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I Read Ayn Rand So You Don’t Have To - My Rage Bait Essay

Reading & Writing / by azurePond

July 13th

...See more Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism presents a seductive vision of a rational individual who is a sovereign architect of their happiness. She framed altruism as a weakness and sacrifice as a moral crime. Engaging with her work is like being handed a knife that feels clean and dangerously sharp. Objectivism preaches radical self interest as the only rational path. It’s the ultimate “I’m the blueprint” mindset that suggests our highest purpose is to be a self made lion who does not concern with others. It’s intellectually bracing. It’s fiercely powerful. And it’s about as realistic as believing you coded the entire i0S because you have mastered your own homescreen layout while ignoring the millions of lines of inherited code forged by others and the very concept of a network that gives your device meaning. Ayn Rand’s individual is a single cell growing in a petri dish for a lab experiment. Her first error is anthropological. She imagines our prehistoric ancestors as proto industrialists who survived by sheer individual grit. The most savage rebuke to this view is a healed femur. Anthropologists point to this mended thigh bone as the first sign of civilisation. A broken leg in the wild meant death. A healed one meant someone chose to offer protection which is a massive investment in a vulnerable other. THis was the original survival strategy. Groups that cooperated outlived and out thrived packs of selfish individuals. To call altruism “irrational” is to call the very strategy that allowed our species to dominate the planet a mistake. It’s giving “failed experiment” while the evidence screams “core functionality.” Even our physiology confirms this. Our brains reward us with dopamine and oxytocin when we cooperate and give a neurochemical affirmation that helping others feels good because it is good for us. An Ayn Rand defender can dismiss this example as the ‘naturalistic fallacy’. One confusing biological wiring with moral virtue. But this misses a deeper point. For a being whose survival and flourishing are its central values, these signals are not irrelevant feelings to be overridden by a disembodied reason. They are biological indicators like pain or hunger that objectively sustains our life. To consistently ignore them is not rational independence but it is a profound irrationality. It is a denial of the biological reality that reason itself depends on. Another argument might be that this is not proof of selfless charity but of long term value calculation. The injured person must have been a skilled hunter or a wise elder. Keeping them alive was a rational investment. Fair point. But this defense only highlights the problem. It reduces human connection to a cold ledger of assets and liabilities. It asks us to believe that the comfort offered, the patience extended, the sheer care over months of helplessness was merely a calculated pre payment for future meat. This is a profound impoverishment of the human experience. It mistakes the form of the transaction for its content. The bone healed not just because of caloric math but because of a bond that made the math worthwhile in the first place. Our evolutionary edge was the ability to create value through bonds that transcend immediate exchange. To call this mere "trade" is to look at a cathedral and see only a pile of quarried stone. An Objectivist might concede this point but attempt another criticism. They might argue that the bonds and care that I described in this defense are indeed essential to human flourishing and they are among the highest values a rational individual can choose. But the error is in calling them altruistic. The man caring for his injured tribesman does so because he values that person. His action springs from his own hierarchy of values. To label it a sacrifice implies he acted against his own judgment and interest. The issue is not the action but the moral justification for it.’ This defense appears solid. It seems to reconcile human connection with the sovereign self by simply filing connection under "rational value pursuit." But this argument contains two fatal flaws. First, it commits a psychological error. The myth of the monadic valuer. It assumes our "values" are generated in a vacuum by a solitary self to which others are merely delightful items. This inverts reality. Our capacity to value anything…. companionship, love, the future itself is not prior to connection but it is forged through connection. We learn to value because we are first valued. The "companionship" the defender cites is not a pre existing preference the self brings to the relationship. To say "I help because I value you" is to start the story in the middle. The deeper truth is "I have come to value you because our well being has become intertwined." The self and its values are not the static starting point of relation but they are the dynamic products of it. Second, and more importantly, this defense destroys the very concept of morality by making it redundant. If every chosen action is, by definition, selfish (because it reflects one's subjective values) then the term "selfish" loses all power to distinguish, judge or guide. What indeed then is “selfish” then? Under this logic, a child sharing a cookie is being just as "selfish" as a child stealing a cookie. Both are doing what they want. If both are "selfish," then the word means nothing. Rand’s principle falls apart here. Another occasion where Rand’s trader principle falls apart is in a real either or situation. Picture a firefighter running into a burning museum. They can save one: a living person or Da Vinci’s painting.. the Monalisa. They save the person. The painting is lost forever. The Objectivist might immediately object (pun intended) : "This is a false dilemma because in Rand's ethics, human life is the ultimate standard of value. The Monalisa is an artwork and a product of life. A rational firefighter saves the person because a living human consciousness is the root of all value including the creation of future masterpieces. This is a trade where the firefighter trades the concrete artwork for the abstract value of affirming the principle of life, which is integral to their own moral identity. They act selfishly to preserve the world in which they , a valuer, wish to live." This defense appears sound but contains an important admission. It concedes that the highest "trade" is not for a concrete calculable return but for the affirmation of a metaphysical principle (the sanctity of human life). This is the crack in Rand's petri dish. If the "value" received is the psychological integrity of upholding a principle then any act of perceived principle