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Comment by JPKab | Hacker News Reader

I read the book years ago. (I literally lost a bet.)

At first, I really found the characters to be hollow caricatures, and hated every minute reading it.

As the book went on, it grew on me. It's not about "rich beautiful people" at all, but more about something that resonates with people who build things (coders like us) and that feeling we get when we are dragged into a meeting filled with people who you sense do nothing but talk about talking about meeting about work.

Like many books of this nature, it has pieces that resonate and parts that fall flat. However, I found the parts that resonated to be powerful and useful.

Question:

Did you ever read the book?

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I’ve read the book, although I think to be fair I gave up in the final monologue- which is just pages of excruciating exposition. The book just has one small flaw, Rand builds a world where her philosophy is true, and that world looks nothing like ours. It’s just absurd phantasy.

The beautiful thing is a funny jibe because it’s just so lazy to make your philosophically good characters physically superior too. It’s like if you put the slightest critical eye to the work it immediately creaks.

Nah. The book is a big metaphor used to explain the philosophy. Making the characters like that means they're harder to relate (I think to some degree, Rand thought she was Dagny) but easier to understand. Them being physically superior to me is a bridge between the abstract and the concrete of the philosophy, in that the characters embody their beliefs. As for the presumption that her philosophy is true as a premise for the book, I guess it depends on how you see objectivism, and let's not kid ourselves, where on the political spectrum you consider yourself to be. To me, it's about inspiring to be competent, self-sufficient, reliable, virtuous, and that the pursuit of that is what gives life meaning. To others, from what I've heard, it ranges from being a selfish asshole to a worse 50's version of Twilight. As for that world looking nothing like ours, I agree 3 times: 1 You and me probably live on different universes; 2 This world looks almost nothing like the gulch, and 3 our world is way worse than the one in the book :)

It's not a challenge to write a fiction book that paints a picture of a world that is better than ours. The problem isn't so much that the fiction is bad, it's that it's just entirely insufficient to be persuasive about real issues. It's like watching Star Trek and then deciding we should all live in a socialist utopia. Star Trek is very compelling, but there's a limit to how much it instructs us about the real world. Rand operates closer to a Peterson style self-help book than a real political philosophy.

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