Life & Mortality Quote by John McCarthy

McCarthy’s line has the cool, managerial chill of someone treating emotion like a public-safety problem. Hatred, in his framing, isn’t a moral failure so much as a hazardous material: it will exist, it will seek a target, and the only question is where you store it. Ayn Rand is offered as the ideal lightning rod precisely because she’s dead, famous, and already a symbolic stand-in for a whole worldview. If people are going to rage, better they rage at an effigy than at a neighbor.

The intent is almost brutally pragmatic. He’s not defending Rand, and he’s not endorsing hate; he’s advocating triage. Politicians often speak in abstractions about unity and civility. McCarthy instead admits the underlying engine of politics: grievance needs an object. The subtext is that trying to “talk anyone out of” hatred is not only futile, it can be counterproductive. Efforts to reform feelings can redirect them toward the reformer.

Context matters: Rand functions less as an author than as a totem in American ideological combat, especially for critics of libertarianism and market fundamentalism. A dead totem is safe because it can’t sue you, threaten you, or show up at your door. The sly move is the phrase “might actually do harm,” which drags the discussion from ethics into consequences. It’s a politician’s calculus: symbolic scapegoats are preferable to real ones, because real ones bleed.