I've been thinking about Ayn Rand recently, which is not unusual. I think about her most frequently when friends of mine find themselves struggling with the kinds of thing Ayn Rand wrote about. And the thing I struggle with is that Ayn Rand identified—and not only identified but nailed—a specific dynamic that exists between two specific kinds of people, one of whom is the sort I wind up being good friends with.

The joke is that reading Ayn Rand for the first time makes you an asshole for at least a couple of years—at best, it's a vaccination, and at worst, it's a lethal infection. That was certainly my experience with Rand: I read her at 16, and mostly stopped being a Rand-flavored jerk by 19 or so. But what I can't let go of is that, in many ways, Rand spoke to me because she identified some of my better tendencies, along with the insistence that my worst tendencies were great and that I should inflict them on everyone I ever met. And I find that we're collectively bad at identifying the peculiar mix of good and bad things that Rand had to offer: people who hate her notice all the bad stuff, and people who love her notice all the good stuff, and neither is willing to acknowledge that the other part is right.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that Rand's philosophy is remotely healthy. Its toxic parts drastically outweigh the bad, like how mass murder is bad even if you volunteer once a week at the soup kitchen. Ayn Rand despised all flavors of sickness, more-or-less suggesting that good people never struggled with their health. She assumed that no amount of financial or societal misfortune would keep successful people from succeeding. Her relationship with gender and sexuality was complicated—surprisingly feminist in some ways, extremely misogynistic in others—but she was unabashedly racist, and argued that people in power usually wound up deserving it. The frustrating thing about her, as a sympathetic non-sociopath, is that she clearly knew this wasn't true, and that awful people often wound up with the power to oppress and destroy. But because her philosophy is so fixated on the idea of deservedly powerful people controlling the whole of human destiny, her conclusion is that bad people are only powerful when good people let them have power, an argument that's so facile it can only end up where it did wind up, with Rand suggesting that victims of genocide were to blame for their own demise.

What Rand excelled at, however, was in portraying a particular mix of envy, guilt, and sadism that feels continually relevant to both my own life and my friends'. As much as I want it to stop feeling like an important recurring theme, I think that Rand hit upon something powerful and somewhat universal. And when I find myself returning to Rand, it is for her portrayal of that specific kind of social conflict: not even her articulation of it—and she's her weakest and worst when she attempts to have her characters monologue out all of her half-baked conclusions—but her knack for capturing emotional conflict, and at identifying the many ways in which this particular conflict plays out.

At the core of every Randian story are two people. One is selfless, but claims to be selfish. One is selfish, but claims to be selfless. The tension arises when the selfish one, the one who is loudly and conspicuously selfless, guilts and shames the genuinely selfless protagonist, exploiting their generous spirit by guilting them into hurting and destroying themselves.

Ayn Rand has a fucked-up relationship with the world "selfish." To her, it refers to ego in the Freudian sense—able to find a balance between the self and others—rather than ego in the colloquial sense of bigheadedness. She is very, very bad at articulating this, though, partly because she's so obsessed with cocky men that she can fantasize about sexually submitting to that most of her protagonists are Big Dick Energy personified, and most of her antagonists fall somewhere between comic relief and mustache-twirling villains.

I'm going to use words to mean the normal things they use, though, so please just assume that "selfless" people are the ones who are willing to give themselves to others, and "selfish" people are the ones who want to take without giving.

"Shouldn't happiness consist of a healthy balance between the two?" you ask. Yes! You are very smart. Probably smarter than Ayn Rand, so give yourself a pat on the back. I am very proud of you. But back to Rand.

In both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, society is controlled by people who believe, essentially, that it's wrong to think you have anything worth giving to the world. In The Fountainhead, an architect struggles with classmates who believe that good architecture means photocopying other people's buildings. In Atlas Shrugged, a railroad executive struggles with her shithead brother, who wants her to spend millions of dollars building train lines that go hundreds of miles out of the way to service, like, five people. The dominant social paradigm, in both cases, is basically: if you can do anything good for people, you'd better destroy it, because real charity would be doing self-destructive shit that keeps anybody from benefitting from your existence.

This gives us envy, the first third of the Rand dramatic formula. Rand used the phrase second-handers to describe these people—take that, Macklemore!—and eventually switched to looters as her default. Phrasings that could have used some self-examination! But in either case, there's a single archetype: somebody who doesn't feel valuable, hates themselves, and resents people without that self-loathing, because those other people go on to do nice things and make other people happy. These people depend on the nice, good folks, but they resent that they do, so they find themselves simultaneously begging the nice fellas for help while trying to destroy them. And by "destroy them," I mean they try to make the nice fellas destroy themselves, because these people hate themselves too much to think they could get away with anything at all.

What Rand's describing, essentially, is narcissism. Her antagonists are so self-obsessed that they can't escape their own belief that their perceived worthlessness defines the world. They are completely dependent on other people to thrive, but they are unwilling to offer anything back. And the more they depend on other people, the more they hate those other people, and the more they want to destroy them, not by any means of force, but by convincing those people that "giving people stuff" is selfish and "taking stuff from others" is selfless. Rand portrays this as a kind of spiritual suicide, because it ends, not with the destruction of one party, but with the destruction of both.

Every sympathetic Ayn Rand character is essentially in an abusive relationship. They make compromises that they shouldn't make, and even those compromises aren't enough. Because, of course, the narcissists they're with don't want compromise. They pretend to want it, but they could only ever be satisfied with total conquest. Which is how you get to the paradoxical place that Ayn Rand does, where business contracts seem not only moral but righteous by comparison. A good contract, in her mind, nobly leaves both people better off than where they started—as opposed to the soul-sucking "contract" that impoverishes one party, not only at the behest of another, but in ways that will ultimately deprive the other party of anything they could have wanted in the first place.

The conventional criticism of Rand is that her heroes are sociopathic. And the irony is that, because Rand is so binary in her portrayal of good and evil, she comes to a sociopathic worldview, one in which only her flavor of nobility is human, and the only other flavor of person is the suicidal narcissist. In Rand's mind, the latter type of person destroys themselves, and deserves their punishment; it's up to them to save their own lives, but any charity towards them will be squandered and any flavor of empathy will be exploited and taken advantage of. (Put a bookmark here: we'll be coming back to this in a bit.)

The second part of the Rand equation, then, is an intense guilt, universally suffered by all her protagonists. It's the guilt, basically, of anybody who has tried to compromise with a narcissist, found the narcissist unwilling to make a deal, and then gotten blamed by the narcissist for the deal not going through. The source of that guilt is fairly varied: it can be spouses feeling unseen and unloved (and feeling guilty for wanting appreciation), artists being attacked for their particular flavor of creativity, or businesspeople feeling like the contracts they want to create—between their employers or their employees or their business partners—are somehow asking for too much.  And while Rand's unsurprisingly more popular with ownership sorts than with labor, and favors men more frequently than she favors women, credit where credit is due: she makes it clear that these dynamics arise in all directions, and don't always consist of the powerless resenting the powerful. Even if she never quite takes that as far as she needs to, and never examines the contradictions in her own statements.

