Atlas Shrugged
by Ayn Rand
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Book Reviews of Atlas Shrugged
Book Review: Requirement To Know: Who Is John Galt?
Summary: 4 Stars
If you have never heard of Atlas Shrugged or Ayn Rand, do yourself a favor and read it. The novel is truly a piece of literature that will make you think and look at things from a different perspective.
To me, I hold it as one of the more influential novels (fiction) of the 20th Century. While the book did not do very well when it came out some 50+ years ago, current sales of the novel are white hot. If you've read the book, this should not come as a surprise.
The unprecedented and growing number of government interventions in the economy (TARP , bank bailouts, stimulus packages, Fannie/Freddie/AIG nationalization, GM/Chrysler nationalization, etc) have exploded the size of the federal government that it is hard to tell where private enterprise begins and government ends.
Atlas is unique not just it's 1,000+ pages of fiction. The novel contains many complex layers of philosophy, ideals, and even treatises on private property and entrepreneurship through the lens of a very complex and opinionated author. While I do not want to make this post a book report since I do not feel particularly qualified to do Rand justice, I do want to illuminate the ideas and lessons that I think anyone can extract from her text and apply it the nation we founded some 235+ years ago.
First, let me say that I do not agree with Ayn Rand's position on Atheism as I myself am a practicing Catholic. But, I do think there is a happy medium that can go hand in hand as a Christian with some of the ideas Rand preaches. So many critics and scholars have used her Atheism as a way to discredit her philosophy is misguided. Her staunch godlessness does not bother me since she makes a very good argument against many forms of altruism and their effect on incentive and motivation within a society.
I agree with Ayn Rand that many Clerics and Clergymen use the false notion that altruism should be mandated in order to live a moral life and in accordance with God. Many argue that altruism/charity is the HIGHEST moral virtue. While I do think God calls us to help those who cannot help themselves, mandating or forcing people to carry out such acts (through indirect theft or by physical force) is not an act of virtue.
Personally, I feel that owning and running a business by generating goods and services that people want in a voluntary free market exchange economy is the highest moral virtue. This is achieved by the axiom that there are scarce resources on this planet, yet we have unlimited wants. No matter whether we are poor or extremely well off, we all want something that we typically cannot have or currently possess (yet). This is not greed, but rather human nature. Naturally, this is how the free market is able to manifest these realities and benefit both the producers and the consumers in a medium of voluntary exchange.
In Atlas Shrugged, the plot revolves around the actions of individuals pursuing their own rational self-interest of highly motivated producers who are all hard working industrialists (Dagny Taggart, Hank Reardon, Ellis Wyatt, etc) who become targets of the "looters" within society who feel that they are entitled to people's property and labor for the good of society. The "looter" (as Rand labels them) have an overwhelming influence from Communist/Socialist ideals who want evoke "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" Marxist-style redistribution of wealth.
The "looters" are those within big business cooperating with the state to exert the use of force by the state to nationalize industries, establish wage and price controls, control scarce resources through mass forms of rationing, and many other actions for the sake of the country and society and providing for the "public good".
Obviously, common sense would tell you what happens when all of these programs and actions are executed. They all lead to the actual producers to mysteriously stop working since there is no incentive to succeed when every failed business is propped up and any company that profitably provides a good or service is scapegoated as an evil and greedy corporation taking advantage of others who are suffering. Self-sacrifice and altruism end up doing the opposite of what they are intended to accomplish and the reader is able to understand the continuous question and battle cry throughout the book:
"Who is John Galt?"
After reading this book, you will know the answer to this question and why it is so important.
[...]
Book Review: Atlas Shrugged: A Comic Masterpiece!
Summary: 2 Stars
First, some interesting minor statistics. As of 11/8/2009, Amazon shows 42 posted reviews of Ludwig Wittgenstein's TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS, 26 posted reviews of his PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS, and 1,943 posted reviews of Ayn Rand's ATLAS SHRUGGED. Posted reviews of ATLAS SHRUGGED thus outnumber those of Wittgenstein's TRACTATUS and INVESTIGATIONS combined by a margin of 28.57 to one. I have no fix on annual readership numbers for any of the three books, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that ATLAS SHRUGGED beats out the two Wittgenstein books by at least 100 to one. Although none of this has implications for the comparative statures of Rand and Wittgenstein as 20th Century philosophers [Dan Brown's 2009 readership dwarfs Rand's: is he therefore more important than she as a philosopher?], there's probably a moral in here somewhere, teasing out which I leave to my betters.
