When my daughter was a teenager, I once said to her, "I am an egoist. You are an egoTist. The difference is that as an egoist, I place my interests above the interests of other people. You don't even recognize that other people have interests."

In the Entertainment section is an old thread about "The Virtue of Selfishness." I mentioned there that I came to Ayn Rand's works when a friend in algebra handed me Anthem. For me, all of Ayn Rand's works, fiction and non-fiction, were amplifications, extensions, and explorations of that story. It functions as myth for the culture of Objectivism.

Culture is funny word. I know a shaggy dog story from the days when universities were smaller and all graduate students dined together, being in the Graduate College. After some amicable chatter over dinner, the biologists excuses themselves, saying that they had to "start some cultures." The sociologists burst out laughing, then sobered up as the one turned to the other and said, "I wonder how you would do that..." Well, this is an example of that.

We have a common belief system and a set of "villages." (Does any one else visit any other Objectivist website?) We have "exchange" of ideas and we have "war", or at least conflict between groups based ideas. We have totems and semata: the dollar sign, easily, but also Atlas images and, modern architectural icons such as "Falling Water".