It's the insecurity, not of feeling worthless, but of feeling like your worth is somehow offensive to somebody else. It's the place abuse victims get where they start fearing that their needs are inappropriate for some reason, or that their emotions are somehow "oppressing" the person who bullied them into feeling that way in the first place. It's the workplace paradox where people get punished for working hard, or for listening to coworkers, or for trying to make other people's days better. I'm reminded of Lars Von Trier's Dogville, in which a woman in need offers to help the town that takes her in. At first, they insist that they don't need her help, she doesn't owe them anything, she's lovely for even offering. But the more she does for them, the more they not only grow entitled to her services, but begin demanding more and more, until her generosity morphs into self-sacrifice morphs into violation. And the nature of a Randian protagonist's guilt is a sense that, the more they give, the more they're somehow "not enough." Because they're always asked to give a little bit more than they're giving, and if they give that little bit more, they find they're somehow still not giving enough, and the less grateful other people are that they're giving, so they're shamed simultaneously for what they have given and what they haven't.

There's a scene in Atlas Shrugged where a man's brother-in-law asks for a charitable donation. The charity, in Rand's eyes, is worthless, but let's ignore that, because Rand thought all charities were worthless and because the worthlessness is not really the point. The bigger issue is: the brother-in-law only sees this member of his family as valuable because he can hit this guy up for cash; he only ever talks about his charity and how good it is and how you should give me a lot of money, now, and although Hank (of course his name is Hank) doesn't care for his brother-in-law, he donates anyway, because he's trying to make this marriage work. And Rand pays special note to how Philip (of course his name is Philip) responds, not with gratitude, but with an almost absence of emotion—as if, although his entire visit was to hustle money, the actual fact of charity, and the part of charity that was about family, can be completely taken for granted, even treated somewhat contemptuously. Of course you gave money, goes the implication. You had money to give. Why should I be grateful? The only possible emotion is guilting, shaming, followed by void.

(And then Hank tries to talk about a cool metal he just invented, and Philip is like "inventing cool new kinds of metal sucks," like a real dipshit, and then he tells Hank that he shouldn't try to make money off of his new metal, and Hank is like: But that's how I got all that money I just gave you. But he doesn't say it out loud, because he feels guilty for thinking it, and because Ayn Rand thinks moral complexity is for wimps.)

Which takes us to the final element of Rand's equation, because, for her, envy and guilt aren't enough. If those are the only two pieces of the puzzle, there's still room for these people to find a therapist, hash things out, and move along.

So the Randian drama is, ultimately, a story of sadism. And the sadist in question is the one who demands charity. What they look for, ten times out of ten, is the moment when the protagonist gives them what they want—because that's the moment where they can deny them gratitude, and escalate the shame, and try pushing the protagonist into destroying just a little bit more of themselves. The villain of Rand's ideology, so to speak, is a demon priest who insists that having a soul means selling it, and who sells an idea of "holiness" that means destroying everything worthy, and that "purity" means letting nothing pure exist.

On one level, Rand's stories are a morality play between sincerity and cynicism. Her cynic scornfully insists that accomplishment is meaningless, that charity is only proof that you had too much in the first place, and that believing in anything, valuing anything, is an insult to whatever you don't believe in, whatever you don't find valuable. Nobody is in control of anything, nobody should have any kind of power, and the individual self is an affront, not to the purported "collective" or "community" or "society," but to non-existence and, ultimately, death. And the only joy that her cynic has is that they realize this is bullshit long before the sincere people do. Because the sincere people do their best to take these nihilists at face value, unable to recognize to recognize this as nonsense—it feels like bullshit, they somewhat suspect it's bullshit, but they trust these other people too much to call them out on it, because why would someone else be shitty for no reason?—and the cynics get all gleeful. The joke for them is always: You can't possibly understand why I would do this. Because it would never occur to you to act this way, but it occurs to me, and so long as you don't figure it out, I can make you hurt yourself and you'll believe me when I say that you deserved it.

The glee, for the record, is pretty literal. Rand's villains are constantly laughing at her heroes, and the heroes are always all confused, like What the heck are you laughing at?, and the villains are all, Ha ha, you suck. The narcissist understands, on some level, that they're being exploitative. They recognize that they are treating other people as disposable, and they don't care, because they only think of others in terms of what they have to offer. But it's the nature of narcissism that you don't have anything to give back, and shouldn't have to give anything, and are right not to give. Because if you expect something back, is it really you being a good person? Shouldn't you just want to give everything you have anyway? So you give more than you can healthily offer, and the narcissist still asks you for more, and whenever they're not furious at you, they're laughing at you, because they are playing you for a chump and you're too kind to even notice it.

The funnest character Rand ever wrote is the ur-villain of The Fountainhead, a socialist named Ellsworth Monkton Toohey. He's a completely ugly and gawky man with the world's sexiest voice (because he's only good at manipulating other people, see?), he hates vocal solos but he's in love with choirs (collectivism!!!!!!), and, in between getting repeatedly beat up by the world's tallest architect, he encourages the architect's rival (who is less talented and more famous and deeply bitter) to completely screw over the love of his life, who happens to be Toohey's niece, and pursue a rich blonde lady who knows this guy is complete bullshit but hates herself enough to marry him anyway. Because Toohey's whole life is just engineering elaborate games that make everybody miserable—and while this lady and his niece get nicely fucked over by this arrangement, the person Toohey most enjoys ruining is the man in the middle, who's untalented enough to be resentful, but also close enough to happiness that he might just find a way of living a halfway-healthy life. When he screws it all up, it's because he doesn't trust himself enough to make a healthy, happy decision—and that right there is what Toohey wants to see. Not just a man making everybody around him miserable, but making himself miserable, because he's too ashamed of himself to trust his happiness more than the awful things that everyone else tells him he should want.

Toohey is a deeply implausible man, which is why he's such a delight. He's just a nerdy little demon, crawling about and encouraging everybody else to hate themselves in the name of loving themselves. He's great! In Atlas Shrugged, there is no Toohey, just a jumble of narcissistic people trying to end the world, and the book suffers for it. Because both books posit a fundamentally unsound worldview, but in The Fountainhead, all the fundamental unsoundness physically manifests as some guy snickering over his plan to suck all the joy out of the world by publishing coffee-table books that are so insanely banal they will destroy our collective will to live.

