FReeper Book Club: Atlas Shrugged, Ten Years After

Well, Publius asked, and sig226 asked again, and so here we are. As we stated previously, at the end of Atlas Shrugged, the titular character has only just done so, and the world is hurtling out of control toward the hard, hard ground. We are spared the horrible clamor of impact…and we miss it.

What does happen after Atlas shrugs? Ayn Rand preferred not to advance the story much beyond Galt’s ceremonial drawing of the Sign of the Dollar, probably wisely, inasmuch as post-apocalyptic fiction was as yet a sparsely populated field. Narrative in Atlas Shrugged was only a secondary object anyway.

We can speculate, but exact models turn out to be surprisingly few. The collapse of central government in post-Shrug America suggests the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and Rand herself alluded to the Dark Ages during Galt’s speech, although hers was a screenwriter’s understanding of history, and his an engineer’s, and their apparent conception of the Dark Ages bore very little resemblance to the real thing.

There are significant differences, however, between the two scenarios. For one thing, technology is more pervasive and persistent than we are given to believe in the novel; and for another, the Roman Empire exhibited nothing like the capitalist infrastructure of pre-Shrug America. Banking, credit, deficit spending and widespread economic depression had to wait until the Renaissance to take a form that would be recognizable to a banker such as Midas Mulligan. That infrastructure will be far easier to rebuild than it was to invent in the first place. Pieces of it – local banks, for example – might not disappear at all.

More contemporary models of collapse are not without their own difficulties. That of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, for example, offers insights into survival among the ruins of a people dependent on a past surplus no longer being generated in the present. It is a useful enough model but for the fact that its continuation is now entirely dependent on outside sources that serve to prevent, or cushion, complete economic collapse. No such outside agency will be available to a post-Shrug America; about that Rand is quite specific. Short of an invasion by wealthy and benevolent Martians, we’d be on our own.

Let us start, then, by listing the things we have been told in the novel and extrapolating from there. The security doors on Galt’s Gulch have clanged shut, and we may assume that there is very little in the way of ingress and egress. New York fell quickly. The rest of the country has been pretty much picked clean of potential Gulchers. For a time, the Gulch lies inert, developing inwardly like a chick in an egg, presenting an egg’s blank face to the outside world.

Central government collapsed within the novel. Government, the economy, the raising of food -- and children, a topic Rand avoids with the assiduity of a vampire to garlic -- transportation and education – all these things localize in the sense that electricity did in one of the last chapter’s lovelier metaphors. Rand likened it to a stream stopped and turned stagnant, evaporating and leaving little puddles here and there. She actually can write like that when she cares to make the effort.

So what we have is a constellation of little communities more or less self-sufficient, stuck in a pre-industrial state of technology and relating to their neighbors very little. We saw this in Starnesville, Wisconsin. As far as they are able, they will subsist on the surplus created by their industrial antecedents; we are reminded, comically, of the Mayor of Rome’s possession of a particularly luxurious shower stall culled from the ruins of the Twentieth Century Motor Company. They will not use electricity unless situated at some sort of natural source: a waterfall, perhaps, or a coal mine, and there only until the generators fail. Replacement parts are no longer being produced.

They will not use cash. Rand described the likely devolution of exchange toward a barter economy in Starnesville. It is not fantasy. Paper money is, after all, no better than a promise. Even when it is backed by gold, it is only good insofar as the guarantor’s promise of exchange for precious metal is to be trusted. Backed by nothing at all, it is quickly meaningless, printed in whatever amount the printer thinks can be a temporarily convincing illusion of value. In Zimbabwe we have seen this classic progression from trusted currency to toilet paper, a slide based on the slow realization that no central bank would exchange it for anything of value but would happily continue generating the joke. It wasn’t even very good toilet paper.

It is the fact of backing, and not sentiment toward the backers, that is critical. Certainly the bulk of communities would retain a commitment to the dollar not only out of nostalgia but out of sheer necessity for some medium of exchange. Sentiment and custom are, however, insufficient to run an economy in the long run, as holders of Confederate dollars finally came to concede.

However, the necessity for a medium of exchange would not simply evaporate. Local currencies would arise, just as they did during the early days of America, each backed by the issuers’ physical possession of gold. The micro-economy of Galt’s Gulch works on this literal physical presence, although the notion of making a financial transaction of the magnitude its denizens are accustomed to by hauling sacks of the stuff around is as impractical in fiction as it proved in fact. There is, by all reports, a small forklift moving weighty piles of gold from one alcove to another within the bowels of the New York Fed to reflect financial transactions between countries. That has an atavistic charm to it, but one can quickly discern that it probably would be outside the capabilities of the common investor.

And thus there is no central government and no central currency. That would be high on the “to-do” list of the nascent federal government on that debatably happy day when it once again coalesces around the political ambitions of its sovereign states. In the new federal government presumptive, the currency would most certainly be backed by gold if Rand’s entire thesis is to be followed. The opportunities for thievery inherent will not be new, but they will at least be different.

