It's those looters who don't approve of excellence who are keeping you down. Surely you would be rich and famous and high-status like you deserve if not for them, those unappreciative bastards and their conspiracy of mediocrity.

Any Objectivists who believe this have missed half of Ayn Rand's message and are doing Objectivism completely wrong.

Not only did they miss one of the main points of John Galt's three hour long speech in Atlas Shrugged, but people who level this accusation against Objectivism as a whole missed it as well.

The point I'm referring to is that it takes two things for the looters to keep the men of ability down.

• Someone has a wish that their rationality should tell them they can never have, and they do not discard this irrational wish.
• Someone who has the ability to give the irrational man his wish fails to deny that of him.

When those two things happen, the man of ability has allowed the irrational man to fake his desired reality, and everything spirals downward from there.

The self-proclaimed Objectivists who say "It's not my fault!" aren't much, if at all, better than the looters in the book who also proclaim "It's not my fault!" They want their lives to be better, but rather than using their minds to make their lives better, they wallow in mediocrity and blame, not the men of ability, but the men of inability for their problems. Which is way more pathetic, in a way.