{"id":38208,"date":"2019-05-03T01:00:09","date_gmt":"2019-05-03T05:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=38208"},"modified":"2019-04-03T08:14:59","modified_gmt":"2019-04-03T12:14:59","slug":"qotd-the-key-difference-between-the-fountainhead-and-atlas-shrugged","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2019\/05\/03\/qotd-the-key-difference-between-the-fountainhead-and-atlas-shrugged\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The key difference between <em>The Fountainhead<\/em> and <em>Atlas Shrugged<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Reading <em>Goddess of the Market<\/em> much later in life, I finally met the woman behind the philosophy. Rand doesn\u2019t start out so bad, at least in Burns\u2019 telling. Who can blame the Russian-born Rand, watching helplessly as Communists seize her father\u2019s pharmacy, for growing up to be a furious foe of collectivism (and <em>realpolitik<\/em> compromise), whose <em>\u00fcbermensch<\/em> heroes fight back against the &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikiquote.org\/wiki\/Ayn_Rand\">parasites, moochers and looters<\/a>&#8220;, and win?<\/p>\n<p>Yet the sprinklings of patriotic, almost Capra-esque populism that softened <em>The Fountainhead<\/em>\u2019s unavoidable elitism are absent entirely in her follow-up, <em>Atlas Shrugged<\/em>, replaced by an almost hallucinatory misanthropy. What happened, Burns wonders, in the intervening thirteen years?<\/p>\n<p>The answer seems obvious to me now, rereading her book in my 50s:<\/p>\n<p>Menopause.<\/p>\n<p>Ayn Rand, the avatar of adolescence, was going through The Change.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Now in her forties,&#8221; writes Burns of the author between novels, &#8220;Rand struggled with her weight, her moodiness, her habitual fatigue.&#8221; Already dependent on the crazy-making Benzedrine she&#8217;d been popping to help her meet her <em>Fountainhead<\/em> deadline, Rand was hurtling toward what we&#8217;d now recognize as a midlife crisis.<\/p>\n<p>Enter Nathaniel Blumenthal. He&#8217;d begun corresponding with Rand while still a high school student, but unlike her thousands of other teenage fans, he&#8217;d even memorized <em>The Fountainhead<\/em>. At UCLA, he&#8217;d coauthored a letter to the campus paper, declaring that a professor with suspected Communist ties who&#8217;d killed himself deserved &#8220;to be condemned to hell.&#8221; Then he changed his surname to &#8220;Branden&#8221; because it had &#8220;Rand&#8221; in it.<\/p>\n<p>So, basically a nut.<\/p>\n<p>Kathy Shaidle, <a href=\"http:\/\/takimag.com\/article\/the_danger_of_ayn_rand_kathy_shaidle\/print#ixzz4edp0vQWm\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;The Danger of Ayn Rand&#8221;, <em>Taki&#8217;s Magazine<\/em><\/a>, 2017-04-18.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Reading Goddess of the Market much later in life, I finally met the woman behind the philosophy. Rand doesn\u2019t start out so bad, at least in Burns\u2019 telling. Who can blame the Russian-born Rand, watching helplessly as Communists seize her father\u2019s pharmacy, for growing up to be a furious foe of collectivism (and realpolitik compromise), [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,10,41],"tags":[67,68,139,43],"class_list":["post-38208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-liberty","category-quotations","tag-aynrand","tag-objectivism","tag-psychology","tag-women"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9Wg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38208"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47647,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38208\/revisions\/47647"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}