This is the Fourth Renaissance Letter of Series 2: Planet of the Apes: (2-4: 09). Feel free to read in any order. If you want to read sequentially or want to peer at the Table of Contents: Click here.
Author’s Note: I made some last-second additions and cuts, and I moved a few sections around. As a result, the citations are currently inaccurate, especially the ones marked “Ibid.,” which just means “same as the previous citation.” In the coming weeks, I will return and correct them to make sure everything matches. The text itself, however, is final. Still need to do this as of 02/24/26!
Warning: I am going to spoil a video game called BioShock, a 2007 first-person shooter released by 2K Games. You have been warned.
Hey, it’s Alexis! I thought for this letter I would have a voiceover, considering the length of these letters is getting to be memoir length. I hope you enjoy. This was recorded January 19.
Letter 9: Atlas Wept
Originally Drafted: October 2025-January 2026Originally Published: 01/19/26Last Updated: 01/19/26
What’s Up,
Have you ever played BioShock?
The original one—not BioShock: Infinite?
… I will assume not. It is a horror first-person shooter, and an excellent game choice if you think you are sleeping a little too well at night. You crash somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, swim to a lighthouse, and take an elevator that descends into the depths to reveal Rapture, an underwater city built by industrialist Andrew Ryan.
Andrew Ryan is a zealot for free-market capitalism. He fled Soviet Russia and became a staunch opponent of collectivism. After WWII, he went on to create a new Eden, one where government, religion, and morality could not reach. A place where the strong could rise, unrestrained by the weak. His slogan was simple: “No gods or kings. Only man.”
By the time you arrive, Rapture is in ruins. All that remains is an Art Deco-inspired dystopia consumed by madness. Its people have torn themselves apart chasing a gene-rewriting drug and the illusion of unlimited power. You are guided by a man on the radio named Atlas. He guides you to take out a mentally deteriorating Ryan before it’s too late.
That has nothing to do with anything. I just wanted to share a fun game from my youth.
Part 1: Ayn Can’t
Anyway, Ayn Rand was an atheist writer and philosopher.
She grew up in Russia, saw the Bolsheviks nationalize her father’s business, and never forgave collectivism for it. She carried that anger into a whole worldview: history, she said, is a struggle between creators and parasites. Civilization moves forward when brilliant minds are allowed to create for their own profit. It collapses when society demands that those creators sacrifice themselves for the collective.
She called her system Objectivism—a philosophy that emphasizes the primacy of reason, individual achievement, and self-interest as moral imperatives. In her moral framework, altruism is not a virtue; it is a moral trap. Dependence is not a neutral fact of life; it is a kind of spiritual death. The ideal human was a lone genius: a productive, rational, self-sufficient man of the mind.
Her most famous novel, Atlas Shrugged, imagined what would happen if those minds went like, “nah” and dipped.
✌️😚✌️
The plot follows industrialists who grow tired of carrying an ungrateful world on their backs. They retreat to a hidden capitalist enclave and let the rest of civilization collapse. Rand saw this as prophecy. The world survives, she argued, only so long as its geniuses choose to carry it. Every invention comes from a lone visionary. There is no such thing as a collective brain. No such thing as shared insight. Only the originators and the copycats.
Now, Ms. Rand is no longer with us, which is unfortunate because she will never be able to answer a simple question I have:
What the fuck are you talking about? What Earth dimension are you from? … I guess that’s two questions.
Some caveats. First, I am not an economist, and I have no intention of ever being one. This is not a breakdown of how markets, shares, risk models, or liquidity work. Luckily, there are enough economists to populate a medium-sized city who have already dismantled libertarianism, including Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, Dani Rodrik, Ha-Joon Chang, Mariana Mazzucato, and Thomas Piketty. And yes, there is even friendly fire: libertarian-leaning economists who have gone after Rand’s Objectivism too, including Bryan Caplan and Murray N. Rothbard.
There is a distinction between Rand’s Objectivism and modern libertarianism. Rand framed her philosophy as moral: the pursuit of profit wasn’t just practical, it was good. Libertarians tend to be more agnostic, arguing that markets and minimal government simply work better. Luckily for us, my critique has nothing to do with morality and centers on the fact that both ideologies are based on premises of humanity that are loads of horseradish.
Start with invention. Most breakthroughs are not lightning bolts in one person’s skull. They’re the slow result of multiple people, ideas, accidents, and iterations. When conditions are ripe, you often see the same basic discovery pop up in multiple places because the environment is pushing everyone toward the same solution. People then put their minds together to tinker, experiment, and improve upon the previous iteration.
So let’s use an example from Letter 7, the invention of soup.
Soup was a civilizational game-changer because it turns scraps into calories by boiling them into something usable. No longer did the precious fats just drip into the fire and vanish. It pulls nutrition out of connective tissue and bone and makes the hard-to-use parts suddenly edible and valuable: collagen and gelatin, marrow, minerals, whatever your ancestors could wring out of bad luck. Who figured that out?
