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How is Ayn Rand Still a Thing?

I dunno. I tried a few chapters of Atlas Shrugged and got bored very quickly. Suddenly it's a thing with with Christians that have a strong Libertarian bent. It's funny how they cherry pick the beliefs to take away from the book just like they do the bible.
 
I picked it up at a garage sale not knowing what is was about in college. I immediately got bored and threw the book away.
 
How far were you able to throw it? It's pretty big.
 
Little known fact: Ayn Rand started the "F*** her right in the P****" meme.
 
Most Rand bashers I've interacted with have read her. :shrug:
 
So, please tell us the truth about her and her books. I suppose you will say that her books are well written, gripping and concise, with well motivated characters and relatable antagonists?
 
Most people I meet don't know who the fuck Ayn Rand is.

Of the people who do have even the vaguest idea of who she was, most don't like her.

Of the ones who think she had something of import to say, most haven't read her in any real way, just exerts or quotes attributed to her here and there.

Of the ones who have read her and liked her, most are sociopaths and the rest are confused.
 
If you're interested in libertarian authors, your best bet is reading Jennifer Government by Max Barry. He blows Ayn Rand out of the water.

It's about a cop who's trying to convince a murder victim's family to get a loan to pay her so she can investigate their son's death. He was killed as part of a Nike advertising campaign where they hired people to shoot customers who'd just bought their new pair of shoes and then steal the shoes so that they could increase the street cred of their product because people were willing to murder others to get them. There's a great scene later on in the book where Nike rents a mortar and fires an artillery strike on Reebok corportate headquarters so that they can disrupt the product launch of a competing pair of shoes.

Sure, it's more believable and plausible than any of Ayn Rand's plotlines, but if you don't mind a bit of reality injected into your fiction, it gives you a more readable way to get an overview of libertarianism.
 
Sarpedon said:
So, please tell us the truth about her and her books. I suppose you will say that her books are well written, gripping and concise, with well motivated characters and relatable antagonists?
Click to expand...

Actually no. From a literary standpoint she includes too many long speeches for her books to achieve high ratings as literature. Fortunately for her that wasn't her goal, the books were written to convey a specific message instead of achieving recognition as a peer to Hugo or Shakespeare.

There are a few areas where she really needed to work on her philosophy some more. I'm inclined to agree with Nathaniel Branded that she didn't study enough psychology, I find the fact that Hank and Phillip Rearden are brothers to be unrealistic, as well as the sibling relationship of James and Dagny Taggart. Even though I am estranged from my own brother and will probably not mend relations in this lifetime I still find those sibling relationships to be inadequately thought out.

The antagonist that I found most unrealistic is Ellsworth Toohey. Actually I did until I met someone who basically thought that way.
 
If her books were meant to convey a particular message, why do you suppose she chose to use fiction books? Surely a well written and concise essay, submitted to an economics publication would have served that purpose better than a rather long and tedious novel?
 
Ayn Rand gave people who want to be totally self-centered and not care about another living human being the permission to do that.

She even showed them a way to pretend that this kind of behavior is moral.

This appeals to some.
 
Sarpedon said:
If her books were meant to convey a particular message, why do you suppose she chose to use fiction books? Surely a well written and concise essay, submitted to an economics publication would have served that purpose better than a rather long and tedious novel?
Click to expand...

Embedding a message within a fictional story is a good way to convey that message in a more readable and accessible manner to a wider number of people than an academic essay can do. There are examples of this in pretty much every fairy tale ever written, from The Three Little Pigs talking about how working hard brings better results than taking the easy way out to Frozen explaining why women are unfit to rule because bitches be crazy and if you put one in charge, she will flip the fuck out and destroy the kingdom almost immediately.

It is a better way to convey your philosophy to a larger audience. If Ayn Rand had been writing academic essays, none of us today would have any idea about who she was or what she was saying, as opposed to now when many people have a vague idea of who she was and can be 10-15% accurate about discussing what she was trying to say.
 
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