Some of this has to do with the philosophy itself. Rand’s objectivism proceeds from the premise of an “enlightened self-interest”—even egoism—that is deeply suspicious of any outside influence, whether such influence takes the form of the power or the judgment of other people. The heroes of her novels are young people coming up against traditional structures, which they feel have outlived their usefulness; her villains frequently embody that tradition and have the kind of authority that comes mostly just from age and experience. Her novels are hostile to nuance: characters, institutions, actions fall on one side or the other of a pretty bluntly drawn divide—on the one hand there are creators, on the other there are parasites. It’s a factor of the rhetorical magic of her books that readers are not only always on the side of the creators—they are by some kind of participatory reading automatically part of the creators.
It is a common suggestion that Rand’s novels are perhaps better treatises than works of literature; that the plots are pretty threadbare attempts to maneuver Rand’s mouthpieces into position to hold forth, for page upon page, about the virtues of selfishness. This view can obscure the fact that these books can really function only as novels. They aren’t manifestos that loosely wear the costume of a baggy novel; they are manifestos that cannot work unless they wear that costume. A vaguely novelistic understanding of the world is central to her philosophy. Rand thinks through storytelling, and she has woven herself into the way Silicon Valley tells stories about itself.
Rand presents a world in which self-reliance is easy and pure. And her work depends on an understanding of self-reliance that doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny once you’ve had to, you know, actually self-rely. She is an absolutist about things that are clearly socially conditioned, which can give her world a kind of taxidermic feel. She celebrates capitalist enterprise while ignoring the communal and moral frameworks that it presupposes in order to function. Her fiction is almost entirely about the world of adult workplaces—architecture firms, boardrooms—but it seems to have a purely aesthetic view of what work is all about. There are many moments in Atlas Shrugged (1957) and The Fountainhead (1943) in which the fun house version of capitalist society presented in these books comes into gorgeous, bizarre focus. Consider the moment when the all-powerful architecture critic (yes, you read that right) Ellsworth Toohey, who is a Marxist and also in league with monopoly capitalists and also beloved by the populace, schemes to take over Gail Wynand’s newspaper, the Banner, on the strength of (and I’m not making this up) his writing a column in it. The right pieces are there, but they hang together in baffling ways—like an economic system dreamed up by Borges.
It’s not shocking that Rand’s writing would appeal to people whose work is imposed by parents, who fancy themselves individualists but aren’t allowed to drive themselves to school yet. But the fact that Ayn Rand’s philosophy resonates with adolescents in important ways should not hide the fact that this alliance is forged by a savvy bit of marketing. Young people are drawn to Ayn Rand because Ayn Rand is marketed to young people. Since the 1980s, the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, California, has run the Ayn Rand essay contests for high school students—more recent versions have included options for college students as well. If you had the right high school teacher, you’ve encountered the contests: answer a question about one of Rand’s books in six hundred to sixteen hundred words and you could win $25,000 (if you place first in the Atlas Shrugged category; strangely enough, Anthem nets you only $2,000). Interestingly, techies are not well represented among the winners. Perhaps tech has graduated from Ayn Rand the same way it graduates from the university—you grab a few ideas and you’re on your way.
Like many of the philosophies considered in this book, Rand’s feel very specific to a certain time and place but have been preserved in some pockets of American society. Unlike the ideas of McLuhan, the information theorist Claude Shannon, or the economist Joseph Schumpeter, however, people still very much remember where these ideas come from. In fact, until the Republican Party abandoned Randianism for white nationalism in 2016, Rand’s ideas had arguably had a better run in the twenty-first century than in the twentieth. At the same time, it’s worth remembering where they first emerged from.
Rand arrived in the United States in the mid-1920s, having finished her studies in the Soviet Union, and ended up in Hollywood, where she worked different jobs around the studios and began writing screenplays. From the first, then, her conservatism was that of an outsider and that of an artist. Rand’s profound suspicion of what Howard Roark in The Fountainhead would call “second-handers”—people who get ahead on the strength of ideas and privileges given to them by others—reflected both her jealousy vis-à-vis a perceived establishment and the fact that this jealousy was not so much about material goods as aesthetic matters—taste, prestige, recognition. Rand’s first novel, never published during her lifetime, is about an actress. Her first published books, We the Living (1936) and Anthem (1938), took up the topic of totalitarianism. Neither was a major success.
Books like Anthem became legion in the 1940s and ’50s. Books that rebelled against the conformism of middle-class, mid-century America, that echoed the anticommunism of those years, and that combined
