30 years ago, I finally started to see the faulty reasoning of Rand's "Objectivism", and I won't bore the hell outa everybody with those details. Suffice to say her philosophy insists on sprinting to The Logical Extreme, which is where even good ideas go to die in sometimes epic implosions.
With Ayn Rand, you get things like this:
What the boss says goes.
Rule 1: The boss is always right
Rule 2: If the boss is ever wrong, refer to rule 1
While there's an element of truth to it, there's no room in that cutesy shit for the kind of clear-eyed, pragmatic reasoning that a Randian likes to believe he's mastered.
The most glaring of such reasoning is: The boss does not exist in a vacuum, where he needs no help from anyone.
The only pure rugged individualist is a hermit who starts out naked and alone, and somehow manages to make or otherwise acquire everything he needs all by himself with no help or input of any kind from anyone else - weapons, tools, food, clothing, shelter - all of it.
Wanna know why you never heard of such people? Because they all died before they could get their genetic material into any succeeding generations. Every one of them ended up scattered across the landscape in piles of leopard shit - or bear shit, or fellow-hominin shit - and in very short order.
We are all descended from people who knew how to cooperate - people who knew collaboration and collective action were essential to our survival as a species.
So - New Rules:
1. The boss can be wrong, and the employees can be right. So it's best if everybody gets the benefit of the doubt, and we can hash it all out as we go.
2. Although this is a business and not a democracy, it's a business that exists within a democracy, and democracy is not a business. We all have rights that are not relinquished in exchange for a paycheck.
3. Earn cookies, get cookies. Earn shit, get shit. And that goes for bosses and employees alike.
That's it - let's get back to work.
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