I will do the politeness of responding, as recompense for the passion of my dismissal. > I want to ask, what about the book was so offensive? I would be disho

I will do the politeness of responding, as recompense for the passion of my dismissal. > I want to ask, what about the book was so offensive? I would be dishonest not to admit my dislike's passion was conceived in frustration with the book's fans. "Offense," though I don't affirm the label, arises on interaction with Objectivists. Atlas Shrugged eloquently explicates Objectivism's fundamental lack of empathy - its denial of carnality, passion, humanity, animism, pleasure, pain, misfortune, fate: all sense, no sensibility. The plot, finding its villain in democratic government and indeed all society, and for its heroes a set of selfish, sexless, and statuesque Scrooges, is the denial. So is merely the style: the stodginess of conversation and thought, the relentless rationality of the action. It has no scene containing a believably real corner of society, be it a family, a friendship, or civil society. All argument is intellectual, all triumphs transparently ideological. It is a badly-written novel for precisely the same reasons Objectivism is a poor philosophy. To see someone read it and embrace it as wisdom maddens. And such someones abound in America! One might conclude every man (indeed, this is man's ideology) fancies himself a temporarily embarrassed John Galt. Rich Americans too love Rand's ideas - and are surely delighted so many of the citizenry affirm their own superiority. Rich objectivists mock openly their noblesse oblige, and have no qualms in setting the Republic against itself in pursuit of continually lower taxation. Human social projects are not clockwork systems, but each, since the time we first surpassed the society of apes, is an idiosyncratic novelty. Humanity itself is a singular species, exceptional in our power of rational understanding but roundly unable to apply the talent when considering our own teleology. We overestimate the utility of our pattern-matching and are easily seduced by just-so reductionism. Not incidentally, Marxism shares Objectivism's flawed empathy; the two philosophies are fastidiously symmetrical. That Rand's intellectual rebellion would reject her oppressor's dogma, but not its mode of analysis, seems unsurprising. We all struggle to escape the modes of critical thought we first learned, even as our conclusions mutate. Rand might have been hoped to see this in herself, but then again, such self-awareness she implicitly rejected.