Atlas Shrugged
Over the Easter weekend I spent some quality time with a rather large novel: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Originally published in 1957 the author considered this her opus to Objectivism. The book contains lots of great characters, a decent plot line, and tons of philosophy. I want to detail some of the lessons I’ve learned from it.
First some background. It is set in a dystopian United States which is suffering some form of recession. The main conflict is between the industrial leaders of production(profiteers) and the political shamans of “the public good”, also referred to as the looters. The looters are winning. They are eating production faster than it can be produced. They rack up the bills and then when they run out of interest to live off they start bending the rules to siphon the profits of the industrialists. It’s similar to what is happening in the real world, except the producers are still ahead and will probably remain ahead. Mostly because in the real world they end up being more intelligent than the looters and because we haven’t run out of key resources yet. In the book a group of great minds decide to withdraw from producing in the looters world and to convince every other great productive mind to also withdraw. This of course escalates the collapse of the economy, as the looters have less and less prey to suck profits from, and the people lack competent leadership.
Plot aside, the book contains many long solo speeches by the leaders of the withdrawal. There is one towards the end that is a 3-hour radio address that stretches 57 pages. Each speech contains positions about values, moral codes, love, or the backwardness of society. These include themes like: the strong are punished by the weak for their virtue; and the productive rich are plundered by the poor and unproductive for their wealth. The path of freedom is held up at gunpoint and told to bow before the need of the “public good”.
Society had become lost due to enslaving their minds rather than elevating them. The looters live by a code that only listens to their hearts, even if their mind tries to show them the falsehood of their direction. Thus they expect to live without earning their way. They expect justice and the media to get in line or they threaten to discard them. They expect everyone to give to their brothers without thought for themselves and on and on (literally) 
This flowchart typifies the existence of a low level looter dealing with everything as it breaks down:
Having hit an emotional low point in my life, this book was very good for me. It encouraged me to reevaluate how I give myself away without standing up for the value I represent. It displayed how emotions are a guide to true value, but are not good for creative strategy and planning. Another example the book gave me is in how to take pride in what I accomplish, not the kind where one betters someone through competition, but in pure value creation. It displayed how to take pleasure in producing for my own sake and to profit from the pleasure of others who use my product. To do otherwise is to submit to being raped by a society, who will forever demand more of me than I can give.
Like many others, I have adopted the fears of my father and, in my opinion, I have followed this path for too long. I’ve been afraid of success and have thwarted myself by not working as hard as I could. It drives me to be distracted rather than focused and to avoid the most pertinent work in front of me. I’ve also learned that my fear of success from another angle is fear of failure. In the last few years I had taken failure as if it were success, and while it is important to go through failures to reach success, it needs to be learned from and tossed aside. I was taking pride in my failure and while I learned from it, I wasn’t tossing it aside and moving forward properly. Now with nothing left to lose and my passion still before me, I see the truth. This book helped me see how to pour my love into producing the product that I know will give me great satisfaction first and sharing it with the world second. Now I just need to practice what I preach and work really, really hard to make it great. I think I’m much better prepared to do that now.
Thanks for reading!
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Hmm. We debated this a bit on Twitter, but I’m curious where you stand on the various “themes” you outline:
“These include themes like: the strong are punished by the weak for their virtue; and the productive rich are plundered by the poor and unproductive for their wealth. The path of freedom is held up at gunpoint and told to bow before the need of the “public good”.”
This is what I mean by “conservative claptrap.” The “productive rich” are not in that position merely because they work harder than the “lazy” looters. There are also structural reasons for their privilege (perhaps they’re men; perhaps they’re white; perhaps they’re born into a bourgeois class that affords them opportunities for education, work experience, investment; etc). The way Atlas Shrugged suggests that the impoverished deserve to be impoverished is f*cked up, in my opinion.
None of which negates the emotional impact the book may have had with you at this very moment in your life.
~G.
I saw no suggestion that the impoverished deserve to be impoverished. The “productive rich” are the ones who do work hard. The unproductive rich were the absolute villains of everyone, especially the impoverished. They are the ones taxing everyone and living off the interest of other peoples work.
Thanks for your comment and your insight. It’s good to argue with you again. I miss that.
Cheers,
s
Cool! It’s becoming a movie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6W07bFa4TzM&
Contrary to so much of the disinformation out there about her, it isn’t the case that Ayn Rand was against charity. She was personally charitable to her friends and donated to help Israel defend itself. In her own words: “My views on charity are very simple. I do not consider it a major virtue and, above all, I do not consider it a moral duty. There is nothing wrong in helping other people, if and when they are worthy of the help and you can afford to help them. I regard charity as a marginal issue. What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary virtue.”
Her point was that you have to have a healthy non-charitable sector in order to be able to provide charity, and that economic freedom (and nothing else) provides that health. How much can one donate if one is starving or dies at age 35, as before technology one did.
Government welfare is a perversion of charity because it is ill-managed and cripples the productive sector over time. Look at the tens of trillions in unfunded liabilities that are going to cripple our economy; and it’s just going to get worse unless we get the system right.
One part of the foolishness of the recent debates about Rand is the idea that agreeing with Rand’s prediction and diagnoses in “Atlas Shrugged” – the accuracy of which has been demonstrated in the last few years to a nicety – somehow magically commits one to agreement with her total philosophy. Would this argument be extended to an atheist leftist who recommends Tolstoy or Victor Hugo?
The other part is a specific misrepresentation of Christianity. Christianity is not a pro-Statism religion; indeed, given who killed their Savior, it tends to the anti-State. (This is something the left has not yet dealt with.) Nowhere in the Bible does it say that wealth should be expropriated and redistributed by the dubious means of government structures; it speaks of personal and *voluntary* charity. One might add, looking at the horrific debt and unfunded liabilities situation that the U.S. is in right now, that the Bible and Jesus were wise in staying away from government panaceas.
This entire kabuki charade is in bad faith. The Bible does not advocate any Progressive notions of “economic justice.” The progressives who have suddenly discovered religion and its necessary role in politics – after thirty decades and more of stridently and rightly insisting it must be kept out of politics – are not sincere. After this temporary rhetorical bubble is over, they will resume their previous, also ad-hoc, declarations.
As for the “sociopath” accusation, this is what comes of copying attack website garbage. The whole thing rests upon one author – Michael Prescott’s – highly selective excerpting and chopping up of a private [i.e., thinking out loud without clarifications ] journal written when Rand was barely out of her teens, fresh from the blood bath of 1920s Soviet Russia – and still made it very clear that her read on the personalities of the observers showed that they were not appalled by Hickman’s crime – she said there had been far worse, without the same spectacle of glee – but by his flamboyant and mocking defiance of society. She – who was writing about a *legally innocent man* at the time of the trial – even called him a monster, a pervert, a repulsive and purposeless criminal. Enough with the disinformation and – yes – Satanizing of Ayn Rand.
interesting comment. thanks for adding your impression on Ayn Rand. Did you like Atlas Shrugged?