ATLAS SHRUGGED by Ayn Rand (Review 2)
By B.J.
A long time ago, when I was a nerdy grad student, my then-boyfriend (now husband) recommended that I read Ayn Rand’s opus, Atlas Shrugged. I had never heard of it, and hence had no idea that I was diving into a book that was idolized by some and loathed by others. Here is my review of Atlas Shrugged, from a person who read it with no preconceived notions, and who recognizes its virtues as well as its flaws.
A synopsis is necessary for the rest of the review to make any sense. Feel free to skip this section if you have read the book and be warned that I will spoil the ending.
SYNOPSIS
The story takes place in the future, when the United States has been replaced by the People’s States. There is a sense of malaise and hopelessness, symbolized by the question: “Who is John Galt?”
Early on we meet Dagny Taggart, the Vice-President of Taggart Transcontinental, the nation’s major railroad. Taggart Transcontinental is in dire straits, due to mismanagement by its President, Dagny’s whiny older brother, James Taggart. To save the railroad, Dagny must build a new line, which she names the John Galt Line, in defiance of the hopelessness around her. Her partner in this task is Hank Rearden, the founder of Rearden Steel and the inventor of a superior new alloy called Rearden Metal; his company provides the rails for the John Galt Line. Both Rearden and Dagny are dedicated to their work, and their family life is nonexistent: Rearden is unhappily married to Lillian; Dagny used to be in love with her childhood friend Francisco d’Anconia, but he abandoned her and turned into a superficial playboy years ago, and she’s been single ever since.
(A side note: I can’t help but notice similarities between Dagny Taggart and Daenerys, aka Dany, Targaryen from A Game of Thrones. Both are strong, passionate women in positions of authority typically occupied by men, and both pursue their goals despite dangers and difficulties. Their initials are D.T., and their first names (Dagny and Dany) are almost identical. As Scott would say, TINACBNIAC.)
Against enormous odds, Dagny and Rearden complete the John Galt Line, and they celebrate by having passionate sex. While on a road trip together, they visit an abandoned factory, where they discover a broken motor that transforms static electricity into motion. Dagny exclaims that this motor can provide unlimited energy for the whole world, but there isn’t enough information to get it working again. Dagny scours the country looking for the inventor of the motor but fails to find him, and eventually she hires a scientist who undertakes to rebuild the motor in secret.
Meanwhile, something is wrong with the country. Rearden and Dagny’s triumph in building the John Galt Line is blighted, as one by one, the great companies out West shut down and their owners vanish. Eventually, government leaders get the bright idea to prevent further damage by freezing the economy: no one is allowed to quit their job, to fire anyone, to change production relative to its current level, etc. Dagny quits her job in protest. While in hiding, she receives a surprise visit from Francisco, her old friend and lover. He explains that his persona as a lazy playboy was just a cover for his real task: destroying the company he had inherited, d’Anconia Copper, rather than letting it support a society of exploiters. He pleads with Dagny to abandon Taggart Transcontinental, but just at that moment, a radio broadcast announces the collapse of the railroad’s major tunnel. Dagny rushes back to work to deal with the catastrophe, the government be damned.
Meanwhile, government officials confront Rearden with an ultimatum: give us the rights to Rearden Metal, or we will let the world know that you’ve been cheating on your wife with Dagny. Rearden realizes that because he loves Dagny, he must protect her, and he signs away the rights to the Metal. He resolves never to let Dagny know about it.
Dagny patches up the damage to Taggart Transcontinental as best she can, and then goes home, where Francisco tries once more to convince her to abandon her job. She refuses, saying that she can’t fight her enemies by renunciation. In a dramatic scene, Rearden walks in and assumes that Francisco is trying to seduce Dagny; Dagny reveals that Francisco had been her only lover before Rearden.
