Anthem Blog #1: Rand Philosophy in moder world

Ross Schonberg

Ms. Gubanich

English

April 1, 2016

Rand’s Philosophy

Ayn Rand, the author of the book, called Anthem, has a much different philosophy on life and how someone should live their life. Ayn rand believes in a philosophy called objectivism, which is the belief that certain things, especially moral truths, exist independently of human knowledge or perception of them. A lot of her beliefs, back when she was alive to speak about them, were looked at as not being a good way to live life or just not morally correct. Some of her ideas and philosophies can relate to, or go against with our modern world.

First, Ayn Rand always believed in looking at things logically, which is something that most people today can relate to. In today's world we are always looking at the facts, it helps us process things simpler, especially when it comes to things like science, the news, and life in general. When something is logically correct, it makes much more sense, rather than people who are religious and will say the reasoning behind things because god did them, with no proof behind them. When Ayn Rand said that believing things only if it makes logical sense, that can be true in today's world and a lot of people can relate to that idea.

Than, another belief of hers was that you can only love someone if they have overcome their weaknesses. This belief does not work now, nor did it work back when Ayn Rand was alive. If people, who also have overcame all of their weaknesses, only loved other people who have overcome their weaknesses, than many people would be alone forever and the amount of relationships in the world would be far less. Nobody is perfect, everyone has at least one flaw, so then the world would be a loveless and lonely world. Also, a lot of people accept other people because of their flaws and accept them for that and will try to help them overcome it. So this belief of Ayn’s certainly does not relate to this modern world.

Lastly, One of Ayn Rand's strongest beliefs is that you must only care about yourself and should not help other people in need. She believes this because she thinks that if you help other people it will slow you down from becoming the best version of yourself. Now (we discussed this in our english class) Ayn doesn’t mean that you can’t help some old lady across a street, since that hes little affect on you, but say that you decide to go Africa and help poor and starving towns, Rand would probably not believe in that. This philosophy so does not work today because so many people need help and it would come off as just being mean to other people, being selfish and having very little altruism. This completely clashes with the idea of being kind and considerate to one another in today's world.

At first it seems that it is easy to see that she makes her ideas present and very straight forward, but it is clear that not all of them can make a whole lot of sense it today's society. A lot of her beliefs are meant to help make a better you, but it would be such a struggle to succeed in doing that, while living in the world that we do today.