Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism

[Mister Agenda]

I recently discoved Ayn Rand and learned about her philosphical views. I found it extremely interesting. The idea that "altruism is immoral" completel goes against all my previous ideas and intuitions, and therefore is quite an uncomfortable idea to entertain, but when I pushed through and read more about what she meant by it, it makes a lot of sense to me. To put it in my own words, she argues that people should not sacrifice themselves for other people if it does not fit with their own needs, because it is equal to suicide. If you help someone, do it because you have a need to do so, not because you think you should do that because you want to be a good person. You are responsible for your own life, and your own happiness. This sounds very healthy to me. I want people around me to live like this, I want my loved ones taking good care of themselves. Most people also have a need to take care of the people around them and to connect with them,  so I don't think that this philosophy leads to people to live self centred lives. It is very counter-intuitive, but it makes sense to me.

What do you think? Do I describe her philosophy well? Is there a flaw in this reasoning? Has this philosophy impacted your ideas as well?

An important thing to remember about Objectivism is that she, as philosophers are wont to do, is using some words in a non-standard way. It's okay, because she's explicit about what she means, but it makes her extremely easy to take out of context. Even in context she has some problems.

By 'altruism' she means helping others in a self-sacrificing way in return for nothing, even the satisfaction of helping others. That's not too far off from the dictionary definition of 'disinterested or selfless concern for the well-being of others'. Naturally she's not going to think much of anything that smacks of abnegation of self. She's talking about a kind of false charity motivated by guilt and/or shame rather than genuinely wanting to do it. Think of Rearden in Atlas Shrugged writing checks for charities that don't want to be associated with him because he's an 'evil industrialist' because it's 'what he is supposed to do'. If he were donating to a cause he believed in because he wanted to further its agenda or live in a world where that charity is well-supported, he would not have been committing a 'Randian sin'.  

By 'selfishness' she means 'enlightened self interest', which is particularly confusing because selfishness ordinarily means helping yourself without regard to others and enlightened self interest in realizing that you can help yourself by helping others.

You seem to understand her pretty well. Her key error was not exactly her fault, since the research had not yet been done, but it turns out that we have innate drives to compassion, empathy, and even self-sacrifice that aren't easily resolved as merely weaknesses that make us susceptible to 'the looters'. Even guilt and shame are part of our heritage as a social species and they played a role in our survival to this point. To at least some degree, the ideal Randian hero was a sociopath.