It’s those looters who don’t approve of excellence who are keeping you down. Surely you would be rich and famous and high-status like you deserve if not for them, those unappreciative bastards and their conspiracy of mediocrity.
Any Objectivists who believe this have missed half of Ayn Rand’s message and are doing Objectivism completely wrong.
Not only did they miss one of the main points of John Galt’s three hour long speech in Atlas Shrugged, but people who level this accusation against Objectivism as a whole missed it as well.
The point I’m referring to is that it takes two things for the looters to keep the men of ability down.
Someone has a wish that their rationality should tell them they can never have, and they do not discard this irrational wish.
Someone who has the ability to give the irrational man his wish fails to deny that of him.
When those two things happen, the man of ability has allowed the irrational man to fake his desired reality, and everything spirals downward from there.
The self-proclaimed Objectivists who say “It’s not my fault!” aren’t much, if at all, better than the looters in the book who also proclaim “It’s not my fault!” They want their lives to be better, but rather than using their minds to make their lives better, they wallow in mediocrity and blame, not the men of ability, but the men of inability for their problems. Which is way more pathetic, in a way.
Your article is based on the premise that it is important for us to help complete strangers who don’t mean anything to us. That sacrifice is a constant of righteousness regardless of a person’s beliefs or lack thereof.
From an objective viewpoint, sacrifice is wrong. Why should we have to give value in return for lesser value, or no value at all? We should help people because they have value to us, not because they are unable to be valuable at all.
“The man with guilt is the man who will do whatever you tell him to.” The reason religious people do this is because they are taught from a young age that it is moral to sacrifice and amoral to trade with the acquisition of a value in mind. Their guilt does the rest.
Maybe the reason most rationalists don’t devote as much self-sacrifice to the world around them is because they hold somewhat of an objective viewpoint, and a moral code that has no room for self-sacrifice. In short, most rationalists don’t feel guilty for not helping people they don’t know. Why should they feel guilty for that?