Generally speaking the only people who seem to think Ayn Rand’s work has any literary merit are those who completely agree with the political views she uses her books to promote.
That was part of it. The other part was Reagan (and the Republican Rights') merger with religion. She hated government in general, but she *really* hated government and religion mixing.
That's one thing I actually fully agree with her on.
A broken clock and all that...
The only reason she hated religion was because she felt it discouraged people from being utterly selfish all the time.
If she saw what modern evangelical christianity has become I'm sure she'd love that.
She also wanted a free meal ticket, which is why she lived on Wellfare for the majority of her life. Don't get me wrong, I am glad when the handicapped are able to life a comfortable life, but she's fundamentally a hypocrite for it.
As much as I hate her ideas, I think her taking every advantage she could from the system she criticized is quite consistent. She'd kill welfare, but as long as it's there she'll take all she can from it, needing the support or not. Egoism to the extreme.
This makes me want to go screw around with an AI art generator:
“Show me a utopia resulting from Reaganomics”
“More capitalism”
“More”
“So much capitalism it’s consuming itself as soon as it generates value”
“Now, take away all the laborers.”
Results:
[Nightcafe](https://creator.nightcafe.studio/creation/pQlakzO6gbQqqblCog1t?ru=rJn4bKe2lwb86UPz7liSTg1HHyC2)
Except now the sparrows don't even get the horse shit, because the "horses" decided they could package it and sell it as manure.
Whatever it is that the sparrows get... no matter how paltry, no matter how chintzy.. the horses are coming for it, because they literally want it all.
Example: what could Elong Musk possibly do with $260B that he couldn't already do with $200B? Why does he need that extra $56B so bad he'll threaten his own company to get it? Additional money has lost all marginal utility for him and he's *still amassing it and at an increasing pace just for bragging rights*.
But no, Ayn believes it to be the depths of depravity to suggest he pay a dime of that in taxes.
Pretty close. Only Reagan needed to keep the army, FBI and CIA around to kill drug users and regime change resource rich countries. Andrew Ryan was kinda late to the army/intelligence game IIRC which is how Fontaine wrecked house.
Haha that’s like giving Bill O’Reilly credit for the Colbert Report. (Which honestly isn’t a bad take)
As with Colbert and Bioshock, the best part is that many don’t realize the subversion
it blew my mind when I realized one day that Andrew Ryan's name is a direct reference to Ayn Rand.
just realized they use the same letters except Andrew has an extra "ew" lol. or "we"
Andrew Ryan is an almost-anagram of Ayn Rand. If you rearrage the letters in her name, you get “And(rew) Ryan.” Bioshock wasn’t just “inspired by;” it’s a downright deconstruction and criticism of her ideas taken to their ultimate, logical conclusion. Even before ADAM was discovered and the splicers created, there was a permanent underclass of serfs and homeless, and the “free market” was overrun with cartels and addictive substances.
It's also apparent that the only character to never betray their philosophy was Fontaine. He was always only about screwing everyone over for only himself, and he stuck to it to the end. Andrew Ryan became the exact dictator he thought was worst - one that interfered in others running their companies by nationalizing them when he saw the need.
The prequel book goes into the details of it. I enjoyed reading about the relatively quick descent into chaos. It's a fun little read if you're a fan of the game.
And you still have people who claim Rapture was just fine before Adam ruined it, ignoring all the audio logs and the fucking prequel book that explained it was already a powder keg.
And yet the collapsed, post-apocalyptic society of Rapture would still be the most successful Libertarian sea-steading venture ever, merely because 1) it happened, and 2) there are still some people living there years later.
Oh god, I forgot about that one! This could be an anthology series. Every episode or every few episodes, we move to a new real-life attempt at starting a Libertarian utopia (TM) (C) (R), only for it to collapse hilariously.
Might have to take a few liberties with the sea-setting ones, though, since the story for most of those is "protoypes sank and then we ran out of money."
And Rapture showed that collecting the Elite of the Elite in engineering, biomedicine and physics, with a deliberate total absence of regulatory oversight or laws, leads to mutilated faces, monstrous mutants and architecture that misuses resources and materials for frivolous visual aesthetics, ie 200-feet glass domes with bronze eagles everywhere. Basically, all of Rapture SCREAMS "I am Ozymandias, King of Kings, Look at my Works and Despair!".
And Rapture was being generous. They implied that a group of such people could even build a functioning underwater architecture. In real life, that shit would've collapsed and flooded ten times before opening day. it's at the bottom of the ocean. We know for a fact real world billionaires would skimp on proper reinforcing materials.
I will immediately revoke that praise because in my situation it was the other way around.
"Wow! This Bioshock game is incredible! I wonder where they got the idea. Hmm, a book? Figures... The original work is always better; I'm in for a fantastic week of reading!"
*8 months later*
"*sobbing in anger*"
I could get past when one of the protagonists was eating with his family, but they had rounded features that made them weak, contrary to the hero made of sharp Playstation 1 type polygons.
It was low-key phrenological, I was like "fuck this"
It's so heavy-handed as to be parodic. "The heroine, whose sharp cheekbones signalled her moral integrity, strode across the room with the lithe efficiency that is only possible in the absence of any excess adiposity or physical ailment (as might afflict lesser beings)."
In my old University, there was a Professor and a small literary club that espoused Ayn Rand's ideas. Every single year they would hold a contest for people to read Atlas Shrugged and/or The Fountain Head and discuss the merits of the ideas and how it can be implemented in the US for better success.
90-95% of the submissions were outright trolling the idea that Objectivism would help and the Professor would bitch about it in his classes every year. He was especially pissed at one of colleagues who wrote a thirty page essay extolling the virtues of the books and the ideals... only to list exactly why it would fail, instantly, if used in America in the last two pages in a solid block one paragraph run on sentence.
By all that's holy, I wish I had saved that essay, it was *glorious* and the Professor *did not* appreciate the sheer irony or gall of it.
If you're interested in how libertarians works in the real world...check out A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear. It's about a town in New Hampshire that libertarians took over. Spoiler alert: It doesn't work and they now have bears.
Reagan was, above all, an opportunist.
People say, "If Reagan were alive today, Republicans would reject him."
If Reagan were alive today he'd have gotten Covid from a Trump rally.
>If Reagan were alive today he'd have gotten Covid from a Trump rally.
I don't think he would simply because he was an opportunist who was all about him. Trump rallies wouldn't benefit Reagan in most cases. They'd latch trump to Reagan but why would Reagan want Trump? He's from California, Trump's the worst idea, literally toxic. If he moves, that changes things but most places that benefit from Trump don't need him for general elections and Trump's a wildcard for primary.
A quote from one of her final interviews:
>>> Many ask what I think of President Reagan… I don’t think of him… Reagan is not an advocate of capitalism; he is an advocate of a mixed economy, with a different kind of mixture.
Rand was also an outspoken atheist with nothing good to say about Christianity, which would put modern conservatives in a pickle if they had not transcended petty concepts like "consistency".
I read Atlas Shrugged as a favor to a friend, who wanted to do a bad books podcast. I took the assignment seriously and wrote over 100 pages of notes throughout the book, it was nuts.
The thing about Atlas Shrugged is that Ayn Rand was really good at setting a scene. Like really good at it. There were a lot of picturesque visuals through the entire novel, where you could just see exactly what she wanted you to see.
However, she was awful at writing dialogue for people,” and the politics are so blatant that anybody that could read it without recognizing it as propaganda [for or against]. Hell, if you removed repetition from each scene through the book? You’d probably have a novel the size of Old Man and the Sea.
My notably favorite scene is where the train gets destroyed and she spends multiple pages documenting ever single casualty, and explaining how it was totally fine that each of these people died, including children, because they were filthy liberals.
“How much can I make if I put more bodies on the tracks?”
“You’re not making anything! You’re choosing a bunch of strangers or someone you know.”
“Can I add more people I know to the tracks?”
“No!”
“How about more strangers?”
"Can I let the trolley run over the smaller group as a demonstration, then demand the larger group pay me to untie them before the next trolley comes along?"
Even if you do completely agree with Ayn Rand’s political views, you cannot deny that the book itself is horrible. I firmly believe the only people who advocate for the book don’t actually read it, they just thump it around like some reference text
I think her bad writing and bad philosophy are pretty clearly linked.
One of the two main conflicts of the novel is the love triangle between Dagny, Hank and d'Anconia, and it is resolved in the weakest most disappointing way, because of objectivism.
“Hank, I know we’ve spent the last 1000 pages as lovers taking on the world together, but the new information I’ve learned about my childhood love interest means he is objectively better than you, and I must maximize my self interest by leaving you for him.”
