For the failure of such a wide swath of the American population to outgrow individual self-interest, the United States may as well be a nation full of teenagers, says Victoria Bekiempis, a “recovering Objectivist” writing in The Guardian.

Ayn Rand is the early 20th-century founder of Objectivisim, an ideology that states that the pursuit of one’s self-interest, regardless of ethical concerns, is the highest good, and anything that interferes with it is evil.

Rand is not recognized as a serious thinker by most practitioners of academic philosophy, and she is regarded as more of “a hypocritical, questionable character than a moral role model” by many others, Bekiempis says.

Rand’s personal life was no testament to social concern. As a teenager in Russia, she “watched her family nearly starve while she treated herself to the theater.” In America she reaped the benefits of Social Security and Medicare while attacking government on the pages of her novels. Sex mingled with violence in her work, and she based one of her early protagonists on the serial killer William Hickman.

— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly. Follow him on Twitter: @areedkelly.