10 ms·

Erik Naggum on Atlas Shrugged

60 points by beza1e1 17y ago

grandalf 17y ago
No offense to Erik, but he seems to have interpreted the purpose of Atlas Shrugged as a recipe for building a society. On the contrary, the book is intended only to shed light on some moral distinctions about capitalism that people are inclined not to appreciate.
- brecht 17y ago
  Are you implying Rand was secretly critical of a selfishness-driven capitalism? If so, that's a pretty radical interpretation of her work, and one that I doubt many objectivists would support...
- rinich 17y ago
  And it sheds that light by portraying a scene where a bunch of people critical of aspects of capitalism are sent by train into a tunnel and killed.
  - Padraig 17y ago
    The scene you are referring to is pretty blunt alright, but you're twisting it. The train enters the tunnel at hands of the 'baddies' (the irresponsible incompetents). And the passengers are not 'people critical of aspects of capitalism' (Though we are led to believe that they weren't entirely innocent) This is different to the 'people critical of aspects of capitalism are sent by train into a tunnel and killed.'
    - rinich 17y ago
      It's not. It's a slightly more complex setup than I wrote, but the end message is the same. The passage in question opens with this: It is said that catastrophes are a matter of pure chance, and there were those who would have said that the passengers of the Comet were not guilty or responsible for the thing that happened to them. It then gives a list of the people on the Comet, and lists in effect their sins. It ends: These passengers were awake; there was not a man aboard the train who did not share one or more of their ideas. As the train went into the tunnel, the flame of Wyatt’s Torch was the last thing they saw on earth. So, quite explicitly, it debunks the idea that "the passengers of the Comet were not guilty or responsible", and concludes with "There was not a man aboard the train who did not share one or more of their ideas." It's not just sentencing these people to death, it's supernaturalism. It makes the claim implicitly that catastrophes only happen to people that deserve them — a claim that's repeated at several points in the novel.
      - spamizbad 17y ago
        Thanks for pointing this out. I recall reading Rand's work years ago and thinking there appeared to be some element of "cosmic justice" leaking into her allegedly rational world. Perhaps the name Comet eludes directly to this, as it certain fits into Rand's heavy-handed and often clumsy way of story-telling.
        grandalf 17y ago
        You may be right. Her storytelling is free of the sort of opaque language that lets people interpret it any way they like... such language is sometimes poetic and inspiring, but would not be a good fit for Rand's novel. Thus it is not a weakness of the novel that she avoided it. The passengers on the train symbolize the unwitting half-participants in the travesty that led to the train's malfunction. Surely none of them would have expected that their half-hearted support of the system that led to the crash would result in their own deaths. The reader is intended to focus on the thoughts of the passengers and the consequences of their prior beliefs. The point being that few would expect there to be any consequences, which is why the train crash is an effective plot element. The crash is not intended to symbolize the killing of those who oppose capitalism but to show the folly of loose, whimsically held beliefs.
        mschy 17y ago
        * The crash is not intended to symbolize the killing of those who oppose capitalism but to show the folly of loose, whimsically held beliefs.* Yes, A is A. If you are a capitalist then you may not have any ideological compromise at all, even if it appeals to you, and even if there's strong evidence that it's a smart political and economic decision. A is A. The world is black and white. Anybody who sees shades of grey must be killed. Fucking nonsense, IMO.
        rinich 17y ago
        You may be right. Her storytelling is free of the sort of opaque language that lets people interpret it any way they like... such language is sometimes poetic and inspiring, but would not be a good fit for Rand's novel. Thus it is not a weakness of the novel that she avoided it. Opaque language, or simply shallow? Not everything lacking depth ought to be commended for the fact. The reader is intended to focus on the thoughts of the passengers and the consequences of their prior beliefs. That's because the reader of Atlas Shrugged is intended to either think very small, very simple thoughts, or to be semipsychotic. Indeed, this idea that people with "whimsically held beliefs" should deserve to die unwittingly in a train crash is exactly what Erik Naggum was writing about in this thread! So we've come full circle. Naggum writes that his interpretation of freedom has to do with an acceptance of risk, which is an interesting way to look at the concept. In Rand's society, as he notes, there is no acceptance of risk. Either you do things exactly how Rand would like you to, or you die in a fiery train crash. Or you die like Eddie Willers, who supports Dagny the entire time but isn't quite special enough to avoid dying with the rest of society, as Dagny instantly forgets about him and goes whimsically on her way. Look, I know what Rand was