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I read Atlas Shrugged in jail. I& #39;ve honestly never been more conservative than I was right after I got clean, because I& #39;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& #39;d done it /1
all myself. And don& #39;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& #39;t *get it* didn& #39;t *want it* as bad as I did, just weren& #39;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& #39;d also paid for a dozen different treatments for me before that happened. So I was noticing the people who weren& #39;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& #39;t afford the million different forms of constant counseling and monitoring in aftercare that you can if you& #39;ve got money to burn. And don& #39;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& #39;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& #39;s company" /8
Honestly, one thing I think gets missed is that feeling like you earned what you have and don& #39;t owe anyone anything isn& #39;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.*
