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RE: Quora Q and A: What were Ayn Rand's Great Sins?
Ayn Rand was educated in the Soviet Union and she ended up rejecting the ideology that she encountered in school.
People who reject their schooling tend to develop a contrarian style.
So, while she clearly was influenced by Nietzsche, I suspect you would find a strong distaste for Nietzsche's style of nilhilism.
When Ayn Rand came to the United States, she found American intellectuals mired in the same rubbish as she saw in Leningrad.
Her effort to create Objectivism from the ground up as a new ideology shows that she saw something extremely toxic in modern discourse and felt that the best approach was to start over.
"Ayn Rand was educated in the Soviet Union and she ended up rejecting the ideology that she encountered in school.
People who reject their schooling tend to develop a contrarian style."
Yes.
"So, while she clearly was influenced by Nietzsche, I suspect you would find a strong distaste for Nietzsche's style of nilhilism."
Nietzsche wasn't a nihilist. He was pointing out that nihilism is a predictable result of the death of Medieval Christian values. His work was mostly concerned with addressing the problem of nihilism by the individual search for true, overcoming virtue. Rand's main critique of Nietzsche was that he proposed that because values have to be created by individuals (which is an idea that much of her work grew out of), he did not propose an objective morality of any kind (which she did - based on egoism). While Rand proposes an objective morality and Nietzsche doesn't, Rand's underlying premises rely heavily on Nietzsche's work.
"When Ayn Rand came to the United States, she found American intellectuals mired in the same rubbish as she saw in Leningrad."
Yes. She even portrays in one of her plays how American "liberal" intellectuals were actually aiding and abetting the communists directly, which was utterly horrifying to her.
"Her effort to create Objectivism from the ground up as a new ideology shows that she saw something extremely toxic in modern discourse and felt that the best approach was to start over."
Yes. Which, in and of itself, is a very Cartesian impulse. Descarte's project made her project possible in a lot of ways.
The connection between Nietzsche and Rand is interesting.
Personally, I see Nietzsche as a ranting narcissist like Joseph Smith. Both were in love with their ideas and both managed to form a cult following.
It is interesting that Nietzsche saw himself as anti-authoritarian and his rantings became a favorite read of the National Socialists who saw themselves as Nietzsche uber-men driving by the will to power to become the worst authoritarians in history.
Youtube has a video where Rand claims that Objectivism is a fundamental rejection of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.
Ayn Rand seems to face the problem of all philosophies in that reactionary philosophies always end up bearing an imprint of the thing the philosopher is reacting against.