| | In Mackey's defense for that quote, I think he's working off the standard definition of altruism, rather than the much narrower definition of altruism that Objectivists use. Basically, he appears to be ignorant of some of the most basic principles of Objectivism.
And, yes, given his history of getting thoroughly slammed by liberals for speaking out about health care and not sticking to the Obama Party Line TM, he's bound to be nervous deviating from the liberal dogma embraced by a huge chunk of his customers. I think it is rational for him to nervously gauge the reactions of his customers as he deliberately says things that could backfire and lead to the loss of some business.
Mackey's no Objectivist, and he's a very small-l libertarian at most, but I think he is an ally of the individualist coalition. I'm willing to cut him some slack for trying to thread the needle between stating his beliefs -- beliefs that run counter to the views of most of his customers -- and not losing hundreds of millions of dollars in business and provoking another firestorm that might get him ousted as CEO.
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[Ayn Rand] made a, I believe, an unneccessary polarity between selfishness -- or self-interest -- and altruism. She saw those as opposites. She saw that, or believed, altruism was fundamentally evil. ... I always felt like that was just inaccurate to human nature: That fundamentally human beings are both self-interested and capable of love, and that you can't understand human beings unless you see that we are both of them -- and so I reject the polarity.
