Book Review - Classic #12 - Atlas Shrugged

I had to write this now, today, mere hours after finishing because I have become so lackadaisical about writing book reviews and most of the passion and emotion I feel about what I read doesn't translate well when I write about it weeks (or months) later.  With this book, I apologize in advance for trading in any organized thoughts in order to write with emotion.

Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, is a heavy and intimidating novel that mixes fiction with philosophy.  Its main protagonist, Dagny Taggert,  is a woman ahead of her time who understands how to successfully run a railroad.  Her brother, Jim, heads up Taggert Transcontinental in appearance only and focuses most of his limited ability making deals with Washington that essentially cripple his own railroad and other big businesses and make Dagny's job as Vice President of Operations more and more burdensome.  He and others do this out of jealousy, frustration and a feeling that letting those who can, do, isn't fair to those who can't or won't.

The essentials of fiction are present:  characters, plot, a setting, conflict, motive and moral, but each is so narrowly defined and controlled by the author that her philosophy, Objectivism, becomes the main focus.  Her characters are presented as "good" or "bad" with nobody, not even secondary characters, anywhere in between.    Rand defends this style saying she doesn't use average people as her characters.  O.K.  I'll go along with that.

Except, after awhile, none of these people seem real.  None of them have personalities, only goals or agendas.   The "good" guys are always rational, always decent (even if they pretend to the world that they aren't) and always, always right.  The "bad" guys are always irrational, snarky, slick and shrill.  All of the "bad" guys refuse to take responsibility for any action and won't until they are assured someone else will, whereas the good guys never pass the buck, and there is no room for compromise.  Ever.  There is right and there is wrong.  Black and White.  Moral and immoral.  Good and Evil.  Capitalism and socialism and never the twain shall meet.

Moreover, in a style that seems ostentatious nowadays, Rand rarely passes over an opportunity to declare her beliefs without using a tedious monologue.   I was interested, truly, in learning more about  the author's controversial declaration that man must be selfish in order to be good,  but to shovel it to me in sixty continuous pages via John Galt's hijack of the radio waves towards the end of a very, very long book, isn't very neatly disguised fiction.  That's an essay.  If she did happen to use the much easier to digest format of conversation between two characters, the majority of the time it was structured as questions and answers, with the answers short and perfunctory, creating a feeling of barely tolerable boredom.  The book's overall feeling was one of repression and hopelessness.  No one, not the good guys or the bad guys, were ever happy.

For me, this is a seriously flawed approach to persuade anyone about anything.  Man's search for happiness is...well...what life is all about, isn't it?  Rand kept telling us, over and over again, how that happiness is to be achieved, but to devote eleven-hundred pages to tell the story of weary capitalists who could be happy if everyone else would just get the hell out of their way isn't exactly the way to seek out convert capitalists.

Overall, I cannot subscribe to the philosophy contained with the pages of Atlas Shrugged because I don't believe it actually leads to happiness.  I think it leads to a productive economy.  Oh yes, I whole heartedly agree that capitalism feeds the world.  As Atlas Shrugged implies, if the government didn't interfere with the copper industry's production, they would be able to produce more copper at less cost to sell to steel manufacturers who could then produce cheaper steel to sell to the automobile industry and railroad industry and airplane industry and on and on and on.  As Rand states, the freedom "to make money" not to have it handed to you or taken from you or passed down to you from generation to generation is one of the things that has made America great.

However, only one side of the story is told here.  Rand assumes that people with great minds always have the best motives.  Selfish as they may seem, they merely want to do what they do best without interference but without harm or malice to anyone else.  Sadly, I don't think this is true.  I think history has shown more consistently that instead of a lassez-faire economy leading to virtue, more often that economy allows those with power to become corrupt.  Rand unfairly highlights that tendency only within the ranks of the evil socialists who want to take any power and ability away from their productive rivals but never addresses what happens when a producer or businessman uses pure capitalism for his or her own evil purposes.

Still, it felt eerie to read about all of the laws and government positions created to control the economic market during this novel's fictional setting.  Just today, I read about the financial reform bill  that President Obama signed into law that will protect American consumers from the selfishness of Big Banks.  The following article on the page was how the administration extended jobless benefits, in effect promising millions if not billions of dollars to those who are not working to be transferred from those who are.  I'm not kidding, those articles would have fit into Atlas Shrugged with perfect context, not changing a single thing.  It does make one wonder how much additional strain our humongous government, with all their agencies and bureaucracy, puts on yours and my pocketbooks.  Because we pay for it all.  The goods and the government making sure those goods get to us fairly.

Finally, I'm not sure how to balance politics with belief.  The things Rand mocks are notions of humanity, sacrifice, fairness and love.  She claims to view them in any lens besides that of justice and what a person has earned is not only wrong but evil.  To love someone who has not earned our love is not love.  It's giving in to the looters.  To have compassion for someone will less ability or talent is not compassion but supporting the looters.  She made those qualities laudable and easy to digest because those in her story who did not produce, or in other words, the "bad" guys, were horrible.  They were rude, demanding, ungrateful, conniving and dishonest.  Mothers, brothers, wives, children -- it didn't matter.  The complained and expected a free ride, every one of them.  Of course it was easy to declare that they didn't deserve love or aid.   But I believe otherwise.   I am that schmuck who believes that faith, hope and charity matter. Sorry, Ayn.

I'm not even going to start about how retarded the love stories were.  Pluh-ese.  All of those men in love with the same woman but totally ok with who she eventually chooses because they love him too and their love is all so pure and rational and.....no...I can't go there.  It's too ridiculous.


This is not a mediocre book nor is it bad or great.  As a work of fiction, it has serious flaws.  As a look into the ramifications of punishing those who make our economic world spin - merely because they make money doing it - it is seriously eye opening.   Its unflinching confidence about how the world does, can and should work secures its place as a classic, for both those who love it and for those who hate it.