Several of you have read Rand multiple times over decades. CM Maccioli's story about discovering her through a genius brother who gave her time to read, and SheThinksLiberty crying on the Boston T while finishing We The Living—these are the kinds of encounters with books that shape a life. Paul Vonharnish rereading in 2008 and seeing the regulatory trajectory clearly is exactly the pattern I was hoping to surface.
ShieldMaiden offers serious critique from the inside—a former "Randian Disciple" who now sees gaps: family, children, nature, spirit. The Nathaniel Branden material is worth anyone's time. Whether Rand was a "government operative" I cannot say, but the question of what's absent from her framework is fair. Her characters don't have children. They don't get sick. They don't age. They don't pray. That's a narrow band of human experience.
Mark Tokarski raises Enron and the California grid—what happens when Randian rhetoric meets actual sociopaths with market power. The philosophy in the wild doesn't always look like the philosophy on the page. His piece calling her a sociopath is linked; readers can judge.
Benn pushes on "deserve" and invokes Los Alamos—hard-working, innovative, logical people who built instruments of mass death. Point taken. Reason is a tool. Tools can build or destroy.
Gordon Groves and ShieldMaiden both raise the Rockefeller/committee authorship theory. I have no evidence either way. The books exist. The arguments are in them. I've tried to present those arguments clearly so people can assess them on their merits.
Horsea T. notes the natural resource constraint—we transform but don't create matter. eileen raises discernment and the limits of logic without intuition. Both are pointing at the same gap: Objectivism is strong on reason and weak on everything that isn't reason.
James Felter reading the book in one 14-hour sitting and then walking into a candlelit oath ceremony for altruism—that's a collision of worldviews in a single morning.
For those who haven't read the book—INGRID C DURDEN and others—I hope this gives you enough to decide whether the thousand pages are worth your time. For those who have: I'd be curious which ideas survived your own decades of testing and which didn't.
There was no sibling rivalry in my family because we were mostly 6 years apart, so that when #2 started learning their ABC's, #1 was embarking on 7th grade, and so on. Smack dab in the middle of that hierarchy came my brother and and I, only 11 months apart. He was a genius, I was ordinary. We compared report cards. I needed to bump up. He never studied, he read books. I needed 4 hours of study a night to compete while he was outside playing.
But he was kind beyond measure and would come in, all sweaty, and say, "You're still studying?" Being one year ahead of me in school, he gave me all the answers to tests he had taken which prepared me for the following year. That gave me time on my hands. What to do?
I started reading like he did. I found out the reading list for high school when I was in grammar. Steinbeck, Hemingway were a given, Plato's Republic and Thomas Aquinas for the so-called"gifted" I enjoyed more. Has anyone seen those books in high school today?
I then settled on the Russians, Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitzen. All great, read everything they penned. But nothing could have prepared me for Any Rand, another Russian. Her books rocked my world. I also know no one who has read her work, all the while castigating her as a communist, which meant nothing to me, still doesn't. I remember her on the Jack Paar show, I was a child. She looked nervous, even scared to be interviewed. Maybe it was just her big eyes.
Of all the books I have read, nothing comes close to The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. My brother and Any Rand were my mentors. Thank you for touching upon this great book. As you see, it has brought back many memories.
On a tall narrow, freestanding bookcase on a shelf all by themselves sit, in hard cover, "Atlas Shrugged," "The Fountainhead," "We The Living," and the documentary companion book, "Ayn Rand - A Sense of Life."
Loved all three of the aforementioned novels, but "We The Living"? Staggering in its tragic truth about living under conditions that "moral fraud" brings about. Nearing its end, one unfolding series of events leading to one of the book's tragedies actually brought me to blubbering tears. This as I rode the Massachusetts "T" to work in downtown Boston. Feeling like an idiot, but unable to stop, I hung my chin at my chest as I fished for tissues.
Agree, disagree, say what you will, there's only one Ayn Rand.
I read Atlas Shrugged a few decades ago. I remember liking it but can't say or recall whether it had any significant impact on me. For some reason, I felt a desire to reread it a few months ago. It felt timely in our current political environment across the west. I highly recommend it as an important book to read. It is an enjoyable read although I must admit it seemed longer than it needed to be upon my second reading.
I don't think Ayn Rand wrote anything. I think the Rockefeller Brothers Fund wrote it by committee. All the absurdly vile implications and insinuations sound exactly like the sinister monster, John D Rockefeller, and his equally inhuman offspring.
