Hopefully never. Despite her facile, repetitive writing style, Ayn Rand seems to be one of those authors that people discuss more than they read. Has the author read the book?
The result of Atlas Shrugging (or Going Galt, or however you want to put it) was that civilization collapsed and billions of people died. Rand never could align several of her issues, and as such, there’s a fair amount of incoherency in her books.
See, while Rand idolizes all the titans of industry (which she supposes must all think like her in the end), she depicts them as fatalist cowards. Rather than fight back and fend off the nanny-state, she depicts them as all retreating to a “Eureka”-like village, adopting the tactics of the labor movement she so abhors. They never do step back in when they declare, “see, you guys do need us!” (Although the book does include a 150-page rehash of all of its ideas, “This is John Galt.”) Instead, they watch billions of people die while they retreat to an existence closer to Rousseau’s ideal than Edison’s, Reagan’s or Locke’s. In some ways, it’s a fantastically better written companion piece to “The Turner Diaries.”
Eddie is the character which most exposes Rand’s confusion. While the “heroine” Dagny Taggart is going off exploring her sexuality with three different lovers, it’s Eddie, not Dagny, who literally keeps the trains running, demonstrating leadership, intelligence and creativity. Rand actually details his fantastic role in quite some detail. But because Eddie isn’t the ideologue that Dagny is, the reader never gets his point-of-view in the literary sense. At the end, he’s left outside the Eureka-like village.
To be used as a slave, or not to be used as a slave? That is the question.
Well, no. That didn't happen in the book. One of our objectives in the FReeper Book Club's study of this beast is to attempt to figure out exactly what she did expect to happen. I'm not ruling that prediction out, in fact I think it entirely possible, but it didn't happen within the confines of the novel.
One difficulty with the thing is that Atlas doesn't actually shrug within it, he only begins to. Rand gives us one hopeful image at the end, covered wagons, but it is entirely unclear how, precisely, she expects a new society to coalesce around the precepts of Galt. A lot of utopian fiction - I include Karl Marx - suffers from that difficulty. There is a finely planned and executed sequence of destruction and fall, and then poof! - magic. Voila! The State withers away. Abracadabra! Laissez faire capitalism spreads throughout the land. Maybe so, maybe no, but I haven't seen either one yet.
The pertinence of Atlas Shrugged to the moment is, at least for me, in the mechanism of that decay and fall. In that I think she's disturbingly accurate. Why that is so is another question we'll be taking up. Anyone who wishes to discuss these things, please join us. Publius is keeping the ping list.