including self sacrifice can be retrofitted into the "trade" model. Even an addict by this logic, is also "trading" effort for the principle of chemical euphoria. The term "trade" loses its essential meaning of mutual exchange and becomes a synonym for any motivated action. More crucially, this defense silently imports a non transactional premise where human life possesses inherent worth forming a "covenant" we are bound to honour. The firefighter isn't running a cost benefit analysis on the stranger's future productivity like “Artist? Engineer? Probably not a professional couch critic who writes essays criticising Ayn Rand.” But rather the fire fighter is responding to their being. If this inherent worth is granted then the foundational human connection is not trade but recognition. However, Rand’s philosophy does not create this recognition and it can only later attempt to rationalise it. The moment the Objectivist justifies saving the stranger by invoking "the principle of life," they have stepped outside a universe of pure transactional egoism and into one of shared inherent value and precisely upholds the moral reality their philosophy was designed to deny. Therefore the example holds. The firefighter's choice reveals that our deepest moral impulse operates on a plane prior to trade. To call it a "selfish trade" is not to explain it but to perform a verbal sleight-of-hand, stretching selfishness to cover its opposite and evaporating its meaning. So we see that Rand wants the word "selfishness" to carry the grit and radical independence of a conqueror. But she defines it so vaguely that it can encompass the even most profound act of love and sacrifice. She wants a morality that provides clear objective distinctions (the creator vs the looter) but she builds it on a circular definition that dissolves all distinction. In the end, this defense does not save the theory. It reveals its ultimate poverty. It offers a world where the language of ethics where words like generosity, loyalty, or cruelty is flattened into a single “reason”: " Because I wanted to." This is where Rand’s philosophy becomes a tautological shell game. Her definition of ‘rational’ does all the heavy lifting, secretly packed with the very social goods she claims to reject. If ‘rational’ means ‘life affirming for man qua man,’ and the nature of ‘man’ is inherently social then ‘selfishness’ simply becomes code for ‘acting according to human nature.’ The radical individualist bite of the word is hollowed out into a circular claim: be ‘selfish’ (that is, fulfill your nature (which is social)). It is a philosophical bait-and-switch. It becomes a circular logic that simply defines any human flourishing as "selfish," thereby making its own axiom true by default. So the real conflict isn't between selfishness and sacrifice. It's between two visions of the self. Rand’s is a closed lab experiment where interactions are carefully managed. The alternative, supported by our biology and psychology, is an open ecosystem. I understand that Rand allows for relationships and that all actions spring from values. But that's just the point. Her model of the self as a pre social 'sovereign' valuer is a fantasy. Therefore, her explanation for relationships “ as voluntary trades between such creatures” is inadequate. My critique isn't that Objectivists live alone. It's that their model of the self is isolated by definition… a sovereign entity that exists prior to and independent of social bonds where relationships are 'exports and imports' between these finished products. This ignores that our very capacity to value, reason and have a stable identity is forged through interdependence. We don't choose society from a position of completed individuality. We become individuals through socialization. The 'network' is not a marketplace we enter; it's the medium in which we are formed. Even the tool of reason, language, is a social inheritance. Our very consciousness is forged through recognition by others. A child raised in total isolation does not become a perfect Randian individual but a fractured non self. Therefore Rand mistakes a type of rationality for rationality itself. True rationality requires an accurate assessment of reality. And the reality is that we are nodes in a network. A truly rational actor understands that their well being is inextricably tied to the health of their human and environmental ecosystem. Game theory’s winning "*** for tat" strategy doesn't start with ruthless defection but it starts with cooperation. It builds trust… a social capital that is the absolute bedrock of civilization. Some may call this view utopian. It is not. It is, if anything, brutally realistic. To say we are wired for connection is not to say we are wired for perpetual peace. Our bonds are the very things that make betrayal, jealousy, anger and tribal hatred possible. The same capacity for empathy that allows for care also allows for cruelty… for understanding precisely how to hurt someone. The ‘cathedral’ of human society is built not only with quarried stone but with blood and compromise. This is the crucial distinction: I am not arguing that human nature is only kind. I am arguing that our intelligence and our sociality are the same complex faculty. Our knack for kindness, for building networks of trust and reciprocal care, is not a pretty add on to a brutish core. It is our fundamental survival technology and the primary tool we evolved to manage the terrifying chaos of nature and the terrifying complexity of each other. For better and for worse, this is the raw material of the human experience. Rand’s model discards half of it in the name of purity. But a philosophy that cannot account for the soldier sharing his rations, the rival offering a hand up, or the community forgiving a debt is not strong minded. It is blind to the very battlefield it claims to master. In the end, the "virtue of selfishness" is a sterile concept not because it's wrong about the importance of the individual but because it defines the individual too poorly. The healed femur is not just a receipt for a calculated trade. It is a fossilized testament to a more profound truth: we became human not when we learned to take but when we learned to care for. We are wired not just for transaction but for connection. Our intelligence is signified not by our capacity for cold logic alone but by our capacity for kindness because it is the ultimate rational choice of a species that thrives only together. Rand’s knife is sharp but it is designed to dissect a creature that was never meant to be taken apart. It operates on the fantasy of a pre social self, a philosophical ghost that can only haunt the pages of fiction but never survive in the world of healed bones, shared language, and intertwined fates that made us human in the first place.

