Atlas Shrugged
by Ayn Rand
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Book Reviews of Atlas Shrugged
Book Review: CROSS "ATLAS SHRUGGED" OFF MY "BOOKS TO READ" LIST
Summary: 2 Stars
At a suspenseful point in the novel an Errol Flynn-esque character comes crashing through a window to save the day. Rand was a screenwriter before (and even after) launching into a successful career as an author, but I wonder if her screenplays had the same Hollywood dramatics as a few moments in "Atlas Shrugged".
I had to raise an eyebrow at the actions of this misplaced pirate in her novel, along with a few other scenes that left me unintentionally amused. Some of them include: the heroine falling madly in love, becoming mistress to a man's values (it couldn't have been the man himself could it? I'll leave this vague for the sake of those who haven't read the book), the countless references to characters exchanging glances loaded with emotionlessness (do Rand's heroes feel anything?), and the smug attitude of her heroes when they are leaving New York City at one point in the novel, confident that because they are leaving there is no one else of value left behind. Hmm...
"Atlas Shrugged" can be critiqued through the lens of a novel or a philosophical work. Continuing with the former, I felt the elitist attitudes of the characters (as a result of Rand's philosophy) were difficult to swallow. The character's attitude about leaving the people of New York behind, as mentioned above, is written within the context of the story. But because it is within the context of the story, as part of the author's premise, I had big problems with it. Egoism is extolled as virtue for Rand. But the characters I read about with their unfounded conceit (with the exception of Hank Rearden and maybe one or two others) made me say out loud: Please...
As characters in a novel go, Rand's fall flat. The men and women of "Shrugged" are either for her (Rand) or against her. Without hyperbole, the characters are either a bumbling, fearful, unctuous idiot or a courageous, idealistic, intelligent, beautiful, and emotionless amalgam of stereotypical wonder. In Dagny Taggart's persona, Rand seems to put herself on the page. Needless to say, the characters often come across as either larger than life (which could be ok) to totally unbelievable (which hurts the story).
Her style of describing the fools as "fat" and "toady" is blatant and manipulative. I would have loved to see John Galt (Rand's "perfect man") have at least one vice to his character. Or even better-one intelligent character, who is not a doomed fool, openly challenge John Galt's movement.
"Atlas Shrugged" is too long. At the two-thirds stage (still only 650 pages into the book!) I had more than gotten the gist of the story, the essence of Rand's philosophy, how great Rand, Galt, and Senator McCarthy are (in that order), and knew exactly what Galt had been doing in NYC well before Rand decides to cash in on her many hints to finally reveal his occupation. I did enjoy watching to see just what it took to sway Rearden to Galt's point of view. And enough "set-up's" and "pay-off's" are created to establish suspense. However, Rand loves her ideas to the point excess. At worst she is writing diatribe. At best she rambles ad nauseam. (See Galt's continuous stream of consciousness-- 50 pages plus!).
Concerning her philosophy, Objectivism, I don't mean to say her ideas are bunk. I don't believe that. Long live capitalism. For personal application, the basic tenet of Randism is for a person to cherish individualism and pursue happiness as the highest goal. Good. Fine. No problem. Be productive, seek value in one's work, and assume responsibility for one's own place and progress in life. Great. Why not? But the notion of Objectivism abhorring any form of altruism as evil seems like an excuse and misunderstanding of selflessness. This philosophical notion, personified in the character leaving NYC behind, strikes me as "spooky".
I have taken an unofficial, unscientific, poll of what people think about "Atlas Shrugged". In the first place, I think this book continues to be read because it is like a book that makes its way on to a Banned Book List. These kinds of books make people interested to find out for themselves "what all the fuss" is about. "Shrugged" seems to generate buzz for itself one generation after another in just this way. My crude polling data seems to say that a lot of people concerned with business, engineering, money, (and those feeling a lack of appreciation in whatever) love the philosophy. And I admit I didn't mind the discussion about money as a worthy (but not the only) motivation. For many of those who approach the novel--as a novel-- opinions range from outright dismissal to mockery.
