As soon as I befriended people who were not suburban white dudes, and once I understood that they had to work five times as hard to enjoy half of the privilege that I enjoyed, I realized that Rand was singing a heroic ode to the comfortable. Thankfully, it didn’t take me too long to shake off the themes of Atlas Shrugged. Rand’s simplistic Objectivist worldview couldn’t be better designed to appeal to sheltered middle-and-upper-class suburban white boys like me - the kind of people who, in the immortal words of Barry Switzer, were born on third base and thought they hit a triple.įor kids like me at the time, Rand’s message that we earned every piece of wealth that we inherited was a comforting one, and it pleased our egos by centering us as masters of the universe who deserved our elevated perch. Putting others first, she argues, means that everyone finishes last.
Self-interest, Rand argues, is the best motivation for economics, finance, politics, and basically all of humanity’s pursuits. (If you think I’m overstating or mischaracterizing her message, please note that Rand literally published a non-fiction book titled The Virtue of Selfishness.) The rest of the world - populated only by collectivists, politicians, and other assorted “takers” - quickly begins to fall apart without them.Ītlas Shrugged serves as a page-turning enticement to Ayn Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism, which is based on the idea that selfishness should be the guiding virtue for all mankind.
The mysterious hero of the book, John Galt, encourages captains of industry, inventors, and other heroes of capitalism to join him in a secret utopia hidden in Colorado called Galt’s Gulch. And like a lot of white males, Atlas Shrugged turned me into a huge jerk for a couple of months.Ītlas Shrugged, which was published in 1959 and came in second only after The Bible in a Library of Congress survey of influential books, is a 1,200-page sci-fi novel about what would happen if all the “makers” in the world were to go on strike. Like a lot of white males, I read Ayn Rand’s bestselling novel Atlas Shrugged when I was 18.
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