Reality vs Objectivism

As with any developed philosophy of life, until one has made the error often, one does not see the error. Ayn Rand plagiarized the core, built on it but failed to live it completely. In the end she took social assistance, she took legal speed for thirty years, smoked and died of lung cancer. If our life is the highest ideal, and one should not do anything that damages that, like drugs, what was she doing? Preaching, but not living the philosophy. Her ability to stay on a high horse is less than ideal.

When we go dissecting her philosophy, one line at a time, it contains some good concepts, and some lesser ones. Her take on altruism being lower on the hierarchy of values than self interest is useful and more proper than "doing for others" at considerable personal cost to ourselves is good. It represents the same behavior but without the guilt. After taking care of ourselves we are still free to do for others. The effect is the same but without the guilt. The Churches and Buddhist get around this by providing a join to grave support for the members of their clergy or monks, but not for the people.  

Moving reason, rational process, perception, evidence based decisions and thinking into the foundational layers of the process of a life well lived reorders our thinking a bit. Placing equality in our interactions, and production as the primary virtue modernizes the approach, matching more closely with what I observe as reality.

I struggle with taking the better of short and long term decisions, as short term may be all we have, but that also has drawbacks. Long term is more important, but habit is hard to give up. I would eat the marshmallows. Too many years of being letdown by parents will train that into a person at a young age. The promise would not be fulfilled, when it came time for delivery of the prize, it would be gone. Such is life, oh well, get over it. It was more about lack of trust than putting off reward. Too often the reward never comes, and we end up feeling just used.

But what do I know.