Critics of Ayn Rand routinely call her humorless, but she invented a supervillain whose form of biological warfare is prestigious coffee-table books. Checkmate, libs.

But what happens when there are people in the world who aren't narcissists? And what happens when people who could offer something to the world are just too disadvantaged, too oppressed, too unfortunate, to get a chance to offer it?

My pet theory, which I cling to because it pisses off absolutely everyone, is that Ayn Rand secretly wanted to be a socialist, and was simply too ignorant to realize it. She absolutely hated Ronald Reagan, who she thought embodied her antagonists rather than her protagonists; most of the corporate and political dickholes who love her work subscribe to a worldview that Rand very possibly would have despised. Because Rand, in her weird and unexamined way, wholeheartedly and full-throatedly loves labor. She goes on and on about the glory of janitors who take their work seriously, diner chefs who know how to make a good sandwich, and people who love doing things just for the joy of doing them. While Atlas Shrugged takes an obligatory swipe at unions, a key part of her anti-union fantasy is that the employer in question pays his laborers really, really well, offering them aggressively more money than his competitors because he values what they do; Rand never asks whether unions are good in cases where employers are bad, because in her worldview the union that asks for too much is conspiring with the shitty employer who underpays their workers, somehow. But it's clear that, on some level, she's not quite as in league with "all the rich capitalists" as she seems.

My general description of where The Fountainhead differs from Atlas Shrugged is that The Fountainhead is concerned with specific individuals, whereas Atlas Shrugged is concerned with social tendencies. And really, the part of Rand that I love is about three-fifths of The Fountainhead, the part that's more-or-less a love story about three different men, and about how they struggle to truly love one another. While the book marches inexorably towards two shoddy philosophical monologues, the parts before those include some genuinely empathetic examinations of people who do and think shitty things, and offer some piercing insights as to why they behave the way they do. There's also a sense that these people are capable of, well, redemption. That, for all the evil in their souls, they are ultimately confused and misguided and miserable, looking for the same kind of love as the people who they viciously despise. When she buys too much into her own interpretation of events, Ayn Rand goes off the rails, but before that, when she's writing people searching for those interpretations, she hits upon some interesting notes, which arguably contradict everything she insisted upon later on.

Because Rand writes about narcissistic relationships from the perspective of their victim. And her triumphs, in every single instance, involve people finally breaking away from their abusers: people who finally recognize that there is no compromise, that your empathy for someone else can't translate into negotiation if that person is looking to exploit you, and that there are people out there who will value you and love you and see your inherent worth. But when she translates that into a broader portrait of society, she loses all the nuance, all the ambiguity, and insists: Anybody who wants anything out of you is looking to destroy you. And the only way to be happy is to eradicate those people from the earth.

It's surprising how much of The Fountainhead consists of men showing one another tenderness, vulnerability, fragility, compassion, and support. Howard Roark, our dickbag protagonist, is intentionally depicted as a dickbag early on; Rand seemingly wants you against him, so you can slowly be persuaded to look at him another way. But Roark, after he's expelled from of the posh architecture school that his rival Peter Keating excels at—it's Animal House for eggheads, really—wants only to go work for Henry Cameron, the architect who inspired him. He doesn't care about the money, and he isn't in it from the prestige: he only wants to learn from this man, and spend time with him, and, as it becomes clear that Cameron is a broken alcoholic who resents his own glory days, Roark is the one who starts thinking about all his little comforts, caring for him in quiet, thoughtful, and loving little ways.

This goes against the broader image of Roark as a borderline-psychopathic man: his two grandest moments involve blowing up a public housing project and kinda-sorta sexually assaulting a woman, both of which come with asterisks attached but are also literally things that happen. But the first of The Fountainhead's four parts is largely a story about a friendless man forming all sorts of male friendships: becoming drinking buddies with a manual laborer, growing close with a prominent novelist who takes him under his wing, and becoming the caretaker of a wounded, frightened young sculptor, helping him overcome his worst demons so he can find a bit more peace in his life.

Even Rand's antagonists are given a surprising lot of compassion. Peter Keating, the prestigious architecture-school rival whose career surpasses Roark's but who constantly goes to Roark for help, has only turned to his profession because of his fear that he'd never make it as a painter, which is his genuine fondness and passion. Keating is a professional suck-up who cares more about prestige than about accomplishment, but he's capable of respecting Roark, and even tries to use his influence and connections to give Roark whatever professional advantages he can; his resentment of Roark only intensifies after Roark repeatedly refuses to accept Keating's help, implicitly suggesting that his corporate maneuvering isn't as valuable as Roark's ability to actually do the damn job.

(In a superficially un-Randian moment, Peter's breaking point is when Roark helps him win an extremely lucrative competition, at a time when Roark himself is about to go out of business; Peter comes to him with a check that could fund his business for a year, and Roark tears it up, because he feels like his work in the competition was a compromise, rather than a genuinely good piece of architecture. Symbolically, Roark is meant to be telling Peter that he doesn't need to sell his soul to do his job, and Peter loses his mind because he is terrified at the thought of living without sacrifice; emotionally, though, Peter is doing his best to show gratitude for a man he both resents and relies on, and Roark's response is essentially to spit in Peter's face. The emotional story, with Rand, is invariably better than its purported symbolic significance.)

It's a story, overall, where good people often wind up miserable and abused, where less-good people do bad things from a place of internal conflict, and where smaller kindnesses are seen as ultimately meaningful. Guy Francon, the city's most successful architect, helps Keating rise while firing Roark; later, Peter marries Francon's beautiful, perplexing daughter. When the daughter ultimately leaves him for Roark, Francon is able to recognize his daughter's happiness, and lets himself become a father figure to Roark, abandoning his professional and intellectual envies to give his kindness to the loved ones in his life. Meanwhile, the robber baron Gail Wynand—both a brilliant man and a cynic—destroys his career trying to save Roark's life; the novel's climactic emotional moment is when Wynand, who for reasons also involving the Beautiful, Perplexing Daughter can no longer bear to be Roark's friend, essentially admits his love to Roark, and puts his legacy in Roark's hands, asking him to make it a testament to the dignity Wynand should have had, and the dignity Roark never lost.

