As You Go Off To College, Do Not Do This.

For anyone who is about to start college, do drugs, smoke cigarettes try beer but abstain from one thing no matter how much peer pressure you get, don’t read Ayn Rand. I just read in Raw Story about the dangers of Ayn Rand and I can tell you, that reading her books as an 18 year old made me a horrible person. Her beliefs take away the only thing around you, that is other people. All things can disappear but nothing is more important than your connection to the people around you and nothing helps your happiness than their happiness. Ayn Rand’s anti-communism to the extreme takes the thoughts of a teenager and helps them stay in a person through adult hood. Most people grow out of it, but not after they do some serious damage to their own psyche and those around them.

Her ideas led to Regan dismantling the mental care in US, Greenspan’s deregulation of finance industry leading to the Great Recession and Bush and Rumsfeld’s war in Middle East. That’s on the large level, on the low level I’d say the entire thought that we are not responsible for the poor and that somehow our spouses are to make us happy and if they do not we can cheat and divorce has ruined millions of families.

Ayn Rand may have been the worst thing to have come to United States.

Rand offered a narcotic for confused young people: complete certainty and a relief from their anxiety. Rand believed that an “objective reality” existed, and she knew exactly what that objective reality was. It included skyscrapers, industries, railroads, and ideas—at least her ideas. Rand’s objective reality did not include anxiety or sadness. Nor did it include much humor, at least the kind where one pokes fun at oneself. Rand assured her Collective that objective reality did not include Beethoven’s, Rembrandt’s, and Shakespeare’s realities—they were too gloomy and too tragic, basically buzzkillers. Rand preferred Mickey Spillane and, towards the end of her life, “Charlie’s Angels.”

So if there is one thing I can recommend to you before you head to college: do drugs, do drink, do sleep with people and experience life, with others, not by yourself, not with Ayn Rand.

If you don’t believe me, believe John Oliver.