FReeper Book Club: Atlas Shrugged, Afterword and Suggested Reading

A Billthedrill Essay | 15 August 2009 | Billthedrill

[Publius]

Afterword

Where does Rand leave us at the conclusion of this monumental work? Atlas has shrugged. The leadership of the revolution has filtered down from its progenitor, John Galt, through his closest circle of friends, through a class of achievers that encompasses the fields of science, engineering, construction, transportation, art and philosophy, to settle at last on the shoulders of the common citizen, who must bear the ultimate responsibility for choosing a life of mind or a life of “fake reality.” That choice is still very much up in the air as the novel ends. The country is in chaos as the result of the strike of the men and women of the mind, and the resolution is to be found only through the adoption of a new moral code based on objective truth and rational dealings between men and women.

Galt is so certain of his victory in the last scene that he announces the return of the strikers. The denouement of the novel took place at the beginning of winter and the coda in the spring, but which spring? We cannot tell.

It’s time then for a broader perspective on Atlas Shrugged. The structure of the novel is straightforward. There are three sections of ten chapters each. The arc of the plot ascends through a desperate effort of the industrialists to reignite the country’s production, countered by moves on the part of the established powers in academia, bureaucracy and culture, descending in the final third of the book to the ravaging of the country and the escape of its creative elements. Let us recapitulate both Rand’s narrative and the philosophy that it is intended to illuminate.

Part I: Non-Contradiction

The first third of the novel contains an introduction to characters, both protagonists and villains, and a description of the dynamic that exists between industrialist and bureaucrat, between objective philosopher and nihilist pretender. The world it describes is very much a creation of the latter in each case. We learn this from set-piece speeches at formal parties, from radio broadcasts and the other manifestations of popular culture, and from the mouths of the principals Rand casts as villains.

This section introduces us to our heroes, Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden, and elaborates on their struggle to construct a railway that will support the last, best hope of the country with respect to industrial progress, resisted with an inexplicable stubbornness by those who, it would seem, would be its principal beneficiaries. It ends in triumph. Finding one another’s arms and handing the Colorado industrialists their lifeline, Hank and Dagny obtain a victory that is known to be hollow even as it is accomplished. The section ends with the dissolution of the Colorado industrialists and the last, defiant, fiery gesture of Wyatt’s Torch.

Within this section Rand defines the philosophical case of the looters. Economic inequities, which are the result of achievement, are, in fact, the result of theft. Profit is immoral, extra value squeezed out of the consumer of goods and services beyond the latter’s “natural” cost. This profit exists to feed the demands of greed and arrogance, and it is the rightful role of the State to control the greedy and arrogant in the interest of the collective. It is society – the collective – that has the ultimate claim on the fruits of the individual’s labor, a claim it makes in the name of all. This culture is maintained by its promoters’ control of the bureaucracy, academia, journalism and popular culture, through which a steady stream of propaganda beats the citizen into acceptance.

Within this is the notion that individuals who are achievers compose a class of their own, whose interests, motivated by greed, are inimical to the collective. Within this premise is the genesis of another class in opposition, a ruling class whose task it is to rectify the theoretical theft by means of a real theft, and to redistribute the wealth to its source, the collective, taking a generous cut off the top for itself.

This is the case of the looters. Their methods are law. They are secure in the knowledge that their enemies are law-abiding. They flatter themselves that they are equal in virtue to the producers as all are merely thieves. They feel superior to the producers as they are the more successful thieves. In a world where all economic activity is theft, success in thievery is the logical summit of society and the rightful task of those who sit there.

We learn in this section that Rand regards human sexuality to be as much an expression of the mind as a steel bridge or a railroad track, the rightful property of the creative that has been suppressed and misrepresented in an effort to exercise power over them. In this sense, economic liberation is sexual liberation as well. Here Dagny becomes not simply Rand’s protagonist, but her surrogate, and to a remarkable degree their own sexual lives run in parallel.

Part II: Either-Or

In the second section we are shown the philosophy of the looters in action as it methodically takes the country into its grip.

