Ayn Rand's been dead for more than a quarter century, but her books are more alive than ever. Whether one judges by the booming sales of Atlas Shrugged, libertarian weird beards "gulching" to avoid taxation, or corporations relocating to the real-life Galt's Gulch of Zug, Switzerland, the Russian-born novelist's ideas have proven amazingly resilient. Five years after dubbing Rand an "intellectual moron," I, alongside the likes of Joseph Bottum and Burt Folsom, explore the relevance of Ayn Rand in the age of Obama in a symposium @ NRO.

I read the book years ago when I had to but am currently in the middle of it again. It's scary how the basic premise of a book that was released in 1957 is now so relevant.

Why would Ayn Rand be an "intellectual moron" and an idol for a seemingly solid website like ...
http://www.heartland.org/full/24881/Great_Is_Truth_and_Mighty_Above_All_Things.html#

Interesting, I guess I'll start with her chapter from Dan's great book.

If you are not familiar with it, you should check out Murray Rothbard's play "Mozart Was A Red." It's a pretty funny skewering of Ayn Rand and her followers. Just google the title.

Rothbard's entire split with Rand was hilarious. He published an article in a journal drawing upon some ideas, I can't remember which ones, that Nathaniel Branden believed he had invented. Of course, these were basic tenets of western philosophy, but the Objectivists think they invented everything.

Anyways, in his response letter, Rothbard made sure to provide evidence for the longstanding existence of these ideas by quoting entirely from Catholic monks of the Middle Ages.

P.S: I'm no Objectivist. But the suggestion that the draw of Atlas Shrugged lay in its sex scenes is more offensively stupid than anything in the Objectivist philosophy, because it's so obviously a deliberate lie.

That passage jumped out at me too, Ben. I thought all the participants in the symposium offered really thoughtful comments, pro and con, on Rand. But the idea that anyone reads Atlas Shrugged (The Fountainhead, at least, had a memorable Rhett/Scarlett-like sex scene) for the sex doesn't mesh with my reading of it.

It's not as if Rand was a romance novelist, and in the instances when she injected romance into the narrative it was, well, not very romantic. Consider Rearden's declaration of love for Dagny: "I love you. As the same value, as the same expression, with the same pride and the same meaning as I love my work, my mills, my Metal, my hours at a desk, at a furnace, in a laboratory, in an ore mine..." Try that line on a real girl and she might throw up on your shoes laughing at you.

I think that it’s important to understand the era that the novel was written in and that Rand purposely elevated certain of her characters as heroes and embellished their larger than life importance.

Love, sex, intelligence, accomplishment and self-sufficiency were elevated to hero status.

Reading the book today requires a significant measure of understanding and suspension of reality today than it did when it was written.

The ironic and interesting thing is that pretext is more relevant today than it was when it was written originally.

Has anyone stopped to consider why this country is in the shape it's in? I've read that many people say this (Atlas Shrugged) is either their favorite or most influential book. Is it possible that enough people have withdrawn their brains from this society to cause it's current ills?

Just a thought.

Daniel
Las Vegas
Home of Glitter Gulch, not Galt's!!

The Federal Reserve withdrew their brains, alright