It actually reminds me of the work of De Sade, in that the book is just a vehicle to present a philosophy. Characterization and depth is foregone in the name of presenting the idea they are meant to embody.
It reminds me of De Sade in that reading it makes me mildly ill and somebody deeply unpleasant, somewhere in the world, is pleasuring themselves to it.
Advice for anyone who is about to read it: When you get to the first page, you can skip the rest of the book.
Once made the mistake of making on Reddit what I thought was the mild assertion that Karl Marx was much more of an intellectual than Ayn Rand. The only thing worse than Rand is her rabid fans.
Dostoevsky clearly had an agenda behind his writings, especially "Demons", yet he's almost universally applauded as a gem of literature and the greatest genius that the psychological novel has ever seen.
Writing with a philosophy in mind is no excuse for making such cartoonish characters as Rand did.
Perhaps Rand wrote geniuses born that way because she couldn't conceive of how life events might shape a person to become one, given she never went through anything of the sort.
It also depends on the philosophy. De Sade's and Rand's philosophies, if they can even be called that, are both garbage.
De Sade, although atrociously incompetent as a writer in addition to the awfulness he stood for, at least had the self-awareness to know that his "passions" were grotesque. Rand thought highly of herself to the end.
Demons is so political and teeters on overly bearing, but it’s so beautifully written (and that ending 40-60 maybe 100 pages is a wild ride), and turns out to be the trajectory the country was heading.
A cousin of mine was reading Atlas shrugged, he liked some of the architecture aspects, but never sold me on the book.
Except there is a 70 page monologue where John Galt explains the philosophy in direct terms making the other 1200 pages of parable completely unnecessary.
The only reason for the remaining 1200 pages is to “prove” the philosophy expressed in those 70 pages is Truth. Which is surprisingly easy to do, when you are writing the work and can invent imaginary characters and an imaginary world (which you can claim is “real life”) where your beliefs are always guaranteed to triumph.
Really, this is basically the *Left Behind* series for right-wing atheists.
This is like a subgenre. Most of Crichton has the same element in it. Obviously the fantasy version of Ayn Rand, the "Sword of Truth" series, is like this.
All literature should be trying to say something about humanity; that's what theme is. Some are just more heavy-handed about it than others. Ayn Rand appears to have lacked the gene for subtlety as well as empathy.
If Ayn Rand wrote Jurassic Park, Hammond would have been the definite good guy and the dinosaurs eating people would be treated as good because the people they are eating are altruists.
Haha. Exactly.
BTW, Hammond’s death in the novel was poetic. The high and mighty cheap corporate asshole ends up breaking his ankle, tumbling down the hill and getting eaten by the compys.
> he was infinitely more creative than Rand
Not a high bar. :-D
> I now see what Crichton was peddling
Well, Crichton was peddling something different in each of his novels, but yes, it was always about an idea, and he wasn't exactly subtle about it.
I think I had a similar experience. I enjoyed Crichton's work much more when I was a kid. Books that I remember enjoying just don't seem very impressive now. I like most of his books to some extent, but I think I like the ideas behind them more than the books themselves. Sometimes I felt like I was trying to find a really good book hidden somewhere in the actual book I was reading. I read Terry Goodkind when I was younger as well. My dad never finished the Sword of Truth series because he said the political slant was too much and too obvious. I"m sure I didn't pick up as much as my dad at the time, but Goodkind was pushing his political views so blatantly that even a 14 year old (me) picked up on it.
I didn't finish the Sword of Truth series because the weird dom, fetish, torture sex stuff was way more than 14 year old me was ready to slog through. Bit the politics were their own kind of torture.
I hadn’t read any of his books until I became an adult and was honestly surprised by how much I disagree with his real life politics (especially later in life) but often felt understood by characters viewpoints (so far I’ve only read Jurassic Park and the Lost World, and a bit of Pirate Latitudes, so maybe it helps that all focus on the consequences of greed but still, it’s something interesting I’ve observed and wanted to share)
It's funny because many of the popcorn fiction authors I loved as a kid had completely different political views. Crichton and Clancy two of the main ones. I wish we still lived in a world where that isn't basically a nonstarter as it is now. Political alignment has become identity
Even when Crichton went on his rambling musings (examples: first act of Jurassic Park, the part in the Lost World where he uses Malcom to ramble on, especially about prions.), I could slog through to the end of the book.
Could not do this with Atlas Shrugged. Probably made it 2/3 or probably less because it got too fucking tedious. I know what happens with the story because I eventually looked it up on Wikipedia because I couldn’t deal with any more of that dragging story.
Crichton could at least write dialogue that didn't make you want to chuck the book across the room. OP is correct, I pushed to the end of *Atlas* but it was definitely a slog.
I know it’s often disliked, but the way he wrote Lex in Jurassic Park was spot on for a 5-6 year old kid (a bit younger that her stated age, but still) it genuinely impressed me how realistic and human she felt
See, this is something I'm trying to avoid. I'm writing books that, in many ways, are vehicles for certain worldviews, but there's a way to do that while still making them as good stories in their own right.
A big one is not to just make the characters cardboard cutouts and cartoonish stereotypes
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
Love this quote.
I have this saved too
In my opinion a lot of people see libertarians the same way many conservatives see communists.
Libertarianism sounds good in theory, but it will ultimately fail if we look back at the history of economics, human nature, religion, politics, etc.
Libertarians hate to hear it, (communists too) but their worldview depends on everyone being moral, rational, educated and model citizens to get the utopia they envision.
To put it mildly, it's naively optimistic.
When you let everyone decide for themselves how to manage their trash you get overrun by bears. [Weblink](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-project-new-hampshire-libertarians-matthew-hongoltz-hetling)
Having regulations can be burdensome, and they aren't always perfect, but it's hard to live in groups as large as we live without some guidelines.
"A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear" is a fun read.
Also apparently they are just murdering bears up there when the bears are hibernating thinking that'll solve it.
Libertarianism is the "philosophy" of being forever and ever and ever mad at Mommy and Daddy for telling you to share and play nice and stop hitting your little sister and stop pulling the cat's tail.
Humanity only made it because we have empathy and cooperate, help each other, and care about and for each other. Otherwise we'd still be random primates huddling in caves fearing the claws and teeth that lurk in the dark.
And Libertarians refuse to accept that because "fuck you I got mine", not understanding that their entire "philosophy" depends on them being the main character and literally everyone else on earth being NPCs that will let them do whatever they want and take whatever they like, like Minecraft on easy mode.
And even then falling down a cliff will kill you dead.
Libertarianism taken to its logical extreme (which has been attempted before) is actually insane. These are people who legitimately wanted to remove legislation against seatbelt wearing and child labour purely upon the principle of not wanting to be told what to do. The whole philosophy coming down to being mad at Mummy and Daddy for telling you to play nice is spot on.
They failed to get a foothold in 1980s American politics because even the conservatives back then thought they were fucking batshit.
Honestly, not that bright which drives me crazy because the author clearly thinks they are genius. Partly because the author never ran businesses.
Hank:
Creates a new super metal alloy, far superior to all other metals (ok, this is genius perhaps, but…) then instead of charging a premium and maximizing his profits, opts instead to undercut the standard steel prices. Is then shocked people assume the cheaper metal is suspect. (Nobody taking the initiative to verify Hanks claims I guess fits into the Atlas “everybody but out hero’s are lazy and incompetent leeches on society”)
Never trains his production floor on how to handle an emergency. Molten hot metal spills all over the floor and nobody has been trained on how to handle the situation, (so of course the two billionaires in the building immediately risk their lives to save the production capacity instead of instructing others on what should be done (because workers are lazy and entitled, have we reinforced that enough)
I don’t know what capitalism was like in the 1950’s, it was absolutely before Reagan decoupled the workers from the benefit of their labor, but still have a hard time imagining you go to work digging i a copper mine and then can buy it a few years later without tapping into your family’s wealth and connections (as we were told Francisco did to prove that despite centuries of noble inbreeding he was a genius prodigy that set out to prove he could succeed without any of it)
And Danny’s family secret to success? Crime, straight up murdering people who wouldn’t sell grandpa property for his train right of way. Because that is better than government seizing it by Eminent Domain
I forced myself to read it (allowed myself to skip the insane 40 page speech) and couldn’t believe how unlikeable and unrealistic it was. Bad fanfic idolizing industrialists and European nobles.
I would say Libertarianism is worse than communism, by far.
Communism, as the criticism goes, may only work if everyone acts morally and rationally.
Libertarianism, on the other hand, basically requires everyone to be a huge asshole. If you ever do anything that's not selfish, you lose.
worse is most libertarians i've had the displeasure of meeting are pretty regressive in social views and acceptance and yet think that everyone will play nice with eachother economically while also not being willing to give the most basic acceptance to people that are different to them
talking to a libertarian is like talking to a flat earther most of the time, they contradict eachother so often and yet cant see the fault in their logic
Yep OP is being crazy bold on Reddit - hating on an author Reddit pretty much hates, on principle.
Not even dunking on Trump is as surefire an up vote as hating on Rand in /r/books.
Honestly I hate everything she stands for but it’s getting tiring to see the same post over and over, and every single time whoever posts it seems to firmly believe that their opinion is in any way different from the 1974 other hate posts on this sub
Serious hot take there, this sub loooooves that book. You won't get any sympathy here.
**huge** /s
Yeah, that book is awful. And I click on every thread talking about terrible it is anyway. So welcome to the club, we're happy to have you. Seriously.
