Update, today's xkcd:

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The mouseover of which says:

I had a hard time with Ayn Rand because I found myself enthusiastically agreeing with the first 90% of every sentence, but getting lost at 'therefore, be a huge asshole to everyone.'



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I was so very determined to read this, not least because I have acquaintances who live in a day-to-day way with Rand the way some people live with Jesus. You can't get through a meal or a game of bridge or a walk down to the lake without Objectivism coming into play. I thought at the very least we might be able to have a conversation if I learnt some of the rules.

Birdbrian asks why reviews of this are always so emotional*

Well. I wonder too. But my bemusement is based on the solitary page I read before it went on the got-to-go pile.


* http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

Fantastically disgusting book. I have never felt so much exhausted after reading a book. This book plays tricks on your mind. Now I can suspect I owe some justification to call Atlas Shrugged 'fantastically disgusting.

To the point of disgusting, imagine a book that advocates condemning social responsibility towards others, calling charity opposite to justice, forcing state to disown mentally handicapped citizen, loving someone for his success not for character. Anyone can explain these are the reasons for inescapable poverty in developing countries where individuals are exploiting the economy for individual gain. It is the most pathetic philosophy one can imagine.

On the collusion course of fantastic, imagine a book that advocates intellectual freedom, liberty,pursuit of happiness, independence of minds, critical thinking, innovation and will to overcome difficulty. A book that has been an explicit defence for individualism by using imaginative mentality and creative style; exploring the individual philosophy like never before.

In the end no matter how serious was the intention of Ayn Rand to produce a work of parallel philosophy; it was still a work of pure fiction and I admire the right of a writer to offend, criticize and challenge lazy assumptions in work of fiction without being judged on political correctness.

I must confess this book was slow in pace and that I had to force myself to read in between that's why I consumed this book by using cliff-notes after first few chapters. I would like to end my review by her own words, "this book only got good reviews from people who did not understand it at all"

My snarkasm generator is revvin' up already.
https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/ent...

Someone needed to tell me that Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing had started a streaming platform for awful, heinous stuff like this! This is comedy gold!
***
Pretentious poseur writes pseudophilosophical apologia for being a sociopath. Distasteful in the extreme.



Appealing to narcissists since 1949...unappealing to properly emotionally constituted adults since then, too.

Recently a Very Dear GR Friend (VDF for short) asked me the following question:

VDF: By the way, I'm very very curious. What I know of your views would not have made me think that you would have rated Atlas Shrugged so highly. What was it about the book that made you feel so highly about it?

This is an excerpt from my response. You'll need to understand my system of Ratings/Review as well. Which I'm now violating by writing this:

GNF: I read Ayn Rand about a decade or more ago and I remember going around in a daze for weeks afterward - it just appeals to the anarchist in me, you see, at the visceral level: DOWN WITH THE EBEL STATE! - as well as feeling totally dicked off with the love story garbage, because for me it got in the way of the REAL STUFF: ANARCHY!!!!

Ahem. I was more impressionable in those days. If you made me read her again, would I have exactly the same reaction? I love hard work. Independence. I'm the right reader for what I interpreted as being her political message, although I know that her politial message isn't necessarily what I interpreted.

......

Oh, and I just thought of Rand again. Because Atlas Shrugged is supposed to be a dystopia, right? When I read it, I never even thought about that. I just thought about the freedom to work and produce without institutional strangling. I didn't even get the dystopic stuff (ie America as the last bastion of a global economy crashing down (if that is even what it is!) - cue cultural blind spot - in fact, she pissed me off for bagging out Europe the whole time, since I think the EU is probably more compassionate at the community level than the US), because the Valley just sounded great - wow, I want to go there and work!!! And by working hard and being compassionate to others and giving people the opportunity to be productive in a way personally satisfying the Valley society will be like that. No deadwood government smothering the individual's drive to create. That's predominantly all I took away from it. Which is of course completely loopy if you take Ayn Rand's personal circumstances into account. In the interim, I've read briefly about her and I think she suffers a bit of intellectual/emotional dishonesty too. But I didn't know anything about Rand when I read her book, hence the emotional 'starred' response.

