Posted on 03/06/2007 2:42:33 PM PST by RWR8189
When Ayn Rand finished writing "Atlas Shrugged" 50 years ago this month, she set off an intellectual shock wave that is still felt today. It's credited for helping to halt the communist tide and ushering in the currents of capitalism. Many readers say it transformed their lives. A 1991 poll rated it the second-most influential book (after the Bible) for Americans.
At one level, "Atlas Shrugged" is a steamy soap opera fused into a page- turning political thriller. At nearly 1,200 pages, it has to be. But the epic account of capitalist heroes versus collectivist villains is merely the vehicle for Ms. Rand's philosophical ideal: "man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."
In addition to founding her own philosophical system, objectivism, Rand is honored as the modern fountainhead of laissez-faire capitalism, and as an impassioned, uncompromising, and unapologetic proponent of reason, liberty, individualism, and rational self-interest.
There is much to commend, and much to condemn, in "Atlas Shrugged." Its object – to restore man to his rightful place in a free society – is wholesome. But its ethical basis – an inversion of the Christian values that predicate authentic capitalism – poisons its teachings.
Mixed lessons from Rand's heroes
Rand articulates like no other writer the evils of totalitarianism, interventionism, corporate welfarism, and the socialist mindset. "Atlas Shrugged" describes in wretched detail how collective "we" thinking and middle-of-the-road interventionism leads a nation down a road to serfdom. No one has written more persuasively about property rights, honest money (a gold-backed dollar), and the right of an individual to safeguard his wealth and property from the agents of coercion ("taxation is theft"). And long before Gordon Gekko, icon
(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...
I couldn't get through the Fountainhead either - but Atlas Shrugged was worth the read.
"Explain what religion was practiced, and I mean actively promoted, by Pol Pot, Mao, Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Hitler"
In some the state as religion, as you said, or the elimination of religion to "better the masses," although in Hitler's Germany the vast majority of the population remained in some form of Christianity.
"Christian/Jew is a moral order based on rules and basic rights directly from the Creator to man."
I'm an atheist. You might as well be telling me it was handed down from L. Ron Hubbard. I honestly don't care where it came from, I care about whether or not it makes rational sense and works.
"It's only when humans believe "rights" are assigned" by the government that inhumanity arises."
Human rights ARE assigned by the government (or the society as a whole), even if you dress them up in fancy language and cultural assumptions about dieties. I'm lucky enough to live in a society where the religion of the culture at large assumes many of the same rights I would find to be logically consistant with a healthy society.
Unfortunately this always makes me a little nervous, since people tend to fail to examine why certian rights are important, resting on the assumption of divine intervention to do the mental legwork for them.
Thanks for the ping; pleae forgive any re-pinging; I'm out the door leaving for my state capital to badger legislators...
Is it just me, or does John Kerry remind you of Kip Chalmers, too? (Think: Do you know who I am?)
You don't count stay-at-home moms with that figure. Mothers actually do the most important work.
Nor do you count children.
Nor do you count military/police/emergency personnel.
Nor do you count those who are legally and ethically receiving retirement benefits.
OTOH, you do count trial lawyers, Hollywood actors and broadcast journalists :-)
At the risk of being accused of not understanding Rand's stuff - and I do think I read nearly all of it, even slogging through the lamentable Objectivist Epistemology - I would like to offer a couple of comments on this particular volume.
My biggest complaint is that it ends before Atlas actually shrugs. While a request for a continuation of a 1000+ page novel might be regarded as an exercise in masochism I do wish she'd have explored it a little further. Maybe it's just because I wanted to see more of her villains get theirs, but as the book ends Galt has only really begun his job and society is still chugging along as parasitically as it ever has been.
The fall at that point is more or less inevitable, to be sure. This essentially utopian literature, and the notion that out of the ashes would have arisen the phoenix of Galt's Gulch writ large strikes me as a beautiful aspiration but perhaps overly hopeful for the real world. But of course this isn't the real world, it's fiction, and hence she is free to pull the plug anytime she pleases.
The real problem is that the productive tend to create institutions that are a little more resilient than one might think, more along the lines of a D'Anconia than a Reardon, and that the reaction to Atlas really shrugging is more likely to be a long, horrible senescence than a sudden crash. We may be seeing signs of such a senescence in certain European economies where Atlas has been successively chained and systematically smothered. It could take awhile for the real effects to be bad enough to motivate someone to take the necessary action. It could be never.
That said, a happy anniversary. I actually like Galt's speech but I read it separately from the novel itself because by the time I'm through it I need notes to catch up on where everyone was when he began. But it is fun.
I found a copy at the bookstore and read it cover to cover that weekend!
Providing food and shelter is more important.
Nor do you count children.
Right. Because children don't help produce. It's been made illegal.
Nor do you count military/police/emergency personnel.
Drop in the bucket. Besides, should I really count police like those in Boston that make over $200,000/year? Seems to me that at that amount, its the public serving the police and not the other way around.
Nor do you count those who are legally and ethically receiving retirement benefits.
Legally, but often not ethically. There are huge subsidies for the retired. Those subsidies raise prices for things, like health care, for the rest of us. We give them money for health care, then use our own money to compete with them in the market for health care. Taxpayers end up competing with themselves. And often lose.
You spin it any way you want. 130 million people are getting used.
I am often amused that so many "readers" of Ayn Rand's books are willing to boast of their ignorance and herd mentality. These threads are the evidence of why she recoiled from conservatism. It doesn't take any great amount of intelligence to "get" Objectivism, so long as you are able to question your knowledge.
So you admit that religion is stupefying. What makes capitalism unstable, pray tell? Or are you directly quoting from Marx?
Because it was over your head.
But you're not. You expose the fact that most of these people didn't read the book. After reading Atlas Shrugged, a person who would misspell the protagonist's name has got some "splaining to do.
And???
Hopefully Hollywood won't leak into the movie and destroy it's much needed message.
Altruism, by its philosophical definition, is the greatest producer of misery for mankind.
Are we having a little problem with projection?
Ann who?
Libertarianism is a rationalization for evil.
But legislating morality is a recipe for tyranny of the majority and the beginning of the end of individual liberty.
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