QUOTE(dtobias @ Sun 22nd March 2009, 7:04pm)
I remember back when I had just read Atlas Shrugged and was in a burst of enthusiasm about it, being frustrated at the extreme scarcity of mentions of Rand in the references I consulted in the school and public libraries. For an author whose books sold millions of copies, had spawned a large movement, and were (to my teenage mind) irrefutably true, it was astounding that almost nobody who wrote for the various bound volumes on philosophy and literary criticism in the libraries (the main sources I had to work with in that primitive era when I couldn't just google or wikipedia something) scarcely mentioned Rand at all, and on the rare occasions they did, it was with brief dismissive sneers. Obviously the altruist/collectivists had a pretty powerful conspiracy going.
When I was in college, back in the early 80's, I dated a girl who was something of an Ayn Rand cultist. Which is to say, every once in a while she would say something like, "Ayn Rand wrote that..." or "in Objectivist philosophy..." followed by some nonsensical statement or other. Since I didn't think it would be "gentlemanly" to break up with her over a mere ideological disagreement, I mostly played along, pretending to respect whatever views she was espousing, no matter how dumb they seemed. Occasionally I would ask, "So... do you think I should read some of this Ayn Rand stuff? And if so, what should I read first?" And the answer was always, "naaah, you wouldn't like it."
For a while, I wondered if this was some sort of reverse-psychology recruitment strategy, i.e., tell the guy "it's not for you" as a means of getting him more interested. Luckily for me at the time, she didn't realize that I'm one of those rare persons for whom reverse psychology almost never works. If someone (and not necessarily a female I'm dating at the time, though that certainly helped in this case) tells me not to bother with something, I generally don't. (IMG:
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So it wasn't until about 10 years later that I first became exposed to Ayn Rand in print, at a rented beach house where the owner had left several books for people to read if they got bored (a common practice, apparently). I got through about 80 pages of "The Fountainhead," slowly realizing the whole time that the girl had been right all along. Later I read some excerpts from "Atlas Shrugged" too, but at that point I was already a committed "anti-Randian."
I'm not sure any of this is germane, but I just wanted to get it off my chest.
Ayn Rand and cults generally, In which I have a bet with Jimbo