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The City from the choir (Short story - Horror )

Reading & Writing / by azurePond

December 25th, 2025

...See more This was inspired by a Minecr.aft ARG - Searching for a world that doesn't exist - which itself took inspiration from an 18th century novel (or perhaps a play or musical) TW - Horror genre The city from the choir The studio air still smells of spilt beer and ozone, and a thousand burned out circuits. My first official session with The Basalt Theorem - TBT. I’m their hired gun brought in to replace Joshua, their bassist who according to the guitarist Leo “went full cra.ckp0t" and according to the drummer Chloe “just couldn’t handle the volume inside his own head.” They’re polite but distant, a unit of three that’s sealed over a wound. The details are hazy, muttered over whis.kies... hallucinations, ranting about “broadcast signals,” a final, incoherent email about “the anthem of the angles.” They think it was bad acid or maybe just the genetic lottery finally cashing a bad cheque. Im just here to lay down a solid groove and collect a pay cheque. Im setting up my gear, syncing my tablet to their ageing studio computer. Leo says “Josh left a bunch of junk on the hard drive. We havent touched it. Can’t bring ourselves to wipe it. Maybe you’ll find something useful.” It’s a gesture, an offering to the new bloke. Most of it is junk... tempo maps named after constellations, hundreds of bass takes that subtly drift out of tune, field recordings of underground tunnels. Then I find a folder labelled C A C O P H O N Y. Inside, a single audio file: source_vocal_take_1.wav. No project file, no stems. I press play. The music is… not what I expected. It’s not the chugging post metal TBT plays. It’s minimalist, eerie. A bed of shifting, harmonic static, like a radio tuned between stations, but pulsing with a strange, arrhythmic heartbeat. And a voice. Joshua’s voice, I assume, but processed, layered, whispering and singing at once—hauntingly, devastatingly beautiful. It hurts to listen to. Then I hear the lyrics. “Remember the weight of the sun on the pier, when the water showed you your other face, clear…” A cold needle slides down my spine. I do remember. I’m seven years old, on a weathered wooden pier that collapsed decades ago. The sun was a physical pressure. I leant over the green water, and for a second, the reflection wasn’t mine—it was older, terrified, mouth open in a silent scream. I’d buried that. A childhood nightmare, lost for thirty years. “The static in the nursery, the lullaby from the wall, the voice that promised you’d never, ever fall…” My breath stops. The static. My old baby monitor, a constant pink noise. I told my parents a nice lady sang to me from it. They laughed, called it an imaginary friend. I haven’t thought of it since I was four. Line after line. The feel of my dog’s fur the hour she di.ed, a specific, forgotten shade of blue in my grandmother’s kitchen, the exact taste of a cough medicine I had at age five. Impossible. I feel the world tilt. I listen on loop, in my headphones, in my car, each pass unearthing another buried shard of me—a forgotten birthday disappointment, the smell of a long demolished cinema. It’s an aut0psy of my subconscious, set to the most beautiful music I’ve ever heard. The band notices. Chloe looks at me with pity. “You’re going grey around the eyes, man.” I have to find Joshua. The band hasn’t seen him in six months. He vanished after sending that final email. I scour his socials, dead ends. I call his listed number, disconnected. Then, in the studio computer’s recycle bin, I find a deleted text file. A single line, dated the day he disappeared: “I went to see the city they sing about.” The city they sing