I recently came across a twitter thread (I refuse to say X) where someone went on and on about a how brilliant a book Atlas Shrugged is. As an avid book reader, I’d definitely heard of this book but knew little about it. I would officially like to say eff you to the person who suggested it and eff you to Ayn Rand who I seriously believe is a sociopath.
And it gives me a good deal of satisfaction knowing this person ended up relying on social security. Her writing is not good and she seems like she was a horrible person… I mean, no character in this book shows any emotion – it’s disturbing and to me shows a reflection of the writer, I truly think she experienced little emotion or empathy and was a sociopath….
ETA: Maybe it was a blessing reading this, as any politician who quotes her as an inspiration will immediately be met with skepticism by myself… This person is effed up… I don’t know what happened to her as a child but I digress…
by GrouchyPineapple
6 Comments
Most of my life if I started a book I finished the book. Around 30 years old a friend told me to read Atlas Shrugged…. “It will change your life.” He was right, if I think a book is crap I no longer finish it. That was the last book I trudged through past the point of not liking it. It’s poorly written, poorly formulated literary and “philosophical” diarrhea.
That book is basically propaganda
“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.” -John Rogers
Monty Zander has a great video discussing Bioshock and he talks a lot about Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged in it. I recommend it if you got some time or just want something to listen to in the background.
If you want to truly understand how deranged and morally bankrupt of a psychopath Rand was you can check out her writings on ethics. She legitimately argues that there is nothing wrong with passively watching a person drown to death in front of you because we do not owe our aid to other humans.
All of this is before we get into Murray Rothbard’s child markets and Hans Herman-Hoppe’a arguments for the rights of towns to enforce segregation if they want to. Or we can look at the hilarious clip of the 2016 Libertarian Party debates where the audience booed a candidate who said it should not be legal to sell heroin to preteens. We do not give these whackjobs enough credit for how dangerous they are.
1,000% agreed. The book is painful to read. The only good that’s personally come of it has been finding like-minded people critiquing its nonsense