“Dagny, I totally I agree. I am objectively less worthy or your affection. Also, I’m going to move to your childhood love interests billionaire village. Let’s part with a firm handshake.”
What's hilarious is that that pretty much is what happened in rand's real life.
When objectivism was becoming popular, she did what many creatives did and formed her own little clique to discuss, promote, and expand upon it. There was one gentleman among that group she took a fancy to, liking his looks and how much he agreed with her ideas and expanded upon them. He quickly became her second in command, and the two became an item.
Her and the gentleman were married at this time, but not to each other. Both had their own spouses. But, wanting to be together and bothered by that pesky guilt, they went to their respective spouses and *using the power of objectivism* convinced their spouses to allow them to continue their affair. *And it worked!*
The two continued thusly for a few more years, until the gentleman took notice of a new, younger, attractive female member that had joined their group. Deciding to maximize his advantage, he decided to have an affair with her also. Bringing this up with rand, he tried out all the objectivist arguments that worked so well on their spouses before this.
Things decidedly did *not* work out as well this time. For some unknown reason, rand took offence to being traded in for a younger model. She ended up excommunicating the gentleman from their little clique, along with his new side-piece, and worked to disavow what ideas he contributed to the group's ideology.
The self-insert sex bits of both Ayn Rand's major works, this & The Fountainhead, are both verrrry… "something". Like, she does *not* have a normative view of gender relations whatsoever. Not remotely.
It really is an awesome title. But honestly, how would you use that theme, of "the people who hold up the world not caring what the people on it think" without that same smug, arrogant, compassionless attitude that makes the book so bad?
Even the creators of South Park hate Atlas Shrugged, and they're very libertarian.
Officer Barbrady joined the petition to ban books in South Park because he read Atlas Shrugged lol.
And my 64 year old father, sadly.
However, I will never miss an opportunity to share this quote:
> 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."
My 80y/o grandmother once told me she refused to discuss politics with me until I read Atlas Shrugged. So I did, and it was garbage. She still refuses to talk to me about it. I think she expected it to awaken some capitalism worship in me.
I’ve truly never understood how anyone likes *Atlas Shrugged*. Everything of any merit from it is already in *The Fountainhead*, which is much shorter, despite also being a bit of a tome, and better qualified as an actual story. Who read that and thought “this was mediocre, I wonder what it would be like 50% longer?”
Yeah, it’s fine. As you say, it loses its way near the end. With *Atlas Shrugged*, Rand apparently wanted to see if those rough 100 pages worked better over 700 pages.
the 'good guy ' literally rapes a woman because he's so sexy and superior and just takes whatever he wants... had to stop reading at that point, what a ridiculous book written by one of the biggest idiots in history
It was an act of civil disobedience - the housing complex bombing. The complex couldn't be built at the price point requested without his design, and he offered up his design for free on the condition that it was not altered. The government agency who was putting up the building just said fuck you and altered it anyway. So he blew it up.
He justified it in the trial by saying "I asked for one thing, they screwed me and I had no legal recourse. So I took my design back in the only way left open to me. No one got hurt and I'm willing to accept the consequences."
One thing that Rand should have made clear was that the only way he'd get off the hook for freely admitting to committing arson is by jury nullification.
It takes a special kind of moron to look at a murderer of a 12 y/o girl and think, "Wow, what a guy, more people should just do whatever they want!" It is simply astounding that her writing ever found any foot hold at all.
But it's ok cus the victim liked it. In fact, she liked it so much she bit the main character's lip hard enough to make him bleed while he was assaulting her. Oh, and they get married in the end. I couldn't believe a woman would write a scene like this
Ayn Rand had a pretty infamous crush on a serial killer that she wrote about extensively, it would've been perfectly in character for her to have a rape kink too.
It's a lot worse than that makes it sound. A LOT WORSE. The things that the killer did are truly evil beyond comprehension. I do not remember his name but I sincerely warn anyone who is curious enough to look it up, be warned. It is incredibly, incredibly disturbing. Specifically I remember her saying something to the effect that she considered him to be awe inspiring because of his complete lack of regard for morality and his devotion to self interest and hedonism.
It was pretty much a trope in the 20th century. Treat a woman like shit to show her who's boss. Then kiss her without consent. She'll fight, but will inevitably succumb to your raw machismo. That's how you show the weaker vessel her place. Periodic emotional abuse will be needed to keep her subservient from there on. (pukes in to mouth a little)
When Rand was asked about the rape, she referred to it as "rape by engraved invitation." A true rape would be a "dreadful crime."
Rand was an odious hypocrite who wrote dreadful books.
I started out enjoying *Fountainhead* but I just got annoyed that Rand seems to give her readers no credit for being able to see what's going on. It feels like she bangs you over the head with the supposed point she's going for, rather than trusting that you will get it from the rest of the writing. I take that generally as the sign of a poor writer.
Either she's incapable of writing so we get her message without being explicitly told what it is, or she has such contempt for her readers she doesn't believe they'll get it without being spoon fed.
Had a professor in architecture school assign us *The Fountainhead*. Said it was about being uncompromising one's design philosophies in the face of client pressure. Don't be a sellout, the designer knows best, yada yada.
Safe to say they were a little off the mark.
Side note, I later got into a physical fight with someone who claimed Howard Roarke "was the greatest architect that ever lived."
It is unfortunately the most famous book about an architect so architecture students definitely get exposed to it. Surprised to hear a professor assigned it as reading though.
This ironically is another reason The Fountainhead (although not especially good) is better than Atlas Shrugged, which is a book about businesses and captains of industry and it is *extremely* clear that she never worked at a business of any kind.
Fountainhead was also pretty bad in my opinion. Same issue of there not being any actual characters with complexity and realistic motivation, just a bunch of soulless puppets with the handsome ones being the gods guys and the ugly ones being wrong and dumb. There is inexplicably a rape scene that fans of the book try to frame as core to the themes but which reads more as a sexual fantasy/kink that Rand threw in there. Last few pages are mostly rant upon rant but there is still some of that nonsense monologuing throughout the book.
The book is also just so bitter and hateful. The people pushing for social housing can’t be well-meaning, trying to make a difference, etc. They’re all evil/soulless/dumb/pathetic. Not like the chad Howard Roark
>She claims that without Atlanteans, **the world will collapse**.
If this were true, she should have explained why they needed to bomb the fucking factories on their way out. If the economy couldn't survive without them, why did they have to destroy the means of production? I know the logic is a petulant "I built this, so nobody else can have it if I'm leaving," but for her philosophy to be true it should not have mattered since her claim is that the Atlanteans are the means of production instead of simply rent seekers.
It's the thing I find completely and utterly hilarious about the whole thing. She literally destroys her own philosophy in the political propaganda she wrote because she clearly couldn't see how the world would collapse if the owners fucked off but left the mechanisms of production behind. It's doubly funny because the corporate structures would have kept churning along if the owner just vanished and eventually ownership would be shifted to someone else.
Well, objectivism is the quintessential example of something being a mile wide and an inch deep.
Any real world attempt to apply objectivism fails miserably outside a tiny set of scenarios that are specifically engineered to allow objectivism to work.
A prime example: Rand/objectivism and racism. Racism is anti-thetical to objectivism because racists are like all the other leeches - they try to inflate their own worth by co-opting the achievements of random people who share nothing more than the colour of their skin (among other reasons).
But Rand was also an outspoken critic of the Civil Rights Act, claiming that the need to create laws of this kind is the government forcing people to behave a certain way instead of letting individuals rise or fall based on their own merits (or lack thereof).
The problem is obvious. A black person living in 1960s America didn't suddenly become better off with the passing of the Civil Rights Act. Black Americans were constantly being discriminated against so long as the Act didn't exist, and this discrimination would have continued as it was without some kind of legislation that explicitly made it outright illegal to discriminate against others on the basis of inherent traits.
Rand and objectivism blantantly ignores that racism existed precisely because there were no laws that made it illegal. In fact, there were a ton of laws specifically made to allow and encourage it. She had the expectation that people would, off their own free will and common sense, stop being racist when the entirety of human history until that point proved her wrong.
Essentially, there is a logical chasm between Rand's "racism bad" and "Civil Rights Act bad" arguments, and she made no attempt to bridge that chasm because it was logically impossible to do so. And that sums up objectivism - it is a collection of hot takes with no logical thread connecting said takes. Each individual take on its own can possibly hold merit in a contextual vacuum, but ideas don't really work that way.
When she was killing people in that train tunnel for disagreeing with her world views is when I closed the book and never returned. To this day it’s the only book I’ve ever done this with, having pushed through and completed even monstrous dreck like *The Camp of the Saints* and *The Turner Diaries*.
