Missing the Point of Atlas Shrugged

Much has been made of Ayn Rand's opus of late, Atlas Shrugged, and its relevance to our current economic crisis.

To condense a thousand page novel into a lede: As the U.S. worsens, captains of industry disappear, creating a secret utopian community of their own led by John Galt, waiting to return into society until it crumbles so badly without them, the lights of New York go dark.

To condense a thousand page allegory on Objectivism into a rationale: Some people are just geniuses, and they should be left alone to produce, because their ingenuity is what allows society to flourish. Intrusion into their process is oppression.

The inherent problem of literature is that often times citing it is in itself an appearance of wisdom, superior reasoning, of being right. And as grandiose as the grunting of "Going Galt" by conservatives has been, their many detractors have disparaged an otherwise good novel.

As long-winded as the book is, it has a cool story, and through bringing the reader into the minds of leading industrialists, it captivates the imagination and lets us fantasize about the prestige, power, and ability of being a genius in the world that Ayn Rand divines from a familiar United States in the middle of the last century.

In the heightened reality of her universe, there are the geniuses, whose innovations benefit all of us eventually, and there are the looters (haters), untalented bureaucrats who restrain the geniuses through repetitive mandates requiring their successes be shared with the government to make up for its lack of innovation. The role of the government in her book is as cartoonish as her antagonists.

It is a thousand-paged stacked deck. Ayn Rand's portrait of America is as rarefied as Norman Rockwell's.

The danger is that through reading this novel, many people become so empathetic to the heroic geniuses that they begin to believe that they are themselves geniuses. (After all, they just got through a preachy thousand-page book.)

HINT: If you needed this book to realize you are a genius, you are not a genius.

Thus, the empty threat of defection to a non-existent utopia is proffered by people who would not be eligible for said utopia.

To brag of being Galt-ian, you may as well brag about being Vulcan. Both offer some practical wisdom from their respective fictitious worlds -- but why not wear funny ears while you're at it?

There is another inherent flaw with the principle that an unencumbered genius will perform for the betterment of society. That same naivete fed Alan Greenspan, star of Ayn Rand's salon of sophists, who as Fed Chief reasoned that traders and corporations would not put out flawed products, funds or services, because to do so would obviously be of detriment to their future sustainability. The Free Market would thus be a noble marketplace where competition keeps its players serving the consumers.

This blind trust in some gentlemen's code that does not exist allowed the rampant run up of short-sighted scroungers to swindle millions of Americans through predatory lending, inflated mortgage securities, Enron, Big Pharma, and the insidious hold the oil industry has on our government and society.

Now, even Alan Greenspan is calling for nationalizing banks. Poor Ayn must be spinning in her solid gold sarcophagus.

Her life was like her lordly literature. Born in St. Petersburg, her family was uprooted by the Russian revolution of 1917 and her father's business seized by looters. (I think it would behoove many of the people crying out about socialism that Ayn Rand's idea of socialism is the real deal, when Lenin was leading mobs in the streets and Bolsheviks were taking your stuff away from you.) At 21, she came to America on a visa to visit relatives, never to return to Russia. (Anti-Immigration zealots who revere Ayn Rand, take note, you champion an illegal Russian immigrant, who was also a devout atheist.)

On her second day in Los Angeles, she was discovered by Hollywood titan Cecil B. DeMille, who saw her peering through the gates of a studio lot, and then hired her to become an extra and eventually a script reader (no doubt because he recognized her true genius at 21). She met her future movie star husband on the lot a week later.

While married, she famously had an open affair with her protege, even naming an heroic character after him in Atlas Shrugged. This heir apparent to Objectivism, Nathaniel Branden, was also married, and in their erudite circle of being objective to what Ayn Rand wanted, Branden's wife and Rand's husband had to be cool with them boning.

But when Ayn Rand found out that her boy toy was objectively screwing a young actress acolyte of theirs, she went ballistic, ostracizing him from the institute he had built for her, and bashing him in their literary journals without acknowledgment of their affair (actually pre-dating MySpace).

While a thinker cannot always be held to the ideals they author as inspiration to others, Ayn Rand in particular does not make a good role model. Actually, she was kind of a bitch. (I only dare say that because she's dead and can't get me.) When she died, her body was displayed next to a huge floral arrangement of the dollar sign, a symbol she lauded as the ultimate icon for the self.