More drama follows: the scientist whom Dagny had hired to rebuild the magic motor has written to her of his intention to quit. Dagny rushes from New York City to Utah to stop him, only to be told, upon reaching her destination, that the scientist has just left on a plane with a stranger. Dagny chases them in her own plane, and she crashes in a valley in the Rockies.
When she regains consciousness, Dagny sees a stranger who introduces himself as John Galt, the man whose name everyone has been saying. He is the inventor of the magic motor, and he shows Dagny around the hidden valley. All the businessmen who had quit their jobs and disappeared live and work here. Galt explains to Dagny that they are all on strike – a strike of people of reason and achievement, who refuse to work under a hostile regime. Some of his fellow strikers live in the hidden valley year-round; others work as menial laborers in the outside world, but they return to the valley for one month out of each year. The monthly retreat is now beginning, and Galt announces that Dagny will not be allowed to leave for its duration. At the end of the month, she may choose to join the strikers or return to the outside world.
Of course, Francisco is one of the strikers, and he and Dagny are reunited in the valley. Francisco tells Dagny that he has always loved her, but he left her to build the kind of world she deserves. He accepts that she now loves another man. Dagny’s month in the valley, which she names Atlantis – after “the lost city that only the spirits of heroes can enter” (p. 637) – is supremely happy. She earns her living as Galt’s housekeeper; their mutual attraction is palpable, but they never touch each other, and they address each other formally as “Mr. Galt” and “Miss Taggart.” Everyone in Atlantis shares Dagny’s values – reason, self-reliance, hard work. Nonetheless, she refuses to give up on Taggart Transcontinental, and at the end of the month she bids an emotional farewell to Galt, promises never to reveal the location of Atlantis, and leaves.
James Taggart, the no-good President of Taggart Transcontinental, welcomes his sister back in characteristic fashion: by insisting that she speak on a radio broadcast in praise of the regime. After Dagny refuses, Rearden’s spurned wife, Lillian, turns up with an offer to Dagny: speak on the radio, or I will tell everyone you have been sleeping with my husband, who signed over the rights to Rearden Metal to protect your name. Dagny speaks on the radio broadcast, but her message is decidedly not what James and Lillian intended. She proclaims that she is proud of having been Rearden’s mistress, and that he had been blackmailed into signing over the rights to Rearden Metal. Afterward, Dagny faces Rearden again, who, until recently, believed she was dead, killed in the plane crash in the Rockies.
This is the worst moment of Dagny’s life: first, she must tell Rearden, whom she still cares about, that she loves another man; second, she believes that after hearing her speech on the radio, Galt will abandon her. She breaks down and cries for the first time. But Rearden, like Francisco, accepts that Dagny now loves another. They resolve to support each other in their struggle against the slow collapse of civilization.
And civilization continues to collapse, thanks to the bumbling, dogmatic idiocy of government officials and corrupt businessmen such as James Taggart. Rearden’s steel mills are attacked by a gang of goons, but Francisco saves his life, and Rearden finally goes to Atlantis. Galt gives a three-hour speech on the radio, in which he explains his view of life and morality and the reason for his strike. While struggling to keep everything from collapsing, Dagny learns that Galt has been a menial laborer at Taggart Transcontinental for years – that’s how he fell in love with her in the first place – and the two consummate their love in the tunnels underneath the Taggart Terminal.
Afterward, Dagny visits Galt at his home. Unfortunately, she is under government surveillance, and Galt is promptly arrested. The head of the government pressures him to bring all the vanished businessmen back and revive the economy. Predictably, Galt refuses. Eventually, government officials resort to torture to break Galt, but James Taggart, who is present in the torture chamber, breaks first: he collapses when he realizes the enormity of his own evil. Dagny, Francisco, and Rearden rescue Galt, and they all fly away to Atlantis. The last scene shows the heroes living happily in Atlantis and Galt proclaiming, “We are returning to the world.”