So what happens in the transition to Atlas Shrugged? In a nutshell, Rand stops caring about her characters, who are all variations on three of the four Fountainhead archetypes (Roark, Keating, and Wynand, with poor forgotten demon-child Ellsworth Toohey left out in the cold), and instead starts using her characters to start making broad social declarations, all of which amount to: Leave the narcissist! Leave! Leave!!!! Ironically, the most interesting characters in Atlas Shrugged—ostensibly a novel about Good Guys triumphing over Bad Guys—are its few victims, who suffer worse fates than anybody in The Fountainhead ever does. One woman, Cheryl Brooks, marries a miserable rich man who fakes all of his success, and winds up in a textbook abusive relationship, her husband mocking and shaming her until she's driven to suicide just to get away. A brilliant scientist named Robert Stadler creates a state-funded institute for science, refusing to accept the way its findings are perverted for purposes of social manipulation, or the fact that all his breakthroughs are used to invent new forms of military weaponry, rather than social betterment. (Rand's anti-military stance is rarely examines, but in this case it leads to marvelously childish dramatic irony: a would-be warlord blows himself and Stadler up with Stadler's own superweapon.) And, in the book's most jarring note, Eddie Willers, the childhood friend and yearning would-be lover of the woman who runs the railroads, stays behind to try and save the trains as the world falls apart. As every hero but him celebrates the start of something new, Rand gives us one last look at Willers, terrified and desperate and in impossible pain, screaming for help that will never come—one piercing image of someone devoting themselves to a relationship that gives them nothing back.

Rand's great mission, essentially, was to appropriate and redefine words like "greed" and "ego" and "selfishness." Is it greedier to offer something meaningful to the world and get rewarded for it, or to ask somebody for more than they can healthily give you without offering anything in turn? Rand could have argued that the latter is what true greed looks like. Instead, she kept the former definition of greed, and tried to base her ideology on the idea that, no, greed is good. Rather than differentiating between the "healthy balance" definition of ego and the "completely self-centered" definition, she simply argues that ego is wonderful, the end, no need to quibble over the semantics! This is how we get to her definition of men being tender and loving to other men as "selfishness." How isn't it selfish to give something to somebody you love? Don't you feel happier when the people you love are happy? Therefore, selfishness is good. No more questions!

Where Rand's worldview falls apart is that, ultimately, the terminology that people use matters far less than their behaviors. It is possible to abuse other people's generosity, or to be kind to others in the name of your own ego. But it's just as possible to abuse selfishness, or to see the things you accomplish as a form of humility. People's motives are complex, but so are their relationships with whatever ideology they espouse. It's possible for communists and capitalists to agree on matters of economics and state, because the labels we define ourselves with are rarely as ideologically pure as we assume. It's possible for an atheist and a Christian to agree more about the nature of God than that Christian would agree with another Christian. But Rand operates more like a juvenile Nancy Drew, and finds narcissism (or, as she calls it, "second-hander mentality") hidden more-or-less everywhere. She's the witchfinder who suspects that everybody else may just be a witch. And her solution to things, which is absolutely the healthy way to respond to bona fide narcissism in your life, becomes an invitation to be a flat-out monster to decent people, without ever taking accountability for your own actions.

It's popular in some circles to affirm people's rights to self-care: to say, basically, that you're allowed to do nice things for yourself, you're allowed to be gentle with yourself, you're allowed to show yourself kindness. That is absolutely true and it is sometimes important to hear, if you're prone to ignoring your own needs, prone to putting yourself in unhealthy positions without self-regard, prone to letting yourself get hurt in certain well-meaning but misguided ways. It is, for instance, certainly "self-care" to let yourself cut abusive narcissists out of your life, and for the same reasons that Rand says: "Is it selfish to abandon these abusive people? Very well, then: be selfish, because selfishness is clearly good."

But that tendency towards self-care, ironically, can become highly narcissistic. There's the infamous example where a self-care meme encouraged people not to talk with their grandparents, because letting your grandparents call you is inherently a form of... abuse? And during a boycott of Kellogg's products in 2021, over Kellogg's exploitation of its workers, some fatuous asshole said something about how "buying Kellogg's products is really just a form of self-care," and therefore this boycott was actually abusive towards people who like Corn Pops. It is pathetically easy to take the terminology we use to promote well-being and turn it into the evil opposite of itself. It's toxic for you to call me toxic. Calling me abusive is abusive. Accusing me of gaslighting, are you? Clearly you don't realize that your accusation is the real gaslighting here.

"Put yourself first" is the motto of people looking to escape narcissists, but it's also the motto of narcissists themselves. Rand even understands this, which is why her selfish pricks are constantly calling other people selfish pricks. What she doesn't seem to understand is that her response, which is to change "selfish prick" from an accusatory epithet into a badge of honor, just lets the assholes in her books call themselves something different and go on abusing others, casting themselves as the victims in Rand's own stories. At times she shows glimmers of self-awareness, like when Humanity's Perfect Scourage Ellsworth Toohey cleverly releases a new coffee-table book describing modernist architecture (which is the thing Howard Roark does) as the new cool thing to photocopy and plagiarize... but she never reckons with the possibility that her villains might appropriate her language. What happens when Ellsworth Toohey calls himself an Objectivist? Rand seems to treat her own philosophy as holy words that will burn on demons' tongues, so she never examines this any further. Which is a shame, because there's an interesting story to be made out of that.

The most infamous scene in Atlas Shrugged involves a train full of people running into a tunnel under dangerous circumstances. Terrible things happen, and everybody dies. And we've been following along with the story of Rand's railroads falling apart, so we understand this is a tragedy in the making, and recognize that the feckless bureaucrats ordering this train to run despite obvious physical perils are bastards—but that's not enough. Because Rand doesn't want us to see this as a tragedy, in which innocent lives are lost. She pauses, and she runs us through every car of that train, explaining how every person involved—from politicians to schoolteachers to mothers—espoused some flavor of "altruism" that meant they got what was coming to them. Hence the memorable Randian pivot: the quiet Fountainhead tragedy of people struggling to love one another becomes the Atlas Shrugged sneer that says the impure deserve to die. And Atlas Shrugged ends—let's not mince words—with a group of rugged industrialists watching the world end and everybody die, celebrating because now only the pure remain. Even poor Eddie Willers, who was neither masculine enough to win his best friend's heart nor ambitious enough to abandon his life's work, is given one final scream before he falls silent forever... and we're encouraged to ask, But didn't he deserve it?

Fellas, is it self-care to destroy the world?

Atlas Shrugged was intended to be Ayn Rand's Book of Revelation. That is, it's an apocalyptic vision of a world far worse than this one, far worse than the world that Rand believed existed, to ask the question of: If the whole world of awful people turned against the decent ones, and if even the middle ground gave way, would there be a reason for the decent humans to despair? And her answer, which is that people's best qualities will triumph over their worst ones, and that self-destructiveness and spite and envy will never eat away the parts of people that are joyous and creative and cooperative, ought to be seen as positive. But Rand did a far worse job than Christians did of preventing dogma from taking over, and a large part of that stems from her absolute refusal to portray anything remotely like a contradiction to her claims. Therefore, it becomes easy to define almost anything as self-destructive or spiteful or envious, and to see anybody who suffers even a little as no better than a moocher, and to proclaim that nothing's better than unchecked greed. Not everybody, thank goodness, is a narcissist. And a philosophy that insists the rest of the world is out to get you will invariably encourage you to harden your heart against the world's tremendous suffering.