Loved this reflection on Atlas Shrugged and how you connected Rand’s world to our current moment. The reminder that reason, productivity, and personal responsibility are moral virtues—not moral failings—still cuts against so much of today’s cultural current.
Rand’s insistence that the individual’s mind is the ultimate driver of progress, and that a society which punishes its most creative and competent members is ultimately sabotaging itself, feels especially relevant. I also appreciate how you avoid turning this into a caricature of “greed is good,” and instead highlight the dignity of doing excellent work, owning the consequences of one’s choices, and refusing to live by guilt or resentment.
I read this book many years ago, and as an exposition of a philosophy, fine. Thus do the characters have to utter lines that living breathing humans would not. But I was influenced by it. As time went on, and expecially after Enron and the California electrical crisis of the same time, I began to realize that this philosophy, or any, when actually implemented, quickly turns to s***. Enron imploded, and the CA power grid was taken over by psychopaths who used rolling backouts to maximize profits and "crush poor F****** Grandma's" bank account, roughly the actual recorded words of one grid operator.
Thus did I comment on a blog run by Randians out of Missoula that anytime Rand's philosophy was put into practice, chaos followed. The business world is disproportionately populated by sociopaths. Their hidden hands do not help us, but rather slap us silly. The blog has long since folded, but I would bet if the proprietor opened it up again tomorrow, I would still be banned.
Then there is Rand the person, whom I judged to be a sociopath. I wrote about that on my own blog and drew both wrath and praise. She could not appreciate romantic love because she had never experienced it. She openly had an affair with a trusted colleague, her spouse be damned. And, push did come to shove, as when she had smoked herself into lung cancer, she accepted Medicare.
A flawed woman espousing a flawed philosophy to a flawed world. Several years ago certain individuals decided to "Go Galt" and retire from the world to punish us by withholding their genius ... I did not keep track, but I would bet they all came creeping back into the world again quietly, through the bathroom window.
I read "Atlas Shrugged" in 1983. I was introduced to the work by a person who considered herself "conservative". She wasn't... My views at the time were; shall we say, libertarian... I thought I understood the message of the work at the time, but as life continued I realized I hadn't grasped its true value... The book and its author were endlessly denigrated by mainstream press.
I reread the book in 2008, and was blown away by the complexity. of Ms Rand's insights. It was early in the Obama 'administration' and I could *clearly* see the trajectory of regulatory decay and social decline. That said: Quoted from your article: "The person who sacrifices their values for momentary pleasures or for the demands of others is acting against their self-interest. The novel redefines selfishness as virtue by distinguishing it from mindless hedonism." [End quote] Perhaps this poem defines alternate perspective.
Thank you. I rarely publish my poetry, even though I was offered international publication and acclaim many years ago. I have concluded the majority of public have been reduced to machines spouting machine language. Alas...
Thank you for this. I am writing this as a woman who read “The Fountainhead” in Jr. High, and “Atlas Shrugged” in high school, plus many other books by Rand including “The Romantic Manifesto”, “We the Living” etc. In short I was a ‘Randian Disciple’. With 50 years of perspective since, I honestly think that there is a good chance that Alysa Zinovievna Rosenbaum was a government operative, recruited in Hollywood. That aside, I now find ‘her’ philosophy to be very narrow. Her books leave HUGE gaps in an understanding of what it is to be a human. Family, children, all manner of Nature are completely absent except for the metaphor of the mighty oak. Also absent is any appreciation of human spirit apart from logic and guts. Rand was an avowed atheist. The Dollar Sign became her selected icon of a type of cult. “The Fountainhead” went far to defame classical architecture while actual demolition of old world buildings has been going for decades all over the world. As a writer of character she was rather childish, but her narratives were intermixed with some actual salient logical reasoning. Not original but repackaged. She was also a scary narcissist in her personal life; reference psychologist Nathaniel Branden (a.k.a. Nathan Blumenthal) who was in her inner circle and her adulterous lover for years. Branden (anagram of ben + rand = son of Rand) wrote a revelatory book on the subject. I believe much damage has been done to people who, like me, were romanced by left-brain philosophy but have not outgrown it. Suffice it say, I am happy to have gotten over it. I honestly don’t understand certain individuals who can speak with devout admiration of Ayn Rand and somehow promote their own spiritual and psi (psychic phenomena) pursuits. Rand herself would have scorned them viciously.