******

So there you have it. No analysis of the prose. Not even understanding of Rand's message - in fact, as you've guessed, most of it flew right over my head. I'd have to go back and read it to know whether what I took out of it reflects the prevailing view as to what her philosophy and politics were. And I would have to read the prevailing view. First.

Dedicated to my VDF.

UWAGA: To będzie długa recenzja. Myślę, że mógłbym napisać długi esej o tym jak bardzo ta książka jest zła.
Na liście najgorszych książek z jakimi zetknąłem się ostatnio, wyprzedza ją chyba tylko
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Przy czym Shantaram to tylko zła literatura popularna. Ta książka ma ambicję bycia wiekopomnym dziełem. Niestety wyobrażam sobie, że wielu ludziom mogła zrobić z mózgu kogel-mogel.

Ta gruba na 1200 stron książka jest podobno najczęściej, po Biblii, kupowaną książką w Stanach Zjednoczonych. Podobno pełni również funkcję Biblii wśród libertarian, izolacjonistów i innych szeroko pojętych wielbicieli Donalda Trumpa. Chyba właśnie to mnie zachęciło do jej przeczytania (oraz mój przyjaciel Mirek).

W warstwie fabularnej to dość prosta historia. Mydlana opera ubrana w formę political fiction: dzieje się w ostatnim kraju, który funkcjonuje wg zasad rynkowych. Wokół są tylko Republiki Ludowe, które przymierają głodem. Tylko Stany Zjednoczone utrzymują je na powierzchni. Problem polega na tym, że w USA także do władzy dochodzą ludzie, których celem jest stworzenie sytemu "ludowego"; wyrównanie różnic społecznych, kosztem geniuszy biznesu, którzy tworzą wielkie dzieła przemysłu. W tej książce toczy się wojna między elitą biznesu, która chce tylko zarabiać pieniądze po to, by wszyscy żyli w dobrobycie i antyelitą, która pod płaszczykiem walki o równość chce sama zagarnąć zdobycze biznesowej elity.

W tym sporze nie ma żadnych niuansów. Ze złej strony rząd, który wprowadzając pozornie równościowe regulacje powoli demoluje gospodarkę i doprowadza do powszechnej nędzy. Z dobrej strony jest grupa wspaniałych przedsiębiorców, którzy chcą ciężko pracować po to by się wzbogacić, dzięki czemu gospodarka działa i wszystko jest OK. Tak długo jak wspaniali biznesmeni mogą robić co chcą, wszyscy są szczęśliwi. Gdy zaczyna się ich krępować regulacjami, następuje katastrofa, której zbliżanie się obserwujemy przez całą książkę. Więcej szczegółów fabularnych nie będę zdradzał, poza tym, że po katastrofie następuje jutrzenka swobody, która na ostatnich stronach jest już na horyzoncie. Mam nadzieję, że nie oznacza to, że powstał drugi tom.

Fabuła ma ilustrować warstwę filozoficzną. Podejrzewam, że książka miała być czymś w rodzaju polemiki z New Dealem FDR-a; oraz z powojenną polityką gospodarczą Stanów Zjednoczonych, kiedy podatki były wysokie a rząd mocno ingerował w gospodarkę. Być może wtedy, gdy książka powstawała ktoś mógł się na nią nabrać, ale dziś to jest po prostu głupie i anachroniczne. Dziś już raczej wiadomo, że wielki biznes puszczony samopas nie myśli o tym, żeby dbać o społeczeństwo tylko o tym, żeby mieć coraz więcej kosztem tych, którzy mają mniej, unikać płacenia podatków i wyniszczać tych, którzy naruszają monopol; czego skutkiem jest powiększanie się nierówności społecznych. Wszystko co ta książka proponuje, jako system, jest jedną wielką bzdurą.

