Atlas Shrugged: Worst Book Ever

Spoiler Alert: Don’t read past this point if you’re planning on reading this book.

Also, a warning: this blog post is only slightly less disjointed than Atlas Shrugged. I am just going through point by point the complaints that I have with this book.

Well it only took me about four months, but I finally and begrudgingly finished Atlas Shrugged. Clocking in at 1,070 agonizing pages, with tiny type, it was a pain to read. I wanted to read it because it is such an influential book, especially for many neocons.

The “heroes” were not heroes at all. What kind of hero simply gives up and lets their world go down the drain? That is what all of the characters have done when they went on strike. This is what they have done when the acquiesce to a corrupt government. This is what they have done when they refuse to actively and effectively fight back. How is John Galt a hero when he tells the President that he will say anything and do anything that he is ordered to do? He is presented as a hero because he says he won’t volunteer to do what he is ordered to do.

For a book that has at its core the concepts of reality, reason, and logic, Atlas Shrugged remarkably lives in a fantasy world. Sure, the setting is the United States. But it isn’t the United States that exists anywhere outside of Ayn Rand’s head (and maybe some neocons, too).

Somewhere in the book someone is describing the hard work and honesty that the United States was founded on. Give me a break. The United States was founded on dead Indians, dead African slaves, indentured servants, exploited workers, racism, sexism, and other forms of exploitation. Ayn Rand would have done well to take a decent history class.

Rand would have us believe that when a few dozen industrialists disappear, the world descends into chaos. I contend that if the leading industrialists disappeared, we would live in a slightly better world. (Only slightly, because there would be people to replace the disappeared industrialists. This new stock would be slightly worse at exploiting people for profit, hence, a slightly better world.)

Rand also would have us believe that socialism is akin to zero productivity. What would she say today when presented with some European states that are much more socialistic than the United States and still productive? What would she say when presented with countless cooperative businesses, such as Rainbow Grocery here in San Francisco? What did she say about the anarchism that was successful in Spain during the Spanish Civil War?

Another problem with Rand’s argument is that she has no concept and no mention of externalities – the concept that people don’t always pay for the negative effects that they have on society. The cost of these effects are not reflected in the price of their products or the price of doing business. An example would be a power plant that sickens the surrounding community, such as in Richmond, California, and doesn’t have to pay for the resulting medical bills. In fact, several times in the book, Rand describes disasters that happened to the Taggart Railroad. Many people died in these disasters, but there was no implication that their families were compensated. In fact, it was implied that it was the fault of the socialists that the accident happened. Well, guess what? No matter who creates the unsafe conditions for a railroad, you can’t just run the train anyway. The “heroes” were essentially taking the same position as the villains without actually saying it: the position of “It couldn’t be helped! It’s not my fault!”

Yet another disgusting part of the book was when Hank Rearden’s family was begging him to not let them starve in the coming economic collapse. Letting your mother starve is evidently OK she has disrespected you. Eye for an eye, right?

I would have liked Atlas Shrugged a lot more if it had at least partially represented the opposing argument. Instead, this book was the worst misrepresentation of an opposing argument that I have ever read. The left was portrayed as “looters” who only stole the productivity of others. The leftist characters in the book never attempted to present a credible philosophy, supposedly because they had no philosophy. They were portrayed as being the worst kind of nihlists.

The absolutely most grueling part of the book to get through was the 70-page rant by John Galt. It was rambling, incoherent, poorly written, and disorganized. I did manage to get through it, skimming part of it.

All of the characters were portrayed as pure good or pure evil; there is no inbetween. It takes a remarkable lack of creativity to write a book with completely interchangeable characters.

At one point, a train explodes in a tunnel. Rand painstakingly goes through the passenger list, describing how dozens of people were part of the leftist problem that she sees. She implied that those who died in the crash deserved to die. This included children. Ayn Rand really must have been an awful person.

At the end of the book, the judge adds an amendment to the constitution saying that business is a fundamental right. A clause such as this in reality would ruin the environment and destroy the lives of workers.

Ayn Rand is a wanna-be great philosopher. I think she has deluded herself into thinking that her theories must be true due to a world that she sees as black and white, ones and zeroes. Unfortunately, her theories only work in the fantasy worlds that she creates. I find myself thinking this a lot about different people (mostly people, I suppose, who buy into Rand’s BS, like Dick Cheney et. al.): I wish I could see Noam Chomsky debate Ayn Rand.