A reader asks:

Isn’t it time for the Libertarians to cast aside the whole myth of objectivism championed by Ayn Rand? She said we should be realists, so let’s be real and see her for who she really was … a women who when she got sick, and push came to shove, cashed the checks.

To put this into perspective, Ayn Rand:

Was a considerable “thing” in the mid-20th Century.  I was one of millions of young people who read “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead,” and accepted libertarianism at the time.

Her way of thinking evaporated, for most of us anyway, when we realized that unbridled greed was eventually going to cause the demise of humankind on this planet.

The actual root cause of this demise was unclear, but as the years passed, environmental collapse became the prime suspect.  Rich people obviously couldn’t care less about climate change, ocean acidification, loss of biodiversity, or desertification.

Ayn Rand Is No Longer a “Thing” — Here’s Why

A reader asked me the question above, to which I reply:

Our brains seem to be “wired” in such a way that our political philosophies and other aspects of our character and belief systems are not entirely under our control.

About 10 years ago, I heard a presentation on the results of a university study in which subject participants were hooked up to electronic sensors that monitored the activity in various parts of their brains while they were shown photographs of innocuous things like kittens, puffy white clouds, and the beach, along with occasional photos of things that are potentially dangerous, perhaps an angry dog, a rattlesnake, or a tarantula.

There was a profound difference in brain response between self-described “liberals” and “conservatives.”  In particular, the amygdalas, the part of the brain that deals with “fight or flight,” emotional responses including fear, anxiety, and aggression, in the latter group were far more active in response to potential danger than the former group, suggesting that conservatives are somehow “programmed” to have more violent responses to potential harm than liberals.

Additionally, we all naturally gravitate toward data points that corroborate what we already believe.

To me, this explains why conservatives, especially those of the present day, stir themselves into a frenzy with Fox News and Newsmax, while the rest of us content ourselves with the New York Times.

The novel of author/philosopher Ian McEwan “Saturday,” albeit fiction, takes this subject on in a deep and fascinating way.

What Particular Discovery of Science Has Changed the Way You Think About Ourselves and the Universe?

Oh, that’s good news!

Tens of thousands of scientists who have spent their careers studying the subject have magically turned out to be corrupt radical leftists, lying about the data they have collected over the last 50 years.

Makes perfect sense to me.  What a relief. 

Good News from Big Oil