I tu dochodzimy do warstwy propagandowej. W tym aspekcie każdy rozdział tej książki był obraźliwy dla inteligencji. Narzędzia literackie użyte do przekazania myśli autorki były łopatologiczne i bardzo proste do rozszyfrowania. Od czytelnika nie oczekuje się żadnej refleksji - zło jest czytelnie złe, kompromitowane słowami bohaterów i konsekwencjami ich czynów. Dobro - wspaniałe i wzniosłe. Dysonans polega na tym, że nie trzeba dużo, by zacząć mieć wątpliwości - to co jest w książce określane jako złe - wcale nie musi być złe a to co dobre - nie jest w tak oczywisty sposób dobre. Za opinią autorki przemawia tylko stworzona przez nią fabuła. Jak trochę ją poskrobać - argumentacja się sypie. Niestety te wątpliwości nie są intencją autorki. Przeciwko jej wizji świata, przemawia jednak rzeczywistość. Świat bardzo podobnie do wizji autorki funkcjonował przez ostatnie kilkadziesiąt lat. No i proszę - jesteśmy na skraju zagłady.

W warstwie propagandowej ważne są postaci. To chyba jeden z najsłabszych elementów tej bardzo słabej książki. Postaci są psychologicznie szablonowe i jednowymiarowe. Ale najgłupsze są charakterystyki fizyczne. Postaci złe są zawsze brzydkie. Zawsze mają jakieś fizyczne felery: krzywy nos, obwisłą wargę, niski wzrost, wysoką potliwość, łysinę, pękaty spinaker - i te cechy zawsze są opisane tak, żeby wzbudzały wstręt i obrzydzenie. Zanim poznamy opinie bohatera o rzeczywistości już wiemy, że to ktoś godzien pogardy - wystarczy na niego spojrzeć oczami autorki. Gdy ktoś brzydki się odezwie, tylko utwierdzamy się, że duszę ma równie brzydką jak ciało.

Postaci dobre są za to piękne: gęste loki spływają im na ramiona, mięśnie delikatnie zarysowują się pod aksamitną skórą, oczy inteligentnie spoglądają i są takie wymowne a paznokcie - zawsze zadbane. Gdy dobra postać coś powie, to w słuchaczach budzi się nadzieja, wiara lub świadomość. Chyba, że dobry mówi do złego; wtedy w złym budzi się strach.

Jeżeli postać zła jest ładna - można mieć pewność, że ostatecznie okaże się dobra. A jeżeli nie okaże się dobra, to znaczy, że ostatecznie jednak stanie się brzydka; wyjdzie z niej brzydota nie tylko moralna, ale także fizyczna. W całej książce takie ewolucje w postrzeganiu postaci były 2 (słownie: dwie).

Cieszę się, że przeczytałem tę książkę, chociaż męczyłem się okropnie. Męczyłem się, bo to nie musiało być takie długie. Wszystko to, co autorka miała do powiedzenia dałoby się upchnąć w 200 stronach łącznie z tą banalną fabułą i dyrdymałami o filozofii gospodarczo-politycznej.

Mam poważne wątpliwości, czy wyznawcom zasad ujętych w tej książce udało się dobrnąć do jej końca. Pewnym ułatwieniem jest umieszczona pod koniec, 50-stronicowa wykładnia całej filozofii - podana jak na talerzu, gdyby ktoś nie zrozumiał przez poprzednie 1000 stron. Ta wykładnia jest nudna jak flaki z olejem, ale pewnie łatwiej przemęczyć 50 stron niż 1200. Pocieszające jest to, że jeżeli takie postrzeganie rzeczywistości utrzymuje się na tak wątłych podstawach, to trudno wróżyć temu wielką przyszłość i może jednak ta zagłada nie jest tak bardzo blisko.

Nikomu nie polecam tej książki, nawet w imię zasady, że warto znać poglądy przeciwnika. Wystarczy poczytać w Wikipedii o autorce oraz znaleźć sobie jakieś streszczenie w internecie.

Ayn Rand is Nietzche for stupid people She was an evil woman, with evil ideas who wrote pathetic books . Nothing she ever said or wrote is worth taking notice of.

