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When you put forth ideas like, "Self-interest is the highest morality", and "One class of people are productive innovators and that those innovators are held back/dirtied/tainted by a stealthy, bureaucratic, parasitic lower class", you lead people to start LOOKING for those "parasites"...and to try and eliminate them.
Hitler would have done what he did whether he'd written "Mein Kampf" or not. He was racist and xenophobic to the core, and the act of writing down his insane internal dialogue was just a recording of something that was already there. "Mein Kampf" didn't lead to anyone's death; Hitler, the man, did. But "Atlas Shrugged"? I honestly shudder to think about how many people have died because Ayn Rand decided to write a book that held up sociopathy as moral--and not just moral, but the ONLY true morality. It influenced thousands and thousands of wealthy people and wannabe-wealthy people who then took those ideas and tried to destroy our institutions of human compassion. In many cases they succeeded.
How many wars have been waged because people who followed Rand's philosophy came into power? How many millions and millions of people have starved, suffered, or died as a result of the simple idea that altruism is a moral evil? The stirs and echoes of Rand's toxic miasma of a philosophy stretch out down the decades...and they haven't stopped yet.
:(
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