It was the second semester of my freshman year in college and my dear friend, Serena, wanted someone to go with her to an Objectivist meeting after reading and falling in love with Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. I had never read the 1000+ page philosophical tome, but decided to go with her for support.

Arriving at the coffeehouse in Champaign, we were directed to a semi-private room in the back; the room was separated by a glass wall, much like an interrogation room at a police station creating a fishbowl effect that would have unnerved many people, but all the members of the Illini Objectivists seemed right at home and ready to philosophize. Within minutes of their discussion, I realized the full irony of attending an Objectivist meeting as a favor to a friend.

They were discussing drowning victims and how often people who go in to save the helpless party end up being carried down by the frantic victim. This is certainly true, something I had been taught years ago at the local pool: “Don’t try to save them yourself. Go get help, they panic and put their full weight on you and you’ll both drown.” Not a pleasant image for a child in summer swim classes, but a useful life lessons are not often filled with pleasant imagery. But these collegiate Objectivists took it a step farther than my swim instructor that day; the person drowning was not some stranger who you saw from time to time on the street, but it was…your wife. This didn’t seem to change any of their feelings and one even joked about her life insurance policies. Was it a joke? Callousness is not supposed to be a good quality, but the goldfish in this particular bowl seemed to give it a certain dignity. I had always hoped to find a student group like the one described in Les Misérables - a group willing to sacrifice it all for ideals and the public good – but there wasn’t a single Marius in the bunch.

The problem, of course, is that they were probably right in this situation. I didn’t want their answers to be right at all; I was, after all, a good college student on a liberal campus, where there are ten different protests on the quad a day and the jingling of cans begging for charity echo like a bum outside Union Station. But they were right. Several years back, four boys were camping in New York and one of them fell into the river where waves were overtaking him. One by one, his friends came in to save him. The story was written up as some tragic testament to friendship, but I only saw one unnecessary death that became four for no reason. Sometimes, you do need to look out for yourself and pay attention to what is bigger than your will to be good: like the laws of physics. Are those boys admirable? Yes. Are they still dead? Yes. When you weigh one tragedy against a bigger one, perhaps it is not as callous as it first appeared.

So why then am I a Pinko Commie? After they got done talking about collecting the insurance off of their cold, dead wives, they started to discuss the tsunami that hit South Asia that year. They were peeved at how much aid was being given and how one could not blame a natural disaster on the West or more advanced countries. I chimed in, “But we have detection technology  that we should have given them since the Indian Ocean had no such system!” I was not intending to blame America for a natural disaster, just stating a fact which silenced the fishbowl. One short, wiry guy looked into my eyes through his thick glasses and asked, without humor, “Are you a Pinko Commie?” I was taken aback since I thought that term had died out three decades prior and quickly said that no, I was not a Pinko Commie, that I just thought we should help people if we had the means. That pretty much ended my career with the Illini Objectivists.

Flash forward 5 years and Ayn Rand is all the rage again. A club like IO which fit snugly into that fishbowl, has to find a bigger aquarium these days. It is interesting that everyone has a strong reaction to Ayn Rand: about a third of my friends have become Ayn Rand-obsessed Objectivists, while the other 66% just find her to be plain objectionable. As for myself, I am more of a moderate than that day at the coffeehouse – dealing with actually nonsensical, lazy whiners in college probably made me aware of some good qualities of selfishness – and I have decided to give Atlas Shrugged a proper go, with the proper amount of skepticism. Since I have some time on my hands and an English Literature degree, why not document my thoughts on, and analysis of, the book, chapter by chapter, for all to read without compensation for my time and effort?

Eh, so maybe that guy was right after all.