Dagny and Hank discover that, just as in Colorado, the entire country is beginning to crumble under the rapacious onslaught of the ever-hungry looters. In addition, the producers who could be counted on to feed the parasites for the good of all are beginning to disappear. The host is weakening, and the parasites are growing apprehensive. They will do what they can to maintain the system, even at the cost of eliminating some of their fellow parasites and by inviting the hosts to share in their power – by feeding upon themselves.

But there is organized resistance to the conspiracy of looting. It is underground and its perpetrators are damned as agents of greed. Yet it is the parasites, the looters, who truly are the greedy ones. They will not stop until they control all production so that they may redistribute its fruits in places other than the pockets of those who actually earned them. That turns out to be their own pockets, the reward of cleverness and the righteousness of promoting social justice.

The philosophies of both looter and producer are based on self-interest, but that does not make them equivalent, nor is actual theft the equivalent of accused theft. One critical difference is that the thief must have the producer, but the converse is not true. The producer must create or there will be nothing to steal – he must live for the sake of the thief. For the code of theft that is this twisted social contract to function, he actually owes this to the thief on behalf of the collective of which they both are a part. That social contract requires the victim’s sanction. It will have no difficulty in procuring the sanction of the thief.

We understand in this section that someone, The Destroyer, is acting to break this social contract by withdrawing not only the sanction of the victim but the physical presence of the victim. The section ends when the principals are about to meet The Destroyer.

Part III: A is A

In this section we learn at last Rand’s conception of an ideal social contract, first by observing the activities of its proponents in a mini-Utopia named “Galt’s Gulch”, and later through an exhaustive rhetorical presentation. The main dramatic conflict arrives when the principals, Dagny and Hank, must run to completion the course that has caused the rest of the creative class to go on strike. The agonizing conclusion requires the abnegation of all that has kept them producing under the existing system. It is clear at last that it is the creators and producers who are the exploited and the ones who claim the exploited status, their oppressors. The things that have been earned – material wealth, family, social status, and most vital of all, the opportunity to create – must be rejected for the strike to have any chance of success.

In the end, they are. Dagny is admitted into the company of the strikers as the alpha female to Galt’s alpha male. The rest accept comfortably subordinate positions. It is not, in the end, an egalitarian society even though predicated sternly on equal rights. It is a hierarchy built on relative technical excellence and moral virtue, and its citizens compete fiercely for primacy within their chosen fields.

This, then, is the case of Rand’s heroes, and the foundation of a new philosophical approach to morality she termed Objectivism. We have examined its particulars in some detail, but briefly the idea is that human existence is based on reason and the recognition of the part of reason in the dealings of men and women with one another. The repository of both rights and responsibilities is within the individual, and no valid moral code may be based on one individual’s right to demand that another live for his or her benefit. There are no group rights; indeed, class identification is essentially a curiosity, and social mobility is unhindered by it, driven only by individual merit.

As we have seen, these are ideas developed during the philosophical period labeled the Enlightenment, and Rand is only to be considered a conservative in that she wishes to base her new utopia upon these old ideas.

As John Galt traces the sign of the dollar in the air, we leave the novel with the knowledge that a new world is to be built upon laissez-faire capitalism and human rights, based on reason and focused on the individual. Rand’s case is that it is the only system ever to have developed a surplus that offers the luxury of being second-guessed, scorned and looted. For her that is its greatest testament.

Rand’s Sources

We have stated that Rand has attempted to reconstruct the body of modern Western philosophy from first principles, which is mainly, but not entirely, the case. She had a formal philosophical education in Russia before emigrating to the United States, and not only acknowledges, but pays open tribute, to Aristotle as her principal intellectual model.

Here we see the divergence between Rand’s philosophy and the tremendous body of fictional narrative that is Atlas Shrugged, for her narrative runs very much along the lines of another philosopher, Nietzsche, with his insistence that human excellence creates a defense against nihilism and that the superior man or woman has, within certain limits, the right to make his or her own rules. This dynamic between philosophy and narrative, between reason and passion, between Aristotle and Nietzsche, runs the entire length of the novel, and in the end it is up to the reader to resolve it – or not. It is that demand which takes the novel out of the category of popular fiction and into the realm of serious intellectual consideration.