Who is John Galt? Actually, I think he may be alive and well, and residing in the US Senate this very minute. I hate to accuse anyone directly, but I think he may even be from my own state. Metaphorically speaking of course, because he has many imitators around the world. When I read a book I usually try to seperate the writers personal views and opinions from the novel and read it for what it is, a work of fiction. That's hard to do with Ayn Rand, especially this book, because she hammers you with them in every paragraph. ("Socialists are weak and evil, capitalists are strong and good. The 99 percenters are trying to feed off the genius and success of the 1 percenters"). I didn't like the agenda put forth in this book, but I gave it 4 stars because when it comes to putting pen to paper, Ayn Rand could write. She just didn't write what I want to hear. I also gave it 4 stars because it's important for us to pay attention. This book has had, and still does have, a huge influence on millions of people. When Modern Library selected their 100 best novels of the 20th century Atlas Shrugged wasn't on the list, but they also allowed readers to vote and select their favorite novel. Atlas Shrugged was number one. That might have given us a little hint why someone like Trump could be elected president. As I did in my review of The Fountainhead, I will quote Pogo; "I have seen the enemy, and he is us".

This is a very massive tome, full of economics and philosophy, memorable characters, and descriptive prose. While reading other reviews, I noticed that it seems to be a love it or hate it sort of book. Those that agree with the point Ayn Rand is making, will likely enjoy it and be moved by the story, but those who disagree are not likely to enjoy the story, let alone the message. Rand's points of the merits of capitalism and objectivity are not concealed in allegory, but are a major, if not the major part of the book. I will not elaborate too much on the story, for it is so multi-faceted it would be difficult to condense successfully. However, it has industrial intrigue, romance, and even a bit of science fiction of the futuristic Earth kind. It's epic, beautifully written, and unforgettable, and its imparted desire to change the world will remain after the book itself ends.

I didn’t know what to expect from this book when I started reading, but it is fair to say that I wouldn’t have guessed it would prove to be anything like it ended up. This is pure and simple melodrama starring various iterations of Nietzschean Supermen wrapped up tight in Hayek’s Road to Serfdom – so, essentially, this is three of my least favourite things all slammed together in one endlessly, endlessly long book. In fact, if you were to read The Road to Serfdom and to say at the end of each chapter, “oh, yes, yes, take me, take me in your strong arms, no, no, don’t ask, just take me, take me here, here on my desk, here, oh yes, yes, let my body sing against your unbridled and determined will, please, please, let me submit to your manly desire, oh, yes, god, oh, yes, yes, yes.” You would pretty much have the novel down pat and would have saved yourself a week or so of reading.

About a year ago I read a book, written in the 1880s, called ‘The Melbourne Riots’. It was written by a kind of agrarian Socialist, I guess. In the book he shows how grossly unfair the current social situation is and proposes a utopian village where people will be able to live in a kind of commune, where each person will contribute to the common labour of the village, and will be rewarded according to the work that they do. I thought as I was reading it that it was interesting how these sorts of novels really had had their time at the end of the 19th century – with their Owen-like visions of brave new worlds. Do people write novels about socialist utopias now? Do people still go off to Paraguay to set up communes?

Well, this book is a right wing version of these utopian communes. It is a vision where the great and best among us go on strike and leave the rest of us to our misery – leaving us as Nietzsche’s botched and bungled – for us to fend for ourselves, catastrophically for ourselves, until we realise the error of our ways and beg for the thinkers, the men of action to return to once again have their way with us.

In this sense the novel is also a reworking of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata – where the women of Greece go on a strike denying men sex until they end the Peloponnesian War. It is just in this case it is the businessmen and the great scientists who go on strike until they are allowed to finally be rewarded according to the true worth of their contribute to society. This is a book of inversions and strawmen.

The main strawman is a caricature of Marx, particularly his ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their need’. This is repeated throughout the novel, maybe 20 times, you are certainly not meant to have missed it – but it is always used as an excuse by those with a death mentality so as to excuse the fact that they live from the appropriated productivity, brilliance and wisdom of the supermen industrialists. The fact that Marx believed work was the highest human virtue, that he said those who do not work should not eat, that his conception of morality was that people create the world through their labour and that this is the sole source of all value, moral and physical, in the world – none of this is mentioned in the strawman that is built. And Marx is not the only strawmen. The only Christians that could feel comfortable reading this book would be that particularly US version, the Prosperity Christian.

