![]() ![]() In “ The Culture of Narcissism,” his famous 1979 study, Christopher Lasch writes that the narcissist can only overcome insecurity “by seeing his ‘grandiose self’ reflected in the attentions of others.” Freiman slyly casts Rand as Anna’s “grandiose self,” the mask she pulls on over her pain and vulnerability. She may not get invited to parties anymore, but she wouldn’t enjoy them anyway-she’s too radiantly liberated. Her selfishness, she realizes, is radically ethical. ![]() in the breaking of bonds and severing of ties.” As Anna reads, she feels her weaknesses becoming strengths. The books argue that “selfishness was a form of care” and that “wealth was a beautiful thing.” They claim that “true freedom lived . . . Seeking a counternarrative, Anna gloms on to a tour group discussing Ayn Rand in a coffee shop and, soon after, orders a bundle of her works. She doesn’t believe in anything all she can do is make fun of people. To Anna’s horror, the descriptions remind her of herself. Worst of all, a review in the New York Times suggests that Anna is that current-day bête noire, a “narcissist.” Devastated, Anna borrows a friend’s book on narcissism and reads that narcissists are “selfish, arrogant, and insecure,” “grandiose and fragile and incapable of handling any threat to their identity,” and that they “saw themselves reflected back everywhere, made grand narratives of their lives, but felt at their core that they were empty.” On Twitter, she is enjoined to jump off the balcony of her pied-à-terre on Madison Avenue and to use her novel as a parachute. Instead of the acclaim she expects, Anna gets dropped by her publisher and ghosted by her friends even her old prep school rejects a last-ditch job application. “I had honestly believed I was writing a book so good it metabolized its own badness,” Anna explains, somewhat touchingly. Anna, a mid-career writer who comes from money, has just published a “contrarian” novel about the opioid epidemic, a satire of the rural poor full of “bad haircuts,” “misspelled tattoos,” and pants-shitting. In “ The Book of Ayn,” a novel by Lexi Freiman, Rand takes on a new role: North Star for the cancelled. “I didn’t think I’d get fired” if anyone saw the book, he explained, “but it wouldn’t look great.” He smuggled it down the hall and into his bag. A friend, in order to lend me a copy of “Atlas Shrugged” for this piece, stowed the paperback in a manila folder that she then stapled shut and handed off to my partner at their mutual workplace. The presence of “Atlas Shrugged” or “The Fountainhead” on a bedside table or Tinder profile is a waving red flag-reliable shorthand for latent sociopathy. Find her on “The Simpsons” (“Russian weirdo Ayn Rand”), “Parks and Recreation” (“a terrible writer”), “Girls,” “Watchmen,” and “The Mindy Project,” invariably dressed as a menace or a punch line. Elsewhere, she has become a pop-cultural bogeyman, ridiculous but unkillable. Since Rand’s death, in 1982, she has been embraced by tech billionaires (Peter Thiel, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk), free-market politicians (Ronald Reagan, Clarence Thomas, Rand Paul), and their acolytes. underwrites the form of capitalism on steroids that dominates the present.” To her detractors, Rand’s novels, as Lisa Duggan writes in her 2019 study “ Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed,” glamorize rapacity and violence they grant happy endings to characters who showcase “contempt for lesser beings and a cool indifference to their suffering” and they “provide a structure of feeling-optimistic cruelty-that . . . To her admirers, her books, including “ The Fountainhead” and “ Atlas Shrugged,” celebrate exceptional men and women who make their own flourishing a moral imperative. ![]() 60 Montana St.Is liking Ayn Rand a personality defect? Before she was the godmother of American libertarianism, Rand was a writer known for insisting on the virtue and beauty of self-interest. Game Details Date Attendance 1169 Site Betty Engelstad Sioux Center, Grand Forks, ND Referees Angie Ahrendt, Michael Kolness, Jon Garrow Montana St. ![]()
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