Rereading “Atlas Shrugged”

Books and Media John Walker's Reading List
,
13

I can understand that: Rand was explicitly an atheist (although not anywhere as spiteful and virulent as the “new atheists” of recent decades) and opposed to altruism, which many Christians endorse. You get the sense from her writing, however, that she considered the secular state far more of an enemy than religion, although in Galt’s speech near the end of Atlas Shrugged he denounced both self-sacrifice to a “mystic God” (religion) and “the people” (state).

She pushed all of their buttons. Rand had a talent, probably not equaled until Tom Wolfe came on the scene, of distilling the absurdity and pretentiousness of “public intellectuals” and holding them up to hilarious scorn. She detested and mocked everything they exalted: modern art, literature, music, and architecture. She wrote books with heroes and villains, and they sold in the millions, while the books that made the front page of the New York Review were remaindered in their first printing of 5000. An emigré from the Soviet Union, she was a stalwart anti-Communist in the Red Hollywood of the 1930s and 1940s, and had written an anti-Soviet novel, We the Living.

The denunciation and excommunication of Ayn Rand and her supporters (who, at the time, included Alan Greenspan) by National Review, including the notorious review of Atlas Shrugged by Whittaker Chambers in the 1957-12-28 issue, “Big Sister Is Watching You”, foretold the intellectual collapse of that magazine and its assimilation into the Imperial Ministry of Truth more than half a century later. “Defeat with dignity” appeared to be, even then, preferable to intransigent opposition to evil.

7 Likes
14

Wow, I can’t believe it, this reminds me of the “stakeholder capitalism” we keep hearing about now—also “benefit corporations” business corps founded for prettty much the purpose of losing money!
But in a way this is encouraging, that we’ve been here before and we got out of it. So maybe we will get back to what I learned in law school: a business Corp has one purpose only: to make money for its shareholders.

You’re right, I’m remembering more now, my uninformed argument had to do with altruism v. Individualism.

Anyway I can hardly put this book down.

5 Likes
15

You know that something is a really bad idea when they have to keep renaming it every few years because the last name has fallen into disrepute and become a term of derision. Now they’re calling it “ESG investing”, although that one may be scrolling off the screen since in recent weeks the ESGurus have decided that weapon manufacturers fall within their acceptable purview of investments.

6 Likes
16

Ayn Rand, like many legal immigrants to the U.S.A, understood the fundamentals of capitalism better than most Americans. The fact that she came from entrepreneurial parents, in St. Petersburg (aka Petrograd, aka Leningrad) within earshot of the 1917 October Revolution gave her unique insight into the real life effects of Socialism, life in the Union of Unions, the Soviet Union was not quite as the New York Times reported (some things never change). When young Rand saw the signs of this same system in the U.S.A. in the 40s and 50s, her response in her life works is a compelling narrative for the restoration of founding principals of the U.S.A., with a feminist twist.

Consider also reading WE THE LIVING, which is likely to have been the closest to an autobiography that she had written.

That book shows what it is like growing up in socialist Russia, and it translates well to today’s New York City, Chicago, or San Francisco (but not most of the producing areas of the U.S.A which is why there is still hope we can turn it around)!

5 Likes
17

…”From the apprehensive present , from a future packed
With unknown dangers, monstrous,terrible and new,
Let us turn for comfort to this simple fact:
We have been in trouble before, and we came through! “

—Edna St Vincent Millay, from “Thanksgiving 1950”.

2 Likes
18

All the before times did not include Ruinous Dept. It’s the ruinous dept that will undo us. Wish it weren’t so .

3 Likes
19

Survival bias?

1 Like
20

“When a man thinks he’s good, thats when he’s rotten. Pride is the worst of all sins, no matter what he’s done.

“But if a man knows that what he has done is good?

“”Then he ought to aplogize for it.

“To wnom?

“To those who haven’t done it.”

—from “Atlas Shrugged”

Now —doesnt that oerfectly sum up Leftism, their hatred for “America First” and MAGA?
And see, I’m totes chuffed by this! We have been here before, and we got OUT of it!!

4 Likes
21

Cue B. Hussein: “You didnt build that.”

4 Likes
22

Maybe I should push that estimate up a couple of ticks.

https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1510437869688537088

Margrethe “Cuffie” Vestager, is “Commissioner for Competition” of the “European Union”. Says Wikipedia, “Vestager has been a professional politician since the age of 21 …” and “She studied at the University of Copenhagen, graduating in 1993 with a degree in Economics.” She was born in 1968, and so was around age 25 when she received her degree in “economics”, which would be four years after becoming a “professional politician”. There is no mention of any employment in the productive sector of the economy. I guess that’s how you become a “competition” commissar in the EU.

