Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Come on, man.

Fight for a just cause, love your fellow man, live a good life.

T R E 4 5 O N

Fight them, without becoming them!

Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

One way or another, he’s a liar.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

You are either for trump or for democracy. Pick one.

“Perhaps I should have considered other options.” (head-desk)

We can show the world that autocracy can be defeated.

I’m more christian than these people and i’m an atheist.

When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty. ~Thomas Jefferson

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

The fight for our country is always worth it. ~Kamala Harris

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

“Loving your country does not mean lying about its history.”

’Where will you hide, Roberts, the laws all being flat?’

Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

Sometimes the world just tells you your cat is here.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

“In the future, this lab will be a museum. do not touch it.”

You are here: Home / Economics / Free Markets Solve Everything / The Last Word on Ayn Rand

The Last Word on Ayn Rand

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Responding to DougJ’s open thread about Ayn Rand, I would just like to state that IMHO, this is all that ever needs to be said about the philosophy:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

The irreplaceable Kung Fu Monkey.

Reader Interactions

141Comments

  2. 2.

    Rob in CT

    That line really is brilliant. I’ve read both, and my love of LotR endures. Rand’s works, on the other hand, massaged my (often butthurt) teenaged ego for a little while before being blown away by, you know, reality.

  6. 6.

    JustAnotherBob

    @PeakVT:

    I doubt that many of the 27% have read her books. I don’t get the feeling that most of the 27% are the reading types.

    They are more the ‘blind follower’ types.

  7. 7.

    Litlebritdifrnt

    The only thing anyone needs to know about Rand is that she drew social security and medicare in her later years. In other words she was a total and utter fraud and a hypocrite.

  8. 8.

    JD Rhoades

    Has anyone else linked to this yet (my favorite take on Atlas Shrugged)?

    http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/10/01/what-i-think-about-atlas-shrugged/

    …the idealized world Ayn Rand has created to facilitate her wishful theorizing has no more logical connection to our real one than a world in which an author has imagined humanity ruled by intelligent cups of yogurt. This is most obviously revealed by the fact that in Ayn Rand’s world, a man who self-righteously instigates the collapse of society, thereby inevitably killing millions if not billions of people, is portrayed as a messiah figure rather than as a genocidal prick, which is what he’d be anywhere else. Yes, he’s a genocidal prick with excellent engineering skills. Good for him. He’s still a genocidal prick. Indeed, if John Galt were portrayed as an intelligent cup of yogurt rather than poured into human form, this would be obvious. Oh my god, that cup of yogurt wants to kill most of humanity to make a philosophical point! Somebody eat him quick! And that would be that.

  9. 9.

    JGabriel

    __
    __
    Is it worth noting that John Rogers (kfmonkey blogger and author of the Rand/Rings quote) is also the creator and show runner of Leverage? Whether or not it is, consider it noted.

    Also, Rogers has worked on Dungeons & Dragons manuals and comics, which gives an extra shot of irony to his comment about orcs.

    .

  10. 10.

    Hunter Gathers

    Atlas Shrugged is nothing more than Battlefield Earth for upper-class idiots. Both are are shitty science fiction. Although they both come in handy when couch legs break.

  12. 12.

    Comrade Jake

    Look, all you really need to know is that Pamela Geller’s website is named Atlas Shrugs.

  13. 13.

    Mike E

    My daughter’s Summer reading list includes The Fountainhead and a Kaplan AP test prep book is also recommended…I’m wondering if her teacher is telegraphing sumptin.

  14. 14.

    beltane

    I’ve said this many times, but Ayn Rand is nothing more than a drab, cloddish, bourgeois imitation of the Marquis de Sade. Rand shares De Sade’s sociopathy, but her writing style is far more clunky and awkward and her shrill, embittered persona is just depressing.

  15. 15.

    gelfling545

    @PeakVT: As I may have mentioned before (because I have never forgotten), I was suckered into reading Atlas Shrugged at age 18 by a friend of my life-long democrat & union member father. Bob was one of about 6 (actual count) registered conservatives in our town. I have never forgiven the loss of those golden moments of my youth spent on that drivel. No matter how you look at it – as literature, philosophy or just plain story-telling- it is ghastly to a degree rarely achieved by any author who actually gets published. My parents, very wisely in my opinion, made it a practice never to restrict what I was allowed to read but I sometimes wish they had made an exception in this case.

  19. 19.

    quannlace

    than a world in which an author has imagined humanity ruled by intelligent cups of yogurt

    On the Leonard Lopate show they just had an author on, talking about his book on different kinds of fermentaion. ( yogurt, cheese, saurkraut, beer….) After listening to him, cups of yogurt definitley sound more interesting than Rand’s cardboard characters.

  20. 20.

    eric

    I would rather re-read Jude the Obscure over and over for the remainder of my life than even pick up that trash. (Jude wins as the single most depressing book I have ever read.)

  22. 22.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Comrade Jake: and The Atlantic’s business and economics editor once used the pseudonym “Jane Galt”. Which I’m sure Longellow, Emerson et al would be totally cool with. Of course, once you hand the keys to loony Michael Kelly, I’m not sure it matters what they would’ve thought.

  26. 26.

    rlrr

    There’s a company in St. Louis called Bradford and Galt, founded by someone named Bradford who is a Randroid…

  27. 27.

    Punchy

    The Last Word on Ayn Rand

    Where do I place my $10,000 bet on the “no it wont be” wager?

  28. 28.

