Having met a very large number too, my own anecdotal assessment is that about three-quarters are high-functioning neurotics. Highly intelligent, quite disciplined, but utter social misfits with low self-confidence. They are walking, and sadly talking, liabilities to the philosophy. (…)
But new and radical philosophies tend to attract marginal people, those somehow discontented with life as it is. The early Church Fathers were unlikely to have been laugh-riots. Something very far in the flesh from, say, William F Buckley, Jr. They were misfits attracted to what was then an extreme, radical and highly subversive worldview. The type of people we today associate with kind-hearted country vicars would, in Imperial Rome, probably have been good upstanding pagans, and would have regarded Christianity as something profoundly weird and unhealthy. Only in the last decade or so has Objectivism become mainstream enough to attract a large number of “ordinary” adherents.
