Watching Sarah Palin just creeped me out but what's worse is knowing she has an audience for such drivel.

There are 300 million people in the U.S. and book sales of 3 million is 1% of the population. Palin does have a rabid support base but it would be a mistake to take the raw numbers at face value without realizing that Sarah's views reflect a very small portion of our overall population. Personally I much prefer the Palin from England....Michael Palin and his Norwegian Blue.

Of course, I'm going to have to go back and re-read her work now, because, yes, I read it in my teens, was blown away by it and haven't looked at it since. So in my mind, it retains a patina of brilliance. Thanks for the (potential) reality check.

My worry is the percentage of the population in the US who started the swiftboating saga that put Bush into the White House

A serge in sales? Are you saying they are increasingly red?

OK OK have corrected serge to surge. Just remember I am mildly dyslectic so if the spell checked does not pick it up ....

Interesting post... and I am always interested in which philosophies people subscribe or unsubscribe to... and I was actually quite surprised by the number of people who subscribe to complexity but not to Rand.

I am very fond of the Buddhist notion of the "Myth of Permanence" (and it seems that chaos, complexity and quantum sciences are as well)...

This myth basically states that contemplation of permanence leads to meditation on security (probability and order)... and that contemplation of impermanence leads to meditation on freedom (possibility and chaos).

The reason they say that permanence is a myth is found in the notion that everything which is conditioned into being, is innately impermanent. Therefore that which we believe to be permanent will ultimately become unconditioned, leaving us with suffer and waste.

The mathematician Godel provided a theorem that any formal system can not be both complete and consistent...

Thermodynamics provided that any closed system (the universe being the ultimate) has an ever increasing rate of entropy (a measure of disorder), but pockets of open systems can lower entropy by importing negentropy, but further increasing the overall entropy...

Socrates provided the simple notion of asking the right questions to expose holes in our reasoning (interestingly simply poking people until they noticed the incompleteness or inconsistencies)...

And we have further metaphors being provided by chaos and complexity theories as well as quantum mechanics (which I am finding more and more are close to Western versions Eastern philosophies)...

What's my point?

I am led into the position that a person's philosophy, as well as the philosophies they choose to subscribe themselves to, are a representation of or reflection on their contemplations of permanences and impermanences leading to meditations on security or freedom... and further more that it is how these contemplations bubble up both in and from humans individually and socially that result in the order we find security in or the chaos we find freedom in...

So that would advance the idea of why Rand might be so appealing to teenagers who are at a point in their life where they are conflicting with old permanences in search of new ones... as well as why an Archbishop from Canterbury is criticizing it...

Furthermore, I am finding it increasingly hard to find just cause and reason to argue with people and their philosophies, and more reason to understand people and their philosophies (more hermeneutical)...

One idea from Ayn Rand that I was always left with was the simple fact that it is extremely hard to escape ourselves and our own self-interest.

Oh and to throw some politics into it all... gimme some RON PAUL in 2012!

Ron Paul, Mark? Interesting choice, even if the comment was made in sarcasm (not sure what your political affiliations are).

Dave - may that percentage for population realise the folly of their ways before it's too late, although I doubt that will ever happen.