Originally Posted by aculady
Lori,

Has your son read The Lord of the Rings? If so he might enjoy one of my favorite quotes about Atlas Shrugged, from John Rogers:

�There are two novels that can transform a bookish fourteen-year-old�s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish daydream that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood in which large parts of the day are spent inventing ways to make real life more like a fantasy novel. The other is a book about orcs.�


This is an interesting quote for several reasons.

Here is the source. Its a bit different than your text. Key part is bolded. The irony here is it was written by someone who does caricature and irony for a living. Either they know one when they see one or that is how they take everything.

http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2009/03/ephemera-2009-7.html

Quote
One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world.

LOTR and AS are very similar in many respects and both were deeply influenced by the same historical events. I cannot read either without thinking of Fermor's "A Time of Gifts" which paints Europe prior to the War but as told through the color of nostalgia. Everything and almost everyone Fermor depicts was destroyed as was much of Tolkien's Middle Earth.

I think back to the time I first read the book below, which shows an American Professor, admirer of National Socialism, posted as Ambassador, who comes face to face with the seizure of Germany. The Nazis seem so cartoonish when reading history, but in this book they come to life, and we see the gradual turning of the American to become Hitlers' sworn enemy. The cartoonish picture Germany showed the world was very different than the ground truth. The caricaturists were able to deceived the world.

http://www.amazon.com/Garden-Beasts-Terror-American-Hitlers/dp/0307408841

If you think that there is a lot of truth that genetics determines much of what people do, and you accept the thesis in the "War Before Civilization," in which mass murder was the norm in human past, and the anthropology is quite clear on this, then you have to accept that there are genes which determine this behavior and other genes that accept this. I often wonder what the mental processes are for people that hold these propensities.

I think Robert Heinlein sums it up.

Quote
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded � here and there, now and then � are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as "bad luck."

Robert Heinlein has captivated many a young man, too.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_A._Heinlein