As extreme as it might sound to worship a symbol of currency, self-empowerment and self-enrichment are hardly enemies of the American character. The individual's freedom is what our renegade country was founded on, and there is no threat to an American's rights (not counting the Bush years). There are in fact industries devoted to selling such success through books far easier to read than Atlas Shrugged. The lofty ideal of rational self-interest challenges the principle of personal responsibility, and lays the groundwork to rationalize anything.

This argument from a senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute sets the record straight on the recent rampant citing of Atlas Shrugged.

"If we are our brother's keeper, as Obama declares (echoing the conventional wisdom) -- if your moral duty is to serve your neighbor and anyone else who is in need, then you don't have the moral right to pursue your own life and happiness."

Astonishingly, one actually can have compassion for other people and not thereby be enslaved.

The reference point for such a defensive assault on compunction is from an individual who did not want to feel culpable of compassion, and so has constructed a critique of others who are.

Any belief system can be used to justify one's means -- but Ayn Rand's Objectivism is about justifying one's means.

Follow John Wellington Ennis on Twitter: www.twitter.com/johnennis

Comments

[JSValliant]

The title of this article is most appropriate as it misses the point of "Atlas Shrugged" entirely. And in so many ways...

One example will do.

After quoting Mr. Brook from ARI on "moral duty," you write, "Astonishingly, one actually can have compassion for other people and not thereby be enslaved."

I know Mr. Brook. He's compassionate, and, like Rand, he does not think that his compassion has "enslaved" him. He values it. That Rand valued compassion is well documented. Disagree all you like, but don't invent straw-men to knock over.

See, that's a real instance of "stacking the deck."

The only "astonishing" thing is how much of Rand's actual thought seems to have flown by you without notice. Or, is this worn-out and false Boogyman merely being hawked for the consumption of others?

And, equally tired are the empty if seemingly obligatory personal attacks on Rand's fans and Rand herself. Just once, out of all the dozens and dozens of Rand's admirers whom I've met, I'd like to meet one who actually learned that she was a genius from reading Rand. Just one who thinks himself a genius would do, I guess, but still it's an empty set. (I'll be darned!)

Nope, it's usually only Rand's genius that the honest reader finds.

[MVW2009]

And the take away, I think, is that the ability of an individual is the individual's property. If an individual wishes to squander it, he or she can. If the indvidual wishes to exploit it for profit, he or she can do that as well. But there is something wrong in rewarding incompetence and penalizing competence not only for the "elite industrialists" but also for the remainder of society. And that ought to make perfect sense. Without financial incentives and the right to own the benefits of one's labour, why do posters think they would be able to sip their lattes while posting comments trashing the system on a website that uses billions/trillions of dollars wortth of infrastructure to communicate instantaneously around the world? The wealth that has been created out of nothing by the Microsofts and the Apples and the Intels of the world benefits everyone, and it is simply silly to pretend those who sunk their intelligence and time and effort into these endeavours are greedy for wanting the largest chunk of the benefits they can bargain for.

[MVW2009]

Second, those who are most genuinely productive DO deserve the right to be filthy stinking rich, and if they want to giove the money to charity (a la Bill Gates) then fine, but it should be their right to alienate their property as they see fit. "Greed" is only bad where it involves efforts to expropriate wealth from others rather than create it by adding value to others and receiving payment for that value creation. Otherwise, it is not only not bad (to use a doubler negative), but the entire underpinning of everything we have (including social services). Her point that without people undertaking this work to entirch themselves we would have no money to help the poor and the sick and the "moochers" is entirely correct.


As for the rest, I didn't take this book to deal only with the "elite industrialists", but really every person who adds unique value to the economy and society. The engineers and the scientists were clearly within this group the author describes, including the protagonist who was a self-made engineer of no background to speak of.

[MVW2009]

Do I think that her view of morality is correct, no. Well, not entirely. But there are a number of grains of truth in this (as there are in most things). First, exproporiating the resources of another person IS wrong. Not absolutely wrong (because there are needs within society that warrant committing this wrong), but wrong. Until the middle of April or May or June or whatever ("Tax Freedom Day"), every single day you go to work you get paid nothing - the government exporpriates the entire value of that labour and gives it to other people. You can't make that day come sooner by working harder, because if you take a job thatmakes more money or work more hours, you pay more taxes. And this has implications for what people do, how hard they work, and the rest (basic economics we don't need to get into).