Standing up (shivering) against Russian aggression with cold showers. Let’s move the dial up to 72%.

11 Likes
23

I have almost finished. I cant remember the last time i read like this, falling into a novel—i can smell the mills, hear the shriek of the wheels on the rails. It reminds me of when i discovered Thomas Wolfe at 15.
Right now im reading Galt’s speech,
Last week my BMD watched the 3 part movie. (He didnt want me to watch since he has a thing about knowing the ending woukd spoil reading the book— so i didnt get in on it till part 3.) I’ll be curious to see if the book ends the same way. I tbought the atmosphere of the movie was perfect. But in the movie, everybody has cell phones, and there are cameos by Hannity and Glen Beck!
There are so many people whom i am urging, gently, without unleashing my now-fanatic enthusiasm, to read this book—especially men. My young friends who are struggling to be able to assert tbeir talents, my own peers who are incredulously witnessing the takeover of the Jim Taggarts —“You didnt build that. Why, you oughta apologize!” I know they wont, most of them arent novel readers. And THIS is one mother of a novel! I’m afraid we’re ALL out of practice at reading books like this one, i know i was.

6 Likes
24

I think there are an additional 5% points toward final implosion found in the inability of either a supreme court (sic) nominee or the administration to define the word “woman”. We are surely near a discontinuity in civil life.

6 Likes
25

Right. Notning matters about Jackson except that she is black amd she’s a woman, even though race and gender are just social constructs, they arent real, but still they are THE most important things about a person, even a person who doesnt know what one or either of them means.
Simple, really. “Simple” as in “moronic”.

7 Likes
26

Maybe. If there is one thing we can learn from the past, it is that the future is hard to predict. But if people who have really looked into it are correct, it may take less than 30 years to reach the AI and nanotech singularity. It’s not the least bit clear that humans, as we know them, will exist on the far side of that point in history. I can make a case either way and have done so.

3 Likes
27

Finished it.
Like with all absorbing novels, there’s a feeling of being thrown off a train when they end. I’ve been riding the rails of this book for weeks now. I feel like Eddie feels: “Don’t let it go!”
But beyond that, I thought of two other stories of the world being destroyed and reborn.
Are Galt and Dagny Deucalion and Pyrrha? They will be able to re-people the Earth using only the planet’s own raw materials, like that mythical couple, throwing rocks over their shoulders as they walk, rocks which become men and women?
Because, although there is one mother in Galt’s Gulch, a nod to the idea that raising children can be a worthy objective goal, NONE of these Titans of industry: Hank, Dagny, John, Ragnar, Ellis—have reproduced.
And what if they did? Both Alexander and Napoleon had sons, but neither of them ever approached the stature of their world-devouring sires.
I also thought of Gore Vidal’s novel “Kalki” (spoiler alert, if you ‘d rather read it) in which a few people engineer the demise of the rest of humanity. They have preserved only one “breeding pair” and of course have very carefully vetted the man and the woman to be sure their respective reproductive systems are functional. But it turns out that, even though the two of them, who were supposed to re-engender the human race, are individually fertile, they just…cannot breed with each other. Some kinda chromosomal incompatibility.
Will these glorious and indestructible men of steel in whose company I’ve spent the last few weeks be able to repossess and rebuild the world they’ve destroyed? (Because surely, outside Galt’s Gulch, people are dying in droves from starvation, cold, violence when “the motor of the world” sputters out.)
Or was their rôle after all, as in “Kalki”, simply to be the avatars of Siva, the Destroyers who bring the present age of the world to an end?

7 Likes
28

Okay, heehee, I think I woke up too early this morning…I can’t stop imagining some vaguely— or maybe explicitly —pornographic “fan fiction”, in which Dagny, either willingly in satisfaction of her own gargantuan sexual appetite, or enslaved to the will of the Titans, has to bear children to Copper, Steel, Oil, Electricity, and Music (that’s D’Anconia, Rearden,Wyatt, Galt and Halley…I mean really, have you seen what “fans” are doing to JK Rowling’s characters these days? What Marvel has done to Thor and Loki? No, no, Hypatia, that way madness lies…I will be ok, really….

