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 Posted: Sun May 18, 2008 1:10 pm
I can't say I'm a full supporter of Rand.
What I love: What attracted me to Rand was her general views. I agree that a person should reap the benefits of his/her own work, and that it is their responsibility to make the best of options available to them. It is important that a person can do as they please (i.e. launch a business) yet be responsible and honest about it. The protagonist characters in her books (Dagny Taggart, Roark, Galt, Rearden, etc.) were attractive not only physically (physical strength), but more importantly because of their honesty and dedication. At times I envied the characters and wished that I knew them myself. I loved how they understood each other simply from body language, because they were of similar minds, all wanting to put forth their best performance and achieve ultimate success no matter what limitations society placed on them. Even to this day I think of Dagny Taggart during particular moments and admire her strength and dedication.
What I dislike: Although Rand's characters and general philosophy all point towards honesty and success, I can feel a cold bitter side in her. At times it seemed that the characters were so dedicated to their ambitions that they put off love, friendship, etc. They were often heartless and incompassionate. I like how the books have happy endings and good guys won, but in reality business doesn't go that way, no matter how much honesty a person may have. I wish reality was like her books.
Wish I had some quotes to prove my points, but I haven't read the books since my sophomore and senior year. This is what I generally recall though, and also picked up from different debates.
Altogether, I really like Rand's outlooks and take them as general guidelines, but I'm never going to call myself an objectivist.
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Posted: Sat May 24, 2008 1:57 pm
For your list of dislikes, are you sure you really got all the points of the stories? Because the good reasons and answers behind those things you don't like were some of the major things the books tried to explain. I could see how with a brief look and forgetting details over time you may think some of the things in the story would be "cold," but toward the end of The Fountainhead for example (which I am rereading at the moment and just got to this particular point again a day or so ago) there is a part where Roark is explaining to Peter Keating why he, Roark, is actually the kindest person Keating knows. If you want, ask and I'll find passages I can quote from The Fountainhead and/or Atlas Shrugged about why they aren't cold people. As for "bitter" that though I have no idea where you got that impression. Neither any of the protagonists nor Rand herself were bitter about much of anything. In The Fountainhead some of the characters started out bitter a bit, but a large part of the story was how they got out of being bitter. This was explained too, it came down to that part a couple of the characters mentioned sometimes about the "pain that only goes down so far" and how Roark mentioned once about how and why ultimately other people couldn't really hurt him in a significant way. If you think they were incompassionate, try thinking back to the scene where Roark met Steven Mallory for the first time or when the riot took place at Rearden's factory and Rearden found "the wet nurse"/"nonabsolute"/Tony injured. And how the good guys really have more power than the corrupt ones, despite what may be the initial appearance, was the major point in both books, especially Atlas was about why any corruption can exist at all, that it needs the good to be a parasite off of, and if the good quit letting the parasites leech off them, the corrupt fall apart.
Also, I've looked at numerous arguments against Objectivism and so far I've seen the vast majority have misunderstood what Objectivism actually says and thus just argue against strawmen of the philosophy and even if they don't do that they've typically taken one or a couple isolated aspects of it and not looked at all the reasoning behind why they are supported in Objectivism and then basically just saying "I don't like it." O_o; 
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Posted: Wed Jul 22, 2009 10:15 am
I'm not quite sure where you got the impression of coldness or bitterness either.
If you understood one of the major points of the stories (there were a lot of them!), you'd understand that the protagonists were really the only ones who could rightfully be called "loving". Rand tried to portray what it really means to love. The characters didn't throw about love to anyone they saw. Love to Rand was the delight in seeing your values represented in another person, and as such, the characters gave out their love only to people who they consided worthy of love.
"I like how the books have happy endings and good guys won, but in reality business doesn't go that way, no matter how much honesty a person may have. I wish reality was like her books. "
Rand's books weren't about the current social reality (I say social because reality is objective). Rand's books were about what the world could be, what an ideal world would be. She portrayed in her novels the way the world should be, and the means through which such a world must be achieved, and the obstacles that stand in the way of such a world.
Maybe you ought to read Atlas Shrugged (again?). In the story, the world seems almost hopeless. But the only reason for this is because of the parasites, and the fact that the ones being leeched off of, the victims, give sanction to the parasites. Once that sanction is removed, once the productive, rational, people of the world leave, the world of the parasites crumbles, and a new world can rise up again.
And please, don't base what you think of Objectivism off of debates. Most of the people who argue against it don't understand it or intentionally misconstrue it. Objectivism is a full system, it's not just an assortment of random ideas. If one doesn't understand some of the basic parts of Objectivism, it's pretty easy to go wrong at other places, and a lot of the people who argue against it make this mistake.
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