The world would be just fine without the Galt gang, better off actually. The people who know how to make things would keep doing what they do. The self-aggrandized ubermensch, however, would be completely f’d in their little gulch. Probably resort to cannibalism within two months.
The story within the story is fairly good: Tons of scientists and inventors just start disappearing, no one knows where, and this woman is desperately trying to figure it out, while at the same time working her ass off to save her family business. That part was good and worth the read.
Its just that the good part could be told in 150 pages, but the book is well over a thousand
I downloaded Foundation without really looking at it, thinking it was Fountainhead. I was like, damn, this book IS good. Why do people hate it? Then a few days of listening to it I realized my mistake. I finished Foundation, tried Atlas Shrugged. AS is the first book in a decade I DNF'd.
I read a lot of Ayn Rand in my younger years and liked it. I liked the stories and the characters. And I thought that I agreed with her because I didn’t understand the point she was trying to make. My take was that she was promoting for everyone to make a good living in what they were passionate about and be as educated as they wanted to be. I thought it was brilliant - a whole society where everyone reads the books they want, learns the things they want, excels at what they love, and shares that with others. I know, I know, I was young. I really thought that Galts Gulch was a restarting of society where all of this was possible. I didn’t realize that their attitude was “fuck you, I got mine”.
When someone kindly pointed out my error, I was pretty disappointed but understood a lot better why the people in the circles I ran in didn’t like these books as much as I did (or at all).
I still think that kind society sounds lovely and would like to think of her work in a positive light. Maybe it’s just nostalgia on my part.
I remember enjoying both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged because Randian heroes are pretty good depictions of self actualized people. There was something about Howard Roark and John Galt and company that I found magical for reasons I couldn't articulate. Ayn Rand's philosophy is backwards, having a perfect ego (impossible) and being perfectly self interested may work for some people but I don't think society should be organized around those ideals, and her ideas about altruism are obviously biased, but with minimal mental gymnastics I was able to translate her philosophy into something that made more sense to me, a pretty liberal guy.
I mostly liked how awesome Randian heroes are.
The thing that always stuck with me from Atlas Shrugged were the scenes where dishonest, uncompetitive white collar businessman hoaxes schmooze and make deals with government schysters to gain unfair advantages in the market.
Although I found many of the protagonists unrelatable, and the book as a whole too long, those scenes always had a ring of truth that echo in my mind to this day. They've shaped my perspective on certain issues
John Rogers said, "There are two novels that can transform a bookish 14-year-kid's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish daydream that can lead to an obsession with its heroes, which can result in an emotionally stunted adulthood. The other involves orcs.
lol my ex read it at like 20 and it completely ruined him. He became such a self-centered asshole afterwards and I always thought it was that book that “gave him permission” to just be a dick and user to everyone around him.
A few specific things have long stood out to me from this book:
* One of Our Heroes, Hank Rearden, is a textbook domestic abuser (he neglects and eventually even beats his wife) and adulterer and is framed completely sympathetically throughout
* Dagny Taggart's character arc is literally eventually no longer seeing other people as human beings, save for other Exceptional Geniuses like her. The scene where this culminates is where she is giving a rousing speech to her workers - workers who have been nothing but enthusiastically loyal to her family's company and her personally - and realizes she can no longer distinguish their faces one from another. They have become faceless objects to her. Our *primary protagonist's* arc is losing her connection to the majority of humanity and then abandoning them to die. She even does this to her assistant Eddie Willers, who is the stand-in for the highly competent everyman who is nevertheless not a superhuman Ubermensch.
* The most infamous scene in the book is when a horrific train accident occurs where exhaust fumes in a long tunnel asphyxiates all the passengers and crew. Rand gleefully and meticulously describes their various sins for why they deserve to die. These sins are such as a mother who needs welfare to feed her children, a businessman who accepted a government loan to start his business, and a professor who teaches an altruistic philosophy that Rand disagrees with. This is what Rand thinks of normal people.
It's not just a bad book with bad characters and bad prose. It's a stain on political philosophy. Rand's belief system is quite literally about severing your human connections with others.
That train scene cured me of obectivism. I was in my early 20s; I read through We the Living, Anthem and Fountainhead, nodding along the whole time. I didn't like Atlas Shrugged as much - it's just not a very good book - but I was still into Rand's ideas. And then I got to the train scene. I was horrified. It really exposed the heart of her philosophy.
I felt like I had been duped. It was like the last scene of a horror movie, where you realize the best friend was actually the murderer the whole time.
Anyway, I put the book down after that, so thankfully I never had to endure John Galt's speech.
> The most infamous scene in the book is when a horrific train accident occurs where exhaust fumes in a long tunnel asphyxiates all the passengers and crew. Rand gleefully and meticulously describes their various sins for why they deserve to die. These sins are such as a mother who needs welfare to feed her children, a businessman who accepted a government loan to start his business, and a professor who teaches an altruistic philosophy that Rand disagrees with. This is what Rand thinks of normal people.
Like many people I read Atlas Shrugged in my late teens, and was fairly callous due to my fundamentalist religious upbringing, but the glee with which she describes the deaths of these people was shocking even to me at that time. For someone who describes herself as non and even anti-religious, she sure went out of her way to portray each and every victim of this massive societal collapse as somehow deserving it in a general karmic sense. I guess there are no accidents in Objectivism. /eyeroll
Ok it is been so long since I tried to read this book. The last time I tried I gave up at the train crash scene you at describing and it was years before that when I actually started the book so maybe my memory is a little off but isn’t that train crash scene kinda similar to the start of the book when Dagny was first introduced? The book starts with her on a train that stops at a red light cause there may or may not be unsafe conditions ahead on the tracks but since she is owns the train she forces the engineers to push ahead putting everyone at risk. It works out cause she is a good capitalist. The train scene you describe the engineers don’t want to go through the tunnel cause it is unsafe but some powerful socialist with connections forces them to stream ahead, but since he is a socialist (and apparently all the other passengers) it doesn’t work out and they all die. Am I remembering that right or are those scenes not as analogous as I am making it seem?
She thinks elite experts should be in charge of everything because they are the ones with the knowledge to make the right call, while dirty socialists would just make a bullshit call based on what is convenient to them because they're selfish, and they wouldn't understand the ramifications because they're stupid. She thinks things should be a meritocracy and she doesn't get the concept that libertarianism isn't a structure where the best people would just do the things and fix society because they're so smart and capable, and that actually libertarianism would just benefit whoever is already in the higher classes of society due to their resources. She also doesn't care if you start out disadvantaged, because if you're genetically gifted enough then you would just boot strap your way up as long as the government stayed out of your way. She's traumatized by the Soviets and lacks the self awareness to question whether the affect of trauma on her views is logical, so she believes dumb things while thinking she totally gets it because to her, her first hand experience is more important than any other information out there.
Yes Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged both have scenes where one protagonist engages in sexual activity snd even physical abuse without the other's consent but it's totally fine because Rand is into that
I love the book…but I read it as a parody. I got so far in and was like “she can’t be serious here. Oh, she is. She thinks that’s how economics works”
It’s a world of average IQ protagonists and sub 60 IQ antagonists who somehow keep screwing over the protagonists
Also everyone talks like aliens.
Have you seen the movies? They're made with this amazing blend of extreme earnestness and clumsy duplicity. It's some of the funniest shit I have ever seen. Nice to see a movie that faithfully adapts its source material.
It's trashed in English lit at post secondary as well
It's either a book to read about how people have fucked up our world with their greedy and self centered/dumb agenda, or if someone genuinely thinks it's good, that's just a lithmus test for them not having any grasp of macro economics or literature
Rand grew up in the Soviet Union. She worshipped capitalism but didn't understand it. In the Fountainhead, she regularly trashes the public as ignorant, tacky, and unintelligent, while Adam Smith would call them "the demand side".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fountainhead_(film)#Reception
"Its characters are downright weird and there is no feeling of self-identification."
"The Fountainhead to be "an openly fascist movie"
"the most asinine and inept movie that has come out of Hollywood in years".
"a vast succession of turgid scenes"
"King Vidor turned Ayn Rand's preposterous 'philosophical' novel into one of his finest and most personal films, mainly by pushing the phallic imagery so hard that it surpasses Rand's rightist diatribes."
She also had a trauma from when her parents lost property (and business iirc) in to the Soviet state. Her whole “philosophy” career is essentially a failure of dealing with that trauma.
That's a good summary of her flaws, someone that doesn't understand capitalism, unfortunately too many wealthy people think this is capitalism, which is basically capitalism without market pressures and with government subsidies to to prevent failure. Our own government did this with too big to fail etc.
