Find out why Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand is the worst novel I have ever read.
With the threat of right-wing ultranationalism looming large with the support of figures like Donald Drumpf and Ben Shapiro, I feel it’s important for us on the left to understand just how our Enemy thinks. Having spent most of my childhood in one of the most conservative neighbourhoods in Canada, I have a good deal of personal experience concerning how right-wingers see the world.
How I Stumbled Upon Atlas Shrugged
In short, I was surrounded by conservatives who took every opportunity to gaslight me into thinking there was something wrong with me. I grew up believing that no one else in the world could possibly share my conviction that poor people should have access to food, shelter, and other necessities. This and other forms of abuse were so omnipresent that they felt entirely normal.
When I was in middle school, many of my teachers would answer all manner of questions with the same phrase: “Who is John Galt?” I never understood what that was supposed to mean until I had to research far-right author Terry Goodkind for an article I was writing. You see, Terry Goodkind was a member of a particularly nasty cult called Objectivism.
Objectivism, founded by far-right author Ayn Rand, is an anarcho-capitalist, vaguely fascist ideology that holds selfishness to be humanity’s highest virtue. Yes, really. As part of my research, I decided to read a bit of Ayn Rand’s most famous novel Atlas Shrugged, whose first sentence was all-too-familiar: “Who is John Galt?”
Motivated partly by morbid curiosity and partly by a desire to understand the ideology that drove my abusers, I read Ayn Rand’s most famous novel Atlas Shrugged. I can only say that reading this oversized fascist tract felt like sinking into a dark abyss of deranged cruelty.
Afterwards, I wrote this article so that others might better understand our Enemy without suffering through such an unpleasant and repulsive novel.