Rands publicity team, back in the late 1960’s responded to fan letters and were quick to explicitly state that Rand wasn’t married to Nathaniel Brandon, the man who was in charge of her public relations and everything else, and that her husband was Frank O’Connor . Rand was very much ‘into her self’. The Objectivist newsletter was boring and mundane not like the books. Rand was an avowed atheist and never entertained the idea of procreation. She was a true narcissist, a back stabber and no-one you would want to have as a friend.
I don’t need Rand either. I came to a libertarian outlook by taking time to read the Bible from cover to cover. When I was done I realized:
1. Man has free will to choose or reject God.
2. There are temporal consequences to rejecting God.
3. There are eternal consequences to rejecting God.
4. The temporal consequences are God’s way of making us understand when we’re not right.
5. If an authority of any kind takes “pity” on someone who has rejected God and tries to shield them from the temporal consequences of their actions (and their free will), they leave them at risk of the eternal consequences.
6. Anyone who says the state (or their church) should protect us from ourselves is holding that God doesn’t understand what He’s doing and we are better at saving people than God. (E.g., ‘protecting’ a 50 year-old from the evils of Beer on Sunday).
I don’t need a messed up Russian who doesn’t even keep her own name to make up some idea that “reason” replaces God. That’s not new to Rand either. Read Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky. He successfully debunks that notion, which was popular even in the 19th Century.