STS fiction books

[APeacefulWarrior]

One thing I have often wondered is whether they're happy?

This is actually something I've puzzled over in Rand's novels.  Her protagonists proclaim their happiness quite often, but they rarely express it in any way except literally saying "I'm happy."  They rarely laugh, never joke, etc.  I sometimes wondered if she really had a different definition or even experience of "happy" than most people.  And don't even get me started on her ideas about love and sex.  

Otherwise, frankly, I think her characters' definition of happiness would largely coincide with Conan the Barbarian's description of what is best in life.  

I also think she was a good candidate for STS harvestability. It's quite instructive to watch her interviews on Youtube, just to see how someone so completely embodies Ra's description of the negative polarity.

See, that why I really think she was a Negative Wanderer - her utter embodiment of Negativity.  Her philosophies were set at a very young age -- largely because she lived through the Russian communist revolution, on the Czarist side -- and she literally spent her entire adult life preaching a philosophy that glorified egotism, greed, and radical individualism.  Almost as though her life was tailor-made to produce someone who despised any form of collectivism.

And there are two other things.  First, she was just so incredibly successful.  Millions of people followed her, and she still has many many readers today.  There are those who legitimately regard her as one of the greatest thinkers in history - and there's a great many of them in positions of power in industry and government.   In terms of spreading her ideas, she was as successful as Jesus or the Buddha or other major Positive Wanderer-Philosophers.

That sort of magnetism and charisma doesn't come out of nowhere.

The other thing is that there was a deeply apocalyptic thread that ran through her books.  Her very first novella was a 1984ish sci-fi dystopia about a future where individualism had been so squashed that the word "ego" had literally been eliminated from the language.  The Fountainhead's climax escalates to having city-wide riots in an attempt to stop its ego-centric hero from being himself.  And in Atlas Shrugged, she paints a picture of an entire world on the verge of turning collectivist and attempting to destroy all the individualists.  John Galt's actions were almost entirely justified through "It's either us or them" rationalizations, that he had to tear down the existing social structure to prevent it from wiping out individualism entirely.  

And, at face value, this all seems very kooky - especially since she never really justified exactly why she was so certain that the collectivist apocalypse was coming.  Yet...  it IS coming, if Ra and the other channelled sources can be believed.  The 4D Positive changeover for Earth will create an environment which is effectively kryptonite to negative entities.  And with it scheduled to happen around the turn of the century (give or take) she really didn't have much time left - hence the strident desperation, even if she didn't know exactly where it came from.

Basically, I think she was some 5D or 6D neg's last-ditch Hail Mary attempt to derail the 4D shift, by producing someone so skilled in articulating the Negative philosophies that she might lead great numbers of people away from the Positive side. This also provides a motive strong enough to overcome such an entity's fear of incarnation, if they were sufficiently invested\interested in the fate of the Earth.