I was asked to repost my old rant about Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, which I originally posted 28 December 2009. Um… okay. But I reserve the right to update those old essays a bit, and I did so here.
I didn’t actually read Rand’s capitalist version of Lord of the Rings till ’09, when I posted the piece. I’d always been encouraged to. People said it changed their lives. But these were the same sort of people who said Dave Ramsey changed their lives, or Bill Gothard changed their lives, or Francis Schaeffer changed their lives. Naught for three.
So I approached Atlas with the same sort of hesitation I had for the first 12 Left Behind novels: Didn’t really wanna read ’em, but my friends were reading ’em, quoting ’em, and letting their fearful Essene/Manichee scenarios leak into their theology and draw ’em further away from the Light. Same with Atlas; I’d spent years wondering why all the so-called “Christian” conservatives I knew were so heavily infused with social Darwinism, despite Jesus’s compassion for the poor and needy. Time to muddy myself with the source material.
Despite years in the Republican Party, an active member in my teens and early twenties, I’d actually never examined libertarianism. Nor Rand’s version of it, which she called Objectivism. (Because “existentialism” was taken.)
Didn’t feel I needed to study it, either. The libertarians have their own party, you know. During the ’80s and ’90s, they were pleased to stay in it, for the most part. That changed in the mid-’00s when the Tea Party took off, and a bunch of libertarians joined the Republicans—and a bunch of Republicans came out of the closet as full-on libertarians.
There are two main wings of the Republican Party: Social conservatives, and economic conservatives. I was in the social conservative wing. I was a Fundamentalist, so I was against abortion, drugs, homosexuality, porn, illegal immigration, and evolution taught in public schools. I didn’t really care about economics.
I mean, lower taxes sounded good. The elimination of government waste sounded good. Capitalism sounded good. Communism didn’t. Republicans told me socialism was Communism Lite, so I believed ’em and didn’t care for that either, as far as I knew. But that wasn’t my primary reason for being in the party. Social change was. And since the Republicans were the only anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-science party, conservative Christians figured they found a home, and moved in. I was raised to believe a Christian couldn’t be a Democrat unless they’d seriously compromised their faith. You know, like Jimmy Carter. (Like I knew anything about Jimmy Carter, at the time.)
The economic conservatives were all Rand fans. They didn’t really gush about her books; they assumed everyone read them already. They rarely brought them up to us social conservatives. And having now read Atlas Shrugged, I can definitely see why. Its morals run entirely opposite to the social conservative agenda. You can’t call yourself a social conservative if you’ve embraced Objectivism. At best you can only be a partial Objectivist: You’re okay with unlimited laissez-faire capitalism, with hands-off government, with people profiting off their own initiative and creativity. But when Rand starts saying the rich needn’t help the needy, or that love should be based on whether you can do anything to benefit me, or that original sin is a lie meant to subjugate the masses, that’s the part of Objectivism that makes Christians balk.
Rand was an atheist, you see, and didn’t like Christian morality getting in her way any more than the government.
Atlas Shrugged was her last novel before she quit fiction and devoted her life to spreading her philosophy. Really, the book is an introduction to the philosophy. All the good guys are Objectivists, battling a world gone mad. I call it the libertarian bible because, like the bible, it’s not pure philosophy: It’s a narrative, with a philosophy at its core.
But before I rant about it, I’m gonna summarize the plot. If you don’t want the ending spoiled, stop reading. It’s kinda stupid to give spoiler alerts for a 57-year-old novel, but I’ll be nice. This time.
Set in the near future (Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957, so let’s say it’s set in 1970 or so), the United States is now run by some guy named Thompson, who isn’t necessarily the President. The world consists of People’s States—socialist governments which all run alike. Thompson’s a bit dictator-like, and can get the Congress to quickly nationalize businesses. But he wants people to believe they still live in a democracy.
