Review: Ayn Rand’s ‘Ideal’ Presents a Protagonist Familiar in Her Superiority

1984 probably packed more of a punch when it was distributed covertly in totalitarian Soviet states. You're reading about a society which bans books, in a book banned by your society. It's less meaningful in a liberal democracy where 1984 is widely read.

Likewise, in Atlas Shrugged you're reading about a society which doesn't ban certain ideas but sneers at them and makes them unseemly in polite society. Which is exactly how Atlas Shrugged is treated.

For the record, I think the Fountainhead is the most literary of her books. Rand is more original when discussing psychology than politics, and the Fountainhead paints a more interesting spectrum of characters than Atlas Shrugged, especially in her "almost-heroes". Gail Wynand, the tabloid newspaper tycoon who transformed the idiocy of the masses into a personal fortune, who lives a shamelessly public life except for a secret private art gallery he only enters alone -- in Rand's words, a man who "could have been", who possessed every other Randian virute but who had abandoned his integrity -- is such an original character, and shows how nuanced her views could be. Were her political ideas not anathema to modern academia, the Fountainhead at least would certainly be more widely studied.

I found Atlas Shrugged to be a good page turner, but to my eyes it's clear that Ayn Rand was pissed off that everyone misunderstood the Fountainhead and so she turned the intensity and contrast up to 11, making everything as black-and-white as possible, at the expensive of believability. The political focus means people like or dislike AS based on their prior feelings towards libertarian philosophy, which obscures the fact that her ideas have some distinctions from libertarianism. In particular the focus on maintaining an independent mind; something which always requires effort, not rote formulas or blindly relying on other's opinions. In one memorable scene a group of people invest in a company based purely on the stock price movement going up, in another the heroine bets on a new alloy, going against the scientific consensus which, after studying it, she believes to be unfounded. In the first case people who follow the herd go down with the herd; in the second case one who goes against the herd succeeds.

On the same note, her best non-fiction book is the obscure Romantic Manifesto, a set of her essays on art. Her philosophical essays aren't as bad as some people make out, but she oversimplifies and makes false dichotomies, and there isn't much which is original in her political ideas. She also has some horribly confused notions about intellectual history which alone are enough to exclude her from the top rank of philosophers. She's a philosophical novellist but not a philosopher; her gift is for portraying characters which embody particular ideas.

This has turned into quite an effortpost so I might as well finish with a comment on her and Nietszche, someone she's often compared to, though who is surprisingly much more tolerated in the intellectual establishment. Nietzsche didn't originate the wave of Nihilism which spread over European culture from the top down in the 20th century, but he was the first to properly anticipate it. The guy managed to inspire a diverse array of groups, from Nazis to French postmodernists to new age shamanists, but I think the Objectivists might be the ones with the seed of an actual solution. Specifically, their focus on reason and a purpose-driven life, and their embrace of industrial capitalism (as the most natural thing for man, even).

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¹ http://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-people-are-psychopat...