    Suffern ACE

    Oh Ryan is apparently heading to the Iowa state fair. This really means its been a year since the press went nuts over how natural Perry appeared among the salt of the earth Iowa voters. How well he connected in his cowboy boots. It was a game changer for the Republican campaign, it was, it was. It practically guanteed he was a serious contender, much like that Ames Straw Poll win sewed it up for Bachman.

  29. 29.

    SatanicPanic

    @Litlebritdifrnt: Here is where I see a contradiction- Rand is going around harping on being a “producer” at the same time she’s arguing the virtue of self-interest. But if self-interest is a virtue, then what difference does it make whether you produce or not? It’s in her self interest to hustle a bunch of rubes and live off what the producers produce, because it’s easier to be a moocher. I suspect hearing that she took SS wouldn’t matter a bit to her fans. They all want to be Romney- a high end moocher. That producer stuff is just what they feed to the rubes.

  30. 30.

    Dork

    I suppose, as in the case of Paul Ryan’s staff

    With all due respect, it’s the MSM’s job to fanboi over Paul Ryan’s staff.

  32. 32.

    Turgidson

    @rlrr:

    I still find it odd there are Christian any Ayn Rand devotees who aren’t clinically insane…

    Fixt.

  33. 33.

    isildur

    I was a teenage Randroid.

    I’ve written about this before at length, and if anyone really wants to read a wall of text about the actual philosophical principles Rand outlines, I’ll be happy to repost it, but the short form is:

    Rand offers teenage outcasts two powerful self-definitions: first, that feeling you have when you’re a teenager that everything has a simple answer and if only people would listen to your 18 years of wisdom you could solve every problem is actually correct; second, that the reason you’re a social outcast is that you’re actually better than the people around you, who are nothing but a bunch of moochers and looters.

    It’s profoundly effective at turning teenage angst into teenage determination.

  34. 34.

    jl

    I think there was a link in this here blog about how Ryan has been trying to play both sides of the fence here. Randian psycho for one audience, devout pious insufferably smarmy little Christian boy for another.

    Anyone have the link?

    I think this is fair game and hope some one goes after Ryan on this. The Village will howl ‘personal attack’, but any sane voter will pay attention, I think. So will be important for around 70 percent of the voting population.

    Edit: I also think the topic of willful rampant hypocrisy is fair game.

  39. 39.

    danielx

    @gelfling545:

    Yup. I went through a somewhat similar experience, except that I was fourteen. I started to reread it at 17 and got about 50 pages in, then came to the realization that the book was genuinely awful and took it back to the library.

    People over the age of 18 who take Ayn Rand seriously are people who have never grown up and never will.

    In other news, Mitt’s foreign policy team sounds like a compilation by various artists of All War, All The Time: Greatest Hits. You just can’t keep these bastards down.

    http://tbogg.firedoglake.com/2012/08/13/bill-kristol-is-getting-the-band-back-together-again/

  40. 40.

    Anoniminous

    @Suffern ACE:

    Them Iowa corn farmers will love this:

    National farm and crop insurance subsidies would be cut by $30 billion over 10 years under a proposal made by [Ryan] on Tuesday …

    At a time when the MidWest corn crop has turned into popcorn.

  41. 41.

    FlipYrWhig

    @isildur: I see myself as a near miss. If I had ever heard of the books, my teenaged self would probably have loved them, because I was temperamentally sullen and thought everyone around me was an idiot. Instead I became a sentimental misanthrope.

  44. 44.

    peach flavored shampoo

    National farm and crop insurance subsidies would be cut by $30 billion over 10 years under a proposal made by [Ryan] Obama on Tuesday …

    Fixed for how it will appear in GOP commercials, stump speeches, and sadly, CNN broadcasts.

  46. 46.

    Seanly

    I got into Ayn Rand trying to fathom The Fountainhead for some essay contest. Never wrote the essay, but did read a bunch of her stuff, culminating with Atlas Shrugged. Her horrible writing & progressively stupider philosophy turned me off. I’m probably a raging neo-soc1alist because of her terrible works.

    There were so many plot holes and things that made little sense if any.

  47. 47.

    D0n Camillo

    The thing is, for all her faults at least Ayn Rand came by her anti government views honestly. She lived through the Russian Revolution and watched her father’s pharmacy be confiscated by the state leaving her family destitute. Watching the rise of Stalin and Hitler in the 20th Century could justifiably make one suspicious of too much government. Of course she also lived in the US when FDR used government to save the country from the worst effects of the Great Depression, but it’s pretty obvious that her mind was already made up at that point.

    What has big government ever done to Paul Ryan apart from pay him Social Security survivor benefits and provide him with a paycheck for most of non Wienermobile career?

  49. 49.

    Rob in CT

    @isildur:

    Rand offers teenage outcasts two powerful self-definitions: first, that feeling you have when you’re a teenager that everything has a simple answer and if only people would listen to your 18 years of wisdom you could solve every problem is actually correct; second, that the reason you’re a social outcast is that you’re actually better than the people around you, who are nothing but a bunch of moochers and looters.

    Yep, that’s basically it. When you’re an geeky 16-year old with no girlfriend, it sorta works. I speak from experience. Still thinking it works when you’re a grownup? Willful self-delusion.

  50. 50.

    jl

    As for reading Rand, there were a number of Randoids at my HS, and I gave in and tried to read her novels. I’m not a fan of thick novels, and I found the writing atrocious, so made it ten or so pages in, seemed like a lifetime, looked at the remaining 4 inches or so of book and put them down forever, one after another.