TROUBLE IN ATLANTIS
The chapters that describe life in the hidden valley were among my favorite parts of the book. Unfortunately, the more one thinks about the valley, the more unrealistic it becomes. It’s a shame that the antagonists are, for the most part, inept and stupid, and their strongest criticism of Galt’s philosophy amounts to “That’s heartless and cruel! Where is your compassion?” That’s too easy for the protagonists to dismiss. In contrast, I ask, “How do you expect this to work?”
I wish I was an economist, so that I could do a detailed analysis of how a real-life Atlantis would fail. Let’s posit that a) the valley is perfectly hidden, such that the only inhabitants are hand-picked by Galt and there’s no risk of incursion by the military, starving refugees, roving gangsters, etc.; b) the valley has ample natural resources and arable land (the novel mentions shale oil and copper deposits); and c) the magic motor provides more than enough energy for the residents’ needs. We are already into “assume a perfectly spherical cow on a frictionless surface” territory, but for the sake of argument, let’s run with it. How would Atlantis fail?
My first guess would be the complete lack of economies of scale. Frustratingly, Rand understands the concept of economies of scale, because after a major oil producer goes out of business, the aftermath is described thus: small companies
“…discovered that a drilling bit which had cost a hundred dollars, now cost them five hundred, there being no market for oil field equipment, and the suppliers having to earn on one drill what they had earned on five, or perish…” (p. 350; all page numbers are from the Dutton 35th anniversary hardcover edition)
But then she does not apply this principle to Atlantis! We don’t know the size of the local population, but the description seems to imply a couple thousand people at most, possibly fewer. How much specialization can such a small society sustain? The strikers can’t rely on importing mass-produced goods from the outside world, because they keep their imports to a minimum, both out of principle and to reduce the risk of detection by hostile authorities. Yes, the strikers have unlimited energy thanks to the magic motor, but this does not help with labor-intensive tasks that require manual dexterity. For example, one of the strikers, who used to manufacture airplanes in the outside world, has made a tractor by hand, and is now leasing this tractor to farmers in the valley. How much did that tractor cost, when every single part had to be made by hand, and all the costs must be recouped by leasing just this one tractor to a small handful of people?
Everything is going to be way more expensive per unit produced, and hence the standard of living is going to be far lower than it would be in a large, complex society. Who is doing low-value-added yet necessary work, like hauling away trash or picking tomatoes, and how much do they earn? How does any of this pencil out?
Sadly, part of the answer seems to be that Rand has no idea how much specialization is inherent in producing everyday goods and services, even at a level far below the expectations of a middle-class 21st century American. Consider her description of housing in Atlantis:
“The homes were not lined along a street, they were spread at irregular intervals over the rises and hollows of the ground, they were small and simple, built of local materials, mostly granite and pine, with a prodigal ingenuity of thought and a tight economy of physical effort. Every house looked as if it had been put up by the labor of one man…” (p. 728)
First, holy cow, that’s an inefficient layout, and second, what kind of house, no matter how ingeniously designed, can be “put up by the labor of one man [or woman]”? I consider myself reasonably intelligent and educated. If you gave me a patch of land and told me to build a house, I could, maybe, with much effort and trial and error, put together a wattle-and-daub hut with a fireplace in the middle and a single hole in the roof to let the smoke out. Electric wires? Indoor plumbing? Glass windows? Forget it. Has Rand ever tried to build a house?
Somewhat relatedly, Rand seems to assume that the strikers can a) cheerfully switch from one line of work to another and b) be good at it. Some strikers continue in their original line of work; Francisco, the former head of d’Anconia Copper, runs a small copper mine in Atlantis. But many don’t: a judge is now a dairy farmer; an automobile designer now runs a grocery store. In real life, how many people would do this? If someone approached Scott with, “I can invite you to a secret community that embodies your values if you give up psychiatry and blogging and become a shoemaker,” would Scott agree? What if it turns out that, for all his intellect, Scott is very bad at shoemaking, and he wishes to return to his psychiatry practice and his faithful ACX readers in the outside world?
