Oh, Becks, no!

Jesus. Would you just kick his ass and tell him he's a fucking idiot?

Thanks! Super helpful, B. This has clearly never happened to anyone close to you.

Would you just kick his ass

As I understand it, he has martial arts training.

That too.

So tie him up while he's sleeping, then kick his ass.

I mean, how into it? How many books has read? How many times per our is he spouting? Has he eliminated the local fire department yet?

And my parents are encouraging him to start college as an econ major because then he would qualify for a scholarship, even if he later changed his mind. You can't let someone already dabbling with Rand take econ courses!

^he

^h

It sucks that he's already 18. The critical period for stomping out Objectivism only lasts until about 20, after which the odds of a successful deprogramming go to nil.

Wait. He's going to take a scholarship? At the urging of other people? How do these manifestations of dependence square with his Randian principles?

He must not be allowed to attend U. Chicago.

That's very sad. Perhaps you could cleverly suborn him with some Max Stirner or back issues of The Match. Then gradually introduce him to some Johann Most and Mikhail Bakunin, after which it's only a short jump to Goldman, Malatesta and the IWW preamble.

Or just tell him that upper-division Philosophy classes will mock him mercilessly. Although that might be counterproductive.

Dude, even J. Podhoretz gets it when it comes to Atlas Shrugged.

http://tbogg.blogspot.com/2006/03/scratch-behind-ear.html

13: Or just eliminate the local fire department and burn his house down.

Save the kitties, of course.

I've never read any Ayn Rand and have only very vague notions about the basic tenets of Objectivism. I understand taht it's a kind of unreal libertarianism. (Wasn't Greenspan Ayn Rand's boy toy at one point?) I've always thoguht that my life was better for never having read them, but I sort of wonder whether I shouldn't read one just so that I'll be armed when facing an Objectivist.

There are a bunch of fairly succesful venture capitalist types who seem to take her/it very seriously.

He's not going around spouting Randian BS yet but he has read a disturbing number of her books.

Is he susceptible, or is this just information-gathering? Being able to sift the wheat from the chaff, especially when there are people praising the chaff, is a good skill to have before you get to college.

I read Anthem and watched (now I'm blanking on the name - the architect one) and started reading Atlas Shrugged all around the same time (17/18). I gave her stuff a lot more time and thoughtful attention than I would today, but I didn't get sucked in. So I have lots of hope for your brother.

(My experience is similar to Witt's, FWIW.)

Relax Becks, relax. Lots of teens go through a Rand phase. And the best way to cure any teen of something is to put it down indirectly and in passing, as if everyone knows that it's stoopid.

I found Ayn Rand valuable in high school when I needed some intellectual backing to fully and comfortably reject the collectivist trappings our public schools are steeped in (school spirit my fucking ass). Once that was one, I noticed that if I took it any further, I'd be an asshole, so I stopped.

NBarnes' experience, I think, is pretty typical. Teens are attracted to Rand because they are at a stage where they need to individuate themselves, especially from family, but are surrounded by the most asinine collective identities around (high schools, clubs of cool kids). A lot of kids don't even notice the ra-ra capitalism stuff. (Capitalism, that's something they talk about in school, right?)

You should push him to other misunderstood genius books. It's not to late for Salinger.

Then again, the biggest Rand fan I knew in high school went on to buy a ninja-style motorcycle.

*Some* teens are attracted to Rand b/c they want to individuate themselves and have obnoxious delusions of superiority and independence. Others just become goths or bookworms.

Kitty!

Will Salinger function as an antidote to Rand? Somehow I'm not quite seeing it. I sort of think you're wrong to say it's not too late; I think prime Salinger-liking territory is around 15.

Also, do ninjas ride motorcycles? And how come nobody is telling me about Thelonius monk on the other thread?

Er, ah, I mean Thelonious Monk.

I never liked The Catcher in the Rye, but around 16 or 17 I liked Franny and Zoe quite a bit.

I think Franny and Zoe and Nine Stories can last you till 18, but I've always been a late bloomer.

can last you till 18

Oh no question, I believe I still like For Esmé at 35; I just think it's too late to get into it if you're introduced after mid-teens.

(Love and Squalor would be a decent band name. Probably already been done.)

You could have him watch Varsity Blues where the protagonist adopts an (implicitly) Objectivist pose and makes everybody in his town sad. The whipped cream and other delights will take his mind off asinine philosophy.

