I love Atlas Shrugged; it’s a beautiful novel that’s definitely worth reading, but I downvoted your original comment because it fails to recognize that Rand really was terrible at rationality, compared to what we know now. (ChronoDAS’s analogy is perfect.) I agree that Atlas Shrugged is full of inspiring prose praising the ideals of reason and recognition of objective reality—but actually recognizing objective reality requires a certain, well, empiricism that Rand just utterly fails at. I mean—laissez-faire capitalism follows deductively from the law of identity and the choice to live? What? Sorry. “Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever.”
I love Atlas Shrugged; it’s a beautiful novel that’s definitely worth reading, but I downvoted your original comment because it fails to recognize that Rand really was terrible at rationality, compared to what we know now. (ChronoDAS’s analogy is perfect.) I agree that Atlas Shrugged is full of inspiring prose praising the ideals of reason and recognition of objective reality—but actually recognizing objective reality requires a certain, well, empiricism that Rand just utterly fails at. I mean—laissez-faire capitalism follows deductively from the law of identity and the choice to live? What? Sorry. “Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever.”