What I've Been Reading -- Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

Here's my commentary on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, which I read a few months ago. It's a little more disorganized than I would prefer and it doesn't address all of her arguments in detail, but it was already long enough – though not even 1% of the length of the book itself – and I didn't consider it worth spending any more time on than I already had. Still, it seemed appropriate to talk about it a little, especially considering Mitt Romney's choice of Rand disciple Paul Ryan as his running mate in the US presidential election (Ryan used to get his interns to read her work and gave copies of this novel as Christmas presents, though he has recently distanced himself from her philosophy due to its atheistic aspects) and the prevalence of other Rand followers in US politics nowadays.

I hardly know where to start with this one. First of all, though it is in the form of a novel, it is as much or more a lengthy polemic in support of Ayn Rand’s highly problematic (to put it nicely) philosophy. It seems less a novel than a manifesto for talented sociopaths. What’s rather creepy is how closely her extremist ideas accord with many of those espoused by many members of the so-called Tea Party. How many of them are directly inspired by her I don’t know, but certainly some of them are, perhaps the most prominent examples are Paul Ryan and the Pauls, Ron Paul and his son Rand Paul. But even many of those who haven’t read her would probably be going “Yeah! Exactly!” on every page – at least until the later parts, where she attacks Christianity, though not by name. Of course much of the rest of her philosophy – such as self-centeredness and total hostility to the concepts of altruism and living for the sake of others – are completely contrary to Christianity, but many Christian Tea Party members manage to ignore similar contradictions in their political beliefs. But even aside from inconsistencies in the ideas of her followers, many of Rand’s own ideas are logically flawed or based on false premises, to use a word she was fond of.

Apparently Rand considered herself a fiction writer first and a philosopher second, but that’s not what comes across in this book. I have read many works of fiction that incorporate philosophical and political ideas, and even many that have expression of such ideas as their main purpose. Yet most of the authors of such books do this with some subtlety, incorporating their ideas into the story in a plausible manner. At the very least, they usually do not spend every single part of the story talking about them, and not every character is neatly categorized as (what the author views as) good or evil. Yet with Atlas Shrugged, the entire book of over 1100 pages is a constant, one-sided argument for her ideas.

Perhaps this can be made clearer by comparison with other books. A novel like Voltaire’s Candide or Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha is a bit difficult to compare to Atlas Shrugged, as they are totally different in style and present their arguments in completely different ways. Furthermore, in Voltaire’s case, he didn’t try to claim to be primarily a writer of fiction, and in Hesse’s case the philosophical ideas are not political in nature. A more instructive comparison might be with a contemporary writer with a strong political viewpoint, such as China Miéville or Kim Stanley Robinson. Take Robinson’s global warming trilogy Science in the Capital for example. Robinson’s own viewpoint is clearly evident to anyone who reads the novel, and in many arguments, characters presenting his side do win rather handily. But the opposing side at least isn’t given such blatantly nonsensical arguments as Rand gives to the antagonists in her novel (a point I’ll come back to). Furthermore, not all debates are so clear cut as to which side is right (an example from another of Robinson’s books comes to mind, namely the terraforming debate between Sax Russell and Ann Clayborne). This never happens with Rand, as for her absolutely everything is black and white. Finally, much of the dialogue and events in Robinson’s trilogy are not connected to any of the political, economic or philosophical issues that are discussed elsewhere, whereas in Rand’s case, there’s virtually nothing in the entire book that doesn’t directly relate to her ideas. Even if I agreed with her on everything (with I certainly don’t), this would get tiresome. In this case, it made the book tedious as well as objectionable.

I am not going to attempt to answer all of the hundreds of pages of arguments Rand makes in favor of her philosophy, as that would take more time than it is really worth. Instead, I will point out a few of the obvious problems. Before I do so, I should also say that I actually agree with some of her basic points. For instance, she spends a lot of time arguing in favor of the primacy of the mind and of reason, and criticizing those who refuse to think. I completely agree with this – I also find what I call “willful ignorance” extremely annoying, to say the least. But when I – or someone like Albert Einstein, Aung San Syu Kyi or Kim Stanley Robinson or any number of other highly intelligent people in different fields – use my mind in thinking about what kind of society would be best for me as an individual as well as those around me, I reach conclusions that are in many cases diametrically opposed to Rand’s.