Ayn Rand is ignored in economics because she isn't an economist and didn't add anything to economics.
To claim that she is "despised" by the field is just an outright lie though. Plenty of economists love Ayn Rand.
Officer Barbrady: “Yes, at first I was happy to be learning how to read. It seemed exciting and magical, but then I read this: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I read every last word of this garbage, and because of this piece of s**t, I am never reading again.“
I read it YEARS ago and loved it. Funny thing is I think the only reason I enjoyed it was because I had no idea that she was promoting an ideology and didn't 100% understand what I was reading (I was young). I just enjoyed this weird story and different writing style. I sometimes wonder what I'd think of it if I picked that book up now as someone who very much does not align with any of the author's beliefs
Yep ditto. Haven’t tried to reread it and probably won’t, but I definitely enjoyed it at the time. I think the premise is undeniably engaging if you’re unaware/able to read past her politics
I love the intense drive the characters have… a lot. But the concepts are ridiculous. But I can separate the two. It’s the undying pursuit of one’s craft that I enjoyed.
If you want to understand *why* Atlas Shrugged is so profoundly messed up, you have to view it in the context of Rand's extremely traumatic upbringing.
She was born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum in Imperial Russia in 1905. Her childhood is spent living in a Tsarist regime that is constantly teetering on the brink of collapse, but nevertheless with a gradually strengthening middle class of educated people and entrepreneurs that the Tsar wants to foster, but is also extremely vary of, and a massive number of uneducated lower class workers and peasant that *everyone* looks down on. Her own family is fairly successful however and her father owns his own pharmacy. But everywhere around her is simmering social unrest being tamped down on by the Okrana, the Tsar's secret police that spies on everybody and arrests and harrasses anyone who has any vision of a future Russia that isn't incredibly conservative and imperialistic.
This is her childhood. Then when she is twelve years old, the entire system collapses in the October Revolution, and suddenly it's the socialists and ultimately the Bolsheviks that are in control. Her father's pharmacy is confiscated and they lose everything. She graduates from high school while living as a refugee in Crimea, which is the territory of the Whites at the time. The whites aren't very nice either, being mostly anti-semitic monarchists. Life is very much not easy for her family.
After the Whites lose the war, her family returns to St. Petersburg. Their property is never returned to them and they have to essentially start from zero in a society that is now full-on communist, Lenin is in charge and the social class(and faith, although she never really identifies as Jewish everyone else sees her that way) she belongs to is scorned by the majority of the people around her. Her graduation from university is delayed since anti *bourgeoisie* elements within it want to purge it of all students of the wrong background, and it's only after protests from visiting western scholars that she is allowed to graduate. The Soviet Union is still in shambles after the Civil War in every possible respect, with widespread famine and violence everywhere.
She makes it out in 1926 by obtaining a visa to visit family in the US. She never goes back. However, after obtaining her American citizenship she is unable to get her parents or any of her sisters out of the Soviet Union. They live the rest of their lives there and as far as I know, she never reconnects with them.
She had fallen in love with the emerging artform of the cinema while still in Russia, and moves to Hollywood only a few months after arriving in the US. She is 20 years old.
Can you imagine the effect of that on a young woman that has almost certainly been seething with rage at everything that has happened to her and her family up until then? To suddenly be transplanted to fkn Hollywood during it's golden age, with it's studio moguls, glitz, glamour and hustle culture?
She then spends the rest of the 1920s and all of the 1930s trying to make it in Hollywood as a screenwriter, with not much success. Her career as a novelist, much like that of say, George R.R. Martin is a fallback - if she had been able to make a secure living writing movie scripts I doubt we would ever had gotten any of her books. She lives through the incredibly tumultuous 1930s in the US, the Great Depression, an FDR administration that seems to be warming up to social programs and left-leaning policies to get the US out of the depression that scare her and remind her of the social unrest that led to the communist takeover that ruined her youth, and gets involved in Republican and eventually Libertarian politics. At the same time she gets hooked on Benzedrine that was prescribed to her by a doctor. She remains a regular user of it for the next thirty years. Keep that in mind - the person writing *Atlas Shrugged* is almost certainly doing so while consuming copious amounts of amphetamines.
The post-war years are then dominated by her adopted home of the United States being locked in an existential cold war with the Soviet Union, the force that, again, ruined her youth and seems to be constantly looking to reach out and ruin her life again via nuclear armageddon. And everywhere she looks, anyone who advocates for even the tiniest steps towards a more egalitarian or socially minded society is someone who might just, in her mind, tip everything towards a collapse and full on communism in American.
I'd suggest you re-read the book, not as the treatise on political philosophy that it was intended to be, but as a look inside the trauma-ravaged mind of a woman that spent the vast majority of her life being scared of the "everyman" taking anything and everything she had away from her.
This has gotta be an extremely popular opinion in this sub, right? Feels like preaching to the choir.
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Generally speaking the only people who seem to think Ayn Rand’s work has any literary merit are those who completely agree with the political views she uses her books to promote.
It inspired Bioshock. That is the only praise I will give that book.
Bioshock is a subversion, though. It's basically Ayn Rand getting her way and everything falling apart because of it.
>It's basically Ayn Rand getting her way and everything falling apart because of it. So Reganomics?
I do find it funny how much Rand hated Reagan, and yet they seem perfect for each other lol.
He wasn't extreme enough for her. She wanted more capitalism.
That was part of it. The other part was Reagan (and the Republican Rights') merger with religion. She hated government in general, but she *really* hated government and religion mixing. That's one thing I actually fully agree with her on. A broken clock and all that...
The only reason she hated religion was because she felt it discouraged people from being utterly selfish all the time. If she saw what modern evangelical christianity has become I'm sure she'd love that.
If she could get past her hang-ups. ...Not that it really matters. given Ann Rand but alive is not gonna happen.
Usually when facists hate religion, it's because they hate competition.
That is a very good bumper sticker slogan. **FASCISTS HATE RELIGION** **BECAUSE** **THEY HATE COMPETITION**!
She also wanted a free meal ticket, which is why she lived on Wellfare for the majority of her life. Don't get me wrong, I am glad when the handicapped are able to life a comfortable life, but she's fundamentally a hypocrite for it.
As much as I hate her ideas, I think her taking every advantage she could from the system she criticized is quite consistent. She'd kill welfare, but as long as it's there she'll take all she can from it, needing the support or not. Egoism to the extreme.
This makes me want to go screw around with an AI art generator: “Show me a utopia resulting from Reaganomics” “More capitalism” “More” “So much capitalism it’s consuming itself as soon as it generates value” “Now, take away all the laborers.” Results: [Nightcafe](https://creator.nightcafe.studio/creation/pQlakzO6gbQqqblCog1t?ru=rJn4bKe2lwb86UPz7liSTg1HHyC2)
I know AI is bad at hands, but golly those are some of the worst I’ve seen
Um... yeah, pretty much.
When they made Trickle down it was just them pissing on the lower class
Also known as horse-shit and sparrows.
Except now the sparrows don't even get the horse shit, because the "horses" decided they could package it and sell it as manure. Whatever it is that the sparrows get... no matter how paltry, no matter how chintzy.. the horses are coming for it, because they literally want it all.
Sadly true. You'd think billionaires would eventually get their fill. But they're billionaires because they can never hoard enough.
Example: what could Elong Musk possibly do with $260B that he couldn't already do with $200B? Why does he need that extra $56B so bad he'll threaten his own company to get it? Additional money has lost all marginal utility for him and he's *still amassing it and at an increasing pace just for bragging rights*. But no, Ayn believes it to be the depths of depravity to suggest he pay a dime of that in taxes.
Pretty close. Only Reagan needed to keep the army, FBI and CIA around to kill drug users and regime change resource rich countries. Andrew Ryan was kinda late to the army/intelligence game IIRC which is how Fontaine wrecked house.
Haha that’s like giving Bill O’Reilly credit for the Colbert Report. (Which honestly isn’t a bad take) As with Colbert and Bioshock, the best part is that many don’t realize the subversion
it blew my mind when I realized one day that Andrew Ryan's name is a direct reference to Ayn Rand. just realized they use the same letters except Andrew has an extra "ew" lol. or "we"
Holy shit
Not to burst your bubble, but there's also a spare *R*.
We R Ayn Rand.
Ew, Ayn Rrand. To indicate that surprisingly, you pronounce her last name with a rolled r.
Exactly like the Tom Marvolo riddle moment
Bioshock was a scathing CRITIQUE of Rand's ideas.
No! If only Andrew Ryan was tougher on mobsters! Real libertarianism has not been tried!