In the world of this book, humanity is divided into two distinct groups. One group is the great mass of us, and we are mostly parasites. We are, and will always remain, Nietzsche’s sheep. We are good at following orders, but only because we refuse to think for ourselves. When confronted by a new or novel problem that is not contained within a standard protocol we have learnt or can refer to, we are immediately crushed and incapable of any form of action and particularly not risk taking. This is what divides us from our betters, the Supermen. They would rather act than be delayed for a moment in their grand desire to transform the world in their own image. They are the great artists – the world is their canvas – the will to power is the creative gesture that they deploy and make the rest of us gape upon in wonderment. Where a challenge stops the rest of us in our tracks, risk is but another obstacle on the path to their foretold greatness.

And this world would be fine, except that we cannot be contented with allowing these gods among us to exercise their greatness. No, instead we have created life draining moral precepts to keep these gods in their place and to force them to dedicate their lives to meeting our needs and our wants at their expense. This is all straight Nietzsche, of course.

It is hard to know if you are meant to read this novel as a work of political philosophy or as a kind of cheap novel. As a novel it is breathless soap opera. “Oh, alack, it would have been impossible for me to finish building my railroad if I had 9 months, but now, now I have only 6 to do it in – I will just have to dedicate myself to this greatest of achievements and focus my will…” You might think I’m exaggerating – but read 20 pages of this and you see, in fact, I’ve toned it down.

At the start it becomes fairly clear that many of the Supermen are what we would today call ‘on the spectrum’. They are socially inept, trapped in loveless marriages and with families who do not understand them, or even try to understand them. They are unable to understand why they are expected to meet various obligations that they are otherwise completely uninterested in. But if the main characters are incapable of empathy, this reflects the lack of empathy the author struggles with for anyone that is not one of her supermen. The only slightly three-dimensional characters in the book are these supermen – everyone else is a two-dimensional cartoon character who are only in the book for what they represent – which is invariably an obstacle placed in the way of the Supermen to help them learn both their own true nature and the true nature of the society they need to tear down and rebuild anew.

I don’t want to spoil this for you, well, any more than I already have, but I do need to say that towards the end of this the main Superman gives a radio speech to the world. He says later, in a conversation about the speech that it went for three hours – it certainly felt like it as I was reading it. An endless harangue, putting all of us in our place, explaining morality, economic theory, the author’s great men of history theory, and so much else, felt like it was never going to end. I kept thinking, can she really believe this would convince anyone? I mean, beyond the total lack of verisimilitude in such a long speech, I kept hearing the audience of the supposed radio program saying, ‘can’t you turn this shit off?’ In no sense could this be called ‘show, don’t tell’. In fact, the whole book is a kind of exercise in tell, don’t show. There are no debates in this book – there is no discussion. There is the truth and lies – and each speaks past the other. This is a book of certainty.

I need to come back to sex. Each of the Supermen want to have sex with the sole Superwoman in the book, our main character in the novel. And each does have sex with her. But the sex is always initiated by the men while she submits, a passive receptacle of his desire and his lust. Look, I know it was written in the 1950s, but for someone calling for the revaluation of all values, this passive female sexuality clearly wasn’t one of the values she had in mind as needing re-evaluation. There is even a scene where the female lead is lying in a bed, in the room next to the man she wants to screw next, but although she is nearly driven insane by desire, she remains lying on her bed, her hands pressed deep into the mattress to stop herself rushing to the object of her desire, struggling to contain her overwhelming passion. The purple prose in this book is, I have to say, nothing if not amusing.

As someone who doesn’t agree with the ideology pushed here, I was always going to struggle with this book. But I was curious to see what a novel written by someone pushing these ideas might look like. And now I know. The best of ideological fiction generally contains characters that are complex and interesting – there’s not a single character here that is truly interesting. The good guys are superheroes – flying planes into impossible landings, sticking it to the man, fixing the unfixable, knowing when to take risks and for those risks always to pay off. The bad guys are infinitely bad, and invariably reduced to silence by the least word from one of these Supermen. Still, the melodrama is turned up to eleven here, and the whole way through, every damn page. In fact, I kept wondering how there could still be so much left in this book when crisis after crisis seemed to imply we would need to be nearly at the end, surely, nearly at the end now.

