Why all the hysteria over Ayn Rand?

Altruism means "serve everyone but yourself" when the logical thing to do from the utilitarian perspective is to serve everyone including yourself.


The basic principle of altruism is that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value.
Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others.


Ayn Rand meant selfishness in the sense of standing up for yourself. There are many real life examples of where the traditional roles of selfishness and altruism are overturned, where selfishness is good and altruism is evil. For instance if you're being bullied the altruistic thing to do would be to sacrifice your own personal gain for others, by sitting there and taking it like a little bitch. The selfish thing to do would be to gain pleasure at the expense of others, escape, tell your bros then jump them the next day, spraying them up with mace and beating them with phone books.

I don't agree with Ayn Rand on everything, I believe the "common good" as a concept has been abused, not that it is invalid. The common good should ideally be democratic concerning groups and include individual rights when the group is at odds with the individual.

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/altruism.html
http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/common_good.html

However I have never heard anyone criticize Ayn Rand on these legitimate points and issues, only ever "hurr durr selfish randroids derp".

>>115
Most communications would be through IM anyway
In the real world, however, words like "meeting" still feature prominently in corporate dictionaries. And "meeting" still means that a group of people are physically present in the same (physical) room at the same time.

Why would a company publish a list of neckbeards on its front page?
They don't, but that's beside the point; Even when you're not even on their web site in the first place, someone sees your page, recognize where they've seen you working, and makes the connection.
So what if it's your boss that sees it first, he's gonna go ballistic with paranoia. And not (entirely) without cause, either.

Thing is, most (if not all) businesses rely on a reputation of having a professional staff ("professional" here meaning attitude, sense of discipline and public image, at least as much as how much you know).
Which is how, whether you like it or not, you end up representing your workplace damn near every time you're anywhere public. Including your facebook page, which (for all intents and purposes) is public 24/7.


But srsly; Do you really need to be told all this? Do schools in your country suck that hard?
Over here, just about any work-related school these days has stuff like this at some point, under "customer relations" or somesuch. Even the news media feature "watch what you put on facebook and here's why"-type sections from time to time, like slow news seasons.