I originally believed that I could crystallize and share my thoughts about the limits of Ayn Rand's philosophy in four brief segments, each one focused on one particular aspect of its shortcomings, but in doing some elementary fact-checking for those pieces, I discovered a few additional truths about Ms. Rand that I hadn't previously known, and thus, I felt the need for one more round. What did I learn that I didn't know before? It came as news to me that AR openly voiced her approval for the savage genocide executed against the native people of the American continents by the European immigrants and settlers.
To put it mildly, reading Ms. Rand's quotes regarding native Americans made me angry. I have not yet read any historic accounts of the so-called savages attacking a white settlement and killing all inhabitants, including women, babies, and young children, by splitting their heads open with axes, as a group of white settlers did to a native American village in northern CA territory not long after the Gold Rush era. Whatever disagreements my grandfather and I might have had over the course of our lives, we had a life-long agreement about how badly our ancestors had wronged the native American people. On a visit to a reservation in Wisconsin during the summer before my final year of high school, I well remember him saying, "It's shameful the way this country treated the Indians." Around that time, he read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, which I eventually got around to reading as well.
A little over a year after the visit to the reservation, during my first few days at Northwestern U., I watched a comedian performing the Firesign Theater bit about how the West (and more) was stolen, and it made me laugh, but I also understood the more serious deeper meanings behind that bit. Then, a couple of years later, on a visit to the Adirondacks with my parents, I ventured out alone one day on foot, and soon found myself stopping at a nearby drum shop. The drum maker welcomed me at the door, and he proceeded to fill me in on a number of details that I hadn't known, including the fact that every treaty between whites and native Americans was broken by whites. He challenged me to find a single instance to the contrary, and I've yet to do so, over 4 decades later. He also showed me a copy of one particular treaty, and reading it, my gut reaction was that the white people who crafted it obviously never meant to keep it.
Ms. Rand happily accepted Hollywood stereotypes of native Americans, and didn't care to look any deeper into the actual historical context. She blithely justified theft and genocide by asserting that the natives had no right to their land because they believed in collective ownership rather than individual rights. I would love to have gotten her answer regarding the Georgia Cherokees who had adopted individual rights and the European-based lifestyle of their white counterparts, even to the point of taking their case to the Supreme Court, but despite winning that case, still ended up on the Trail of Tears. That forced march to Oklahoma in some ways reminds me of a similar story I read about Poland and eastern Germany during the final months of WW2, and somehow I would guess that a woman born with the name Alisa Rosenbaum would not have been so forgiving to the Nazi regime as she seemingly would have been to the Andrew Jackson administration.
As a capper, I had concluded that someone who would reduce life's complexities into such a simplistic two-toned philosophy would not exactly qualify as a genius, but Ms. Rand wrote well, and expressed herself capably when conveying her ideas and principles. I did not expect to find in her biography a quote about how much she believed the darkest Hollywood stereotypes of native Americans -- I honestly didn't know she was that gullible. It makes me wonder if she believed that Tide really could make whites whiter. Even as a wide-eyed young elementary school kid, I figured out that you couldn't believe everything you saw on TV or in the movies. To begin with, two competing products couldn't possibly both be the best one -- that didn't make logical sense, even to a 5th grader. However, apparently AR believed those early TV cigarette ads that touted the health benefits of smoking, even though that also didn't make sense to my 5th grade self.
Was Ayn Rand smarter than a 5th grader?
Evidently not.