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Summary: The tin man decides that heartlessness is a virtue, and lights the scarecrow on fire.

Short review: It doesn’t take my 2 year old 1,200 pages to yell, “Mine!”

In this book I see traces of an argument I might find interesting were it not for the author’s preoccupation with discrediting threatening ideas, and the underhanded tactics by which she does it.

From the onset, this book is a study in false dichotomy. Rand’s protagonists are handsome geniuses and articulate pillars of personal strength, innovation, and industrialism. They are brave, victimized individuals who suffer in their quest to save the world from her antagonists, who are almost uniformly, effete, bulbous-eyed, fat nobodies who care only for parties, leisure, and pretending socialist idealism in order to inhibit their competition.

Rand would have the reader believe that altruism and compassion do not really exist–that strength and intelligence are never applied honestly to improving the well-being of others. A person is either intelligent and driven, in which case their highest goal is their own personal fulfillment, or one is a lecher who “clutters up the world” and pretends to care about the poor in order to steal from those who actually work hard. It is not difficult to see the proliferation of this spurious reasoning in our politics.

The virtues of industriousness and achievement should be championed, and they should be protected against those would stifle them in favor of such national tragedies as tall poppy syndrome. However, Rand cheapens them by victimizing the ideals and lashing out–even at the poor–in angry self defense. The philosophy is fear-driven, like the child who would rather take her ball away and go home than risk the possibility of losing it by sharing with 21 others to allow a game of soccer. To continue the analogy, this book appears to be offered as proof that the only real game is to steal the ball for yourself, and that everything else is just pretense.

And so she proceeds, setting up the most pathetic of straw men and knocking them down systematically. In the story of the San Sebastien mines, credulous and sentimental businessmen invest in a Mexican copper mine, which is subsequently nationalized by the Mexican government. The man who they had trusted, the suave and noble genius, Francisco d’Anconia, arrives at a ridiculously shallow party that they are all attending, and declares that he duped them to make a point of their hypocrisy–that their distress at losing millions to the Mexican people, whose plight should, according to their professed beliefs, represent a victory for fairness and equality, is proof that they never truly cared about anything but their money. Being Rand’s straw men, they are, of course, ruthlessly guilty.

What I find most objectionable in this scene is Francisco’s disingenuous treatment of his own motives. He basically says, “How can you say it is evil to be selfish? I was completely unselfish in this matter, allowing the people of Mexico to gain the property, and now you may see what it has cost all of us, and put aside your empty words.” Here the term “unselfishness” is divorced from any sense of beneficence or kindness. The underlying assumption is that unselfishness means “allowing others to steal from you.” Again, we have a false choice: one may be smart and selfish, or a sentimental sucker.

Even as a person who shares many of the social preferences and antipathies of Rand’s protagonists, I find the whole thing unbalanced and lacking in humanity. Not everyone may notice, but we treat others differently when we are afraid of them, and the result is often a self-fulfilling prophesy. Books and philosophies like these, in my opinion, encourage the problem.