Atlas Shrugged

Vlad Piranha · Posted: Tue Jan 08, 2013 11:51 pm Post subject: Atlas Shrugged

Atlas Shrugged was one of the most controversial books of the Twentieth Century and maintains a certain amount of notoriety now. Ayn Rand's beliefs rubbed many people the wrong way yet she was considered an important political philosopher in her time. Strangely, this book still punches above its weight in terms of the respect it deserves and influences more government policies than you may realize.

The 1,070 page plot is impossible (and pointless) to describe in any detail in a modest review, but the book is intended as propaganda, so the message it is meant to deliver is far more concise and approachable. Perhaps the best way to get the ball rolling is to describe the three main characters and their outlooks.

Dagny Taggart is an industrial heiress. While her incompetent brother James is the face and official director of her family's railroad empire, every worthwhile decision and innovation comes from her. She is literally the only thing keeping her company together, let alone solvent. Her brother James fancies himself a humanitarian and engages heavily in left-wing politics with the ultimate goal of redistribution of wealth which is fueled by his irrational hatred for people who are more skilled than he is.

Hank Reardon is a self-made man and the inventor and patent holder of Reardon Steel, a powerful new alloy that's stronger than typical steel and just as easy to produce. His steel is under government scrutiny for the sake of antitrust laws. A patented product of its value would completely and utterly destroy competition in the steel industry. He resents public policies that keep him from truly exploiting his product, his life's work, for it's greatest possible profit, his only incentive for producing it.

Francisco d'Anconia is a fabulously wealthy Argentinian playboy and heir to the d'Anconia copper mine fortune. He is described as a genius of business, capable of mastering any other craft he so desires to pursue. In spite of this, he squanders his fortune on as many vices as he can rather than build upon what he inherited, knowing that crooked socialist policies will be used to tax and swindle him out of whatever he earns through his hard work.

All three of these characters suffer various indignities at the hands of the broken government in their dystopian version of the world. Dagny Taggart toils away at holding her company together out of stubborn pride because she refuses to let the 'looters' succeed in sucking it dry, her brother especially. Hank Reardon makes himself a target of interest groups who want his image tarnished in an effort to destroy his company. d'Anconia has established many businesses in many countries and finds himself getting cheated with unfair practices each time his company turns a profit.

The title of the book references d'Anconia's perspective. He recalls for Reardon the myth of the Titan Atlas who held the sky upon his shoulders to keep it from collapsing upon the earth at large, a slave for the sake of the rest of the world. Francisco says that, were it him in Atlas's position, condemned to carry this unfair burden on his shoulders, he'd shrug it off. Through the course of the first two acts, the three main characters find themselves losing a battle against public policies that threaten their ability to profit from their own hard work, instead told that, as the most successful and blessed, they have more of a responsibility to provide for everyone else. They all come to know a man named John Galt, a kindred spirit who has built a utopian society in a hidden place where the most brilliant and talented people on earth can find refuge and leave a selfish and dishonest world to its misery, falling apart without their contributions.

The concept of the book is a fairly sound one: if you remove the inventive for a person to excel or fail to punish incompetence or selfishness, you encourage people to do as little as necessary to get by. While profiting in spite of a lack of effort may be a desirable end for dishonest, lazy, or stupid people, it will crush the spirit of those who want to succeed simply out of pride of being exceptional. Those people exist. I'm one of them. If you've ever worked a crappy retail job for even one summer, you've seen this in action. Wal-Mart and Target are proof of this concept. I could rant about that for an hour and still not fully encompass their idiocy. The most competent, hardest working, best employees they have will be coerced into working two or three times as hard to make up for a lack of effort on the part of the fools who contribute nothing to the whole, yet are never even nudged toward self-improvement (and surely will never find it on their own). The only solution to this problem is to hide your skills and intelligence. To be made to fear or feel some sort of shame for your talents is a death sentence for the human spirit.

The part of the book that fails is everything else. Ayn Rand made a couple very good points in this book, and made much of her point in the first one hundred pages, but overextended her reach greatly. Everything from economics to Epistemology are touched upon in Atlas Shrugged, sometimes for no apparent reason at all other than that Rand seemingly wanted to rant about her perspective. Make no mistake, Ayn Rand has a child's understanding of macroeconomics. I get the feeling that she was simply raging against the status quo of a world that she hated because it didn't work the way she wanted it to. How sick does that sound? This book is an instruction manual for assholes with no sense of self-awareness. I swear that Atlas Shrugged was an effort, oddly successful in some ways, of remaking the world in her image. It shouldn't bode well for you when your life's philosophy and magnum opus can, in many ways, be compared to Mein Kampf.