intending. I had my phase of thinking she wasn't a deluded psychopath too. My point was that her intent led to her thinking it was perfectly okay to write a scene featuring people dying in a train crash for thinking bad thoughts, and that furthermore it was okay to found an entire "school" of philosophy around the concepts laid out in the same book, which, for all its strict observances of "objective" reality, also has a scene where scientists build a torture device that miraculously doesn't work on John Galt. A rational philosophical assault on that scene might proceed as follows: How much control did the people on that train have over their beliefs? Is it possible for somebody to believe wholesale in something harmful, without ever having a chance to doubt themselves? Then we can actually look at how people act in real life and realize that, in many cases, our inbred beliefs aren't entirely under our control. So when those people are killed for their whimsical beliefs, perhaps it's not their beliefs that they die for. Perhaps it's the beliefs of their parents, who raised them not to question certain things and so blinded them to the future. These people might be rehabilitated, but no, in Atlas Shrugged they will die without a questioning of their motives. It's one of those scenes that's suspiciously close to Christianity — these pop up everywhere in Rand's writing. She believes that people are born evil or born good, that their character just pops out of the womb, that there's no chance to change. No character has a change of heart in the entire book. So by her logic it's okay to sentence evil people to die — not just in the train scene, but when Dagny shoots a guard, or when Ragnar destroys ship after ship because not a single talented captain on the planet will argue with him so he's just killing off virtual retards. It's the world ending in fire, with John Galt delivering the good people into salvation — and, let's remember, nobody is as pure as Galt in this story, and all of them would have died were it not for his brilliant idea. It's not worth further arguing here. Atlas Shrugged is a brittle enough novel that a sharp tap crumbles it. It's certainly not the sort of writing that deserves to be taken seriously.
  - patrickgzill 17y ago
    No that is a gross mischaracterization. Rand is talking about the degradation of society as a whole, rather than the depradations of just one person in a society..
    - rinich 17y ago
      ..which is shown to the reader as a scene with people sitting in a train, riding to their deaths, with a lengthy exposition explaining they deserve it.
grandalf 17y ago
As I was reading this I noticed that Erik makes the same logical mistake that is often made when people contemplate evolutionary theory... the notion that natural selection happens to the group rather than to the individual. It came as a sort of entertaining surprise, then, to read a bit further and notice that Erik explicitly attempts a metaphor about group selection to underscore his comments about how a human social system ought to work. To those who haven't read the book in question: I recommend reading it for yourself before you waste much time reading essays like Erik's.
- gojomo 17y ago
  Since groups also self-perpetuate, why wouldn't selectionist pressures apply to both individuals and groups?
  - enki 17y ago
    selection doesn't even apply directly to the individual, but to the survival of individual genes through individuals. if a gene establishes itself within the genepool of a group, that is because it has been beneficial to every individual (and the genes that survive through that individual), by it's own merit - not by merit of being widespread in the group already, along the way.
    - thras 17y ago
      Well, a gene can spread in a small group through drift (even if detrimental). If it allows that group to out-compete the next tribe over, it will spread farther. Of course, no one has ever seen this in action, so it's pretty unlikely that group selection is very important in evolutionary history.
      - grandalf 17y ago
        Not true. A group does not "out compete" another group. Individuals only survive and reproduce or don't survive or don't reproduce.
    - 17y ago
samh 17y ago
I was inspired by Erik's 'no prisoners' extreme rationalist writings on usenet. I was very surprised to find out how young he was and very saddened to hear about his death.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
akkartik 17y ago
Really hard to read, like all of his writings. A version with my edits as I read: http://akkartik.name/blog/naggum-atlas http://akkartik.name/blog/naggum-atlas My surgery likely butchered the original. Errors in where I inserted paragraph and section boundaries will correspond to limitations in my understanding. I'm putting it up partly so you can tell me what I've totally missed.
dsspence 17y ago
Not well written, like Atlas Shrugged.
dmfdmf 17y ago
Erik Naggum wrote a piece about Atlas Shrugged that is rife with errors and confusions regarding Ayn Rand and her ideas. Most, if not all, of his errors are addressed in Rand's non-fiction work. At the end of the article Erik wrote "It is just as impossible to become a contributor to a free, humane society without having read Ayn Rand as it is to become one having only read Ayn Rand" which I agree with. Read Ayn Rand's works (and other thinkers) and judge for yourself.

