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Does anyone care who John Galt is anymore?
- PaulHoule 5y agoI read Atlas Shrugged when I was in college, I thought it was pretty good as a potboiler novel until John Galt gave his speech which was just self-indulgent on the part of the author, then there wasn’t any tension for the events after that. Although Rand called herself an ‘objectivist’ her fiction grew out of her very own subjective experience of the Bolsheviks killing her family and taking their stuff, she had strong personal reasons to hate and oppose that movement. Trains as symbology are interesting in that book for a few reasons: one is that the Soviets had their own strange obsession with trains (they put one on display that was a replica of one that Lenin rode when he returned to the country) plus the mostly forgotten hostility that pre-WW II Americans had against railroads (the phrase ‘railroaded’) which would skip building a station in your town and instead build a new town on land that they own. Many people have critiqued the love affair people have with cars but it is brilliant political engineering that we feel like the system belongs to us since we own the roads collectively and own vehicles individually so we feel ‘invested’ in this way of life and continue to support it. That delivered us from the railroads, which we are so glad to ride when we go to Europe even if Europeans take the plane because taking the plane is such a better experience than it is here. (Has competition with the railroad!)