    In college I tried her essays on Objectivism, from a compilation that included stuff by the young Greenspan. Made not one lick of sense. Totally insane economics. At least standard economics, whatever its drawbacks, is logically consistent. Objectivist economics is raving incoherence. The philosophy just as bad. Read Josepth Butler’s famous critique of the doctrine of egotism and you’ve wiped out nearly all their ethical arguments.

    Only thing Rand ever said I agreed with is that the old Twilight Zone could often be a good show. Rand wrote a whole essay on how the original Twilight Zone TV show was a brilliant tour de force and exemplar of Objectivism. Hilarious, in a drab and sorrowful way.

    Edit: Speculations about my attention span derived from my dislike of long novels are probably correct, but I will read one if it is good. Say, Dickens.

  51. 51.

    Chris

    @Litlebritdifrnt:

    The only thing anyone needs to know about Rand is that she drew social security and medicare in her later years. In other words she was a total and utter fraud and a hypocrite.

    I’ve disagreed with this before and I’m doing it again: for Ayn Rand, the one and only ethic worth following was selfishness. Money was available to her; she wanted it; therefore, she took it.

    People who expect her to not gobble up the money in order to uphold some sort of principle (like many of her followers) have completely missed the point. Selfishness isn’t a bible or a code that you cling to because of its philosophical rightness: you take what you want when you want from wherever you want. And she did.

    (Doesn’t make her or her “philosophy” any less despicable).

  52. 52.

    Anoniminous

    @Ash Can: @NancyDarling:

    If the pinko commies running Texas A&M had allowed students to carry M-16A4s – the one with the handy grenade launcher – AS IS THEIR CONSTITUTIONALLY GAR-ON-TEE’D RIGHT on campus this wouldn’t have happened.

    ETA: Remember, an armed society is a society with large numbers of people in intensive care.

  53. 53.

    beltane

    I have to confess that I’ve never read a word of Ayn Rand’s oeuvre. This is mainly due to the fact that I found her photograph on the dust jacket to be absolutely terrifying, a face literally deformed by the deranged bitterness that consumed her.

    Also, I had enough problems as a teenager to risk catching the fuglies from reading this withered hag’s books.

  55. 55.

    tulip

    JFC… I know this is OT, but another shooting. This time at/near Texas A&M. The gunman opened fired with automatic weapons.

    The shooter has been apprehended… I suppose this is going to be come a weekly thing now. If only those folks at Texas A&M were packing, none of this would have happened, eventhough supposed 2 of the victims were police officers.

  56. 56.

    joel hanes

    @FlipYrWhig:

    my teenaged self would probably have loved them

    You may be underestimating the sheer awfulness of Rand’s prose. For example: few other writers allow their protagonists a fifty page soliloquy, consisting of a single mistaken idea repeated fifty times in slightly different ways. Example two: sex scenes that are repellant rather than hot.

  57. 57.

    Chris

    @JD Rhoades:

    Same article called Atlas Shrugged “right wing nerd revenge porn” and said that its enduring popularity pretty much came from the fact that it was right wing nerd revenge porn.

    Eh. For my money, right wing nerd revenge porn was done a lot better and less pretentiously in Ender’s Game.

  58. 58.

    Mike E

    @Dork:

    fanboi over Paul Ryan’s staff

    I admit my humor is an acquired taste, whilst yours needs, err, annotating.

  59. 59.

    Chris

    @rlrr:

    I still find it odd there are Christian Ayn Rand devotees…

    My assessment: they want to be selfish pricks, but because they’re weak authoritarian-submissive little pricks, they need to be told by a higher power that it’s okay to be selfish and that the higher power wants them to be selfish and that they’re doing great good in the world by being selfish. How to be a prick and still sleep at night – be a Fundiegelical Randroid.

  60. 60.

    scav

    I didn’t read any Rand because I figured anything advertised that frequently using cheap photocopies on bulletin boards at the back of classrooms was probably a scam.

  61. 61.

    jl

    @D0n Camillo: Maybe, but a lot of artists lived through the Russian Revolution, had their, or their family’s stuff confiscated, and did not go raving mad and psycho.

    Mandelstam comes to mind.

  62. 62.

    NotMax

    A clutch of selected Rand quotes:

    Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values.
    __
    If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.
    __
    The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap.
    __
    The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.
    __
    Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue.

  63. 63.

    Brachiator

    @beltane:

    I’ve said this many times, but Ayn Rand is nothing more than a drab, cloddish, bourgeois imitation of the Marquis de Sade. Rand shares De Sade’s sociopathy, but her writing style is far more clunky and awkward and her shrill, embittered persona is just depressing.

    Odd, isn’t it, that de Sade is sometimes depicted as a rebel or a hero, and even had a movie done not too long ago casting him as a misunderstood artist and advocate of free love, Quills (from the IMDB blurb).

    In a Napoleonic era insane asylum, an inmate, the irrepressible Marquis De Sade, fights a battle of wills against a tyrannically prudish doctor.

    Rand hasn’t yet been sanitized canonized despite the huffing and puffing of her admirers.

    A while back, the New Yorker did a great putdown of Rand, and somewhere along the way noted that Rose Wilder Lane, daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder of Little House on the Prairie fame was a big admirer of Rand’s work and is noted as one of the founders of the American libertarian movement.

