by JLRoberson

Created on: November 24, 2009

This is no more than "Left Behind" for atheists.

Take it from someone who once actually read all the way through this doorstop that would kill a cat if you tossed it at them. And, for that matter, read everything she ever wrote and was once afflicted with her philosophy for six months of my life in which, I promise, talking to me would have been very annoying. This, and anything else she ever wrote(THE ROMANTIC MANIFESTO, a book that murders the creative spark, being the worst of her essay collections) is utterly worthless except as a store of ready ammunition in arguments AGAINST Rand. Don't bother with it. I'm here to save you the trouble.

I was not shocked to learn recently she wrote all her work on benzedrine, though at one time I just assumed the books were long because she was Russian. It's mediocre bestseller writing at its most clumsy and simplistic, on the level of how it reads, with characters either arrogant or simpering. And in a book released in the late 50s that doesn't claim to be a "period" book, we see a pop culture where opera and radio are the main fixtures. We see a two-page argument for smoking(which killed her) on the basis of how pretty the flame burns and how it symbolizes the intellect.

Which is an odd metaphor given it's a dying ember created by addictive, deadly poison, much like her philosophy. (note: I myself am a longtime smoker)We see intellectuals who actively despise the world and allow it to be destroyed, including a doctor who refused to treat patients under new, "collectivist" regulations, which is again, interesting, and begs the question of whether Rand knew of the Hippocratic Oath, which renders doctors inherently altruistically-based. We once again see a strong female character who's, underneath, just looking for the right man to tame her and make her his domestic servant. We see a view of most people as not even human, but as rapacious, hungry ants not just ready to steal everything the sainted industrialists and professionals make, but to mindlessly destroy the means of production when their wise masters go away. Which begs the question: does Rand think most people are in fact looking to their self-interest? Not everyone could rise to the top like her heroes. So, if everyone believes as she does, does everything settle into a logical stratified society with the workers acknowledging the "producers" as the actual creative force, and subsuming their own individuality into the will of, say, Henry Rearden?

Of course it does, and thus we can see what the real agenda was here. It was not freedom for all. It was a new kind of totalitarianism, but one she thought of as "natural." And really, nothing new at all. Just the wet dream a 19th century industrialist might have had while sleeping on his moneybags.

We see the longest, most turgid, and most incomprehensible exegesis of a philosophy, ever. I made it through it, and at the time also read her other books, and all it really comes down to is a refusal to acknowledge others are as human as yourself and a permanent stunting of oneself at sixteen years old in emotional development. That's putting it kindly. A better way of putting it is that this work is a long revenge fantasy for sociopaths. It even makes stabs at being science fiction, including an infrasound device used to kill cities. And even that's stupidly dramatized.

It's worthless. Don't bother. Unless you like to really work to find things to mock.

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