Rand’s Style

Ayn Rand was the adult identity of the Russian girl named Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum, for whom English was not a native language. It is a testament to her linguistic abilities that she mastered English to the point at which she could support herself as a professional screenwriter and playwright in the depths of the Great Depression. This was a signal accomplishment, and by the time she began writing Atlas Shrugged she already had one best-selling novel, The Fountainhead, to her credit. For this reason we must search for another source for those odd quirks that catch the modern reader’s eye, such as the use of the formal “one” for the vernacular “you” in the mouths of her least educated characters, a fondness for the more formal “perish” in place of the more common “die”, and a correct, but somewhat strained, insistence on “you’ll” in the place of “you” in informal conversation. Further, that even her least educated and most despicable villains tend to present their ideas in the form of logical propositions that would not be out of place at an Oxford formal dinner.

These are not fatal flaws; they are scarcely to be considered flaws at all, but stamps of the author’s fiercely analytical approach to human intercourse. That analytical approach is not always happily applied, especially when it comes to the description of the vagaries of human sexual relations. Here the conflict between narrative and philosophy is most sharply defined – we rejoice that Dagny and Galt have found one another but are dismayed at the strange rationalizations that attempt to bring their joyful and vigorous sexual attraction within the realm of analytical reason. Rand’s narrative describes the lovers with convincing verisimilitude; her philosophy struggles to account for them. If, in the end, we suspect that there is something more than reason going on here, we have Rand the story-teller to thank and leave Rand the philosopher to be furious about it.

The Faults of Atlas Shrugged

It’s too long, for one thing. Each of the protagonists has his turn before the podium, but because they are of an identical philosophical stance, their various expressions of it tend to blend into one another. In fiction there is no need to hear the same idea expressed in many different ways in the mouths of sundry proponents. In philosophy, or more accurately in the teaching of philosophy, there is.

Lest we lose sight of Rand’s objective here, it is not simply to give the reader a rousing adventure ride, but to teach. If the same philosophical or moral point takes various shapes, it is the teacher’s hope that the student will apprehend one of them. For a novelist this is wasteful; for a didact it is indispensible.

There is, of course, the matter of The Speech. As a literary construction it is disastrous, an enormous, immobile rock of idea placed in the middle of a stream of plot. It is, despite Rand’s best effort to make it accessible, dense, complicated and challenging. It does not advance the plot, but it is the reason for the plot’s existence.

The Speech is the finish of the novel of ideas; the ensuing three chapters compose the resolution of the narrative. It is a unique and somewhat clumsy construction, but it does appear to serve its purpose.

Like many novelists, Rand has been accused of being cruel to her minor characters. We have seen the Wet Nurse mocked nearly up to his last breath, Cherryl Taggart hounded over a precipice and into a watery grave, and most poignant of all, the abandonment of the loyal, able and virtuous Eddie Willers along a deserted track in the Arizona desert. The elite protagonists bask in their perfection and seem to shade their eyes against the glare of a glorious future while standing on a mountain of bones of those who did not live to make the journey. One understands that such a monumental project will have its victims; one waits in vain for the heroes of the piece to acknowledge them.

Atlas Shrugged’s Place in Modern Literature

Flawed as it is, Atlas Shrugged succeeds brilliantly as a novel of ideas. It has an acknowledged appeal to young people in that it presents a clean, workable system of ideals on which to base a moral approach to the world. Its coherence, its certitude, and its outrageous political incorrectness appeal to the rebel in young and old. In it the complications of parenthood do not arise; the difficulties in accommodating ideals that in practical application, eventually conflict, are nowhere to be found. It is not necessarily a young person’s novel, but it is an idealist’s novel.

If Atlas Shrugged’s critics tend to accentuate its flaws and ignore its message, they do so at the risk of echoing the absurdities of Rand’s villains: the collectivist, the nihilist, the person whose education and reputation exceed his or her actual intelligence. Most timeless about Atlas Shrugged are the culture and character of its villains. Five decades after its publication, their voices still sound in the mouths of its detractors and of public servants who solemnly repeat the platitudes without considering their sources. They need to check their premises.