This brings us to the inevitable type I and type II errors that Galt and his friends will make when deciding whom to invite to Atlantis. Many people in the outside world deserve to enter Atlantis and would do well there but were never identified as such by Galt and his handful of friends. This is a twofold tragedy: these people suffer unjustly in the outside world, while Atlantis is deprived of their contributions. Conversely, all it takes is for one enemy of the strikers to be admitted into the valley – it could be a person who enters the valley under false pretenses or a true believer who has second thoughts later – and the whole plan collapses. Has the valley not had a single Cypher who said to himself, “Living aboard this dinky ship sucks, I’d much rather have a nice juicy steak back in the Matrix”? We are past “Galt is a super persuasive and charismatic leader” and on the way to “What mind-altering substances are they putting into the drinking water in Atlantis?”
Let’s stretch our suspension of disbelief to a breaking point and assume that Galt is a brilliant judge of character who only lets true believers into Atlantis. This does not solve the problem, however, because there is a wild card that Galt cannot control: the strikers’ children.
I’m imagining a sequel titled Atlas Shrugged II: Trouble in Atlantis. The children of the original strikers are now grown up. Some of them are naturally compassionate and they want to help people, including those suffering in the outside world. Some are just plain lazy and irresponsible, despite their parents’ best efforts, and they try to guilt and manipulate others into supporting them. What happens then? Galt can’t just kick all these young people out of the valley, because they could have their revenge by leading Galt’s enemies to Atlantis. He has tried and failed to persuade them to adhere to his code. Now what? Imprison them? Kill them? Do nothing, leave the moochers to their own devices, and end up with homeless encampments and a bunch of panhandlers and petty criminals in Atlantis? It’s a conundrum!
Not that there are many children to worry about, because the strikers’ fertility rate gives South Korea a run for its money. Galt, Francisco, Rearden, and Dagny are all childless by the end of the story. Galt and Dagny can still have a child or two, if they act quickly (Dagny is thirty-seven when the novel ends). Francisco and Rearden love Dagny and presumably don’t want to have children with other women. In the best-case scenario, we’re looking at two of the novel’s heroes having one or possibly two children, and the other two remaining childless. Most characters in the valley appear childless, as far as we can tell (one woman is described as a mother of two). Moreover, the gender balance of Atlantis seems suboptimal for reproduction, with men greatly outnumbering women. If the future belongs to those who show up, that does not bode well for Atlantis, which is headed for demographic collapse. Idiocracy for the win?
Finally, a major problem with Atlantis is Galt’s endgame: he proposes to reenter the outside world “when the code of the looters has collapsed” (p. 748). Said collapse will doubtless involve suffering, starvation, pain and death from preventable disease, people dying of hypothermia for lack of heating fuel, violence as people fight over limited resources, etc. Suddenly, Galt pops up and tells the survivors, “Hi everyone, my friends and I have been hiding in our secret valley all this time, well fed and wealthy and happy, waiting for your evil society to collapse. Now follow my teachings and all shall be well!” Are the survivors likely to thank him for his beneficence and wisdom, or to overwhelm the valley by sheer force of numbers, kill everyone, and set everything on fire out of spite? While Galt is portrayed as a genius, this plan of his is forehead-slappingly stupid.
As a fantasy, the appeal of Atlantis is undeniable. I am certainly not brilliant, but I was one of the more accomplished students in my high school, and I hated being surrounded by knuckleheads who didn’t value academic success (and who made fun of me for caring about it). I sometimes daydreamed about a school composed entirely of intelligent, ambitious, high-achieving students like me (an unrealistic dream, since my parents could not afford private school). So, I completely understand Ayn Rand! She had the same fantasy on the level of the entire society. Wouldn’t it be amazing to be surrounded by people who value what you value, to work together toward a common worthy goal? Atlantis is like an island in the Archipelago from Scott Alexander’s old SSC post, and as such it is highly attractive; too bad it can’t work.
