The following from Tim Stanley via Johnathan Pearce:

All in all, I’m predicting Skyfall will have the charm and good humour of a night spent manning the phones at the Samaritans. Its miserabilism reflects a culture that thinks suffering automatically creates credibility – a world where X Factor contestants weep for our votes because last week their gran sustained a paper cut while opening a gas bill.

This is something Rand strongly condemned in Atlas. She has one character committing suicide over the fact she was forced to be a part of it, an unwittng X Factor contestant. She loudly bashed this culture of death worship and down-doing in words that I just couldn’t accept as plausible. Apart from Rand’s sci-fi weaponry (both offensive and defensive) this a theme in the book where she was least persuasive. But there is something wrong, she was onto something, and this made-up word “misiberabilism” gets closer to it than several thousand of Rand’s.