CULTS HAVE THEIR COMFORTS. Membership persuades their adherents that they are an elite, party to the secret workings of the world, unlike everyone else who exist in a benighted condition of original ignorance. Adherents are saved, non-adherents are damned.
One of the most curious of modern cults is surely that of Ayn Rand. Well before the advent of social media, cult members turned on heretics, renegades and unbelievers with the virulence of extremists, and one editor tells me that never in the 40-year history of his publication has anything aroused such fury as an article dispraising Rand. For members of her cult, she must be perfect, a kind of Mohammed or Lenin.
A cult needs its guru, and gurus comes in different shapes and sizes; but Ayn Rand is surely one of the least attractive of them. Intolerant, humourless, lacking in irony, incapable of self-doubt, arrogant, single-minded, hard and inflexible, it is difficult for those not under her spell to think of anything that accounts for the absolute loyalty that she inspired.
But just as some are inclined to believe that the lengths to which fanatics are prepared to go to further their cause reflects favourably upon the justice of that cause, so, perhaps, the very