But for now we have the Dark Ages, the real ones, not the Randian caricature. Civilization will contract to the limits of lamplight and torch, of horse and oxcart. And incidentally, we have seen covered wagons emptying towns at the close of Atlas Shrugged, but where, one wonders, did the drovers and the teamsters find the necessary livestock? One does not simply harness a riding animal and expect magic to happen. If the farming economy is bereft of the internal combustion engine, who or what will pull the plows? This has starvation written all over it, and is one additional reason why the farming areas will produce only that which is sufficient to their own needs. They won’t have a choice until Wyatt’s wells start producing again and Hammond’s engines roar to life once more.

Thus the state of the country after Atlas shrugs. It isn’t, nor does Rand intend it to be, markedly different from that of the United States of 1840 or so. It is to be remembered that the real-life Taggart bridge, the Rock Island Mississippi River bridge, was not constructed until 1856. Up to that point even the railroads were necessarily regional. And regional political and economic structures are the most likely pattern one might expect from a post-Shrug America.

Would these independent communities retain a loyalty to the government of Mr. Thompson and Cuffy Meigs? Hardly. Would they retain a loyalty toward that social contract that is the Constitution, buttressed by the memory of the past prosperity it accorded? That is very likely. But that is, after all, a blueprint for federal, and not local, government. Would the people surge forward united, based on a universal acceptance of that garbled, borderline incoherent statement of principle that was Galt’s radio broadcast? It seems, to be charitable, unlikely. They would, as people do in that situation, abide.

One might construct an entire body of fiction around this alternate world. It is a pity that Rand declined to do so.

We must assume that the inhabitants of Galt’s Gulch have been assured by some sort of benchmark or omen that their return is likely to succeed. It seems rather implausible that it could have been in the spring following the collapse that is detailed in Rand’s final chapter. How long before the warehouses run out? How long before the population gives up its sentimental attachment to Central Park and begins to migrate to where the food is? How long before the last gasoline pump runs dry and the last automobile’s riders take to horseback? Our society is, at the test, quite a bit more resilient than one might think, a bounty offered a thankless people by the capitalists it affects to disdain. Let us say ten years.

Even this may be a bit abrupt. One annoying thing about Rand’s social model is that it posits helplessness on the part of the ordinary citizen in the absence of guidance from the super-producers, something that is not borne out empirically. When that last gas pump runs dry, are we really to believe that no one in this country is capable of figuring out how to make a refinery work? Given that the technical manuals are still there and a hundred-year-old process is not in fact lost, is it not perfectly accessible to anyone who wishes to try?

The single suspension of disbelief necessary to make Atlas Shrugged work as a novel is that the genuine producers are so tiny in number that a single individual and a handful of friends may convince the lot of them to strike; that there even exists a super-elite whose absence is sufficient to make the entire system come crashing down. It may be a contrivance necessary for fiction, or it may be that Rand believed this with all her heart. I do not.

But let us remain within the boundaries of fiction. A decade later, let us imagine Galt’s people finally ready to emerge from their bastion. They have wealth, they have expertise, and they have a moral code that enables the trust necessary for large-scale economic transactions. What they don’t have is a foothold, a necessary consequence of sequestration. Where do they start?

Consider its advantages. First, there is physical proximity to Galt’s Gulch in a time when travel has become highly unreliable. Second, there reside the remnants of the last and presumably the most modern of America’s industrial development. Wyatt’s wells are still there, and so are the numerous concerns whose needs were to have been met by the John Galt Line. The latter is, of course, torn up for its rail, but the most important part is that the roadbed still exists, the routes cleared, the rights-of-way established. Given resources, Dagny will have it operating again in weeks, not years.

Third, it’s close to where the food is grown. The existence of railroads was originally to move resources to consumers, wheat to the granaries and timber to the mills. Kansas and Nebraska aren’t starving, but they are only producing that which is sufficient to their local needs. The cities are at the end of this logistics chain, not at its beginning. That chain will be re-forged, extended once again to the hollow and empty concrete canyons of New York. But it starts in Colorado.

It will start with the re-occupation of the Wyatt fields, the re-population of the factories that produce necessities first, and luxuries only later when the economic surplus necessary to afford them is once again in place. There will be tractors before there will be limousines, all paid for in product, financed in gold by the Mulligan Bank.

Towns and villages that have earned a hardscrabble existence from the land itself will find that they too have product to trade, wealth to earn, but only if they agree to trade with Colorado on Galtian terms. Some with brute strength may be tempted to try to acquire that wealth by force, not trade. The Coloradans will have to devise a means of collective security: force, as Rand proposed, guided by intelligence. The ability to produce will not confer a magical safety; the Gulchers will find they have to fight for their freedom. These things are not a function of talent or economics, they are inherent in the human condition.