Ayn Rand is no exception to the generalization that authors of utopian literature usually stack the deck to favor their chosen ideology. How often does it turn out that the viability of the advocated social-political order requires a population of ideal citizens? Given an ideal citizenry, of course, virtually ANY system works well.
Literature-wise, ATLAS SHRUGGED competes favorably with Terry Southern's THE MAGIC CHRISTIAN as a piece of comic fiction. Characters and plot are figments of a third-rate imagination (case: a supposed-to-be-highly-talented walk-on who insists upon employment as a janitor for exclusively PHILOSOPHICAL reasons). Rand won't countenance for an instant the possibility that somebody might size up characters or plot developments differently from the way she intends; so she lectures her readers for pages on end about the ONLY permissible way to interpret her narrative. My favorite example: Rand strenuously insists that when her protagonist-hero John Galt rapes heroine Dagny Taggart, a transparent idealization of Rand herself as a genius with irresistible good looks, his action MUST be perceived as a purely rational act rather than an act of ungovernable passion. In Rand-World, you see, the good guys never get carried away.
Rand's prose style is a hoot also. She composes a long, tangled counter-factual description of the way John Galt looks when he walks, a description that more or less amounts to saying: "He walked as he would have walked if he had walked exactly as he did, in fact, walk." I sure wish I could write like that.
Which brings us to the fundamental message of ATLAS SHRUGGED. The novel inducts us into Rand-World, which is populated with two kinds of people: Objectivists, who preach selfishness but go around doing things that benefit everybody, and Altruists, who preach brotherly love but go around screwing people. This is supposed to teach us that Selfishness is the TRUE philosophy and Brotherly Love is the FALSE philosophy. Deep. Really deep.
The thesis that what's morally right is what serves one's own self-interest is called "Ethical Egoism". Rand publicly denied subscribing to Ethical Egoism. Nevertheless, by making the Objectivist characters in her novels advocate a MORAL commitment to their own self-interest, she encouraged every reader who would identify with those characters to think that the selfish life is a moral life--even though this leads to paradox (heinously selfish criminals, for starters, become moral exemplars). Rand conspicuously tried to give the selfish life a patina of moral respectability by implying in ATLAS SHRUGGED that the world at large benefits by the selfishness of Objectivists in particular. Now, to argue that such benefits are anything but accidental is an excellent way to establish one's eminence in the pantheon of laughable imbeciles. More to the point, to argue philosophically that benefits to others provide the moral justification for one's own selfishness effectively makes one an Altruist.
Rand-World, whose optative ruling class is populated exclusively with ultra-rich, ultra-right-wing capitalist/genius Uebermenschen, is clearly intended to be morally and intellectually attractive. It's neither. The overwhelming majority of all the people who ever lived don't qualify for inclusion as anything more than limousine hood ornaments or lobby doormats for plushly-appointed corporate suites. Readers of ALTAS SHRUGGED are informed personally by John Galt in his supposed-to-be-climactic 60-page speech toward the novel's end, "WE don't need YOU."
Book Review: Morally Empty Manifesto to Selfishness and Uber-Conservatism
Summary: 1 Stars
There is a reason why college students love this book, join the Objectivist's Club, and then fall into real life and join the political party of their choice. If they truly loved this book, they they will be a Republican. If they hated it, as I did, as I do every one of her books, you will be a Democrat or Democratic Socialist. I was 8 months pregnant when someone gave me this book. I made it to page 753. Then, when the deserving rich have made a commune for themselves in the Rocky Mountains, one of their members discovers a cure for cancer. They decide that the struggling masses of working and unemployed worthlessness that is the rest of the world do not deserve to have this cure (even though the cancers may be caused by the rich's own companies and/or lack of safety devices in factories). At page two, I called my best friend and said "This book is a right wing manifesto, right??" She said yes and wondered how long I would actually read it. On page 753, I threw the book as hard as I could against the wall. Then I tore it into little pieces. Very little ones. It took a few days. It was far more fun than actually reading it. Look, her basic philosophy is NO government. Man's basic birthright is to make himself happy in any way possible. If that means stepping all over other people, then all the better. The stepped on deserve it! Why didn't they get out of the way, those morons! The basic problem with Rand and with her "philosophy" (I do not believe her book or her ideas are a complete philosophy. I believe they are conservative masturbation), anyway, as I was saying, the problem is that Rand completely omits the FACT that you