Anton LaVey, Scott Cunningham, Ayn Rand - oh, the follies of youth! I’d nearly forgotten my 14-year-old Objectivist phase until I stumbled on the hilarious “Free-Market Meat Market,” an article over at New York Magazine that features posts from an Ayn Rand Dating site, with precious gems such as this:
thustotyrants, Selden, New York
[I am] short, stark, and mansome.
You should contact me if you are a skinny woman. If your words are a meaningful progression of concepts rather than a series of vocalizations induced by your spinal cord for the purpose of complementing my tone of voice. If you’ve seen the meatbot, the walking automaton, the pod-people, the dense, glazy-eyed substrate through which living organisms such as myself must escape to reach air and sunlight. If you’ve realized that if speech is to be regarded as a cognitive function, technically they aren’t speaking, and you don’t have to listen.
Ladies… any takers?
November 29th, 2008 at 7:27 pm
Haha…LOLRandz
I’m so glad objectivism is getting royally flushed down the shitter right now…
November 29th, 2008 at 8:12 pm
Well hell, he sounds like a keeper to me, though he might be outdone by the Londonite in the article:
I love intelligent, sassy girls, particularly those working in consulting or investment banking (but other fields are great too). Really, nothing is hotter than an accomplished girl in a suit, as long as she is willing to settle down and have my children. I want a girl who will support my ambitions against the naysayers in society.
I also swear that from now on, I will find a way to put the words “short, dark and mansome” into every piece I write.
Whittaker Chambers had Ayn Rand’s number back in 1957. It’s amazing though, how many people I know, weird and wonderful now, have had a “14-year old Objectivist phase” or thereabouts. I think her stuff is really, really appealing around that time. If one’s an intelligent dorky outcast kid, here’s Rand’, telling you that your brain makes you a frickin’ god. Sadly, for some the phase never ends and thus you get the insufferable crud above.
In a bizarre sort of way, Objectivism is one of the most successful alternative cultures of the past 50 years, A small band of intellectual misfits ended up having their ideas infect the mainstream, getting their adherents in high places and changing how people thought. It’d be almost inspiring if the philosophy hadn’t been so noxious and the results so terrible. As it is, the financial wreckage we’re living in has Rand’s name all over it.
November 29th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
It is too bad, I agree, that tards like this guy have to take it so far. Why can’t people take something at face value, integrate into your own being and not think it is the end all, be all way of going about life? I’m admittedly a fan of miss rand’s writing, but it is just literature. So is the Bible.
November 30th, 2008 at 5:22 am
I was the loner in my group of punk rock friends who never really cottoned to Objectivism. I was more the LeVey, Nietzsche, Crowley reading sort who wanted to Speak Truth to Power by being extra odd and independent. Living in a small town in North Carolina, all a fella had to do was wear eye liner and be straight-edge and you were weirder than ten trucks of hippies put together.
I’ve got a good friend who loves to retreat into Rand-y speak whenever he feels threatened, and because that is her role to play in life, I can’t fault her that much. Are you emotionally vulnerable and socially awkward? It’s not you, it’s them!
But then, it’s wouldn’t be the first time a vapid and groundless philosophy came to dominate the higher ranks of power and so influence the discourse of nations that every discussion becomes a protracted bribery session.
November 30th, 2008 at 5:24 am
Dude, I think it is pretty envyable to be the exact opposite of this guy:
Ayn Rand ignited the fire within me that was searching for the right spark. My every action is guided according to my philosophy, and my philosophy is the philosophy of Ayn Rand.
I am interested in meeting someone that truly embodies the values and virtues of Objectivism. I have found very few women that have not already been beaten down to a flimsy, irrational, empty pulp. I have changed many girls’ lives, but no one has blown me away yet.
I never “hook-up” randomly, I never kiss a girl that doesn’t deserve mine. I have yet to find a girl deserving of my falling in love with her. But “other people” are secondary values no matter what, so finding someone is not a priority for me.
All the pain this guy must be suffering in search for somebody worthy. Sticking to egotism out of fear of you might destroy the world by thinking of others. And then end up suffering so much you have to say you do not really care for other people, on a fucking dating site!
*Leaves the house in search of a random hook-up*
November 30th, 2008 at 5:45 am
LOLOLROFLMAO
I haven’t had this much fun since Pompei!!11t
November 30th, 2008 at 6:31 am
I hate you so much for finding this before me. Damn you, Lev!
Also, as is common on the internet, the ensuing discussion in the comments section is worth a read for a few extra laughs. It’s difficult, yet it appears that people can argue Marxist theory and the value of dating sites simultaneously.
Unfortunately it does not culminate in a manifesto calling for the workers of the world to rise up and date one another.
November 30th, 2008 at 7:28 am
The only people I know who genuinely feel The Fountainhead was a decent slab of literature also feel the same way about both The Alchemist and Jonathan Livingston Seagull. I rest my case.