They will likely prevail, not just because force guided by intelligence really does beat brute strength, but also because freedom is impossibly seductive, and that too is inherent in the human condition. Even a brute knows it, envies it and will, given the chance, embrace it rather than destroy it. Freedom is an intoxicant, an elixir, a permanent addiction. A half-century of relentless propaganda could not stamp out its attraction even in the New Soviet Man. Galt flashes gold, he propounds morality, but what he actually offers is freedom. Prosperity is only a necessary consequence.

What a story it might be! Towns in Colorado, Kansas, Wyoming, re-establishing industry, technology, education, lit by the electricity that is a product of their own labor, the light beating back the darkness without. It will be a clarion call for the honest and a siren song for the looters who will still be practicing their bullying, lies and theft, and who will see in the new towns a new host for their parasitism. Danneskjøld has stated that he has committed his last act of violence. Poor fellow, he is impossibly naïve. Reason will prevail, yes, but reason alone and unarmed will not.

And at last it will be worth someone’s while to rebuild the Taggart bridge. It may be Dagny or her granddaughter, if Rand will allow her the blessing of offspring. And so to a new utopia? Probably not. For however excellent it is in the beginning, the rot will take hold from within once again if all of human history is any guide. Galt will be acclaimed a moral genius for a generation, two, perhaps ten, but that part of the human condition that is not “the best that is within us” will find its voice once more, and the conflict between producer, moocher and looter will once again rage. We are not, nor despite Rand’s fondest fantasy, will we ever become, super-beings. Neither are we animals, but we are men and women. We learn, we enjoy, we grow complacent, we forget, and we pay for the lesson once again in blood. It isn’t fiction, it’s history.

Who will accomplish this act of economic and cultural sporulation? Unfortunately Rand does not give us a great number of clues in that direction. One of her major weaknesses as a novelist is a distressing tendency toward static main characters; very few of them are a whit different at the novel’s end than they were at the beginning. Francisco’s character is revealed slowly but does not evolve. Galt’s is a very rock of permanence. Dagny’s only real change is in the identity of her lover of the moment, and Rearden at the end is the same as Rearden at the beginning, only happier because his external circumstances have changed. It is if Rand is presenting a Galtian philosophical epiphany as an end state, an attainment of perfection.

Worse, those characters that do develop in the novel – Cherryl Taggart, Eddie Willers, Tony the Wet Nurse, even Jim Taggart after a fashion – all come to a rather unhappy end as a consequence. And so beyond the certainty that Francisco will mine in the diaspora to come, Wyatt drill, Galt engineer, and Dagny build railroads, we are left with very little to populate a cast of characters that must fill the roles that an expanding civilization will inevitably find wanting.

And so we’ll have to find new characters or develop old ones into new roles. Perhaps Quentin Daniels will finish his tutelage under Galt’s hand and find a talent for building radio sets and firearms. Perhaps Owen Kellogg will find a direction in life – he’s a natural leader -- and so perhaps one of those newly-born towns will have him as its mayor, or its defender. Perhaps another will be led by a mysterious character named Floyd Kennedy, who is Fred Kinnan under a new identity. Perhaps Jeff Allen will make the transition from hobo to patriarch.

And maybe, just maybe, one night in Stockton, Colorado, before the gates of the town walls slam shut, a stranger with a backpack and a staff will stagger in out of the storm, and Francisco will take him into the shelter of a clapboard tavern lit by bare electric bulbs, sit him down, thrust a mug of ale into his hand, and say, “Good to see you, Eddie. Welcome home.”

So now we open the topic, FRiends. Publius threw down the gauntlet. What do you think will happen after the smoke from Galt’s cigarette dissipates into the Colorado night?

I love this stuff. For further reading on the general topic of how civilizations stagger back out of the ruins, I’d like to recommend two series of books: Asimov’s brilliant Foundation Trilogy, and for those ready for the real thing, Gibbon’s incomparable Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

I don't know. I haven't read the book (or even heard of it before now) but the premise, that advanced knowledge is forgotten by all but a self chosen few as a consequence of societal collapse, doesn't seem plausible.

Advanced knowledge was outlawed in Luddite post-nuclear revulsion. (Think contemporary "Green" on steroids.) The monks preserved it, not understanding its significance, in many cases. Leibowitz was an obscure draftsman, who signed many blueprints that were hand-copied as illuminated manuscripts. One such was a drawing for a motor stator, titled "Squirrel cage", which caused no end of bafflement.

One comment I found amusing was a monk wondering why he had to copy a drawing by painstakingly Leaving little white lines to form the image by inking the whole page. it did not make sense.

Over the generations, people began to decode and deduce the scientific and engineering principles, and another civilization slowly rose from the feudal/tribal stages.