Consider the power dynamic between Spongebob Squarepants and Squidward Tentacles.

That's what philosopher Natalie Wynn does, when discussing aspects of Friedrich Nietzsche's work. In her video titled "Envy," she delves into Nietzsche's notion of "master and slave morality," which played a crucial part in the development of Ayn Rand's philosophy in turn.

In short, "master morality" refers to the idea that strength, beauty, and triumph are all moral goods. "Slave morality" refers to the idea that the real goods are abstinence, purity, and meekness. In other words, "slave morality" is not only rooted in absences, it's rooted in the specific absences of everything that master morality holds dear. Nietzsche's theory is that the latter is driven by resentment (literally ressentiment, a re-doing of sentiment) towards the former. What you do not have and cannot possess, you instead cast out as evil—and suddenly, everything that made people seem noble and glorious instead makes them out to be sinful and wrong.

Both modes of morality have their drawbacks. "Master morality" can lead to "might makes right," the idea that unchecked power is the only kind of morality or truth. "Slave morality," meanwhile, risks being defined only as a kind of nihilistic void, negation without creation. It can go beyond compassion or empathy to become a fetishization of purity, in which the only way to be without sin is to have nothing and do nothing whatsoever.

Wynn illustrates this using Spongebob and Squidward, because the former is a naive and multitalented savant, whereas the latter is untalented and resentful, egotistical only to mask a gnawing insecurity. Her point is not that Spongebob is "all good" or that Squidward is "all bad." It's that, while Spongebob is a seeming virtuoso at every skill imaginable, he simultaneously places no pride in that, focusing on the sheer joy of doing things for other people. Squidward, meanwhile, attempts to debase and devalue Spongebob at every turn, but has nothing of his own to offer. His entire identity is defined by resentment: by what he dreams of offering but cannot, and by the "consolation" that none of the many things Spongebob has to offer must be worth anything at all.

It's not even like Squidward's hard-working or particularly kind! He's thoroughly selfish, hates helping other people, despises others for their failings, and persists in despising Spongebob despite frequently needing his help. The implication, of course, is that, while Squidward thinks Spongebob is happy because he has neither strong desires nor lack of talents, it's because Spongebob so readily finds joy that he desires nothing else, and finds few doors closed off to him. Squidward's dreams are not of accomplishment: they are of social stature, of being respected and envied, of being anywhere other than his menial job. Spongebob never wants to be anything other than a fry cook, and as a consequence, his burgers can bring the gods to tears.

These ideas don't bleed into Rand's worldview so much as define its heart. Peter Keating, like Squidward, thinks of his work only in terms of social achievement; he cannot bring himself to value it for its own sake. He seeks to possess Dominique Francon, not because she will bring him happiness—she makes him miserable—but because he knows she will make others envious. Howard Roark, meanwhile, pretty much ever talks about architecture, and he loves his friends because his friends only talk about construction, or sculpture, or whatever else they've made their vocation. Rand's villains think of work as a game to be won. But her heroes only ever see it as a calling.

What defines Rand's work, to me, is her exploration of guilt: guilt as a byproduct of resentment and envy; guilt as a tool of sadism. On some level, her major theme is what happens when the best parts of "master morality" (creativity, open-mindedness, courage) buy into the worst aspects of "slave morality" (what Rand, in her broad and childish way, refers to as "anti-work" and "anti-life"). What happens if Squidward convinces Spongebob that, not only is his joy of making Krabby Patties somehow shameful, but that it's bad that his Krabby Patties are so good? That, somehow, his entire conception of what makes a "good" Krabby Patty cannot be trusted: that his tastes or his skills or his perception are entirely suspect?

As History's Most Charming Monster Ellsworth Toohey says, in his grandiose and unedited monologue near The Fountainhead's end:

(Do you see those edits? Do you see those paragraph breaks? You're welcome. Those are from me, not from Ayn. These are brief excerpts from a single shitheap of a paragraph.)

There is an argument to be made that psychopathy and narcissism and manipulation take intelligence and craft, if you want to be pedantic. But studies suggest that psychopaths, on average, are at best only about as intelligent as anybody else—and there's a suggestion that many of them are quite dimmer. Yet they can be incredibly compelling, incredibly charismatic, for the simple fact that their social trespasses, their profound disregard for anybody else, leaves them free to be a spectacle, absorbing because of how absorbed they are in themselves. We are drawn to them because we are prone to be fascinated by others and to disregard ourselves; they draw us in because they work the opposite way.

Similarly, at the core of Rand's stories is the idea that awful people not only fill their lives with resentment and destructive tendencies, but use the nobler tendencies of noble people to do the heavy lifting for them. If someone is already persuaded to hate themselves, you don't need to do anything impressive to hurt them: you just have to exploit the tendencies that are already there. Speak to whichever part of them is predisposed to hurt themselves, and they'll do all the rest.

What's funny about Rand's preoccupation with selfishness is that a good deal of her protagonists suffer because they are fundamentally generous—so good-hearted that, when they meet with dissatisfaction of any kind, they are prepared to accept that maybe they're not giving others something important that they just don't understand. Tell a Randian hero that they're wrong about something, and they'll ignore you with calm confidence; tell them that they're hurting you, though, or not thinking about them enough, and 8 times out of 10 they'll be possessed with such doubts that they wind up marrying you. There are variations—some choose instead to waste their talents on frivolity and despair, and some of them are a little more combative—but the message is always: They hurt you because they know you can get away with it. And they love your hurt because it's proof that you'll let them control you afterwards.

My suspicion is that Rand put the emphasis on greed rather than on generosity because she experienced the ways in which our most generous inclinations can be exploited and abused. That can be exploitation on a personal front—if you start to believe a narcissist's claims that you hurt them, they can steal anything and everything from you—or it can be the way that some con men use altruistic causes as a way of stealing from the well-meaning. (As I write this, there is an ongoing controversy involving a major progressive organization failing to disclose millions of dollars' worth of donations—though you can find instances of this across the political spectrum, along with similar corporate and governmental corruptions. It's an abuse enabled by institutions as a whole, not by any specific flavor of institution.)

There are plenty of instances when generosity is good, when greed is bad, when charity makes a meaningful contribution to people's lives, when altruism and selflessness have an impact on the world. But I don't think it's controversial to say that generosity should come from a place of confidence and self-worth, or that it's hard to be healthily selfless unless you know how to value yourself, or that meaningful humility requires you to have an ego, and is not even remotely the same as self-debasement.