This is serious.

(a) I think it's right that different people find Rand appealing for different reasons; if he's feeling awkward and alienated, for example, Rand will tell him it's 'cause he's HOWARD MOTHERFUCKING ROARK and people just don't see his genius. The diagnosis will inform the response.

(b) the libertarian bit is far from the worst part of it. I always have time to shoot the shit with actual libertarians, but the infantile we-are-all-granite-now Randians are banned. Try getting him to read *actual good writing* instead of fake good writing. Rand really wilts in comparison.

Have him read an arcane novelist with an entirely opposite philosophy. Maybe Thomas Pynchon.

also always remember: "Ah, the adventures of Super Honky. How's that working out for you?"

I once knew a Randian who was into Pynchon. It was weird.

According to Dr. McNinja, only fake ninjas ride motorcycles.

He mostly just got in fights with the other people on the Pynchon mailing list.

I think we call that cognitive dissonance.

(Unless my memory is playing weird tricks on me, his name was Matt Weiner and he came from Pittsburgh, but he was not the same as the Pittsburghian Matt Weiner we know and love.)

the Pittsburghian Matt Weiner we know and love

Who...?

My father, who on most matters I trust a great deal and whose actual voting behavior is straight Democratic, recommended Rand to me for years because he really enjoyed her during his college years, though I'm fairly certain he never internalized anything she had said as a political principle. So Becks, don't worry too much.

Also, I might pop down to D.C. a couple of days into '07, don't know if you'll be around.

You know, that guy who used to comment here a lot?

You know, that guy who used to comment here a lot?

Ssshhh. I was deliberately being a jerk, on the hope he'd find out and show up to denounce me.

s/know and love/knew and love/ (or maybe knew and loved).

Then I would say, "Who are you, Matt Weiner, to denounce me so!"

I'm sure he would have a clever comeback up his sleeve.

Shall we say, "pistols at dawn"?

Good night, slol et ol.

I'm surprised nobody's mentioned this: http://www.angryflower.com/atlass.gif

But 45, if he was going to notice such a thing (w/ out being notified of it), he'd have to already be reading comments. Do you really think he has such superhuman restraint that he's been reading and not commenting, rather than just not reading?

48: Okay, so a photo of Matt Weiner holding a kitty under some artsy dead tree bullshit. No wait, that was this thread. Never ye mind.

Aw, you never know who's talkin' to who. The Internets are a small world of tubes, see....

A dedicated blogger could cross-check the site access logs with the IPs from which Weiner posted, but I am not that dedicated blogger.

"Dedicated" s/b "nosy, creepy."

That's not going to get me to do it, B.

The humor lies in the discrepancy between what we think bitchphd was trying to communicate with her comment and what we think ogged took it to mean based on his comment.

Thanks for making that explicit, Ben.

He must not be allowed to attend U. Chicago

If he does end up going to Chicago, I know where he might want to eat.

Every mention (n=1) of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang on Unfogged is positive or neutral. I've recently (about two weeks ago) watched it and rather enjoyed it, and am now watching it again, but I would think that a number of people here would dislike it. There are obvious reasons to. Opinions?

Trotter doesn't come off so bad in that interview. Generosity, liberal arts, hey, I can get behind that.

Actually, the humor lies in Ben's explication of Ogged's unhumorous response.

You could arrange for him to see the A.R. movies. That should cure him.

62: Agreed. His devotion to Rand struck me as peculiar because I've never thought of charity as a Randian virtue, and because for some reason I expected him to have better taste.

The third Google hit for "Charlie Trotter" "Ayn Rand" is a USA Today piece with this nice appraisal: "A serious scholar, he can quote Ayn Rand, Nietzsche, Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky..."

How would you know if my response was humorous, McGrumpy?

You might as well ask whether Gracie Allen knew anything about humor.

Say goodnight, B.

That was funny, I'll give you that.

Goodnight, B.

Actually, is it worth reading Rand just to penetrate the cult? Seeing as I spend a lot of time in startup capitalist land, every now and then I find myself surrounded by a crowd of Randians, and I have really no idea what they're talking about b/c I was never interested in reading her, and it's such a completely foreign philosophy to me. But it occurs to me it might be a useful code to be in on.

Don't take any chances. Cut off his fucking head and kill anything inside that moves.

What are you, Sunni?