  64. 64.

    beltane

    @Chris: Evangelical Christianity is centered around individual salvation, so it’s hardly a long path to get from that kind of self-centeredness to Randian selfishness. What I cannot wrap my head around is how anyone who truly follows Catholic teaching can also be a Randian. It would seem that people like Paul Ryan, who claim to follow both teachings, are clearly lying.

  66. 66.

    peach flavored shampoo

    @Anoniminous: I love this blurb in on MSNBC:

    Campus officials issued an alert to faculty and students for an “active shooter” two blocks southeast of the university, which houses the library of former President George W. Bush.

    Let’s keep politics in this! Both sides do it! A GWB hater on the loose! Even though we have no info, clearly a Dem who clearly hates Bush is clearing his muzzle!

  67. 67.

    NotMax

    @joel hanes

    For example: few other writers allow their protagonists a fifty page soliloquy, consisting of a single mistaken idea repeated fifty times in slightly different ways

    Fifty pages for which Rand compromised her principles.

    The publisher wanted to cut all of that out, citing the consequent reduced cost of publishing. He offered Rand the choice of being paid much less to offset those increased printing costs.

    She took the deal.

  68. 68.

    D0n Camillo

    @jl:
    You’re right JL, she was deeply disturbed but you can at least see see where her distrust of centralised government stems from even if her preferred solutions were appalling. Ryan on the other hand has benefitted from gevernment his entire life and has made it his mission to deny those benefits to as many other Americans as possible.

  69. 69.

    Calouste

    @JD Rhoades:

    …the idealized world Ayn Rand has created to facilitate her wishful theorizing has no more logical connection to our real one than a world in which an author has imagined humanity ruled by intelligent cups of yogurt. This is most obviously revealed by the fact that in Ayn Rand’s world, a man who self-righteously instigates the collapse of society, thereby inevitably killing millions if not billions of people, is portrayed as a messiah figure rather than as a genocidal prick, which is what he’d be anywhere else. Yes, he’s a genocidal prick with excellent engineering skills. Good for him. He’s still a genocidal prick. Indeed, if John Galt were portrayed as an intelligent cup of yogurt rather than poured into human form, this would be obvious. Oh my god, that cup of yogurt wants to kill most of humanity to make a philosophical point! Somebody eat him quick! And that would be that.

    That sounds suspiciously like how God acts during the Biblical flood.

  70. 70.

    hep kitty

    @Chris:

    right wing nerd revenge porn

    Seems to me Ayn Rand knew just how to lure those impressionable, self-absorbed young men into her web and all the while, they’re thinking they’re being all intellectual and stuff when actually their lack of self-awareness makes them easy to exploit by a clever, older woman.

  71. 71.

    scav

    Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue?

    well then, Digital Wireless is the windsock of a society’s ethics.

  73. 73.

    Chris

    @D0n Camillo:

    The thing is, for all her faults at least Ayn Rand came by her anti government views honestly.

    As much as I love the Magneto “I suffered horribly in childhood and was therefore tragically turned into a monster” origin story in fiction, I just don’t buy it in real life. Mostly because I’ve met enough people who’ve had childhoods just as bad as Ayn Rand’s or worse and somehow managed to turn into something other than a sociopathic narcissist who held up serial killers as the ultimate example of human perfection.

    I know you weren’t justifying her. Just felt the need to get that off my chest just the same.

  74. 74.

    NancyDarling

    @jl: I have friends who walked across the border from Hungary into Austria in 1956 with their kids, a mother-in-law, and the clothes on their backs. They are all lovely people.

  75. 75.

    beltane

    @Brachiator: The Marquis de Sade was a sick puppy with few redeeming features, and I am not swayed by recent attempts to rehabilitate him. His writing, however, has a certain ebullience that Ayn Rand completely lacks. If one aspires to be a high priest or priestess of depravity, de Sade is certainly a better role model than the dreary, unhappy looking Ayn Rand.

  77. 77.

    AA+ Bonds

    Is any reporter gonna do a “gotcha” interview where they quiz Paul Ryan on the work of Thomas Aquinas, with which he claims to be more familiar than with Ayn Rand

    Just quiz him with some really basic stuff from Summa Theologica and see if he does as well with that as he does with factoids from Atlas Shrugged

    It would make a reporter’s career

  78. 78.

    AA+ Bonds

    @beltane:

    The Marquis de Sade was a sick puppy with few redeeming features, and I am not swayed by recent attempts to rehabilitate him

    He’s a baptism by fire, that’s for sure

  79. 79.

    Brachiator

    @isildur:

    Rand offers teenage outcasts two powerful self-definitions: first, that feeling you have when you’re a teenager that everything has a simple answer and if only people would listen to your 18 years of wisdom you could solve every problem is actually correct; second, that the reason you’re a social outcast is that you’re actually better than the people around you, who are nothing but a bunch of moochers and looters.

    Yeah, I can see this. A number of books fit the bill here, including of course A Catcher in the Rye. Others develop a fondness for a SF writer like Heinlein.

    I had a college girlfriend who was big on Rand, at least The Fountainhead and really liked the heroic protagonists against the world stuff.

  80. 80.

    AA+ Bonds

    @D0n Camillo:

    The thing is, for all her faults at least Ayn Rand came by her anti government views honestly. She lived through the Russian Revolution and watched her father’s pharmacy be confiscated by the state leaving her family destitute.

    Because her family were anti-revolutionary Whites and toffs . . . the point being that her philosophy doesn’t come from her experience during the Revolution; it comes from the way she was brought up by her parents

  81. 81.

