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"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engende
by jbooth 16y ago
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
- lionhearted 16y agoIt's got some flaws, but it's one of the most pro-individualism, pro-production, pro-creativity, pro-persistence, pro-hard work, anti-politicking, anti-corruption works of all time. Her characterization of the people she's opposed to is a bit juvenile, but there's a lot of really good and valid stuff in there too - it's the only book I know of that acknowledges the phenomenon where a man works really hard to provide for a bunch of people who think he's not doing enough (Hank Rearden). Also, the opening chapter where everyone is looking to cover their ass and Dagny says she'll accept responsibility if something goes wrong introduces a very strong female protagonist who does business, travels, and lives her life in a strong way. It's not high literature, it's got some flaws, but it's got some great messages - it'd be a shame people who have contradictory politics just throw all those great messages out.
- jbooth 16y agoEcch. Let's stick with the Lord of the Rings comparison. If Ayn Rand wrote it, Aragorn and Gandalf would have just hopped the first boat west and let the world fend for itself, because hey, what's the world done for them? If you were born in America with access to a good education, you're in the luckiest 1% of anyone who ever lived anywhere, and that's all before your 10th birthday. The message of Atlas Shrugged, that these people are 100% self-made and the world owes them something for their hard work, is entitled bullshit.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- yummyfajitas 16y agoThe message of Atlas Shrugged, that these people are 100% self-made and the world owes them something for their hard work... As I understood it, the message of Atlas Shrugged is that no one owes anyone else anything except by voluntary agreement. The only people who owe Dagny anything are her passengers, and they owe her only train fare. (The only exception being that everyone owes a small amount of tax money to pay for public goods, e.g. police protection.) You should really read a book before criticizing it.
- jbooth 16y agoWell, first off, yeah, so if you're born into the situation that I described above (which I was and I'm pretty most HNers were), I think it's pretty entitled and childish to pretend that your accomplishments are yours alone and you have no obligation to the society that produced you. But sure, technically, you don't legally owe anybody anything. Second off -- if you're the boss, you take responsibility. Any CEO who wants to "go galt" can go right ahead -- they'll be replaced easily enough. There's a fundamental misunderstanding about capitalism -- someone's always ready to replace you. If you're the type of guy to whine about not being appreciated and "go galt" to teach people a lesson, you probably didn't deserve responsibility in the first place -- responsibility is all about being under appreciated.
- grandalf 16y agoYou've seriously misunderstood the book if you have actually read it. Before I respond in detail I have to ask you bluntly if you've read Atlas Shrugged in full.
- jbooth 16y agoI've only read passages. I'm mostly concerned with the "Going Galt" bit, which I'm either understanding as originally conveyed or every summary I've read from both ends of the political spectrum was egregiously wrong. So if you'd like to correct me on what "Going Galt" means, please feel free. It looks to me like a total cop-out abdication of responsibility that would change precisely nothing - because everyone's replaceable.
- grandalf 16y agoNot sure where you're getting that. Atlas Shrugged addresses the morality of capitalism. If you want to criticize it, you should be clear what you're criticizing. You seem to have an axe to grind with some subset of Americans, but I'm not sure how that relates to Atlas Shrugged. In my opinion, legitimate criticism would take the form of an argument against capitalism or an argument that shows how some other economic system is actually far better from a moral standpoint (not just in intention but in results).
- jbooth 16y agoIt addresses the morality of crybabies. The major theme of the book is that these titans of industry were such a bunch of whiners who didn't get enough respect and love from people, so they peaced out to show the world who was really important. Guess what? If you do that, I'll just take your job. 4 weeks of transition and we'll be rolling again. That's called being the boss. You're accountable and the people who are smaller than you can snipe, you can be bigger than that or you can be one of them. I find it hard to believe that anybody who's actually had any responsibility in their life would ever get behind taking your ball and going home to spite people.
- brg 16y agoYou missed or ignore a good portion of the book. No hero of the book was a crybaby; no one whined to their parents, friends, or authorities to get their way. Every hero of the book took it upon them self to better their own situation at the expense of no one else. They saw it was full of crybabies, and removed themselves by their own volition. I can't see why anyone has a problem with someone else just asking to be left alone.
- grandalf 16y agoYou seem to think that someone whose passion is business (in the case of Atlas Shrugged mechanical engineering) should somehow feel a strong obligation to create on behalf of others. Nobody expects this of painters, poets, or writers because it is understood that their creative acts are done with love and personal importance. But creation is creation, whether it's an alloy or a painting or a poem. Rand's point was that it is the same driving force that moves humanity forward. The question is whether you think of it as something that should be coveted and respected (like, say, the musings of a Poet) or if you simply look at the distribution of wealth and declare that all that is unimportant, that the creative person should care more about helping others than about pursuing his/her work. The point of the book was not to suggest that people leave, but to show how the morality described in the book could stand alone as first principles of an improved society. The book is a novel of ideas and not (as you seem to have taken it) as a literal prescription for how individuals in society should act.
- mhd 16y ago> where a man works really hard to provide for a bunch of people who think he's not doing enough Isn't that the plot of every Charles Dickens novel ever?
- aaronbrethorst 16y agoThat and Arrested Development.