I had longed planned to read this book; it has been on my "To Read" list since high school. Now, a year out of college, I gladly will cross "Atlas Shrugged" off the list. My secret was to keep plowing through the monolithic monologues and knowing just when I could skip down to a different part, certain that I wouldn't miss anything I hadn't read before.
Book Review: Good book in many ways, good philosophy, but imperfect conclusions
Summary: 5 Stars
To start off I'm giving this book 5 stars because:
1. It's pretty profound
2. It's very unique
Now Ayn Rand thought that there was no such objective thing as "good music" and I agree with her. I also think there's no such objective thing as "well written". These things are subjective and invented by human minds.
Rand's style of writing, is one of the most unique styles of writing I've ever read. There is a very good chance that you'll be unable to stand this book, that you'll find it boring and flat. If you do I don't blame you, but I certainly enjoyed it. The style would have definitely been different if Rand had been born in a different era, but she's Russian and from the 50s, and that's going to give her a certain distinct style of writing.
Now on to the philosophy. The core of Rand's philosophy is very logical, in particular her metaphysics. The rest of the philosophy just kind of flowers outward (/me is thinking of fractals) from that bit.
Now Ayn Rand is a brilliant thinker, but what annoys me is how there's a cult around her that sees her as the be all and end all. Rand's ideas could use improvement. Her orthodoxy has already established that her homophobia was just a illogical product of the times (although they tend to gloss over this thinking that she's still 100% perfect and rational), but they seem reluctant to bring into question her other ideas.
One example is her insistence of maintaining a military, for the people's self defense. She mentions this in passing in Atlas, but doesn't really provide any rationality behind it. That's because this is an irrational thing fundamentally. What constitutes self defense, would "preemptive strikes" (aka the costly massacre of little children for no reason where BOTH SIDES lose) come under this category? Also, she thinks it's immoral for the taxmen to extort money from people at the point of a gun. I agree with her on this, but how does she plan to sustain this self defensive mechanism?
Her certainty is certainly a breath of fresh air, but just because she has a lot of good ideas and is certain about them people start thinking that she is ALWAYS right and following her blindly, despite her insistence that people think for themselves.
So this book has some inspirational ideas, but keep a sharp eye out for its flaws. I actually think that Robert Anton Wilson understands some aspects of Rand better than every single one of the reviewers here:
"The error of most alleged libertanians--especially the followers (!) of the egregious Ayn Rand-is to assume that all property(1) is property(2). The distinction can be made by any IQ above 70 and is absurdly simple. The test is to ask, of any title of ownership you are asked to accept or which you ask others to accept, "Would this be honored in a free society of rationalists, or does it require the armed might of a State to force people to honor it?" If it be the former, it is property(2) and represents liberty; if it be the latter, it is property(1) and represents theft."
The Illuminatus! Trilogy page 768
Now lets talk about morality (which Rand obsesses over, for a good reason though). Rand's core ideas about this ("man is an end unto himself") are very sound, but after this things get fuzzy fast.
Some idiots think that it's purely a morality of greed, and that those who make tons of cash money are more moral than others. Those who think that obviously never got to the Atlantis chapter.
What Rand really thought was that the only moral thing a man could do with his life was to seek his own happiness, and what the final section of the book shows is that money != happiness.
Now what I believe separates her philosophy from hedonism is what she believes makes men happy. She thinks looters can never be happy people, and that's why they're immoral. So now we get to the most glaring flaw of her philosophy, her theories about human nature. She doesn't really back up her assertions of "man and human beings are all like _this_". Her belief that man is a rational being could be backed up by evolutionary psychology, but she fails to take Zugzwang into account (woah, I'm getting way over my head here). Other than that though, what she thinks about human nature isn't really based on facts or logic much.
But her lack of consideration and thought into human nature leads to the most blatantly false parts of her philosophy, her beliefs about love and sex (she makes the usual error, assuming that everyone is the same as herself).