    AA+ Bonds

    @Brachiator:

    It’s a good point – Heinlein is just as bad as Rand and in my opinion far more offensive in how he portrays women

    I mean imagine those Dagny Taggert scenes except that the rapist is a stand-in for the author; that is how Heinlein reads to me

  82. 82.

    Suffern ACE

    @AA+ Bonds: The important thing about Aquinas is that he proves that our rights come from the laws of nature and God and not from government. And most certainly does not include homosexuals. Beyond that talking point, I doubt he’s read anything by Acquinas that he felt would be profitable, and therefore it is long forgotten.

  84. 84.

    Chris

    @Brachiator:

    I had a college girlfriend who was big on Rand, at least The Fountainhead and really liked the heroic protagonists against the world stuff.

    Indulging myself as a sci-fi nerd here –

    One of the things I loved about Wrath Of Khan is the way they flipped that “heroic protagonist against the world” thing on its head. Objectively, Khan is smarter and stronger than any of the baseline humans on the Enterprise. He still gets his ass handed to him, first because of a routine measure he didn’t know about, then because the Enterprise crew has experience in starship operations and he doesn’t. Procedure and training > innate awesomeness, and dull boring bureaucracy > Superheroic Individual. You know… like most of the time in real life.

    Trekkie interlude over, please go back to the Rand-bashing.

  85. 85.

    isildur

    Ok, here’s my wall of text about Rand. If you don’t really know what it is she believed, or what sorts of intellectual shenanigans Paul Ryan subscribes to, this will hopefully give you an easier introduction than trying to read her actual writing. Think of it as the Cliff’s Notes version of her entire oeuvre.

    https://plus.google.com/u/0/111922906987995001876/posts/EDj5MZEWsYJ

    (I realize this is far enough down in the thread to be missed, but hopefully it’s useful to one or two of you.)

  86. 86.

    Just One More Canuck

    @PurpleGirl: Certainly not me – I started it in the hopes of getting “close” with this girl from university – I gave up after about 3 pages and figured if this is the stuff she’s into, she’s crazy

  87. 87.

    Rob in CT

    @Chris:

    Also: if Kirk had merely followed regulations, the whole thing would’ve ended quickly with a resounding win for the Enterprise. Regulations!

    ;)

  88. 88.

    Matt in HB

    @Rob in CT:

    That line really is brilliant. I’ve read both, and my love of LotR endures. Rand’s works, on the other hand, massaged my (often butthurt) teenaged ego for a little while before being blown away by, you know, reality.

    This. Exactly this.

    I should probably re-read the Fountainhead, as my memory of it is that it was much better than Atlas Shrugged. I wonder if a fresh read would change that to awful, but better than Atlas Shrugged.

  89. 89.

    wrb

    Can we add Joseph Smith to the mix? With all due respect, he seemed to have had the idea long before Rand or Hubbard.
    Reply

    Smith’s there.

    It is LRon who is being dissed.

    In a Romney/Ryan administration Tom Cruise has a lock on secretary of Defense.

  90. 90.

    Jay in Oregon

    @SatanicPanic:

    I suspect hearing that [Rand] took SS wouldn’t matter a bit to her fans.

    IIRC, the revisionist history that’s applied to that is: hey, she paid money into the system, so it’s only right that she gets to take her money back out again.

  91. 91.

    isildur

    @Matt in HB: The Fountainhead remains modestly stylish, which is its only saving grace. The world in which the characters move feels like the set of a period piece about the 1920s. Atlas Shrugged lacks that stylishness.

  92. 92.

    Elrond

    Couldn’t have said it any better.

    I read the Fountainhead about 7 or 8 years ago, and it was fine as a plot driven, non-political work about a rebel architect. Nothing extraordinary, but I found it interesting and not especially political. Then I picked up Atlas Shrugged. I lasted about 50 pages before it made me sick. Terrible characters, terrible writing, ridiculous plot. My time would have been better spent re-reading the Hardy Boys.

  93. 93.

    jl

    @Suffern ACE:

    Ryan’s public statements alone on how humans should be treated by government or economic system show that he gives not one rat’s ass about anything Aquinas said.

    If Ryan ever said he studied Aquinas, just some of his smarmy pious little church boy schtick for the rubes.

    Or, he did not understand one word of Aquinas’ economics.

  94. 94.

    Brachiator

    @beltane:

    If one aspires to be a high priest or priestess of depravity, de Sade is certainly a better role model than the dreary, unhappy looking Ayn Rand.

    I don’t know. Some of the people who look at de Sade as a poetic libertine conveniently omit the sad historical fact that many of his victims were not willing participants, but servant women, and that de Sade could get away with what he did because he was a minor noble, and the laws gave the lower classes no rights.

    Rand, on the other hand, just wrote crazy shit and inspired fools like Ryan and the Pauls.

  95. 95.

    Nicole

    @Chris:

    As much as I love the Magneto “I suffered horribly in childhood and was therefore tragically turned into a monster” origin story in fiction, I just don’t buy it in real life. Mostly because I’ve met enough people who’ve had childhoods just as bad as Ayn Rand’s or worse and somehow managed to turn into something other than a sociopathic narcissist who held up serial killers as the ultimate example of human perfection.
    I know you weren’t justifying her. Just felt the need to get that off my chest just the same.