about. The “they” in his lyrics. The voices. I start hearing the static everywhere... in the hum of my refrigerator, the white noise of my shower, the rush of traffic. Using producer forums and old band contacts, I piece together a trail. Psychiatric hold, release, then a one way bus ticket to a decaying, post industrial city... a place Joshua called home. I found Joshua’s flat on the edge of the city, a third floor walk-up above a shuttered pharmacy. The landlord, a weary woman with no interest in mystery, took my cash and handed me the key. “He said he was coming back. Left everything. Artists,” she sighed, as if that explained both the mess and the madness. The place was surprisingly tidy, spare, almost monastic. No obvious signs of psychosis, no scribbled manifestos on the walls. Just books on architectural theory, radio astronomy, and a shelf of vintage sci-fi paperbacks. And then, in the small sitting room, on a massive sheet of plywood supported by sawhorses, I saw it. His city. It was a model, breathtaking in its intricacy. Not a fantasy metropolis, but something hauntingly familiar. It was built from scrap... circuit boards became plazas, jagged shards of mirror formed lakes, coaxial cables snaked like motorways. Tiny LED lights, de.ad now, dotted the landscape. The buildings were made from carved plaster, textbook covers and pieces of old guitars. They leant at unsettling, fluid angles in a way that felt like a different set of rules. I stared at it for maybe twenty minutes, tracing the impossible avenues with my eyes. The silence in the flat was absolute. Then I laughed. A sharp, relieved bark that echoed in the empty space. Of course. This was it. The grand delusion of a broken mind. What was I even doing here? Chasing ghosts in a madman’s flat. I drove home that night, the weight lifting with each mile. The familiar smell of stale coffee and carpet cleaner the next day was a relief. In the studio, the glow of LED meters, the quiet tension of a band trying to capture lightning in a bottle. They were re-tracking “Labour of love,” a song they’d been wrestling with for weeks. Leo’s guitar was a wall of precise fury, Chloe’s drums a tectonic pulse. My job was to lock it down, to be the anchor. We took a break. Chloe slumped on the sofa, scrolling her phone, the silver cross on her necklace catching the overhead light. We talked about nothing... the weather, a new plugin, the terrible coffee. “Alright, let’s run it down from the top,” Leo said rolling his shoulders. “Chloe, you’re sure about that fill before the second chorus?” “I’m sure. Lets just do it.” We slipped our headphones on. The click track counted in. The music surged. We hit the second chorus and Chloe leant into her mic, her voice cutting through the mix with raw, clean force: “And the promises won’t hold, when the love bends! The beginning and end...” As she sang the word “end,” the light from the control room hit the polished silver of her cross at a perfect angle. It flared—a sudden, starburst point of blinding white light, like a tiny, captured sun. I flinched, closing my eyes against the retinal burn. When I opened them, the music was gone. And I was standing in the middle of a wide, dust-blown boulevard under a searing sun. I gasped, the heat immediate and shocking on my skin. I turned. And I saw it. It stretched around me to a bleached, impossible horizon. Towers of rusted steel and pockmarked concrete rose in those same familiar, gravity defying curves. The plazas were vast expanses of shattered tile that mimicked the circuit boards. The coaxial motorways hummed with a sub-audible vibration I could feel in my teeth. I was in the city.

Would you give me a sign?

Poetry / by azurePond

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