60 points by beza1e1 17y ago

No offense to Erik, but he seems to have interpreted the purpose of Atlas Shrugged as a recipe for building a society. On the contrary, the book is intended only to shed light on some moral distinctions about capitalism that people are inclined not to appreciate.

brecht 17y ago
Are you implying Rand was secretly critical of a selfishness-driven capitalism? If so, that's a pretty radical interpretation of her work, and one that I doubt many objectivists would support...
rinich 17y ago
And it sheds that light by portraying a scene where a bunch of people critical of aspects of capitalism are sent by train into a tunnel and killed.
- Padraig 17y ago
  The scene you are referring to is pretty blunt alright, but you're twisting it. The train enters the tunnel at hands of the 'baddies' (the irresponsible incompetents). And the passengers are not 'people critical of aspects of capitalism' (Though we are led to believe that they weren't entirely innocent) This is different to the 'people critical of aspects of capitalism are sent by train into a tunnel and killed.'
  - rinich 17y ago
    It's not. It's a slightly more complex setup than I wrote, but the end message is the same. The passage in question opens with this: It is said that catastrophes are a matter of pure chance, and there were those who would have said that the passengers of the Comet were not guilty or responsible for the thing that happened to them. It then gives a list of the people on the Comet, and lists in effect their sins. It ends: These passengers were awake; there was not a man aboard the train who did not share one or more of their ideas. As the train went into the tunnel, the flame of Wyatt’s Torch was the last thing they saw on earth. So, quite explicitly, it debunks the idea that "the passengers of the Comet were not guilty or responsible", and concludes with "There was not a man aboard the train who did not share one or more of their ideas." It's not just sentencing these people to death, it's supernaturalism. It makes the claim implicitly that catastrophes only happen to people that deserve them — a claim that's repeated at several points in the novel.
    - spamizbad 17y ago
      Thanks for pointing this out. I recall reading Rand's work years ago and thinking there appeared to be some element of "cosmic justice" leaking into her allegedly rational world. Perhaps the name Comet eludes directly to this, as it certain fits into Rand's heavy-handed and often clumsy way of story-telling.
      - grandalf 17y ago
        You may be right. Her storytelling is free of the sort of opaque language that lets people interpret it any way they like... such language is sometimes poetic and inspiring, but would not be a good fit for Rand's novel. Thus it is not a weakness of the novel that she avoided it. The passengers on the train symbolize the unwitting half-participants in the travesty that led to the train's malfunction. Surely none of them would have expected that their half-hearted support of the system that led to the crash would result in their own deaths. The reader is intended to focus on the thoughts of the passengers and the consequences of their prior beliefs. The point being that few would expect there to be any consequences, which is why the train crash is an effective plot element. The crash is not intended to symbolize the killing of those who oppose capitalism but to show the folly of loose, whimsically held beliefs.
        mschy 17y ago
        * The crash is not intended to symbolize the killing of those who oppose capitalism but to show the folly of loose, whimsically held beliefs.* Yes, A is A. If you are a capitalist then you may not have any ideological compromise at all, even if it appeals to you, and even if there's strong evidence that it's a smart political and economic decision. A is A. The world is black and white. Anybody who sees shades of grey must be killed. Fucking nonsense, IMO.
        rinich 17y ago
        You may be right. Her storytelling is free of the sort of opaque language that lets people interpret it any way they like... such language is sometimes poetic and inspiring, but would not be a good fit for Rand's novel. Thus it is not a weakness of the novel that she avoided it. Opaque language, or simply shallow? Not everything lacking depth ought to be commended for the fact. The reader is intended to focus on the thoughts of the passengers and the consequences of their prior beliefs. That's because the reader of Atlas Shrugged is intended to either think very small, very simple thoughts, or to be semipsychotic. Indeed, this idea that people with "whimsically held beliefs" should deserve to die unwittingly in a train crash is exactly what Erik Naggum was writing about in this thread! So we've come full circle. Naggum writes that his interpretation of freedom has to do with an acceptance of risk, which is an interesting way to look at the concept. In Rand's society, as he notes, there is no acceptance of risk. Either you do things exactly how Rand would like you to, or you die in a fiery train crash. Or you die like Eddie Willers, who supports Dagny the entire time but isn't quite special enough to avoid dying with the rest of society, as Dagny instantly forgets about him and goes whimsically on her way. Look, I know what Rand was intending. I had my phase of thinking she wasn't a deluded psychopath too. My point was that her intent led to her thinking it was perfectly okay to write a scene featuring people dying in a train crash for thinking bad thoughts, and that furthermore it was okay to found an entire "school" of philosophy around the concepts laid out in the same book, which, for all its strict observances of "objective" reality, also has a scene where scientists build a torture device that miraculously doesn't work on John Galt. A rational philosophical assault on that scene might proceed as follows: How much control did the people on that train have over their beliefs? Is it possible for somebody to believe wholesale in something harmful, without ever having a chance to doubt themselves? Then we can actually look at how people act in real life and realize that, in many cases, our inbred beliefs aren't entirely under our control. So when those people are killed for their whimsical beliefs, perhaps it's not their beliefs that they die for. Perhaps it's the beliefs of their parents, who raised them not to question certain things and so blinded them to the future. These people might be rehabilitated, but no, in Atlas Shrugged they will die without a questioning of their motives. It's one of those scenes that's suspiciously close to Christianity — these pop up everywhere in Rand's writing. She believes that people are born evil or born good, that their character just pops out of the womb, that there's no chance to change. No character has a change of heart in the entire book. So by her logic it's okay to sentence evil people to die — not just in the train scene, but when Dagny shoots a guard, or when Ragnar destroys ship after ship because not a single talented captain on the planet will argue with him so he's just killing off virtual retards. It's the world ending in fire, with John Galt delivering the good people into salvation — and, let's remember, nobody is as pure as Galt in this story, and all of them would have died were it not for his brilliant idea. It's not worth further arguing here. Atlas Shrugged is a brittle enough novel that a sharp tap crumbles it. It's certainly not the sort of writing that deserves to be taken seriously.
- patrickgzill 17y ago
  No that is a gross mischaracterization. Rand is talking about the degradation of society as a whole, rather than the depradations of just one person in a society..
  - rinich 17y ago
    ..which is shown to the reader as a scene with people sitting in a train, riding to their deaths, with a lengthy exposition explaining they deserve it.