15 August 2009

Suggested Reading

For its time Atlas Shrugged was a unique admixture of philosophy and politics, and it is difficult to begin an understanding of Rand’s great work of synthesis by going straight to the original sources. Fortunately there is a more graduated approach available, for many of the same issues and influences that crystallized in Atlas Shrugged were the topic of one of the great philosophical popularizers of the late 20th century, Mortimer Adler. Through a lengthy career he touched on nearly all of the constituents of Rand’s magnum opus.

By Adler and recommended in the area of philosophy:

• Aristotle for Everybody: Difficult Thought Made Easy (1978)
• Ten Philosophical Mistakes (1985)

Economics:

• The Capitalist Manifesto (introduction for Louis Kelso’s work) (1958)
• Haves Without Have-Nots: Essays for the 21st Century on Democracy and Socialism (1991)

Political science:

• We Hold These Truths: Understanding the Ideas and Ideals of the Constitution (1987)

And toward religion, a personal favorite:

• How To Think About God: A Guide for the 20th-Century Pagan (1980)

For the reader already acquainted with the ideas illuminated by Adler:

• Knowledge and Decisions and Marxism, both by Thomas Sowell. Capitalism versus Communism, in contention for the soul of the 20th century, by a genius who understands both.
• Animal Farm – George Orwell. Sweet and succinct, this novella speaks directly to the inevitable corruption of a ruling class and the fate of those trusting enough to place it in a position of authority.
• A History of Western Philosophy – Bertrand Russell. A work of stunning brilliance and the ruthless application of common sense in the pursuit of truth, this encapsulates all of Rand’s intellectual sources and quite a bit more.

These can also form a foundation for the consideration of Rand’s primary sources:

• Metaphysics – Aristotle. Rand got a good deal more than her section titles from this seminal work.
• Thus Spake Zarathustra – Friedrich Nietzsche. Surprisingly readable given its occasionally jarring content, but often indirect and allusive. Christians are as shocked by his repudiation of God as socialists are by his repudiation of egalitarianism. The latter, however, seem to recover rather more quickly once that inconvenient principle is dispensed with.
• Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals – Immanuel Kant. Not Kant’s best-known work -- which would be the Critique of Pure Reason, also recommended -- but the one in which he derives his own system of ethics after a pattern that readers of Atlas Shrugged may find amusingly familiar. Rand rejected Kant’s conclusions but they seem similar enough to hers to lead certain of her followers at the Objectivist Institute to suggest that she may have protested a bit too much.
• The Communist Manifesto – Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels. Indispensible in understanding the appeal of socialism both in terms of class analysis and emotive appeal.

This isn’t a laundry list – each of these has a direct hook into the immense intellectual currents that swirl underneath the surface of Atlas Shrugged. It would be an easy task to triple its length; far more difficult to cut it.

[MtnClimber]

Thanks for the reply. I hope the book gets published! I would buy a copy. It is amazing how well this story applies to our sad condition today.

[Publius]

We’ve been receiving FReepmail inquiries from various members of our Atlas Shrugged Book Club as to the possible publication of our Navigational Tool for Atlas Shrugged, so I thought it would be proper to give our members an update.

Here in Seattle, I have a colleague who is the author of books on the national parks and the railroads, and who appeared as one of the talking heads on Ken Burns’ national park series on PBS. He read the first draft of our book and forwarded it to his agent in New York with a recommendation. He told me it might be a few weeks before we heard from him. The next day I received a somewhat frantic e-mail from the agent asking me to call him immediately. He agreed to represent our book if we cut it down by a third, which we did within days.

That was the good part.

Guiding a manuscript by unknown and unpublished authors through the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the major publishing houses is tough enough in a good economy, but it’s even more difficult now. Because of the economy, the major New York publishers are not publishing anything unless it’s by a bankable author, such as Vince Flynn or Glenn Beck. Some have said that they will not accept new material from anyone until the economy turns around. Add to this the whole e-books issue and the uncertainty as to how devices such as Kindle and Nook will affect the business models for the publishers, and you have a situation where nothing happens.

