Thanks for the comments - I have not read any of the Rand bio’s, though I have picked up bits and pieces on her life in my readings.
I always admired her strong opposition to communism, which is especially noteworthy since so much of the intellectual heft among the early Bolsheviks came from secular Jews (who eventually fell out of favor as the Reds descended into totalitarianism). She was certainly perceptive enough to figure out that that particular “worker’s paradise” was a recipe for disaster, and no place for a woman of intelligence to prosper.
What always struck me odd about her was her almost mechanical approach to dealing with others - as if human interactions could be determined by a program, or shaped by a Skinner box. That’s even embodied in the term for her philosophy, ‘Objectivism’ - extended as if those with whom you interacted were just additional objects, only more complicated ones.
I was struck by the parallel between her relationship with Frank O’Cooner, and then Nathaniel Branden, and the “romantic” relationships of Dagney Taggert in “Atlas Shrugged” - as if it made perfect objective sense, once one had reached a certain point in a relationship, to just dump that relationship for a new one, kind of like you might just trade in a perfectly fine car for a new one, if you suddenly had the ability to do so.
Now I realize people divorce and remarry all the time, and I can understand doing so when insurmountable problems arise, but simply “trading up”, if it appears to be a rational alternative, comes across to me as a bit cold.
To the extent I’m able to employ a Judeo-Christian worldview to my behavior, it’s always seemed to me to provide at least the possibility of coming up with a reasonable balance between our concerns for ourselves (and loyalty to our loved ones), and our responsibilities to society as a whole. There’s plenty of room for debate on how one deals with the latter (or even if those are legitimate concerns); Rand is great at showing how the left is completely off-base in that venue, but then seems to conclude that *any* such concerns are essentially immoral. And that, I think, is what turns off most in the conservative camp (and many libertarians) when it comes to Rand.
She was also very totalitarian in her relationship to her “acolytes “. The old saying “You become what you hate if you hate it enough !” seems to be somewhat true in her case.
I see her as someone who learned much and was damaged much by her experiences. I take as a huge positive what she got right about collectivism and her deep perceptions of it. She’s a Russian Jew who lost everything, had it taken away from her by collectivism masquerading as this “superior form of reasoning”. She lost her home, her family, her culture and her nation. She came to the USA, it was her bright shining city on the hill - her psychological, intellectual & philosophical ideal. She rebuilt herself and her life with that ideal. She papered over her damaged psyche best she could but interpreted everything through this tortured Russian cultural lens. Her flaws were great but her insights were greater. She’s worth reading flaws warts & all.