How Did You Discover Objectivism?

[kenstauffer]

Toml, wonderful story. Reminds me of myself, except my father introduced me to objectivism, and I discovered that my father was way off base intellectually. Anyway, your story was very nicely expressed and I enjoyed it.

[Lancifer]

Originally, I was introduced to objectivism through Terry Goodkind’s books. However, I didn’t know it was objectivism. Later a good friend from high school asked me if I had read any of his books, he knew I read a lot of fantasy, and told me he was an objectivist. Then he introduced me to Ayn Rand and I’ve been reading her books and researching it on the net ever since.

[manavmehta]

I saw Atlas Shrugged lying around in my mom's bookshelf practically all the time growing up, and thought it was some profoundly boring book that my mom liked to read. During my college years, I grew interested in reading (late, I know), and eventually became curious enough to pick up my mom's Atlas Shrugged and read it from cover to cover. It has taken me a long long time to get from there to where I am where I finally comprehend her philosophy and am ready to incorporate it in my life. But along the way, I have gone through periods of weakness, and periods of recovery, and I sometimes fear it may be too late for me, but knowing what Ayn Rand said about the power of volition, I know better, and I look toward my future with a new optimism and new found love of existence with every new passing day.

[Ayn+Im+ion]

My grandpa first used the name Fountainhead and instructed me to read the same. As my grandpa has very fine literary skills, so based on his instruction I issued the book from my college library. Till that time I was more into suspense reading so Lady Rand's ideas were somewhat new to me, I simply adored the character sketch of Peter Keating but found Howard's character to be a harder-to-believe-in type. To me the book was different. Recently when I met one of my cousin he said to me that he's reading the same book and also wanted to know my views about the book, to this my answer was "yes, the book was different, but I would certainly prefer O Henry over Lady Rand".

few days back when I was sitting idle in the office I decided to check novels which were available online. I guess that was my lucky day, I happened to open the page wherein d'Anconia's statement "if money is the cause behind all evil" was published. The impact of that statement was so profound that I decided to check every material which was in one-way-or-the-other related to Objectivism. I took the printout of Anthem from my office and read the whole 12 chapters on the same night. The next day I said to my sister that she should present me Atlas Shrugged as my birthday present, and I am glad she did. I still am reading Atlas Shrugged and it's truely liberating experience for me. (And this is how I also came to know about this forum.)

[IdeaSave]

I read "Anthem" during a high school study period, but thought it was just an interesting science fiction book.

Two years after college I happened to run across a PBS television mini-documentary called "Six Great Ideas" with Bill Moyers as the host, and a philosopher named Mortimer Adler as the guest. Adler spent alot of time in this documentary talking about Aristotle, and what he had to say about his philosophy amazed me.

That got me into the habit of cruising the "Philosophy" section in bookstores, initially to read Adler's books and Aristotle. One day I saw the name "Ayn Rand" on the spine of a book in that section, which triggered my memory of "Anthem", and immediately intrigued me because I thought she was just a sci-fi writer. I read the front and back covers, thought it was interesting, and so I bought it. A couple hours of reading later, and my neighbors could hear me shouting "That's how I think!".

The book was "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology", and I've been hooked ever since (and that was in 1980).

Mark Peters

[MNRfan]

I've always read alot of fiction literature. For a long time, my favorite author was Jack Kerouac, and I loved the ideal of the rootless traveler. I still enjoy his writing, but don't think it's a good way to live.

Anyway, I was looking through the bookstore for something to read and I noticed The Fountainhead. I'd heard of it before, though I had no idea what it was about. So I read it and loved it. I read Atlas Shrugged next, followed by Anthem and We the Living.

I like the writing style, it's entertaining and thought provoking fiction. I don't agree with everything Ayn Rand thinks, so I'm not an Objectivist. In her fiction though, I thought the basis was on the basics of capitalism, individual thought, the error of an assumption that one has to help others. In those books, I didn't catch on to the details that I don't agree with, so I considered myself an Objectivist for awhile. Now I just integrate some of her ideas into my own philosophy. She was a great thinker, no doubt.

[andrew]

My father gave me his copy of Capitalism: The Unkown Ideal along with my grandfather's first edition of The Fountainhead when I was a junior in high school.

Of course, my first introduction to Objectivism was listening to Atlas Shrugged on tape while riding in my father's car. I was a little too young to understand it though .

[JMeganSnow]

My childhood was full of anxiety and depression, not happiness, and I turned to books as solace from people that never made any sense to me; by the time I was in high school I was a very fast reader indeed, used to plowing through lengthy texts and ravenously consuming the written word wherever I could find it.

