Atlas Shrugged is the most awesome philosophical work ever written. It is better than the Bible, and definitely better than any single academic book on Philosophy.
It is not a light casual reading. It's no good, if you start reading it and then drop it halfway. I almost got depressed by the midpoint when I first read it. But I knew Ayn Rand could not be a downer forever, so I persevered.
Why do you need Philosophy, and why do you need a correct philosophy? You can't be without a philosophy. Everyone already has some type of philosophy that they follow, be it religion, or their life experience, or something that they read in a magazine or heard their friends say. At the very beginning of their independent lifes everyone has already bought someone else's philosophy. The only question is: whose philosophy did you buy?
There were occasional moments of elation, even when I read it first. But reading it the second time around was a sheer pleasure.
Atlas Shrugged is a different thing to different people. Some, those who it rubbed the wrong way, and who it described way too precisely, hate it fiercely. But I think those people are in the minority, even though you'd start seeing them on the news daily after reading this book.
To me Atlas Shrugged is about happiness. It is about being happy, and about pursuing happiness the right way and the wrong way. It is also about the people who do not want you to be happy, and about the methods that they use on you, with your own consent. And the worst part is that you give this consent to them yourself voluntarily, whether consciously or subconsciously, and then hate and doubt yourself when their methods work against you to their advantage and not yours.
It's about contradictions that most people store deep within themselves. The contradictions that often push them to act against their own best interest. It shows you how to identify and eradicate those contradictions. The contradictions that stand in the way of achieving and experiencing your own happiness.