One concept that is central to Rand’s view of the world is the idea of “prime movers”, a small minority of people who are responsible for keeping everything going with their initiative and leadership skills, or as she would put it, their use of their minds. These are the people she sees as inventing things, making technological advances, finding new ways to do things, and simply running large operations such as major companies with their single-minded use of their brainpower to solve any problems that arise. The whole premise of the novel is that such people decide to start dropping out of society and disappearing rather than continue to be exploited by the rest of society, which mostly consists of “moochers” (those who sponge off the prime movers) and “looters” (those who use the power of government to deprive the prime movers of their hard-earned profits). As these people, according to Rand, hold up the world like Atlas in Greek mythology, when they start to disappear everything starts to fall apart.

Now, I will be the first to admit that I am fairly cynical about the mental capabilities of humanity in general, or at least I think most people don’t use their brains as much or as well as they should. It has also occurred to me that most of the inventions and discoveries human society rests on, from the use of fire to the Internet, were the work of a relatively small proportion of humanity. So does that mean I share Rand’s concept of “prime movers”? Not exactly. First of all, most of Rand’s “prime movers” are industrialists and bankers, not inventors or scientific pioneers. Except for Hank Rearden and John Galt, none of them appear to have invented anything of major significance. While I recognize that it takes a certain type of ability to build and run a large corporation or a bank, I don’t think it is a particularly rare talent or something that most moderately intelligent people could not learn with a little training. Also, even as far as those responsible for scientific and technological progress is concerned, I hardly think the number of people involved is as tiny as the number of Rand’s “prime movers”. Someone like Bill Gates may play the key role of starting up a major company, but once it is established much of the work – even much of the brainwork – is done by many others. Even someone like Steve Jobs cannot be given sole credit for everything his company accomplished. What’s more, there is not nearly such a clear dividing line between the smart, capable people with drive and everyone else. Very important discoveries and inventions may be made by people whose talents are otherwise fairly modest, or are relatively narrow in scope. Some people are good at coming up with ideas but not at putting them into practice, and others have no original ideas of their own but are good at finding ways to use those of others. In any case, there are a lot of elements that go into anything that is produced in a society, and no one can do everything alone. As Elizabeth Warren (or a staff ghostwriter) observed in a recent political mailing: “We don't know who is going to have the next big idea in America. But we're pretty sure they're going to need employees who can read and write. They're going to need power to keep the lights on and clean water and functioning sewers to keep going. They're going to need roads and bridges to move their goods to market or bring customers to their store. And they're going to need police officers and firefighters to keep their businesses safe.”

One of the main villains in Rand’s novel is of course the government, specifically a number of bureaucrats who collaborate with favored businesspeople to create regulations that hurt the ones doing all the real work. The negative roles played by businesspeople like James Taggart, the brother of protagonist Dagny Taggart, might seem like an acknowledgement that not all businesspeople are honest and trustworthy, but Rand seemed to think that those that are capable (like Dagny and Hank Rearden) are automatically honest, and those that are dishonest are automatically incompetent, which any observer of reality knows is not the case. She also seems to think that the only way unscrupulous (by her standards) businesspeople can gain an advantage is by using regulations to aid their cause, when a sufficiently powerful company, especially one with a near monopoly, can use all sorts of market tools to stifle competition and block innovation. As for government, Rand believes that its only legitimate role was policing to prevent legitimate owners from being robbed (though of course she ignores the complexity of determining ownership in the first place). She ignores the role government has played in creating the infrastructure that the US was built on (true, the railroads, like the Taggart company in the novel, were private, but almost all other major infrastructure projects from the Eire Canal to the interstates were mainly government projects. Furthermore, one of her main “heroes”, Hank Rearden, develops a new metal (this and even more so Galt’s invention sound rather dubious scientifically, but we’ll let that slide) and later is forced to give up his patent by a scheming government. But of course patents could not exist in the first place without the government. Perhaps granting patents is another legitimate government function that Rand neglected to mention? She also fails to address the fact that patents can be and frequently are used to hinder innovation. Though it would be difficult to argue that a complete lack of patent protection such as existed before the industrial age would as a whole be more conducive to progress, neither patents nor monopolies are universal positive either, something Rand ignores. Also, while she seems to recognize that incompetence could be deadly, she completely fails to acknowledge that government regulation can help to maintain minimum standards so that companies don’t kill people with their products, whether due to negligence or unscrupulousness.

