I also get such energy from Atlas Shrugged, I don't understand why. I know that the good guys are very carefully crafted, they don't cheat, they don't do things like lobbying to win. They don't compromise on their world view to the extreme. They don't have children, that makes it all easier, but also less real.
Raised christian but feeling burned out by the contradictions, the emptiness of trying to live for others (it's killing for relationships I can tell you), the mental struggle to rationalize all the rules, I too felt that spark. I realize dogmatism is always bad but that voice inside keeps saying: It's not when the theory is perfect! The truth is knowable and can be discovered through reason. How super comforting (and damn that Incompleteness Theorem I learned about later).
I don't know what it is, my hunger for a system? For rules to make sense of the world? Whatever it is, Rand's philosophy remains so appealing. It's probably the reason I started a company, walk into meetings now boldly, with a goal, why I enjoy things now, just to enjoy myself. As a rational, healthy human, there is nothing wrong with that, in contrast to what my upbringing tried to instill in me.
Perhaps that's it, it liberated my from a confining worldview. Perhaps another worldview could have done the same.
I have to say, Quakers are cool Christians if you're wanting to hold on to your faith but abandon the hypocrisy. (I find the Quaker community surprisingly welcoming of me, an atheist.)
Funnily enough, I felt the same energy after reading The Fountainhead by Rand.
It's been over a decade at this point, but I remember Howard Roarks(?) endless ambitious energy was infectious. Sounds like it's time for another read.
The Fountainhead is a great book, one of my favorites. Atlas Shrugged is also a very good book in a slightly different way (but it overstays its welcome). I love Ayn Rand as a writer, she was bold, energetic, smart. She could weave a fictional alternate reality like nobody else, while keeping the human characters at the very center of everything.
The problem is that for some reason she couldn’t keep it at the fictional level and started thinking maybe the fiction was a good model of reality. That kinda taints a bit the legacy, in my opinion.
I read "Atlas Shrugged" but I found it to be a frustrating read, mostly because of how simplistic its worldview is. When I read it, I felt like the complex issues it tries to tackle—capitalism, government, individualism—were reduced to black-and-white moral arguments, without much room for nuance or ambiguity.
The characters didn’t help either. They came across as one-dimensional: the so-called heroes are always right, always rational, while anyone who disagrees with them is portrayed as either stupid or evil. That kind of writing makes it hard for me to take her "philosophy" seriously.
Someone else was burned one too many times. It's fine and dandy until you notice a pattern: others who lack conscience will always work your convictions against you. Though the religion admits as much - it eschews 'worldly wisdom' - i.e. what you need to make anything of a life in this world.
I mean it's empty because you deny people that love you to do nice things for you (I don't care (and it shows!), what do you want to do?). Keep it up long enough and you don't even know what you like anymore. And then you aren't really a fun person anymore.
Good insight. My partner is strong willed, more of a Dagny. She respects me and wants to make me happy, does not like guessing what I want because we’ll just end up with stuff we both don’t like. I have a lot of respect for that. I think hers is the better way.
I now see the conflicts between her and my parents and often she’s like: why don’t they just say what they want? She gets the feeling they do stuff for her/us, but she wants them to do things they like! Of course we really like it if they want to see our children because they like to be with them. Not always because they want to help us out or something indirect. I mean, that’s wat love is right?
Yes it’s tough to know, and often comes down to very different foundational assumptions about behaviour and how to judge it.
My wife is Jewish and was I raised Catholic. I’ve noticed quite recently that she definitely judges actions more in terms of effect and I’m more concerned with people’s motivations/intentions.
And funnily enough I just noticed this explicitly in the Old Testament:
Leviticus 4:1-35 deals explicitly with sacrificial atonement for unwitting offences. The section note in The Jewish Study Bible says: “A basic postulate of Israelite thought is that inadvertent acts are just as harmful as deliberate ones, the need to atone for them just as real, and the desire to do so, once they are realized, greater.”
It's basically "divine right to rule" for rich people, sans religion. I remember hearing about Rand and eventually reading Rand, and I quite literally thought it was satire. Tbf it would be peak if it was satire, but I genuinely don't understand how anyone can subscribe to this in earnest.
Raised christian but feeling burned out by the contradictions, the emptiness of trying to live for others (it's killing for relationships I can tell you), the mental struggle to rationalize all the rules, I too felt that spark. I realize dogmatism is always bad but that voice inside keeps saying: It's not when the theory is perfect! The truth is knowable and can be discovered through reason. How super comforting (and damn that Incompleteness Theorem I learned about later).
I don't know what it is, my hunger for a system? For rules to make sense of the world? Whatever it is, Rand's philosophy remains so appealing. It's probably the reason I started a company, walk into meetings now boldly, with a goal, why I enjoy things now, just to enjoy myself. As a rational, healthy human, there is nothing wrong with that, in contrast to what my upbringing tried to instill in me.
Perhaps that's it, it liberated my from a confining worldview. Perhaps another worldview could have done the same.