Ayn Rand for Dummies

Commentary By Ron Beasley

A few months ago I reviewed the biography of Ayn Rand by Anne C. Heller.  Now I see Ms Rand as a ridiculous sociopath.  One on my favorite writers, John Scalzi, gives us his thoughts on Rand's (in)famous Atlas Shrugged.  Here is a small portion but go read the entire thing.

That said, it�s a totally ridiculous book which can be summed up as Sociopathic idealized nerds collapse society because they don�t get enough hugs. (This is, incidentally, where you can start your popcorn munching.) Indeed, the enduring popularity of Atlas Shrugged lies in the fact that it is nerd
revenge porn � if you�re an nerd of an engineering-ish stripe who
remembers all too well being slammed into your locker by a bunch of
football dickheads, then the idea that people like you could make all those dickheads suffer by �going Galt� has a direct line to the pleasure centers of your brain. I�ll show you! the nerds imagine themselves crying. I�ll show you all! And then they disappear into a crevasse that Google Maps will not show because the Google people are our kind of people,
and a year later they come out and everyone who was ever mean to them
will have starved. Then these nerds can begin again, presumably with the
help of robots, because any child in the post-Atlas Shrugged world
who can�t figure out how to run a smelter within ten minutes of being
pushed through the birth canal will be left out for the coyotes. Which
if nothing else solves the problem of day care.

All of this is fine, if one recognizes that the idealized world Ayn
Rand has created to facilitate her wishful theorizing has no more
logical connection to our real one than a world in which an author has
imagined humanity ruled by intelligent cups of yogurt. This is most
obviously revealed by the fact that in Ayn Rand�s world, a man who
self-righteously instigates the collapse of society, thereby inevitably
killing millions if not billions of people, is portrayed as a messiah
figure rather than as a genocidal prick, which is what he�d be anywhere
else. Yes, he�s a genocidal prick with excellent engineering skills.
Good for him. He�s still a genocidal prick.

Make no mistake - the fans of Ayn Rand are sociopaths, would be sociopaths or dangerous sociopaths if they actually gain positions of responsibility.

PS:  I was one of those engineering-ish types but I knew how to use my slide rule as a weapon, the jocks were all friends of mine and I didn't even have to do their physics homework. I also picked up a copy of Atlas Shrugged because it was in the Science Fiction section of my local book store but unlike John I was so bored after a few pages I quit reading it.

Note: I am still working on a review of 4 of John's excellent books, The Old Man's War quadrilogy (is quadrilolgy a word, not according to spell checker but I like it).