Atlas Shrugged

Ayn Rand
Atlas Shrugged Cover

Atlas Shrugged

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8/8/2015
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This review was written in August 2012

Whew! What a marathon; and what a disappointment.

Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is a weighty tome, and I mean that literally. I started to read this novel many years ago and put it down because the characters seemed so one-dimensional. The philosophy of Ayn Rand is mentioned in the news from time to time of late, but I didn't have a clear understanding of it based on the labels applied to it by the media. So, I decided to give it a second go. This time I listened to the audiobook version rather than trying to read a print version. Let me warn you that it is lengthy, 63 disks of roughly an hour each.

Ayn Rand has garnered a significant number of adherents, presumably through the publication of Atlas Shrugged. Now, having read it, I'm dumbfounded by that. How in the world could Rand's ineloquence, and sophomoric storytelling ever have made Atlas Shrugged a popular novel? She seems completely unable to succinctly make a point. How did she even find a publisher? Based on Rand's bad prose, I give Atlas Shrugged a rating of one star. I award it a second star because it is thought provoking.

DO NOT PROCEED with this review if you read for pleasure. Take a pass on Atlas Shrugged and read something good. What follows is my longwinded and rambling review which, after having slogged through the picayune morass of Rand's writing style, I can't believe I had the audacity, or the stamina, to write. If you'd like to get the gist of Rand's philosophical message, read John Galt's speech. It's on the web - just Google it. It's even on Youtube, 198 minutes.

Incredibly, following Rand's example, this review is unreasonably longwinded.


The Writing:
My first assessment all those years ago of Atlas Shrugged was pretty much on the money, but I was determined to stick it out to the end. The characters are indeed one dimensional. There are lots of characters, but few character types, caricatures, really. Rand is quite verbose but not eloquent at all. The characters speak incessantly; they make speeches at one another, monologues. What little actual dialogue there is, usually seems to be in the form almost of an interrogation. The protagonists answer the questions in short, declarative statements, yes or no. The antagonists generally avoid direct answers, react in confusion and uncertainty, and generally try to deflect any blame from themselves. The protagonists are stalwart, bold, intelligent. The antagonists are sniveling, conniving, incompetent. Rand's descriptions are interminable. There is no glance, facial expression, or subtle gesture that is not worth a thousand words. But these long descriptions don't advance the story and lend little additional insight into the characters.

Ayn Rand is a horrid writer, simply dreadful. Atlas Shrugged is not a pleasure to read. If you want to know about Atlas Shrugged, read the Cliffs Notes first. I haven't read them, but presumably they encapsulate the novel and explain Rand's outlook in a much easier to handle package than she was able to do. Or, you could watch the movie that has recently been released. Though I can't imagine how anybody could make better than a B movie from this novel. Movies are almost never as good as the book, but in this case I can't see how the movie could not be better that the book. Roger Ebert's review of the movie is here: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110414/REVIEWS/110419990.

Perhaps the story wouldn't have seemed so absurd if Rand had placed it in a fictional location rather than in America. People in our culture simply don't act like that. If the story had been more pointedly promoted as sci-fi/fantasy, the necessary suspension of disbelief might have been more plausible. But still, this wouldn't have overcome the deficit of Rand's writing ability.


The Story:
Our heroine, railroad heiress Dagny Taggert, is in charge of operations at Taggert Transcontinental. Her incompetent brother James is the CEO. Dagny undertakes to rebuild a remote line that has fallen into disrepair and orders rails of a new material known as Reardon Metal, manufactured by Hank Reardon, who eventually becomes Dagny's paramour. In the meantime, the United States insidiously, but rather quickly, becomes a communist-like state whose regime works to thwart Dagny's efforts and especially those of Reardon, a self-made steel magnate, through edicts and decrees to stifle industrial production in the name of the public good.. The rest of the world apparently has already succumbed as all the countries outside the United States are peoples' states, The Peoples' State of Mexico, The Peoples' State of Norway, the Peoples State of England, and so forth and so on. One by one, the nation's great industrialists disappear, vanish overnight, abandoning their industrial facilities and in some cases sabotaging or destroying them.

Dagny and Reardon, on an extended road trip vacation explore an abandoned factory, hoping to find machinery that could be used to manufacture diesel locomotives, of which there is a shortage. They discover that the factory has been stripped of all its equipment but, in a junk pile, Dagny stumbles upon a model of a motor which she instantly recognizes as something revolutionary. It obviously would convert static electricity in the atmosphere to useable energy, but she doesn't understand how it might work. After a futile nationwide search to discover the inventor of the motor she finally hires a bright young engineer to figure it out. Over the next year or so, more industries fail as their founders disappear and there is no one who can run them. The country sinks into economic decay. As an example, workers arrive at their factory but the foreman doesn't show up. They discover that the front office is deserted. The owner, engineers, and executives have mysteriously vanished. With no one to tell the workers what to do, factory production just stops.

