Atlas Shrugged

"She looked ahead, at a haze that melted rail and distance, a haze that
could rip apart at any moment to some shape of disaster. She wondered
why she felt safer than she had ever felt in a car behind the engine,
safer here, where it seemed as if, should an obstacle rise, her breast and
the glass shield would be first to smash against it. She smiled, grasping
the answer: it was the security of being first, with full sight and full
knowledge of one's course—not the blind sense of being pulled into the
unknown by some unknown power ahead. It was the greatest sensation
of existence: not to trust, but to know."
"Why had she always felt that joyous sense of confidence when looking
at machines? ... The motors were a moral code cast in steel."
"Do not cry, when you reach it, that life is frustration and that happiness
is impossible to man; check your fuel: it brought you to where you
wanted to go."
Atlas Shrugged is a book about which there are raging debates in
review pages and discussion groups. It seems that people love it
or hate it, and if there were a list for "most fascinating book of
the twentieth century" Rand's classic would have to be in the top ten.
Rand was a philosopher who used fiction to influence the masses. A
Russian emigrant who had seen at first hand the restrictions placed on
individual freedom after the Bolshevik revolution, her magnum opus
may get you thinking for the first time about what it means to be free
and the nature of capitalism. The book addresses one of the basic
issues of existence: the degree to which one should be selfish. At a
higher level, it is a treatise on the heights that human beings can and
should reach for.
What is Atlas Shrugged?
A mystery, raunchy romance, and work of philosophy all in one. Its
protagonist, Dagny Taggart, is a driven young railroad executive who
tries to run Taggart Transcontinental while fighting off corruption on a
national scale. She is joined in the cast by the ruthless industrialist
Hank Rearden and the flamboyant and aristocratic mining baron
Francisco D'Anconia.
However, the key character does not reveal himself until late in the
book, when we get answers to some intriguing questions: Why is the
greatest living philosopher working as a short-order cook in a diner in
the Rocky Mountains? How did the most important inventor of our
time come to be an underground ganger on the railways? What happens
when the people who might save the world choose not to save it?
Who is John Galt?
Reason (or the responsibility to live according to a purpose)
Atlas Shrugged was inspired by the author's fury that people wasted the
one capacity distinguishing them from other animals: reason. Those
who no longer asked "Why am I alive?" or "What am I going to do or
create that can justify my existence?" were to Rand as good as dead.
"Society" amounted to a protection racket for all sorts of mediocrities,
with people agreeing not to point out others' lack of effort if theirs was
not likewise exposed. This willingness to accept less, in order to accommodate
"human nature," Rand saw as actually anti-human. One of her
characters says that most people don't really want to live, but "to get
away with living." And when Dagny Taggart asks Francisco D'Anconia
what he thinks is the worst type of human being, he shoots back: "The
man without a purpose."
Dagny's role in managing Taggart Transcontinental is, in her eyes, a
sacred trust. Only when out on the tracks or poring over figures does
she feel really alive. The trains are a metaphor for her whole understanding
of life—they run at high speed on undeviating courses toward
a fixed destination. In one scene, as she pushes a locomotive up to 100
miles an hour on the newly built John Galt line, Dagny gets a flash of
insight above the roar of the engines: Wasn't it evil to wish without
moving—or to move without aim?
The nobility of making money
For Rand, wealth was a sign that significant individual thought had
taken place. To create something and to make money out of it was
nothing less than the essence of human morality. Napoleon Hill said it
in cruder words: "Think and grow rich." Money obtained by any other
means (including inheritance, fraud, or public directive) is "looting,"
yet in the book the people who advance civilization and keep the world
turning are sneered at as being "vulgar materialists" and "robbers of
the people."
The big question that Dagny faces is why she should still try to save
her railway while the looters, in the name of the "public good,"
emaciate it. "Wealth creators be proud!" is the book's cry. Fight for
your freedom to innovate and produce, and never accept the guilt of
the non-productive.
The best society is one in which people trade the best they have
created for the best that others have created. Alan Greenspan, the
famous chairman of the US Federal Reserve Board, is probably Rand's
best-known disciple and was part of her New York circle in the 1950s.
In The Greenspan Effect, Sicilia and Cruickshank refer to a statement
by the man whom many hail as an architect of America's long boom.
Before he met Rand, Greenspan comments, he was an "Adam Smith"
economist, appreciating the technical basis of capitalism; after Rand he
became convinced of its moral force.
Atlas Shrugged and the individual
For so long an object of ridicule, many of Rand's ideas are now conventional
wisdom. We now worship the entrepreneur just as she did
and today it seems obvious that a purer brand of capitalism makes the
best use of each person's talents and delivers ever more refined products
and services. Economic life in the twenty-first century is not simply a
triumph of technology, but a culture of invention generated by individual
imagination.
The motif running through Atlas Shrugged is the dollar sign. For
Rand, an immigrant to the United States who loved its ideals, this
sacred symbol represented the triumph of the creative mind over the
state, religion, and tradition. It meant freedom from mediocrity and its
strangling power. This worship of the dollar and self-interest looks
unpleasant and unseemly, yet Atlas Shrugged brilliantly portrays what
happens when the ethic of the "greater good" is pursued to its logical
ends. It very effectively annexes the spirit from an entire nation. Selfinterest,
as Adam Smith noted, is actually in full accordance with
nature and therefore brings the more moral end.
Rand is a patron saint of the twenty-first-century entrepreneur
because she provides a morality of powerful creation. A person with a
Randian frame of mind is opposed in principle to "equality" if it means
sacrificing their dreams for the sake of others. The pursuit of equal
rights may be noble, but ultimately suffocates the life spirit that has
always fired human advance.
Atlas Shrugged holds a person's greatest duty to be the appreciation
of the joy of being alive. Dagny Taggart's whole existence seems to be a
struggle, yet she refuses to give suffering authority over her life; she is
not willing to say "that's life" like everyone else.
Final comments
Atlas Shrugged has attracted its fair share of damnation. It is usually
painted as extreme, simplistic, or naïve, but the best word to describe it
is uncompromising. Rand was a genuine radical who created an ideal
of humanity that is uncomfortable for most, and her ideas are still
being digested.
Atlas Shrugged runs to 1,080 pages and, like the greatest novels, is a
world you enter rather than a book you read. It would certainly make
a great opera and it is no surprise that Rand's literary hero was Victor
Hugo. She may have been a ranting, chain-smoking, homophobic commie
hater, yet her star continues to rise. Her philosophy of maximum
self-expression teamed with a lust for technological progress, though
frightening to some, certainly fits with our times.
The book will probably outlive its wry-smiling critics, continuing to
inspire while other works classified as "literature" become of only academic
interest. Rand's might not be the most brilliant prose: There are
many lines that will have the discerning reader shaking their head or
chuckling and there is a fair amount of repetition. Like many books of
this length, it could be much shorter and better edited. Nevertheless,
there is a spirit behind the words that makes you certain that you are
reading something important.