Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand was the author of vast doorstop tomes like Atlas Shrugged and the ripped-off biography The Fountainhead, and other boring books spouting booby-hatch level thinking on libertarian themes. Rand also claimed to be a philosopher.

"Philosophy"

While Rand considered her philosophies to be so well-reasoned as to be completely objective (and even called her philosophy Objectivism), it is generally agreed that what she really created was a highly moralistic personality cult, complete with shunning of dissenters and highly screwed-up sexual politics. Rand summed up her philosophy with the following principles:

• Metaphysics: Objective Reality
• Epistemology: Reason
• Ethics: Self-interest
• Politics: Capitalism

and with the one-liner "To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason, Purpose, Self-esteem." Detractors feel that Rand considered all those properties to be perfectly expressed in herself. Whatever the case may be, Objectivism is essentially Libertarianism with hangups, usually disguised as pseudologic.

Not every Objectivist is a Rand fanatic, but those that are not are shunned by the mainstream Objectivist movement.

"Literature"

Shatlas Rugged

To save you reading over a thousand pages of turgid prose, here is Atlas Shrugged. No "spoiler" alert is necessary:

• A dark and lonely handsome hero with no friends makes shitloads of dosh off the back of lazy and stupid non-union slaves;
• When asked to pay taxes, he and his ilk scream in shock, and flee in a huff to live in the mountains;
• Everyone is miserable except them, as they are busy driving their trains up and down in their incredible mountain hideaway;
• They have laughable sex with some other capitalist boor, but cannot commit due to being too busy making money;
• Everyone else is wrong:
• They are right;
• They appear suddenly in public and punish the miserable hordes by lecturing them in interminably boring eight-hour speeches that go on and on and on for about one hundred pages and have only one point - "You're all fucked, and I'm not, 'cos I've got all the money, Ha Ha!";
• The world goes to Hell in a handbasket, except for them, 'cos they're in their seekrit mountain hideout.

The unauthorized biography of America's greatest architect

The Fountainhead is a not-at-all disguised biography of Frank Lloyd Wright. It's message is to stick to your guns if you are a genius architect, and the fools who dissed you and made you build houses will come to their senses, even if the roof leaks terribly or the decks bend. Books that actually admit to being about Frank are better, since they usually include photos and drawings of some of his incredible work. Oh, and will be written better.

The drooling fans

Generally, the work of Ms. Rand is hugely enjoyed by people with the literary sensitivities of 11 year olds who imagine they have fierce political sophistication. To outsiders they often come off as greedy, callous wankers with economic OCD.

Her fan club is founded on the premise that "A is A". Arguing about Aesthetics in an Armchair while Assuming that Anarchism is Anathema is the same thing as Activism.

Environmental perspective

Ayn Rand's books are the second greatest (after John Grisham's) single destroyer of the Brazilian rainforest, as vast swaths of trees must be ground down to produce the copious quantities of paper required to print the thousand-page doorstops.

References and notes

• A libertarian critique of Rand's thinking from Reason magazine