[MVW2009]

And as for the look at Allan Greenspan thing, I would think people here know that this whole mess was created, in (lagre) part, as a result of government intervention with the community reinvestment act and forcing banks to make loans to people who should not have received them in the name of "fairness". Of course, because of the sway these banks had, they managed to dump these losing assets onto quasi-public companies and shift them around to others to bear these losses. Actually rather similar to what was described in the book if you actually think about it.

As for the criticisms of its content, I'm not all the way through it, but I get where it is going. And with a background in economcis and in antitrust law, I take her point. Do I think that what she proposes will work? No, not really (especially on the antitrust front).

[MVW2009]

I must admit, I don't fully understand what the problem is. I am reading through this book now, actually, and find it to be pretty good.

Is it badly written? Sure, but so are many (most) fictional philosophy type books (think Uncle Tom's Cabin or Brave New World).

Are the characters two-dimensional? Sure, but see above.

But none of that has anything to do with the message - for these types of books, the story is just a vehicle to deliver the message. And the message, as is the case in many of these message books, is extreme, in that it unabashedly adopts a view to push its premise, and then pushes it as far as it can go.

As for the "judge the book by its readership" nonsense, in my experience most juveniles that want to play intellectuals gravitate towards more left wing philosophies, so I don't think that argument takes detractors very far.

[jsgaetano]

Ayn Rand is perhaps one of the worst overhyped writers of our time. Besides, perhaps, L Ron Hubbard... and ironically enough, both of them founded cults.

[bonze]

It's really sad when someone cannot distinguish between a clique and a cult.

To see a reasoned refutation on this point, Google "Is Objectivism a Cult?" by Jim Peron.

[miles120]

I'd like to throw out a reading suggestion for everyone that came from Jason Linkins last year. Hyman Minsky's "Stabilizing An Unstable Economy" is a brilliant work that explains how those responsible for the markets can act to spoil them. He demonstrates how stable yet unregulated markets naturally lead to speculation and collapse. It's both timely and timeless, and everyone should take the time to familiarize themselves with it.

Minsky has made quite a comeback in the past year, but I'd still like to suggest that HE is the one who should be in the national conversation right now, not Ayn Rand.

[RoseBlue]

Thanks for summing up so nicely as to why, like a lot of teenagers, I was drawn in by her writings, but her overall philosophy just didn’t settle well over the years. I also remember even way back then I was stuck by such an utter lack of concern or stewardship in any of her characters for the environment. The world’s resources were just there for the plunder. But I guess that was more a characteristic of the times. The other thing about Atlas Shrugged was John Galt’s god-awful, interminable speech at the end. Never did get through it! I remember a lot of Rand’s droning on was in italics. You could just skip over a lot of it, spare yourself the lecture, and not miss much. One criticism I have though with this article: Rand’s sex life really doesn’t have anything to do with the merit of her writings. I think it’s a little bit of a cheap shot to go there.

[Scotteo123]

My only comment to this post as well as many of the others, is that so many are complaining that the characters are "cardboard" or "cartoonish", but then they "cant get through" or "skip over" the droning in italics.

The characters all represent ideals, clearly (which can be called cardboard/cartoonish), and the italics explain the ideals in the next level of detail (which is complicated and attempts to cover all bases). The ability for the reader to chose for himself... Apropos?

The inevitability of writing a novel with the purpose of making a clear point is that those that disagree with the point will criticise the writing and the clarity.

[CharlieMarlowe]

But the point is that the ideals themselves cartoonish and cardboard, although I prefer to call them two-dimensional.

[flanardiente]

The one thing that annoys me about Ms Rand is that she was a terrible writer. Her characters are flat and cartoonish, her heroes and heroines are impossibly Nordic, her villains are cowardly bureaucrats with funny names, and the dialog is preachy and nowhere near as sophisticated as the average TV sitcom. One writer who often dealt with the same themes as Rand was Robert Heinlein, the difference being that he was a very good (some would say great) writer, whose characters had some dimension and whose dialog flowed naturally, like real people really talking. OK, he tended toward self-parody in the end, probably a result of editors giving him a pass, but he wrote a great many books that dealt with the tensions between society and the individual. Try Beyond This Horizon, Time Enough for Love, Farnham's Freehold, and Starship Troopers (nothing like the movie, thank God!),

[andycan]

AYN RAND'S RAVINGS

Ayn Rand's ravings against the state have unfortunately for all of us been an inspiration to neocons.