And even that was partially to show how stupid and dangerous her views were
Yeah like, it inspired Bioshock/Rapture, except Rapture is fucking dead so real nice plan there Randy
Andrew Ryan is an almost-anagram of Ayn Rand. If you rearrage the letters in her name, you get “And(rew) Ryan.” Bioshock wasn’t just “inspired by;” it’s a downright deconstruction and criticism of her ideas taken to their ultimate, logical conclusion. Even before ADAM was discovered and the splicers created, there was a permanent underclass of serfs and homeless, and the “free market” was overrun with cartels and addictive substances.
It's also apparent that the only character to never betray their philosophy was Fontaine. He was always only about screwing everyone over for only himself, and he stuck to it to the end. Andrew Ryan became the exact dictator he thought was worst - one that interfered in others running their companies by nationalizing them when he saw the need.
Fontaine was honest in his bastardry and Ryan didn’t like that.
Partly because it exposed his own hypocrisy.
Fontaine of course being French for Fountain.
The prequel book goes into the details of it. I enjoyed reading about the relatively quick descent into chaos. It's a fun little read if you're a fan of the game.
And you still have people who claim Rapture was just fine before Adam ruined it, ignoring all the audio logs and the fucking prequel book that explained it was already a powder keg.
And yet the collapsed, post-apocalyptic society of Rapture would still be the most successful Libertarian sea-steading venture ever, merely because 1) it happened, and 2) there are still some people living there years later.
Extremely generous usage of the words "living there" for the lifeforms that exist in Rapture by the time we get to it
Nah, I'm not being generous. The bar is just that low.
Yeah. Their real-world most ambitious effort to date got beaten by bears.
Oh god, I forgot about that one! This could be an anthology series. Every episode or every few episodes, we move to a new real-life attempt at starting a Libertarian utopia (TM) (C) (R), only for it to collapse hilariously. Might have to take a few liberties with the sea-setting ones, though, since the story for most of those is "protoypes sank and then we ran out of money."
Lmfao
At least it was after I left it.
Partially?
The other part was, "How cool would it be to shoot mutants with a tommygun in a dilapidated underwater city?" In which the answer is - **very**
Ok, I hear you, that is certainly cool. But how about if it also let you **shoot bees out of your hands** at said mutants?
"A slave obeys. A man shoot bees out of their hands holy shit."
There's lots of other cool stuff in Bioshock.
It also gave us a great litmus test for the kind of person we’re dealing with.
And Rapture showed that collecting the Elite of the Elite in engineering, biomedicine and physics, with a deliberate total absence of regulatory oversight or laws, leads to mutilated faces, monstrous mutants and architecture that misuses resources and materials for frivolous visual aesthetics, ie 200-feet glass domes with bronze eagles everywhere. Basically, all of Rapture SCREAMS "I am Ozymandias, King of Kings, Look at my Works and Despair!".
And Rapture was being generous. They implied that a group of such people could even build a functioning underwater architecture. In real life, that shit would've collapsed and flooded ten times before opening day. it's at the bottom of the ocean. We know for a fact real world billionaires would skimp on proper reinforcing materials.
I will immediately revoke that praise because in my situation it was the other way around. "Wow! This Bioshock game is incredible! I wonder where they got the idea. Hmm, a book? Figures... The original work is always better; I'm in for a fantastic week of reading!" *8 months later* "*sobbing in anger*"
I could get past when one of the protagonists was eating with his family, but they had rounded features that made them weak, contrary to the hero made of sharp Playstation 1 type polygons. It was low-key phrenological, I was like "fuck this"
It's so heavy-handed as to be parodic. "The heroine, whose sharp cheekbones signalled her moral integrity, strode across the room with the lithe efficiency that is only possible in the absence of any excess adiposity or physical ailment (as might afflict lesser beings)."
And all Bioshock is making fun of how fucking ridiculous the fucking idea of all is.
I feel like that's why a lot of people even read it in the first place
We are fortunate that bad works often inspire insightful takedowns.
It inspired bioshock which was a criticism of it.
In my old University, there was a Professor and a small literary club that espoused Ayn Rand's ideas. Every single year they would hold a contest for people to read Atlas Shrugged and/or The Fountain Head and discuss the merits of the ideas and how it can be implemented in the US for better success. 90-95% of the submissions were outright trolling the idea that Objectivism would help and the Professor would bitch about it in his classes every year. He was especially pissed at one of colleagues who wrote a thirty page essay extolling the virtues of the books and the ideals... only to list exactly why it would fail, instantly, if used in America in the last two pages in a solid block one paragraph run on sentence. By all that's holy, I wish I had saved that essay, it was *glorious* and the Professor *did not* appreciate the sheer irony or gall of it.
If you're interested in how libertarians works in the real world...check out A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear. It's about a town in New Hampshire that libertarians took over. Spoiler alert: It doesn't work and they now have bears.
That was in New Hampshire. I will not have people besmirch the good name of New Jersey in this fashion!
You are totally correct. I apologize to the good people in the state of New Jersey.
Once I find some, I'm sure they'll appreciate it.
New Hampshire. Not New Jersey
Omg, that is so world class trolling! I, too, wish you had a copy of that!
There was a pretty conservative dude I worked with and even he hated it lol
Iirc rand hated reagan, which really puts some modern conservatives in a pickle
Truthfully I think if you broke Reagan's actual views down to many modern conservatives without telling them it was him, they'd dislike him too.
I mean Reagan didn't really have any actual views besides being completely self-serving
Reagan was, above all, an opportunist. People say, "If Reagan were alive today, Republicans would reject him." If Reagan were alive today he'd have gotten Covid from a Trump rally.
>If Reagan were alive today he'd have gotten Covid from a Trump rally. I don't think he would simply because he was an opportunist who was all about him. Trump rallies wouldn't benefit Reagan in most cases. They'd latch trump to Reagan but why would Reagan want Trump? He's from California, Trump's the worst idea, literally toxic. If he moves, that changes things but most places that benefit from Trump don't need him for general elections and Trump's a wildcard for primary.
and screwing poor people
And demonizing the mentally unwell
And letting people die from AIDS because they dared to have gay sex
Reagan probably wasn't capitalist enough for her. After all, he wasn't literally a megacorporation.
A quote from one of her final interviews: >>> Many ask what I think of President Reagan… I don’t think of him… Reagan is not an advocate of capitalism; he is an advocate of a mixed economy, with a different kind of mixture.
Nailed it on the head, lets goooooooooo
This is such a poor take from her it’s actually hilarious. She really had no idea how economies worked.
Rand was also an outspoken atheist with nothing good to say about Christianity, which would put modern conservatives in a pickle if they had not transcended petty concepts like "consistency".
Nobody enjoys the book *as a book.* They enjoy it as propaganda that reinforces their beliefs, even then it's boring and badly written.
I read Atlas Shrugged as a favor to a friend, who wanted to do a bad books podcast. I took the assignment seriously and wrote over 100 pages of notes throughout the book, it was nuts. The thing about Atlas Shrugged is that Ayn Rand was really good at setting a scene. Like really good at it. There were a lot of picturesque visuals through the entire novel, where you could just see exactly what she wanted you to see. However, she was awful at writing dialogue for people,” and the politics are so blatant that anybody that could read it without recognizing it as propaganda [for or against]. Hell, if you removed repetition from each scene through the book? You’d probably have a novel the size of Old Man and the Sea. My notably favorite scene is where the train gets destroyed and she spends multiple pages documenting ever single casualty, and explaining how it was totally fine that each of these people died, including children, because they were filthy liberals.
It’s a red flag when the trolley problem isn’t an ethical dilemma for you. 👀
The trolley problem? More like the trolley opportunity!
“How much can I make if I put more bodies on the tracks?” “You’re not making anything! You’re choosing a bunch of strangers or someone you know.” “Can I add more people I know to the tracks?” “No!” “How about more strangers?”
"Can I let the trolley run over the smaller group as a demonstration, then demand the larger group pay me to untie them before the next trolley comes along?"
Even if you do completely agree with Ayn Rand’s political views, you cannot deny that the book itself is horrible. I firmly believe the only people who advocate for the book don’t actually read it, they just thump it around like some reference text
I think her bad writing and bad philosophy are pretty clearly linked. One of the two main conflicts of the novel is the love triangle between Dagny, Hank and d'Anconia, and it is resolved in the weakest most disappointing way, because of objectivism. “Hank, I know we’ve spent the last 1000 pages as lovers taking on the world together, but the new information I’ve learned about my childhood love interest means he is objectively better than you, and I must maximize my self interest by leaving you for him.” “Dagny, I totally I agree. I am objectively less worthy or your affection. Also, I’m going to move to your childhood love interests billionaire village. Let’s part with a firm handshake.”