JOHN GALT’S MORAL CODE
The Atlantis chapters are fun to read, but the core of the story is John Galt’s three (!) hour long speech, in which he explains his philosophy and moral code, and challenges his listeners to join him and to reject what he calls the Morality of Death. It occurs near the end of the novel, and is the culmination of everything we have seen in the story thus far. Dagny and Francisco (and, to a lesser extent, Rearden) have been living according to these standards all along, but now we see them stated explicitly.
Galt begins by answering the question: why is civilization collapsing? The world is suffering because it has rejected reason and the human mind. Reason is necessary for human survival. But unlike nonhuman animals, which act on instinct and have no choice about acting to prolong their survival, humans are beings of “volitional consciousness” – they must choose whether to think. Since thinking is the tool of human survival, the choice “Should I think or not?” ultimately comes down to “Shall I live or die?” which, as Galt explains, is the only choice in the universe (inanimate matter cannot choose, only living beings can).
Once we have decided to live rather than die, what course of action shall we take? According to Galt, “All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil” (p. 1014). Here we run into the first problem with Galt’s speech: “proper to the life of a rational being” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. Reasonable people can and will disagree on what that is, something Rand does not recognize (more on that later). One thing we can all agree on, though, is that existence exists, i.e., there is an objective reality outside of our wishes, and we must perceive it and think about it clearly if we are to live. Galt makes this point repeatedly in his speech.
Galt goes on to explain the difference between values and virtues: “Value is that which you act to gain and keep; virtue is the means by which you gain and keep it” (p. 1012). This is an excellent definition. Many writers seem to use “value” and “virtue” interchangeably, as in, “Honesty is one of my values.” Following Galt’s example, a happy relationship with my husband is a value (something I act to keep) and honesty, kindness, affection are virtues (the means by which I keep it). I like how Galt emphasizes that virtue is practical; he states it explicitly:
“Virtue is not its own reward… Life is the reward of virtue – and happiness is the goal and the reward of life.” (p. 1021)
Of course, to Galt, the ultimate virtue is rational thought, and the worst vice is willful ignorance – the refusal to think. Galt further develops the theme of what a good human life is by saying:
“Man’s life, as required by his nature, is… the life of a thinking being – not life by means of force or fraud, but life by means of achievement… [M]an – every man – is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.” (p. 1014)
Now, many readers will probably remark, “How narrow-minded and selfish! Doesn’t he understand that true happiness and meaning comes from relationships with others?” Here is the key point: Galt absolutely understands this, but he claims that relationships are a source of happiness only when they are freely chosen between virtuous people who share the same values. Galt says that he would rather kill himself than see Dagny come to harm. Later, Dagny, Rearden, and Francisco risk their lives to free Galt from the torture chamber. I omitted this from my synopsis for the sake of space, but Rearden and Francisco develop a wonderful friendship over the course of the novel. When Galt and Francisco were at university together, an old professor got to know them and came to love them like a father. Other examples abound.
Rand has championed the concept of “the virtue of selfishness,” and this is as good a time as any to dispel the misconceptions around this. Most people hear “selfishness” and think “an amoral SOB who will stab you in the back for fun or profit” or “someone who is out to rule over and dominate others, like Voldemort or Sauron.” That is diametrically opposed to what Rand means. As Galt says in the quote above, achievement, not force or fraud, is a good aim in life. Instead of associating Rand’s philosophy with selfishness, it would make more sense to associate it with trade: the exchange of “value for value,” a phrase that occurs repeatedly in the book. Contrast the relationship between Rearden and Dagny, where each receives something of value – admiration, professional support, intelligent conversation, hot sex – from the other, with the relationship between Rearden and his no-good wife, Lillian; Rearden receives nothing of value from Lillian, and he stays with her only out of pity and a sense of duty. At the end of the novel, it is revealed that Lillian never loved Rearden, and she married him in order to destroy his self-esteem and hence make herself feel better about her hollow, meaningless life.