2 Likes
29

This is usually the consequence of the statistical phenomenon known as “regression to the mean”. To the extent that the attributes that make one a successful creator in the mould of the the heroes and heroine of Atlas Shrugged are heritable, they may pass on some of those properties to their progeny, but given the random shuffling of genes, it’s unlikely that even the children of two extreme outliers will be as far from the mean as their parents. And that’s before considering all of the myriad other factors that contribute to development of a child.

Ayn Rand doesn’t seem to have much to say about the question of heridity/nature/nurture in her novels. Many of the heroes are self-made (Galt, Rearden, Danneskjöld), but others (d’Anconia, Dagny Taggart) are scions of families with generations of success. However, heredity and upbringing in a family of achievers is no guarantee of carrying on the tradition, as James Taggart illustrates.

My interpretation of the childlessness of the principal characters is two-fold. First, many people who are completely absorbed in the life of the mind and building new things in the real world simply do not have the time, or choose not to allocate the time, to raise children as responsibly as they would undertake any other long-term project. As it would be immoral and irresponsible to abandon a child to the depraved upbringing of government schools and peer culture, and they cannot undertake the job themselves or trust others to do it to their satisfaction, they opt out. Second, if one’s assessment of the institutions and culture is as a minefield bent on corrupting the young, which becomes ever harder to evade by the year (Disney, anyone?), they may make the decision that bringing children into a world where those trends are accelerating is unwise.

In the post-collapse world, one would expect a revival of optimism among young couples that their children could expect better lives than their parents would motivate them to raise the next generation, confident they would have the opportunity to make the most of their talents and not be punished for success. Take away that optimism and tax away the ability to raise and educate independent offspring, and watch the fertility rate plummet below replacement as it has in every country which is on the trajectory illustrated by Atlas Shrugged.

Will these glorious and indestructible men of steel in whose company I’ve spent the last few weeks be able to repossess and rebuild the world they’ve destroyed?

We’ll never know. But if they only succeed in bringing down the destructive philosophies and institutions that destroyed what was once the most optimistic, creative, and productive society in history and restore the fundamentals that existed from 1789 through 1912, there may be many others whose “animal spirits” will revive and not only create art, science, industry, and wealth in great profusion, but also generations to follow them.

8 Likes
30

No time for children, and
dont want to bring them into a terrible world.
Yes I think a lot of intelligent people feel that way. (And a lot of Un-intelligent ones, like the climatistas. )
And as we both said, being personally great is no guarantee you’ll engender a great child, nor is being a despicable wastrel any predictor of whether or not your issue will be great. It’s certainly a problem that plagued hereditary monarchies.

All undeniably true but ….we as individuals just don’t have that much time here in this still-glorious world. Issue is it for us in the way of immortality, although it’s an arrow in the dark. I reckon it’s like the Buddha said about children: pity those who have them; pity those who don’t.

8 Likes
31

It has been said of Ayn Rand’s fiction, as I noted in comment #6 above, “Ayn Rand’s heroes are fake, but her villains are real”. Now Charles Murray observes that while he once thought the villains in Atlas Shrugged were “overdrawn”, listening to today’s crop of looters and grifters increasingly brings to mind those villains.

murray_2023-05-07

That’s a thought that’s entered my mind more than once watching the Forbes Breaking News YouTube channel clips of Biden administration minions and their “intellectual” supporters being grilled by the few Republicans with the awareness and fortitude to hold them to account. Those testifying, shifty-eyed evasion by condescending dismissal, come across as the very embodiment of Tinky Holloway, Cuffy Meigs, and Wesley Mouch.

10 Likes
32

Here is an example of testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee by a witness of which I doubt the fertile imagination of Any Rand could have conceived. This is Texas senator John Cornyn questioning University of California “Law Professor” Khiara Bridges, who also has a Ph.D. in “anthropology” from Columbia University, on the racial disparity in abortion rate for black and non-black women. (Bridges’ testimony occupies only the first 2:30 of the video.)

Bridges, in addition to linking just about everything to “systemic racism” corrects Cornyn’s use of the word “woman” to “person with a capacity for pregnancy”, repeating the phrase like a parrot that has just learned it and won’t shut up.

This then motivates Missouri senator Josh Hawley to dig deeper into the definition of “people with a capacity for pregnancy”, “Would that be women?” he asks, setting off a scolding of the senator by the witness which would have been “conduct unbecoming” if done by a college professor to students in a class back in my Bright College Days. Again one minute and 48 seconds is enough for the senator to conclude that he’s heard enough from the professor.

8 Likes