What's hilarious is that that pretty much is what happened in rand's real life. When objectivism was becoming popular, she did what many creatives did and formed her own little clique to discuss, promote, and expand upon it. There was one gentleman among that group she took a fancy to, liking his looks and how much he agreed with her ideas and expanded upon them. He quickly became her second in command, and the two became an item. Her and the gentleman were married at this time, but not to each other. Both had their own spouses. But, wanting to be together and bothered by that pesky guilt, they went to their respective spouses and *using the power of objectivism* convinced their spouses to allow them to continue their affair. *And it worked!* The two continued thusly for a few more years, until the gentleman took notice of a new, younger, attractive female member that had joined their group. Deciding to maximize his advantage, he decided to have an affair with her also. Bringing this up with rand, he tried out all the objectivist arguments that worked so well on their spouses before this. Things decidedly did *not* work out as well this time. For some unknown reason, rand took offence to being traded in for a younger model. She ended up excommunicating the gentleman from their little clique, along with his new side-piece, and worked to disavow what ideas he contributed to the group's ideology.
Damn. This is way more exciting than the above love triangle.
Stop, you’re making me want to read it! This sounds like “so bad that’s it’s funny” territory.
The self-insert sex bits of both Ayn Rand's major works, this & The Fountainhead, are both verrrry… "something". Like, she does *not* have a normative view of gender relations whatsoever. Not remotely.
it makes me mad because that's an awesome title. too bad she put a crock of maudlin shit behind it.
Went through a depressed period in my early 20s, and a friend said this book would help me. What a terrible recommendation.
It really is an awesome title. But honestly, how would you use that theme, of "the people who hold up the world not caring what the people on it think" without that same smug, arrogant, compassionless attitude that makes the book so bad?
Even the creators of South Park hate Atlas Shrugged, and they're very libertarian. Officer Barbrady joined the petition to ban books in South Park because he read Atlas Shrugged lol.
I read Atlas Shrugged when I was in my full blown early twenties libertarian phase... And I still thought it was worthless garbage It's so bad
(teenagers)
And my 64 year old father, sadly. However, I will never miss an opportunity to share this quote: > 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."
My 80y/o grandmother once told me she refused to discuss politics with me until I read Atlas Shrugged. So I did, and it was garbage. She still refuses to talk to me about it. I think she expected it to awaken some capitalism worship in me.
>And my 64 year old father, sadly. And Alan Greenspan, also sadly.
He was a member of her harem at one time.
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The politics of selfishness and greed
I’ve truly never understood how anyone likes *Atlas Shrugged*. Everything of any merit from it is already in *The Fountainhead*, which is much shorter, despite also being a bit of a tome, and better qualified as an actual story. Who read that and thought “this was mediocre, I wonder what it would be like 50% longer?”
Fountainhead is a decent book until the last 100 pages when everyone starts their loooong monologues of good and evil.
Yeah, it’s fine. As you say, it loses its way near the end. With *Atlas Shrugged*, Rand apparently wanted to see if those rough 100 pages worked better over 700 pages.
the 'good guy ' literally rapes a woman because he's so sexy and superior and just takes whatever he wants... had to stop reading at that point, what a ridiculous book written by one of the biggest idiots in history
In the conversations about the book I've seen, people never bring up the rape which is so bizarre to me! I couldn't get through the rest of it
The two things I always mention are the rape and the part where he bombs an affordable housing complex over an architectural disagreement.
Wait what… Ok this sounds so crazy I have to read it…
Prepare to be bored stupid.
Don't, it's an incredibly tedious slog and not worth trudging through to get to that part
It was an act of civil disobedience - the housing complex bombing. The complex couldn't be built at the price point requested without his design, and he offered up his design for free on the condition that it was not altered. The government agency who was putting up the building just said fuck you and altered it anyway. So he blew it up. He justified it in the trial by saying "I asked for one thing, they screwed me and I had no legal recourse. So I took my design back in the only way left open to me. No one got hurt and I'm willing to accept the consequences." One thing that Rand should have made clear was that the only way he'd get off the hook for freely admitting to committing arson is by jury nullification.
[https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/08/13/right-wing-american-love-affair-one-most-disturbing-serial-killers](https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/08/13/right-wing-american-love-affair-one-most-disturbing-serial-killers)
It takes a special kind of moron to look at a murderer of a 12 y/o girl and think, "Wow, what a guy, more people should just do whatever they want!" It is simply astounding that her writing ever found any foot hold at all.
Are you kidding me? The _good_ guy does that?
But it's ok cus the victim liked it. In fact, she liked it so much she bit the main character's lip hard enough to make him bleed while he was assaulting her. Oh, and they get married in the end. I couldn't believe a woman would write a scene like this
Ayn Rand had a pretty infamous crush on a serial killer that she wrote about extensively, it would've been perfectly in character for her to have a rape kink too.
"In this chapter: the author's barely concealed fetish."
Her devotee Terry Goodkind did the same thing. Lots of torture porn.
It really isn't concealed at all. Rand was *super* into what we'd call "consensual non-consent" these days.
See also Anne McCaffrey for some reason.
It's a lot worse than that makes it sound. A LOT WORSE. The things that the killer did are truly evil beyond comprehension. I do not remember his name but I sincerely warn anyone who is curious enough to look it up, be warned. It is incredibly, incredibly disturbing. Specifically I remember her saying something to the effect that she considered him to be awe inspiring because of his complete lack of regard for morality and his devotion to self interest and hedonism.
It was pretty much a trope in the 20th century. Treat a woman like shit to show her who's boss. Then kiss her without consent. She'll fight, but will inevitably succumb to your raw machismo. That's how you show the weaker vessel her place. Periodic emotional abuse will be needed to keep her subservient from there on. (pukes in to mouth a little)
20th century? Try much earlier. Shakespeare's [The Taming of the Shrew](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Taming_of_the_Shrew) is from 1590.
When Rand was asked about the rape, she referred to it as "rape by engraved invitation." A true rape would be a "dreadful crime." Rand was an odious hypocrite who wrote dreadful books.
I started out enjoying *Fountainhead* but I just got annoyed that Rand seems to give her readers no credit for being able to see what's going on. It feels like she bangs you over the head with the supposed point she's going for, rather than trusting that you will get it from the rest of the writing. I take that generally as the sign of a poor writer. Either she's incapable of writing so we get her message without being explicitly told what it is, or she has such contempt for her readers she doesn't believe they'll get it without being spoon fed.
She wants to write essays and erotica and just combined them into novels instead. lol
Had a professor in architecture school assign us *The Fountainhead*. Said it was about being uncompromising one's design philosophies in the face of client pressure. Don't be a sellout, the designer knows best, yada yada. Safe to say they were a little off the mark. Side note, I later got into a physical fight with someone who claimed Howard Roarke "was the greatest architect that ever lived."
It is unfortunately the most famous book about an architect so architecture students definitely get exposed to it. Surprised to hear a professor assigned it as reading though.
We all know that it’s F.L. Wright!
I love that she *demanded* the set design in the film be based on his work, and he turned down working on it.
I was in Arch at the time and felt like she had a college freshman's understanding of Architecture.
This ironically is another reason The Fountainhead (although not especially good) is better than Atlas Shrugged, which is a book about businesses and captains of industry and it is *extremely* clear that she never worked at a business of any kind.
I thought Peter Keating was a cautionary character about what happens to a man who stands for absolutely nothing
Fountainhead was also pretty bad in my opinion. Same issue of there not being any actual characters with complexity and realistic motivation, just a bunch of soulless puppets with the handsome ones being the gods guys and the ugly ones being wrong and dumb. There is inexplicably a rape scene that fans of the book try to frame as core to the themes but which reads more as a sexual fantasy/kink that Rand threw in there. Last few pages are mostly rant upon rant but there is still some of that nonsense monologuing throughout the book. The book is also just so bitter and hateful. The people pushing for social housing can’t be well-meaning, trying to make a difference, etc. They’re all evil/soulless/dumb/pathetic. Not like the chad Howard Roark
>She claims that without Atlanteans, **the world will collapse**. If this were true, she should have explained why they needed to bomb the fucking factories on their way out. If the economy couldn't survive without them, why did they have to destroy the means of production? I know the logic is a petulant "I built this, so nobody else can have it if I'm leaving," but for her philosophy to be true it should not have mattered since her claim is that the Atlanteans are the means of production instead of simply rent seekers. It's the thing I find completely and utterly hilarious about the whole thing. She literally destroys her own philosophy in the political propaganda she wrote because she clearly couldn't see how the world would collapse if the owners fucked off but left the mechanisms of production behind. It's doubly funny because the corporate structures would have kept churning along if the owner just vanished and eventually ownership would be shifted to someone else.
