I thought it was interesting how both the paperback version of “Atlas Shrugged” and “Dianetics” have a form in the back of the book where a person could fill out and mail away to “learn more”.
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“Society”? That implies civilization, organization, people living together in peace. What Rand really describes is a world full of nothing but predators and prey-- choose which one you want to be, there is no middle ground.
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The amazing square that gets circled in GOP circles over Ayn Rand is that she’s a militant atheist. It isn’t that she just disagrees with Christianity, it’s the villain of her story (if the villain were a two-headed monster whose other head was Communism).
The concept of “treasures in heaven” (i.e. not accumulating material wealth in favor of a rich afterlife) is the antithesis of Rand’s beliefs. And yet, so many Republican politicians manage to profess staunch belief in both Objectivism and Jesus at the same time. It ought to be impossible.
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my response to reading it at 14 or 15 was to decide it was a remarkably evil book. my response to later learning how many republicans and right-wing oriented business/finance/government types used it as a foundational piece of their personal philosophy has been to read it about once every ten years to remind myself of how much evil and bullshit walks among us.
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I think you can skip the next reading, given what’s going on nowadays.
I managed to avoid reading the stupid book entirely. I don’t think I’ve missed anything.
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in some ways, despite the evil inherent in it, it gets funnier with every reading. her reliance on trains, steel mills, and petroleum as the beating heart of her universe was enormously funny the last time i read it. i’ve also read the John galt speech" section aloud onto tape while i was reading it the time before last just to see how long it actually takes to say out loud. it took me 3 hours and 20 minutes. i thought that was pretty funny too.
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I haven’t read that book or seen the (by all accounts nigh-unwatchable) 2011 film adaptation or its sequels, but I know one thing the critics fixated on was how anachronistic it seemed to depict the railroads as the heart of the 21st Century American economy. Couldn’t they have just made it a period piece if they wanted to stay faithful to the source material?
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The old white men of Silicon Valley all have giant Ayn Rand back tattoos.
Hey, I know someone they would like…(Roger Stone)
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Yeah, it looks like the Prosperity Gospel has pretty much taken over Christian thought in this nation. You can no longer argue that love of money is not Christian because what Christianity is has changed.
The book is prescriptive, so it always has to be read as warning and promise of how the future will be. It’s also a holy book and can’t be wrong, so you just need to twist reality somehow to make it plausible (so in the movies the Democrats ruined everything so trains are now profitable again - thanks Obama!).
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I would steal this book.
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In the 80’s a friend had drinks with the lead singer of a popular British hair band who shall not be named. The guy was drunk and talking about how great he thought Ayn Rand was along with how he was smart even though people thought he was stupid. At some point he asked to see my friends new Rolex that his dad gave him to see if it was real. He wound up smashing it on the bar. He was rich. He did not replace it. Yep. A dick.
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“Pa is a dolt”…yes, but he’s sexy as in like “Hello, sturdly, can you diddle that thang son? Ooh, I don’t believe it.” Live demos @ 5, 7, and 9pm.
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This series from CBC radio was excellent, she and her group were pretty weird:
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If you want to get the gist of her ideas without reading a huge book, you could watch an interview:
…if that doesn’t put you off, nothing will.
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Michael Landon, maybe. But Pa in the book was a complete idiot. Remember when he nearly burnt the house down while the girls were stuck at home by building the chimney out of sticks and mud? And his solution was to rebuild it out of sticks and mud again and then fuck off to Independence for a week for nails or something? Guy was an idiot.
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I’ve quoted it before…
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That’s not true. They are outliers, and the rest of us assume they are lost.
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Well…
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Wasn’t there only one? 
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