*flounces off to read The Little Engine That Could*
November 30th, 2008 at 10:59 am
this could only be improved by pictures of these gods among men. i want to know what “short, stark, and mansome” entails.
November 30th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
Ayn Rand was a decent writer, and her philosophy definitely had it’s good points. (Having confidence in yourself is never a bad thing.)
However, her works were largely just a knee-jerk response to her life in Soviet Russia — more people need to realize that. They’re just books.
November 30th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
A good friend lent me The Fountainhead in high school, but for whatever reason, I never got around to finishing it.
Looks like I might be better off, even if that means I can’t fully appreciate these delightfully ridiculous love-pleas.
November 30th, 2008 at 6:39 pm
Telemachus Sneezed deals with a time in the near future when we dirty, filthy, freaky, lazy, dope-smoking, frantic-fucking anarchists have brought Law and Order to a nervous collapse in America. The heroine, Taffy Rhinestone, is, like Atlanta was once herself, a member of Women’s Liberation and a believer in socialism, anarchism, free abortions and the charisma of Che. Then comes the rude awakening: food riots, industrial stagnation, a reign of lawless looting and plunder, everything George Wallace ever warned us against� but the Supreme Court, who are all anarchists with names ending in -stein or -farb or -berger (there is no overt anti-Semitism in the book), keeps repealing laws and taking away the rights of policemen. Finally, in the fifth chapter-the climax of Book One-the heroine, poor toughy Taffy, gets raped fifteen times by an oversexed black brute right out of The Birth of a Nation, while a group of cops stand by cursing, wringing their hands and frothing at the mouth because the Supreme Court rulings won’t allow them to take any action.
In Book Two, which takes place a few years later, things have degenerated even further and factory pollution has been replaced by a thick layer of marijuana smoke hanging over the country. The Supreme Court is gone, butchered by LSD crazed Mau-Maus who mistook them for a meeting of the Washington chapter of the Policemen’s Benevolent Association. The President and a shadowy government-in-exile are skulking about Montreal, living a gloomy emigre existence; the Blind Tigers, a rather thinly disguised caricature of the Black Panthers, are terrorizing white women everywhere from Bangor to Walla Walla; the crazy anarchists are forcing abortions on women whether they want them or not; and television shows nothing but Maoist propaganda and Danish stag films. Women, of course, are the worst sufferers in this blightmare, and, despite all her karate lessons, Taffy has been raped so many times, not only by standard vage-pen but orally and anally as well, that she’s practically a walking sperm bank. Then comes the big surprise, the monstro-rape to end all rapes, committed by a pure Aryan with hollow cheeks, a long lean body, and a face that never changes expression. “Everything is fire,” he tells her, as he pulls his prick out afterwards, “and don’t you ever forget it.” Then he disappears.
Well, it turns out that Taffy has gone all icky-sticky-gooey over this character, and she determines to find him again and make an honest man of him. Meanwhile, however, a sub-plot is brewing, involving Taffy’s evil brother, Diamond Jim Rhinestone, an unscrupulous dope pusher who is mixing heroin in his grass to make everybody an addict and enslave them to him. Diamond Jim is allied with the sinister Blind Tigers and a secret society, the Enlightened Ones, who cannot achieve world government as long as a patriotic and paranoid streak of nationalism remains in America.
But the forces of evil are being stymied. A secret underground group has been formed, using the cross as their symbol, and their slogan is appearing scrawled on walls everywhere:
SAVE YOUR FEDERAL RESERVE NOTES, BOYS, THE STATE WILL RISE AGAIN!
Unless this group is found and destroyed, Diamond Jim will not be able to addict everyone to horse, the Blind Tigers won’t be able to rape the few remaining white women they haven’t gotten to yet, and the Enlightened Ones will not succeed in creating one world government and one monotonous soybean diet for the whole planet. But a clue is discovered: the leader of the Underground is a pure Aryan with hollow cheeks, a long lean body, and a face that never changes expression. Furthermore, he is in the habit of discussing Heracleitus for like seven hours on end (this is a neat trick, because only about a hundred sentences of the Dark Philosopher survive, but our hero-it turns out, gives lengthy comments on them).
At this point there is a major digression, while a herd of minor characters get on a Braniff jet for Ingolstadt. It soon develops that the pilot is tripping on acid, the co-pilot is bombed on Tangier hash and the stewardesses are all speed freaks and dykes, only interested in balling each other. Atlanta then takes you through the lives of each of the passengers and shows that the catastrophe that is about to befall them is richly deserved: all, in one way or another, had helped, to create the Dope Grope or Fucks Fix culture by denying the “self-evident truth” of some hermetic saying by Heracleitus. When the plane does a Steve Brodie into the North Atlantic, everybody on board, including the acid-tripping Captain Clark, are getting just what they merit for having denied that reality is really fire.