grandalf 17y ago

As I was reading this I noticed that Erik makes the same logical mistake that is often made when people contemplate evolutionary theory... the notion that natural selection happens to the group rather than to the individual. It came as a sort of entertaining surprise, then, to read a bit further and notice that Erik explicitly attempts a metaphor about group selection to underscore his comments about how a human social system ought to work. To those who haven't read the book in question: I recommend reading it for yourself before you waste much time reading essays like Erik's.

gojomo 17y ago
Since groups also self-perpetuate, why wouldn't selectionist pressures apply to both individuals and groups?
- enki 17y ago
  selection doesn't even apply directly to the individual, but to the survival of individual genes through individuals. if a gene establishes itself within the genepool of a group, that is because it has been beneficial to every individual (and the genes that survive through that individual), by it's own merit - not by merit of being widespread in the group already, along the way.
  - thras 17y ago
    Well, a gene can spread in a small group through drift (even if detrimental). If it allows that group to out-compete the next tribe over, it will spread farther. Of course, no one has ever seen this in action, so it's pretty unlikely that group selection is very important in evolutionary history.
    - grandalf 17y ago
      Not true. A group does not "out compete" another group. Individuals only survive and reproduce or don't survive or don't reproduce.
  - 17y ago

samh 17y ago

I was inspired by Erik's 'no prisoners' extreme rationalist writings on usenet. I was very surprised to find out how young he was and very saddened to hear about his death.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

akkartik 17y ago

Really hard to read, like all of his writings. A version with my edits as I read: http://akkartik.name/blog/naggum-atlas http://akkartik.name/blog/naggum-atlas My surgery likely butchered the original. Errors in where I inserted paragraph and section boundaries will correspond to limitations in my understanding. I'm putting it up partly so you can tell me what I've totally missed.

dsspence 17y ago

Not well written, like Atlas Shrugged.

dmfdmf 17y ago

Erik Naggum wrote a piece about Atlas Shrugged that is rife with errors and confusions regarding Ayn Rand and her ideas. Most, if not all, of his errors are addressed in Rand's non-fiction work. At the end of the article Erik wrote "It is just as impossible to become a contributor to a free, humane society without having read Ayn Rand as it is to become one having only read Ayn Rand" which I agree with. Read Ayn Rand's works (and other thinkers) and judge for yourself.