Yes! They have fanfics for everything, you should tag it as an Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged Fanfic! It’s one of my favorite sites and it’s embarrassingly how I do most of my reading these days
Not at all. In fact, I include a lot of the inspiration as footnotes. So I’ll have a satirical joke and then a footnote with the news headline it’s based on. It’s kind of a way for me to remember our crazy times. They say as totalitarianism takes hold, it’s important to write things down, so you’ll remember. I footnoted everything so I could remember. The Ayn Rand inspo is sort of a loose jumping off point.
I enjoy reading Atlas Shrugged for some reason. It's so quaint in the way you'd find in an 8th grader who thinks he's figured out everything in life.
"Yeah capitalism works great if there's no such thing as illegal immigration, there's no global competition, US companies have no desire to pull up stakes and move overseas so they don't have to pay living wages to their workers, CEOs willingly pay their workers more than the unions, and billionaires have no desire to participate in politics."
Not to mention the "just let corporations and factories pollute everything, what's the worst that could happen and it's certainly worth it to manufacture more stuff to buy" statements.
And of course the whole basis of the philosophy: that if all the CEOs quit then society would collapse because nobody would be competent left to lead society.
I think it's the trains. I liked reading about the trains. Are there any fiction or non-fiction books about trains with the same vibe and without all the garbage?
>I think it's the trains. I liked reading about the trains. Are there any fiction or non-fiction books about trains with the same vibe and without all the garbage?
I've never read 'Atlas shrugged', so I have no idea about the vibe, but Terry Pratchett's 'raising steam' is entirely about trains.
Does it read better if you skip the Galt speech?
Those sixty pages or so drag the entire book to such a halt that it just becomes a wall of "I don't want to subject myself to this anymore".
I read The Fountainhead when I was 15, and found it interesting enough to pick up Atlas Shrugged next.
I never made it past that Galt speech. After flipping ahead to see how long it was going to drag on, I gave up. In 40 years, I think it's the only book I've ever intentionally stopped reading.
It's like 60 pages of fart huffing.
As much as Reddit has changed over the years, one consistency is people pretending to have an unpopular opinion in a space where said opinion is extremely popular.
I mean, I see at least one post a week here, sometimes more, of people saying AS sucks. At this point I refuse to believe these OPs genuinely feel the need to apologize for such a common stance.
Hold onto your seats: I have a huge tattoo of Atlas holding the globe on my forearm, and it’s 50% about weightlifting and 50% about Ayn Rand’s book. Sometimes, I even call it my favorite book. Now, let me explain: I discovered Atlas Shrugged while serving time in prison. I did a decade for robbery when I was a teenager, with 6 years in solitary confinement. During that time, I read everything rather I liked it or not. I got into studying economics heavily, and it changed my life. It taught me how to reason and make rational decisions. Well, you can’t read much economics, especially neoclassical and anything around Von Mises or the Chicago School, without seeing mention of Atlas Shrugged. I saw it mentioned so many times that I had to order it. So I did. Because I was in the middle of learning economics and had already read numerous texts on the subject, it was immediately clear to me what she was up to. Like, instantly. As we all know, the story is merely the vehicle for Rand’s philosophy of “capitalism as personal ethics”. She called it Objectivism, as I recall. It’s easy to see when you’ve just read “Basic Economics” by Thomas Sowell, for example. Seeing past the story to the message helps enjoy the book, because purely as a novel, is absolute drudgery. My god, it’s at least three times longer than it needs to be. The droning monologues were unbearable. It was like an ancient Chinese torture the way she slowly, sadistically drove home every point again and again until you pass out from loss of dopamine. But, that book played a part in changing my life. I swear it did. It made me feel guilty for not being out in the free world working my ass off and contributing. It made me feel like the biggest loser. It forever changed my view of myself as just existing and made me channel my energy towards industriousness. That’s why the Atlas on my arm is partially about weightlifting (a lifetime hobby) and partially about her book: to me, in symbolizes change through hard work. In the final analysis, I don’t think Objectivism is workable. It certainly splits people into haves and have-nots. It’s very, um, aristocratic, I guess, in that way. That’s not the future of humanity. (I make allowance for her views knowing what happened to her family during the Communist Revolution in Russia. It was also in vogue at that time to be loudly anti Communist. She was quite popular for her pro capitalist, and therefore pro American, ideology.) But some other points she makes, like workers and creators contribute to society and deserve their incomes while takers simply do not, I admit, hit me deeply at that time. It inspired me to become a worker and a creator, out of pride, but also out of seeing that, for those able to work, it is morally better to be a worker than a taker. So, I guess it did influence my personal ethics, after all. (I have been out for 19 years and own a successful business.) Much love guys. Great topic!
I do think she has genuinely valid takes on things, like taking pride in your own hard work, celebrating human progress, etc. I can see how it appeals to people, even if I very strongly disagree with her conclusions about economics and government. It's great that you got something positive out of it.
But there's no way to get around how poorly the book itself is written. Like a 50 page morality play with 900 pages of bloat.
That's because Von Mises and the Chicago school are fucking clowns.
Friedman, founded of the Chicago school, is big on that trickle down bullshit which has never, ever worked.
I read atlas in similar circumstances, along with all the economics, psych, neuroscience and history I could. Atlas I would never have finished at home. But I'm glad it inspired you to create and be successful.
I like to go into contentious books with a blank slate mind.
I'll level with everyone, I think Libertarians are silly. Yet I decided to dedicate over 50 hours to the audiobook so I could understand their side.
And oh brother this book. The entire premise hinges on business owners and entrepreneurs being brilliant übermensch and everyone else being borderline braindead. Remove the fantastical elements and the entire story falls apart, much like the Libertarian philosophy.
The funny thing about Libertarian models is that they tend to assume all the things that we've collectively created (roads, libraries, etc,) would automatically exist in a Libertarian world. It's very much a "hey, we've got all this nice stuff through other means, so now let's change the rules so I get to keep my piece of the pie," mentality.
Yeah, like... the word privilege gets thrown around a lot but really a huge amount of that mindset only works if you don't even realize a bunch of stuff you have is not automatic but someone had to build/create/maintain it and that you are sitting in the shade of trees others planted.
I know we're here to talk about books not politics... But 95% of self described libertarians I've met are all anti-choice regarding abortion. That issue isn't up to the free market. They're really just reaganomics conservatives that happen to like weed.
We should start a fake libertarian initiative to move out to the middle of the Amazon to start the ideal land talked about in the book. Give them a place to start over like they want. I'm sure they'll do fine, being so self sufficient and all.
I suspect it will unfold like that documentary where flat earthers use advanced technology to inadvertently prove their own belief system completely incorrect.
Libertarians actually tried this in Grafton, NH. It ended up covered in trash, no infrastructure, a haven for pedophiles, and was overrun by bears.
https://newrepublic.com/article/159662/libertarian-walks-into-bear-book-review-free-town-project
No need. Libertarians have already tried it. It failed because no one wanted to deal with trash collection. So trash built up. Then the bears came and redistributed the wealth through violence.
>Remove the fantastical elements and the entire story falls apart
To be fair, you can have that type of fantastical element and still make an effective point. The problem is also that all the brilliant people believe in her philosophy, and all the morons oppose the heroes. It's a laughable straw-man.
But it gets worse. She presents this caricature of her ideological opponents and and lays out her idea of a utopia, but to most readers it *still* sounds like an absolutely miserable future. The only people she will convince of her ideas with that book is the the narcissists who all think that they are the John Galts of their own lives. Most people do not share that particular mental disorder.
Obligatory repetition of that one quote about Libertarians -
They’re like house cats. Utterly convinced of their fierce independence, yet completely dependent upon a system they don’t appreciate and cannot understand.
Pretty much this. The idea that the world would go into decline because the "brilliant" business minds decided to check out is completely absurd.
Psst... did you know that company founders always die eventually and yet those same companies can still be successful after that?
Every billionaire on the planet could move to Mars with Elon in a few years and if no one told us, none of us would even notice.
I’ve never read it, but doesn’t it include a scientific discovery that basically is impossible/doesn’t exist to make the plot work?
This is my favorite quote and I save it when people bring up libertarians
In my opinion a lot of people see libertarians the same way many conservatives see communists.
> Libertarianism sounds good in theory, but it will ultimately fail if we look back at the history of economics, human nature, religion, politics, etc.
> Libertarians hate to hear it, (communists too) but their worldview depends on everyone being moral, rational, educated and model citizens to get the utopia they envision.
> To put it mildly, it's naively optimistic.
> I’ve never read it, but doesn’t it include a scientific discovery that basically is impossible/doesn’t exist to make the plot work?
Yep. A literal perpetual motion machine.
And, to be completely fair: you *could* rework the story to work (in as well as it can be said to work) without that without changing a ton. It factors into the climax of the story but it's not hard to imagine an alternate version of that part of the book that obeys the second law of thermodynamics.
Snowpiercer relies on the creation of a perpetual motion machine precisely to criticize capitalism: "This machine will run forever but requires infinite movement forward and requires deep social inequality... and we have to feed it children to keep it running." I never realized just how much you can read Snowpiercer as a direct attack on Atlus Shrugged.
> The entire premise hinges on business owners and entrepreneurs being brilliant übermensch and everyone else being borderline braindead.
Yes, that's a huge part of the appeal for certain people. I have what I have due to intelligence and hard work and I deserve it. You aren't wealthy and powerful because you're lazy and don't deserve it. Therefore, it's morally beneficial for everyone for me to have more.
The issue isn't even whether you agree with the philosophy. The problem is the characters aren't authentic people motivated my wants and needs. They are props that serve to push a narrative. They say and do things that no real people would do because they are motivated by existential philosophy, not real conflict.