71: I would say not. The books are long, and about 10% of each book, by page length, is dedicated to a single, incredibly tedious speech. This makes them hard to read, especially if you're the kind of person who insists on reading every page of a book once you've started.

The philosophy is mostly pretty simple -- it's a kind of extreme libertarianism, plus a lot of value judgments that are absolute, yet totally arbitrary. I'll list the ones I can remember:

Women are supposed to be extremely slender. I think an exception is made for the wives of inconsequential bit characters (like a simple but tough farmer).

Ornament (in apparel, architecture or home decor) is bad, unless you live in Communist Russia, in which case it is good. Unless you are a rich bureaucrat living in Communist Russia, in which case it is bad again.

Rape is generally bad, unless you're the hero of the story, in which case it is the best way to have sex.

People rarely make jokes, and when they do, they are never, ever funny.

I should think Nietzsche might work as a substitute. Zarathustra is stirring, BG&E seems trangressive. A superficial reading can provide the egoism without any sense of moral superiority, selfishness as responsibility and hygiene. Worked for me.

I am finding a lot of violence in Lenin, but the other Marxists I am reading now are serious geeks. Che?
Trotsky could write.

There is hope, guys. A friend of mine read a bunch of Rand our senior year of high school; she even wrote a goddamn essay on The Fountainhead for some scholarship thingy (clearly, in retrospect, a cunning plot by the Evil Powers to get young teenagers sucked into the Randian black hole, by offering a scholarship for the best essay on that tripe). Anyway, she ended up totally liberal and awesome anyway. Of course, she did go to Mount Holyoke College, so that might have had some mitigating effect on the Rand.

Speaking of Zarathustra, has anyone watched the L-Word? I've gotten sucked into it this weekend and have now watched 12 episodes in the last 30 hours or so.

"What are you, Sunni?"
No, Ogged, just one who's seen the Randroids replicate. A moment's hesitation and it's too late.
If beheading doesn't work, try chantings from the Manifesto, or getting him laid.

Actually, is it worth reading Rand just to penetrate the cult?

No. The infantile political philosophy aside, they are painfully, dreadfully clunky writing and the interminable "heroic" speeches referenced above are better than ramming knitting needles in your ears, but only just. Further, it isn't like arguing with a Randian is going to get you anywhere.

77:Yes. Mia Kirshner. Otherwise, granted the ubject matter and better than average writng etc, just soap opera/TV.

Was surfing this arty flick about angsty randy teenies ca 1998 (Hey I watch everything) last night,
Nowhere not recommended, and after some coupling or tripling dissolved in a hormonal mist of giggles and tears, uncovered was the immortal purple of the Walter Kaufmann Portable. Just saying.

It was when Bowie at 35 said in his Playboy interview that everyone should read Nietzsche that I lost all respect for him.

Wow, have you guys seen this reminiscence from today's NY Times yet? (Use the "Next" link at the top right to scroll through.) Fantastic.

"It had holes in the ceiling, and the snow came down on our naked shoulders."

for the last few years, I have been considering and making notes for a big revisionist review essay on Ayn Rand for CT. They are not actually bad books, or bad works of political philosophy, of a certain type and age (her book on aesthetics is unbelievable shit though). The only genuinely appalling bit is John Galt's radio speech in "Atlas Shrugged", which I am not going to try to defend. But they're good, pacy novels and rather good satire of a certain kind of New Deal/Tammany Hall politico. "The Fountainhead" is far and away the best.

On a practical note I would advise against precipitate intervention, as they are going to be making a film of "Atlas Shrugged" starring Angelina Jolie as Dagny Taggart (oh my god), which will certainly result in a relapse.

I would prescribe two counter-readings - first, "Les Miserables". Rand was a big admirer of Victor Hugo and there are lots and lots of similarities, but once you've read Hugo, Rand seems a bit thin and unsatisfying. And "Plunkitt of Tamany Hall", which gives the perspective on corrupt politicians from the other side of the fence and is a thumping good read too.

a certain kind of New Deal/Tammany Hall politico

The best novel on this kind of person is Edwin O'Connor's Last Hurrah. Everyone here who hasn't read it, really should. It's wonderful.

They are not actually bad books

I dispute this.

I remember really liking "Les Miserables". It had been assigned to us as summer reading so I went in resenting it for intruding on my vacation and expecting to hate it but got sucked in and read it in just a couple of sittings.

