I first saw the book ATLAS SHRUGGED by Ayn Rand about 20 years ago in a local used bookstore. It was a very well read hardcover copy with many highlighted sections and lots of notes in the margins. It looked to me like it had been read over and over and over again, the pages dog-eared and food stains throughout. I’d never heard of it before, and had no idea what it was about. What caught my eye was the obvious obsession the previous owner had for the book, and I wondered at the time what he or she found so fascinating.

I sure wish I’d bought that copy. It was only $10.00. I passed up a bargain.

During the intervening years I’ve learned a great deal about Ayn Rand and the books she’s written, but I’d never actually read them. As I became more and more familiar with different political philosophies, her name came up over and over again, particularly when researching right wing policies.

In particular, I found that she is beloved among Libertarians, and when I was toying with becoming a Libertarian 15 years ago I read up on her (and them) a great deal.

Our webmaster Rotten Ray is a big fan of her work, and although he considers himself a “conservative” of the old order - certainly NOT a “neo-conservative” in any way - and in spite of the fact that he’s voted Republican on several occasions in the past, I do not consider him to be right wing at all.

He and I had discussed Libertarianism and Ayn Rand on many occasions, and he always said I needed to read ATLAS SHRUGGED before making any commentary on it. In that vein he purchased the 50th Anniversary paperback edition for me as a gift, and I jumped into reading it.

This review is my impression of two aspects of the book. First, it’s literary attractiveness to me. Second, my views on the politics of Ayn Rand and what I perceive to be the genesis of her views in that regard.

On a purely literary basis I found the novel to be a long hard slog. I don’t much care for her writing style. I found her to be tediously wordy, and she embellishes passages needlessly. It starts out depressing, and then goes downhill from there. Her pacing is tiresome, and her ability to define characters is cumbersome. At well over 1000 page I’d hoped that there would be a rich tapestry of events and characters to explore and delve into, but instead she focuses on just a handful, returning to them over and over again absent any dramatic changes in circumstances, and that brought me to the point of boredom.

What I found most irritating was that the world she builds is dark, dank, and repellent. There was very little that compelled me to like the places or the people. Beyond that, everyone is very two dimensional. People are either totally perfect, or irretrievably flawed. They are either brilliantly smart, or incredibly stupid. They are either good or bad, black or white, right or wrong. There are no gradations in Ayn Rand’s world. There is no good in the bad people, and no bad in the good people. They are heroic or evil. I got sick of this very quickly because it says nothing to me about my life.

Her dystopian world wasn’t worth caring about. If it melted down in the first 100 pages I would not have given a hoot. There was nothing worth saving. Even the “good” people were repellent to me. Who wants to live around people who are beautiful and brilliant and have no flaws whatsoever? How amazingly dull would that be?

It took me a long time to finish the book because I was so disinvested in the story and the characters. The only time this changed was towards the end of the book - the last 100 pages or so - when there was actually some real adventure and something happening that captured my interest. However, by that time it was too late, and I still didn’t much care about the people involved.

I could go on and on about the plot and how utterly implausible it was. About how it was completely unattached from any reality I’ve ever encountered. Even in fantasy or sci-fi books, good authors are able to anchor it in some aspect of real life that enables the reader to relate to the situations. Not so here. It was an untouchable caricature of life, and it simply left me cold and uninterested.

The story was maudlin. The characters easily dismissed. The pacing mind-numbing, and the writing style boring.

As you can tell, I didn’t like the storyline much at all.

But, it seems to me that the goal of Ayn Rand in writing this book wasn’t to write a compelling novel. If that were her goal, she failed. I think what she actually wanted to do is deliver a philosophical message and to pronounce her political views, and she hoped that by ensconcing those views within a novel it would better appeal to the population in general. If she’d simply written a study on these things they would have been rejected utterly. So, now I’ll address her philosophy and her politics.

I’ll begin with a summation: poppycock.

Ayn Rand grew up in Czarist Russia in the early 20th century, and as a little girl was middle class (a rare breed then to be sure) and she had a certain level of comfort and security. She ate well, she dressed well, and she had most of the luxuries in life a little girl could want. Then, when she was 12 years old - a very impressionable age to be sure - it was all taken away from her and her family in the Russian Revolution of 1917. It seems to me that for her to see the life of comfort she certainly loved devolve around her must have been a very traumatic experience, and I doubt that at 12 years old she had a very accurate perception of the reasons and genesis of the revolution. This clearly colored her view of the world from then on.

Her politics evolved into a strict Libertarian view, and one in which government is always oppressive and usury. She clearly believes that the only role for government is to provide a limited military for protection against aggression, police for protection against crime, and the courts to prosecute crime. Beyond that I’ve not seen her demonstrate any acceptance of any other government actions. My view on this is that there are many important roles for government beyond these bare bones activities. I think there are many vital roles government must take on in a civilized society. Fire protection comes to mind first, but they extend beyond that to food and drug safety, and environmental protection - but the list goes on from there. Naturally, government can become too intrusive, and a bloated and ineffective government is always a risk. But to my mind the risks of a society on the edge of anarchy are much higher.

She also exhibits a distain for taxes, which although understandable, is ultimately superficial. If we lived in a perfect world we wouldn’t need government or taxes. We wouldn’t even need a military, or police, or the courts. We wouldn’t need many of the things that are necessary in the real world because everyone would be completely perfect and would always do only the right thing. But, we don’t live in a perfect world. We live in a deeply flawed, selfish, uncaring world, and left to their own devices people will revert to barbaric and socially unacceptable actions. They will pollute. They will steal. They will murder. They will cheat. They will become aggressive and unreasonable. There are actually gradations of human behaviors and intelligence levels in people, and there are levels of physical and mental health, and potential for individual advancements. We would all like to think we live in a completely egalitarian society, but that’s simply not true. There are some people who are quite simply useless to society, and never will be useful, yet they still live and walk our streets. There are those who are truly wretched in nearly every measurable way, and yet they still exist amongst us. As civilized humans we must find a way to deal with these people. Because we aren’t machines and do live with emotions, we’re unable to simply execute those who are incapable of taking care of themselves, even though that may be most cost efficient and expedient solution to deal with them. (Thank you, DEAD KENNEDYS for KILL THE POOR)

There is one aspect to life that I think eludes Ayn Rand Libertarians - a heart. Her distain for what she terms “collectivism”, which is to say a combined societal response to certain inescapable situations in life, I find to be selfish and ultimately heartless. She actually embraces the idea of selfishness and finds it to be ennobling and, in her view, ultimately beneficial to society. However, she rarely gives solutions to the poor, the sick, the disabled, or the simply wretched, and because she is an atheist she rejects the spiritual imperatives that guide some in this regard. It seems to me her brand of libertarianism would rely on an individual desire for charity - whatever motivates that desire. If this proves to be insufficient to alleviate the basic human needs of the underclass, then that’s just too bad.

Naturally, this review doesn’t cover all the intricacies of her philosophy, however that is not my goal. My goal is to reiterate my observation that I find her philosophy and her Libertarian politics to be based on some utopian idea of what life should be, and in her view could be, given the right circumstances. However, my own experience tells me that utopia has never and will never exist, and that we must all work together on some things to benefit the collective, which I’ve rarely found to be a bad thing.

I’ll finish off with some quotes from another fantasy that I think sums up my view on “collectivism” quite well.

“Were I to invoke logic, however, logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”

“Or the one.”

- Spock —-
The Wrath Of Kahn

~ SamSez