Anyway getting back to the point. What separates her from hedonism, is that she believes that to be truly happy and fulfilled you need to create something, something useful to you and beautiful. I like that belief because it holds true for me, and has shown me the way forward in life. And for doing that she deserves 5 stars from me.
Book Review: Worshiping the false gods of fairness and compassion
Summary: 4 Stars
SPOILER ALERT! Let's start here. Ayn Rand is not a great writer. As proof I offer the following comparison. I read recently that a survey had indicated that this book was voted the book that had changed more people's lives second only to the Bible. Rand cannot touch the beauty of the language in the Bible (and I say that as a nonreligious person). Her language is more the utilitarian language of business which is perhaps fitting given that both the subject matter of this novel and Rand's highest ideal is business.
That is not to say that this is not a good book, because it is. It is almost awe-inspiring that writing in the late fifties she predicted where we are today. When I first read this novel some thirty years ago, I thought that she was exaggerating the danger, that the US could never go pure nuts and, in worshiping the false gods of fairness and compassion, we would legislate ourselves into poverty and weakness. I stand corrected. Rand predicted the death of truth in journalism, the arrogant pseudo-intellectual rot in government and academy, and the use of junk science to promote socialism. Her characters spout drivel just our leaders spout drivel today. For example, a failed banker who took down the economy of an entire state with the bankruptcy of his bank because he ran it as a banker with a heart rather than by financial calculation, brags that he never made a profit. Our current president-elect, the former community organizer, similarly seeks to rule with a heart by looting from those who earn and promising to give to those who need and who can brag that he has never made a profit, or contributed anything of value to the community. As I write this, the heads of the big three automobile companies are coming hat in hand to the congress to beg for $25,000,000,000 or more based upon their need, not their value, and argue, in essence, that they are too big to fail. As Rand predicted, the looters and the moochers are reigning supreme.
Rand failed to foresee a few of the looters and moochers tactics, most notably the cult of multiculturalism/diversity/political correctness and the environmental hysteria, particularly the global warming fraud.
Rand's solution, however, is the problem. The plot is that the movers and shakers stop moving and shaking thus causing the economy to collapse thus forcing the looters and moochers out of power and allowing free market capitalism to prevail. There are several problems with this starting with that it is unlikely that the looters and moochers would ever see the error of their ways and get out of the way. On the contrary, the more failure their economic solutions cause, the more excuse they have for implementing ever more radical looting and mooching. (Obama's soon to be chief of staff, Rahm Emmanuel expressed this as, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.") Nor has it historically been the case that the looters and moochers go quietly into this good night. Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, for example, has looted and mooched the former breadbasket of Africa into absolute economic collapse (an inflation rate of hundreds of millions percent) and, although everybody else may be starving, Mugabe is doing just fine, thank you very much.
Further, closing up shop and retiring to the great unknown is not an option unless individuals own the businesses outright. However fed up with regulation and taxation the president or chairman of the board of GM or any other big corporation may be, they can't just shut her down. The shareholders aren't going to let that happen.
Finally, Rand's solution is suspiciously like the old sixties mantra of tune in, turn on, and drop out. That is what John Galt and the other heroes do. They go play in the woods in the Rocky Mountains and feel good about themselves while conducting economic sabotage just like the hippies did. Groovy, man.
Notable by its absence, and questioning the viability of the Rand vision of economic heroism, is the parent-child relationship. None of the heroes have any children nor time to raise them. There is a fairly long discussion of Dagny and James Taggart's childhood, and shorter references to those of Francisco d'Anconia and Eddie Willers. References to their relationships with their families are largely limited to hero worship of ancestors, such as Nat Taggart, and acknowledgment of their parents' cluelessness, such as Dagny's mother (who is never named). Rand's vision doesn't require, perhaps doesn't allow, child rearing. (I don't believe that Rand herself had any children.) If we are all living the lives of heroes, where will the next generation of heroes come from? Or, for that matter, where will our customers come from?