In line with Galt’s principle of “value for value,” he does not in any way seek power. He does not want to enter relationships in which the other party must be pressured or coerced to follow him, and he utterly rejects the use of force, except in retaliation. When Galt is arrested, the government leader who questions him asks him, “You’re much smarter than me. Why don’t you pretend to join us, then outmaneuver me and seize power?” But Galt explains that this would be antithetical to his values; he does not wish to rule over a bunch of incompetents and fools. Power for power’s sake is utterly foreign to Galt’s psychology. This is expressed in the Striker’s Oath, which all strikers must take when entering Atlantis:
“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.” (p. 731)
Galt further explains that to live a worthy life, you must have reason (your tool of survival), purpose (a goal to strive toward, something more than mere existence), and self-esteem (the belief that you are worthy of life and happiness). Furthermore, you must practice the virtues of “rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride” (p. 1018). Most of these are self-explanatory, although Galt throws in an interesting explanation of honesty: according to him, honesty is selfish (in a good sense), because a liar becomes “dependent on the stupidity of others” (p. 1019). Productiveness ties into another principle Galt emphasizes repeatedly: the fact that humans are an indivisible union of body (matter) and mind, and we cannot survive without the products of our labor, which exist in the physical world.
As an aside, Rand makes an important point about there being no conflict between the intellect and practical skills, which goes against what we often see today. Rand goes out of her way to portray her characters as both brilliant and capable of dealing with physical reality: Dagny, Rearden, Francisco, and Galt aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty and to endure hardship, and they know their way around a piece of machinery. In contrast, many of Rand’s villains are good at spouting fancy-sounding gobbledygook but are utterly incapable of dealing with any kind of practical problem or emergency. The famous Heinlein quote (“A human being should be able to [do a whole bunch of things that require a combination of intelligence, manual skills, and physical courage]. Specialization is for insects”) comes to mind here.
Having explained his view of human nature and the good life, Galt proceeds with a brilliant takedown of the dominant morality, aka the Morality of Death. Insightfully, he draws a parallel between two groups: religious people, whom he calls the Mystics of Spirit, and socialists/Communists, whom he calls the Mystics of Muscle. Both are his enemies, and both have common methods and goals. They have split humans in two, the soul (aka spirit) and the body, which are said to struggle against each other; what was lost in the process was the mind. Both sides preach the morality of sacrifice: the Mystics of Spirit want you to sacrifice your own needs and desires to the will of God; the Mystics of Spirit, to the greater good of society. Neither type of mystic wants you to think for yourself and decide on the best course of action for you.
As an ex-Christian atheist, I especially appreciated Galt’s takedown of Original Sin, which he calls a “slap at morality” (p. 1025). Some Christians, trying to square the circle of “God is just, yet He punishes us for something that happened before we were born,” claim that we are born free, but Original Sin burdens us with a tendency to sin (my pastor had used this explanation when I expressed my doubts to him). Galt calls this “tendency” a “cowardly evasion… A free will saddled with a tendency is like a game with loaded dice” (p. 1025).
For a novel that was published in 1957, some of its critiques remain startlingly relevant today. For example, Galt says:
“You fear the man who has a dollar less than you, that dollar is rightfully his… You hate the man who has a dollar more than you, that dollar is rightfully yours” (p. 1033)
Replace “a dollar less/more” with “less/more privilege” and make the language gender-neutral, and this becomes a decent description of progressive views on race and intersectionality. Then we have this gem:
“Every dictator is a mystic, and every mystic is a potential dictator. A mystic craves obedience from men, not their agreement… Reason is the enemy he dreads and, simultaneously, considers precarious… His lust is to command, not to convince: conviction requires an act of independence and rests on the absolute of an objective reality.” (p. 1045)
Rereading it recently, I said to myself, “This describes Trump to a T.” By the way, I find it tragic that Rand is right coded in today’s America; if Rand were alive today, she would kick the MAGA crowd to the curb.