cannot, can NEVER omit the link between self and community. The only reason rich people are rich is that there are thousands of people working to keep them that way. The reason poor people stay poor is that there are hundreds of thousands of people trying to keep them that way. I'm not an idiot, I have a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Social Justice. If you want an innoculation against this horrendous, criminal book, read Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed or Cornel West's Race Matters or Hope on a Tightrope: Word and Wisdom by Cornel West or even NIV Pocket Thin New Testament With Psalms & Proverbs by Jesus Christ and other good people. If you are religious and smart, read Introducing Liberation Theology. Or, just look around you. Think about how you ignore the people who clean your messes up, the people who ring up your purchases, the people who keep the entire infrastructure of the world running. They don't deserve a cure for cancer, but the CEOs of Philip-Morris and Nike do? Please. Go out and commit and act of love today. And just don't read this book, unless your reading is to arm you against those who have read it and believe it. THINK! The book, for me, boils down to this: A huge slap in the face to all working class people in the world. All of them. (working class defined as: people who have only their labor to sell; people who live from paycheck to paycheck; people who have no health insurance; people who cannot afford good education for their children -- not even an apartment in a good district -- people who are not in unions but who do physical labor -- teachers, miners, farmers (not the conglomerate farmers, but single farmers), factory workers, sweatshop workers, secretaries, telemarketers, data entry processors, mailmen, etc., etc., etc.) You or your father and mother or your grandparents were most certainly from the working class. If you are the first person in your family to complete a college degree (B.A.) then your family is working class. If your parents didn't complete high school, they are working class. I could go on, but Rand believes that NONE of these people deserve anything good. She would spit in their faces and use the heel of her boot to grind it in if she could. She is a nightmare human being, good only as a negative example of what NOT TO BE. By the way, vote Obama '08.Book Review: Rand: a literary genius for the ages
Summary: 5 Stars
Many years ago my old mate Murray Rothbard, the eminent libertarian scholar and theorist, trashed Ayn Rand in his famous play "Mozart was a Red." (The character Keith Hackley is in part based on my own early life.) In "Mozart" Rothbard derided and mocked and plain insulted Ms. Rand, accusing her in a roundabout way of being a dogmatic fascist, the very opposite of Murray's sacred libertarianism. (This mean critique was to cause a brief falling out between Murray and me, though we later reconciled some years before his death.) I had approached him one day, my face deep angry red while he was calm as could be. I jabbed my finger into his chest and screamed, You don't know Rand like I know Rand! He smiled. I asked if he'd ever finished "Atlas Shrugged" and nearly went into cardiac arrest at his answer. He hadn't!
What, then, causes such bitterness and hatred in the hearts of men otherwise true and kind? (For the record, I do not agree with much of Murray's philosophy. It is too extreme for me, and I consider myself an American conservative styled in the fashion of Mr. Gingrich. Nonetheless Rand's books hold for me an abiding appeal.) My answer can be only jealousy. Jealous of Ms. Rand's success, not only in philosophy but in literature, jealous of her wide and deep influence. If only they had the same exposure, they think, or the same number of weeks on the NYT bestseller's list, they too could change the world and enrich minds young and old alike. This is false. At base Rand's success lies in her unprecedented literary genius, something which, quite naturally, her vanquished enemies could never hope to emulate. For genius is not doled out like so much government cheese! It is available only to the select few--the Galts, if you will, of our time. (Rand created Galt, a supergenius. To my mind this elevates Rand to the level of supersupergenius, a status heretofore obtained by but few men and certainly no women.) Her prose is not like their prose, no, few similarities are to be found save their common employment of English, that noble tongue, and certain words or phrases otherwise inescapable, "the," "and," "blue," "pie," etc. Emerson (a Galtian if ever there were one) once quipped that when he read Shakespeare he had to shade his eyes, the implication being that Shakespeare's words were so radiant, so brilliantly incandescent that it was like staring at the sun, or into the heart of a nuclear explosion. I posit that Rand's words are equally effulgent, or nearly so. Certainly she was the greatest writer of the 20th century, perhaps the greatest since Shakespeare himself. To her critics and detractors the jealousy came naturally, their secret yearning to be like the mistress a pathetic velleity. They have not the heart nor the brains, nor the deep canyons of human feeling necessary to produce lasting works of literary triumph.