It's an ideology tailormade for millionaires who at all costs don't want to pay taxes - no wonder that her greatest admirer is the genius Alan Greenspan who admitted he didn't have a clue about the cause of the fiancial bubble and how it brought down the world economy. In her time Ayn Rand was seen as kind of out-to-lunch - but with neocon conniving and brainwashing she became dignified with the title of philosopher : the Internet is full of PR for this rather mediocre writer.

I would call Ayn Rand's world view a Mcphilosophy, ideally suited for neocon blather. (with noxious consequences)

[Lochmon]

I read this hours ago, wanting to comment but knowing I would just be facetious... something about the heroine of "Atlas Shrugged" being raped by Galt early in the novel... but it's OK because she could tell he had the same moral compass as her own... it would have led to some strained comparison with the movie "Observe and Report". It wouldn't have worked very well.

Instead, I would like to point out the sheer idiocy of the entire premise of "Atlas Shrugged".

I mean, I'm a liberal, or progressive, whatever. Philosophically, I'm very contrary to what Ayn Rand describes as her archetype characters. (And yeah, I was another late-teen reader and then-admirer of this book.)

I don't want geniuses slaving for me. (I'm productive and pay my own way.) I want them creating wonderful new stuff. I want them to get rich from their ideas. I want them to pay fair share of taxes... they didn't start from scratch, they stand on the shoulders of prior giants. Hank Rearden can invent a new metal, and personally might produce hundreds of pounds per year, but he cannot make the thousands of tons needed, not without a lot of help from others.

That's the crux of it. Ounces of genius versus tons of that genius applied in the real world. Either there's a team effort, or there's tyranny. Rand's novel, in the end, is a caricature that has little or nothing to do with the real world.

[bonze]

I'd like to comment on the book in the ad link above the comment section, "Are Capitalism, Libertarianism, and Objectivism Religions? YES!" by Albert Ellis. As an example of Ellis' argument:

"Libertarianism is largely the same as objectivism except that the libertarians are even more deluded than objectivists: libertarians are essentially anarchists who believe in no government at all. Since the capitalism espoused by libertarians, (The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Financial Times, etc.) is the extreme, religious capitalism of Rand, I have include [sic] them for they all are a threat to the [sic] sanity and economic prosperity in the world today. For the sake of brevity, I use only the term “objectivism” in this text to largely cover all three: objectivism, libertarianism, and lassie-faire [sic] capitalism."

Wow! What percentage of right-wing libertarians identify themselves as anarcho-capitalists? Maybe 1% in my experience... but Dr. Ellis simply asserts "libertarians ... believe in no government at all." The WSJ, The Economist, FT... libertarians? Not in this universe! And to top this mess off, "for the sake of brevity" Ellis will happily apply the term "Objectivism" (and contingent beliefs) to a diverse range of people advocating individualist approaches to social organization (where "Objectivists" comprise, oh, maybe .00000000001% of the total).

Rand had a problem with assuming her beliefs were unfailingly correct. Throughout this book, Ellis repeatly commits exactly the same mistake.

[SILVANUS]

Deifying books and authors got us into trouble a long time ago and has wound up killing quite a few, even as it contained some great, instructive stuff.

What if people are living and breathing by Stephen King's CARRIE five hundred years from now just because some Mad Max feral boy finds it and claims it as his own and makes a shrine to Carrie White, and for some reason, people being starved for direction, believe him and take over Idaho and start a church to Carrie?

Is that any weirder than citing Leviticus or building shrines to Rand? I liked the film adpatation of Fountainhead (so over the top), and enjoyed her novel, Anthem, but it was all to 'rammed down your throat' to qualify as lasting lit. Good writing, yes. As another bible, NO.

[realpolitic]

I wonder how Rand would explain the rise of George W. Bush who was certainly no genius, but rose through name recognition alone. He failed in every business adventure he ever had, but always came out financially ahead by the generousity of his daddy's friends.

[Susanfrom29]

He would be considered one of the cartoonish government bureaucrats who appropriated the wealth of others to give it to his cronies.

[realpolitic]

Except Bush was never a bureaucrat who actually had to work for a living. He rose straight through to the top on name recognition alone, nothing to do with talent. It is more like an American aristocracy than Rand's idea of the most talented rising to the top to gaze down on the rest of us from Mt. Olmypus.