After many great insights, we get a fingernails-on-chalkboard moment when Galt says:
“There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.” (p. 1054)
To me, that is one of the worst ideas in Galt’s speech. Galt commits a category error here. Some actions are clearly morally wrong and evil, and in those cases firm opposition rather than compromise is called for. If a husband beats his wife, it’s not right to ask him to hit her half as often or half as hard. But many (if not most) conflicts in public policy are a matter of degree and tradeoffs and cost-benefit analyses, where what Galt scornfully calls a compromise is the only way to go. Should we raise the top marginal tax rate, and if so, by how much? What is the right balance between protecting endangered species and allowing the construction of a new solar array or microprocessor fab? How do we allow law-abiding citizens to own firearms while minimizing the risk of criminals murdering children? If you reply, “Taxes are always evil; lower them to zero” or “Protecting endangered species is a sacred value; never build anything anywhere an endangered species lives” or “Confiscate every firearm in America and melt them down to make a throne for Biden, Game of Thrones-style,” that’s not good policy. I find it deeply ironic that Galt praises rational thought, yet his thinking on this matter is simplistic and dogmatic.
Another problem with Galt’s reasoning can be seen here:
“When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter… one of us will win, but both will profit.” (p. 1023)
This is a brilliant idea in principle, but in practice, not so much. People of good faith can and will disagree, and sometimes there simply is not enough information to resolve the disagreement. Misinformation aside, early in the COVID pandemic people genuinely didn’t know whether the virus spread via fomites, whether you could get it by standing more than 6 feet away from an infected person, how likely each infected person was to die, etc. All these questions were answerable, but gathering the evidence took time, and people had to make decisions based on incomplete information. That said, I completely agree with John Galt regarding the need to make decisions based on evidence rather than motivated reasoning.
Finally, an exasperating feature of Galt’s speech is his complete lack of understanding of game theory and collective action problems. He points out that most people hold onto “the lethal tenet: the belief that the moral and the practical are opposites” (p. 1053). I certainly want the moral and the practical to be the same, but the fact is that if everyone around you is acting immorally, morality really may be impractical! If everyone else is dumping sewage into the lake, but you virtuously abstain from doing so, the lake is still polluted, but you incur the costs (say, by having to pay extra for treating your sewage) with no benefit to yourself. The practical thing to do, then, is to say “Screw it” and dump your sewage into the lake like everyone else, but if everyone thinks this way, the lake will never be clean. Scott describes this well in his “Meditations on Moloch” post, which I wish Ayn Rand could have read.
In contrast, I agree with Galt where he rejects the expression “It’s only human” as excusing human weakness and flaws, “…as if to fail were human, but to succeed were not, as if corruption were human, but virtue were not…” (p. 1050). Galt is a believer in human dignity and self-esteem, and I’m here for it!
This segues into an excellent principle: According to Galt, the measure of your morality is not your intelligence or knowledge, but the “full use of your mind” and “the acceptance of reason as an absolute” (p. 1059). This is fair! Galt does not hold people up to an impossible standard; that would be irrational and unjust, something a mystic/dictator would do. If you have an IQ of 90, Galt won’t blame you for not performing as well as someone with an IQ of 130. He also makes an important distinction between errors of knowledge (forgivable) and of morality. If everyone followed this standard, the world would be a better place, no question. This should lay to rest the complaint that Galt “looks down on stupid people” or something like that. (In fact, the worst villain in the novel is a brilliant man who starts out good, but then sells out and uses his formidable intelligence in service of evil; he is punished with a suitably painful death.)
Galt ends his speech with a stirring call to those who share his values:
“In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst… Do not lose your knowledge that man’s proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads” (p. 1069).
