Who has read Ayn Rand?

[politicat]

32. I did, in high school. I've re-read them occasionally as studies in lasting trauma.

But I started with We, the Living, which may be the least philosophical and most emotionally intimate, and probably the most autobiographical (or at least, most self-aware, in that Rand would have had something like Kira's life if she'd stayed). I knew enough about the Russian Revolution then to know that it was an incredibly disruptive time. Thus, I came to her other books aware on some level that she had been deeply traumatized, and that everything she wrote would be through the filter of her trauma.

I didn't hate The Fountainhead. I read that one at an age when I needed a model to help me be confident in my own abilities despite significant and pervasive voices telling me I was useless, incompetent, worthless (mostly because gender, also religion, also just general cultural assholery). (Having now seen several Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, Roark's self-delusion is much clearer.)

Atlas Shrugged is an excellent carbon sink and it's only utility is as feedstock for papercrete.

I do re-read them because they're an artifact of massive societal disruption as personal trauma. (I read Les Miserables with the same insight -- it's a chronicle of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars +25-40 years.) Trauma does engender self-protection/isolation, narcissism, distrust, empathy deficit, disconnection, workaholism, resentment, so seeing the intellectual artifact of that is useful for getting into that mindset and reverse-engineering ways out of it.


Edit: corrected a title.