    This sounds a lot like a right-winger arguing that they know poor people who managed to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, therefore, welfare is for lazy people. My stepmother is a refugee, from the Pol Pot regime. She spent four years in a labor camp, struggling to keep my (now) stepbrothers from starving to death. And I know a lot of her acquaintances, many of whom were also refugees. And some of their kids have gone on to be gang members, etc. because their parents were too traumatized by what they’d been through to really be able to parent, or to find work, or learn English. Does that mean they are total losers because my stepmom pulled it together after her world went to hell and they didn’t?

    I’m a screaming liberal, but thanks to a teenage crush on a Rand fan (le sigh) I read a lot of her stuff, and the biographies about her (which I HIGHLY recommend, as they are much more entertaining than anything she wrote). She was a Russian Jew, born during a very anti-Semitic period, and as a teenager, her family had everything taken away from them by the government, going from upper-middle-class to very poor. In addition, she had a toxic relationship with her mother, and, due to her very high intelligence, lack of physical attractiveness, and absolute lack of social skills, had few friends (it’s been speculated by some that she might have fallen somewhere on the autism spectrum).

    Her husband was (it seems, at least to this reader of her biographies) to have been a closeted homosexual, so there was little intimacy in her marriage. So, not much love from her family, not much love in her marriage. She was messed up in a whole host of ways.

    And yeah, she was mean, she was manipulative, she was angry. But viewing her as a refugee from a revolution, and one who managed to make a life for herself as a writer in a language that she didn’t learn until she was an adult, it’s hard for me to muster the vitriol that a lot of Lefties have for her. Probably the bleeding heart in me. ;)

    Besides, it’s hard for me to have utter hatred for a woman who said, in 1975:

    “I urge you, as emphatically as I can, not to support the candidacy of Ronald Reagan. I urge you not to work for or advocate his nomination, and not to vote for him. My reasons are as follows: Mr. Reagan is not a champion of capitalism, but a conservative in the worst sense of that word—i.e., an advocate of a mixed economy with government controls slanted in favor of business rather than labor (which, philosophically, is as untenable a position as one could choose—see Fred Kinnan in Atlas Shrugged, pp. 541-2). This description applies in various degrees to most Republican politicians, but most of them preserve some respect for the rights of the individual. Mr. Reagan does not: he opposes the right to abortion.”

  98. 98.

    Elrond

    Ayn Rand fanatics are quite ill-equipped for reality. My own experience bears this out.

    My cousin is a big Ayn Rand devotee who posts quotes from Atlas Shrugged on his Facebook wall. About a month ago, he de-friended me for being a liberal. I asked him why he was making this big stand on Facebook–a site where you keep up with your family and friends–and he said that his ‘philosophy,’ which he called a ‘belief in freedom’ demanded total consistency, and that being my friend was an endorsement of positions that were anti-freedom and that he couldn’t be seen as endorsing my thieving, decadent Keynesian socialist world view.

    He de-friended several other members of our family for the same reason. This supreme conviction, however, hasn’t kept him from ‘liking’ Lupe Fiasco. Perhaps he hasn’t listened to any of his lyrics.

  100. 100.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Not that I think the VIllagers or “swing voters” will notice, but Ryan the Randian’s hypocrisy goes waaaaay beyond getting a death benefit as a child.

    I was struck by the revelation in this morning’s paean to zombie eyed granny-starving in the Times, that young, up-from-the-muddy-bootstraps Paul Ryan, the plucky burger-flippin’ success story from darkest Janesville, Wisconsin, had amassed a fortune of “between three and $7.7 million” without having held a more lucrative job than “Congressman” at any point in his adult life. Then, I noticed another item. Namely, that:

    That fortune? He didn’t build that.
    Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/The_Ryan_Family's_History_Of_Fakery#ixzz23SOC9hGQ

  101. 101.

    isildur

    @Brachiator: Most people who think de Sade was some kind of romantic or heroic figure haven’t read 120 Days of Sodom. I have. It’s reprehensible. It’s the product of a diseased mind.

  102. 102.

    Laura

    I’ve never read any of Ayn Rand’s books. Is it because I was never a white teenage boy?

  103. 103.

    Brachiator

    @Chris:

    Indulging myself as a sci-fi nerd here – One of the things I loved about Wrath Of Khan is the way they flipped that “heroic protagonist against the world” thing on its head. Objectively, Khan is smarter and stronger than any of the baseline humans on the Enterprise. He still gets his ass handed to him, first because of a routine measure he didn’t know about, then because the Enterprise crew has experience in starship operations and he doesn’t. Procedure and training > innate awesomeness, and dull boring bureaucracy > Superheroic Individual. You know… like most of the time in real life.

    Well, yes, but….

    Khan, of course, in the TV episode and the film, is part of a group of genetically enhanced humans who see themselves as superior to ordinary humans.

    But in The Wrath of Khan, Khan is beaten because even though he has read the computer logs and caught up on the future, he still thinks like a sailor navigating a ship on the two dimensional plane of the ocean, not someone with a deep understanding of 3 dimensional starship tactics.

    It was a neat plot twist. Full credit to director and co-screeenwriter Nicholas Meyer.

  104. 104.

    iLarynx

    @jl:

    Speculations about my attention span derived from my dislike of long novels are probably correct, but I will read one if it is good. Say, Dickens.

    This issue is quality, not quantity. I picked up the oh-so popular “The Celestine Prophesy” years ago because my girlfriend at the time had read it and it was sitting on the table. After slogging through one chapter I tossed it. It was simply awful and the author’s writing style pathetic. I didn’t want to spend time reading this crap book when there were so many other good ones I still wanted to read.

