[glenstein]

Could not have put it better myself! After finding myself very inspired by the novels, mostly as an introduction to the virtues of critical thinking and how those can be foundational to a worldview (which is good!), the cracks in the armor really started to show when looking at the community, and especially Rand's relationship with Nathaniel Branden.

There's lots to say about how Objectivism oversimplifies and attacks caricatures, and doesn't address itself to sophisticated economic thinking. You can get good out of it (I read it during the Bush admin and felt like it was making the same warnings against the excesses of state power that 1984 was), and it's not terrible to expose a person to the virtues of philosophy, and critical thinking. In my case it opened my eyes to moral realism, at which point I traded in any interest in Objectivism for that instead.

Even if you want to take the novel on its own terms that it has super-intellectual heroes, how humans work is every bit as much a part of reality as the physics of inventing a new metal. And the talent of administering human organizations is never present. It also never really models how mere mortals can reconcile their imperfections to the standards articulated, and is not self aware enough to speak to the population of mere mortals who would misdiagnose themselves as misunderstood heroes.