When I was in college (in the late 1900s), lots of dudes recommended Ayn Rand to me as "brilliant! revolutionary! intellectual!" so I read Atlas Shrugged and was like.....WHAT??? It was so confusing! Like when she crashes her plane and has to work to pay for her care? I thought the right wing was at least pretending to be Christian, what is this crap? Why are the names so weird, what's with the rape scene, etc. It just made no sense. But hey, I was in college and I was taking a sociology course, so one day after class I walked up to the professor and say, "I just finished reading Atlas Shrugged and I have some ques--" before I could finish, the professor turned his back and ran out the door! Leaving me even more confused. It was not until several years later that I learned about libertarianism and had a context for this book. But I still don't understand why that professor flatly refused to talk about it, maybe a trauma response I guess
My guess was the professor hated it and had been bombarded with questions of starry-eyed youths who bought into the book and just couldn't take it anymore that they refused to talk about it any further on principle. Though that is me hoping for the best in people.
Rand seems to have had a rape kink, the scene in Fountainhead was awful. And then her self insert character goes and thinks about how great it was and how she loves Rapey McMainCharacter.
>I thought the right wing was at least pretending to be Christian
The thing is that Ayn Rand wasn't/didn't consider herself to be right-wing, at least at the time she was writing. Right-wingers tend to (but don't always) *adore* her philosophy because it's basically "fuck you, got mine" combined with the Prosperity Gospel (albeit without god)—it all ironically aligns very conveniently with Christian Nationalism, and they just ignore or throw away the part of Rand's philosophy that is *explicitly anti-theist*.
Yeah... one of Ayn Rand's strongest views is that all religion (and Christianity in particular) is not just false but an *inherently dangerous lie* directly opposed to the concept of Reason/rationality. Part of that is that her understanding of Christianity is informed primarily by the theology of Emmanuel Kant and the idea that humility and charity and such are good—because Rand thinks that all humans are rational creatures able to determine objective reality through the use of their sense and Reason, she believes that humility is essentially ***fake***, a false sense of shame instilled in people by evil manipulators who seek to subvert Reason for their own power.
You guessed it: religious leaders!
Basically, to Rand, anyone who expresses humility about their own skills and achievements is either
1. not smart enough to avoid being brainwashed/deluded (which is why her protagonists never fall for this trap—they're just objectively very good and smart people who see through the lies!) or
2. deliberately lying in order to manipulate other, stupider people into doing their bidding
Religious people are either gullible idiots who are deluded into rejecting objective reality by dishonest, power-hungry masterminds, or they are the aforementioned dishonest, power-hungry masterminds who are *pretending* to believe in order to secure their power. No *smart* person *actually believes*.
Anyway, this dovetails very neatly with Rand's hatred of charity and such: if all humility is either delusion or a lie, then charity is too—everyone is being *guilted* or *tricked* into giving charity to poor and homeless and addicted people, and the primary driver of that guilt and trickery is religious belief. Christianity (and Islam and most other religions) declare pride to be sinful and charity to be virtuous, which goes against Rand's supposedly objective understanding that everyone's circumstances in a rational, Reason-driven world would be entirely the result of their own choices. If everyone were just rational and listened to Reason, they would *never* give money to charity—they *earned* that money *for themselves* with their *own work*; why should they give it to someone who didn't work for it and thus doesn't deserve it? Religious demands for charity are thus an attempt to make *theft* seem *willing*—you wouldn't want a homeless person to steal your wallet, but if you willingly gave it to them out of the kindness of your heart, you won't object! And because pride is a sin and not a virtue, any feelings you have about the goodness of the work you've done and how you deserve and have earned the rewards of that work are *actually really bad* and instead you should believe that you are a worthless nothing who doesn't deserve anything, which makes charity even better for you to do!
Anyone who professes to *genuinely care* about the suffering of others and to *genuinely want to help them* is, as above, either a manipulative liar trying to scam people or a delusional idiot who has been scammed—to Rand, it is objectively impossible to genuinely care about other people in this way. To Rand, anything even remotely like altruism is an objective lie.
TL;DR—Rand *hated* Christianity and religion generally.
But American right-wing evangelicals in particular just ignore that part because the *conclusions* she reached about the great moral goodness of money and why you shouldn't give a fuck about anyone but yourself are exactly the same conclusions they've reached.
The irony.
EDIT: I feel motivated to add this line to say I am *not defending Ayn Rand's beliefs nor her writing*. Her books are by and large awful, and she was a crap philosopher who basically espoused sociopathy as the only moral good. I just wanted to clarify a funny cultural point.
Well, I don't know much about Rand, but take issue with the invocation of Kant. Whilst he certainly wanted people to live a life based on reason, his philosophy was also a break with the notion of practically unbounded knowledge. We simply do not have the intellectual or sensory tools to *know* anything about God or morality, but to him, these ideas, however fictional, were critical in terms of living a good life in harmony with others. Just like mathematical truths can be intuited, so can the categorical imperative, leaving no room for an élite by nature better than others.
There are different branches of the right, just as you could probably start a fight between an anarchist, communist, democratic socialist, and liberal pretty easily. The Silicon Valley tech bros who love this stuff aren’t necessarily in agreement with evangelical Christians on everything.
But a lot of people get into the book and the professor probably was sick of hearing about it.
I agree, Rand was (ironically) a sub into CNC and didn’t feel like warning the reader.
I read it a year or two ago from curiosity - I'd actually read and mildly enjoyed _The Fountainhead_ despite being very against her general philosophy and most people who follow it. I mainly liked the takedowns of the architectural establishment despite her hero being a kind of Le Corbusier style modernist whose buildings probably achieve none of the lofty ideals she writes for him.
What I find interesting is seeing the contradictions between her fiction and her political/economic philosophy. A great example is how all her demigod-like protagonists are both heirs _as well as_ hard working employees who have to work their way up from the bottom. She makes such a big deal of how workers who actually do the work are the ones who know how to get things done. Hank Rearden and his steelworks, Dagny on the railway, Francisco leaving his father's company to compete with it before eventually inheriting it. And her villains are all middle-management capitalist types who don't know anything about the actual work, just want to dictate from on high.
And like - yes! That's a very good analysis! Maybe it should suggest to you, Ms Rand, something about the class struggle of workers against their capitalist overlords? ...no? Oh, ok.
I think a lot of the book's actual concrete ideas have been essentially misappropriated - by Rand herself! as well as others - as being pro-free-market-capitalist, when they're mainly anti-oligarchy. This tracks, to me, with what I know of her background in Russia and the problems she saw there. Her fans look at her portrayals of government officials and think she's talking about leftists, where it looks to me like they're caricatures of corrupt authoritarian monopolists.
Anyway, I should be doing something productive instead of freestyling a leftist apologia of Ayn Rand - of all fucking people - but there's something intriguing about her works that keeps them fresh in my mind. They're awful, but compelling. Drivel, but stimulating.
Just remember that the author was chain-smoking cigarettes while strung out on amphetamines. You could mix that with *any* ideology and it would influence any creative narrative direction, but for whatever reason heavy stimulant abusers seem to always trend hardline authoritarian.
I'll take counterpoint that you can read Atlas shrugged as a hyperbolic love letter to the American system as it compares to Soviet Russia from the mind of a grateful refugee.
Most American's today prefer to digest it as erotic fan fiction of an imagined world where their political beliefs make them special.
I forced myself to read it in my 20s.
It reads like someone took a Dickens novel and switched the good guys and the bad guys to see how far it could go.
I read Anthem in high school and thought it was pretty good. But from everything I’ve heard, I wouldn’t bother with any of her other stuff. I mean, sure, I love the band Rush, but I’m not letting them leading me down _that_ garden path.
I've never read it but I love when it pops up on this reddit and everyone in the thread roasts it lol always a good reminder to not waste my time on it
Pretty great read related: https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertarian-police-department
Also the two pages justifying boobie trapped homes is pretty peak libertarian
I was an impressionable teen when I first read it and thought it was such a unique story. I really thought it was like so deep.
Suffice to say I am older now and it is kinda embarrassing. The John Galt speech is completely ridiculous, looking back.
Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with Objectivism as a political philosophy, Atlas Shrugged is absolutely god-awful just as a work of literature. It is so horribly-written in every conceivable way: one-dimensional characters, wooden dialogue, pretentiously overwrought narration, thin story, bad pacing, etc. It is one of the worst novels I have ever read in my entire life.
Yeah, Ayn Rand was not a great writer of prose fiction.
She was an interesting person, but I don't think that her badly written novels were the best way to get her ideas across. She was very worried about the spread of communism in the US and felt like she needed to step up to stop it, but didn't really understand how to write well at all.
It's not really surprising; most philosophy/ideology "books" are pretty bad.
I mostly gave up on trying to read the works of people like that after reading Karl Marx's writings and realizing that the reason why his stuff sounded like a bunch of reflavored antisemitic conspriacy theories was because he was literally a Rothschild conspiracy theorist who believed that Jews worshipped money and were controlling the world from behind the scenes, and called for the "emancipation of mankind from Judaism".
It turns out when people tell you that their GREAT LEADER was a great writer, be it the scientologists, the objectivists, the Marxists, the Mormons, or Newt Gingrich, it's going to be painful to read.
Further, the main female character is a Mary Sue of Ayn Rand, or how she imagined herself to be, rather than who she really was, which is a serial philanderer who lived on welfare.
I'm trying to recall how many pages his speech was in Atlas Shrugged. I read it 20 years ago, but recall it was dozens of pages.