A friend of mine introduced me to Anthem during a boring car ride to a volleyball tournament when I finished the book I'd brought with me. She was working on her essay for the ARI Anthem contest. That year I'd read similar "post-apocalyptic" books, but Anthem was different because it represented a fundamentally positive view of life. It was a strange thing to encounter; I had long since given up on life and retreated from the world, I was dead inside.

I read Ayn Rand's other fiction and (gradually) nonfiction. It's been a lot of work coming back, and I'm still not all here yet, but I'm a lot better than I was. I get more help from the people that will sit down and argue with me than anything; it's easy to passively absorb things from a book, it's hard to figure out how they all fit together, what RL data they're based on, and how to apply them to specific issues.

It's fun, though. I think that's when you know that you've started to come back . . . hard work = fun, somehow.

[gnargtharst]

I saw the dedication to Rand in the Rush album "2112". The name "Ayne Rand" looked mysterious and interesting, so I looked it up in an encyclopedia. A philosopher? Sounds a little boring. The name sat in my mind for a few years until we were assigned to read a book of our choice in a social studies class (as long as the book had some social or political issue). "We the Living" was on a friend's bookshelf (it belonged to his mom), and I asked to borrow it. It was a very moving experience. Even so, it took me 2 more years to get around to reading The Fountainhead. After that, I devoured the other work very quickly. This was all in the mid-80's.

I remember going to the school library to find everything I could in periodicals about Rand. The unrelenting mischaracterization of her ideas in popular magazines actually made me more interested ("...why are these people acting so insane in response to Ayn Rand?...).

[Jingles]

I used to adhere to Marxism almost religiously until I read the part of 'Why I am not a Christian' by Bertrand Russell where he states that he is not a part of any religion, including communism- I've always found religious people contemptible so when it dawned on me that I was one of them I lost interest in life and became a kind of nihilist and moral subjectivist:

"They do not want to own your fortune, they want you to lose it; they do not want to succeed, they want you to fail; they do not want to live, they want you to die; they desire nothing, they hate existence ..."

I had never heard of Ayn Rand and Objectivism until I saw her books in the reading list of this political compass test. I remember reading some reviews of the VoS and thinking "How can anybody believe this?". Needless to say my PC score was very different after I finished reading the book. Objectivism really is a breath of fresh air.

[DavidOdden]

I used to be in YAF in high school, and was utterly dissatisfied with the choices they offered in terms of man's rights -- either they are god-given (blech) or they derive from the Founding Fathers and fact of men having died to secure freedom. My buddy, who was religious and semi-military, gave me Atlas Shrugged (I still have that copy). The rest is history.

[softwareNerd]

That political-compas test is so odd. I went there out of curiosity and the questions were mostly unanswerable. Of the genre "If gremlins existed, would you be trying to help them or hurt them?"

BTW Jingles, welcome to the forum.

Edited August 20, 2005 by softwareNerd

[JMeganSnow]

I used to be in YAF in high school . . .

YAF?

[skap35]

I took a class where the professor was a Jungian psychoanalyst, and our semester project was to read 5 books and discover "our reason for being."  I read Anthem, and the rest is history.

My grandfather taught me about Objectivism when I was a teenager. He hosted a Michigan radio show that advocated Rand and Objectivism, called the Mark Scott Show. So my parents and grandparents basically raised me on Objectivist ideas. So I've known about Objectivism since I was probably in the sixth grade.

[Felix]

I started out with a major interest in philosophy, especially epistemology.

I read a statement by Alfred Kyrshibsky (I hope I spelled that right!) and it said:

All we have is a map of the territory. I concluded then, if everyone only had a map, we had lots of maps but no one knew the territory. Then I concluded that there might be no territory. By then I believed that reality doesn't exist and that all we have is prejudice. I - having integrity and understanding what I was saying - started concluding that if reality is prejudice I can change reality by changing my mind. This didn't work. There is one thing that almost drove me mad: If everything is just a point of view, then this very sentence is also just a point of view. Therefore it may be wrong. But this, too is a point of view...

I called the problem paradigm panic. The only thing that gave me a little remedy was my discovery (and I did it all by myself ) that you cannot attack reason with reason. Starting with this axiom I started attacking my current philosophy.

Somewhere on the web, I started out being interested in making money online, I found a remark by someone saying that he read a book by Ayn Rand and that it had changed his life. So I read Atlas Shrugged, which was the only Ayn Rand book available in my library. I read it in about two days. All my beliefs were shattered. Being a believer in everything Ayn Rand despised, I was hit in the nuts by this book. It took me a week to recover. I then searched the web and found the objectivist scientists with whom I talked a lot. But I always disagreed with them and made fun of them. If anyone of you reads this, sorry!

