So I've been listening to the Atlas Shrugged audiobook again, for the first time in 20 years or so, with a former leftist. With very little prompting from me, she realized all of her friends were totally full of shit about Ayn Rand, 100%.
In my experience, people who hate Atlas Shrugged have never read it. If they claim they have, they're usually lying. And if they did read it, they clearly can't comprehend it.
The villains in Atlas Shrugged? All elite rich and government officials.
One of the most sympathetic characters? Eddie Willers. Just an everyman. Not rich. Not stunningly capable, just competent, and honest. James Taggart's wife, also. From the hood. Merely an honest, hard-working woman of no stunning importance to the world.
Dagny Taggart's relationship with the hobo is a pretty touching little bit that flies in the face of everything you've ever been told about Ayn Rand.
Atlas Shrugged is also an amazing bit of sci-fi, for it's era. If you didn't know that...you didn't read it.
It's also primarily about anarchism. If you didn't know that...you didn't read it. Galt's Gulch is literally an anarchist community. "We have no laws here."
Rand accurately predicts Detroit's demise with Starnesville. She explains how medicine is being destroyed. You didn't listen, and here we are. She was right. You're wrong.
“They told us that this plan would achieve a noble ideal. Well, how were we to know otherwise? Hadn't we heard it all our lives—from our parents and our schoolteachers and our ministers, and in every newspaper we ever read and every movie and every public speech?”
— The Tramp
I guess some of you hate Atlas Shrugged because the heroes are all highly moral individuals. Rand doesn't celebrate the common man simply for being the common man. She celebrates...virtue. I can see why that would bother many of you amoral, grasping, tax-happy cunts.
In fact, one of the things Dagny gets across is the relative worthlessness of money dishonestly earned. Atlas Shrugged is in fact, anti-materialist.
“You do not have to depend on any material possessions, they depend on you, you create them, you own the one and only tool of production.”
— Dagny Taggart
“What greater wealth is there than to own your life and to spend it on growing? Every living thing must grow. It can't stand still. It must grow or perish.”
— Ellis Wyatt
But you'd kinda have to...actually read it to understand that, I guess.
I mean, Atlas Shrugged is primarily a celebration of the mind. If you hate it, what does that say about you?
It's also, of course, wildly anti-authoritarian. Probably another reason you hate it. You're a bootlicker of some sort, yet also likely a huge hypocrite.
So, Ayn Rand was a fairly fucked-up person in real life. That does nothing to detract from Objectivism, which is basically...believing only things you can prove to yourself are true.
No matter how many times you tell me that taking my money and giving it to someone else is for my own good, it doesn't make it true. That is not for you to decide.
So, when Rand calls people looters, scum, parasites, worthless, incompetent, spineless subhumans, I suspect you get offended because she is talking about you.
Rand's characters are all heroic Mary Sues. But that doesn't mean genius achievers are the only people she celebrates. She celebrates rationality. Again, if you're an opponent of the rational, you're exactly the people she rightfully considered human trash.
“Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice... Man has to be a man–by choice; he has to hold his life as a value–by choice; he has to learn to sustain it–by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues by choice. A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.”
— John Galt
“Your mind is your only judge of truth–and if others dissent from your verdict, reality is the court of final appeal.”
— John Galt
I guess the very idea of morality bothers some of you people. You feel everything is subjective. In other words, you live in a universe of goo. But that's not the actual universe. Many of you are running on emotions without thought.
“Emotions are inherent in your nature, but their content is dictated by your mind. Your emotional capacity is an empty motor, and your values are the fuel with which your mind fills it.”
— John Galt
Garbage in, Garbage Out...
Yours is a death cult, primarily concerned with the destruction of others, instead of your own achievement and value. Basically Nazis, for lack of a better word.
“Whoever, to whatever purpose or extent, initiates the use of force, is a killer acting on the premise of death in a manner wider than murder: the premise of destroying man's capacity to live.”
— John Galt
I guess you probably wouldn't like a writer that exposes your hypocrisy.
“If enjoyment is a value, why is it moral when experienced by others, but immoral when experienced by you?... Why is it immoral for you to desire, but moral for others to do so? Why is it immoral to produce a value and keep it, but moral to give it away?”
— John Galt
Clearly, if you hate Atlas Shrugged, you're a worm of some sort.
“A morality that holds need as a claim, holds emptiness–non-existence–as its standard of value; it rewards an absence, a defect: weakness, inability, incompetence, suffering, disease, disaster, the lack, the fault, the flaw–the zero.”
— John Galt
“The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world.”
— John Galt
You celebrate and cheer an out-of-control government, at the same time that you're wallowing in the offal that is the current state of the country.
“The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence... The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law.”
— John Galt
The chief criticism I see leveled at Rand is that she was a hypocrite for accepting the Social Security she paid into. Except that's bullshit. Atlas Shrugged has generated more in tax revenue than you will ever earn in your life. Victim-blaming, you side with oppression and totalitarianism.
Really fucking nice.
“The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it.”
— John Galt
Sanction? Most of you are huge advocates of evil. Literally complaining that the corporate war machine isn't taking enough of my money. While you likely pay zero income taxes yourself.
“Fight for the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence of that which is man: for his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the morality of life and that yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth.”
— John Galt
A celebration of the individual? Yeah, I can see why many of you would hate that. Truth, beauty, honesty? You probably don't believe in those things.
Let's also pretend that Atlas Shrugged wasn't one of the first, and greatest novels of pure feminism. After all, the protagonist is only a woman who is an extreme mover and shaker in the world of business. Written in the 40s and 50s. Ayn Rand had a greater belief in women than you do, 70 years later. Dagny needed no safe space, no affirmative action, no need to play the role of victim.
You don't want to think, you want to stop me from thinking.
“When you force a man to act against his own choice and judgment, it's his thinking that you want him to suspend.”
— John Galt
Atlas Shrugged is also one of the greatest romance novels of all time. But if flies in the face of the concept that we must love people simply because, and not because of their virtues.
So, what are you left with? Your subjective opinion.
You hate the story, and her writing style. Again, you either didn't read it, or don't understand it. I suspect your criticisms, if voiced, are based upon deliberate misinterpretation. As to the writing itself, it's beautifully crisp, clear, and free of flowery prose. If the story doesn't touch your heart, stop pretending you have one. A matter of taste, I suppose, but I've written about 9 novels. Have you?
In a sense, I understand why you're so fucked in the head. The Puritan concept of wealth as a sign of virtue is largely a lost concept, now. But you probably make no distinction between wealth honestly earned, and wealth syphoned off by the corporate-government complex you worship.
In some ways, Rand was naive. No government can be run effectively unless a country consists entirely of moral individuals. At which point, you would need no government anyway. Then again, she demonstrates this concept nicely with Galt's Gulch.
So, sorry to call you out on your Salon-bleating repetition by rote. You're so full of shit about Ayn Rand, I can smell you from here.