I Was a Teenage Randroid

 

Writing on NSFWcorp, Jason Heller describes the four years he spent as a teenager enthralled with objectivism, the philosophy espoused by Ayn Rand:

The deeper into this labyrinth I wandered, the more airtight her logic seemed. Beyond that, her beliefs tapped into a latent side of myself that I had never fully acknowledged: my inner asshole. Other people? Fuck ’em. When you’re a young, precocious introvert, and it’s easy to turn those feelings of inferiority around and project them onto everyone but yourself. Maybe I didn’t fit into society because, deep down, I was one of Rand’s producers. One of her supermen. One of her Atlases.

One of her Randroids.

So I started acting like one. Emboldened by the clean, innocent, robotic arrogance of Rand characters like Howard Roark and Dagny Taggart, I let my inner asshole loose. I spoke to people with rude, brutal honesty. I walked down the street with my head high, my face expressionless. I was openly disdainful of poor people, my own family included. In other words, I became a practicing sociopath.

As you may be able to tell, the language in the piece is anything but clean, but it’s actually well worth a read.

Atlas Flunked   [NSFWcorp]