Book Review: A LOT OF WORDS, many of which were worth reading
Summary: 4 Stars
I have mixed feelings about this book.
As a novel, I think "Atlas Shrugged" deserves three stars. The books is filled with interludes in which characters give seemingly endless diatribes, the king daddy of which came near the end and lasts nearly 70 pages. Not only do these lectures demolish the pace of the novel, they are filled with opinion stated as fact, groundless accusations, and sometimes self-contradiction. Oh well, what are you going to do? It appears Ms. Rand wrote this book as a vehicle for expressing her philosophy.
Judged as a story instead a novel, "Atlas Shrugged" deserves five stars plus.
"Atlas Shrugged" is the story of Dagney Taggart, the daughter and co-heir of a successful railroad tycoon. Dagney is a hardboiled capitalist with a good education, a great work ethic, and a desire to succeed. Her brother, James, on the other hand, is lazy, shiftless, and easily misled. He believes in making money the new-fashioned-way, through lobbying.
"Atlas Shrugged" is a dystopian tale of government gone wild as lazy industrialists with well-placed lobbyists plunder the work of the people who make oil, steel, railroad, and manufacturing industries succeed. In this novel, the bad guys' success brings destruction to society.
The thing that kept me reading was the insidious way that Orren Boyle, Wesley Mouch, Tinkey Holloway, and rest of the profiteers spread their net across both government and industry. They rang so true, these "looters" these re-packagers who produce nothing but instead earn their livings by feeding off others. These were such wonderful bad guys, slick, smooth, and so conniving. Best of all, they played their roles with such absolute conviction.
But, again, even the story cannot be judged as a whole. In some ways it is three stories in one. The first is the story of how James Taggart, Orren Boyle, Wesley Mouch, and other scoundrels manipulated the government and the people for their own self-interests while selling the idea that they really cared about the common good. As I said before, that part of the book was magnificent.
--THE SPOILERS START HERE--THE SPOILERS START HERE--THE SPOILERS START HERE--
The next part of the story is almost as interesting. It is the tale of Dagney Taggart and her struggle to keep society afloat as the government takes down all the great capitalists one industry at a time.
Here Rand mixes interesting ideas with a few enormous Dickinsonian coincidences such as Dagney discovering the nearly completed prototype of a revolutionary engine while taking a romantic stroll through an abandoned factory--complete with schematics! There's the time Dagney bumps into an important who just happens to be working as a cook in a roadside cafe, the time the bum stowing away on her train turns out to be a failed engineer who knows the identity of missing revolutionary, and the time Dagney just happens to find an airplane that she can hire in a nearby town after the crew abandons a train. You get the idea.
And then there is the romantic angle of the story--a definite two star affair. First, as an aside, there is the whole rough sex angle. Dagney's first two lovers "Atlas Shrugged" both force themselves on her and she accepts them without a fight. When you remember that Roark raped Dominique in "The Fountain Head," questions about the what these occurrences may say about the author quickly come to mind.
Then there are the questions about Dagney. First she loves Francisco, a childhood friend and a South American copper magnet. When he seems to fall apart, Dagney takes up with Henry Rearden, the inventor of a revolutionary new metal and even more ardent industrialist. Finally a new love appears, an uber capitalist whose views are so pure that even Rearden simply bows his head and says, "I understand your attraction." Believable? I found it ludicrous.
And then there is villains' hideout. Well, okay, they aren't villains, but they have created a mysteriously invisible lair in a valley in Colorado that the rest of the world can never locate. When reading this side story, my mind wandered to the evil lair Ernst Stavro Bloefeld has hidden inside a volcano in "You Only Live Twice." I kept imagining John Galt sitting on a swivel chair holding a white cat a cackling as says, "This will the world to its knees! Bwahahahaha!"
Overall, I give this book four stars but I give these stars with very little conviction. The parts with Boyle, Mauch, and the gang are so amazingly real and I consider them unique and significant additions to literature. I have many reservations about giving this book such high marks; but in the end, it probably deserves them.