And there are times when someone needs to hear: you are a good person, you do have worth, you should care about yourself, you're not sinning by thinking about your own needs. You can tell those people that it's not "selfish" to want to be happy, or to make rational choices, or to expect better than what terrible people offer them. Or you can say: fuck it, be selfish. If you're afraid that it's egotistical to put yourself in front of someone who's clearly exploiting you, might as well go ahead and have an ego. "Altruism" flat-out isn't worth the price of letting someone else abuse you. Sometimes, you just have to believe in yourself, even if nobody else does—because if you think something's possible, or worth doing, then you might just be right. And if nobody else is going to find it, it'll just have to be you.

There are ways in which this mentality can go wildly wrong. As I'm fond of quoting, Harry Frankfurt likes to say that sincerity is bullshit: if your only metric in life is whether something feels "true to you," and you're disregarding everyone else around you, then you're accountable to nobody, because there's no longer any such thing as truth or lies. Again, Objectivism is extremely appealing to narcissists for a (somewhat ironic) reason.

But there are a lot of scenes in The Fountainhead where it's clear that Rand's sweet little lads are thinking of more than just themselves. A lot of the conversations Roark has with Steven Mallory, the fragile young sculptor,  feel like Roark is specifically counseling Mallory away from a seriously unhealthy relationship. Even the bluster—"It's you and me against the world, kid!"—feels like what you would say to fire up a friend who's down on their luck, rather than the psychotic ideology that it eventually became. Rand's vision always emphasizes meaningful interpersonal relationships, in which ambition is laid aside and turns into personal connection. And some of her most joyous scenes have nothing to do with trains or architecture, and everything to do with a bunch of friends just hanging out in somebody's home. That's crucial to her vision—as crucial as the part where her antagonists always seem to wind up at dinner parties where everybody's name-dropping prominent artists and critics, trying to out-culture each other without genuinely enjoying the works they claim to consume.

And the sadism in Rand's works strikes a chord with me even today. More than anything, her antagonists live for schadenfreude: what they want, more than "what they want," is to see somebody lowered, debased, convinced of their own debasement. They don't seek physical abuse so much as they want humiliation and degradation: they want people to feel ashamed of their best traits, to apologize for their contributions, to feel like everything that defines who they are needs to be hidden away and repressed. Even more generally, her antagonists resent whatever isn't them: the real affront, as it is with narcissists, is that anything else dares to exist in the first place.

The political scientist Corey Robin said in a recent conversation that the struggle of the political left is to imagine something new. The right never has to: they can point to living memory, or evoke nostalgia for a past that never was, as they argue that everything new is bad, everything old is tested and true, and any attempts to change anything will only bring about ruin. The left struggles, meanwhile, because progress aims to realize what has never before been realized; its enemy isn't just disagreement, it's the kind of reactionary inertia that will kill an idea before it's born, that critiques attempts to make something new by treating early drafts as viciously as you'd go after an established masterpiece, that asks constantly for proof that better things can exist rather than understanding that the goal is to imagine something better, because we can live in better worlds only if we dream them up first.

It's in that sense that I feel Rand's lazy reactionary impulses conceal a half-formed progressive heart. When Howard Roark dynamites that public housing development, it's because a coalition of architects has taken his original design, which would provide not only housing but dignity to the poor and cost the public almost nothing, and perverted it into something bloated and degrading and expensive—so expensive that it risks creating a new wave of impoverishment. Leaving aside everything problematic there (and there's a lot!!), on some level the story is that Howard Roark is attempting to create cheap-but-good public housing for the poor, that his "ego" is dedicated to finding better ways to solve a social problem, and that the architects ruining his vision aren't doing it in the name of "charity," they're doing it because they don't care for the poor as much as they care about newspapers calling them creative. In Rand's conception of artistic integrity, which she articulates the most robustly in her treatment of architecture, the "bad" architects aren't bad because they're untalented or because they care about charity or any of the superficial interpretations: they're bad because they only care about their clout, and feign both taste and charity because it earns them social status. 

(It follows that, in a overgrown capitalist dystopia, the "bad" architects would all be asking you whether you'd read Ayn Rand.)

Rand's conception of guilt and shame plays into the way she writes about sex, which is by far one of the most controversial (and easiest-to-score-points-with) aspects of her work. Most infamously, Howard Roark "assaults" Dominique Francon—and I include that word in quotes only because both Francon in-text and Rand herself declare that what happened was more akin to kinky, consensual roleplay than the scene ever quite admits to. That's contrasted with a scene between Dominique and Peter Keating, later on, in which sex is entirely "consensual" despite Francon clearly being revolted by it. Rand's interest is less in dynamics of power than in dynamics of shame and self-acceptance; every one of her sex scenes is a study in who is ashamed of what.

It is also a study in why desire is there. Peter Keating's case might be the most curious of them all: he simultaneously wants Francon in his own right, but more than that he wants the status symbol of her; his disgust and his shame are not entirely at his desire for her, they're for the way he knows he cares more about the status than the sex. And to the extent that he does want her, despite clearly knowing that she doesn't want him back, what he hates is that he wants her despite her lack of desire—and that feeling of desire-as-impotence, that feeling that his want for her has nothing to do with her want of him (or lack thereof), inspires his own sexual sadism, which she accepts because she believes herself to deserve his degradation.

There is another curious case, in Atlas Shrugged, involving the hapless metallurgist Hank Rearden and his wife Lillian—the one whose brother-in-law Philip gets the big check. Rearden's desire for his wife is described as something that disgusts him; he resists the urge to fuck her until he's no longer able. Her response to him is described as a kind of quiet cruelty: she responds to him, not physically, but with detached amusement, as if bored by everything but the fact of his self-loathing need. Early on, Rearden wonders why his lust amuses her so; he concludes that it must be shameful of him to want her like it does. Later, he realizes she is amused not by his lust but by his shame: what matters is not that she sees what he's doing to her as a degrading, baseless act, but that she knows he sees it that way. More precisely, what she relishes isn't his shame itself, it's the knowledge that he believes his lust is shameful.

In Atlas Shrugged, the sex between protagonists is generally joyous, conspicuously consensual, and verges on orgiastic. Dagny Taggert, the fearless railway industrialist heroine, has a series of trysts with an escalatingly impressive series of hot men. The conflict she faces involves, not whether the sex is good (it is), but whether it's acceptable for her to tell one man she loves that she loves another man more. And because Ayn Rand loves nothing more than men loving other men, all of her hot rich men, who are also tall, agree that nothing would make them happier than to know that the sexiest, smartest women of them all is now having sex with their best friend instead of with them. (On some level, it's a surprisingly thoughtful depiction of male maturity: the feelings of heartbreak and rejection, followed by men taking responsibility for their own feelings, finding a way to be happy for their ex-lover and their close friend, and remembering that the group's collective friendship matters more than anything. I'm not even being sarcastic! Way to go, Ayn Rand.)

