I just finished reading “Atlas Shrugged”. Being a science fiction fan, I thought I would enjoy it. However, never before have I read a book with such glaring inconsistencies, non-sequitur plot twists, improbabilities, and shallow characters (the leading lady falls in love with all 3 of the male protagonists during the story). The politics of the book are ridiculous: apparently every government on the planet (including the United States’) becomes a de facto idiocracy where capricious laws are passed to actively seek out and eliminate any potential for success (no mention of what kind of electorate or constitution would deliver America into the hands of such stupidity).
And that, it seems, is the point of the whole book: 1200 pages explaining what might happen to society if you eliminate every hard-working, smart (but not college-educated… another hobgoblin of the book) person from the workforce. Duh.
So here is a summary of the story: Dagny Taggart is the savvy and industrious Vice President of a railroad. Her brother as President. The story revolves around her efforts to keep her railroad running despite the best efforts of the government to ensure that her success does not harm other railroad companies. Dagny’s brother, James, agrees with the government that the success of their railroad should not come at the expense of anybody else, but does not actively block her efforts as he does like success, just not the responsibility, risk, or governmental opprobrium that comes with it. A man named Hank Reardon supplies Dagny with the steel she needs to build her railways, and he faces similar problems from both his family and the government: His steel is of higher quality and the government considers that quality a threat to other steel makers and passes laws specifically designed to put him out of business (though his dogged determination and simple nonchalance about anything the government has to say sees him through to continued success). A man named Francisco is an Argentinian copper magnate and rakehell who seems to be playing everybody in the world (business and political) for suckers… a game that leaves everyone except the reader confused: He is an obvious saboteur of the economic and governmental machinery.
Business owners with less determination to succeed than Dagny and Reardon slowly close up shop and disappear. It seems that they are being convinced to pack it in by Francisco and his partner in conspiracy, a man named John Galt, to go into early, temporary retirement in a secret, hidden valley in Colorado where they can practice unfettered capitalism, creativity, and research beyond the reach of the government (or it seems, incredibly, their own families). Meanwhile, a third man in the conspiracy named Ragnar proactively works on the collapse as a high-seas pirate, attacking any shipping of “looted” products (i.e. any material being shipped to or from America with the aim of helping those who do not produce). Obviously, more and more producers disappear, the economy collapses under more and more ridiculous government rules (such as: “no new inventions will be allowed” or “every producer must produce the same as last year, no more, no less”) and everybody left behind starves and fights until the government collapses and the “producers” from Colorado (with gold saved up from Ragnar’s piracy) can swoop back in and rebuild a grand new society.
First rule for this book is you have to remind yourself that it was written in the 1950′s by a lady escaped from Communist Russia: That frame of mind is important because the book really is a product of the times in which it was written — technologically, socially, and mentally. This really is a book about the evils of communism.
Second rule for this book is that you can’t remind yourself that this book is used as a cautionary tale amongst America’s far right wing: Only in the most general ways could I relate what I read in this book to anything that we are experiencing in modern times; the specific behaviors of the government are far too detached from even the most fundamental sensibilities.
Third rule for this book is that you need to prepare yourself for some awfully long, rambling passages and speeches. There are some that go on for 10 or 20 pages and really do not say anything or add to the plot. John Galt’s speech toward the end of the book is a 3-hour colloquium on the importance of “rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, and pride” is truly mind numbing. (I stopped reading after 10 minutes and went to a cliff-note summary.)
But in the end, this story was crap for one simple reason: It was filled with straw men possessing not a shred of intelligence. Author Ayn Rand essentially wrote every conversation between one of the “producers” and one of the “looters” as such: Producer says something extremely intelligent; the looter stammers and stutters and says, “but that’s not my concern.” No really. If you read Orwell’s “1984″, you run into some really dangerous minds arrayed against the hero, and you can grasp the fact that Orwell’s world became as it did because the smartest people in the world decided to be evil. In “Atlas Shrugged”, you feel nothing but intellectual contempt for the bad guys and suppose that even you yourself could give them a rhetorical smack-down and leave them blubbering just like the protagonists of the story.
In other words, Rand attributes world-altering skills to people who don’t possess a lick of common sense among them, let alone any kind of devious sophistry or philosophy that would permit them to operate unhindered. In my opinion, if you are going to write a book on competing world views, you have to create a nemesis who is intellectually strong enough to support the opposing world view so that you can understand its supposed danger. What reader can really fear a government run by Keystone cops?
I will say that Ayn Rand’s prose is good. She can paint a good picture, and her clever use of simile in nontraditional ways is engaging. There were some great philosophical one-liners (“the opposite of charity is justice”) in there as well, and nobody can say that Ayn Rand’s is not a world-class mind.
But in summary, the story simply asks an intelligent reader to ignore too many unanswered questions and contradictions. It assumes too much and thinks too little. The book is a philosophical conclusion whose suppositions are then forced to go to great lengths to achieve it.
In other words, you have to be very smart and very gullible in order to walk away from this book with any sense of satisfaction.