The humorous thing is that if you objectively analyze Rand's philosophy, ironically dubbed Objectivism, you'll find logic gaps aplenty. Atlas Shrugged very redundantly tells us that leaving people to their devices to seek their own fortune is the best policy and rails against any kind of mooching. She refers to this as the Virtue of Selfishness. As anyone smarter than a starfish should realize, encouraging self-interest and self-gratification is also the cause of, not the cure for, the very kind of thieving moral bankruptcy she despises. What Rand is really encouraging here is preferential treatment based upon one's perception of self-importance. Rand abhors the use of gut instinct and use of 'feelings' to make any decision, yet that's presumably the only way someone would come to believe that they deserve such preferential treatment. Are we to expect most people on earth to decide through cold logic that they don't deserve to profit from this system of greed? By her own beliefs that people are not programmed for self-sacrifice, Rand undoes this argument completely. Under her system, everyone would believe themselves to be special, meaning no one would be. Rand is essentially the equal and radical opposite of the kind of Marxism she is so repulsed by, which is not an improvement, but the same level of corruption and moral bankruptcy of a different color. I get the feeling the pinhead never read Animal Farm.

She goes beyond merely suggesting that we encourage the best among us to succeed. In the final act of the book, she even suggests removing the income tax as a means to bring back financial prosperity to her dystopian world. While leaving huge corporations to keep all their money and spend it as they like may encourage innovations that will ultimately improve the human condition, as she suggests, that alone cannot support a technologically advanced society as we all know thanks to the Great Recession. Not surprisingly, this book has been exceptionally popular in the past few years, but everything about 2008 should tell us how full of shit it really is, not elevate Rand to the status of a prophet. It's a straw argument from start to finish and cannot be used as an argument for anything.

I'm the most conservative person I know and I think this whole book is pure malarkey, so don't fall into the left versus right mentality that this book was spawned by. I can think of two extremely noteworthy politicians who claim this as their favorite books and that scares the hell out of me. Ayn Rand saw the world as black and white through rose colored glasses. Political philosophy is never simple. Logic is never so cold and hard that there's one right answer. Moral feeling is overarching, no matter how much people wish to deny it, and it's also incredibly subjective. One thousand pages of type and Rand accomplished no more than she would have in fifty.

I wouldn't recommend this book as it simply requires so much reading to ultimately get so little out of it. Redundant is one of the best words to describe it. While you can get perspective on modern political philosophy by studying this book, there is little merit to the work in itself. The prose is effective, but not necessarily interesting, and its straw argument status means that it can't really be used to argue any points. I could put a couple pages of text from the book's only really important part in another post that will explain the book's purpose, leaving you with no real reason for reading it, other than acquiring the right to say you did. I suppose it might have another level of importance if you're the worlds biggest Bioshock fan.

Reasons for reading this book:
High political relevance

massive · Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2013 1:14 am Post subject:

Nice review - although you took way more time to write that than it deserves.

(EDIT for CLARIFICATION: talking about Atlas Shrugged below here, not your review)
It has no prose AT ALL, it's tone is piercingly shrill, it doesn't function as a coherent story let alone novel, and the characters sound like robots.

Writing style aside - the message is really about Exceptionalism. If you believe you are the best, have the best ideas, etc. etc. then you should be able to step on everyone's heads pursuing YOUR goals. They believe that corporate welfare MUST pour out of the government to bail them out when they make mistakes...cuz they arn't lazy bums getting welfare for doing nothing...they are trying to get themselves to the pinnacle of human endeavors.

It is evil in print
_________________

Vlad Piranha wrote:

I'm offended that a zombie holocaust isn't on the list. It would be terrifying, sure, but it would be pretty sweet if you think about it.

Eugene · Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2013 10:18 am Post subject: Re: Atlas Shrugged

Vlad Piranha wrote:

The concept of the book is a fairly sound one: if you remove the inventive for a person to excel or fail to punish incompetence or selfishness, you encourage people to do as little as necessary to get by.

After the October Revolution, the leaders of the communist party ran into a similar problem. How do you motivate people to work hard when money is no longer an objective?

The answer they arrived at was intimidation. Secret police, the regular police, and the army suddenly became the supervisor of everyone.

I know this does not correlate much with your review of the book, or your intended point with that paragraph but this was the first thing that came to my mind when I read that sentence, and I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the USSR.

Vlad Piranha · Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2013 11:02 am Post subject: Re: Atlas Shrugged

Eugene wrote:

Vlad Piranha wrote:

The concept of the book is a fairly sound one: if you remove the inventive for a person to excel or fail to punish incompetence or selfishness, you encourage people to do as little as necessary to get by.

After the October Revolution, the leaders of the communist party ran into a similar problem. How do you motivate people to work hard when money is no longer an objective?

The answer they arrived at was intimidation. Secret police, the regular police, and the army suddenly became the supervisor of everyone.

I know this does not correlate much with your review of the book, or your intended point with that paragraph but this was the first thing that came to my mind when I read that sentence, and I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the USSR.

That's absolutely relevant. As a matter of fact, that's part of what I was thinking when I wrote that paragraph. I think you're right on the money. Bear in mind, this book was completed in 1957, at the very pinnacle of hostilities between the USA and the USSR. I have no doubt whatsoever that it was influenced by the Red Scare and the thought of communism ravaging the West's economy. I imagine AS was the result of a paranoid Rand writing about a perceived blurry gray line between socialist policies and pure Marxism. Even the Pledge of Allegiance was amended in this period to reflect our supposed moral superiority to the Soviets.