Hank, meanwhile, struggles with the fact that, well, Dagny wants to have sex with him, whereas his wife mainly wants to see him feel bad about wanting to have sex with her. When she first realizes her husband is having an affair, Lillian's response is gleeful: here is her saintly husband and his "values qualities like intelligence in women," and he's gone off and had sex with some cheap pretty thing! (n.b. all sexism here is Ayn Rand's, not mine.) But she's horrified to learn that it's Dagny he's been seeing: that, rather than debasing himself, he's started seeing someone who genuinely deserves his love, and someone who genuinely loves him back. All of this climaxes in Lillian having atrocious sex with Dagny's brother, who's in the middle of trying to drive his own poor wife to suicide: neither she nor he want to have sex with one another, but they both enjoy the thought that it's degrading the other person, and get off purely on the thought that, by fucking, they might be hurting somebody else.

Which brings us back to The Fountainhead, and to Dominique Francon, and to what Rand once referred to as "rape by engraved invitation." It's important context that, on one level, The Fountainhead is structured as a game of cat-and-mouse: Dominique and Howard Roark spend the book antagonizing one another, as she tries to destroy his career, he tries to have one despite her staunch opposition, and the two of them go off and fuck regardless of which one of them succeeds.

In a lot of ways, Howard Roark is the least conflicted character in The Fountainhead, mirroring John Galt, the "protagonist" of Atlas Shrugged who's so smarmily self-assured that he doesn't appear until the very end, swoops in, grabs the girl, and vanishes. His relative certainty creates most of the tension and conflict of the novel: he is a mirror who reflects every other character, and none of them like what they see. But none of his counterparts are stranger or more conflicted than Dominique Francon, who has long since decided that, because the world cannot live up to her standards, she will reject all of it, making it a point to seek out glimmers of beauty and love and destroy them before they, too, get a chance to disappoint her.

Peter Keating's rise and fall is also the story of his romance with Dominique. He wants her before he's ever met her, because his goal in life is to usurp her father's firm and fame. When he meets her, he is enamored, more than anything, by the way she recognizes every social-climbing game he plays, and cooly scorns all of them. What he falls in love with—and he sincerely falls in love—is the way that her contempt for him feels not only honest but earned; he too feels he deserves the scorn. There are even moments where, for an instant, it seems like he's on the verge of figuring something out, and becoming less putrid of a man—but every time the rest of the world intrudes, Peter deflates immediately. His defining tragedy is not that he couldn't be a better man—it's that, even as he recognizes something sincere and beautiful in her, he can't escape the social climbing. When Dominique offers to marry him, out of nowhere, it is as he is literally heading out the door to marry the meek-but-sweet woman who he loves... and it is precisely because she offers marriage to him as a social contract, rather than a romantic one, that Peter goes for it.

Roark, by contrast, meets Dominique while he's doing manual labor in her father's quarry. She has no idea, at the time, about his former career as an architect; all she knows is that he doesn't tiptoe around his attraction to her, which strikes her as an affront. As is common with Rand, there are two layers to her outrage: while she feigns indignity at his lower class status, what truly shocks her is that his feelings are shameless and unhidden—and that he notices her reaction to him as well.

What follows is a series of perceived degradations. Dominique, exploiting her position above Roark, forces him to perform a series of increasingly sexualized, and increasingly laborious, menial tasks; her attempts to shame him repeatedly, and comically, end with her own shame, but the source of her shame is the opposite of the one she seeks to find in him. It's the inverse of Hank's shame with Lillian: while Dominique attempts to shame Roark for coveting her, she winds up shamed by Roark noticing her own desire back. But what rankles isn't her desire—not exactly. It's that Roark doesn't see her lust for him as shameful, but she does; what he enjoys is that she struggles to repress herself, and fails.

This is the context for the infamous rape scene: after all this, which ends with Dominique making Howard install lights so she can ogle his ass behind his back, Roark enters the home that she invited him to, finds her in bed, and they have sex.

We're going to pause for a spell here, because it's important to say this: there is a difference between what Rand intended with this scene and what Rand actually wrote. As it is written, minus the subtext, minus the subtleties that Rand is getting at, this moment is not only clearly written as an assault, but it ends with Dominique explicitly using the word "rape" as she thinks about it later. And yes, she's thinking about it in a somewhat hot-and-bothered way, but it's still incredibly messed up that a major philosophical movement with purchase among powerful men who love abusing their power specifically depicts a scene in which a man has sex with a woman without asking, in which she physically struggles against him, and later on the two of them go off and get married. I don't want to think of how many men were inspired by this scene to do something terrible to a woman, but that number's not zero, and it might be shockingly big.

Looking at the scene in context, though, Rand wrote the scene the way she wrote it because the undercurrent is one of Dominique struggling with her own shame. To her mind, the first time had to happen the way it happens, because Dominique, who has rejected her belief that the world can offer her anything of worth, is already hell-bent on destroying Roark the way she will go on to try and destroy his career. Her scorn and her shame are pitted against Roark's self-acceptance and his joy. And every one of their early contests ends the same: with Roark saying, I enjoy this, and I know that you enjoy it too, and I know that you want me to think you hate it, and I enjoy that you can't even lie to me with a straight face. It happens multiple times before the sex, with the sex following a pattern that's been clearly laid out beforehand; the implicit point in Dominique's referring to it as "rape" is that, even as she says it, she knows the word doesn't hold true.

And I'm gonna cycle back around quickly to: it's messed up that this scene consists of a man telling a woman how much she wants sex even as she is clearly communicating otherwise. It's messed up even though I completely believe that, in Rand's mind, Dominique's "nos" were not only untrue, but they were untrue in a way she had clearly communicated to Roark, and that Roark had enough information to proceed with an act that was, ultimately, consensual.

I hope you'll forgive me for dissecting this moment of all moments—the most-hated Rand moment that doesn't overtly involve mass murder—but it's important for the same reason that Rand's stories about what she believes are more significant, in many ways, than her monologues about what she believes. Because this moment, in her worldview, is a moment, not of trauma, but of reckoning with a trauma that already exists. It's a moment when someone who professes to loathe the world because they are in denial about how much they loathe themselves is confronted with someone who feels anything but loathsome towards her, and passionately, violently rejects it. Dominique rejects Roark—his feelings for her, her feelings for him, and his pride in his feelings—because to accept him would be to accept that she is more than just a trophy, that his feelings for her are more than just lust, and that her feelings for him shock her, not because of their carnality, but because of her own need to be seen and understood and wanted. Likewise, the shame she feels at herself is different than the shame Roark makes her feel: she feels ashamed of her desires and needs, but she feels ashamed in Roark's eyes because he makes her feel like she shouldn't feel ashamed of those at all.