    Life’s too short to waste time on reading crappy books.

  106. 106.

    Redshift

    @Laura:

    I’ve never read any of Ayn Rand’s books. Is it because I was never a white teenage boy?

    Could be, though I was one and I never read them either. I vaguely remember The Fountainhead appearing on some reading lists, though never as required reading. I was a bright teenager who was fairly adept at avoiding reading boring books if they weren’t required, and reading only enough of required ones to fake my way through school assignments. That left as much time as possible for actual good books.

  107. 107.

    Rob in CT

    I picked up the oh-so popular “The Celestine Prophesy” years ago because my girlfriend at the time had read it and it was sitting on the table. After slogging through one chapter I tossed it. It was simply awful and the author’s writing style pathetic. I didn’t want to spend time reading this crap book when there were so many other good ones I still wanted to read.

    LOL! I royally pissed off my then-girlfriend via overt mockery of that book! She was all into it, so I decided I’d volunteer to read it w/her (read a chapter out-loud). I started laughing very quickly. She was… not amused.

  109. 109.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @peach flavored shampoo: @trollhattan: Let me throw in a yee-fucking-hah! I think September is the perfect time for a publicity hungry Sarah Palin wannabe (jesus, how’d you like that to be on your tombstone) to be out campaigning against Planned Parenthood.

  110. 110.

    Nicole

    @Laura:

    I’ve never read any of Ayn Rand’s books. Is it because I was never a white teenage boy?

    Sadly, in my case it was because I had a crush on one. On the bright side, come senior year of high school, while the crush was long gone, when my AP English teacher assigned our final project, to design an imaginary college based on the philosophy of an American writer, I was all set. I had a blast doing that project- twelve pages of poking fun. I even wrote myself a rejection letter from my imaginary Ayn Rand college, explaining I was far too short to have a chance at admission.

    Mrs. DuPratt, wherever you are, you were an awesome teacher.

  112. 112.

    Randy P

    I remember liking Ayn Rand at 14. I can’t remember everything that appealed to me. I liked that her Galtian heroes were good at everything they put their hand to. I wanted to be that way. I liked the “be proud to be human” message, at a time when I was really bothered by the “I am a worm, I am unworthy” stuff I was hearing as the theme of the Catholic services of my upbringing.

    I thought her take on altruism was idiotic and I just rolled my eyes at that part.

    As for the 50-page speech, I read a couple pages, then started flipping to see how long it was. Skipped the rest. Up till then I’d always tried to read every word of every book I started.

    Sometime later I read “The Fountainhead” and was amused at how she had re-used the same characters in “Atlas” (didn’t both have a hero with the initials HR?), as if she only had one book in her. Later I was appalled to discover that there was a movie version, even a well-regarded movie. I couldn’t imagine how that crap could be a movie.

  114. 114.

    The Other Chuck

    @JGabriel:

    Is it worth noting that John Rogers (kfmonkey blogger and author of the Rand/Rings quote) is also the creator and show runner of Leverage? Whether or not it is, consider it noted.

    Kind of surprising I haven’t heard the quote come from Nate Ford’s mouth yet. I suppose Hardison could also paraphrase it, given his background with the orcs (I can’t imagine him delivering it as-is). I guess that separates Rogers from Sorkin.

  115. 115.

    The Other Chuck

    @iLarynx:

    I read the whole Celestine Prophecy back when I actually was dabbling in new-agey thought.

    Come to think, that’s about when I stopped dabbling in new-agey thought.

    Other awful books I’ve been made to go through:

    _Ishmael_ – The story of a talking ape who talks like Socrates.

    _Jonathan Livingston Seagull_ – Not horrible, kinda inspirational, but really overrated.

    _Illusions_ by the same author as JLS – Horrible horrible woo-woo shit

    _The Way of the Peaceful Warrior_ – That one I actually couldn’t finish.

    _The Dancing Wu-Li Masters_ – Quantum mechanics explained through the lens of woo-woo nonsense.

    _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_ – Trick, I actually loved this one and still do. Unfortunately, it led to:

    _Lila_ – A dreadfully unworthy sequel and quite possibly one of the most boring books I’ve ever read.

  116. 116.

    Don

    @Litlebritdifrnt:

    The only thing anyone needs to know about Rand is that she drew social security and medicare in her later years. In other words she was a total and utter fraud and a hypocrite.

    I really don’t care for this line of argument. One, her advocacy is so divorced from reality with regards to indirect costs that it’s just not necessary to shellac her personally rather than her sub-par ideas.

    Two, and more importantly, I think, is that it’s just not valid reasoning. I’m opposed to the current tax rates and would like to see them closer to Clinton-era levels. But I’m going to keep paying the ones that are the current law rather than the marginally higher rates I think should be in place.

    Why? Because this is the current law of the land and I don’t get to just pay less when I think they should be lower, either. I want a solution to our real problems, not to make some sort of empty gesture that puts me at a comparative disadvantage without accomplishing anything.

    Rand apparently really believed her moronic ideas and wanted a world that resembled them. Demanding that she refuse to live in the world as it is while calling for something different isn’t a reasonable thing. It’s the intellectual equivalent of the morons shouting “if you want to pay more taxes then do it and leave us alone” at Warren Buffett. Let’s be better than that.

  118. 118.

    hep kitty

    Of course, now I understand why, although I absolutely loved seeing Patricia Neal look glamorous and downright gorgeous for a change (and so did she!), The Fountainhead, really, really got on my nerves. A lot. I didn’t even know who Ayn Rand was at the time.