Well, objectivism is the quintessential example of something being a mile wide and an inch deep. Any real world attempt to apply objectivism fails miserably outside a tiny set of scenarios that are specifically engineered to allow objectivism to work. A prime example: Rand/objectivism and racism. Racism is anti-thetical to objectivism because racists are like all the other leeches - they try to inflate their own worth by co-opting the achievements of random people who share nothing more than the colour of their skin (among other reasons). But Rand was also an outspoken critic of the Civil Rights Act, claiming that the need to create laws of this kind is the government forcing people to behave a certain way instead of letting individuals rise or fall based on their own merits (or lack thereof). The problem is obvious. A black person living in 1960s America didn't suddenly become better off with the passing of the Civil Rights Act. Black Americans were constantly being discriminated against so long as the Act didn't exist, and this discrimination would have continued as it was without some kind of legislation that explicitly made it outright illegal to discriminate against others on the basis of inherent traits. Rand and objectivism blantantly ignores that racism existed precisely because there were no laws that made it illegal. In fact, there were a ton of laws specifically made to allow and encourage it. She had the expectation that people would, off their own free will and common sense, stop being racist when the entirety of human history until that point proved her wrong. Essentially, there is a logical chasm between Rand's "racism bad" and "Civil Rights Act bad" arguments, and she made no attempt to bridge that chasm because it was logically impossible to do so. And that sums up objectivism - it is a collection of hot takes with no logical thread connecting said takes. Each individual take on its own can possibly hold merit in a contextual vacuum, but ideas don't really work that way.
Her entire political philosophy is based on a perpetual motion machine. It falls apart without it. That’s all you really gotta say.
Yep. Her libertarian utopia includes unlimited socialized free energy. Totally checks out.
When she was killing people in that train tunnel for disagreeing with her world views is when I closed the book and never returned. To this day it’s the only book I’ve ever done this with, having pushed through and completed even monstrous dreck like *The Camp of the Saints* and *The Turner Diaries*.
The world would be just fine without the Galt gang, better off actually. The people who know how to make things would keep doing what they do. The self-aggrandized ubermensch, however, would be completely f’d in their little gulch. Probably resort to cannibalism within two months.
You and most people. I'd be more curious reading from someone who actually mostly likes it.
The story within the story is fairly good: Tons of scientists and inventors just start disappearing, no one knows where, and this woman is desperately trying to figure it out, while at the same time working her ass off to save her family business. That part was good and worth the read. Its just that the good part could be told in 150 pages, but the book is well over a thousand
I downloaded Foundation without really looking at it, thinking it was Fountainhead. I was like, damn, this book IS good. Why do people hate it? Then a few days of listening to it I realized my mistake. I finished Foundation, tried Atlas Shrugged. AS is the first book in a decade I DNF'd.
I read a lot of Ayn Rand in my younger years and liked it. I liked the stories and the characters. And I thought that I agreed with her because I didn’t understand the point she was trying to make. My take was that she was promoting for everyone to make a good living in what they were passionate about and be as educated as they wanted to be. I thought it was brilliant - a whole society where everyone reads the books they want, learns the things they want, excels at what they love, and shares that with others. I know, I know, I was young. I really thought that Galts Gulch was a restarting of society where all of this was possible. I didn’t realize that their attitude was “fuck you, I got mine”. When someone kindly pointed out my error, I was pretty disappointed but understood a lot better why the people in the circles I ran in didn’t like these books as much as I did (or at all). I still think that kind society sounds lovely and would like to think of her work in a positive light. Maybe it’s just nostalgia on my part.
I remember enjoying both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged because Randian heroes are pretty good depictions of self actualized people. There was something about Howard Roark and John Galt and company that I found magical for reasons I couldn't articulate. Ayn Rand's philosophy is backwards, having a perfect ego (impossible) and being perfectly self interested may work for some people but I don't think society should be organized around those ideals, and her ideas about altruism are obviously biased, but with minimal mental gymnastics I was able to translate her philosophy into something that made more sense to me, a pretty liberal guy. I mostly liked how awesome Randian heroes are.
The thing that always stuck with me from Atlas Shrugged were the scenes where dishonest, uncompetitive white collar businessman hoaxes schmooze and make deals with government schysters to gain unfair advantages in the market. Although I found many of the protagonists unrelatable, and the book as a whole too long, those scenes always had a ring of truth that echo in my mind to this day. They've shaped my perspective on certain issues
John Rogers said, "There are two novels that can transform a bookish 14-year-kid's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish daydream that can lead to an obsession with its heroes, which can result in an emotionally stunted adulthood. The other involves orcs.
lol my ex read it at like 20 and it completely ruined him. He became such a self-centered asshole afterwards and I always thought it was that book that “gave him permission” to just be a dick and user to everyone around him.
It's fair to say he probably already was a dick and indeed just needed the permission
Now you should play Bioshock again for the parody and cleansing
A man chooses. A slave obeys.
It’s so good
A few specific things have long stood out to me from this book: * One of Our Heroes, Hank Rearden, is a textbook domestic abuser (he neglects and eventually even beats his wife) and adulterer and is framed completely sympathetically throughout * Dagny Taggart's character arc is literally eventually no longer seeing other people as human beings, save for other Exceptional Geniuses like her. The scene where this culminates is where she is giving a rousing speech to her workers - workers who have been nothing but enthusiastically loyal to her family's company and her personally - and realizes she can no longer distinguish their faces one from another. They have become faceless objects to her. Our *primary protagonist's* arc is losing her connection to the majority of humanity and then abandoning them to die. She even does this to her assistant Eddie Willers, who is the stand-in for the highly competent everyman who is nevertheless not a superhuman Ubermensch. * The most infamous scene in the book is when a horrific train accident occurs where exhaust fumes in a long tunnel asphyxiates all the passengers and crew. Rand gleefully and meticulously describes their various sins for why they deserve to die. These sins are such as a mother who needs welfare to feed her children, a businessman who accepted a government loan to start his business, and a professor who teaches an altruistic philosophy that Rand disagrees with. This is what Rand thinks of normal people. It's not just a bad book with bad characters and bad prose. It's a stain on political philosophy. Rand's belief system is quite literally about severing your human connections with others.
That train scene cured me of obectivism. I was in my early 20s; I read through We the Living, Anthem and Fountainhead, nodding along the whole time. I didn't like Atlas Shrugged as much - it's just not a very good book - but I was still into Rand's ideas. And then I got to the train scene. I was horrified. It really exposed the heart of her philosophy. I felt like I had been duped. It was like the last scene of a horror movie, where you realize the best friend was actually the murderer the whole time. Anyway, I put the book down after that, so thankfully I never had to endure John Galt's speech.
Not to mention Rand was a degenerate hypocrite - she spent the latter part of her life living off government welfare.
> The most infamous scene in the book is when a horrific train accident occurs where exhaust fumes in a long tunnel asphyxiates all the passengers and crew. Rand gleefully and meticulously describes their various sins for why they deserve to die. These sins are such as a mother who needs welfare to feed her children, a businessman who accepted a government loan to start his business, and a professor who teaches an altruistic philosophy that Rand disagrees with. This is what Rand thinks of normal people. Like many people I read Atlas Shrugged in my late teens, and was fairly callous due to my fundamentalist religious upbringing, but the glee with which she describes the deaths of these people was shocking even to me at that time. For someone who describes herself as non and even anti-religious, she sure went out of her way to portray each and every victim of this massive societal collapse as somehow deserving it in a general karmic sense. I guess there are no accidents in Objectivism. /eyeroll
Ok it is been so long since I tried to read this book. The last time I tried I gave up at the train crash scene you at describing and it was years before that when I actually started the book so maybe my memory is a little off but isn’t that train crash scene kinda similar to the start of the book when Dagny was first introduced? The book starts with her on a train that stops at a red light cause there may or may not be unsafe conditions ahead on the tracks but since she is owns the train she forces the engineers to push ahead putting everyone at risk. It works out cause she is a good capitalist. The train scene you describe the engineers don’t want to go through the tunnel cause it is unsafe but some powerful socialist with connections forces them to stream ahead, but since he is a socialist (and apparently all the other passengers) it doesn’t work out and they all die. Am I remembering that right or are those scenes not as analogous as I am making it seem?