Yet various people—mainly capitalists, with a token academic and judge thrown in—know they’re not. They consider Thompson and his cronies “looters,” who tax their profits, steal their ideas, put ridiculous limits and demands on their businesses to keep the world “fair,” and hence squander the economy’s potential. So they decide to speed up the economy’s collapse. One by one, they “go on strike”: They abandon their companies and careers, vanish, and leave everything in the hands of incompetent underlings who suck up to the looters. And so the economy is in free fall.
Objectivists might argue this is how things will naturally go if all the capitalists quit. But Atlas Shrugged doesn’t really make that case for them. Two capitalists stick around to throw monkey wrenches into the system. Copper magnate Francisco d’Anconia poses as a careless playboy, and makes harebrained business decisions which ruin investors, or ruin any governments which try to profit from his mines. And pirate Ragnar DanneskjΓΆld keeps capturing d’Anconia’s ships, neutralizing any success he does have.
So, the economy is grinding to a halt, yet somehow nobody’s realized the missing capitalists might be a factor. Instead they express their frustration—or pure apathy—with the book’s idiom for “Who knows anything anymore?” which is, “Who is John Galt?” And somehow, nobody knows where that bit of slang came from either.
That’s the backstory. Now the protagonists: Dagny Taggart, the vice-president of her family’s railroad company, who really runs the shop while the president, her idiot brother Jim, capitulates to the looters and dabbles in politics. And Hank Rearden, the owner of a steel plant and inventor of a new copper alloy he names “Rearden Metal"—which doesn’t roll off the tongue, and doesn’t take marketing into consideration. The looters later rename it Miracle Metal.
Jim claims his business decisions are about "what the people need” and “what’s fair,” but really they’re about supporting the old boys’ network and gaining political power. (Kinda like the striking capitalists are doing, but never mind.) By contrast, Dagny only cares about making money, and has nothing but contempt for people who are in business for any other reason. And whenever she encounters a like-minded man, like Hank, she tends to have sex with him. Dagny is a thinly veiled stand-in for Rand, depicted as decisive, competent, clear-headed, and successful. Jim, in comparison, blathers about irrelevancies, screams a lot, avoids thinking whenever possible, and hates his sister and her philosophy. Yet he keeps her around because he knows (but won’t admit) she’s the only reason their company stays afloat.
Frustrated by her stagnating business, Dagny wants to build a new rail line to service an oilman with a new oil-extraction process. Because Jim and the board are indecisive, she quits, builds the line on her own, then sells it back to her company. Yet just as she does, the government nationalizes the oilman’s business. Since the oilman doesn’t give a crap about providing oil to an oil-hungry nation—he’s in it for the money, like a good Objectivist—he sets fire to his wells, Saddam Hussein style, and vanishes.
Hank grows frustrated that his family takes him for granted, and manipulate him through his sense of duty to them. But Hank has an Objectivist epiphany, and realizes he needn’t do jack for a family that doesn’t earn his love. He moves out, and proceeds to have lots of dirty sex with Dagny. To Rand, their relationship is wholesome because they demand nothing of one another; Hank’s wife makes nothing but demands. So it’s noble, philosophically correct adultery.
The government nationalizes steel production. Hank ignores them, so they arrest him. Rand, low on ideas, reuses a scene from her previous novel The Fountainhead: Hank makes a nice speech in court about how the government has no right to control his livelihood, and the court, whose power over him is only valid if he believes it’s so, caves in and releases him. In real life they’d have jailed both him and The Fountainhead’s Howard Roark.
But Thompson and the looters finally realized their economy was running out of capable leaders, and didn’t want to jail or shoot any more of them. Instead, they threaten to tell everyone about the dirty sex Hank’s having with Dagny. A true Objectivist wouldn’t care, but Hank’s still new at this, so he gives them Reardon Metal.