This is a capitalist utopia of aggressive selfishness – who could have guessed that could become the basis of an entire, very, very long novel?

tI only gave this book 3 stars because it was so tedious and repetitive. I actually have some things to say in defense of the usual criticisms, but more on that in a minute. Whether or not you agree with her philosophy, Ayn Rand does make some good points in favor of her argument. I can forgive it for it's exaggerated depiction of socialism as a system which rewards the weak and lazy and parasitizes the intelligent and productive. Honestly, if you install any system which allows people to thrive as parasites, plenty of people will take advantage of it. It's just human nature.
tUnfortunately, this book only seems to be aware of human nature where it guarantees the failure of the system it's trying to shoot down. It never takes into account the inevitable abuses of capitalism by fallible human beings. Special interest groups, politicians making laws which favor corporations they hold stock in, sweat shops, the whole military industrial complex, etc. While the author's point of view is understandable given the communism she came to america to escape, and the fact that the issues I listed above probably weren't in the news as much back then as they are now, I still don't think her long long long argument holds up.
tThe brilliant, attractive, articulate, morally perfect industrialist heroes of Atlas Shrugged are not real people. Ayn Rand herself said, in defense against her critics, they are not man as he is, rather man as he should be. Which would be great in another book, I have no objection to admittedly portraying non-existant ideals if it makes a good point. If such people really existed capitalism could work. Ayn Rand seems perfectly aware of the shortcomings of human nature when they manifest themselves under communism, but then offers as an alternative another system which could only actually work for the non-existant ideal men she made up.
tSo as a piece of propaganda, It doesn't fully convince me. I suppose if I were completely on the nurture side of the nature vs. nurture debate on human behavior, I could have simply bought the idea that installing an economic system based on moral principles could create a better culture and thus better people. Though if there's anything history shows us over and over again it's that no new belief or set of rules has ever succeeded on that front. As a novel, well, it's full of excessively long-winded monologues and drags on. But, it did keep me interested enough to see it through to the end, and forced me to think so I have to give it some credit.

Atlas Shrugged is another of those novels which are classic because they create both an entertaining story, contain philosophical ideas and tie into historical events. Yet for me Atlas Shrugged was a contradictory enigma. It was both a long novel and yet its most basic message could be boiled down to a line such as ”I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine”; it was both exceptionally good and exceptionally poor in places; and it at points seemed to support an ideology and then attack it. Ultimately I liked some of the philosophy, I enjoyed the story (or else I would have quit reading likely) and yet I found that the long philosophical spiels turned out to be far too preachy and hence ruined the entertaining aspects of the story. I feel that George Orwell and Alduous Huxley wrote far better in their balance between story and message.

The plot follows two central characters while also covering several other important individuals. However one of the two characters makes almost no appearance in the first three quarters of the book. Hence the mysterious question on everyone’s lips: ”Who is John Galt?” It could be seen as a dystopian and a semi-science fictional type of novel for Atlas Shrugged is set in a fictional America where the government rules ‘for the will of the people’, seizing the assets of the wealthy in order to do so. The main protagonist Dagny Taggart blindly accepts this system as she tries to become the sole female entrepreneur in the fictional economy. Yet gradually she comes to see that the government is manipulative and self-serving and that she cannot continue to accept that system as proper any longer.

It appears to me that Ayn Rand’s book was very much influenced by the contrast between the governments of Russia and America around the time of writing. Rand left Europe to go to America where Atlas Shrugged was published and therefore it is likely she would have witnessed communism first-hand. Yet it also appears to me that as a result she turns American capitalism into a kind of panacea, believing that because that system was better than Russian communism it was a wonderful system. She certainly argues her philosophy in her novel that those who become rich through work have earned it and deserve to keep their wealth and not have it taken from them. Yet I think she is in many ways too optimistic as any human made ideology has flaws in it: to believe that one is the cure to all ills is a fallacy in my opinion. Even democracy as we have institutionalised it has many flaws. I for one do not get a truly direct say in governing my country.

