A reader writes:
The ultimate problem with Ayn Rand is that she became her own villain. This is because she needed to justify her every action through her philosophy, including her need to bang Nathaniel Branden while her husband not only accepted the infidelity, but remained monogamous himself.
This is the reason why her characters in Atlas Shrugged behave in such inhuman ways. Dagny just drops Hank Reardan, whom she had been having a torrid love affair with, because John Galt is so much smarter and better than him. She tells him as much. And Hank is not only supposed to accept this betrayal without feeling the least bit sad or upset about it, but he's supposed to totally understand and still remain friends with Dagny. He'd be the jerk if there was any weirdness or jealousy.
Of course this is completely ridiculous.
No human, especially one who has embraced their ego and selfishness, is going to just go, "Oh, you've found someone better than me. Well, hope we can still be friends. I'm so happy for you." But she needed to idealize this sort of inhuman behavior so she could guilt her husband into accepting his cuckolding.
So Atlas Shrugged is, at heart, an attempt to use objectivist philosophy to convince her husband to behave selflessly. Which is just about the worst possible thing you can do in the Ayn Rand moral universe. Atlas Shrugged is a deeply dishonest book that, at heart, is the deep perversion of its own philosophy. It's this contradiction that is one of the deep flaws at the heart of Objectivism.
Another one is that for a philosopher that idealized independent thinking, Rand sure behaved like a pretty standard cult leader.
I don't think that Atlas Shrugged can be reduced in this way to a mere venting of personal issues. It stands on its own – and remains a well-read book. Reason also interviewed Branden's wife, Barbara:
Arguably, no two people were closer to Ayn Rand than Barbara and Nathaniel Branden, whom Rand once named as her "intellectual heir." Indeed, when the Brandens married in 1953, the author served as bridesmaid (Rand had also urged the pair to wed).
A decade later, the Brandens would collaborate on the first biography of Rand, Who Is Ayn Rand? In 1986, Barbara published a second biography, The Passion of Ayn Rand, which eventually was made into an award-winning Showtime movie starring Helen Mirren.
Despite the ruinous and controversial romantic affair between Rand and Nathaniel Branden and her eventual ouster from Rand's inner circle, Barbara still feels fondly for the author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. As Branden, now 80, recalls in this Reason.tv interview, "I felt like she's answering questions that I've been looking for answers for, and nobody's been giving me any sort of answer until now."
The Dish 