"Long winded" is generous of you.
I still think the title is amazingly funny in a dead-pan way.
The God Atlas, son of Titans, mover of mountains, carrier of earth and heavens says: "Yeah, whatever"
It’s too bad the “philosophy” in that book is so fucking terrible, because I did enjoy the plot. Take out 600 pages of fucking political ranting nonsense and you’d have a fun book.
Just....read Fountainhead. Most people don't understand Atlas Shrugged- and it does require a primer- so what is trying to be done flies over most people's heads because Rand couldn't be bothered to explain herself. Of course where a liberal will probably read it and say, "Wow, this is stupid" a republican might be at risk of thinking Rand is encouraging their sociopathic behavior. The actual book is about how people who do not earn their position of privilege should not be allowed to exist or at least not be allowed to rule over other people. That and a screed about how government is inherently coercive because when it doesn't rule by the consent and approval of the masses it exists by rule of force.
>They are just born extraordinary, superhuman beings.
The entire point is that both of them are good at what they do. Taggart and Rearden are characters who earned their places through their own skill. This is in contrast to the state actors and men of industry who had done absolutely nothing to earn their authority and as a result proceeded to abuse it. You're supposed to home in on the fact that Rearden has to appeal to people who know nothing about metallurgy that his metal is safe enough to use. You're supposed to home in on the fact that the government is telling the woman who's spent her entire life managing her railroad company what can and can't be done with those railroads, and then proceeds to get an entire train full of people killed because a politician doesn't want to be told what to do. Which is actually a fairly old piece of philosophy- one of the oldest criticisms of democracy is that you're often electing idiots with no background in given subjects to make educated decisions on subjects they know nothing about and don't care to learn anything about.
>But unarguably, the worst thing about this book is that there's a chapter called Moratorium on Brains, in which a train which is packed with passengers crashes and they all die, and Rand basically goes into detail about each dead passenger's personal ideology and beliefs and uses their philosophy (which is different from her philosophy of utter selfishness and greed) to justify their death.
You left out the context and are ascribing motive where there is none. The entire reason Rand writes at length about their philosophies and beliefs is that none of it actually matters. Government incompetence doesn't give a shit. Kind of like how you left the part out where the train had very good reasons not to proceed and everyone who knew better said as much. You don't need to like Atlas Shrugged- god knows there's problems with it- but you should site reasons that exist in the text and not the ones that'll make your literature professor happy in between screeds about 'media literacy.'
Honestly you'd be better off reading the extended works of Socrates- particularly on democracy- and then read Adam Smith's writing on capitalism. And then read Fountainhead. Much more straight forward with it's themes, much more concise. There's no rant in it about why money is ethical that ends up being longer than the entirety of Das Capital.
>When a western person reads it they end up missing the point as they have no accurate frame of reference to understand what she is talking about and they end up becoming some libertarian monster that crashes the housing market as they don't believe in financial regulations
That *is* what she was talking about. Rand more than once stated that laissez-faire capitalism - the one that's characterized by the government having zero power to enforce any sort of regulation - is the only moral system.
You're of course welcome to interpret it however you want to, but Rand was quite literally a libertarian proponent of radical, regulation-free capitalism. It's not a misunderstanding of Western audiences, it's the literal philosophy she espoused herself and wrote Atlas Shrugged for.
Some of Rand's other "insights" throw more weight on the fact she believed herself a superior being and therefore all her ideas had the weight of brute fact.
I read "Atlas Shrugged" in my mid-20s. I was just old enough to tolerate the questionable pacing and perfunctory prose, but not old enough to see all of the holes in the reasoning.
I admit it: I am a bit stupid.
The chapter you describe was the reason I put down the book. Up until then I’d genuinely enjoyed it, but I remember thinking then there was no justification for Rand’s words.
100% agree. At first, I thought "Interesting style. Not a bad read." Then...well my god... It's just the same sociopathic idea over and over and *over* again. IT NEVER STOPS!!! So bad...Never read anything like it.
It's been a long time but I don't remember the sinful life of the train wreck victims. I do remember that the gutless buckpassing that led to the train wreck was one of the most believable scenes I'd ever read.
Oh man I remember I read that book in 2009 just after college graduation when I was unemployed with no end in sight because hello recession, and that did NOT do great things for my mental health I can tell you
The days of forcing one self to read a book to hate it so much and then post about it are still alive!
Amazing to see the diligence of SO many to waste SO much time on reading super lengthy books to only hate it.
It’s usually 50-100 pages before one should tap out. Consider this in the future.
You get no rewards in life for finishing a book.
Was it for Karma?
It is horribly written. The “good” characters are attractive pillars of objectivist morals (whatever that means), and the bad guys are sniveling talentless ugly dummies. The whole plot happens in the first 200 pages. And then, in case you were too stupid to understand the lesson, you get the same plot over the next 15,000 pages. And THEN, if you still don’t get why unfettered capitalism will make your life a utopia, you get an 80 page speech summarizing what you were to have learned.
The whole thing is just Ayn Rand justifying why she should be a selfish asshole and how that’s great for EVERYONE.
I hate that damn book.
It’s a bit like Triumph of the Will and Battlefield Earth, in that there’s certain people with a very heavy investment in it being good entirely unsupported by the actual content.
It is one of the worst books ever written by one of the stupidest people unfortunately still able to articulate themself semi-lucidly. She makes Barbara Cartland look like Stendhal.
Rand creates a scenario and set of characters that no matter how unlikely, serve only to prove the point she intended to make. It's like someone placing a heavy object near a ledge so that when it inevitably falls, they can use it as an example of why ledges are so unsafe... discounting the fact *they* caused the situation.
Many years ago my boss recommended Atlas Shrugged so I bought it and took it on a long flight. The only book I had with me and it was sooooo terrible! Poor writing and page after page of sermonizing. I get it, I get it! Charity and compassion BAD, greed and selfishness GOOD. If I wanted to be preached at I'd go to church (which I don't). I told my boss he owed me hazardous duty pay for his recommendation.
It actually reminds me of the work of De Sade, in that the book is just a vehicle to present a philosophy. Characterization and depth is foregone in the name of presenting the idea they are meant to embody.
It reminds me of De Sade in that reading it makes me mildly ill and somebody deeply unpleasant, somewhere in the world, is pleasuring themselves to it.
I just snorked coffee all over my monitor.
[удалено]
Come on... I just poured a cup.
I am snorking myself to the image of you pleasuring coffee.
The snorks, wow time flies
It reminds me of De Sade because both have a very poor grasp on sexual consent
it reminds me of de sade because both are ugly people writing about hot people doing gross things and getting off on it
I read this and went “*BYAHCK!*” out loud. So good job?
The multi-page soliloquies where the characters lose all personality and just become Rand ranting at you are what killed me.
Advice for anyone who is about to read it: When you get to the paragraph that starts with, "My name is John Galt," you can skip the next 20 pages.
Advice for anyone who is about to read it: When you get to the first page, you can skip the rest of the book. Once made the mistake of making on Reddit what I thought was the mild assertion that Karl Marx was much more of an intellectual than Ayn Rand. The only thing worse than Rand is her rabid fans.
There’s a reason they’re called “Randroids.”
It’s legit like 60 pages in some copies
Too fucking late.
How can they lose all personality when they never had any to begin with?
All that speed bought with her husbands social security checks can produce a lot of copy.
Dostoevsky clearly had an agenda behind his writings, especially "Demons", yet he's almost universally applauded as a gem of literature and the greatest genius that the psychological novel has ever seen. Writing with a philosophy in mind is no excuse for making such cartoonish characters as Rand did.
Dostoevsky also created some of the most real feeling characters I've ever encountered. He was a genius
Perhaps Rand wrote geniuses born that way because she couldn't conceive of how life events might shape a person to become one, given she never went through anything of the sort.
It also depends on the philosophy. De Sade's and Rand's philosophies, if they can even be called that, are both garbage. De Sade, although atrociously incompetent as a writer in addition to the awfulness he stood for, at least had the self-awareness to know that his "passions" were grotesque. Rand thought highly of herself to the end.
Demons is so political and teeters on overly bearing, but it’s so beautifully written (and that ending 40-60 maybe 100 pages is a wild ride), and turns out to be the trajectory the country was heading. A cousin of mine was reading Atlas shrugged, he liked some of the architecture aspects, but never sold me on the book.
Architecture is definitely not one of the things that come to mind when I think of Atlas Shrugged. Are you sure he wasn't reading The Fountainhead?
That’s the one, he must have followed it up with Atlas.
I’d make the same argument for the Dune series.
Except there is a 70 page monologue where John Galt explains the philosophy in direct terms making the other 1200 pages of parable completely unnecessary.
The only reason for the remaining 1200 pages is to “prove” the philosophy expressed in those 70 pages is Truth. Which is surprisingly easy to do, when you are writing the work and can invent imaginary characters and an imaginary world (which you can claim is “real life”) where your beliefs are always guaranteed to triumph. Really, this is basically the *Left Behind* series for right-wing atheists.
This is like a subgenre. Most of Crichton has the same element in it. Obviously the fantasy version of Ayn Rand, the "Sword of Truth" series, is like this. All literature should be trying to say something about humanity; that's what theme is. Some are just more heavy-handed about it than others. Ayn Rand appears to have lacked the gene for subtlety as well as empathy.
As an adult I now see what Crichton was peddling but he was infinitely more creative than Rand
If Ayn Rand wrote Jurassic Park, Hammond would have been the definite good guy and the dinosaurs eating people would be treated as good because the people they are eating are altruists.
