Thread by @OliverBOfficial

I finished Ayn Rand's “The Virtue of Selfishness” the day before and will thus seal this chapter in my reading list firstly. “The Fountainhead” will follow someday else. Attached to this post you see, piled up next to this last book of mine I read, the books of hers I read so far

(Books in the background unrelated)
And because I am not going to share the “essay” on her separately on Blogpost because the Mises one was already one hell of a workload I do not need to experience again. Wait until I am ready to present it to you.

Instead, I will write a

short thread on what I now thing of #AynRand and her #Objectivism, although I do not warrant definitiveness even on my own views. It'll just be a pile of thoughts and opinions.

So, many say that her views are blunt, juvenile, populist, even misanthropic and fascist. Prior to

reading beyond “Atlas Shrugged”, I already thought that (1) those people are wrong, (2) those people misunderstood what Ms. Rand conveyed in her tome, and (3) that those people should read more than one book by an author before they shape an opinion about that person, especially

when the whole bibliography surpasses more than that one book. When I read “For the New Intellectual” (I still think that this title is cringey), I said that people should read that book: It's shorter, it's non-fiction, thus clearer in its message, and it spans across her fiction

writing, gathering the most important excerpts from her books, esp. ASh.
Ms. Rand's obvious hot topic is individualism, liberty, and free-market policies at the zenith. This already rejects the idea that she is misanthropic or even fascist. She is an earnest loudmouth, that's

true, and her fiction writing oftentimes lacks depth and a more prudent dramatis personæ. That's why I had to stop reading ASh at first and take a break from it: Not because it was so long—I managed to read through Anna Karenina in one attempt—, but because it was so flat in its

plot. But in the end, I did enjoy it, especially the third part. But her non-fiction writing—“For the New Intellectual” and “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal”—are far more accessible especially when you receive it with an open mind, and leave your prejudices behind. I still do not

agree with three fourth of what she said, but I now understand her better. I also would otherwise have never heard that she is not against a state, as many modern-day Libertarians are. She is in favour of a purely regulatory state, she rejects the welfare state.
This brings up

the issue of some of her rather half-baked ideas: When one reads through her essay on how a less interventionist state could finance itself, she builds up on wishful thinking that it could work without taxes, that people would keep it juiced simply because they approved of its

regulatory work. (Viz. her essay “Government financing in a free world”) It resembles a donations programme as we see it with many Subsack newsletters, which also feature freemium products. Whether a gov't could function this way stood up to question.

There are also many other

similar questions in her work I will not address here but in a separate text I will not share as a blog post (as I said, more work than time for it; will maybe share some first pages and the rest as a PDF), but all in all, there is one thing that can be said: Instead of decrying

her as some of the former 2th Century Motorway Company decried the earnest businessmen and the gov't that did not intervene when their house of cards collapsed, it would be better to read up on her. The books are cheap, and reading whatever can be read is still better than hangin

around in one's virtual echo chamber, begin spoon-fed information that confirm one's personal bias. Not false information, but one-sided information without a counter-weight to balance one's beliefs. She is worth it, as Atlas Shrugged is just one part of her work, and honestly

not her best one, especially in terms of representation, despite her own and Nathaniel Branden's laudatory citations in their essays. She is less extreme than she is represented as, but she is as loud as she is also perceived. The media buzz does her wrong to some degree.

@threadreaderapp Please unroll.

1. Rand, Ayn (1996). Atlas Shrugged. London: Signet Books.
2. Rand, Ayn (1963). For the New Intellectual. London: Signet Books.
3. Rand, Ayn (1967). Capitalism – the Unknown Ideal. London: Signet Books.
4. Rand, Ayn (1964). The Virtue of Selfishness. London: Signet Books.

If you have any favourite quotes from #AtlasShrugged, go ahead and drop them hereunder for me. I am currently looking through the book to seek anything Rand herself might not have mentioned in her essays.