Becks - For pete's sake, buy the kid some decent porn; it will take his mind off misunderstood genius. Or get him into Scientology; it's less likely to lead him into Objectivism.

77: M LeB: They keep filming it on our block. Sometimes we watch them do it - does that count?

The key question, Becks, is:
Is your brother simultaneously going through a Kurt Vonnegut phase?
If yes, then, like all teens, he's experimenting with bad pseudoliterary prose, not really thinking much about ideological conflicts. He is safe and will eventually move on to better material.
If no, then you're going to have to hear about this Rand shit until you die. Try introducing Mother Night and see what he says.

I recently started hanging out with a friend I hadn't seen since high school. It's all been going really well, but then there was the moment where she said, "Oh, you teach English now? So you must have read all of Ayn Rand's books. Why does everyone look so shocked when I say that? Are you close-minded?"

So, is there some kind of "quick refutations to Objectivist baloney" faq page, or something like that? I mean, I usually resort too quickly to, "Have you left no sense of decency?"

89: I think forcing them to read "A Modest Proposal" until their eyes bleed would be a good start.

90: ...in that it depicts what happens if you remove compassion from social science.

Ooh! I think he is reading Vonnegut, too. There may be hope yet!

I'm didn't realize that this board was so far communist. What's with dissing the author and univ of chicago? You people have your priorities fogged up.

I have one good thing to say about Rand: In her novels, she does a great job of capturing the combined intellectual and emotional thrill of creation, whether it's art or science or industry or whatever. It's an emotion I experience from time to time in my job and personal life, and it's very hard to describe (at least for me). I give her props for that, and I think it's part of the appeal to intellectually ambitious teens who yearn to make something that will inspire it.

Then there's all the rest of her stuff.

For me, Objectivism fails a simple reality test: taken seriously, it says that open source software is a bad idea. You could sort of work out a rationalization about how you the individual contributor are exchanging value with the whole network of contributors, but that emphasis on the reality of the collective is not something Objectivism would tolerate in other circumstances. In practical terms the open-source contributor is giving up control over something that they hope has value, in hope of recieving something else of value from others. This isn't Randian consideration of value.

And since there isn't room for both open source coding and Rand, I know which I favor. :)

75: "Trotsky could write."

And speechify, by all accounts. Alas, he was no more immune to ice picks than other mortals.

A person like your brother needs to read Jude the Obscure, after going through a very serious Kafka stage.

AWB -- some Vonnegut is truly great. Specifically Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five come to mind. Granted Mother Night is tripe.

97: Oh, believe me, CA, I went through my teenaged Vonnegutathon. I read just about everything. I don't think it's all tripe, actually, but it's not even remotely good prose. Now I realize that's the point, but at 15 I thought it was neato fancee-stylee.

I tend to read Vonnegut as semi-autobiographical non-fictional commentary; sometimes, with a plot. And I like it that way.

Me too!

I read the entire Vonnegut corpus as it then existed one summer.

I read the entire Vonnegut corpus as it then existed one summer.

I used always to do this with new authors I decided I liked. I would like to think it was diligence but I suspect obsessive-compulsion.

Doesn't nearly every teenager have to flirt with Rand before growing up? I and many people I know had a teen infatuation with her that ended harmlessly after passing stage 4 of moral development when we become mature enough to see she's total bullshit.

I for one have never read a word of Ayn Rand.

One student in my high school entered that essay contest, reading The Fountainhead solely in order to write an essay on it, and was quite brilliantly ironic about the whole thing -- he made a button for his backpack with a picture of her face and the caption "Grandma Ayn." Last I heard from him, he had an internship at the NY Times; this was several years ago.

Wait -- I've read the quoted "Who is John Galt?"

(It was never clear to me whether he won the essay contest.)

Rand reads like someone parodying a bad, self-important pseudo-intellectual. I've never understood how she fooled anyone. It's like that Million Little Pieces guy who managed to pass his book off as autobiography for a while: how?

Isn't JackieMackiePaisleyParsley an Objectivist? Send him to her website and tell him that all of the women who read Rand are like that. It should scare him away. [Unless, of course, he's teh gay, in which case, he won't care.]

SHow him these:

Howierichexposed.com
http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2006_09_24.html#005510

and this
http://www.szasz.com/szaszawardpix2003.html

and finally this:
http://www.freedomworks.org/newsroom/press_template.php?press_id=1977

and this:
http://www.freedomworks.org/newsroom/press_template.php?press_id=1970

It should work fine. Don't let him near Julian Sanchez.