Rand also implies that applied science is superior to theoretical science. One of her villains is the physicist Robert Stadler, who has a powerful mind but acquiesces to and even supports the corrupt system around him. He was supposedly based in part on Robert Oppenheimer, and perhaps Albert Einstein as well. His theoretical work is used by others to create a sound based weapon of mass destruction (which obviously represents the atom bomb – Rand’s apparent anti-nuclear stance is something many of her modern day followers don’t seem to share), but unlike Oppenheimer and Einstein, when confronted with the fact of the weapon, he decides to violate his remaining principles and speak in favor of it. Stadler complains on a number of occasions of people who expect him to actually produce things with his scientific work, when he is only interested in theoretical work. Given the way Rand writes, this clearly means that in her view applied science is actually superior. But in reality, most of the important developments in technology over the past few centuries have been based on theoretical work. Even aside from nuclear power, many other modern technologies are based on the work of people like Einstein who were doing purely theoretical work. A relevant quote to this effect appeared in a recent news story about the apparent discovery of the Higgs boson: “Finding the Higgs particle would not be of practical value, at least not yet, but Roser argued that when the electron was first discovered in 1897, nobody guessed how it would lead to the high-tech, wired world we have today.” To insist that science should produce immediate commercial results is ignorant and short-sighted.

In fact, a study of history and in particular the history of science shows that the real “prime movers”, to the extent that there are such people, were as often people who sought knowledge for knowledge’s sake, or even people who were motivated by altruism, which Rand considers a great evil. Many advances in the field of medicine in particular were made by people who simply wanted to help others, which Rand claims no one should want to do. The great chemist Humphry Davy invented the safety lamp as a public service – and possibly to some extent for public recognition to feed his ego – but in any case not in order to profit directly. The idea that selfishness is the only driver of innovation and progress is absurd.

In fact, one of the biggest flaws in Rand’s philosophy is that for someone who places such emphasis on seeing things the way they really are, she is remarkably blind to reality. She insists on the reality of absolutes that clearly do not exist. She insists that it is not human nature to be imperfect, or to try to take advantage of others when the opportunity presents itself. In her view, if people like her prime movers were given free reign, they would naturally be honest if self-centered in their dealings. They would pay their workers what they are worth, because it is in their interest to do so, and they wouldn’t take advantage of monopoly power to gouge their customers. Anyone who knows anything about people, however, knows that being talented and ambitious certainly does not guarantee that someone is honest in their dealings with others, and even those who attempt to be will inevitably on occasion act in ways that favor their interests at the expense of others, because despite what Rand says to the contrary, in dealings between people subjectivity always plays a role. Simply put, powerful industrialists were given the type of free rein Rand calls for, many of them would take advantage of it in ways that would be harmful to society as whole, and ultimately to the kind of human progress that Rand celebrates. John Donne once said that no man is an island, and any observer of human nature realizes the truth of this statement. Humans are social animals, and while some individuals among us are relatively misanthropic and content to remain alone most of the time, very few people can function without interacting with others at all, and this means some degree of compromise and consideration of the greater good. That’s what makes a society function, and this will be true no matter how strongly Rand and her disciples may deny it.

