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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.
Fucking hell, don't even compare Rand to Tolkien, even in jest.
As to her success at sales - "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead" are very American in theme. Strip out the Objectivism and what you've got left is your basic American "from the log cabin to the White House" legend. Brave, smart, handsome guy is lone pioneer fighting against reactionary social forces (and Rand being anti-Communist helped, as her villains and society are vaguely Socialist to Communism tinged) who succeeds via grit, moxie, and being just that darn wonderful, plus he gets the girl! Stuffy old convention is defeated, Progress, Science and Free Market Capitalism conquer all!
That's a theme and a style very appealing in the 50s and even 60s and 70s - after all, sticking it to the fossilised social consensus and striking out to do your own thing was in tune with the counter-culture. I read a fan book about Star Trek back in the day, and one sentence that struck me was something about "so-and-so of course read The Fountainhead, isn't it striking how most people in the fandom have done?". It was phrased in such a way that the assumption was of course everyone knew what The Fountainhead was, and it made me seek out Rand's books. Unfortunately, a short encounter with Miss Rand's prose and philosophy turned me off so completely I didn't even buy the book after flipping through it in the book shop. Speaking of the non-BDSM sexual relationships, the part I opened at random had Dagny Taggart rhapsodising about wearing the chains of the man she loved and, me being a convent school girl educated by the nuns, I bounced off a character who had so little sense of self she only found meaning in being the appendage of some man 😁 Yes, I do get the irony that if I had opened it at another part, this is not the impression I would have come away with, but I still would not be sympathetic to people who justify adultery on the basis of "your wife is a bitch, I deserve you more".
Rand would probably have loathed Roddenberry's vision of the future, but the politics don't matter - I honestly think most people who read the books have no interest in the actual politics, save for a minority who become "this is the way!". It's the theme that appeals - the lone genius who is exploited by society, looked down on, and who stubbornly sticks to his vision and is eventually vindicated. If you're a teenager, it's the ultimate "I'll show them, I'll show them all!"
As someone that has not only read but reread Atlas Shrugged, I don’t agree with your cause map of why I enjoyed the book as a teenager at all. In fact, it sounds like yet another indictment of libertarians as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires,” which has always been a poor effort by leftists to use their love of power dynamics and status games to try to explain values anathema to their own. My enjoyment of Rand’s work can be attributed to exactly one personality trait/flaw: I hold in very low regard the kinds of people who insist they have a right to my time or energy.
So her work clicked with you because it was a compatible opinion. Her political stance didn't convert you, it was "yeah, she gets it about moochers and looters!"
If you will pardon me, it's also a teenage trait to be self-obsessed, because that's the time we're trying to figure ourselves out, who we are, and what our place in the world is. The depths of our own selves are endlessly fascinating, because we don't know what we'll pull up when we go trawling there. And that kind of deep gazing takes a lot of time and energy. So naturally "my time and energy is too important and vital, others need to demonstrate they've earned the right to my attention" is a stance appealing to the adolescent who feels pulled every way by the demands of family, school, peers, society and trying to set the quicksilver changes of mind and body into a more fixed shape to develop their own personality and character.
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