Honestly, I wouldn't worry about it. Lots of kids go through an Objectivist thing at that age, and if they're decent human beings, they snap out of it pretty fast. My sister picked them up from a boyfriend in college, and I picked them up from her, and there weren't any lasting ill effects.

(Although I'm confessing a taste for absolute tripe here -- I thought they were entertaining beach-read books. A thousand pages of bizarre sex and overly described clothes and luxury goods, interspersed with seething hostility. And hundred-page speeches, but everyone skips those.)

Post "Just Shoot Me" admission (and quotation, IIRC), I think you can confess to anything without worrying about harm.

So I can tell you guys about the time I killed that hobo?

Only if you ate him afterward.

teenaged Vonnegutathon

AKA a Vonneglut. And stop doing that thing with your name, SomeCallMeTim.

108: objectivists are ugly? Is that what we are to take from those links?

113: Followed by a trip to the library to Buskowtow?

I went through my reading-the-whole-Vonnegut-corpus-at-ages-13-thru-18 as well (including "Happy Birthday, Wanda June!" and "Sun, Moon, Star") -- What I'm saying in 97 is, I think some of it really stands up to rereading, prose quality aside -- I reread Cat's Cradle (of which I have an autographed copy, yay! Vonnegut's self-caricature and the text, "for good old Jeremy") a few months back, for the first time in about 10 years and the approximate zillionth time in my life, and was astonished by what a good book it is

including "Happy Birthday, Wanda June!" and "Sun, Moon, Star"

Also I watched the execrable film adaptation of Slaughterhouse Five.

I saw Slaughterhouse Five as a double bill with Catch-22 at the local second-run movie theater when I was 17 and had mono. I remember very little of either movie, but I do remember that that night I had a fever and hallucinated that I was in military situations, arguing with officers, etc.

Said brother is now having a LAN party in our basement. I walked downstairs to put some stuff in the wash and it was the eeriest sight -- twelve teenage boys sitting in the dark huddled around 8 television sets and wires and CPU towers strewn all over the floor. It looks like NASA mission control or something.

Rand is very definitely a US thing. I hadn't heard of her until I was in my mid-20s. Most the other US cult writers (on either side of the political spectrum) are much more popular here. I'd read most of Vonnegut, Pynchon, et al, in my teens, for example.

a LAN party

Wait, you mean the thing with the different colors of lipstick?

Rand is like Nietzsche, in that when you're a reasonably bright teenager, and you're just beginning to notice that the rest of the world comprises mostly the intellectual equivalent of chewing gum, both Rand and Nietzsche seem to speak to you. You are the overman, being kept down by your mom, as she makes you clean your room! Will to power your clean socks! If you just will it, you can shape the future!

It doesn't work to substitute one for the other.

And now, I read, and Labs pwns it.

Re 114. My own critique is so much ugly, as obsessed with privatizing our most important social programs, willing to use power in sneaky ways to frame false choices for voters and, of course, hanging out with Ward Connerly. WHich is ugly in a different way. But for sake of this argument, the pictures also serve to show that these folks are just folks, although it would infuriate some of them to know that they come off that way.

Cala gets it right in 122. Objectivism is a bit like a fan club. The people who run actual fan clubs for rock bands, I'm told go to great lengths to prevent their actual fan club members from meeting, since the actual experience is never quite as good as the feeling of being part of a group of secret sharers who know something that others don't.

That leaves the question of how someone actually signs up for a stint of objectivism. Perhaps many are called, but a few do self select.

Oops. Above should start: "My own critique is not so much ugly..."

Suggest that he read Sewer, Gas, and Electric by Matt Ruff - it's not the best book, but it's got the ghost of Ayn Rand in a hurricane lamp that gets across the sort of "smart woman but more than a little crazy nature of things". And point him to Scalzi's Least Successful Holiday Specials of All Time.

But really - part of the fun of being a teenage boy is getting to believe in Objectivism. You don't want to deny him that. Just plant the seed in his mind that actually a lot of very smart people go through this phase, and eventually they all realize what the problems are with it, and one day he'll be smart enough to realize them too, but until then it's kind of cute, and you'll have done your big-sisterly duty.