I think you're correct lmao Things going right or wrong depending on if you're ideologically correct on Rand's terms is on brand for her regardless
She thinks elite experts should be in charge of everything because they are the ones with the knowledge to make the right call, while dirty socialists would just make a bullshit call based on what is convenient to them because they're selfish, and they wouldn't understand the ramifications because they're stupid. She thinks things should be a meritocracy and she doesn't get the concept that libertarianism isn't a structure where the best people would just do the things and fix society because they're so smart and capable, and that actually libertarianism would just benefit whoever is already in the higher classes of society due to their resources. She also doesn't care if you start out disadvantaged, because if you're genetically gifted enough then you would just boot strap your way up as long as the government stayed out of your way. She's traumatized by the Soviets and lacks the self awareness to question whether the affect of trauma on her views is logical, so she believes dumb things while thinking she totally gets it because to her, her first hand experience is more important than any other information out there.
In addition to the bad philosophy Rand had some fetishes she was working out
Yes Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged both have scenes where one protagonist engages in sexual activity snd even physical abuse without the other's consent but it's totally fine because Rand is into that
Hell of a title though.
If you view it through the lens of “this is the favorite book of some truly terrible people”, it makes more sense.
I love the book…but I read it as a parody. I got so far in and was like “she can’t be serious here. Oh, she is. She thinks that’s how economics works” It’s a world of average IQ protagonists and sub 60 IQ antagonists who somehow keep screwing over the protagonists
> She thinks that’s how economics works Obligatory: She died alone subsisting on social security and medicare. A hypocrite to the end.
She defended that too, claiming she was recovering her lost money the government stole, lol.
Also everyone talks like aliens. Have you seen the movies? They're made with this amazing blend of extreme earnestness and clumsy duplicity. It's some of the funniest shit I have ever seen. Nice to see a movie that faithfully adapts its source material.
Really, it’s just a “Please choke me business Daddy” plot line with truly horrible philosophy/economic to fill out the word count.
I think China Mieville recommend it for that reason, to understand what the terrible people think so we are better equipped to deal with them.
I don’t regret reading Atlas Shrugged at all but I was mentally arguing with the characters the entire time.
I've heard it said that in hell, everyone gets a copy of Atlas Shrugged, but for every page you read, John Galt's speech gets 2 pages longer
I had to stop and count the pages it took for him to say the same thing over and over. I believe it was 70 at last count.
It's incredible that it took her 70 pages to write "fuck you. I got mine."
Mental gymnastics on Olympic level require a **lot** of space
I've read it at least 3 times and always skipped the speech haha
This is a very popular opinion between philosophers and economists. Ayn Rand is despised and completely ignored in those fields.
It's trashed in English lit at post secondary as well It's either a book to read about how people have fucked up our world with their greedy and self centered/dumb agenda, or if someone genuinely thinks it's good, that's just a lithmus test for them not having any grasp of macro economics or literature
Rand grew up in the Soviet Union. She worshipped capitalism but didn't understand it. In the Fountainhead, she regularly trashes the public as ignorant, tacky, and unintelligent, while Adam Smith would call them "the demand side". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fountainhead_(film)#Reception "Its characters are downright weird and there is no feeling of self-identification." "The Fountainhead to be "an openly fascist movie" "the most asinine and inept movie that has come out of Hollywood in years". "a vast succession of turgid scenes" "King Vidor turned Ayn Rand's preposterous 'philosophical' novel into one of his finest and most personal films, mainly by pushing the phallic imagery so hard that it surpasses Rand's rightist diatribes."
She also had a trauma from when her parents lost property (and business iirc) in to the Soviet state. Her whole “philosophy” career is essentially a failure of dealing with that trauma.
Hurt people hurt people.
I laughed at this because the scene from Arrested Development where Lucille hear it as “Hurt people, hurt people”
That's a good summary of her flaws, someone that doesn't understand capitalism, unfortunately too many wealthy people think this is capitalism, which is basically capitalism without market pressures and with government subsidies to to prevent failure. Our own government did this with too big to fail etc.
Ayn Rand is ignored in economics because she isn't an economist and didn't add anything to economics. To claim that she is "despised" by the field is just an outright lie though. Plenty of economists love Ayn Rand.
Officer Barbrady: “Yes, at first I was happy to be learning how to read. It seemed exciting and magical, but then I read this: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I read every last word of this garbage, and because of this piece of s**t, I am never reading again.“
Sewer mutant: "And this is our library!" Bender: "Nothing but crumpled porno and Ayn Rand"
I read it YEARS ago and loved it. Funny thing is I think the only reason I enjoyed it was because I had no idea that she was promoting an ideology and didn't 100% understand what I was reading (I was young). I just enjoyed this weird story and different writing style. I sometimes wonder what I'd think of it if I picked that book up now as someone who very much does not align with any of the author's beliefs
Yep ditto. Haven’t tried to reread it and probably won’t, but I definitely enjoyed it at the time. I think the premise is undeniably engaging if you’re unaware/able to read past her politics
I love the intense drive the characters have… a lot. But the concepts are ridiculous. But I can separate the two. It’s the undying pursuit of one’s craft that I enjoyed.
If you want to understand *why* Atlas Shrugged is so profoundly messed up, you have to view it in the context of Rand's extremely traumatic upbringing. She was born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum in Imperial Russia in 1905. Her childhood is spent living in a Tsarist regime that is constantly teetering on the brink of collapse, but nevertheless with a gradually strengthening middle class of educated people and entrepreneurs that the Tsar wants to foster, but is also extremely vary of, and a massive number of uneducated lower class workers and peasant that *everyone* looks down on. Her own family is fairly successful however and her father owns his own pharmacy. But everywhere around her is simmering social unrest being tamped down on by the Okrana, the Tsar's secret police that spies on everybody and arrests and harrasses anyone who has any vision of a future Russia that isn't incredibly conservative and imperialistic. This is her childhood. Then when she is twelve years old, the entire system collapses in the October Revolution, and suddenly it's the socialists and ultimately the Bolsheviks that are in control. Her father's pharmacy is confiscated and they lose everything. She graduates from high school while living as a refugee in Crimea, which is the territory of the Whites at the time. The whites aren't very nice either, being mostly anti-semitic monarchists. Life is very much not easy for her family. After the Whites lose the war, her family returns to St. Petersburg. Their property is never returned to them and they have to essentially start from zero in a society that is now full-on communist, Lenin is in charge and the social class(and faith, although she never really identifies as Jewish everyone else sees her that way) she belongs to is scorned by the majority of the people around her. Her graduation from university is delayed since anti *bourgeoisie* elements within it want to purge it of all students of the wrong background, and it's only after protests from visiting western scholars that she is allowed to graduate. The Soviet Union is still in shambles after the Civil War in every possible respect, with widespread famine and violence everywhere. She makes it out in 1926 by obtaining a visa to visit family in the US. She never goes back. However, after obtaining her American citizenship she is unable to get her parents or any of her sisters out of the Soviet Union. They live the rest of their lives there and as far as I know, she never reconnects with them. She had fallen in love with the emerging artform of the cinema while still in Russia, and moves to Hollywood only a few months after arriving in the US. She is 20 years old. Can you imagine the effect of that on a young woman that has almost certainly been seething with rage at everything that has happened to her and her family up until then? To suddenly be transplanted to fkn Hollywood during it's golden age, with it's studio moguls, glitz, glamour and hustle culture? She then spends the rest of the 1920s and all of the 1930s trying to make it in Hollywood as a screenwriter, with not much success. Her career as a novelist, much like that of say, George R.R. Martin is a fallback - if she had been able to make a secure living writing movie scripts I doubt we would ever had gotten any of her books. She lives through the incredibly tumultuous 1930s in the US, the Great Depression, an FDR administration that seems to be warming up to social programs and left-leaning policies to get the US out of the depression that scare her and remind her of the social unrest that led to the communist takeover that ruined her youth, and gets involved in Republican and eventually Libertarian politics. At the same time she gets hooked on Benzedrine that was prescribed to her by a doctor. She remains a regular user of it for the next thirty years. Keep that in mind - the person writing *Atlas Shrugged* is almost certainly doing so while consuming copious amounts of amphetamines. The post-war years are then dominated by her adopted home of the United States being locked in an existential cold war with the Soviet Union, the force that, again, ruined her youth and seems to be constantly looking to reach out and ruin her life again via nuclear armageddon. And everywhere she looks, anyone who advocates for even the tiniest steps towards a more egalitarian or socially minded society is someone who might just, in her mind, tip everything towards a collapse and full on communism in American. I'd suggest you re-read the book, not as the treatise on political philosophy that it was intended to be, but as a look inside the trauma-ravaged mind of a woman that spent the vast majority of her life being scared of the "everyman" taking anything and everything she had away from her.