Haters gonna hate
At a meeting organized by old objectivists, I got thinking about all those "liberals" (US word for socialists) who so hate Ayn Rand they can't even hear her name without becoming angry, much less articulate a truthful account of her ideas that they could rebuke. They can't even try to put themselves in her shoes, feel like her, rejoice at the things she celebrated, and despise the things she scorned, they can't embrace her biases, what her passion brought that was positive, they can't relate to the wounds that explain her failures. The brain damage is not even at the level of reason, that they may or may not have otherwise reached. It goes deeper. Above all, what these collectivists are missing is EMPATHY.
Funny how collectivists precisely claim to be the great empaths, who feel for the weak, the poor, etc., when in actuality, they totally lack empathy, and use some kind of empty pseudo-empathy for collective abstractions as a prop to fill the utter void in their ability to relate to other humans. And that's how Benjamin Constant was already remarking that their modus operandi was to sacrifice to the people as a collective the holocaust of the people as individuals. (Funny that back in the days, the "liberals" denoted individualists like Benjamin Constant who opposed the growth of the State, when nowadays in the US, it denotes collectivist partisans of the totalitarian State.)
Sure, Ayn Rand herself lacked empathy. Part of it probably comes from innate inclinations. Another part probably involves experiencing the midst of a totalitarian revolution where people denounce each other for profit - to the point that members of the formerly aristocratic families must become themselves the most rabid communists and send their relatives to die in dark prison cells or concentration camps least they themselves get sent to cold death. She probably witnessed enough of the darker part of the human heart everywhere to not want to empathize too much. Yet, though she might have had sociopathic tendencies, she was capable of great personal charity - like giving shelter and a job to people formerly sent to concentration camp by collectivist hero Roosevelt based on their ethnicity. And unlike the "altruistic" collectivist kind of sociopaths, she never argued for mass murder.