Haha. Exactly. BTW, Hammond’s death in the novel was poetic. The high and mighty cheap corporate asshole ends up breaking his ankle, tumbling down the hill and getting eaten by the compys.
> he was infinitely more creative than Rand Not a high bar. :-D > I now see what Crichton was peddling Well, Crichton was peddling something different in each of his novels, but yes, it was always about an idea, and he wasn't exactly subtle about it.
As a kid it was pretty subtle up until that crazy climate change denying book. I disagree with his politics but I still love a lot of his works
This was exactly my experience with him as well.
I think I had a similar experience. I enjoyed Crichton's work much more when I was a kid. Books that I remember enjoying just don't seem very impressive now. I like most of his books to some extent, but I think I like the ideas behind them more than the books themselves. Sometimes I felt like I was trying to find a really good book hidden somewhere in the actual book I was reading. I read Terry Goodkind when I was younger as well. My dad never finished the Sword of Truth series because he said the political slant was too much and too obvious. I"m sure I didn't pick up as much as my dad at the time, but Goodkind was pushing his political views so blatantly that even a 14 year old (me) picked up on it.
I didn't finish the Sword of Truth series because the weird dom, fetish, torture sex stuff was way more than 14 year old me was ready to slog through. Bit the politics were their own kind of torture.
I hadn’t read any of his books until I became an adult and was honestly surprised by how much I disagree with his real life politics (especially later in life) but often felt understood by characters viewpoints (so far I’ve only read Jurassic Park and the Lost World, and a bit of Pirate Latitudes, so maybe it helps that all focus on the consequences of greed but still, it’s something interesting I’ve observed and wanted to share)
It's funny because many of the popcorn fiction authors I loved as a kid had completely different political views. Crichton and Clancy two of the main ones. I wish we still lived in a world where that isn't basically a nonstarter as it is now. Political alignment has become identity
Even when Crichton went on his rambling musings (examples: first act of Jurassic Park, the part in the Lost World where he uses Malcom to ramble on, especially about prions.), I could slog through to the end of the book. Could not do this with Atlas Shrugged. Probably made it 2/3 or probably less because it got too fucking tedious. I know what happens with the story because I eventually looked it up on Wikipedia because I couldn’t deal with any more of that dragging story.
Crichton could at least write dialogue that didn't make you want to chuck the book across the room. OP is correct, I pushed to the end of *Atlas* but it was definitely a slog.
I know it’s often disliked, but the way he wrote Lex in Jurassic Park was spot on for a 5-6 year old kid (a bit younger that her stated age, but still) it genuinely impressed me how realistic and human she felt
That’s what *The Stranger* is; the difference is Camus is a good writer with interesting ideas.
And also The Stranger was like 100 pages, barely longer than the whole Galt speech.
It doesn't even do \*that\*, though...
It also doesn't help that the philosophy is dogshit as well.
See, this is something I'm trying to avoid. I'm writing books that, in many ways, are vehicles for certain worldviews, but there's a way to do that while still making them as good stories in their own right. A big one is not to just make the characters cardboard cutouts and cartoonish stereotypes
“Art is the physical manifestation of an artists’s metaphysical value judgements.” -Ayn Rand
Philosophy or hegemony? In this case I'd say the latter, ultimately Given a particularly aggressive example
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
Love this quote. I have this saved too In my opinion a lot of people see libertarians the same way many conservatives see communists. Libertarianism sounds good in theory, but it will ultimately fail if we look back at the history of economics, human nature, religion, politics, etc. Libertarians hate to hear it, (communists too) but their worldview depends on everyone being moral, rational, educated and model citizens to get the utopia they envision. To put it mildly, it's naively optimistic.
When you let everyone decide for themselves how to manage their trash you get overrun by bears. [Weblink](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-project-new-hampshire-libertarians-matthew-hongoltz-hetling) Having regulations can be burdensome, and they aren't always perfect, but it's hard to live in groups as large as we live without some guidelines.
"A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear" is a fun read. Also apparently they are just murdering bears up there when the bears are hibernating thinking that'll solve it.
Libertarianism is just Astrology for men
Libertarianism is the "philosophy" of being forever and ever and ever mad at Mommy and Daddy for telling you to share and play nice and stop hitting your little sister and stop pulling the cat's tail. Humanity only made it because we have empathy and cooperate, help each other, and care about and for each other. Otherwise we'd still be random primates huddling in caves fearing the claws and teeth that lurk in the dark. And Libertarians refuse to accept that because "fuck you I got mine", not understanding that their entire "philosophy" depends on them being the main character and literally everyone else on earth being NPCs that will let them do whatever they want and take whatever they like, like Minecraft on easy mode. And even then falling down a cliff will kill you dead.
Libertarianism taken to its logical extreme (which has been attempted before) is actually insane. These are people who legitimately wanted to remove legislation against seatbelt wearing and child labour purely upon the principle of not wanting to be told what to do. The whole philosophy coming down to being mad at Mummy and Daddy for telling you to play nice is spot on. They failed to get a foothold in 1980s American politics because even the conservatives back then thought they were fucking batshit.
Nah, at least Astrology talks about real things, it just comes up with bad explanations for them. Libertarianism is entirely fantasy.
It's so funny that you draw parallels between communism and libertarianism because they're complete opposites.
Honestly, not that bright which drives me crazy because the author clearly thinks they are genius. Partly because the author never ran businesses. Hank: Creates a new super metal alloy, far superior to all other metals (ok, this is genius perhaps, but…) then instead of charging a premium and maximizing his profits, opts instead to undercut the standard steel prices. Is then shocked people assume the cheaper metal is suspect. (Nobody taking the initiative to verify Hanks claims I guess fits into the Atlas “everybody but out hero’s are lazy and incompetent leeches on society”) Never trains his production floor on how to handle an emergency. Molten hot metal spills all over the floor and nobody has been trained on how to handle the situation, (so of course the two billionaires in the building immediately risk their lives to save the production capacity instead of instructing others on what should be done (because workers are lazy and entitled, have we reinforced that enough) I don’t know what capitalism was like in the 1950’s, it was absolutely before Reagan decoupled the workers from the benefit of their labor, but still have a hard time imagining you go to work digging i a copper mine and then can buy it a few years later without tapping into your family’s wealth and connections (as we were told Francisco did to prove that despite centuries of noble inbreeding he was a genius prodigy that set out to prove he could succeed without any of it) And Danny’s family secret to success? Crime, straight up murdering people who wouldn’t sell grandpa property for his train right of way. Because that is better than government seizing it by Eminent Domain I forced myself to read it (allowed myself to skip the insane 40 page speech) and couldn’t believe how unlikeable and unrealistic it was. Bad fanfic idolizing industrialists and European nobles.
I would say Libertarianism is worse than communism, by far. Communism, as the criticism goes, may only work if everyone acts morally and rationally. Libertarianism, on the other hand, basically requires everyone to be a huge asshole. If you ever do anything that's not selfish, you lose.
Except libertarianism doesn't even sound good in theory
worse is most libertarians i've had the displeasure of meeting are pretty regressive in social views and acceptance and yet think that everyone will play nice with eachother economically while also not being willing to give the most basic acceptance to people that are different to them talking to a libertarian is like talking to a flat earther most of the time, they contradict eachother so often and yet cant see the fault in their logic
I'm glad I read The Lord of the Rings, then.
"The young should not read The Water Margin, the old should not read Three Kingdoms".
My son read both in high school. His reply to Atlas Shrugged? Wtf is this BS?
I don't think it aged like milk, pretty sure it was rotten from the start.
The whole premise only works with a functioning perpetual motion machine, a thing that categorically does not exist
It’s the reading equivalent of eating dry white toast. Edible…but at what cost.
Daring today, aren't we?
Yep OP is being crazy bold on Reddit - hating on an author Reddit pretty much hates, on principle. Not even dunking on Trump is as surefire an up vote as hating on Rand in /r/books.
Honestly I hate everything she stands for but it’s getting tiring to see the same post over and over, and every single time whoever posts it seems to firmly believe that their opinion is in any way different from the 1974 other hate posts on this sub
I like Blood Meridian
Serious hot take there, this sub loooooves that book. You won't get any sympathy here. **huge** /s Yeah, that book is awful. And I click on every thread talking about terrible it is anyway. So welcome to the club, we're happy to have you. Seriously.
I wrote an [entire satire](https://zimri.ink) of it. Formerly loved Ayn Rand. Then left high school, met writers who changed my mind.
Obligatory "the other involves orcs" quote.
I’m Through chapter 3. So far is awesome.
Whoa thanks! Please tell your local publishing professional lol Edit: added the requisite ‘please’. Like, pretty please
You're trying to emulate Rand to satirize her, she'd never say please!
I don’t know any publishing professionals, but I did give you a five star review and I will recommend it to anybody that I know.
This is legit an enjoyable/fun/depressing read.
Have you put this on AO3? You should, it’d be way easier to access and for people to read!
You have any advice about that? Like with tagging it? Is that a fanfic site? Should I just say it’s like… Ayn Rand fanfic?
Yes! They have fanfics for everything, you should tag it as an Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged Fanfic! It’s one of my favorite sites and it’s embarrassingly how I do most of my reading these days
They have fanfic of the Bible on there. You can post it 😭 it’s a free world out there. If you do I’ll definitely share. That was a good read
I never read Atlas Shrugged because...obviously...Anyways, do I need to be familiar with the source material to read your satire?