I became convinced when we had a student protest against having to pay for our education. And I couldn't help finding it evil that other people should pay for my education. I then immersed myself in economic theory.

Then I read Atlas Shrugged again. Since then I have read The Fountainhead, VOS and Philosophy, who needs it?

Now I am posting in this forum.

[DavidOdden]

YAF?

Young Americans for Freedom. They used to be a somewhat influential collection of non-leftists (more rigorously conservative once they booted out the libertarians). But that was eons ago.

[BlackSabbath]

I'm a keen weightlifter and I discovered Mike Mentzer many years ago and, more and more, I came to subscribe to his theories and, in HD2, he talked extensively about Ayn Rand and Objectivism so I picked up a copy of Atlas and it all followed from there.

[Prometheus98876]

My story is fairly typical I would say. I have held alot of the core values of Objectivism, such as the prime importance of rationality. Then a number of years ago I discovered the Sword of Truth, and was hooked right away. I realised that Terry was one of the few authors whom understood the true nature of art, of productive storytelling.

So, over the years my philosophical views, my thought patterns shifted abit as the SOT series helped me in a few areas I had not quite fully grasped.

Then from Terrys website I found the Ayn Rand Institute, and I was hooked on this. Ever since I have been finding out as much as I can about a philosophy that I have been unknowingly following almost to the letter for years already. A pleasent surprise I must say...

[Dagny]

I grew up with a Catholic background but no one in my family was ever religious and never went to church. I was interested in religions and wondered why people believed what they did. I did read the bible but was not really satisfied with what the church offered. Also having learned in school about scientists getting killed by church for their discoveries pretty much put me off religion in general.

During my teens and early twenties i studied about other religions and political views. I was trying to find myself....find out what I believed in. I had always loved to read and had been taught the value of hard work by my parents but I didn't have any philosophy to guide me. I basically didn't know what to do with my life so I dropped out of UCLA where I had been planning to major in microbiology only because my parents wanted a doctor in the family. I got myself a full time job working for a real estate appraisal company.

During those years my boss, who is a Republican, listened to Larry Elder every day which meant everyone else in the office did too. I also learned alot about the economy and real estate. Having grown up in Los Angeles public schools I'd been brainwashed by liberal union teachers into thinking bussinessmen were all evil, etc. but I realized while working that it was not case at all. I met a lot of hard working people earning over $100k a year but also working 60-70 hours a week. I went back to college and decided to major in economics.

I got a fastweb email about the Ayn Rand Institute college scholarship. I read the Fountainhead & Atlas Shrugged. The Fountainhead made me realize why I was so lost....I had been instilled with Keating-like values from my teachers/friends all my life. Atlas Shrugged made me want to learn more about Objectivism.

Edited August 22, 2005 by Dagny

[Cake]

I would like to preface this by saying that I was raised by existentialists and therefore was never really told what to do. I was further interested by ethics when I was 13 when I discovered the difference in the attitudes of people of different cultures (specifically the european outlook on alcohol).

I discovered Ayn Rand in class on justice that I took while enrolled at a catholic university. The professor was a man who had an undergraduate degree in mathematics, a masters in theology and a doctorate in economics. I took what he said seriously just because of the train of thought that he had travelled on to get where he was.

I forgot about Atlas Shrugged, but some time later was reading The Plauge by Albert Camus (the last existentialist book I will ever read). There was a line that said something like "certianty lies in the everyday activities of earning a living." That was enough to make me read Atlas Shrugged in three days. I have been learning and applying that knowledge ever since. Oddly enough, I came out of that catholic university an athiest.

[Lemuel]

A good friend of mine had read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and spoke of it often, but never pressed. He's a really smart guy who I've always respected and valued as a friend.

When I transferred to another college, I checked Fountainhead out of the library, read it, bought a copy and read it twice again. I read Rand's earlier fiction, then Atlas, then her non-fiction. I couldn't get enough of it ... still can't, really.

Edited August 23, 2005 by synthlord

[JMeganSnow]

I'm a keen weightlifter and . . .

I thought you were a pirate.

[Tommy]

We had to read a book for Lit, and my teacher said that she highly suggested The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, and Anthem. Plus, I vaguely remember my mom saying something about Atlas Shrugged: it was her favorite book when I was her age.

[BlackSabbath]

I thought you were a pirate.

How do you get that 'yarr' icon?

I only get this one.

[softwareNerd]

How do you get that 'yarr' icon?

I only get this one.

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