{"id":171720,"date":"2025-09-22T10:00:24","date_gmt":"2025-09-22T14:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=171720"},"modified":"2025-09-23T10:41:27","modified_gmt":"2025-09-23T14:41:27","slug":"the-abysmal-scum-on-not-reading-ayn-rand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2025\/09\/22\/the-abysmal-scum-on-not-reading-ayn-rand\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cThe Abysmal Scum!\u201d: On Not Reading Ayn Rand"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Rand’s signature created in vector format by Scewing, via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>. Public domain.<\/p><\/div>\n

A few months ago, as a result of the strange, hazy possession that occurs while sitting in front of the laptop screen, I \u201cfound myself\u201d\u2014a phrase I\u2019ve disliked ever since I read a tweet by Elisa Gabbert pointing out its imprecision (although in this case it\u2019s appropriate)\u2014staring at Ayn Rand\u2019s marginalia in C. S. Lewis\u2019s The Abolition of Man<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never read Ayn Rand, even though I\u2019ve owned a copy of The Fountainhead <\/em>since I was twenty-two, when my depressed friend moved to the West Coast and left me his book collection. I agree with Walter Benjamin that it\u2019s good to keep a library regardless of whether or not you actually read the books, and so I brought The Fountainhead <\/em>with me wherever I moved. My friend Megan, while visiting, said she \u201cactually liked\u201d The Fountainhead<\/em>, and I took great satisfaction in being someone people felt free enough around to confess things like their love of The Fountainhead <\/em>to. This was 2017\u2014a time when a Fountainhead <\/em>confession could get you into real trouble. And so The Fountainhead <\/em>became a kind of litmus test: if, when perusing my book collection, someone mentioned liking The Fountainhead<\/em>, I felt I could trust them; if they asked in a baffled, catty tone why I had it, I lost a little respect for them, despite my not having read it and still having only a vague sense that certain people didn\u2019t like Ayn Rand because she was a \u201ccapitalist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sometime during 2018 or 2019, my YouTube algorithm started giving me videos from the Ayn Rand Institute, most often by a guy named Yaron Brook, who has a speech impediment that makes him unable to pronounce r<\/em>\u2019s and th<\/em>\u2019s. Around that time, too, a guy I used to follow on Twitter, \u201cJack the Perfume Nationalist,\u201d was promoting Ayn Rand; in particular I remember Jack, a gay guy, praising Rand for something she\u2019d said about how blowjobs are for the pleasure of the giver, not the receiver.<\/p>\n

While doing research for my novel Muscle Man<\/em>, I read some books by the bodybuilder Mike Mentzer, who based his entire bodybuilding philosophy on Ayn Rand. Like Rand, Mentzer believed that men were meant to be heroes. In Mentzer\u2019s case, he believed that he could communicate heroic virtues\u2014what he called HUNGER<\/small> (height, uplift, nobility, grandeur, exaltation, and reverence)\u2014by building a back that looked like bat wings, quadriceps like chicken breasts, a thin and rippled waist, bulbous biceps, and so on.<\/p>\n

When I searched my email inbox for \u201cAyn Rand,\u201d to see what I had said about her prior, I found an email about Lexi Freiman\u2019s novel The Book of Ayn<\/em>, and an email to Olivia Kan-Sperling, an editor at The Paris Review<\/em>, in which I told her that The Paris Review <\/em>had linked the wrong Twitter account when they posted my and Tao Lin\u2019s interview<\/a>: they\u2019d mistakenly linked a Jordan Castro parody account, meant to mock me, which I could tell had been made by a specific ex-friend, because this specific ex-friend would always accuse me of \u201cloving Ayn Rand,\u201d and the bio on the fake Twitter account said \u201cRandian Objectivist.\u201d<\/p>\n

So, when I emerged from my screen blackout to \u201cfind myself\u201d staring at the marginalia on this<\/a> random blog, which I’d assumed was an Ayn Rand blog but was in reality a C. S. Lewis blog called LEWISANA, I was immediately delighted when I started reading Rand\u2019s notes, taken in the margins of her copy of The Abolition of Man<\/em>. They were hilarious, feral, aggressive, and dismissive. Plus, she was chimping out about a book that meant a lot to me, which I actually had <\/em>read, by an author whom I appreciated, and who had influenced my worldview.<\/p>\n

The Abolition of Man<\/em> was originally a series of lectures at King\u2019s College in Newcastle (then printed by Oxford University Press). The text argues for the reality of objective, cross-cultural moral values, and warns that, in our attempt to create<\/em> new values (an impossibility in Lewis\u2019s view), we inevitably delude ourselves, cease to be fully human, and banish ourselves to an existence of \u201cobedience to impulse.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019d read The Abolition of Man <\/em>in 2018, along with almost all of C. S. Lewis\u2019s other Christian apologetic works. Until then, I\u2019d only vaguely associated Lewis with The Chronicles of Narnia<\/em>\u2014<\/strong>but, as I started taking Christianity more seriously, after being as dismissive and uncharitable toward it as one could possibly be, people kept telling me to read C. S. Lewis, so I read C. S. Lewis, and\u2014despite the occasional cringe, in addition to, I\u2019d later learn, some questionable theology\u2014it was helpful, in part because he wrote for secular and at least semiliterate people like me, who\u2019d never spent much time seriously considering many of the beliefs they had but taken for granted.<\/p>\n

Reading Rand\u2019s marginalia, I felt a kinship with her. I hadn\u2019t read her books, but we had read the same book<\/em>, and in these small, private responses I could relate with Ayn Rand the person; I felt a closeness that I rarely felt with authors, even when I read their whole books; instead, Ayn Rand and I were one<\/em>, like she was sharing her private thoughts with me directly, such that they were mine.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Ayn Rand, in CS Lewis<\/strong>\u2019s The Abolition of Man<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

You bet he couldn\u2019<\/em>t!<\/em><\/p>\n

The abysmal bastard!<\/em><\/p>\n

!!<\/em><\/p>\n

The cheap, awful, miserable, touchy, social-meta\u00adphysical mediocrity!<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

What\u2019s that<\/span>, brother?<\/em><\/p>\n

(The bastard!)<\/em><\/p>\n

The cheap, drivelling non-entity!<\/em><\/p>\n

This is monstrous!<\/em><\/p>\n

!!!<\/em><\/p>\n

!!<\/em><\/p>\n

!!!<\/em><\/p>\n

!!! <\/em>\u2026 you God-damn, beaten mystic at the Renaissance<\/span>!<\/em><\/p>\n

This is true\u2014but even here he\u2019s lying.<\/em><\/p>\n

Oh, BS<\/span>!\u2014and <\/em>total <\/em><\/span>BS!<\/em><\/p>\n

(The abysmal scum!)<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Jordan Castro is the author of the novels<\/em> Muscle Man and<\/em>\u00a0The Novelist.\u00a0He is the editor in chief of\u00a0<\/em>Cluny Journal and is on the board of the DiTrapano Foundation of Literature and the Arts.<\/em><\/main><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You’ve NEVER seen Ayn Rand THIS MAD.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2561,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[30442],"tags":[12648],"class_list":["post-171720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-document","tag-marginalia"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\u201cThe Abysmal Scum!\u201d: On Not Reading Ayn Rand by Jordan Castro<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"September 22, 2025 \u2013 You've NEVER seen Ayn Rand THIS MAD.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2025\/09\/22\/the-abysmal-scum-on-not-reading-ayn-rand\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta 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