I turned out to be a very independent minded lefty Dem and I read almost all of the Rand catalogue, all of the Vonnegut, all of H Hesse, some Mann, most of Dosteyevski, bits of about anything that had a literary or non-conformist reputation. I was very left when I read Rand, it didn't change mind, the stories weren't too bad, the speeches interminable, and it did appeal to my non-conformist streak. All this was around 1970.

Whether the politics rubs off or not is a big question regarding Rand, but the emphasis on thinking for one's own self is a good thing. 18 or so is a pretty good age for reading Rand. Don't get too worried, particularly since it sounds like he's got a varied reading list, if he starts subscribing to Randian magazines - lock him in the basement.

Expose him to live rock and roll, of the highest grade you can access and afford. It's a powerful, direct experience that's completely inexplicable within the terms of Randist Objectivism.

Music in general tends to conflict with Randist thought. She didn't have much of an ear for it. Her aesthetic pronouncements about it were mostly an attempt to rationalize the stuff she did like. She had a hard time saying "I just like it, that's all" about anything.

As others have already said here, many teenagers go through a phase of reading Ayn Rand. Her books reassure them that they're justified in loathing the false, forced "communal" aspects of their school and/or church and/or family. Once they go off to college and make new friends there, the Rand thing tends to fade, unless they've gotten involved in Republicanism, libertarianism, or explicit Objectivism (which can make it socially awkward for them to extricate themselves from that mindset), or they've used Randism as a justification for remaining a solitary weirdo.

Good luck to you and your brother both.

> Expose him to live rock and roll, of the highest grade you can access and afford. It's a powerful, direct experience that's completely inexplicable within the terms of Randist Objectivism.

Keep him away from the Frank Zappa though. I think it is an exception.

Since Zappa is dead, that won't be much of an issue.

He does love music and I have definitely done my part in that vein by taking him to a number of awesome concerts.

Good luck to you and your brother both.

I love the way you say that like he has a terrible disease. Heh.

Hi
My exposure to Rand was via Robert Heinlein.

And yet, Heinlein is a much subtler author, writing within the constraints of SF 1950s genre. Him and Roger Zelazny both talk to the 'alienated adolescent' in us, but as a self-affirming individual who takes moral responsibility for his or her actions (see Zelazny's brilliant Lord of Light, or the endlessly entertaining 9 Princes in Amber).

On Heinlein see: Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Double Star. Revolt in 2100. The Puppet Masters. The Past through Tomorrow. The Star Beast. Between Planets. Time for the Stars (anyone who has a sibling will relate to that one). Stranger in a Strange Land. Friday.

Also in the later Heinlein there is lots of weird sex, which is innately appealing to all teenagers ;-).

Heinlein's characters are truly
'I am the master of my destiny/
The captain of my soul'

In other words, they are (unrealistically) smart and capable, and cynical about the capacity of human organisations for good, but they also accept moral responsibility for their actions (whereas Rand seems to be saying the only morality is selfishness).

I found Science Fiction (which has a strong libertarian streak) an almost perfect antidote to libertarianism. Because you could imagine these worlds where free will was king (Ursual LeGuin: The Dispossessed) and then you could see what would go wrong with that.

Then one spirals off into the 'space operas' of David Brin (Startide Rising, The Uplift War), James H Schmitz (Agent of Vega, Telzey Amberdon, The Demon Breed), Lois McMaster Bujold (Cordelia's Honor, anything about Niles Naismith Vorkosigan) and CJ Cherryh (especially Downbelow Station, and its related books Heavy Time/Hellburner, Rimrunners, Merchanter's Luck as well as the hani series Pride of Chanur and sequels).

All of these have strong characters, vivid ideas, gripping plots, and a sense that utopia is not achievable, and the morally superior human recognises both his/her strengths, her limitations, and her need for other people.

http://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Cooperation-Robert-Axelrod/dp/0465021212

is a pretty interesting book for a bright teenager, and again undercuts Rand.

I guess the last piece is to read Sartre. In the sense that Existentialists share the libertarian notion of the primacy of the individual, but it doesn't take them to the same conclusions, at all.

(remove 'at' to reply by email)

I would add that reading Heinlein has helped me understand military people whenever I have encountered them.

Their politics are well to the right of mine, and their social attitudes very conservative, but their value systems (of loyalty, and commitment to a higher cause) are both appealing and make them trustworthy in a number of circumstances.