“I talk to young founders these days and for them, there’s no other world than the Trump world. I ask them what inspired them to go into tech and they say they read Marc Andreessen’s manifesto, they read Peter Thiel’s books, and I think, “Oh, your brain’s cooked.” They come in pre-pickled. But everyone else who could have told an alternate narrative has been hounded out of the industry.”
I’m not a believer in Ayn Rand or objectivism, she was wrong on the fundamentals, but she’s excellent brain exercise. It’s vanishingly rare to find anyone who can meaningfully explain an organized, recursively-coherent single-idea philosophy for 70 pages (the Atlas Shrugged monologue) without clear contradiction if you accept her flawed premises. She truly, viscerally believed, and spent the time thinking about it to prove it (even if, again, she’s wrong).
This manifesto is just someone who made some money post-facto rationalizing it with grade-school logic.
You have to have been absent from the world and basically just a brain in a vat that was just turned on to somehow believe in the idea of the “moral, altruistic, genius, persecuted and taken advantage of” greedy and proud capitalist when reality shows the entire opposite: the selfless have nothing, often not even their lives, the rich ones took from everyone, often even their lives. I liked Atlas Shrugged and felt like a real smart cookie halfway in when I was in my early teens reading it in my living room but the characters had already felt a bit, uh, unrealistic and then the monologue/rant came about and it was just ehhhhh. My favourite philosophical exploration/manifesto is the one in Dune, it doesn’t even feel blurted out because it’s in every book, in every page even, you just absorb it. 👍