As noted earlier, all “debates” in the novel are extremely one-sided. Rand’s antagonists say completely absurd things that no one with any sense would agree with. But while there may somewhere be people who actually claim that thinking is an outdated notion or that virtue consists in giving to the undeserving, as characters in Rand’s novel do, I don’t know any actual liberals, progressives or leftists who say such things. Of course, she seems to believe that all ideology that emphasizes doing things for the benefit of others in essence equates to an abdication of reason, but her arguments for this view make little sense. In any case, an “objective” observer can clearly see that people like, for example, Aung San Suu Kyi (who advocates acting for the greater good) have not abandoned reason but are at least as thoughtful as Rand – more so, in fact. Rand’s protagonists easily win all intellectual arguments in the novel because Rand makes their opponents out to be idiots who literally refuse to think or engage in logical debate. But in the real world, there are many people who could make mincemeat of their arguments for selfish behavior.

As for how far Rand goes in her disdain for any sort of compassion, a fundamental human emotion that is common to one degree or another in everyone but sociopaths (who as I noted would probably love this book), one example will suffice. At one point the protagonist Dagny Taggart is riding on one of her company’s trains and upon leaving her car for the diner, encounters the conductor preparing to force a tramp off the moving train, which would mean his death. Dagny observes that his collar is laundered and that despite his general indifference to his possible death, he tightens his grip on the bundle that contains his only possessions, which she sees as a “gesture of a sense of property”. These things are what make her stop the conductor and invite the tramp to eat with her – the implication being if the tramp had not had a laundered collar and a concern for his possessions, she would have stood by while he jumped or was pushed off the train to his death. Even the sheer cold-bloodedness of this attitude is not enough to put the reader off, the idea of judging the worth of a human life on such narrow standards is irrational. There are many people who have contributed a great deal to human progress who were fairly careless of their appearance and material possessions, and many who have those characteristics do little or nothing worthwhile. But this is just one example of Rand’s simplistic, absolutist viewpoints. For example, she has a judge who talks about “objective law” and contrasts judicial decisions based on justice with those based on mercy. But the latter ignores the fact that court need not choose one or the other; the ideal should be justice tempered with mercy, which allows justice to be done, without rendering absurdly hardhearted decisions – which can also be stupidly counterproductive as far as the society is concerned, by locking up people with potential and leaving less room to incarcerate hardened criminals.

As an example of “objective” law, Rand might name laws against theft, i.e., depriving others of their property, as this is clearly a big obsession with her. But who determines who owns what in the first place, or what can be owned? For example, suppose a group of people live on an island with a spring as the only water source. Can one of them lay claim to the spring and charge the others for the water that comes out of it? Perhaps she would say the person would have to have some sort of basis for the claim. But suppose the group arrived together by shipwreck, and one of them was the first to find the spring. Would that be a sufficient basis on which to claim a resource needed by all? This would be a problem for the group to determine. This same problem applies to land and property laws in a more developed society such as the US. How do we determine ownership of a piece of land? And does ownership of a piece of land imply ownership of any resources buried beneath it? The answers to these questions are not the same in all countries and under all legal systems, and there is no absolute “objective” answer to them. Another potential example of “objective” law might be those against murder. But what then of questions of self-defense, or someone who kills in order to save a third person? The point is that no law can be truly “objective”; they all have to be determined by the society. Reason can and should be used to make this determination, but essentially it is used to create a set of moral and ethical standards for the society, standards that take into account both rights and needs and both individuals and the society as a whole.

Some of what Rand says about sacrifice is correct, but as usual, she takes it to extremes. For example, she says that a woman who buys food for her hungry child rather than buying a hat is not making a sacrifice, unless she values the hat more than the child. This is true, but what if she has to give up something that has much greater value, such as a treasured heirloom or even food for herself? Someone who gives up their own life to save the life of another is certainly making a sacrifice, and someone who is forced to choose between two things of equal value is also making a sacrifice of whatever they give up. Rand says that sacrifice is “the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don’t”, but she ignores the fact that in many situations it is the surrender of one thing you value in return for another. She might have argued that this is simply a trade, but if you are forced to give up something you value and would normally prefer to keep, you are still making a sacrifice of sorts.

