Atlas Shrugged

Drat! I made it 756 pages into Atlas Shrugged before every fiber of my body rebelled and convinced me to move on. Since my paperback version is densely packed at 1,074 pages, the bean counter in me is somewhat satisfied that I made it 70 percent of the way through. I did read it cover-to-cover back in the late 90s, so I still have a vague memory of the novel’s conclusion.

Why did I stop?

Well, truth be told, I lost heart. While I do enjoy listening to the book on tape so-to-speak, reading along with it, it was taking forever! It’s truly amazing that I tamed my hopper tendencies for the 49 days-worth of reading. Since I noticed I was tracking about a dozen pages a half-hour, I put nearly 32 solid hours of reading into the darn thing.

Okay. Enough statistics.

Here’s the bottom line you need to know about Ayn Rand’s (I’ll admit) masterpiece: She diagnoses the disease correctly, but prescribes the wrong cure.

How to condense 1,074 pages into a paragraph? Tough, but here goes:

In a somewhat alternate-timeline 1950s, socialism has spread its tentacles throughout the world. The United States stands alone in a sea of People States, i.e., the Peoples State of England, the Peoples State of Canada, the Peoples State of Argentina, etc. But the US is not impervious. A soft, gelatinous, greedy form of institutionalized meddling has straddled more and more all aspects of the economy, arts, and daily life. This leads to an unexpected and unique “strike.” One by one, the great producers of society – be it in industry, literature, music, education – are disappearing. At first our heroine, Dagny Taggart, heir with her soft, gelatinous, greedy brother of great Taggart Transcontinental railroad, believes a “Great Destroyer” is out there, causing these leaders and visionaries to disappear. Then, through a systematic series of revelations, she learns the identity of the first striker, John Galt, and the fate of the other missing men, and their philosophy for the future as the world collapses all about her, the inevitable result of the “looters” and “moochers” in the government.

I don’t know about you, brother, but it seems to me that we’re a-travelin’ down this road further and further every year, regardless of who occupies the big house in DC. (Others on this here Internet label it the Hegelian Two-Step: two steps to the left, one step to the right, two steps to the left, one step to the right, ad infinitum.)

Now here’s where Rand goes wrong. Her thesis is that only the promotion and glorification of some type of “higher” selfishness (possibly an oxymoron), through the vessel of completely-free-market capitalism, can overcome that government man with a gun to my head emptying my wallet. This ideal of “higher” selfishness is personified in the main protagonists of the book: John Galt, Francisco d’Anconia, and Hank Reardon. It is revealed to us as we accompany Dagny on her sleuthing and listen to her lengthy, tortured, interior ruminations. The seed’s always been in her, and we see-first hand this gloriousness as it sprouts and blossoms within her.

I recently read that the best parts of Rand are Aristotelian. That’s something I find myself in complete agreement with. Large chunks of the novel are dedicated to the “looters” beliefs that there is no objective reality, there is no “out-there,” there is no such thing as “thought” and “thinking.” Mostly these chapters dealt with the State Department of Science and the corruption / capitulation of the eminent scientist Dr. Robert Stadler (one of the saddest and most tragic arcs of the novel). Though she makes caricatures out of her opponents, Rand’s arguments in these segments seem rock-solid to me.

And, from the same article, the worst parts of Rand are Nietzschean. Specifically, Nietzsche’s concept of the “Superman,” or “Overman”; however it’s imperfectly translated from the German, it describes a superior man, one above traditional morality, one who is his own morality, aspiring to and excelling within his own noble goals and ideals. In Rand’s world, these men (and women such as Dagny) are the Prime Movers, the ones whose ideas are translated into products and services that raise the entire world up (hence the titular metaphor describing their “strike”). True, the existence and flourishing of such individuals (and their resulting philosophies into a world-view and culture) is an antidote to the evils of socialism. Problem is, as an antidote it is as loathsome as the disease it’s sent to cure.

This loathsomeness is illustrated by the protagonists’ actions. Infidelity and the justifications for it struck me hardest reading the novel. (And Rand’s own life distastefully bears this out.) Other aspects, such as their rigid inflexibility and loyalty to their … libertarian (? Is that the right word?) … ideals, their no quarter given to those who cannot function on their level, their hoisting of Work and Workaholism to Idol worship stature, these things I found repulsive too, though in moderation and not as an End but a Means there is the rare possibility they can be a positive.

Oh, and all these Super Men and Women are atheists. At least, they never mention the following: God, Jesus Christ, theology, the Bible, a priesthood, organized religion, prayer. Correction: the name of Jesus Christ is taken in vain on a handful of occasions. But I find it hard to believe that on his deathbed, someone like John Galt would be self-satisfied he gave no “sanction” to looters or moochers rather than ponder the ultimate destination of his soul. Rand’s protagonists espouse a philosophy as much at odds with Catholic teaching as that of the socialists.

There are other faults, too, faults of a literary as opposed to philosophic nature. First of all, I could never shake the soap-opera feel to the names of these people: Dagny Taggart, Francisco d’Anconia, Hank Reardon, Wesley Mouch, Midas Mulligan, Ragnar Daneskjold (!). These are the Days of Our Lives! Also, this chick loves exposition, thick chunky page-length paragraphs of it. Not necessarily a fault, unless done in excess. Characters often speak in similar seemingly endless sentence-upon-sentences. Listening to it on audio CD I would often wonder if the person being spoken to had fallen asleep as a ten minute clip of dialogue keeps going on and on and on.

And, of course, there’s Galt’s famous speech toward the end of the book (which I mercifully did not live through a second time). I did, however, locate it one night and did some calculations. The speech covers 56 pages in my paperback. Checking a few random pages I noted 51 lines per page and anywhere from 12 to 15 words per line. This totals out the speech to nearly 40,000 words! That’s almost 150 times the size of the Gettysburg Address! It’s about half the size of a yer average, regular-sized novel! This book-within-a-book restates, for those of us who slept through the first 920 or so pages, every single point made by every single character in every single chapter. Only in a dry and boring speech format.

All this being said, I do believe Atlas Shrugged should be required reading in high school. If only as an antidote to that soft, gelatinous, greedy socialism being force-fed the world. Or as a warning to literary excess, for those exhibiting a bit of flair with the pen. And though I can’t say hated the novel, I can’t say that I liked it, either.

Grade: A-minus or C-minus, depending where you stand in the ideological spectrum.