| | [My former friend] regards the wearing of eyeglasses in public as "unacceptably intruding a handicap into public view ... implicitly degrading the image of Man ... Thrusting evidence of a visual handicap into the public view of healthy unhandicapped children and adults ... ruinous to uncounted children's sense of life. ...
Now you know one reason that I was asking, a few months ago, about a statement by Rand on handicapped people.
Personally, I believe that we bring ourselves to our interactions with reality. Reality rules in the final analysis, but somewhere short of that are many complicated subjects, which, before they can analyzed and understood, must first be grasped intellectually. I know objectively that my color vision is normal because as a pilot, I have it checked every two years (every year now that I am over 60). Yet, I also know from common social experience that we disagree on whether an object is aquamarine or teal, dusty rose or sandstone pink. That level of perception and identification is the basis for much disagreement. The pyramid of complexity builds quickly. You have no way to know easily what inside your friend was unlocked by the words of Ayn Rand. She might not identify the elements easily.
It is true that Ayn Rand said that people who are handicapped should not be presented to children.
Rand: [mid-sentence] "...for healthy children to use handicapped materials. I quite agree with the speaker's indignation. I think it's a monstrous thing — the whole progression of everything they're doing — to feature, or answer, or favor the incompetent, the retarded, the handicapped, including, you know, the kneeling buses and all kinds of impossible expenses. I do not think that the retarded should be ~allowed~ to come ~near~ children. Children cannot deal, and should not have to deal, with the very tragic spectacle of a handicapped human being. When they grow up, they may give it some attention, if they're interested, but it should never be presented to them in childhood, and certainly not as an example of something ~they~ have to live down to."
- Ayn Rand, The Age of Mediocrity, Q & A Ford Hall Forum, April, 1981
http://aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/2008/03/ayn-rand-quote-of-week-12308.html
But there are differences between <everything in Ayn Rand's head> and <Objectivism>.
To me, a person's sense of life is more important than the correctness of their ideas, though that, too, is important. You might never have noticed your former friend's implicit assumptions (sense of life) before. Maybe you never saw her drunk. I mean that. We have many myths about drugs, especially alcohol, and one of them is to excuse people when they have been drinking because "they did not mean it" when they say or do hurtful things. It is the nature of alcohol to reduce inhibitions and submerge learned behaviors. The way you are when you are drunk is the way you really are ... and Superman is a mean drunk... So, too, with your friend and Ayn Rand.
If she were a teenager, as many of us were, it would be appropriate to work your way through or around her misperceptions because of her immaturity and lack of worldly experience. We live and learn. For an adult to "suddenly" come to such views is really only the revealing of a hidden syndrome. She really was like that all along. You just never saw it, or just were never exposed to it.
As for "Ayn Rand versus the Handicapped," I point out that in 1981, Ayn Rand herself was far from her own peak of achievement and her spontaneous remarks -- while they, too, reveal the real person inside -- are not of the same character and quality as her earlier published essays.
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