I found the book Fountainhead cold when I read it (1994) and didn't hear of her again before today. At that time I was far from being aware of the Moors or Tartarians and Powers-that-shouldn't-Be's incredibly evil and methodical - and still active - obliteration of their beautiful civilisation from our history. .
I read several of Ayne Rand's books when I was 14. Atlas shrugged was a surreal experience. I was a patriotic young man growing up in a military household. I read the book in one 14 hour sitting starting after dinner around 7pm and finishing as I arrived at school around 9am with no sleep.
Then I went straight into a junior national merit scholarship induction ceremony. That was essentially a ritual magic candel ceremony taking oaths to commit ones life to altruism.
I am not an objectivist, but I never attended another njmss meeting.
No, Ayn, it is not just about your mind and your creativity and your hard work. After all is said and done, we are living on natural resources - things which can be transformed but never invented. Once they are gone, they are gone. Any worthwhile political system understands this.
Rand's ideas are correct in an abstract way. But this is globalism we have here, today. Most people can't make good decisions when the entire western world's mainstream media are the biggest promulgators of lies imaginable.
Heard a lot about Rand and seen her books in the houses of friends but never read any. I am not looking forward to reading a 1000 page book, usually the ones I started of that volume, I did not finish. Thank you for this summary, I think it is quite what is going on and has been for many years, probably since the industrial revolution started. When people still lived in small communities, bartering was easy and even exchanging work. I think people were at that time respected for what they could do. We all regretted the last shoe repair man retiring in our village. Nowadays in a throw-away society, it is hard to respect those who made our stuff in China, Vietnam and the likes. Work is hardly respected and the workers are seemingly not proud of their jobs, as it takes 6, 7 calls to find someone who is willing to do it! Sometimes I wonder what they live from?
Author's Note
Several of you have read Rand multiple times over decades. CM Maccioli's story about discovering her through a genius brother who gave her time to read, and SheThinksLiberty crying on the Boston T while finishing We The Living—these are the kinds of encounters with books that shape a life. Paul Vonharnish rereading in 2008 and seeing the regulatory trajectory clearly is exactly the pattern I was hoping to surface.
ShieldMaiden offers serious critique from the inside—a former "Randian Disciple" who now sees gaps: family, children, nature, spirit. The Nathaniel Branden material is worth anyone's time. Whether Rand was a "government operative" I cannot say, but the question of what's absent from her framework is fair. Her characters don't have children. They don't get sick. They don't age. They don't pray. That's a narrow band of human experience.
Mark Tokarski raises Enron and the California grid—what happens when Randian rhetoric meets actual sociopaths with market power. The philosophy in the wild doesn't always look like the philosophy on the page. His piece calling her a sociopath is linked; readers can judge.
Benn pushes on "deserve" and invokes Los Alamos—hard-working, innovative, logical people who built instruments of mass death. Point taken. Reason is a tool. Tools can build or destroy.
Gordon Groves and ShieldMaiden both raise the Rockefeller/committee authorship theory. I have no evidence either way. The books exist. The arguments are in them. I've tried to present those arguments clearly so people can assess them on their merits.
Horsea T. notes the natural resource constraint—we transform but don't create matter. eileen raises discernment and the limits of logic without intuition. Both are pointing at the same gap: Objectivism is strong on reason and weak on everything that isn't reason.
James Felter reading the book in one 14-hour sitting and then walking into a candlelit oath ceremony for altruism—that's a collision of worldviews in a single morning.
For those who haven't read the book—INGRID C DURDEN and others—I hope this gives you enough to decide whether the thousand pages are worth your time. For those who have: I'd be curious which ideas survived your own decades of testing and which didn't.
Thank you for reading.
There was no sibling rivalry in my family because we were mostly 6 years apart, so that when #2 started learning their ABC's, #1 was embarking on 7th grade, and so on. Smack dab in the middle of that hierarchy came my brother and and I, only 11 months apart. He was a genius, I was ordinary. We compared report cards. I needed to bump up. He never studied, he read books. I needed 4 hours of study a night to compete while he was outside playing.
But he was kind beyond measure and would come in, all sweaty, and say, "You're still studying?" Being one year ahead of me in school, he gave me all the answers to tests he had taken which prepared me for the following year. That gave me time on my hands. What to do?
I started reading like he did. I found out the reading list for high school when I was in grammar. Steinbeck, Hemingway were a given, Plato's Republic and Thomas Aquinas for the so-called"gifted" I enjoyed more. Has anyone seen those books in high school today?