In time, this did likewise.

One one of my all-time favorite books. I may need to read it again now.

Coming to this thread by way of the more recent one about the just-wrapped AS movie (Part 1). If my comments are off-topic, I apologize in advance.

There’s a great series of SciFi/Alt-History novels that deal with a situation very similar to what could be expected in the post-AS world. Called the “1632” series (after the first book), the plot revolves around a circa 1999 West Virginia coal-mining town called Grantville (based closely on the very real WV town of Mannington) hit by a cosmic cataclysm and transported, intact, to Central German in the middle of the 30-years war.

While written in a very different style and with less intellectual heft than AS (more whimsical/tongue-in-cheek), and also with a decidedly different ideological bent (the originating author, Eric Flint is a big union guy - former UMWA - and undoubtedly a Socialist - many fans call him “Eric the Red”) as well as much suspension of disbelief (too easy assimilation by the “uptimers” into the variety of languages in use at the time), the series does talk very effectively about how a society more modern than AS (1990s vs 1950s) is able to adapt and assimilate with one significantly more primitive (late-Renaissance vs industrial post-apocalyptic). With the added wrinkle of existing well-established nation-states and true historical figures (Richelieu, the Hapsburgs and de’ Medicis and Barbarinis, the Inquisition and a King Charles I of England who learns about 20 years early what a then-young Oliver Cromwell will have in store for him) thrown in.

One might construct an entire body of fiction around this alternate world. It is a pity that Rand declined to do so.

No pity - Go for it!

Perhaps your book will be on the shelves constantly for the next 50+ years and become the most read novel in history?

Everyone sits on a different branch and gets a slightly different view from their perch.

It isn't necessary to tear apart another persons description of THEIR view - just present your own.

'reminds me of all the commentaries on the Bible, and even IN the Bible - all the pontifications of what Jesus taught, for example.

I'm with Jefferson on that subject. I have "Jefferson's Bible" - which is merely the words of Jesus, cut and pasted - literally - by Jefferson into a book of it's own.

I also have a beautifully "illuminated" book (illustrated in old Bible style illustration,) and the entire text is simply what would be the 'red letter' words in the Bible. It's simply titled: "His Words."

I'm of a mind that Jesus - especially considering who He was, was able to get across His message before He left. Although, admittedly, he taught in 'layers', for "those who have eyes to see and ears to hear." It's up to us as individuals to read and reread and "get it" - straight from the horses mouth, as it were.

I feel the same way about, say, Robert Frost's poetry, or Michelangelo's - or Norman Rockwell's paintings. They stand on their own and need no interpretations. They said, painted, what they had to say. End, fini.

They stand on their own. As does Rand's works.

Different writers, hatched in a different place, a different era, interpret the scene beneath their perch a bit different. That's fine. Write about your vision, paint your own paintings.

The saying goes: "Those who can't, teach."

I've often thought that could also be "Those who can't, 'critique."

No offense. Just my "view."

An aside: One doesn't have to reach back to the 'Dark AGes' for examples of how to live post 'civilization.' I grew up on little farm, deep in the country, in the 1930-40's. We lived, basically, as people had lived for hundreds of years - other than we had a car - but we could have gotten by without even that.

There was no electricity in area. Our 'running water' was a hand pump on the sink. We burned kerosene lamps and heated/cooked with wood stoves - our fuel cut from the surrounding forest.

A constant years supply of food was on hand - in the gardens, cellar barrels, gleaming canning jars - milk,butter, pork and beef in the barn. Chicken and eggs in the coop. Meat and fish in the woods and waters. Fruits (apples and cherries) and berries on the land. We had a GOOD life. My grandparents never worked for anyone else.

Right now, you might be surprised at the thousands of people across this county who are already or in preparation to be able to live that way again. They are preparing with great purpose. They are networking. Many communities already have bartering systems - some even their own 'money' - up and running.

There are many today that wouldn't be in The Gulch when the SHTF - but they will not be helpless - NOR defenseless.

You might enjoy this story, as it pertains to a non-dollar system.

http://www.realitysandwich.com/berkshires_kicking_dollar_habit

Even the bank accepts their 'money.' There are bartering networks across the country.

Some states, even now - I think Utah and Georgia? - are reading their own in state monetary system, their own currency.

I could go on - but enough already. The Tea Party folk are a testament of the people that will be able to roll up their sleeves, dig in and create survivable communities that would "seed" the recovery - or maybe it isn't 'recovery' we want or need, but redirection of our country. Jefferson's dream was to develop this country as 'agrarian" - be the breadbasket of the world and trade for manufactures good - leaving the manufacturing and big cities overseas - his rationale: They breed crime and corruption. Who can argue with that.

Just maybe, like it or not, we'll soon have the chance to redecide that proposal.

In the meantime, as bad as it is and may well be - We'll weather the storm better'n most think...

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