Meanwhile, Taffy has hired a private detective named Mickey “Cocktails” Molotov to search for her lost Aryan rapist with hollow cheeks. Before I could get into that, however, I was wondering about the synchronistic implications of the previous section, and called over one of the stewardesses.
——
It was in God’s Lightning that I read Telemachus Sneezed, which I still think is a rip-roaring good yarn. That scene where Taffy Rhinestone sees the new King on television and it’s her old rapist friend with the gaunt cheeks and he says, “My name is John Guilt”, man, that’s writing. His hundred-and-three-page-long speech afterwards, explaining the importance of guilt and showing why all the anti-Heracleiteans and Freudians and relativists are destroying civilization by destroying guilt, certainly is persuasive, especially to somebody like me with three-going-on-four personalities each of which was betraying the others. I still quote his last line, “Without guilt there can be no civilization.” Her non-fiction book, Militarism: The Unknown Ideal for the New Heracleitean is, I think, a distinct letdown, but the God’s Lightning bumper stickers asking “What Is John Guilt?” sure give people the creeps until they learn the answer.
November 30th, 2008 at 6:40 pm
About the only thing I really like in relation to Ayn Rand is the film The Passion of Ayn Rand. Mainly because of the awesomeness that is Helen Mirren cannot be ignored.
“Really, nothing is hotter than an accomplished girl in a suit, as long as she is willing to settle down and have my children.”
Ladies…THAT is a winner. Marry him and give up all that made you attractive, interesting, and independent in the first place! :D
I dunno how smart the notion of wanting someone to live up to a certain philosophy is to begin with. Especially if you are after a person that is actually an individual…how can they be an individual if you’re hammering on about how they MUST live up to your definition of individuality? My head hurts just thinking about it.
….I still enjoy LaVey’s work though :P
@Mark….The Little Engine That Could is arguably better than 99% of work written about the human spirit, hard work, and focus. Ones time is much better spent reading it from time to time than struggling through vast tomes of overwritten philosophy. Unless it has kinky pictures of course.
November 30th, 2008 at 7:55 pm
@Mark: Hehe…The Little Engine will only be satisfied when he climbs the mountain of ruined lives and dead hookers.
November 30th, 2008 at 8:15 pm
A professor I once worked for had a great line on Ayn Rand: “If a guy had written that screed, everyone would be saying ‘Why is he banging his dick on the table?’”
A funny thing about ‘Satanists,’ ‘Objectivists,’ and other miscellaneous embittered, self-supposed Ubermensch types: I’ve never met one that was doing particularly well in life. Usually they live in their parents basements, are on the dole, etc. So much for the Will to Power.
November 30th, 2008 at 10:25 pm
Very funny ross… The Fountainhead, The Alchemist and Jonothan Livingsron Seagull are all sweet books. I also enjoyed The prophet…sorry.
November 30th, 2008 at 10:52 pm
lol randroids.
Recent, relevant, hilarious McSweeneys:
ATLAS
SHRUGGED
UPDATED FOR
THE CURRENT
FINANCIAL
CRISIS
December 1st, 2008 at 8:31 am
Reminds me of a time when I, and many others on a book discussion forum I was a member of, experienced a sudden invasion of Randian fanatics. We called them “airship dwellers” and it provided us with endless entertainment. It also inspired me to make a bumper sticker that I now have a box full of - “Please, Ayn Rand, save me from your followers.” My ex-bf still has it on his car.
December 1st, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Ross, you should still blog about it! Would love to see your write-up. :)
December 1st, 2008 at 4:42 pm
Oh god, I was a tweenage Randian too. It’s like the dark shadow that runs through all precocious teen pasts. I also found all my old, self righteous usenet posts cached on google. Horrifying
December 1st, 2008 at 5:27 pm
D: Oh my god, that revised Atlas Shrugged was GENIUS. I love McSweeney’s!
December 1st, 2008 at 9:14 pm
I can’t count the number of people who, upon hearing I studied architecture, responded with, “Oh! I LOVED The Fountainhead! Didn’t you?”
No. No, I didn’t. The bitter ramblings of a first-rate romance novelist-cum-third-rate philosopher with a violent hatred of anything smacking of Stalin? Not my cup of tea.
I’ll give her one thing. Her knowledge of philosophy was a whole lot more profound than her knowledge of architecture.
*mutters to self ominously, skulks away*
December 1st, 2008 at 9:49 pm
Never heard of her or it.
December 2nd, 2008 at 5:03 pm
I wonder.. Is it the case that all subcultured American tweens go through an Objectivist phase? (while everywhere else they go through a Socialist phase?)
I like Ayn Rand’s writing. She’s definitely remarkable for being completely adored and completed hated by a very odd coupling of extremities.
December 6th, 2008 at 6:56 pm
I went through a Henry Rollins phase, so much the less romantic.
“I am solipsist motherfucker.” Poetry, I tell ya.