No, seriously.
Who is the genius here, the one who deserves credit, profit, and control over all future bowls of soup? Who is the soup king?
Picture a band of prehistoric humans huddled around a fire, stumbling toward boiling by trial and error. Which of these esteemed cavemen is responsible for its creation?
* Ooga Booga, who first realized fire could be controlled and carried.
* Ooga Aagah, who hunted and brought home a hunk of meat.
* Googa Dooga, who threw heated stones into a vessel of water to see what would happen.
* Ooga Googa, who tossed in herbs and roots and discovered flavor leaches into water.
* Arrooga Boogoo, who tried again with bones and scraps and got something rich enough to matter.
Now imagine believing one of them deserves the exclusive “rights” to soup and the authority to define how soup gets made forever. That would be stupid. Right?
That’s the entire point of working in groups. Most of modern life exists because collective creativity stacks over time. Not because a hundred thousand geniuses sat down and invented “society,” but because a million small contributions piled up until they became structure. In such conditions, ideas begin to take on a life of their own.
Ooga Googa may never have had another smart idea in his life. But because he was there, because he participated, because he contributed one tiny piece to a shared process, he helped push a real creation into being and improve on the previous iteration. That’s what humans do. It’s what sets us apart from every other form of life on this planet. Chimps can make tools too, but a thousand generations later, they’ll still be working with variations of the same ones. We, for better and worse, have intercontinental ballistic missiles.
We’re a species with recurring drives: belonging, status, safety, meaning, control. But how those drives express themselves is never fixed. It is shaped by context, culture, incentives, technology, scarcity, and whatever a society rewards or punishes. What are the incentives that Rand’s worldview cultivates?
Rand’s perspective leads people to imagine themselves as unappreciated geniuses in a world of parasites. It breeds distrust, arrogance, and contempt for shared responsibility or achievement. Worse, it fosters deception, especially when others have something to gain by your honesty. You don’t want to be the sucker who loses out, do you? Instead of working together to improve, we aim to be the first to capitalize. Instead of trying to innovate, we now focus on replicating behaviors and riding others’ coattails to the top.
Notice that the focus and incentive structure have now shifted from the rewards of invention to the rewards of profit—money. Now it’s not about making anything, you are selling something! And in those conditions, success is determined less by who’s actually capable and more by who can convince the most people that they’re capable.
This is foreshadowing.
Part 2: The Gravity of Reality
That’s what makes all the talk about “individual freedom” so slippery, even as Rand and modern-day libertarians worship it. What the fuck is a “productive, rational, self-sufficient man of the mind” in the real world? What does “freedom” mean when most people’s beliefs, tastes, ambitions, and even personalities are shaped by narratives and incentives they didn’t choose, in a world sculpted by generations they never met? Libertarianism smuggles in a fantasy that freedom automatically equals empowerment, an assumption built on pixie dust and wishful thinking.
And it assumes something it has no right to assume: that people will treat others’ freedom as sacred in practice, not just in principle. That’s naive on its own, but it becomes genuinely absurd once you add capitalism, because the incentives pull the other way. In competitive markets, the rewarded behavior is not “respect everyone equally.” It’s “win,” and winning often means finding leverage, pushing costs outward, and turning other people’s needs into your advantage.
For libertarianism, which treats power as something produced by institutions and government rather than as a byproduct of social life, that creates a basic problem: power still shows up where, by the theory, it isn’t supposed to exist.
These fucks think we do government for fun, or because we like controlling people. No. Government is a mechanism for managing the byproducts of living together. We do not invent rules because we love rules. We invent them because cooperation creates spillover: conflict, coordination failures, freeloaders, fraud, violence, monopolies, and the constant temptation for the strong to turn “freedom” into a weapon. And yes, rules create their own problems, but they are not inventing power. They are channeling it.
See, unregulated power operates a lot like physics. Well… social physics.
Let’s talk about mass and gravity.
Social Physics
In science, gravity is what pulls matter together. The more mass an object has, the stronger its pull. Planets form when dust clumps into rocks, rocks into boulders, boulders into cores that draw in even more mass. The Earth itself began as little more than scattered dust, but proximity and chance led some particles to clump together. Each collision added mass, which in turn increased gravitational pull, drawing in even more matter. Over time, this accumulation transformed random debris into a giant rock we can all inhabit and pay taxes on.
Human societies operate similarly. In human terms, mass is influence, and gravity is practicality. Influence, power, and culture tend to aggregate through feedback loops of attraction. Small groups, ideas, or movements—once they gain just enough “mass” (attention, followers, resources)—begin to draw others in, not necessarily because they are inherently “better,” but because their very existence exerts a kind of social gravity.