Book Review: Ayn Rand forgets the 2nd Amendment.
Summary: 3 Stars
This mammoth novel is many flashes of brilliance broken up by many flaws. There will probably be some spoilers to follow.
Obviously, you're not going to agree with Ayn Rand completely. I didn't and hopefully I won't ever buy into one source of opinions completely. Bill Maher might be the smuggest p.o.s. to grace my television, but that doesn't mean he's never hit the nail on the head. Ayn Rand has plenty of things worth listening too. She recognizes that all things are pleasure motivated; an obivious fact of life that people are scared of. Rand fails to realize that some people fully happy through philanthropy, altruism or basic sacrifice, but does realize that a person should put nothing higher than their own happiness. She shows off some great libertarian ideals, such as the idea that capitalism really just needs the government to protect honesty and it will pay dividends. With "Atlas Shrugged", Rand also shows how selfishness has nothing to do with being a good person. She shows off things that should be obvious. Nothing is free. Unconditional love is rediculous; love/relationships is/are a partnership. The truth is sacred. The most fufilling high comes from getting high on life. Rand holds reason highly, advocating logical choice. She also reminds us that there is nothing wrong with a little greed, so long as it's an honest buck you're trying to make which means trading the fair value of your honest labor for the fair value of anothers. Who decides what is right? We all do. Each individual does. One of the most important things Rand does with the book is just remind us of the importance of having some standards. I'm pretty sure Anton LaVey ripped off the idea of everyone being their own God from Rand.
As far as quality writing in "Atlas Shrugged", Ayn Rand does create some unwavering heros in about 4 characters (Dagny and the three guys she has relations with). They are memorable heros because they are tirless, and became successful by never claiming that which they had no right to and by never once having to compromise themselves. Ayn Rand also creates tension well by showing these Gods among men go head to head against (a few) genuinely scary communist zealots who are bound to turn the USA into the People's States of America. Ayn Rand brilliantly shows the two ideals of capitalism and communism sabotaging each other and clashing with great rhetoric, but by the end the ugly truth of communism is exposed and the world where everyone lives for everyone else collapses because there is no one left to mooch off of.
I read that Rand did not advocate violence as a first option for action. If "Atlas Shrugged" is any indicator, she didn't believe in violent revolution as a 2nd, 3rd or probably even 10th option. No one that needs to get shot does until the last 30 pages. This is the major problem I have the book. The 2nd Amendment was designed so that any sort of illegitimate government could not come to be in the United States. Ayn Rand wholly ignores the inherent solution provided in the constitution to her world's problems. She takes selfishness too far by having otherwise infallible characters get their own heaven on earth while everyone else is doomed to rot in a communist distopia. The common man is left with only futile violence acted out of frustration. Here or there a low level lackey gets murdered or a town hall gets burned down. The main antagonists never get so much as a death threat and they are never shown having to come face to face with Joe Public.
Yes, she created her own, I'll admit, interesting philosphy, but other problems also involve how Any Rand doesn't delve into hard political science or offer much in the way of solutions to the problems. Of course, maybe her solution - protect honesty and roll back the powers of the government - is that simple, but generally she sticks to the basics, and you don't need to read a 1000 page book with tiny print to know that the 16th Amendment is a joke. The book is also unpolished from my amatuer writer's standpoint. It seems like Rand could've benefitted from a good editor. There are dozens upon dozens of scenes of inflections by characters. Once in a while she gives us a good scence of inflection that engages, moves the plot and develops a character. Most of the time these inflection scenes are unnecesarily long, pointless because they beat one point into the ground repeatedly. These are passages of big words for the sake of big words; a problem stemming from the facts that English was not Ayn Rand's first language and that she was unwilling to murder her darlings.
Yes, there is a lot wrong with Atlas Shrugged, and I know I gave it 3 stars, but check it out anyway because there is a lot worth at least a read here.