“IN THE NAME OF THE BEST WITHIN US”
As I pointed out above, Rand’s philosophy has many serious flaws. To be fair, Rand was playing on easy mode in some ways. Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957, the heyday of American success, when the average (white) American man could get a job that would pay for a house in the suburbs and a car, and his wife could afford to stay home with their 2.5 children and their dog. She did not have to face questions such as “What happens to all the workers, including the diligent and responsible ones, whose jobs have been automated away or offshored to China?” Also, unless you are an ascetic who believes that human civilization is evil, you will agree that all the heroes in Atlas Shrugged provide goods and services that are a net positive to society: steel, copper, a well-run railroad. None of the protagonists made their wealth off esoteric financial instruments or marketing intended to entice Americans to increase their consumption of processed sugar. What would Rand think of people who earn their profit off things that do not serve rational human beings’ long-term goals? None of her protagonists crave status or fame, or seek positional goods (Galt doesn’t care whether his house is bigger or fancier than Francisco’s, for example). In all these ways, Rand’s heroes are highly atypical. What happens when 21st-century capitalism interacts with human craving for prestige and positional goods, which inherently involve zero-sum competition? Would this question bother Rand in any way?
Somebody once said, “Never offend people with style when you can offend them with substance,” and accordingly most of my review has focused on the substance of Rand’s novel. As for the style, I have one thing to say: someone ought to make a “director’s cut” of Atlas Shrugged – cut out half of the length of the novel without sacrificing anything of substance. The same theme is illustrated over and over and over again, and Rand never uses a sentence when four paragraphs would do.
At this point you may well ask, why read Atlas Shrugged, with all its flaws?
My answer is: I love this novel for its earnest depiction of heroic characters striving against great odds toward their chosen goals. Simply put, if more people were like Rearden and Dagny, the world would be a better place.
In fairness, I did not like the novel when I first started reading it, because I did not find any of the characters likable in the first two or three chapters. Early in the story, Dagny and Rearden are both surrounded entirely by antagonists: Dagny’s useless brother; Rearden’s whiny mother and manipulative wife. The protagonists respond by being brusque and cold in their demeanor, and this does not make for fun reading.
However, once the protagonists get together, they start to blossom. I could feel the joy that Dagny and Rearden took in working together to build the John Galt Line, and I admired them for their perseverance in the face of immense difficulties. The story took on greater emotional depth after Dagny met Galt in Atlantis. Watching her struggle with the most difficult decision of her life – should she stay with the man she loves or return to the outside world to continue her battle against the forces of destruction, knowing that she might never see him again? – was genuinely moving. Later, when Dagny visits Galt in his home in New York, he is a few steps ahead of her and he figures out that since she’s here, government agents can’t be far behind. He explains to her that he’s about to be arrested, that she must not regret that, but that from now on she must pretend to hate him – if the looters figure out how Dagny and Galt feel about each other, they will torture her to force him to cooperate. I was riveted by this scene, in which Dagny struggles with feelings of horror and guilt, knowing that she has unwittingly betrayed the man she loves, while he, knowing that he’s facing imprisonment and possibly death, does his best to stay calm and to reassure her, telling her how happy he is to see her, no matter what may happen next. My feelings toward the protagonists evolved over the course of the novel from mild antipathy to genuine respect and admiration, and their happy ending was truly rewarding.
It’s been many years since I first read this novel, but sometimes, when I’m dealing with challenges in my life, I pick up my old copy of Atlas Shrugged off the shelf and I read an excerpt in which the protagonists display courage and steadfastness in the face of evil and despair, and it puts a smile on my face and helps me face my own difficulties.
I give Atlas Shrugged an A for a stirring depiction of heroic and inspiring characters in an interesting narrative and an F for a plan on how to structure society in real life, and I won’t insult Ayn Rand by doing something as insipid as averaging these scores and giving the entire novel a C. It made me rethink a lot of my assumptions, and it was well worth reading for that alone.