The Age of Selfishness Ayn Rand, Morality, and the Financial Crisis by Darryl Cunningham

​     We live in the age of selfishness. It didn’t begin with Ayn rand, but this book does. And then goes on to cleverly connect her specific brand of lunacy to the present day ugliness through theoretical links of ideology and very real and tangible link of Alan Greenspan, a once upon a time Rand disciple who went on to become a longtime chairman of the Federal Reserve until 2006 and had entirely too much to do with the financial crisis that followed almost immediately after.
    Ayn Rand was a character.  Ayn Rand was a caricature, really, and thus lends itself perfectly to being featured cartoonishly. The thing is…every single thing about her theories, her thinking, her ideas…it’s all perfectly explicable, given her background. She’s a perfectly epitome of you can take the girl out of (insert country of origin), but you can’t take (country of origin) out of a girl. She left behind a totalitarian regime of conformity and oppression and went on to reinvent one in the new world. Every ugly and wrong thing she loathes, she brought with her. And she didn’t seem to realize it either. She comfortably preached individualism while actively submitting her followers to her will and rule and abiding no dissent. She extolled the virtue of self reliance, perfectly comfortable accepting assistance from her relatives who helped her get established in her new country. She even accepted government’s assistance late in life when she needed it, from the safety net she has been so determined to destroy with her ideology. So yeah, hypocritical and hypercritical, she was a critically panned author who tended to wrap her ideology in oversentimental overwritten tomes that extolled selfishness as virtue and money as the most important thing of all. That’s a reductionist version of her life, but this reviewer is trying for brevity. That’s also chapter one of the book.
     The subsequent two chapters take you into the making of a financial crisis and its aftermath. And here I’ll try to be even more reductive…making of was caused by uncontrolled greed and made possible by deregulated markets and the aftermath was surpassingly slap on the wrist mild. And thus we are currently living in a society with the most striking and ever increasing wealth disparity and nothing is likely going to be done about it.
    The author seems to be more optimistic than me, but then again this book was published in 2015. That’s practically ironic. Or just sad. To publish such a scathing condemnation of a great American socioeconomic tragedy a year before The US took a decisive (avalanche style) turn downhill, to rant about a financial crisis when nowadays the very democracy is in crisis…yeah, no words.
     But some closing words must be said…Cunningham is good. This was my second read by him and he’s got a knack for explaining complex things simply, with simple but fun cartoons to go along. And so this was a very good guide to the whys and wherefores of American financial system for anyone interested. Not an easy read, great injustices don’t really make for those, but an important one. And that timing…oh, man. 
     Ayn Rand may be on the cover of this production and featured heavily in it, but it wasn’t her fault, she’s more of a gargoyle presiding over a great temple to Mammon that American dream greed built. The age of selfishness is a comfortable age to live in, but it’s brutal for the soul. 
   The author takes a much more polemic approach to it and as a result the book is very ne sided and very partisan and very much the case of preaching to the choir. It seems unlikely that the people on the right (who are according to the book are statistically more stuck in their ways and less willing to accept new information and change their minds) might read this book and see the error of their ways. And people of the left probably already know all these things and are powerless to change them. Such is life. Knowledge is probably meant to empower, but it mostly just frustrates. There’s a reason there’s that saying about ignorance…
   For anyone choosing to forgo ignorance and its cozy promises, this is a good and informative read