- LargeWu 16y agoIf that's all you took from her philosophy - being an individual is good, working hard is good, etc. - then you missed a lot of the detail. To Rand, the ultimate measure of one's self worth is how much money you are making vs. how much you could be making. Building a company up, then offshoring all of your labor to China is more moral than keeping your operations local, because it will lower your costs, and therefore increase profits. And profits, to Rand, is the only thing that matters, as long as you aren't stealing from somebody else. Similarly, in Rand's book it would be moral for, say, hedge fund managers to make risky bets on bad mortgage-backed securities, even if such a house of cards would eventually cause huge harm to the world economy, as long as the hedge fund managers make money doing so. In Rand's world, there are no such things as externalities. There is only black and white, good and evil. It is a fairy tale land where everybody is always capable of making rational decisions with perfect information. Markets are always perfectly efficient. Within the context of her writings, her philosophy works because she gets to define the axioms. But it all falls apart when one realizes that the world is far more complex than she imagines it to be.
- davidw 16y ago> It is a fairy tale land where everybody is always capable of making rational decisions with perfect information. Markets are always perfectly efficient. Well, just as the Marx fairy tail is studied, I think the Rand fairy tail (and it is) is good for thought too.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- yummyfajitas 16y agoTo Rand, the ultimate measure of one's self worth is how much money you are making vs. how much you could be making. Rand gave up $0.07/copy in royalties to make sure Galt's speech was included in the book. http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/189415/word-count/nicole-gelinas http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/189415/word-count/nicol... Roark, in the Fountainhead, also turns down money (and shuts down his company) to preserve his artistic vision. I really don't know where you got this idea from.
- ojbyrne 16y agoI read Atlas Shrugged and immediately followed it by (re)reading The Grapes of Wrath. Both are horribly doctrinaire (with opposing viewpoints), so it made for an interesting contrast. Steinbeck can at least put a sentence together.
- grandalf 16y agoExample of a particularly bad sentence? I'm curious b/c although I'm a native English speaker I was not put off by Rand's prose.
- ojbyrne 16y agoNice placement of a semicolon: "That's not of any importance, even my life and work are not of any importance to me right now, nothing is of any importance; except I must find him." "The window frame trembled with the speed of the motion, the pane hung over empty darkness, and dots of light slashed across the glass as luminous streaks, once in a while." What? "What she felt in that moment contained, as one nameless part of it, the knowledge of the beauty in the posture of his body as he held her, as they stood in the middle of the room high above the lights of the city" Again, what? "This is the world and the core of it, this is what made the city – they go together, the angular shapes of the city and the angular shapes lines of a face stripped of everything but purpose – the rising steps of steel and the steps of being intent upon a goal – this is what they had been, all the men who lived to invent the lights, the steel, the furnaces, the motors – they were the world, they, not the men who crouched in dark corners, half-begging, half-threatening, boastfully displaying their open sores as their only claim on life and virtue – so long as he knew that there existed one man with the bright courage of a new thought, could be given up the world to those other? – so long as he could find a single sight to give him a life-restoring shot of admiration, could he believe that the world belonged to the sores, the moans and the guns? – the men who invented motors did exist, he would never doubt their reality, it was his vision of them that had made the contrast unbearable, so that even the loathing was the tribute of his loyalty to them and to that world which was theirs and his." Open sores? Why not just choose a suitably racist epithet. A 50 page speech? Would anyone listening to that (other than in the fake world that the book is set in) actually be awake? These I got from just googling around, I don't have the book handy. I'll leave you with a quote from an actual writer, Salman Rushdie: "No. I am not--and have never been--influenced by Ayn Rand. In fact, I pity anyone who is influenced by Ayn Rand. It's almost as bad as being influenced by Dan Brown." And finally you can go read George Orwell on why the kind of prose that Rand writes, isn't just bad, it's evil. The same way Mein Kampf and the Communist Manifesto are evil: http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm "As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse."
- grandalf 16y agoNote that most people who aren't fans of Atlas Shrugged resort to making dumb, belittling jokes about it rather than articulating an argument. The internet is full of parodies, etc., but there really aren't many people who dislike the book and are also capable of persuasively arguing against it without resorting to religious authority or mocking sneers (or both). Why? Probably because most people haven't read the book. It's not the easiest read. There are great audio versions, but audiobooks are generally viewed with disdain by literary types...
- lzw 16y agoWhen I first read the book, I started looking for criticism to see if I'd been tricked, or if she'd played on my emotions to make me think something was reasonable or logical that wasn't. I have found some obscure philosophical arguments that seemed to be based on a misunderstanding or different interpretation, or making a mountain out of what I think is a molehill. But those are in the minority. Almost all the criticism I've found seems to take a very shallow, "soundbite" perspective. eg: to presume that the book opposes charity, advocates meanness or evil, etc. Near as I can tell, there is a huge cult who hates Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged, and the reason seems to be that her book clearly and logically demolishes the philosophy they espouse. They cannot address it honestly because that would bring up the actual issues in their philosophy and likely many people would see that Atlas Shrugged shows them to be fallacious. So, instead, they attack her with ad hominem and derision and refuse to be honest about what the book actually said.