Dagny goes to check on the progress of the young engineer she hired, but finds that he has just left on a private plane, which she then follows in her own plane. She follows the plane to the Rocky Mountains where it disappears. She searches for it and crash-lands in a hidden valley. When she regains consciousness, she finds herself in a secret idyllic village founded by John Galt, the actual inventor of the motor she had found. All of the disappeared industrialists live there, plus a few exceptional non-industrialists, including a musical composer, a banker (the owner of the hidden valley), a judge, and three professors. There is also a female movie star, apparently the only woman besides Dagny, accomplished enough to be invited. Galt explains that all the extraordinary people there are on strike. The emblem, or logo, of this band of strikers is the dollar sign. It's even on their cigarettes. (Everybody in Atlas Shrugged smokes.) Galt tries to persuade Dagney to stay and join the strike, but after a month she leaves to rejoin her fight to save her railroad from The Looters, which is what the strikers call the regime and its supporters.

As the country sinks deeper into dysfunction, the public is notified to listen to an upcoming radio speech by Mr. Thompson, the leader of the regime. At the appointed time, the airwaves are taken over by John Galt, who gives a three hour long speech in which he reveals the strike by the Men of Ability. This speech, the culmination of the novel, is the exposition of Rand's philosophy. Of course we, the reader, have already heard much of it from the mouths of the protagonists, Galt's Men of Ability, throughout the novel. After Galt's speech, the country collapses into apocalyptic ruin. The Looters arrest Galt and try to convince him to take over as dictator because only he can save the country. He refuses. They connect him to a persuasion machine, a torture device which uses electric shock, to make him take over the country. Dagny and a team of Men of Ability arrive in the nick of time, shoot the guards, rescue Galt, and escape to the secret valley.

In the final scene, Dagny and Galt look out on the darkened and smoldering land, in anticipation of their emergence to reclaim it, as the judge writes in a document, "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade."


The Philosophy of Ayn Rand:
Rand called her philosophy Objectivism. It is, I believe, a form of existentialism, like Descarte's cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I exist. She repeats the phrase "A is A", sometimes adding phrases such as truth is true. How she extrapolated this to the tenets of Objectivism expounded in Atlas Shrugged, I'm not sure. The inventive intellect of Rand's Men of Ability would perhaps be represented in our time by the likes of the late Steve Jobs, but in the persona of greed-is-good Gordon Gekko. Gekko's famous quote (prophetically anticipated by Rand in a collection of essays entitled The Virtue of Selfishness.) could just as well have been uttered by Dagny Taggert or Hank Reardon "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures, the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind and greed, you mark my words, will not only save [Reardon Steel], but that other malfunctioning corporation called the U.S.A"

But Rand goes beyond greed is good. She believed that altruism is evil. Philanthropists like Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, though obviously accomplished in business and otherwise suitable for inclusion as Men of Ability, would have been villainized in Atlas Shrugged, not because they choose to share their wealth, but because they share it with those who don't deserve it, who haven't earned it, whose only claim is that of need.

In Clint Eastwood's movie Unforgiven, Will Munny stands over Little Bill Daggett with his shotgun in Little Bill's face. Bill pleads "I don't deserve to die like this." "Deserve's got nothing to do with it," snarls Munny before he pulls the trigger. For Ayn Rand, deserve has everything to do with it. Only through superior reasoning can man advance. Wealth is created by the trade, value for value, of the products of reason. Rand says that manual labor, by a blacksmith for instance, can only produce objects of iron, which go no further than the end consumer. A modern day blacksmith, the worker in a steel mill making railroad rails, can only do so with the help of the Men of Ability who created the production facilities in which he works. Ultimately the things a worker consumes are equivalent to the goods he creates. There is no net creation of wealth. The blacksmith or steel mill worker isn't deserving of wealth because he creates nothing through the application of reason.

Rand was famously an anti-communist. Atlas Shrugged is not about capitalism, per se, although The Looters could have crawled out from under Joe McCarthy's bed. The ideal she extols is the power of reason, which manifests itself through heavy industrial production. Her philosophy can be extrapolated to economics, sure, but in Atlas Shrugged she never mentions the usual economic concepts of supply and demand or risk and reward. Retail business and service industries play no role and are not mentioned. Aside from the occasional use of credit by her industrialist heroes to accomplish their ends, the stock market, bonds, and commodities likewise play no role. In fact, it was not wealth or capital that made the difference. There were major industrialists, represented by Dagny's brother and his cronies, who were destined from the outset of the book to end up on the wrong side of the conflict, unrelated to their wealth or capital but because they failed to reason out the truth of the situation. They whined about social responsibilities. It's clear that "the public good" is anathema to Rand. In the philosophy of John Galt expounded in his radio speech, as the personification of Rand in Atlas Shrugged, investors could be considered to be of The Looters ilk because they expect reward based on their contribution of capital, regardless of whether or not they deserve it according to their ability. Rand's philosophy expressed in Atlas Shrugged can only indirectly be extrapolated to the laissez-faire capitalism extolled by the current crop of politicians, though surely she would have endorsed it. The goal that the Atlas Shrugged Men of Ability sought was unfettered industrial production.

