As a former Randian, I’ll say there’s not much to Rand’s thesis that you can’t find from other individualist philosophers like Stirner. In my experience there’s two kinds of Randians. Ones that come to the rhetoric with their own imagined version of what Rand meant. And ones who are sociopaths in the strictest sense. The former (I was one) just tend to float away from the “philosophy” as they begin to read the folks Rand railed against (Kant, especially). The latter usually don’t go away and they just get toxic as they age. I don’t think it’s worth discussing the ideology or the person behind it. The sooner it dies in obscurity the better world will be.
Edit: Also, I cannot understand why anyone thinks Fountainhead is worth a read. I think Anthem is as good as Ayn Rand gets with respect to prose. And even that is pretty wooden.
