Notable Admirers and Emulators of Randian Heroes
As Rand's fiction and non-academic philosophical works became popular especially in the 1980s, her fans would often claim that attributes of these heroes could be found in themselves, or should be. US GOP Representative Paul Ryan, for instance, credits his early interest in politics to Rand. Critics of Rand and her works have sometimes observed that those who most exhort Rand's heroes' merits, demonstrate actual behavior closer to those of her villains (cronyism, influence peddling, fraud and so on). For example, Conrad Black has been compared Rand's heroes, even after Black was convicted of fraud. As one trait that Rand's heroes and villains often have in common is megalomania and extreme interpretation of an inventor's or executive's or owner's authority. However, one may still say that Black could have emulated Rand's heroes even in these actions. Paul Ryan, in explaining why he no longer defends Rand's ideology, explicitly describes Rand's ideology as (at least politically) useless for not appealing to "people who aren’t 18-year-old boys with delusional fantasies of superiority."
The most prominent of Rand's personal disciples, the early self-esteem psychologist Nathaniel Branden, addressed "the accusation that we are against feelings, against emotions" and in part acknowledged the criticism that a celebration of ultra-rationalism was dangerous:
- If, in page after page of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, you show someone being heroic by ruthlessly setting feelings aside, and if you show someone being rotten and depraved by, in effect, diving headlong into his feelings and emotions, and if that is one of your dominant methods of characterization, repeated again and again, then it doesn't matter what you profess, in abstract philosophy, about the relationship of reason and emotion. You have taught people: repress, repress, repress.
Alan Greenspan, who later recanted most of his economic positions in common with Rand (notably the gold standard which he championed in a 1966 essay published in her book), as US Federal Reserve chair had extraordinary and controversial influence over US & global monetary policy, was of all her followers most influential, bringing further scrutiny on the ideals of executive authority and heroism she promoted.
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