded, many years before meeting these two, that any time someone felt a strong need to share their philosophy or religious beliefs with me, I could take it as a sign of their own insecurity in that belief system. Knowing this, I expected to encounter some form of hypocrisy not long after I met them and I recognized the Rand bait. Familiar with the lures, I managed to avoid the hook with one of them. With the other one, though, the logical contradictions of his arguments twice annoyed me to such an extent that I had to point them out, and both conversations ended exactly as I knew they would, with him angry at me for doing so. I didn't change his mind in either case, even though we both knew he had no logical answers to my questions, and so on those two occasions he left the room clinging to his nonsense, without giving my assertions any serious thought.
While Randians may try to pose as intellectuals, I've generally found them to be the type naturally drawn to a concept like The Virtue of Selfishness but uninterested in actually studying and understanding the foundations of that concept. In other words, they latch onto a belief system that tells them their selfishness is a good thing, and they just want to get the basics of the system. Neither of these two AR disciples cared to see the obvious contradiction between their stated beliefs and their constant need to find comfort in alcohol. As a peek into what might lurk beneath the cloak of an Objectivist's intellectual pretensions, I'll just mention that one of these two told me, flat out, without hesitation, and totally unrelated to anything else, that he thought the story about the hole in the ozone layer was a myth -- he wanted me to know that he didn't believe it.
To make one final note about seeking comfort in substances, can you name a common one that's as addictive as heroin, and that can be found in any convenience store in the U.S.? Next, can you guess the pen name of a certain female author, named Alisa Rosenbaum at birth, who indulged heavily in that drug over decades, and contracted lung cancer as a result? If you can answer these two simple questions, then you may have concluded, just as I have, that when a philosopher can't live up to her own ideals, you don't need to give her philosophy much serious consideration, as it doesn't actually make sense for real human beings living in the real world.