Guest Post by Morbo
Fifty years ago this week, Ayn Rand published the novel “Atlas Shrugged.” Never has such a wretched piece of work had such a powerful impact.
“Atlas Shrugged” is a terrible book — it’s turgid, didactic and poorly written with character development that comes straight out of a cardboard factory. Yet it has influenced countless venal people over the years, providing a justification for greed and theories of capitalism untainted by social responsibility. Folks like Alan Greenspan, John Fund, Clarence Thomas and John Stossel cite “Atlas Shrugged” as an influence and drool over the cult of Ayn Rand that has arisen since its publication. (Stossel, who says he was “stunned” when he read the book at age 40, was the featured guest at an event in Washington this week, celebrating the novel’s 50th anniversary.)
If you’ve never read it, “Atlas Shrugged” is a work of fiction that explores Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, a kind of personal fascism based on the premise that selfishness is a virtue, government regulation is always bad and taxation and social welfare programs are a great moral evil. In “Atlas Shrugged,” characters frequently offer up extended rants outlining the virtues of finding new ways to shaft your fellow human being. One of them goes on for something like 50 pages. This is considered the centerpiece of the novel.
The plot, such as it is, concerns a group of selfish people who decide to punish the liberal, sissy parasites who live off their brilliance by slipping away to a hidden mountain retreat somewhere in Colorado. There they smoke cigarettes embossed with dollar signs, invent cool stuff and have great sex all while building a model society free of things like bureaucracy, compassion, food purity laws and the greatest threat to human freedom ever, Social Security. (If you really want to have fun, go to a meeting of Rand devotees and say something nice about Franklin and/or Eleanor Roosevelt and watch their faces turn purple.)
The idea is that once these rugged individualist super-geniuses have withdrawn from the pathetic, socialist welfare state that America has become, society will quickly collapse and beg for them to come back — only this time it will be on their terms. The books ends with society in chaos as the square-jawed, ravishingly beautiful hyper-capitalists scheme to put the boot on our necks for good and smoke even more cigarettes and have even better sex while liberals squirm in their wretchedness, pining for the days of food stamps.
Rand herself was quite a piece of work. Tired of her lackluster husband (a dullard nothing like the dashing heroes of her books), she began an affair with a disciple half her age and used her philosophy to justify it. In fact, Rand came to believe that her personal opinions were pretty much synonymous with facts. In one of her non-fiction books, she claimed to have objectively proven that Mickey Spillane was a better writer than Shakespeare. She opined that the greatest painter who ever lived was the Dutch master Vermeer. Why? Well, because Rand said so.
It wasn’t long before some of her followers began to question some of Rand’s teachings. These apostates were angrily expelled from the movement, and everyone else was warned not to listen to them. The malcontents failed to understand that Rand’s views had been objectively proven to be true and thus no dissent was needed or permitted.
Rand remains idolized today and has a worldwide cult following of disciples who defend her every word. Many of these folks are too dim to realize the irony of their position: Objectivism claims to champion individual thought and bold action – yet if you dare to actually exercise independent judgment by questioning the teachings of Rand, you are branded a heretic. Nevertheless, some Randites have done that over the years, and today Objectivism is splintered into various factions, all of which claim to hew to the true teachings of the Oracle. It is in many ways like a fundamentalist religion.
Literature, of course, has the power to forge opinions and shape thinking. That is one of its strengths. I defy anyone (with the exception of Dick Cheney) to read Charles Dickens and not be touched by the plight of the poor in Victorian England.
The difference is that Dickens was a writer of staggering imagination and gifts. He knew ways to weave a moral lesson into the text of an interesting story. By contrast, Rand’s theory was to never use a scalpel when there was a meat axe nearby.
In a way, I’m sorry “Atlas Shrugged” is just a book. The idea of luring people like Fund, Thomas, Stossel and the rest of the “hate-the-government” brigade off to a hidden mountain retreat and leaving them to their own devices has a certain appeal — though perhaps not the one they perceive.
