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Notes -
Looks like @KulakRevolt got a shoutout from Scott for his (her? Whence the catgirl branding?) review of a certain novel. Putting it in a Twitter thread was kind of weird, but I thought the piece was fascinating. The comparisons to Tolstoy and Tolkien are not only viscerally upsetting but also remarkably accurate. There are a couple points I wanted to address, but first, a little background.
The year was 20XX. I was a broke 19-year-old, fresh out of my freshman year, scrounging for scholarship opportunities. My mother ran across one held by some sort of Ayn Rand fan club. Read Atlas Shrugged, write an essay, and receive a decent one-off award. My memory suggests it was guaranteed, but a quick search only finds the more sane framing of a contest. They do apparently provide the book, though. In the end, I didn't bother with the contest, since I got an actual job for the summer, thus avoiding any creative output. How ironic.
This brings me to my first point: Atlas Shrugged in schools. A book which inspires diehard followers to spend their time and money bringing its insights to the unenlightened masses. A book which, simultaneously, people must be paid to read. That contrast is enough to make Atlas Shrugged useless in the eyes of public schools; it would be enough even if elites were united in their admiration for Rand's morality. In a vacuum, the book is Objectively a train wreck. But its true potential is revealed only under a certain sort of engagement, one which is anathema to public-school demands for measurable outcomes.
I'm talking about immersion. It is the same flavor of suspension-of-disbelief which lets humans devour hundreds or thousands of pages about hobbits. He who delves wholeheartedly into the book, populates its barren vistas and soulless boardrooms with art-deco trappings or noir atmosphere, fills in the caricatures with the look and feel and essence distilled from decades of American cultural mythology--yea, he shall be rewarded. And when he comes up for air, it is not the clumsy plotting or the inhuman dialogue which comes with him. Verisimilitude has been outsourced to his own mind.
No matter the flesh in which the well-immersed reader clothes it, though, the philosophy of Rand's heroes remains unambiguous. It is the one area where she leaves no room for improvisation. When the converts gather for book club, they are envisioning different Roarks and Tooheys, different Taggarts and Stadlers and Galts. But they know Objectivism when they see it.
Her works are remembered not for their style but for their steel spine.
Kulak's meteoric rise on Twitter has been fascinating to watch. One of his threads — Are you racist or anti-semitic?, I believe — did numbers and put his follower count over 10K. His evocative style and grandiose ideas fit the medium very well, though I will miss having him around if he stops posting here.
Hallelujah! His prior follower count was leaving me deeply pessimistic about the virality of good writing. Glad to see, he's finally getting a fraction of the audience he deserves.
I was hooked since since he first posted Alex Jones Worsdsmith almost 4 years ago. Now he has the attention of people like Peterson and Scott Adams. I'm quite interested to see what kinds of ideas he will meme into the ether of right-wing twitter if he keeps this up.
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