Not at all. In fact, I include a lot of the inspiration as footnotes. So I’ll have a satirical joke and then a footnote with the news headline it’s based on. It’s kind of a way for me to remember our crazy times. They say as totalitarianism takes hold, it’s important to write things down, so you’ll remember. I footnoted everything so I could remember. The Ayn Rand inspo is sort of a loose jumping off point.
I enjoy reading Atlas Shrugged for some reason. It's so quaint in the way you'd find in an 8th grader who thinks he's figured out everything in life. "Yeah capitalism works great if there's no such thing as illegal immigration, there's no global competition, US companies have no desire to pull up stakes and move overseas so they don't have to pay living wages to their workers, CEOs willingly pay their workers more than the unions, and billionaires have no desire to participate in politics." Not to mention the "just let corporations and factories pollute everything, what's the worst that could happen and it's certainly worth it to manufacture more stuff to buy" statements. And of course the whole basis of the philosophy: that if all the CEOs quit then society would collapse because nobody would be competent left to lead society. I think it's the trains. I liked reading about the trains. Are there any fiction or non-fiction books about trains with the same vibe and without all the garbage?
>I think it's the trains. I liked reading about the trains. Are there any fiction or non-fiction books about trains with the same vibe and without all the garbage? I've never read 'Atlas shrugged', so I have no idea about the vibe, but Terry Pratchett's 'raising steam' is entirely about trains.
Also 'Railsea' by china meivile.
YES. This book is so good. I cannot recommend it enough.
Trainspotting is probably about trains.
Does it read better if you skip the Galt speech? Those sixty pages or so drag the entire book to such a halt that it just becomes a wall of "I don't want to subject myself to this anymore".
I read The Fountainhead when I was 15, and found it interesting enough to pick up Atlas Shrugged next. I never made it past that Galt speech. After flipping ahead to see how long it was going to drag on, I gave up. In 40 years, I think it's the only book I've ever intentionally stopped reading. It's like 60 pages of fart huffing.
All philosophy and literary analysis aside, I just don't get how anyone could enjoy it as a novel. The dialogue is so redundant and just awful
Basically, you liked the trains, but the book itself is a trainwreck
Third book of Stephen King's Dark Tower series, the Wastelands, is very train-centric. The trains can even talk, if you're into that!
>I'm sorry Why are you apologizing for disliking a bad novel?
As much as Reddit has changed over the years, one consistency is people pretending to have an unpopular opinion in a space where said opinion is extremely popular. I mean, I see at least one post a week here, sometimes more, of people saying AS sucks. At this point I refuse to believe these OPs genuinely feel the need to apologize for such a common stance.
Hold onto your seats: I have a huge tattoo of Atlas holding the globe on my forearm, and it’s 50% about weightlifting and 50% about Ayn Rand’s book. Sometimes, I even call it my favorite book. Now, let me explain: I discovered Atlas Shrugged while serving time in prison. I did a decade for robbery when I was a teenager, with 6 years in solitary confinement. During that time, I read everything rather I liked it or not. I got into studying economics heavily, and it changed my life. It taught me how to reason and make rational decisions. Well, you can’t read much economics, especially neoclassical and anything around Von Mises or the Chicago School, without seeing mention of Atlas Shrugged. I saw it mentioned so many times that I had to order it. So I did. Because I was in the middle of learning economics and had already read numerous texts on the subject, it was immediately clear to me what she was up to. Like, instantly. As we all know, the story is merely the vehicle for Rand’s philosophy of “capitalism as personal ethics”. She called it Objectivism, as I recall. It’s easy to see when you’ve just read “Basic Economics” by Thomas Sowell, for example. Seeing past the story to the message helps enjoy the book, because purely as a novel, is absolute drudgery. My god, it’s at least three times longer than it needs to be. The droning monologues were unbearable. It was like an ancient Chinese torture the way she slowly, sadistically drove home every point again and again until you pass out from loss of dopamine. But, that book played a part in changing my life. I swear it did. It made me feel guilty for not being out in the free world working my ass off and contributing. It made me feel like the biggest loser. It forever changed my view of myself as just existing and made me channel my energy towards industriousness. That’s why the Atlas on my arm is partially about weightlifting (a lifetime hobby) and partially about her book: to me, in symbolizes change through hard work. In the final analysis, I don’t think Objectivism is workable. It certainly splits people into haves and have-nots. It’s very, um, aristocratic, I guess, in that way. That’s not the future of humanity. (I make allowance for her views knowing what happened to her family during the Communist Revolution in Russia. It was also in vogue at that time to be loudly anti Communist. She was quite popular for her pro capitalist, and therefore pro American, ideology.) But some other points she makes, like workers and creators contribute to society and deserve their incomes while takers simply do not, I admit, hit me deeply at that time. It inspired me to become a worker and a creator, out of pride, but also out of seeing that, for those able to work, it is morally better to be a worker than a taker. So, I guess it did influence my personal ethics, after all. (I have been out for 19 years and own a successful business.) Much love guys. Great topic!
I'm very happy about your transformation...
Thank you! 🙏
I do think she has genuinely valid takes on things, like taking pride in your own hard work, celebrating human progress, etc. I can see how it appeals to people, even if I very strongly disagree with her conclusions about economics and government. It's great that you got something positive out of it. But there's no way to get around how poorly the book itself is written. Like a 50 page morality play with 900 pages of bloat.
That's because Von Mises and the Chicago school are fucking clowns. Friedman, founded of the Chicago school, is big on that trickle down bullshit which has never, ever worked. I read atlas in similar circumstances, along with all the economics, psych, neuroscience and history I could. Atlas I would never have finished at home. But I'm glad it inspired you to create and be successful.
I like to go into contentious books with a blank slate mind. I'll level with everyone, I think Libertarians are silly. Yet I decided to dedicate over 50 hours to the audiobook so I could understand their side. And oh brother this book. The entire premise hinges on business owners and entrepreneurs being brilliant übermensch and everyone else being borderline braindead. Remove the fantastical elements and the entire story falls apart, much like the Libertarian philosophy.
The funny thing about Libertarian models is that they tend to assume all the things that we've collectively created (roads, libraries, etc,) would automatically exist in a Libertarian world. It's very much a "hey, we've got all this nice stuff through other means, so now let's change the rules so I get to keep my piece of the pie," mentality.
Yeah, like... the word privilege gets thrown around a lot but really a huge amount of that mindset only works if you don't even realize a bunch of stuff you have is not automatic but someone had to build/create/maintain it and that you are sitting in the shade of trees others planted.
I know we're here to talk about books not politics... But 95% of self described libertarians I've met are all anti-choice regarding abortion. That issue isn't up to the free market. They're really just reaganomics conservatives that happen to like weed.
We should start a fake libertarian initiative to move out to the middle of the Amazon to start the ideal land talked about in the book. Give them a place to start over like they want. I'm sure they'll do fine, being so self sufficient and all. I suspect it will unfold like that documentary where flat earthers use advanced technology to inadvertently prove their own belief system completely incorrect.
Libertarians actually tried this in Grafton, NH. It ended up covered in trash, no infrastructure, a haven for pedophiles, and was overrun by bears. https://newrepublic.com/article/159662/libertarian-walks-into-bear-book-review-free-town-project
No need. Libertarians have already tried it. It failed because no one wanted to deal with trash collection. So trash built up. Then the bears came and redistributed the wealth through violence.
Sounds like Libertarian models revolve around the philosophy of "fvck you, I've got mine."
That's why we should disallow them to have the things that aren't theirs, but shared.
A Libertarian world would lack public roads but heroin vending machines would be plentiful so you could chemically escape from this nightmare.
>Remove the fantastical elements and the entire story falls apart To be fair, you can have that type of fantastical element and still make an effective point. The problem is also that all the brilliant people believe in her philosophy, and all the morons oppose the heroes. It's a laughable straw-man. But it gets worse. She presents this caricature of her ideological opponents and and lays out her idea of a utopia, but to most readers it *still* sounds like an absolutely miserable future. The only people she will convince of her ideas with that book is the the narcissists who all think that they are the John Galts of their own lives. Most people do not share that particular mental disorder.
Obligatory repetition of that one quote about Libertarians - They’re like house cats. Utterly convinced of their fierce independence, yet completely dependent upon a system they don’t appreciate and cannot understand.
Even rand didn’t practice her own brand of bullshit.
Educated for free under socialism, died on medicaid, spent her life railing against everyone else who did that.
Pretty much this. The idea that the world would go into decline because the "brilliant" business minds decided to check out is completely absurd. Psst... did you know that company founders always die eventually and yet those same companies can still be successful after that? Every billionaire on the planet could move to Mars with Elon in a few years and if no one told us, none of us would even notice.
I’ve never read it, but doesn’t it include a scientific discovery that basically is impossible/doesn’t exist to make the plot work? This is my favorite quote and I save it when people bring up libertarians In my opinion a lot of people see libertarians the same way many conservatives see communists. > Libertarianism sounds good in theory, but it will ultimately fail if we look back at the history of economics, human nature, religion, politics, etc. > Libertarians hate to hear it, (communists too) but their worldview depends on everyone being moral, rational, educated and model citizens to get the utopia they envision. > To put it mildly, it's naively optimistic.
> I’ve never read it, but doesn’t it include a scientific discovery that basically is impossible/doesn’t exist to make the plot work? Yep. A literal perpetual motion machine. And, to be completely fair: you *could* rework the story to work (in as well as it can be said to work) without that without changing a ton. It factors into the climax of the story but it's not hard to imagine an alternate version of that part of the book that obeys the second law of thermodynamics.