I disagree with many of Ayn Rand’s philosophical ideas, for instance when she defines the notion of a sacrifice as being only when we give up something of value. Her example that it is not a sacrifice for a woman to give up food to a child rather than for a hat is false in my view. I think that sacrifices occur in every act of giving something up for another human. I do agree with how she indicates that we must allow creativity and thinking to flourish. As a future teacher this is something I think must be encourages to flower in any democratic and liberated society for education. I also agree with a handful of other points she makes. Yet I personally feel that her major philosophy of objectivity is flawed to the point where I cannot agree. Her idea appears on the whole too materialistic. As she states:

“my philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”

This thought is in contrast to many of my beliefs about humanity. I see humanity not as truly noble but more as a flawed being striving to become heroic, to earn salvation. How humans gain that salvation becomes the debate of religions in general. Curiously Rand’s philosophy appears highly selfish and self-serving, making man not the noble being she perceives but a hypocrite. I think she holds an ‘every man for himself’ mentality as he can fit into society. It is up to a man to find what happiness, what enjoyment he wants from life (which is why her characters, even her heroes prove unfaithful to their spouses and to themselves – again no noble characteristics). She also seems to push a message of ‘the wealthy deserve their wealth and no one deserves to use what products they produce.’ Ultimately if this is man’s ultimate aim it seems to me a shallow, egotistical end.

I do recommend reading this, despite its length, as it is an interesting read. Like Orwell and Huxley its great strength is in how it prompts the reader to consider the author’s messages. However unlike those other authors Rand tends far more toward preaching and using unnecessary words and thoughts. I’d never read a 60 page speech in any novel, and now I have. Yet there is an entertaining dystopian novel here which even if you dislike its ideas you may still find worth the read. And if you don’t there should be some reward for slogging through over 1100 pages of writing.

Reading this book is like watching Donkey Kong. Thinly-drawn characters of stoicism and stereotype wielding clunky paragraphs of dialogue like a wooden keg mallet at the heads and shoulders of anyone that takes center screen. Bonk, bonk, bonk. Huge square paragraphs. Pages long. 40 pounds each. Bonk, bonk, bonk.

Characters respond to questions with 1800 words, and then, to a simple “What do you mean?,” they spew another 1800 words. So, if a paragraph could be shorter, so could the book, by hundreds of pages. The book is unwieldy, not only because its width is the size of a keg mallet, but because the message is ponderous, lumbering, interminable.

This is ultimately a story of dystopia, revealed, not delicately, through a panoply of failed moral standards in post-1957 America. The moral standards, murderous by Rand’s accounting, are pushed to their absurd ne plus ultra. And that’s where dystopias live, right, at the absolute end of human endeavors.

People, I think, view Atlas Shrugged as a wicked political treatise. That’s not the full diatribe. Instead, the story uses politics as a vehicle to broadcast moral standards packaged as economic policies. Politics of morality and value, then, is the monolith at which Rand beats her story; objectivity is the hammer. Bonk, bonk, bonk. Interestingly, the politics between the covers eerily resemble our American landscape 55 years later, and because the connection to our diametric political system, GOP v DNC, is so apparent, people quickly assume Ayn Rand is making an 1100 page political jeremiad. (If Rand’s premonition of our current, overbaked entitlement system was something she viewed as inevitable, then she is my idea of a true oracle, because her perspective like an arrow goes right through the politics—specifically the election—of 2012.)

The book has 4 main characters, and, in a book this size, dozens of not insignificant subordinate characters. The 4 main are all powerful industrialists, and they are increasingly hamstrung by a political system that inverts the spirit of entrepreneurialism. Capitalism restrained. Worse, capitalism broken. The many quotes below are enough to represent the main theme that America has perverted the incentive to produce goods for individual gain, and instead puts societal needs before individual gain. Deliverance is eventually—and awkwardly—attained by the mantra “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”

In words that presage the 2012 Democratic plank, and the mock horror of Republican ideals, we have these jewels:

-- ”It seems to me that the national policy ought to be aimed at the objective of giving everybody a chance at his fair share of iron ore, with a view toward the preservation of the industry as a whole” (50).
-- “It isn’t fair. It’s discrimination. I’m just as good as the next fellow. I’m entitled to my fair share of that metal” (254).
-- “The steel mills of the country were ordered to limit the maximum production of any metal alloy to an amount equal to the production of other metal alloys by other mills placed in the same classification or plant capacity—and to supply a fair share of any metal alloy to all consumers who might desire to obtain it” (311).

