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I read Atlas Shrugged in jail. I've honestly never been more conservative than I was right after I got clean, because I'd had a "pulling myself up by my bootstraps" experience. By the time I got clean and sober, my parents had cut me off so it *felt* like I'd done it /1
all myself. And don't get me wrong, I am proud of myself for getting clean, as I am for going from homelessness to practicing law with an office in a skyscraper. What turned me around is that I started sponsoring other alcoholics, and eventually working in rehabs. /2
Some of these addicts just didn't *get it* didn't *want it* as bad as I did, just weren't getting sober even when the consequences were super dire. Then I started noticing that these people happened to come from poorer families than me, or from more severe trauma than I did. /3
Like, yeah, I got clean when my parents cut me off, but they'd also paid for a dozen different treatments for me before that happened. So I was noticing the people who weren't getting sober had greater hardships than me, right? /4
Then I started noticing the people who got sober with much higher "rock bottoms" than I did. People who never got arrested, who got sober after one treatment experience. Sure enough, they tended to be from extremely wealthy families. My parents were upper middle class, /5
could put me through rehab a few times but couldn't afford the million different forms of constant counseling and monitoring in aftercare that you can if you've got money to burn. And don't get me wrong, plenty of poor people get sober on the first try, and plenty /6
of rich addicts never recover. But I definitely had to throw out the Atlas Shrugged bullshit because *my* success definitely wasn't just *my* success. And it definitely makes Ayn Rand look even worse that I do not know a single conservative who has "pulled themselves up by /7
their bootstraps" more than I did. If that framework is bullshit for "homeless addict to big firm attorney" imagine how much more bullshit it is for "born rich, got a job with my dad's company" /8
Honestly, one thing I think gets missed is that feeling like you earned what you have and don't owe anyone anything isn't the only psychological benefit of conservatism. When I got sober I had nothing. /9
I definitely did not *feel* privileged. But the world felt a lot less scary, telling myself that people basically get what they deserve. My poverty was a consequence of my own actions and that was comforting because it meant I had *control.*