One of the most obvious flaws in all of Rand’s ideas about the way a society should operate, particularly the preeminence of industry and the idea that it should be completely unrestricted, is that she completely ignores environmental issues (judging from a bibliography at the back of the book, she did later write an essay about environmentalism, judging from the title one that was dismissive of the seriousness of environmental concerns). While Dagny does at one point seem to show something resembling an appreciation for nature, she also spends much of the same period of time thinking about how to build roads through the isolated area she is in. A more indicative attitude is seen when she and Hank Rearden are driving through empty countryside and bemoaning a lack of billboards – and criticizing those who would see that as a good thing. More importantly, Dagny Taggart, Hank Rearden, Francisco D’Anconia and their friends speak blithely of endless building, mining and development, as if the Earth’s resources are unlimited and pollution is a complete non-issue. The planet is not made entirely of oil, coal, copper and other resources, and if we exploit them without restraint, eventually they will run out. And we can’t pollute the air and water endlessly without eventually facing some sort of consequences. All this is even aside from the problem of climate change, something which Rand, despite her so-called “objectivism” would no doubt ignore the evidence for like her contemporary followers do, because it doesn’t fit with their preconceived notions of how things should be.

It is particularly frustrating how Rand manages to make even the more positive aspects of her novel less palatable. Even aside from her distortion of the basically sound principles of reason and objective thought, the value of the novel’s relatively forward looking stance on sexuality and the role of women (especially considering that it was published in the 1950s) is diminished by her follow through. Dagny Taggart is a powerful, capable woman who has defied sexist attitudes to become the real boss of the country’s most powerful railroad. She also defies conservative sexual mores by having affairs with three of the book’s male protagonists (the way all these “supermen” fall for Dagny makes her seem almost like a wish fulfillment for Rand). But in these affairs she is quite submissive sexually, letting the men ravish and dominate her. Granted, the idea of sexually aggressive women was almost unknown in mainstream literature in those days, but you would expect a woman like Dagny to be a little less passive sexually. As for other aspects of femininity, the very idea of maternal feelings is of course ignored, as it would not fit with Rand’s philosophy. Virtually the only family relationships are hostile ones, such as that between Dagny and her brother or Hank Rearden and his mother and brother, or even Cherryl Brooks and her family. While I might agree that the traditional ideas of the love and loyalty we “owe” to those we happen to be related to are exaggerated and often absurd, Rand, as usual, goes to far in the opposite direction, denying the existence of any sort of family bonds. Race is not even mentioned. Theoretically Rand’s philosophy should be color blind, just as her “heroes” include self-made men and people from well-established families. And yet all of her protagonists seem to be white (while Francisco D’Anconia is Hispanic, his Spanish ancestry is emphasized), and in his absurdly long diatribe near the end of the book, John Galt refers to “some barefoot bum in some pest hole of Asia”, which certainly could be construed as racist, though it’s equally likely to be due to another of Rand’s absurd ideas, namely that anyone is poor deserves to be.

This attitude is the flip side of her embracing of the American myth: the belief that anyone who has talent and works hard will certainly be successful. This myth is perpetuated by all the rags-to-riches stories that are favored in education and the media (in Atlas Shrugged Rearden and Galt are examples of the same sort). I am not denying that such things do happen, but it is equally clear that many people in America who are both talented and diligent nevertheless live their lives in poverty and obscurity. In many true rags-to-riches stories an element of luck, of being in the right place at the right time, is key to the protagonist’s success, even if this is not apparent in the way the story is told. In any event, there were also be many people who through no fault of their own get no opportunity to exercise their true talents, even if they discover them (how would a child how has a natural talent for physics or computer programming discover it if they never get exposed to these disciplines?). The idea that anyone who is poor must be lazy, incompetent or both is ridiculous, yet Rand clearly believes this (the character of Cherryl Brooks and her description of her family background is but one example).