During a vacation, Dagny and Hank discover an abandoned engine which magically runs on static electricity. She tries to track down its inventor, but can’t. She hires a scientist to reverse-engineer it, but before he succeeds, he tries to disappear like the capitalists. Dagny winds up chasing him over the Rockies in a plane, and crashes into a secret valley, hidden by a holographic mountain. In this valley… are all the vanished capitalists.
In this capitalist utopia, where no government tells them what to do, leaving them free to pollute, to sell inferior goods, to cheat one another in the name of business, to exploit workers to their hearts’ content… Oh wait; this is fiction.
Utopia is powered by the static-electricity engine, which is supervised by its inventor, John Galt. Who also invented the holographic mountain.
John is Rand’s other surrogate: He’s the brains behind the capitalist strike, and recruited his college friends Francisco and Ragnar to help him. He understands Objectivism perfectly. And because of his noble philosophy, he’s young and handsome and proud, and Dagny wants to shag him rotten. But she’s with Hank, and apparently it’s wrong to be unfaithful to fellow Objectivists. (Everybody else is fair game though.) In the end, not to worry: Hank acknowledges John’s superior Objectivist mojo, and withdraws so John can have Dagny.
John lets Dagny stay in Utopia a month. He wants her to stay, but she yearns for her railroad company (no, I’m not kidding) and opts to leave. But it’s no fun anymore, so she yearns for John.
The looters finally decide to nationalize everything, and go full Communist. They threaten to reveal Dagny’s adultery unless she goes on the radio to support the plan. Instead she calls their bluff and confesses publicly… and again, they let her get away with it ’cause she and Hank and Francisco are the only capitalists left. And when Chile and Argentina try to nationalize Francisco’s company, he blows up all his factories and vanishes. In a panic, the U.S. government takes over Hank’s plant. He lets them, and he vanishes.
Thompson tries to placate the public—but John jams his broadcast with a super-powerful signal, and goes on for 50 entire pages about why they suck and Objectivism is awesome. I’m not kidding about the 50 pages either. I wish I were. Good Lord. I don’t know who would stay awake through the whole preachy, condescending mess unless they already believed it, or like me were analyzing it. But in the book, apparently it works, and throws Thompson’s underlings into a panic: They think the jig is up.
But Thompson shrewdly figures John broke the system, so John can fix it. Dagny unintentionally (and stupidly) leads the government to him, and Thompson tries to persuade John to work with them. Of course John refuses, so Thompson resorts to torture. So Francisco, Hank, Ragnar, and Dagny form an impromptu commando unit (again: not kidding), rescue John, and fly off to Utopia, to make plans on how to rebuild civilization in their image.
And society collapses. The end.
Rand entirely leaves out how the masses, abandoned by the capitalists, had to survive the resulting anarchy. Probably by resorting to feudal warlords, in a post-apocalyptic Mad Max scenario where only the strong survive. And that would be what the capitalists would return to: Hoping to be society’s saviors and intellectual giants, they’d be drawn and quartered by any redneck smart enough to take over the nearest National Guard armory first. Good luck starting any new business: You’re gonna get so looted. This time literally.
Writing a novel to introduce a philosophy has one giant problem: It’s a novel. It’s not the real world.
However much the author bases it on the real world, it’s gonna lack some of the real world’s complexity. And chaos. In the real world, accidents happen. In novels, “accidents” are always deliberate. In real life, accidents make a mess and stop everything; in novels, they drive the story forward. Very few writers know how to make a fictional accident look like the real-life roadblocks they are, and not a plot point. There’s only one accident of note in Atlas Shrugged: Jim’s wife dies. But she dies as a victim of looter philosophy; not because sometimes effluvia happens.
So is Atlas Shrugged real enough? Yeah, it’s science-fictiony, but so what if it has super-strong metal or static-electricity motors: I’m talking about the people. Are Atlas’s looters and capitalists real people? Can we find their equivalents in the real world? No.