WOW!! Echoes of most of Obama’s campaign speeches circa Jan-Sep 2012. Bonk, bonk, bonk. Here’s some more:

-- ”Disunity, that’s the trouble. It’s my absolute opinion that in our complex industrial society, no business enterprise can succeed without sharing the burden of the problems of other enterprises” (48).
-- “The public can’t remain indifferent to reckless, selfish waste by an anti-social individual. After all, private property is a trusteeship held for the benefit of society as a whole” (50).
-- “Now that you’ve reached college age, you ought to learn something about ideals. It’s time to forget your selfish greed and give some thought to your social responsibilities, because I think that all those millions you’re going to inherit are not for your personal pleasure, they are a trust for the benefit of the underprivileged and the poor, because I think that the person who doesn’t realize this is the most depraved type of human being” (97).

WOW!! Obama’s most important voter demographic in 2008, college-aged kids. Bonk, bonk, bonk.

-- “It is the social impact of a product that must be considered. We are thinking in terms of the country as a whole, we are concerned with the public welfare and the terrible crisis of the present moment” (170).
-- “You know, Mrs Taggert, I don’t think that such a motor should ever be made, even if somebody did learn how to make it. It would be so superior to anything we’ve got that it would be unfair to lesser scientists, because it would leave no field for their achievements and abilities. I don’t think that the strong should have the right to wound the self-esteem of the weak” (330).
-- “It’s their lack of social spirit. They refuse to recognize that production is not a private choice, but a public duty” (495)
-- “It’s a backward, primitive, unenlightened place. They don’t even have a modern government. It’s the worst government in any state. The laziest. It does nothing—outside of keeping law courts and a police department. It doesn’t do anything for the people. It doesn’t help anybody. I don’t see why all our best companies want to run there” (254).
-- “We voted on every claim, and the will of the majority established every person’s need and every person’s ability. The income of the factory was distributed accordingly. Rewards were based on need,, and the penalties on ability. Those whose needs were voted to be the greatest, received the most. Those who had not produced as much as the vote said they could, were fined and had to pay the fines by working overtime without pay” (301)
-- “That money went to men who grow rich by such methods. Such men do not remain rich for long. The money will go into channels which will carry it, not to the most productive, but to the most corrupt. By the standards of our time, the man who has the least to offer is the man who wins” (120).

Whose time? 1957 or 2012? Bonk, bonk, bonk. The keg hammer is working. Not very subtle, huh? Between these quotes and an 80 page radio broadcast from John Galt, you have the whole story in husk. All the rest is bonk, bonk, bonk.

Can you guess what party Ayn Rand may have voted for in 2012? You’re wrong, she would have voted Libertarian.

Faithful to similar dystopias, Rand includes the standard Orwellian bureaucracies that are not only supposed to show how off-track (communistic) America has become, but to scare the bejesus out of GOPers: Friends of Global Progress, Office of Morale Conditioning, State Science Institute, the Emergency Commission, Office of Crucial Supplies, Officer of Consumer Protection, Bureau of Economic Planning and National Resources, Fair Share Law, Public Stability Law, Preservation of Livelihood Law. Etc, etc, etc.

I award 2 stars because Rand is trying to forge, in a single work, a total philosophy. However, the story suffers because everything (specifically the dialogue) is subordinated to establishing tenets of the philosophy. Minimize the dialogue and the story is complete in 250 pages, not 1100. At 250 pages the story may have even been compelling, but this story just can’t mesmerize at its full unabridged length. Also, the story devolves so quickly in the last fifty pages that Rand gives us an absurd rescue scene, with gunfights like gangsters and a hidden armada of secret aircraft, better suited to Fantastic Four comics.

Read another review if you want to know who (and what) John Galt is?

One final note, something I found tempting. I believe Ayn Rand is projecting herself into the leading role of Dagny Taggert. Dagny is perhaps the strongest industrialist, is the last to cave, is devastatingly beautiful, and has sex with each of the 3 other leading men. Perhaps a fitting role in fiction for an average looking woman whose real life was surrounded by powerful New York industrialists of the 1950’s.