Of course, I wouldn’t dispute the fact that some poor people are lazy or incompetent and that this is the reason they cannot escape poverty. The problem with Rand and so many other people is insisting on absolutes that don’t exist. It’s like the debate over the causes of the financial crisis in 2008. The left insists it was entirely the fault of greedy financial institutions playing games with people’s money, while the right tries to blame it on low-income people who took out mortgages they couldn’t afford. While the evidence points more to the former, I wouldn’t say the latter had nothing to do with it either. But even if blame belonged equally to both, I would have much more sympathy for people whose chief mistake was ignorance or an overestimation of their own ability to pay and who ended up suffering for it then bankers and other Wall Street people who didn’t have ignorance as an excuse and at most suffered by losing out a few extra millions in income. Similarly, while I’m sure there are lazy, no-account poor people taking government handouts and hard-working, capable entrepreneurs who get hindered in legitimate business efforts by government red tape, there are also hard-working, capable poor people who get nowhere and unscrupulous entrepreneurs who trample on everyone they can to get a profit. I don’t see any benefit to society in making things harder for the latter type of poor people just to make taking advantage of the system more difficult for the former type, but I can see a lot of benefit in regulating the latter type of entrepreneur at the cost of making the former type deal with a little more bureaucracy. Rand’s problem is refusing to believe the latter two types of people even exist.

One thing that is very evident in Atlas Shrugged is Rand’s hostility to communism. The word itself is never used, but there are frequent references to “People’s States” which have evidently sprung up all over the world, and are portrayed as disaster areas where starvation is rampant. More directly, the tramp saved by Dagny Taggart tells a story of working in a factory where the owners instituted a policy of “to each according to his need, from each according to his ability”, which of course is the most famous Marxist dictum. Rand portrays this as not just an utter failure but as the worst form of “evil”. I suspect that she is correct in arguing that a wholesale application of the principle would not work (as I noted in my comments on The Communist Manifesto, Marxism has plenty of obvious flaws), though it need not be as bad as she makes it out to be. But what is interesting is Rand’s unrelenting hatred for the principles of Communism. It was only after finishing the novel and reading the brief biography of the author at the end that I learned that she was born in Russia and lived through the Bolshevik Revolution, encountering many of the worst aspects of the Communist efforts to enforce conformity of thought before defecting to the US in the 1920s. This makes many of her attitudes, including her absurdly exaggerated view of American exceptionalism as well as her worship of capitalism and hatred of socialism, a little more understandable – but it doesn’t make them any more correct, or less distasteful in their extreme form.

What is particularly ironic about Atlas Shrugged is the type of literature it most closely resembles is Communist propaganda literature from Cold War-era Russia and China. It is in certain ways almost an exact mirror image of such literature: instead of heroic, downtrodden workers and evil, oppressive bosses, it features heroic, downtrodden (in a manner of speaking) bosses; lazy, incompetent workers; and evil, oppressive government officials. Otherwise it is almost identical – everything is black and white, the heroes are unrealistic, the villains are caricatures, the writing is polemical and the arguments are one-sided.

I haven’t even touched on many of the questionable points of view made in this novel, such as the claim that money is not evil but good (money itself is just a tool and so neither good or evil, but the desire for it does lead to considerable evil) or that creating art is identical to digging coal mines (while some artists do create through a more conscious process and there is some similarity between the inspiration which strikes artists and that which strikes inventors, to claim that in all ways the creative processes in art and business are the same shows a rather poor understanding of art – though it might explain why Rand’s writing doesn’t seem terribly inspired artistically speaking). Speaking of such things, I haven’t really talked about Atlas Shrugged from an artistic perspective, except to note how her ideology predominates to an extent that there is little room for genuine story-telling and characterization; I might add that her prose, while not awful, is not all that great either, and the plot, while interesting at times, also gets bogged down in the constant polemicizing – certainly the story is not as exciting as the back cover blurb might lead you to believe. Readers looking for entertainment should look elsewhere, as should those looking for a philosophy to actually live by. Those who want to understand the mentality of many in the so-called “Tea” Party and today’s American right wing might consider reading the book – but shouldn’t expect to get a great deal of pleasure out of it.