Rand was ~90-95% right most of the time... but that last ~5-10% was seriously problematic, and it took gross distortions of reality to make her logic consistent for herself. It takes a massive denial of what society is, what it has done for everyone, and what we should do within it to be a moral part of it to blindly follow Rand.
She was guided heavily by Aristotle (re-branding much of his concepts as if they were her own -itself a corruption of her own 'self-made' delusion), then warped it all in her (otherwise justified) hatred of Russian Communism into thinking ruthless Capitalism was perfect. It's an endorsement of Social Darwinism -which is highly immoral.
She had a totally distorted view of what it means to say "I earned that".
Society goes too far in demonizing selfishness -a word that just means 'for yourself' and is morally neutral, but she went too far and rode an overly-selfish worldview right into the ground.
To make Atlas Shrugged work, she had to make two sides into ridiculous caricatures where one side has hero CEOs/master planners/inventors run companies, doing every single important thing on their own. On the other side, generic/nameless companies run by packs of complete worthless idiots who can only get ahead by cheating and stealing from the heroes and tricking government into making it all happen.
It's easy to see who's right in this impossible reality. But she taught her philosophy as if this WAS reality. That was pure blindness. It was just fear that Communism would take over America.
She rightfully took religion like we should any other claim -'show me the evidence. oh, you don't have any? ok. disbelief remains the default, and only logical, position.' A delusion I'm glad she railed against -and sad that modern psychology still gives a pass for no reason what-so-ever.
As for the book, it would be a pretty interesting dystopian classic (alongside -1984, Brave New World) IF it were ~300 pages. But it's a BILLION pages. This right there shows that she was somewhat insane and not objective. She would just claim she was not willing to lower herself or compromise -which was a cheap excuse to think she needed no editor and she was flawless.
As others have mentioned Galt's radio speech at the end is CRAZY long. If in any way realistic, no one would have been listening to it as it went on for hours. It didn't need to be so long to make her point, so that's a farce.
From what I remember, too... in The Fountainhead, the 'hero' architect blows up the building he designed because the people who paid him to build it, changed it. It was no longer the vision he created. But that ought to be the exact ANTI-Rand thing to do, since in her praise of Capitalism, it was not HIS building. They PAID him for a job. They had the right to change what was theirs unless it was written in a contract that they couldn't. So there she could've made a point about how artless, corporate bastards ruin shit by having too much undeserved power/money/control, and it's wrong to blow a building up, but we should fight this crap within the bounds of reason.
But no... she's got a big overdrawn speech where she acts like blowing the building up was the moral, justified thing to do. It was anti-morality AND anti-her own self. Very screwy. And that was the vision of her IDEAL man.
Sorry, if this was too long, too. Way to Galt it, bro!
