Skeptic Project

I've run across several reminiscences about the late David Nolan, one of the founders of the Libertarian Party. One of his friends, Robert Poole, who founded Reason magazine, writes:

http://reason.com/archives/2010/11/22/dave-nolan-rip</p>

Dave and I came to libertarianism by similar paths, growing up reading Robert Heinlein’s individualist-oriented science fiction and then discovering Ayn Rand’s writings. It was many discussions and debates with my MIT YAF friends that persuaded me to finally read Atlas Shrugged in the summer of ’64, a summer during which I spent many evenings distributing Goldwater literature door-to-door in the Miami area where I grew up.

These guys became libertarians and decided to try to overthrow the American political system because of what they read at an impressionable age (before their adult judgment matured) in some crappy pulp novels?

Seriously, I grew up reading Robert Heinlein's novels as well, but I could figure out by my early 20's that he bullshitted for a living. I considered the libertarian stuff about on the same level as the fantasies about Martian woo-woo powers, interstellar travel and the swinging polyamorous families. I read Ayn Rand's novels later, and drew similar conclusions about the practicality of Rand's world view. (At least Heinlein had the decency not to create a cult around himself.)

By way of comparison, suppose someone started a new political movement based on the novels, of, say, J.R.R. Tolkien, with the goal of destroying industrial society and restoring feudalism. Would anyone with mature judgment take that effort seriously because the imagined end result looks good in a novel?

Ayn Rand appeals mostly to teenagers and people who think like teenagers.

Heinlein is also intellectually shallow, but at least he had some writing ability. Rand had none. I'd rather stick rusty icepicks into my own eyeballs than read anything by Ayn Rand ever again.

@Muertos:

Not just any teenagers. Rand's novels appeal to the geeky teen boys destined to stay virgins until their 30's, like Rand's heroes Howard Roark and John Galt.

Rand also attracts teen fangirls who apparently view her as a kind of romance novelist. But they have an easier time of losing their virginity at a developmentally appropriate age: Lie back and think of Galt's Gulch.

The recent biographies of Rand show that Rand formed some unusual, self-centered beliefs as a child before the Bolshevik Revolution, which she never grew out of and which she used as the basis of her novels written in another language and published in another country. Strangely enough these ideas happened to resonate with many culturally alienated American and Canadian teens in the middle of the 20th Century. I suspect the whole Rand phenomenon derives from a search for moorings in a rapidly changing environment humans have yet to adapt to evolutionarily.

As an actual teenager, I don't really see how Ayn Rand is a horrible author.

For what it was worth, Anthem was a great novella.

Objectivism, I'm too ignorant about to judge...