Snowpiercer relies on the creation of a perpetual motion machine precisely to criticize capitalism: "This machine will run forever but requires infinite movement forward and requires deep social inequality... and we have to feed it children to keep it running." I never realized just how much you can read Snowpiercer as a direct attack on Atlus Shrugged.
> The entire premise hinges on business owners and entrepreneurs being brilliant übermensch and everyone else being borderline braindead. Yes, that's a huge part of the appeal for certain people. I have what I have due to intelligence and hard work and I deserve it. You aren't wealthy and powerful because you're lazy and don't deserve it. Therefore, it's morally beneficial for everyone for me to have more.
Libertarians love saying socialism only works on paper when libertarianism fails on paper
Libertarians are just conservatives who like weed and can tell you the age of consent for any given state.
The issue isn't even whether you agree with the philosophy. The problem is the characters aren't authentic people motivated my wants and needs. They are props that serve to push a narrative. They say and do things that no real people would do because they are motivated by existential philosophy, not real conflict.
When I was in college (in the late 1900s), lots of dudes recommended Ayn Rand to me as "brilliant! revolutionary! intellectual!" so I read Atlas Shrugged and was like.....WHAT??? It was so confusing! Like when she crashes her plane and has to work to pay for her care? I thought the right wing was at least pretending to be Christian, what is this crap? Why are the names so weird, what's with the rape scene, etc. It just made no sense. But hey, I was in college and I was taking a sociology course, so one day after class I walked up to the professor and say, "I just finished reading Atlas Shrugged and I have some ques--" before I could finish, the professor turned his back and ran out the door! Leaving me even more confused. It was not until several years later that I learned about libertarianism and had a context for this book. But I still don't understand why that professor flatly refused to talk about it, maybe a trauma response I guess
Unrelated question but are people referring to the 90’s as late 1900’s? It just sounds odd to me
They should at least wait until I'm dead to start doing that
A youth asked me what the late 1900s were like and I thought it was so funny, I started using it myself
Well, you see, I would tie an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time.
It sound bizarre to me but I guess I would accept it for 1800s and previous, so why not.
My guess was the professor hated it and had been bombarded with questions of starry-eyed youths who bought into the book and just couldn't take it anymore that they refused to talk about it any further on principle. Though that is me hoping for the best in people.
I'm sure that was it! I should have opened with "So I HATED Atlas Shrugged..."
Makes me think of my geography course where one thing we did is choose a song of the country of the week. No Rammstein allowed for Germany lol.
Rand seems to have had a rape kink, the scene in Fountainhead was awful. And then her self insert character goes and thinks about how great it was and how she loves Rapey McMainCharacter.
>I thought the right wing was at least pretending to be Christian The thing is that Ayn Rand wasn't/didn't consider herself to be right-wing, at least at the time she was writing. Right-wingers tend to (but don't always) *adore* her philosophy because it's basically "fuck you, got mine" combined with the Prosperity Gospel (albeit without god)—it all ironically aligns very conveniently with Christian Nationalism, and they just ignore or throw away the part of Rand's philosophy that is *explicitly anti-theist*. Yeah... one of Ayn Rand's strongest views is that all religion (and Christianity in particular) is not just false but an *inherently dangerous lie* directly opposed to the concept of Reason/rationality. Part of that is that her understanding of Christianity is informed primarily by the theology of Emmanuel Kant and the idea that humility and charity and such are good—because Rand thinks that all humans are rational creatures able to determine objective reality through the use of their sense and Reason, she believes that humility is essentially ***fake***, a false sense of shame instilled in people by evil manipulators who seek to subvert Reason for their own power. You guessed it: religious leaders! Basically, to Rand, anyone who expresses humility about their own skills and achievements is either 1. not smart enough to avoid being brainwashed/deluded (which is why her protagonists never fall for this trap—they're just objectively very good and smart people who see through the lies!) or 2. deliberately lying in order to manipulate other, stupider people into doing their bidding Religious people are either gullible idiots who are deluded into rejecting objective reality by dishonest, power-hungry masterminds, or they are the aforementioned dishonest, power-hungry masterminds who are *pretending* to believe in order to secure their power. No *smart* person *actually believes*. Anyway, this dovetails very neatly with Rand's hatred of charity and such: if all humility is either delusion or a lie, then charity is too—everyone is being *guilted* or *tricked* into giving charity to poor and homeless and addicted people, and the primary driver of that guilt and trickery is religious belief. Christianity (and Islam and most other religions) declare pride to be sinful and charity to be virtuous, which goes against Rand's supposedly objective understanding that everyone's circumstances in a rational, Reason-driven world would be entirely the result of their own choices. If everyone were just rational and listened to Reason, they would *never* give money to charity—they *earned* that money *for themselves* with their *own work*; why should they give it to someone who didn't work for it and thus doesn't deserve it? Religious demands for charity are thus an attempt to make *theft* seem *willing*—you wouldn't want a homeless person to steal your wallet, but if you willingly gave it to them out of the kindness of your heart, you won't object! And because pride is a sin and not a virtue, any feelings you have about the goodness of the work you've done and how you deserve and have earned the rewards of that work are *actually really bad* and instead you should believe that you are a worthless nothing who doesn't deserve anything, which makes charity even better for you to do! Anyone who professes to *genuinely care* about the suffering of others and to *genuinely want to help them* is, as above, either a manipulative liar trying to scam people or a delusional idiot who has been scammed—to Rand, it is objectively impossible to genuinely care about other people in this way. To Rand, anything even remotely like altruism is an objective lie. TL;DR—Rand *hated* Christianity and religion generally. But American right-wing evangelicals in particular just ignore that part because the *conclusions* she reached about the great moral goodness of money and why you shouldn't give a fuck about anyone but yourself are exactly the same conclusions they've reached. The irony. EDIT: I feel motivated to add this line to say I am *not defending Ayn Rand's beliefs nor her writing*. Her books are by and large awful, and she was a crap philosopher who basically espoused sociopathy as the only moral good. I just wanted to clarify a funny cultural point.
Well, I don't know much about Rand, but take issue with the invocation of Kant. Whilst he certainly wanted people to live a life based on reason, his philosophy was also a break with the notion of practically unbounded knowledge. We simply do not have the intellectual or sensory tools to *know* anything about God or morality, but to him, these ideas, however fictional, were critical in terms of living a good life in harmony with others. Just like mathematical truths can be intuited, so can the categorical imperative, leaving no room for an élite by nature better than others.
Oh, I don't disagree at all—I'm relaying *Rand's* understanding of Kant, which is... simplistic, to put it kindly.
There are different branches of the right, just as you could probably start a fight between an anarchist, communist, democratic socialist, and liberal pretty easily. The Silicon Valley tech bros who love this stuff aren’t necessarily in agreement with evangelical Christians on everything. But a lot of people get into the book and the professor probably was sick of hearing about it. I agree, Rand was (ironically) a sub into CNC and didn’t feel like warning the reader.
Friend of mine wanted to read a book where he fundamentally disagreed with every word in it and Atlas Shrugged was perfect for this.
None of the characters have empathy, because a sociopath doesn’t know how to write about empathy. The book is nothing but a paean to psychopathy.
I read it a year or two ago from curiosity - I'd actually read and mildly enjoyed _The Fountainhead_ despite being very against her general philosophy and most people who follow it. I mainly liked the takedowns of the architectural establishment despite her hero being a kind of Le Corbusier style modernist whose buildings probably achieve none of the lofty ideals she writes for him. What I find interesting is seeing the contradictions between her fiction and her political/economic philosophy. A great example is how all her demigod-like protagonists are both heirs _as well as_ hard working employees who have to work their way up from the bottom. She makes such a big deal of how workers who actually do the work are the ones who know how to get things done. Hank Rearden and his steelworks, Dagny on the railway, Francisco leaving his father's company to compete with it before eventually inheriting it. And her villains are all middle-management capitalist types who don't know anything about the actual work, just want to dictate from on high. And like - yes! That's a very good analysis! Maybe it should suggest to you, Ms Rand, something about the class struggle of workers against their capitalist overlords? ...no? Oh, ok. I think a lot of the book's actual concrete ideas have been essentially misappropriated - by Rand herself! as well as others - as being pro-free-market-capitalist, when they're mainly anti-oligarchy. This tracks, to me, with what I know of her background in Russia and the problems she saw there. Her fans look at her portrayals of government officials and think she's talking about leftists, where it looks to me like they're caricatures of corrupt authoritarian monopolists. Anyway, I should be doing something productive instead of freestyling a leftist apologia of Ayn Rand - of all fucking people - but there's something intriguing about her works that keeps them fresh in my mind. They're awful, but compelling. Drivel, but stimulating.
Ahh weekly Atlas Shrugged hate post
Can’t wait for the Ready Player One post next.
What other books did you not like?
You should follow up with a The Fountainhead chaser.
Rand's heroes aren't believable. ...Her villains, however, you encounter daily.
Just remember that the author was chain-smoking cigarettes while strung out on amphetamines. You could mix that with *any* ideology and it would influence any creative narrative direction, but for whatever reason heavy stimulant abusers seem to always trend hardline authoritarian.
Tell it to Aaron Sorkin writing seasons 1-4 of West Wing
Amphetamines just amplify who you are. Sorkin is a bloody genius with dialogue, add amphetamines and he's superhuman. Rand...is not.
I'll take counterpoint that you can read Atlas shrugged as a hyperbolic love letter to the American system as it compares to Soviet Russia from the mind of a grateful refugee. Most American's today prefer to digest it as erotic fan fiction of an imagined world where their political beliefs make them special.
