Slow down there, Atlas

Beware, it's a 3hr long monologue.

I'm the guy from above who said I liked the "quantity over quality" she had because it let me get lost. Even I skipped "the speech" lmfao. It just repeats the shitty, not subtle, ideas that have been repeated 100x by that point, and even within itself it repeats the same damn thing over and over and over.

I can see it being a nifty writing technique to basically have an academic paper micro-version of the whole work diogenically within your philosophy tilted book, but the problem is if that was the intent, it's a paper that no one would publish because it sucks.

Haha thanks. There were parts I enjoyed and I don't get a chance to talk about them much without people thinking I'm crazy, or worse, in the cult.

Re: The super engineer. I also was lucky there that I read it before my technical education, now it would probably bug me. Still, the escapism of being the superman "I CAN do it all!" can be fun, but it is just that: escapist fantasy. Problems arise when people forget that.

Right, like that's definitely a read of it. That's kind of what I was getting it in that the philosophy makes sense in the world she created, it just doesn't have all that much in common with the real world.

That take makes sense, but it's definitely not what the author intended. She very much wanted it to be applied to modern times. Whether or not you can separate the authors intent from the book itself involves some "death of the author" type conversations that, despite knowing some $5 lit terms, I'm not super versed in. Even then, I think the energy is better spent on more interesting examples, like how "Uncle Tom's Cabin" kind of changed significance over time.

I'm close with a family that lived through the collapse of the USSR. Based on what I've heard alone, Rand's reaction is really understandable in my opinion. It doesn't make it correct, but I do get the reaction.