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Is it true that Ayn Rand ended her life broke and reliant upon Social Security?
Yes, but it's so, so much worse than that.
She ended up broke, reliant on Social Security, and with lung cancer. She was an avid and enthusiastic smoker, and she publicly, loudly, and frequently derided the "fake science" that said smoking was linked to lung cancer. In fact, she—get this, I swear I am not making this up—she told her followers they should smoke, because smoking was a token symbol of how humanity mastered the force of fire.Yes, I'm serious.
She actually said that not only did smoking not cause cancer, but that people who said it did were repeating "Communist propaganda"—yes, really—and that "correlation is not causation."
After she was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1974, she couldn't afford treatment, so she was covered by Medicaid. She refused to back down on the idea that smoking is harmless and doesn't cause lung cancer, continuing to insist that lung cancer and smoking have nothing to do with each other until she died. Of lung cancer.
You can't make this shit up.
Ayn Rand is like a cartoon villain from an episode of Rick and Morty. She was comedically inept, arrogant, and cartoonishly unable to see what was right in front of her. She was emotionally unstable, erratic (she destroyed the Objectivist schools founded by her lover Nathaniel Branden, who she had an affair with; she believed that monogamy was an archaic relic, but freaked out when he began a relationship with someone other than her, and spent the rest of her life destroying him), stubborn, and hilariously hypocritical.
I will not, if I live to be a thousand years old, ever understand why people worship this woman. She was more wrong more frequently on a wider range of topics than any human who came before her up to Aristotle, but unlike Aristotle she was mendacious about it.