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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   1728 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 4, 2026

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So, what are you reading?

I'm picking up Bly's Iron John: A Book About Men.

70 pages into Blindsight by Peter Watts. It's a very inside-baseball take on cyberpunk/hard SF which approaches impenetrability at times, and Watts uses far too many italics for my liking, but I'm curious to see where it goes.

As much as I enjoyed the book, my feelings about Peter Watts echo my feelings about Ayn Rand. Like on on one hand I get it, on the other I can't help but think that the popular lessons taken from this story are not the lessons you should be taking from this story.

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year-old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs"

Atlas Shrugged is a great book screed set of words put on paper if you suffer from very specific forms of people pleasing type behaviours. One thing I struggled with being raised by parents who were less than ideal was the feeling that my life was all for other people; I had to do what my parents wanted me to do, including giving them the money from my job; I had to accept that I deserved to be alone because I wanted a girlfriend; I had to accept that my destiny was to work 80 hours a week in a tiny shoebox to pay for other people, then die alone and unloved when I was no longer economically useful.

I'm not kidding when I say that Atlas Shrugged was one of the most useful things I ever read; the willingness to just say "no, it's okay to be selfish" was huge to me. I'm not going to say it's a masterful work of literature - but it was exactly what I needed to hear when I read it, so I will always defend it.

Her earlier novel, The Fountainhead, was what awoke me to the realization of how my codependency (that very specific people pleasing behavior) was crushing my soul. It was my first breath of fresh air in a long journey of recovery. Iron Man 1 was my second.

I've thought it's a reasonable storyline if you take it as a dystopian novel (about the Laffer curve, of all things). Still long-winded, but it makes more sense to me sitting next to 1984 and Brave New World in ways that show how society can fall apart (in this case by Big Government's effective marginal tax rates). As gets mentioned occasionally, the villains don't feel that unrealistic.

The villains were based on the Communists ruining the Russia she grew up in and escaped. They’re not unrealistic because choices that absurd and worse happened, and are happening.

I am not sure why, but for me the idea had always seemed natural. "It's ok to be selfish?" Well, duh, of course it is. I mean, I am not a psychopath, I empathize, I donate money to charity, I help others, some people even say they like me (weird, I know), but being selfish always came easy to me. Maybe that's why when I read Atlas Shrugged it wasn't a big revelation to me - maybe I was even somewhat underwhelmed. Like, if I'll be even more selfish that I already am, I will kinda be an asshole, and I don't really want to be an asshole. At least not much more of one than I already am.

That's cause you're not a crazy person, unlike me, who is verifiably insane.

So I'm going to talk a bit about my parents' style of parenting, while trying to avoid enough specifics to give away exactly who I am - so you can hopefully kind of get why it made a difference to me.

I was the oldest child of several; my parents were very clear on how little they wanted to be married or have kids (my mother, specifically, told me that having kids was the worst decision of her life, and she actively encouraged me to be kidnapped - her advice for if a stranger tried to abduct me was to go with them). An overriding theme of my childhood was that I had to earn my right to exist; I wasn't allowed to listen to music, spend time with other kids, or any number of other specifics that would certainly give me away. I was forbidden from inconveniencing them in any way (so like, I was "allowed" to go to a friend's house, but only if I could get there on my own; when I was 8 and my friend lived 30 minutes away by car, this was obviously a challenge).

With my siblings, the situation was a lot more about sacrificing for them; my parents loved to buy enough food for all but one of us to eat, and then would guilt me into giving up meals for them (my father was an extremely wealthy man, and his take-home pay was over $300k a year). They did the same with other things, like school trips or clothes or whatever else. Although I was nominally allowed to "take" any of the offers made, if I did I was told it would make my siblings suffer, or I'd be depriving the family, or whatever.

As a result of this upbringing, I was a horrible nervous wreck when I graduated from high school; I took an adult job as a programmer which I worked while I did my degree, but I felt so guilty about the amount they were paying me that I literally only cashed half my paycheques from the job, and burned the rest (for reference, they were paying me around $500 a week). I couldn't make or maintain any sort of friendships at all because I felt that everyone was tolerating my presence because I was useful, so I spent years in therapy over it - actually, for the first 3 years of therapy, I literally couldn't say a word to my therapist at all because I felt so much like I was ungrateful and deserved it.

My mental model of myself at this point was that I was someone who'd had a good upbringing, but that there was something horribly wrong with me that made me too tainted to be around other people.

So at around this age, one of the book series I was reading was Terry Goodkind's "The Sword of Truth." (Yes, yes, I know - don't judge me, I was like 18-21). One of the books in the series (called "Faith of the Fallen") follows a woman named Nicci who expressed the exact same emotions that I was - she saw herself as a bad person. The book itself was not great - but it resonated with me. I remember that this was around the sort of time that you could go online and like, talk about books with other people, so I looked up the book to see what people said - and on top of everyone criticizing it, they mentioned it was like "Atlas Shrugged" (which, from reading Atlas Shrugged, it absolutely is - like, it's literally at the fanfiction of it level). Reading that was a huge revelation for me - before, I'd felt like I had to do everything that other people wanted, because I could do it and I had to pay back my upbringing, and because I was only tolerable if I was doing everything for others.

I am not the person mentioned in all debates are bravery debates, but the same sort of thing happened to me.

told me that having kids was the worst decision of her life, and she actively encouraged me to be kidnapped - her advice for if a stranger tried to abduct me was to go with them

Wow that sucks. I mean I can get regretting having kids - it's not always easy, and stress levels can be enormous. But telling it openly to your own kid, and trying to get the kid kidnapped (and likely murdered)... that's just fucked up.

That kind of readjusts my priors a bit. Maybe I never needed to be told it's ok to be white me, but clearly there are people who are, and books that do it for them are doing a good work then. Of course, some people who are already assholes enough might read it and become excessive assholes, but I think that'd happen to them anyway, so overall the effect is still positive.

I can't see the comparison. Like, at all.

Mind, it's likely due to my odd little niche of absolutely adoring Blindsight while having an attitude of sneering disgust toward the writer himself.

Agree, I don't see much similarity. But I suffer from the same predicament - I am a big fan of Watts' writing, and no fan at all of the man. Which unfortunately happens with more than one contemporary writer. It's easier when couple of centuries has passed and you can enjoy the writings without bothering too much with how the author's personality was totally disgusting. Yeah, maybe, but the guy is dead for 150 years, so who cares.

Curious to see how that applies to this novel.

Also, Atlas Shrugged slaps.

Honest answer, It's an interesting story that raises legitimate questions about the the nature and value of consciousness. At the same time there is a certain sort of person who is going to interpret the narrative not as a thought experiment but as a blueprint and/or instruction manual because they are autistic

What about for Rand? Same thing?

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