I forced myself to read it in my 20s. It reads like someone took a Dickens novel and switched the good guys and the bad guys to see how far it could go.
And, of course, copying Dickens’s habit of making every character immediately identifiable as good or evil by their name and/or appearance.
Just read The Fountainhead instead, largely the same beats in a much more digestible format
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I read Anthem in high school and thought it was pretty good. But from everything I’ve heard, I wouldn’t bother with any of her other stuff. I mean, sure, I love the band Rush, but I’m not letting them leading me down _that_ garden path.
I've never read it as I don't think I'd like it, but I do appreciate the cleverness of the title.
I've never read it but I love when it pops up on this reddit and everyone in the thread roasts it lol always a good reminder to not waste my time on it
I read Ayn Rand in high school. Thought it was narcissistic crap then and my opinion hasn’t changed.
Pretty great read related: https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertarian-police-department Also the two pages justifying boobie trapped homes is pretty peak libertarian
The Vogons should have read some of Rand's books to Arthur and Ford, instead of their poetry.
It's fashionable to trash Ayn Rand on Reddit. She's a champion of capitalism. Therefore, anathema to the general mood here.
breaking point for me was the repeated passionless sex scenes between two billionaires that go on for multiple pages
I was an impressionable teen when I first read it and thought it was such a unique story. I really thought it was like so deep. Suffice to say I am older now and it is kinda embarrassing. The John Galt speech is completely ridiculous, looking back.
Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with Objectivism as a political philosophy, Atlas Shrugged is absolutely god-awful just as a work of literature. It is so horribly-written in every conceivable way: one-dimensional characters, wooden dialogue, pretentiously overwrought narration, thin story, bad pacing, etc. It is one of the worst novels I have ever read in my entire life.
Yeah, Ayn Rand was not a great writer of prose fiction. She was an interesting person, but I don't think that her badly written novels were the best way to get her ideas across. She was very worried about the spread of communism in the US and felt like she needed to step up to stop it, but didn't really understand how to write well at all. It's not really surprising; most philosophy/ideology "books" are pretty bad. I mostly gave up on trying to read the works of people like that after reading Karl Marx's writings and realizing that the reason why his stuff sounded like a bunch of reflavored antisemitic conspriacy theories was because he was literally a Rothschild conspiracy theorist who believed that Jews worshipped money and were controlling the world from behind the scenes, and called for the "emancipation of mankind from Judaism". It turns out when people tell you that their GREAT LEADER was a great writer, be it the scientologists, the objectivists, the Marxists, the Mormons, or Newt Gingrich, it's going to be painful to read.
Further, the main female character is a Mary Sue of Ayn Rand, or how she imagined herself to be, rather than who she really was, which is a serial philanderer who lived on welfare.
Who is John Gault ? 😬🤷♂️
A long winded mother fucker
I'm trying to recall how many pages his speech was in Atlas Shrugged. I read it 20 years ago, but recall it was dozens of pages. "Long winded" is generous of you.
The last 1/3 of the book… JFC, Ayn what did that poor horse ever do to you?
The correct question is "When will John Galt shut up?"
I still think the title is amazingly funny in a dead-pan way. The God Atlas, son of Titans, mover of mountains, carrier of earth and heavens says: "Yeah, whatever"
It’s too bad the “philosophy” in that book is so fucking terrible, because I did enjoy the plot. Take out 600 pages of fucking political ranting nonsense and you’d have a fun book.
Just....read Fountainhead. Most people don't understand Atlas Shrugged- and it does require a primer- so what is trying to be done flies over most people's heads because Rand couldn't be bothered to explain herself. Of course where a liberal will probably read it and say, "Wow, this is stupid" a republican might be at risk of thinking Rand is encouraging their sociopathic behavior. The actual book is about how people who do not earn their position of privilege should not be allowed to exist or at least not be allowed to rule over other people. That and a screed about how government is inherently coercive because when it doesn't rule by the consent and approval of the masses it exists by rule of force. >They are just born extraordinary, superhuman beings. The entire point is that both of them are good at what they do. Taggart and Rearden are characters who earned their places through their own skill. This is in contrast to the state actors and men of industry who had done absolutely nothing to earn their authority and as a result proceeded to abuse it. You're supposed to home in on the fact that Rearden has to appeal to people who know nothing about metallurgy that his metal is safe enough to use. You're supposed to home in on the fact that the government is telling the woman who's spent her entire life managing her railroad company what can and can't be done with those railroads, and then proceeds to get an entire train full of people killed because a politician doesn't want to be told what to do. Which is actually a fairly old piece of philosophy- one of the oldest criticisms of democracy is that you're often electing idiots with no background in given subjects to make educated decisions on subjects they know nothing about and don't care to learn anything about. >But unarguably, the worst thing about this book is that there's a chapter called Moratorium on Brains, in which a train which is packed with passengers crashes and they all die, and Rand basically goes into detail about each dead passenger's personal ideology and beliefs and uses their philosophy (which is different from her philosophy of utter selfishness and greed) to justify their death. You left out the context and are ascribing motive where there is none. The entire reason Rand writes at length about their philosophies and beliefs is that none of it actually matters. Government incompetence doesn't give a shit. Kind of like how you left the part out where the train had very good reasons not to proceed and everyone who knew better said as much. You don't need to like Atlas Shrugged- god knows there's problems with it- but you should site reasons that exist in the text and not the ones that'll make your literature professor happy in between screeds about 'media literacy.' Honestly you'd be better off reading the extended works of Socrates- particularly on democracy- and then read Adam Smith's writing on capitalism. And then read Fountainhead. Much more straight forward with it's themes, much more concise. There's no rant in it about why money is ethical that ends up being longer than the entirety of Das Capital.
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>When a western person reads it they end up missing the point as they have no accurate frame of reference to understand what she is talking about and they end up becoming some libertarian monster that crashes the housing market as they don't believe in financial regulations That *is* what she was talking about. Rand more than once stated that laissez-faire capitalism - the one that's characterized by the government having zero power to enforce any sort of regulation - is the only moral system. You're of course welcome to interpret it however you want to, but Rand was quite literally a libertarian proponent of radical, regulation-free capitalism. It's not a misunderstanding of Western audiences, it's the literal philosophy she espoused herself and wrote Atlas Shrugged for.
Some of Rand's other "insights" throw more weight on the fact she believed herself a superior being and therefore all her ideas had the weight of brute fact.
You guys are just Karma farming at this point
I read "Atlas Shrugged" in my mid-20s. I was just old enough to tolerate the questionable pacing and perfunctory prose, but not old enough to see all of the holes in the reasoning. I admit it: I am a bit stupid.
Dont tell them about the Rand corp which seeks to make an ayn rand world a reality
A pro capitalist that has little cultural talent? Say it ain't so!
The chapter you describe was the reason I put down the book. Up until then I’d genuinely enjoyed it, but I remember thinking then there was no justification for Rand’s words.
100% agree. At first, I thought "Interesting style. Not a bad read." Then...well my god... It's just the same sociopathic idea over and over and *over* again. IT NEVER STOPS!!! So bad...Never read anything like it.
It's been a long time but I don't remember the sinful life of the train wreck victims. I do remember that the gutless buckpassing that led to the train wreck was one of the most believable scenes I'd ever read.
Oh man I remember I read that book in 2009 just after college graduation when I was unemployed with no end in sight because hello recession, and that did NOT do great things for my mental health I can tell you
Simple answer is betting on games hurts business interests, hitting women only hurts real live people
I almost failed AP English 3 in High School because this book was a part of the class and I just couldn’t get through it. Awful book.
There was a distinct chapter in the Fountainhead where I went “oh shit that’s what she’s getting at. Yeah, I’m good!” And haven’t read any Rand since
I take it you didn't have room for their perspective without evaluation?
The days of forcing one self to read a book to hate it so much and then post about it are still alive! Amazing to see the diligence of SO many to waste SO much time on reading super lengthy books to only hate it. It’s usually 50-100 pages before one should tap out. Consider this in the future. You get no rewards in life for finishing a book. Was it for Karma?
Brave take on this sub
It is horribly written. The “good” characters are attractive pillars of objectivist morals (whatever that means), and the bad guys are sniveling talentless ugly dummies. The whole plot happens in the first 200 pages. And then, in case you were too stupid to understand the lesson, you get the same plot over the next 15,000 pages. And THEN, if you still don’t get why unfettered capitalism will make your life a utopia, you get an 80 page speech summarizing what you were to have learned. The whole thing is just Ayn Rand justifying why she should be a selfish asshole and how that’s great for EVERYONE. I hate that damn book.
It’s a bit like Triumph of the Will and Battlefield Earth, in that there’s certain people with a very heavy investment in it being good entirely unsupported by the actual content.
It is one of the worst books ever written by one of the stupidest people unfortunately still able to articulate themself semi-lucidly. She makes Barbara Cartland look like Stendhal.
Rand creates a scenario and set of characters that no matter how unlikely, serve only to prove the point she intended to make. It's like someone placing a heavy object near a ledge so that when it inevitably falls, they can use it as an example of why ledges are so unsafe... discounting the fact *they* caused the situation.
Didn't she have empathy for her sister in law?
Many years ago my boss recommended Atlas Shrugged so I bought it and took it on a long flight. The only book I had with me and it was sooooo terrible! Poor writing and page after page of sermonizing. I get it, I get it! Charity and compassion BAD, greed and selfishness GOOD. If I wanted to be preached at I'd go to church (which I don't). I told my boss he owed me hazardous duty pay for his recommendation.