Once someone is the biggest fish in a given pond, they become the center of the ecosystem, making it more efficient to route everything through them, and impractical, if not downright impossible, to get around them. That convenience pulls more people in, which increases their mass, which increases their pull, and the cycle repeats.
In theory, libertarianism assumes less interference leads to spontaneous cooperation, that if everyone just acts in self-interest, the invisible hand sorts it out. That is an interesting theory, because it is wrong. In observed practice, the invisible hand takes its middle finger and shoves it up your ass.
The “hand” is not a referee. It’s a mechanism. And like any mechanism, it doesn’t float above the system, correcting it from on high. It gets defined by the system’s mass and gravity: by who has scale, who controls chokepoints, who sets terms, who can absorb losses, and who can bend incentives without getting punished for it. Capitalism is also not a referee. It rewards and amplifies existing power. It does not automatically check entrenched hierarchies. It usually inherits them, organizes around them, and then intensifies them, because advantage compounds.
Now there are 800,000 examples that show this very process at work, but let’s choose… THIS GUY!
John Davison Rockefeller Sr.
Rockefeller, pictured above in standard issue and vacuum-sealed, was an oil tycoon and a genius, but not primarily because he invented something. He was a consolidator. He looked at a chaotic industry full of small operators and realized the real prize wasn’t a better barrel. It was control: scale, logistics, pricing, and the chokepoints that decide who gets to exist. Standard Oil became dominant and, by the late 19th century, controlled the vast majority of U.S. refining. And scale wasn’t the end of it. He used that weight to squeeze better terms out of railroads, including secret rebates, then built the infrastructure that made competitors dependent (pipelines, tank cars, storage, distribution, etc.) until Standard Oil could dominate the whole chain from wellhead to market.
By the time regulators caught up, he wasn’t part of the market. He was the market. He was the invisible hand. At one point, Rockefeller’s fortune is commonly estimated at roughly 2–3% of U.S. GDP, depending on the year and methodology.
Libertarians argue that the government is responsible for these problems, but if not for the U.S. Government and the Supreme Court coming down with the hand of god to break apart Standard Oil, this would now be the United States of the Rockefeller Republic.
Even Rand warned against an “aristocracy of pull,” a society run on connections and favoritism. She just didn’t see that her system breeds it, because winners don’t merely compete, they shape the rules, buy loyalty, and lock in dependency. That blind spot runs deeper: Rand builds her philosophy on an ideal man who doesn’t exist, treating Homo sapiens as lone geniuses rather than a social, learning species. The result is self-defeating. It worships “ability” while eroding the cooperative conditions that produce it, and it can breed the very incompetence and stagnation she claimed to hate.
The whole point of libertarianism is that everyone floats freely in their own orbit. Sometimes people gain influence for good reasons. Most of the time, they learn how to play the game. In reality, someone always gathers mass through money, charisma, control of resources, or sheer audacity. Once they do, they bend everything around them. There will always be a system, and if there isn’t a formal one, the strongest actor becomes the system by default.
In a logical world, Ayn Rand is a crackpot nobody listens to. But since we live in clowntown, conservatives treat her like she’s Confucius. She gets praised by conservative judges and politicians as the thing responsible for their political awakenings. It’s what got people like former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (remember him?) to go into politics—well, at least he’s gone—but then you realize that Atlas Shrugged is also one of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s favorite books, because of course it is.
Look at Donald Trump and Elon Musk… I rest my case. These two buffoons can’t do anything right, but have the influence of gods. Because they are not failures in building Rand’s system. They ARE Rand’s system, and more importantly, the only plausible manifestation of it. I must say, sports fans, the gravity is fucking crushing.
Part 3: Needs, Dreams, Nightmares, and Realities
Golden Rule #1: If your ideology depends on everyone believing, perfectly and perpetually, in the same ideal for the system to function, it’s non-functional.
Such unilateral commitment never happens outside of theory or cults. Life is messy, and people are messy. Real people are not always rational. Nor should they be expected to be. We are not computers. We do not reliably think long-term. We are emotional, impulsive, and competitive. We make bad decisions based on unreliable information or out of love, ego, anger, rage, and fear. I would argue that’s the point: the system is supposed to temper the damage those impulses can cause to others. It must operate, even when conditions aren’t ideal. Because conditions are never ideal.
Most people do not set out to build dominance. Coordination gets easier when decisions are compressed and redundancies are removed. Resources move faster through one center. Risk feels lower when one actor can plan, store, enforce, and respond. Once that arrangement works, it gets copied, formalized, and defended,
Then the story catches up to the structure. Convenience becomes merit. Dominance becomes order. And eventually it gets ritualized as natural, inevitable, and divinely ordained. Then there are no more choices. There just is.
A society only works when it is flexible and reciprocal, built around what people actually need to survive, function, and stay bought in. Misread those needs, physical, social, and psychological, and your institutions will optimize for the wrong things.