In the real world, everybody (save Jesus, and the absolute best of us Christians) are motivated by one thing: Self-interest. And yes, that’s true of Atlas Shrugged: The looters claim they’re doing it for the common good, but really it’s because they don’t know how to create anything, are jealous of those who can, and figure the next best thing is to control the creators. And the capitalists fully admit they’re doing it out of self-interest; doing anything for the undeserving rabble is, they feel, stupid.
But in the real world, some socialists are jealous control freaks, and some socialists are fearful of unrestrained capitalism. They’ve seen the harm it can do. Some socialists trust some capitalists; some trust none; some are capitalists and are gaming the system. While everybody is still motivated by self-interest, not all socialists are monolithically the same. But in Rand’s novels they are.
In the real world, jealous control freaks tend to not get elected. Yeah, there are exceptions, but usually not. The only way they can gain real power is in a non-democratic system, like the Soviet Union, where Rand grew up. Any Russian who lived under the Soviets can tell you horror stories of capable factory managers undermined by jealous politicians. Any Cuban or Chinese or North Korean can tell you more contemporary stories. Rand left the Soviet Union at age 21, and naΓ―vely assumed every socialist is cut from that same cloth.
But what sort of capitalists did the Soviets overthrow in 1910s Russia? The upright, fair-minded, honest, hard-working, noble, competitive capitalists Rand depicts in Atlas Shrugged? Not even close. They encountered the same capitalists we find in 2010s Russia: Exploitative robber barons, taking advantage of deregulation and lax law enforcement, running their turf like a personal feudal state. Before the 1917 Russian Revolution, they weren’t too far removed from the times of actual feudalism, with serfs and everything. Russia was centuries behind the rest of Europe, and plagued with poverty and vice. Had it been run by Rand’s noble capitalists, Lenin and the Bolsheviks would have been dismissed as irrelevant faster than the Occupy protesters. But true laissez-faire capitalism is anarchy, and anarchy breeds revolution—and revolution can go any direction. It all depends on which faction wins first.
Few libertarians would call themselves anarchists. If anything, they think of themselves as pillars of social order, as upright and honorable as Rand describes them. But U.S. and world history shows otherwise. Had our capitalists been so noble in the 1800s and 1900s, we’d have no need for the
Nor would we be crawling out of our latest economic mess. Our politicians, assuming a free hand is best, removed long-held laws that prohibited outrageous speculation—for no better reason than that they were old. They trusted the capitalists to behave with the same degree of logic and objective truth Rand believed of them. The capitalists didn’t. Rand’s axiom of “A is A” is fine and true, but if you wanna make fast money, you gotta convince everyone A is B. And that’s the real world.
But in Atlas all the capitalists would never lie nor cheat. (Well, on non-Objectivists, but not each other.) And all the looters are lying weasels. There are no real capitalists nor socialists in the whole bloody book. It’s a novel. It’s fiction.
It’s a good yarn; you can look at John Galt’s Objectivist rants as the character’s motivations. But it’s like looking at the Force as the characters’ motivation in Star Wars: The Force isn’t real either. Doesn’t stop them from being entertaining movies, but God forbid you try to use Jedi mind tricks in order to get your way. Or Objectivism either.
Rand argued you don’t embrace a worldview because you want it to be true, but because it’s logical and reasonable. Ironically, introducing Objectivism through a novel undermines this whole argument: The heroes are so noble and good, and their enemies so petty and shrill, you want their worldview to be true, right? But in the end, it tries to say selfishness is good, love seeks its own, total depravity doesn’t exist, and capitalists would never game the system. It’s not logical and reasonable. It’s intellectual Crisco.
Nonetheless, a version of Objectivism with fewer trans fats—the Little Debbie snack cake version—has a key role in the economic conservative movement. Businessmen and libertarians love the idea of the virtuous capitalist, unfettered by a grasping government, free to live and let live, and trade as he will. For them, Atlas Shrugged is pure fantasy wish fulfillment. The stingy love Rand’s condemnation of the poor who take advantage of the rich’s charity, and rather than offer gratitude or try to better themselves, demand more. If they could only paint all the poor and needy with that brush, it justifies them never giving another dime to charity.