In "Atlas Shrugged" the protagonist Dagny Taggart is an executive of a railroad company she inherited from her grandfather. The economic climate is much like that which we experience today under Obama's iron rule, a sad soggy mess of collectivism. Dagny recognizes it as her destiny to fight this natural injustice, and to win gloriously; in this way Dagny is a true heroine cast in the mould of Joan of Arc, Queen Elizabeth I and Meryl Streep. She meets her male counterpart, Hank Rearden, her equal in every way. Then a question arises and arises again, an insistent interrogative drum beat louder and louder with each failing day: Who is John Galt? Our merry heroes then embark upon an epic adventure attempting to answer this question, traveling through the jungles of Laos, through the pyramids of Egypt and the lost Navajo ruins of the United States. Finally they have found the solution they seek, and John Galt appears like the sun on a cloudless morning, his 240-page soliloquy on the nature of man and righteous capitalism is the sum total of human understanding up to the point at which the novel was written. I'll not spoil you with details, but you may rest comfortably knowing that no dark crevice of humanity is spared from this man's awesome philosophic illume, not the awful ways of the peasant masses nor the higher calling of their betters. It must be said that, in a brilliant turn of technique in many ways anticipating the post-modernist metafiction that would send euphoric shiverrrrrs through the bodies of closeted literary theorists everywhere, Galt's ultimate ideal man is Rand herself.
Book Review: Explaining America To Itself
Summary: 5 Stars
If you take a lifeguard class at the local YMCA pool, the first rule they teach you is, don't go under with a drowning man. If a person is determined to drown (and some are), then there is nothing noble in letting the victim take you down with him.
Your YMCA instructor will say: "Kick him in the groin if necessary, but do whatever it takes to get free, and ensure your own survival -- so you can go on to live YOUR life (and, not coincidentally, save more lives of other potential drowning victims on other days)."
If you can understand the supreme morality of this rule, then you can appreciate Ayn Rand. I believe her influence on today's commonly-accepted political assumptions, concepts and language has been underrated. Rand came to America from Soviet Russia just in time for the rise of the Popular Front and the worship of collectivism to become the jargon of the day. The very belief in individualism, much less the value of it, was being undermined (for an example of this in pop culture of the day, see the old Spencer Tracy film "A Guy Named Joe" where it's explained that nobody EVER achieves anything on his own; each of us had help every single second of the way).
Confronted with this groupthink, Rand realized that America had a unique political philosophy, that of individualism. But she also realized that (beyond the outdated 19th century rhetoric of the "self-made man") America in the '30s and '40s had no stock language or popular concepts to explain or express that philosophy to itself. Accordingly, she saw this unarticulated political philosophy in danger of disappearing, and foresaw that America's greatness would go with it.
Like de Tocqueville, she made it her mission in life to explain America to itself, but in this case with a decided prescriptive bent. Intellectuals like to cite F.A. Hayek's 1944 book "The Road to Serfdom" as the seminal work that explains how collectivist government and social structures can lead to a loss of freedom and national vitality. But Ayn Rand's books have sold in the millions (her two main works usually are in Amazon's top 500 best sellers). Unlike Hayek's thought, her ideas were expressed with a popular propagandists's vulgar touch, had a much broader and deeper influence. Polls consistently show that Americans name "Atlas Shrugged" as the second most influential book in their lives, right after the Bible.
Admittedly, Rand is a problematic writer because of (among other things) her dogmatic, extreme way of expressing her views; and because of her contrarian delight in redefining traditionally negative words like "selfish" and "egoist" in positive terms. Where Rand says "egoist" we today would say "inner-directed" or "having intellectual and spiritual integrity" and so on. Where Rand says "selfish" we would say "not co-dependent" or "healthy self-assertion" or "taking proper care of ourselves" etc.
Rand over-idealizes free market economics as part of her dogmatic reaction against the worship of statism and planned economies that dominated mid-20th century political thought in the USA, Europe, and USSR.
Rand's efforts to portray her ideal of the free man or woman of inner-directed values can seem, paradoxically, like quasi-fascist idolatry of the Neitzchean Superman who worships nothing but his own strength. I don't think that's at all what Rand intended (I believe her heroes were iconoclastic creative geniuses like Edison, Frank Lloyd Wright, etc), but some readers take it that way.
Finally, if you believe that an artist should be judged not just by their work but by their private lives, then you'll be dismayed that Rand's marriage, sex life, and friendships were all disasters to varying degrees.
Despite these problems, I believe Rand is still very much worth reading today. She explains (and, in her novels, she dramatizes) how there can be a noble idealism of loyalty to the self, and how there can be an admirable morality of competitive meritocracy. She explains/dramatizes why these value systems are equally deserving of respect (if not more) as the ethics of self-denigration, self-negation, self-hate, and self-"sacrifice" that we still hear preached so often today.