I then settled on the Russians, Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitzen. All great, read everything they penned. But nothing could have prepared me for Any Rand, another Russian. Her books rocked my world. I also know no one who has read her work, all the while castigating her as a communist, which meant nothing to me, still doesn't. I remember her on the Jack Paar show, I was a child. She looked nervous, even scared to be interviewed. Maybe it was just her big eyes.
Of all the books I have read, nothing comes close to The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. My brother and Any Rand were my mentors. Thank you for touching upon this great book. As you see, it has brought back many memories.
On a tall narrow, freestanding bookcase on a shelf all by themselves sit, in hard cover, "Atlas Shrugged," "The Fountainhead," "We The Living," and the documentary companion book, "Ayn Rand - A Sense of Life."
Loved all three of the aforementioned novels, but "We The Living"? Staggering in its tragic truth about living under conditions that "moral fraud" brings about. Nearing its end, one unfolding series of events leading to one of the book's tragedies actually brought me to blubbering tears. This as I rode the Massachusetts "T" to work in downtown Boston. Feeling like an idiot, but unable to stop, I hung my chin at my chest as I fished for tissues.
Agree, disagree, say what you will, there's only one Ayn Rand.
I read Atlas Shrugged a few decades ago. I remember liking it but can't say or recall whether it had any significant impact on me. For some reason, I felt a desire to reread it a few months ago. It felt timely in our current political environment across the west. I highly recommend it as an important book to read. It is an enjoyable read although I must admit it seemed longer than it needed to be upon my second reading.
I don't think Ayn Rand wrote anything. I think the Rockefeller Brothers Fund wrote it by committee. All the absurdly vile implications and insinuations sound exactly like the sinister monster, John D Rockefeller, and his equally inhuman offspring.
Interesting.
I agree!!! (see my comment, if you can find it).
Maybe try reading Ms Rand's works. Your true identity: https://imgur.com/uPRAoBt
Very intelligent, Paul. Very cute.
Loved this reflection on Atlas Shrugged and how you connected Rand’s world to our current moment. The reminder that reason, productivity, and personal responsibility are moral virtues—not moral failings—still cuts against so much of today’s cultural current.
Rand’s insistence that the individual’s mind is the ultimate driver of progress, and that a society which punishes its most creative and competent members is ultimately sabotaging itself, feels especially relevant. I also appreciate how you avoid turning this into a caricature of “greed is good,” and instead highlight the dignity of doing excellent work, owning the consequences of one’s choices, and refusing to live by guilt or resentment.
I read this book many years ago, and as an exposition of a philosophy, fine. Thus do the characters have to utter lines that living breathing humans would not. But I was influenced by it. As time went on, and expecially after Enron and the California electrical crisis of the same time, I began to realize that this philosophy, or any, when actually implemented, quickly turns to s***. Enron imploded, and the CA power grid was taken over by psychopaths who used rolling backouts to maximize profits and "crush poor F****** Grandma's" bank account, roughly the actual recorded words of one grid operator.
Thus did I comment on a blog run by Randians out of Missoula that anytime Rand's philosophy was put into practice, chaos followed. The business world is disproportionately populated by sociopaths. Their hidden hands do not help us, but rather slap us silly. The blog has long since folded, but I would bet if the proprietor opened it up again tomorrow, I would still be banned.
Then there is Rand the person, whom I judged to be a sociopath. I wrote about that on my own blog and drew both wrath and praise. She could not appreciate romantic love because she had never experienced it. She openly had an affair with a trusted colleague, her spouse be damned. And, push did come to shove, as when she had smoked herself into lung cancer, she accepted Medicare.
A flawed woman espousing a flawed philosophy to a flawed world. Several years ago certain individuals decided to "Go Galt" and retire from the world to punish us by withholding their genius ... I did not keep track, but I would bet they all came creeping back into the world again quietly, through the bathroom window.
https://pieceofmindful.com/2019/04/27/was-ayn-rand-a-sociopath/
I read "Atlas Shrugged" in 1983. I was introduced to the work by a person who considered herself "conservative". She wasn't... My views at the time were; shall we say, libertarian... I thought I understood the message of the work at the time, but as life continued I realized I hadn't grasped its true value... The book and its author were endlessly denigrated by mainstream press.
