Ayn Rand, author of such novels as The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, was not only a great novelist, but a great philosopher as well. She believed the view of life portrayed in her characters to be not only an effective literary device, but a philosophy as well - one capable of radically altering the way in which we think and live.

Our culture is disintegrating. The rampant irrationality of modern culture is seen everywhere - from our universities to our city streets. We are told that man's mind is impotent; that either he is the freak of the universe, doomed to suffer the nauseating despair of godless absurdity, or that he must surrender his mind to a higher "supernatural" power. We are told that man has no right to exist for his own sake; that instead, he must sacrifice himself for others. We are told that the individual is nothing without the masses; that society has the "right" to exploit the individual to its own ends.

Objectivism rejects these ideas in total. It holds the following principles:

Reality is objective; facts exist independently of anyone's beliefs, fears, or wishes.
Reason is man's only source of knowledge and his basic tool of survival.
Man is an end in himself - which means that each individual must live by his own mind and for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor others to himself.
The political implementation of these principles is the original American system, laissez-faire capitalism, a system based on man's inalienable rights, with the sole function of government being the protection of those rights. (Summary of Objectivism from pamphlet provided by the Ayn Rand Institute.

By espousing these principles, Objectivism rejects any and all forms of mysticism, altruism or collectivism. This includes all forms of religion, modern fads like environmentalism, multiculturalism, post-modernism or existentialism, and the ideologies represented by all predominant political parties.

Unlike these movements, Objectivism provides proof for its claims. The validation of its principles is contained in the extended non-fiction works of Ayn Rand and her successors. These include Ayn Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, The Virtue of Selfishness, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal as well as Leonard Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand.The facts to which these works point are "provided" by reality.