  119. 119.

    Michael Bersin

    As I teenager I was a voracious reader. There are only two books I can recall starting, reading in a few pages, then putting down, never to open them again. They were Atlas Shrugged and Norman Podhoretz’s Making It ( a gift from a cousin). My parents never censored my reading, either, but I know they were proud of me.

  120. 120.

    Bill Arnold

    @JD Rhoades:

    …an author has imagined humanity ruled by intelligent cups of yogurt.

    LOL. I see at the bottom that Scalzi followed through with a story about how humanity came to be ruled by yogurt.

  122. 122.

    geg6

    @Matt in HB:

    I wonder if a fresh read would change that to awful, but better than Atlas Shrugged.

    No need to torture yourself like that. Believe me, it would. Atlas Shrugged is the all-time worst book I ever tried to read. I actually finished The Fountainhead. Though I threw it at a wall when I finally did.

    I never bought into this bitter hag’s scheme. I can’t believe there are adults out there who do.

  123. 123.

    Kathy in St. Louis

    The book was awful. The dialogue was stilted. The characters totally cardboard and unbelievable. Read it at 19 and thought that if the adult world was really like a Rand world, I might as well go into the convent. Peopled with awful, totally self-absorbed people. Having read it and having discussed it with several libertarians who thought it was great literature with a real philosophy for day to day life, made we wonder what the hell had happened to mankind.

  126. 126.

    rea

    Fountainhead is based on the life of Frank Lloyd Wright, although in real life he was not much like a Rand protagonist, apart from being an ass.

    I read Rand at the canonical age–14–after my best friend in high school had gotten into Rand in a big way. 40 years later I looked him up on the internet, and we exchanged a couple of e-mails. His dissertation on snowflake formation had somehow led to him making millions as a consultant to Wall Street. Go figure. I didn’t ask him if he still is an admirer of Rand . . .

  127. 127.

    NotMax

    The scene in The Fountainhead where Patricia Neal’s character gets the vapors watching Gary Cooper wrap his big, muscular hands firmly around his long, hard, throbbing tool* and repeatedly thrust it into service almost makes the movie watchable.

    Almost.

    * No, not that. It’s a jackhammer.

  128. 128.

    The Other Chuck

    @rea:

    A lot of the specific architectural shit described in The Fountainhead sounded pretty damned unsound even to a layman like me. It’s a good thing the protagonist blew up his slum projects before they burned down or fell over with people in them.

    Wright really should have been allowed to build Falling Water according to his vision without those pesky builders overriding him. It would have fallen down immediately and that would be the end of that phony legend.

  131. 131.

    Ohio Mom

    @The Other Chuck: When I went to Falling Water the tour group I ended up in included two contractors and their wives and they absolutely made the tour. When they weren’t asking questions like, “How many cubic feet of poured cement?”, they were poking each other and rolling their eyes and laughing at little inside jokes like, “How you’d like to re-wire *that*?” They were very clearly not impressed.

    And, re: @95 “due to her…absolute lack of social skills, had few friends (it’s been speculated by some that she might have fallen somewhere on the autism spectrum),” can we please, please, please stop trivializind autism and mixing it up with sociopathic tendencies?

    Sign me,
    Mom of a boy with autism

  133. 133.

    AHH onna Droid

    @Ohio Mom: Who but you is calling it sociopathic? Aspies like me are unfortunately at a disadvantage at developing a theory of mind, which is required for empathy, because of our tendency to pay attention to maybe the wrong things in our environment. My own experience of empathy blossomed with both maturity and serious work, after my diagnosis, to correct my behavior and catch up to my NT peers.

    Consider this: a NT soc io path will be deceitful in pursuit of selfish ends, whereas Rand is stridently candid. (She is also obsessed with the choo choos and a terrible student of human behavior.) I think you do a discredit to your child and everyone with asd when you recklessly conflate learning disabilities with an incurable personality disorder.

  134. 134.

    kuvasz

    Ayn Rand’s philosophy is known to any parent with a 13 year old child whose adolescent petulence produces the screech-like admonition that “you’re not in charge of me!”

  135. 135.

    El Cid

    It really pisses me off that I’ve read the works of brilliant minds actually working really hard to figger things out, including figures such as Descartes, and they were called philosophers.

    And this trite, inane, simple game of mirror image simplistic extremism where you take the Stalinist collectivism you hate and assert baldly that the opposite is better is frequently described as the work of a “philosopher”.

    No, it’s not.

  136. 136.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Rob in CT:

    I broke with my therapist over “Celestine.”

    And I will post more, much more, on my personal experiences with Objectivism and “studying” personally with Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden in New York from 1965-68, and how I met my husband through Objectivism, and why I became disillusioned, and everything, but it will have to wait for some time when I am not +anything, and when I am not distracted as I am right now.

    If I forget, please remind me. It was an interesting time.

  137. 137.

    Ron

    I never read any of Ayn Rand’s books. I have no real desire to do so other than morbid curiousity.

  138. 138.

    El Cid

    @Ron: Try a few pages in the middle of one of the books in bookstore or library and unless you’ve a real appetite for amazing yourself at shitty writing and shittier characters and shittierier plot, you’ll get over it in under 10 seconds.

  139. 139.

    Ken Pidcock

    Hey, when I was fourteen (maybe thirteen), I read John Updike’s Couples. Good introduction to how much of life is deceptive acting.

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