And it's interesting that, of all the sex scenes in Rand's two major books, this one is the very first. In its broken, probably-could've-been-handled-way-better way, it cuts right to the theme that defines both Rand's protagonists and her antagonists alike: If you let others make you feel ashamed of what's best in you, they can control you and destroy you—but if you love yourself properly, people who would rather humiliate and repress you can't do a thing.

And it articulates her minor-key theme too: Accepting this as truth will be a lot harder than you think.

[TW: a brief discussion of suicide]

The fourth and final part of The Fountainhead opens with an unnamed young man considering ending his life.

He is alone in the wilderness, appreciating nature, asking himself why untrammeled nature appeals to him so much more than anything he's found in civilization, or in other people. And then, in the middle of the forest, he sees an implausible fantasia of a town.

Of course, he finds Roark there—Roark, at this point, has been completely off-stage for all of Part 3—and the boy departs after a brief conversation.

When I think of Ayn Rand in the most positive, complimentary light I can—when I'm focused on what I love about her, and forget briefly the many awful things that make those fond moments so fleeting—I think about this scene. So much of why she appeals to so many, I think, is found here: not in the grand proclamations about selfishness, not in her disturbing of the deserving getting to watch as the undeserving get shafted, but in the moments when she describes something joyous, something at once innocent and bewilderingly complex, and captures that sense of delight mixed with wonder mixed with awe. This is incredible; I can't believe that this exists; I realize now, for a moment, that more is possible than anyone has ever imagined. For a moment, there is that visceral sense that life could be like this: all the loveliest flavors of disbelief, all the moments that feel like they'll last forever, partly because when we're in them, we behold not just the present but the future we wish could be.

What about her books spoke to me, when I was 16? More than anything, it was that they spoke to my joy, and to my hope, and to my dreams of better things; they spoke to that, and then they tried to answer why I was so afraid of my own happiness, why I was so frightened of being hurt, why I was wary of trusting other people with the things that made me happiest.

To this day, I'm wary of sharing my favorite band with people. I've gone through entire relationships without playing the person I was in love with my favorite song, because I didn't want to know what I'd see on their face. I am fortunate enough to have a life full of passionate, savage joys, too many for me to document even if I'd tried, but it sometimes amazes me how much of the things which make me happiest just aren't things that I feel comfortable sharing with other people—because I don't need another reminder of how infrequently my stranger joys are shared with someone else.

Towards the end of The Fountainhead, the corrupt bastard Gail Wynand meets Howard Roark and immediately falls in love. At some point, early in their budding friendship, Wynand, inspired by him, says: “I’ve always thought that a feeling which changes never existed in the first place. There are books I liked at the age of sixteen. I still like them.” It's the usual Randian blend of overblown and touching, but it describes a feeling I'm immediately familiar with: one, not just of pleasure, but of innocence, of responding to something without any measurement or calculation, of feeling the way I feel about it just because it's what comes up.

If there's a single word to describe Rand's protagonists, it's carefree—and if there's a single way to sum up their struggles, it's that "carefree" is often easier said than done. Which is why, when she gets tired of proclaiming her beliefs and using her characters as mouthpieces, Rand gets down to the important businesses of having them all get dinner together, or letting them all ride a train, focusing less on grandeur and expense than on a man cooking for his friends, or on someone smiling at the way wind blows through her hair.

And if there's a single thing that Ayn Rand has to say about art or enterprise or sex, it's that the best things about them should also come easily. That's not to say it can't be hard at times, or even frustrating—just that underlying that all is a simple happiness, that sense of present-mixed-with-future, of cherishing this moment in part because, in moments like this, a lovely future is easier to see than ever. The joy is envision, the joy is making, the joy is sharing; the joy is the dream and it's the work and it's the accomplishment all at once. It's selfish and it's selfless all at the same time: selfless commitment to the dream, selfish belief that you get to decide the dream is worth a damn, even if it is your dream and you might be biased.

With the exception of Glourious Basterd Ellsworth Toohey, who is an implausible human and life's greatest joy, Rand's antagonists are defined, not only by their resentment, but by their fear. Their fear, in every case, is that the world's opinion of them matters more than they do: that whatever genuine feeling they have, whatever thoughts might legitimately spring from them, is inconsequential and even blasphemy in the wake of whatever Society has deemed to be true. They have bought into this belief, they have accepted this fear, and what they resent in their nemeses isn't talent or skill or opportunity or intelligence—it's that their nemeses have whatever they have because they sought to learn it or make it or acquire it. And their only weapon is to take their fear and their shame and accuse others with it: to treat with scorn, not specific ideas or feelings or opinions, but the audacity of having ideas and feelings and opinions in the first place.

It is unquestionably true that this philosophy, left unchecked, breeds tiresome assholes. Anyone who calls himself a "free thinker" because someone correctly called him a douchebag once, anyone who thinks that corporate maneuvering is thrilling enough to justify its body count, anyone whose idea of sex includes the word "alpha" anywhere, has Rand to thank for society's not permanently forcing them to work in dunk tanks. For all my strong feelings towards Rand, for all that I can talk about her till I'm blue in the face, for all that every time I open Atlas Shrugged I know full well that I will read it at least one more time after this, I can't even remotely separate the parts of her that speak to me from the parts of her that fill me with disgust.

Yet I find myself wishing that I could recommend her to certain of my friends. I find myself talking with someone who despises themselves, someone who is afraid to even admit that a certain thing might bring them joy, someone who can't offer up an opinion without apologizing, someone who can't let themselves admit that somebody is hurting them because they don't feel like they have a right to admit it... and I realize, everything I want to say to them is something that I first picked up in Rand.

What is it that I want to say to them? Something like this:

But I'm not sure how to separate what's good about Ayn Rand from what's bad. She wanted so hard to find an easy, simple explanation for everything, and she found an audience of people who felt she spoke to their feelings so strongly that they were willing to accept all of her lazy, unexamined simplicities. I'm not sure there's a simple way to dismiss her without dismissing what I love about her, a simple way to concisely separate the parts of her that helped teach me who I am from the parts of her that I struggle every day to be less like.

And then I realized: I don't have to keep it short. All this, and I'm still only ⅓rd as long as that one monologue in Atlas Shrugged.


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Special thanks to Matt Mazewski, for reminding me of the obvious tweet to lead this piece off with.