4 ms·
I believed this quote when I first read it. I now see that both the heroes and villains in Atlas Shrugged turned out to be far more real that I could have imag
by aeternum 11mo ago
I believed this quote when I first read it.
I now see that both the heroes and villains in Atlas Shrugged turned out to be far more real that I could have imagined (the engine was still unnecessary BS though).
- delichon 11mo agoThe central mythical figure in the novel is John Galt, a great inventor. What more critical piece of machinery could Rand have him contribute than an engine, the driver of the industrial revolution? It doesn't work to simply remove it from the plot. It would need to be replaced by something else, like Taggart's railroads, Rearden's steel or Roark's buildings.
- CalChris 11mo agoA MacGuffin is just something that drives the narrative.
- aeternum 11mo agoIt didn't have to be a mythical engine that ignores the most basic laws of physics. Just like with Rearden's steel, a more optimized version is often sufficient to change the world. Both Elon and Bezos have significantly decreased cost to orbit and are very close to full reusability. This is alongside their other feats like a global logistic network that gets pretty much any product in the world to your doorstep in 1-2 days, self-driving cars, neural implants that enable mind-controlled computing. If that were in the novel, no one would believe it.
- delichon 11mo agoSee also Heinlein's Waldo (1942) where the hero invents a receiver for an inexhaustible ambient energy source. I wonder if Rand read Astounding. To me, a good hard scifi story is allowed up to one impossibility anyway, as long as taken seriously.
- mchusma 11mo agoI think this quote is the kind of thing that sounds smart, but is actually devoid of meaningful criticism. As you said, Atlas Shrugged touched a real conflicts that are rarely addressed. Is it kind of obtuse/allegorical? Yes. Would I like it to be a bit shorter? Yes. But it’s ideas seem generally right, the subject matter important, and under discussed.
- danaris 11mo agoBut the "heroes" of Atlas Shrugged are, in fact, the villains of our modern world.
- aeternum 11mo agoStrong disagree, the true villains have always been those attempting to convince you that human ingenuity and invention is bad. Without even mostly unknown inventions like the Haber process, over half of humanity would be starving right now. Industrialists and inventors are the great heroes of our time.
- danaris 11mo ago> Strong disagree, the true villains have always been those attempting to convince you that human ingenuity and invention is bad. Those don't exist. Effectively nobody actually believes that, or is trying to convince anyone else of it. And if you think that "we should make sure no one person or small group has too much power (with wealth being a form of power), because we've seen the bad outcomes that produces" equates to "human ingenuity and invention is bad", you have been swallowing propaganda whole.