I offer the following as an illustration of a difference between capitalism and Rand's Objectivism. There is a scene early in the book in which copper mining heir and early secret co-conspirator with John Galt, Francisco D'Anconia develops a copper mine in The Peoples' State of Mexico. It is supposed to be tapping the greatest copper deposit ever. It attracts lots of big investors, including Dagny's brother James Taggert. D'Anconia foresaw that the mine would be nationalized by the government and when that happened it was discovered that the mine was a sham. There was no copper. The government had nothing to show for its confiscation. The investors lost everything. They complained that they had invested in an endeavor of the greatest copper mining expert in the world, who had also put large sums of his own money in the project. D'Anconio scolded them for having trusted him. If they had used their faculty of reason to investigate they would have known the mine was spurious. Therefore they didn't deserve the wealth they had risked. The mining town D'Anconia had built to house the workers was made of substandard materials, even though there had been no cost savings, which would crumble to nothingness within a few months. The cost was unimportant. The point was that the mine workers would return to the slums whence they had come, because that was what they deserved.

The following are some scraps of the tenets of Rand's Objectivism that I winnowed from Atlas Shrugged:

Rand decries the Mystics of the Spirit (religion) and the Mystics of Muscle (materialism). The only truth is truth that can be learned through objective reason. Those who argue that faith should overrule reason are an anathema to Rand. Faith has no value; it is false. Only reason is valuable.

Obligations to family, friends, community, country are false. One's only obligations are to oneself. Giving to others, even family or loved ones, on the basis of their need is wrong. Giving can only be justified if the recipient is deserving. Personal sacrifice is a sin, if the word sin can be used in the context of Rand's anti-religionism

One can infer from Atlas Shrugged that Rand supported the gold standard of currency. Galt and his followers used only gold for money because they believed in its objective value.

In his captivity, when pressed by Mr. Thompson for advice on how to save the country, Galt did recommend abolishing income tax and firing all government workers. He also said that the only functions of government should be the police, for protection against criminals, the military for protection against foreign invaders, and the courts for protection against breaches of contract.

I suspect that although Rand's Objectivism is appropriated by politicians to further their own agendas, it is probably widely misconstrued. It is sometimes called Libertarianism, which I believe it is not, though the two may share some points.


The Sequel?
The post-apocalyptic era to be created by John Galt and his Men of Ability, after Atlas Shrugged, would be an industrial quasi-feudal society. Rather than being hereditary, the succession of the aristocracy would be based on the ability of contenders to apply their reasoning to the processes of production, especially in heavy industry. Henry Ford, the father of the assembly line, would be an ideal role model for those who would ascend to power. The ability of an individual would be measured, through the contest of competition, by the usefulness, durability, and efficiency of production of his product - a trial by industrial combat. In the assessment of value, utility would rule - there would be little value placed on artistry or craftsmanship. Hard work and diligence of labor would have little bearing. Loyalty, familial love, religion, and philanthropy would be devalued, if not quashed.

 

Adenda

According to the Ayn Rand Institute, Ayn Rand pronounced her first name "ine," as in mine or fine.

The following is excerpted from an article in The Seattle Times published at the same time that I posted this review. The article focused primarily on grants to universities, including free copies of Atlas Shrugged, for the teaching of Ayn Rand's views:

Ayn Rand, economic muse to Ryan, an unlikely hero for conservatives

An outspoken atheist, supporter of abortion rights and adulteress, she can seem an unlikely hero for conservatives, at least those most concerned with social issues. Her views on unfettered free markets, limited government and personal responsibility, though, -- and the way she expressed them -- have always been powerful stuff.

A consistent charge by Rand critics is that her work simply isn't very good, and that it has a reputation for prompting teenage infatuations that quickly wane.

Guilford College philosophy professor Richard Zweigenhaft said last week that he had one of those teen flings with Rand's fiction. It's fine, he said, for Guilford to teach "Atlas Shrugged" as long as it's the faculty's decision. But from a practical standpoint, he said, there isn't enough important material in the nearly 1,200-page tome to make teaching all of it worthwhile.

Rand offers ample material for attacks and spin against a candidate like Ryan, who professes admiration for her views on economics and limited government, which her philosophy binds tightly to a rejection of religion. Also, her dismissal of altruism is easy to portray as harsh.

Then there are her personal failings, including a lengthy affair with an associate 25 years younger and an admiring infatuation with a murderer who had dismembered a 12-year-old girl.

A host of stories, postings and tweets since Ryan's ascension to the GOP ticket link him with all of Rand's views -- including some he clearly doesn't hold, such as her firm atheism (religion, she wrote, is "a short-circuit destroying the mind") and support for abortion.

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