I Assert/Refute It Thus

Ayn Rand got some things exactly right.  Nobody, I think, ever caught the hideous, half-ghoulish, half-pitiful character of collectivist theory and collectivist theorists quite as brilliantly as she did. Nobody else ever described quite so incisively as she did the mingled obscenity, helplessness, cruelty, and resentment of those who hate and fear rational thought and individual freedom and integrity; those who make an ethos of "intersubjectivity" and "compassionate vulnerability," and who mock the "Myth of the Isolated Mind."  I relished it when I saw this monstrous vitiosity exposed in Rand's romantic/realist novels--particularly in Atlas Shrugged; notably in the characters of Lillian Rearden and James Taggart, if memory serves after so many years.   And that was pretty much all that interested me as a teenager.  As for the collectivist threat to my own sanity and integrity--thanks to the classlessness and individual nurturance of my upbringing--I had vanquished most of the ideological Dragons of Religion and Received Authority by the time I was twelve years old (in just the way that Althusser, Foucault, Gramsci, et alii have maintained that it should have been impossible for me to have done--see blogs April 9 through 11, 2006, and 11/27/07 and 12/4/07); such that, when it came time for me to face down the ultimate collectivist threat to my existence, military conscription, in my twenty-first summer, I was conspicuously well armored, and sailed through the encounter unscathed (see blogs May 10 and 11, 2006).