• • • The meaning of altruism… 
,
Altruism  |Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Capitalism  |Egoism  |Paul Ryan  | When I was a college freshman, I became completely enamoured with Ayn Rand. As a literary heroine, she surpassed so many of my early heroes. The self-defence of Rand’s hero architect Howard York in The Fountainhead, standing trial for dynamiting a housing project he designed. It was such a captivating defence that I insisted on sharing it with everyone who would listen. Many of my classmates who did listen came to the same conclusions as me. Six million copies of The Fountainhead provided evidence of the following that Rand developed. Many of us couldn’t help wanting to be trial lawyers, who could make arguments as convincing as Roark (and Rand). Over the next decade of subscribing to Rand’s “objectivism”, I realised that I had been infected with the worst kind of selfishness.  

• • Know your audience 
,
Do you want to try to convert deniers who refuse to accept anything you have to say? They are the opposite of believers. Can deniers be persuaded to accept a view that opposes a previously held strong conviction? Following national party politics might readily convince listeners that efforts to change minds are impossible. Yet strong deniers have been known to occasionally become converts with the right kind of persuasion. A stunning example of this happened with the change in political orientation of a number of early readers of Ayn Rand’s novels. Strongly committed liberals became conservatives overnight.  

• • Pioneers have a vision of something better 
,
The Fountainhead  |Individualism  | Author Ayn Rand provided an excellent example of individualist thinking in her novels, the most famous of which is The Fountainhead. The novel’s hero Howard Roark agrees to provide the architectural design for a housing project on the promise that nothing be changed. When the city’s fathers permit changes to save money, he blows up the project. Rand’s defence is a remarkable justification of Roark’s action.  

• • Obama’s tribute to US ideals 
,
Author Ayn Rand has inspired one reader so much that he decided to spend a month driving 12,000 miles across the US using a GPS tracking device as a pen, to virtually write Read Ayn Rand. He put the data on Google Earth to create the world’s largest author endorsement.  

• A love that cannot die 
,
The Fountainhead  | Apart from reading classics, the Diary of Anne Frank, Sherlock Holmes and The Fountainhead, [my father] also introduced to us Tintin and Archie comics.