It’s a snack cake version of reality because nobody eats handfuls of straight Crisco. Nobody practices pure Objectivism as Rand outlined it. They can’t. It’s atheist. It’s entirely materialist. Only matter and energy exist under objectivism. Spirit doesn’t. And in a country where nearly 90 percent of us believe in God, 78 percent of us are affiliated with Christianity, and only 4 percent are truly atheist, people won’t follow an atheist, materialist philosophy without tweaking it to accommodate their religion. Hence semi-Objectivism is preached, a version which dodges all Rand’s faith-mocking statements. Looks like so:
- There’s no such thing as subjective truth; there’s only objective: It’s true for everyone or it isn’t true at all. A is A.
- We’re reasonable and logical, but they’re unthinking and emotion-driven.
- Pure laissez-faire capitalism, where everyone is free to do whatever they like, is the best and purest state of humanity. As soon as humanity achieves it, they’ll do nothing but benevolent, fair, uplifting things to one another.
- Socialists and government are only interested in seizing power, crushing freedom, and making everyone dependent on them. Any claims that they truly want to help, or that they actually care about the needy, are façades and trickery.
- The only purpose of government is to defend rights. Everything else, like schools, utilities, public services, or public land, should be privatized. Capitalists can do a better and cheaper job anyway.
Rush Limbaugh is an excellent example of a watered-down Objectivist. He holds all the above views, and preaches them liberally on his radio show. Yet (though no Christian) he still lifts up God and Judeo-Christian ethics. A true Objectivist should have absolutely no problem with abortion and homosexuality, and would strongly object to faith-based initiatives. But Limbaugh takes the opposite view because he’s a deist.
Can you be a watered-down Objectivist? Rand would say absolutely not. A is A. You must accept the whole system without compromise. It’s what John Galt would do. Anything else plays into the looters’ hands, and enslaves you to their irrational morality.
In Atlas Shrugged’s 50-page rant, John Galt absolutely rejects Christian ideas as empty morality. Doing for your neighbor does nothing materially for you. Doesn’t matter what it does spiritually—there is no spiritual world. “Love your neighbor”? Ridiculous; your neighbor will exploit you. “All have sinned”? Ridiculous; it makes people focus on righteousness instead of their own happiness. Selfishness is evil and sacrifice is good? Just the opposite.
Objectivism’s central tenet is John Galt’s statement, “I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” This flies, deliberately, in the face of one of Christianity’s central tenets: Love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus teaches there’s no greater love than laying down your life for your friends. Rand calls that stupid; there’s no greater love than taking up your life for yourself.
I actually recommend the book for the same reason I recommend people read other problematic works: If you wanna know what wrong-headed people think, go to the source.
’Cause they quote Rand like crazy. She still has tons of fans who spread her thinking everywhere, and even those who’ve never read her books will quote her unknowingly. I’ve actually heard social conservatives, who would never approve of John Galt’s speech, nonetheless try to blend Rand’s philosophy of rational selfishness with Jesus’s philosophy of self-sacrifice. No, it can’t be done. But that won’t stop them from trying. Jesus said we can’t serve both God and Mammon, but they’ll try their damnedest to prove him wrong.
As a literary effort, Atlas Shrugged has obvious problems. The looters are interchangeable. So, really, are the capitalists, and the unthinking members of the public. The giant multi-page rants of Objectivist philosophy are poorly concealed, and are slow going. You can skip ’em without damaging the plot at all. But even so, Rand tells an intriguing story.
So it’s a know-your-enemy kind of thing. If you’d rather not slog through it all, just skip forward to John Galt’s 50-page rant. You won’t have to read much of it before you realize Objectivism is rotten to its very core.