I reread the book in 2008, and was blown away by the complexity. of Ms Rand's insights. It was early in the Obama 'administration' and I could *clearly* see the trajectory of regulatory decay and social decline. That said: Quoted from your article: "The person who sacrifices their values for momentary pleasures or for the demands of others is acting against their self-interest. The novel redefines selfishness as virtue by distinguishing it from mindless hedonism." [End quote] Perhaps this poem defines alternate perspective.
The Collective
The collective shall always immerse itself
In the busy grey beatitude of consensus
Condemning any singular effort
That probes the flames of self-surrender
Self-love invites the curse of envy
Mystical love is considered subversive
Erotic love is not concerned with economy
We tear our saviors’ limb from limb
Listen not to needful fires
And build numb arks of coinage
11/16/2002 PV
Good poem there.
Thank you. I rarely publish my poetry, even though I was offered international publication and acclaim many years ago. I have concluded the majority of public have been reduced to machines spouting machine language. Alas...
Thank you for this. I am writing this as a woman who read “The Fountainhead” in Jr. High, and “Atlas Shrugged” in high school, plus many other books by Rand including “The Romantic Manifesto”, “We the Living” etc. In short I was a ‘Randian Disciple’. With 50 years of perspective since, I honestly think that there is a good chance that Alysa Zinovievna Rosenbaum was a government operative, recruited in Hollywood. That aside, I now find ‘her’ philosophy to be very narrow. Her books leave HUGE gaps in an understanding of what it is to be a human. Family, children, all manner of Nature are completely absent except for the metaphor of the mighty oak. Also absent is any appreciation of human spirit apart from logic and guts. Rand was an avowed atheist. The Dollar Sign became her selected icon of a type of cult. “The Fountainhead” went far to defame classical architecture while actual demolition of old world buildings has been going for decades all over the world. As a writer of character she was rather childish, but her narratives were intermixed with some actual salient logical reasoning. Not original but repackaged. She was also a scary narcissist in her personal life; reference psychologist Nathaniel Branden (a.k.a. Nathan Blumenthal) who was in her inner circle and her adulterous lover for years. Branden (anagram of ben + rand = son of Rand) wrote a revelatory book on the subject. I believe much damage has been done to people who, like me, were romanced by left-brain philosophy but have not outgrown it. Suffice it say, I am happy to have gotten over it. I honestly don’t understand certain individuals who can speak with devout admiration of Ayn Rand and somehow promote their own spiritual and psi (psychic phenomena) pursuits. Rand herself would have scorned them viciously.
I found the book Fountainhead cold when I read it (1994) and didn't hear of her again before today. At that time I was far from being aware of the Moors or Tartarians and Powers-that-shouldn't-Be's incredibly evil and methodical - and still active - obliteration of their beautiful civilisation from our history. .
I read several of Ayne Rand's books when I was 14. Atlas shrugged was a surreal experience. I was a patriotic young man growing up in a military household. I read the book in one 14 hour sitting starting after dinner around 7pm and finishing as I arrived at school around 9am with no sleep.
Then I went straight into a junior national merit scholarship induction ceremony. That was essentially a ritual magic candel ceremony taking oaths to commit ones life to altruism.
I am not an objectivist, but I never attended another njmss meeting.
No, Ayn, it is not just about your mind and your creativity and your hard work. After all is said and done, we are living on natural resources - things which can be transformed but never invented. Once they are gone, they are gone. Any worthwhile political system understands this.
Rand's ideas are correct in an abstract way. But this is globalism we have here, today. Most people can't make good decisions when the entire western world's mainstream media are the biggest promulgators of lies imaginable.
Read it once/year ! Great reminder of why capitalism works….
Heard a lot about Rand and seen her books in the houses of friends but never read any. I am not looking forward to reading a 1000 page book, usually the ones I started of that volume, I did not finish. Thank you for this summary, I think it is quite what is going on and has been for many years, probably since the industrial revolution started. When people still lived in small communities, bartering was easy and even exchanging work. I think people were at that time respected for what they could do. We all regretted the last shoe repair man retiring in our village. Nowadays in a throw-away society, it is hard to respect those who made our stuff in China, Vietnam and the likes. Work is hardly respected and the workers are seemingly not proud of their jobs, as it takes 6, 7 calls to find someone who is willing to do it! Sometimes I wonder what they live from?
Klaus Shwaub's version is titled, 'Atlas kills the plebs and forms a transhuman technocracy'.
Just look at the South African or Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) example. They chased the white farmers out and the whole country went to shit.
Thank you.
I know a business owner who discussed this book. I was not familiar with it. Once I understood its lesson, I had more faith in him/his products.