She would habitually confront her guest with "what is your premise?" After stumbling around for a time the guest would blurt out some axiom that would be their intellectual burial plot. Mrs. Rand would begin her logical point by point destruction of her 'opponents' position until they were hopelessly out- manned, and her logical premise was the only possible conclusion to the thought grapple.
Why was she this way? According to the referenced article, she was. . "proud, grouchy, vindictive, insulting, dismissive, and rash.. . but she was also idealistic, yearning, candid, worshipful, precise, and improbably charming. . She funneled all of these contradictory elements into Objectivism, the home-brewed philosophy that won her thousands of Cold War–era followers" and cold logic repudiation of current bail-out, stimulus pablum economists (excepting Austrian thinkers) and philosophers.
. . "but in person – her big black eyes flashing deep into the night, fueled by nicotine, caffeine, and amphetamines – she was apparently an irresistible force, a machine of pure reason, a free-market Spock who converted doubters left, right, and center. Eyewitnesses say that she never lost an argument."
She had a tragic childhood,
"Rand insisted, over and over, that the details of her life had nothing to do with the tenets of her philosophy. She would cite, on this subject, the fictional architect Howard Roark, hero of her novel The Fountainhead: 'Don’t ask me about my family, my childhood, my friends or my feelings. Ask me about the things I think.'”
"Ayn Rand was born Alissa Rosenbaum, in St. Petersburg in 1905. Her father, a pharmacist, was successful enough to buy both the pharmacy he worked in and the building that housed it. Her mother, foreshadowing her daughter’s future, named the family cats after American place-names. The family employed a cook, a nurse, a maid, and a governess. It was a bad time, of course, to be Russian Jews, and also a bad time to be a prosperous business owner—to be both basically guaranteed disaster. The Rosenbaums were subject to strict anti-Semitic laws, the constant threat of pogroms, and—just as Alissa was hitting adolescence—the Russian Revolution. At 12, Rand watched Bolshevik soldiers march in and take her father’s pharmacy. He would never really work again, and she would spend her adulthood railing, from across the world, against anyone who used force to “loot and mooch” from productive businessmen. As violence escalated and the Russian economy imploded, the Rosenbaums were forced to leave St. Petersburg and move into a small unheated house in a resort town on the Black Sea."
A feminist before her time who believed in the free individual unhampered by the state, tradition, or so called morality.
With Love and Kindness,
THE HATMAN
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