THIS IS FORESHADOWING!
Therefore, we have to understand people’s needs and build systems that flow with human nature rather than requiring humans to become perfect ideological robots. People have impulses. People have needs. We must construct a society that accounts for both.
In Bioshock, Rapture collapsed not because it was too free, but because that freedom created a vacuum that begged to be filled. Ryan’s city was overtaken by a man who understood the system better than he did. And the final twist? Even you, the player, were never free. You were programmed to obey, believing you had a choice.
Foreshadowing is a literary device in which a writer hints at future events—!!!!!
Now, to be fair, in BioShock, you also end up fighting massive human-cyborg tanks in diving suits called Big Daddies, guarding little girls implanted with sea slugs, while shrieking mutants try to harvest their mucus so they can inject it and shoot lightning, fire, or a swarm of bees out of their hands.
So, you know…some subtle distinctions, but I think you get the point.
Part 4: Alone
^^^ That was where the letter was originally supposed to conclude, but I have a few more thoughts.
This is, on its face, a dim view of humanity, right? Libertarians will insist it is actually optimistic because it assumes cooperation and connection emerge without coercion. And that may be true in the abstract. But in practice, capitalism turns that “optimism” into another mechanism to get ahead. There are makers, and there are takers, and if you are not the mover, then you are being moved. It is a worldview that claims to celebrate human potential while quietly teaching you to fear your fellow humans through suspicion.—What do they want from me? What do they want to take? What value do you bring?
It also rewrites and warps history. Now, we narrate history through faces and names because that is how humans think. We remember Martin Luther King Jr. because a single human life is a shape our minds can hold. But, he is (and perhaps rightfully) a symbol of a broader movement and struggle.
Objectivism, however, takes that normal storytelling habit and upgrades it into metaphysics. The “great man” is not just a symbol of a movement; he becomes the movement. The inventor, the entrepreneur, the general, the lone genius, the lone hero. History becomes a parade of solitary men dragging civilization forward like an exhausted dog on a leash.
It doesn’t help that every modern ideology, from conservatives to socialists, absorbs some version of the maker-and-taker instinct. On the left, it shows up as the reflex to audit the tribe for defects, treat imperfect allies as liabilities, and turn politics into an internal proceeding where the goal is not to build power but to prove moral seriousness. Someone says the right thing in the wrong tone, has the wrong history, picks the wrong strategy, compromises in the wrong place, and the response is not correction or coaching. It is humiliation and exile. The movement eats its own because it quietly adopted the same logic it claims to hate: the worthy and the unworthy, the enlightened and the contaminated.
It pressures ordinary people to be “world-changing” just to count, just so you aren’t a failure, and it hides the real engine of change, collective work. The Civil Rights Era was not one speech and not one guy. It was thousands of people building organizations, registering voters, raising money, printing materials, hosting meetings, getting arrested, and coming back the next day. Names like Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, Fannie Lou Hamer, Septima Clark, Malcom X, get absorbed into the entity of Martin Luther King Jr. And there are millions more. Freedom came from community, discipline, and repetition, not a single heroic will.
But Randism/Objectivism fits American individualism so cleanly. It matches the John Wayne fantasy, the rugged lone wolf, the man who needs nobody and answers to nothing—the mover of history. It flatters a certain kind of masculinity, not just because it centers strength, but because it frames dependence as shame. Needing people becomes a weakness. Being part of something becomes surrender. Community becomes a threat. But community is not optional. Community is the base layer of being human. Even the most “self-made” person is standing on a platform of other people’s labor, knowledge, care, and sacrifices, most of which they will never see.
We already live in an arrangement that is too narrow and too isolating. The nuclear family, by itself, puts insane pressure on parents to be perfect providers, perfect teachers, perfect therapists, perfect role models, and it leaves kids growing up in a small private universe with very few adults and very little shared life. It can produce a lonely, thin childhood, in which identity and achievement become a performance in search of meaning and belonging.
Then Randism shows up and says, yes, this is the point. Be the best. Be the mover. Do it alone. If you fall behind, that is your fault. If you cannot carry the weight, you do not deserve help. It is a philosophy that claims to liberate the individual, only to leave the individual unbearably alone.
Wouldn’t it be nice for a developing child to see their parents' flaws and the imperfections of their idols and heroes, and to learn that those imperfections are not disqualifying? To know they are not alone, in the unknown. To grow up watching adults admit mistakes without collapsing into shame or becoming hostile and defensive. To learn that love and respect do not require pretending. That belonging does not require perfection. That you may fall, and others will be there to pick you up. That do not have to change the world on your own to matter.
I agree—it would be nice.
It would’ve been nice.
‘Till Next
These letters take a while to write and assemble, especially given work and life away from here. I would really, really appreciate it if you could hook me up and…
PLEASE….
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