So our agent avoided the major houses and went to the small boutique publishers that might have an interest in our book and would give it some marketing attention. Some publishers passed on it, but others have been sitting on it since last September because they don’t want to make a decision until the economic situation resolves itself. We’re in limbo right now.

Some FReepers have suggested that we turn to self-publishing or e-publishing. The problem with that is that once you've committed to it, the conventional houses won't touch your book. It gets too complicated legally, and it's used material by then anyway.

So as of right now, we’re waiting for someone to take a chance on us.

[Liberty Valance]

I just finished “Hondo” by Louis L’amour and just started “A Gathering of Old Men” by Ernest Gaines ...

I’ll read Atlas Shrugged again soon ...

[GeronL]

Of course if you give up on traditional publishers, It is apparently really easy to become one of the many things available on Kindle etc. The problem being that there are so many things to compete with.

Trying to get noticed would be the next problem. I expect this particular offering would be reviewed by some popular blogs and political sites and such.

Good luck though!!

[Publius]

If we got published and Stossel got his hands on a copy, we’d be made in the shade.

[GeronL]

lol. Who exactly is “we” in this, lol. And shouldn’t FR get at least one percent?

wow. I’m counting chickens way before the eggs are laid.

[Publius]

“We” is Billthedrill and myself. And certainly, FR would get a larger donation in the FReepathon following publication.

[GeronL]

well, that would br to the good.

Again, the best of luck on getting published!

[Clinging Bitterly]

I think some time, someone will, just keep it in the network. The economy, tell me about it. For the last almost two years I have been experiencing it and a few months ago we were hanging by a thread. In a week I am starting a new job, the biggest and best one I have had in my life.

[Loud Mime]

Thanks for the recommendation of Sowell’s book. I’ll buy a copy as I pass through Las Vegas tonight - - before I throw the dice.

[definitelynotaliberal]

Shucks. Maybe by next Christmas if not sooner.

[stylin_geek]

Well, you need to get Glenn Beck to pump your book.

Seriously, though, you made it this far. Which is very good. You never know how things may turn out.

[goodnesswins]

THIS sounds GREAT....a lot of people find Atlas Shrugged a bit overwhelming.....with this “tool” I could probably get some young relatives to read it!

[r-q-tek86]

Thanks for the update, Pub.

If we got published and Stossel got his hands on a copy, we’d be made in the shade.

You should send him the manuscript as it is just to see his reaction and if he would push it forward. For that matter, sent it to PJTV and the Atlas Society.

[Billthedrill]

LOL! Right you are, and it will enable me to up my own contribution to FR. I could double it and still it wouldn't be what FR is worth to me.

A BTT for the evening crew. And now I have to get back to thrashing away at Alexander Hamilton. That Publius, he's a slave driver... ;-)

[GeronL]

lol

[TASMANIANRED]

The old “Hurry up and wait” ploy.

I’m very sorry.

After the revolution, it will happen.

[Publius]

The work generated by our first FReeper Book Club is now a book. Who is John Galt?: A Navigational Guide to Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” is now available at Amazon. Click on the link to find it and order.

This book is dedicated to Jim Robinson, whose site made it all possible. If you know anyone who is trying to slog their way through Ayn Rand’s largest novel, here is the book that will explain it all for them.

[Billthedrill]

Hot puppies! We're 630,549 on the best seller list! I can't wait for my first media interview - it's with Jim-Bob Kowalski on the 5:30 AM Farm Report...yessir, right there between swine futures and the potato blight...

BTT. If we can't have fun with this, nobody can.

[IronJack]

Congratulations on an impressive work in its own right. Myriad attempts have been made to interpret, redefine, deconstruct, and discredit Rand, but her work stands as a sterling (if somewhat didactic) paean to the worth of the individual over the collective. It appears you’ve captured that intent in your analysis. May it become a valuable addition to the body of work around this iconic author.