I don't understand how it became so popular, because it was terrible. I was only able to read it for the reason that it is divided into three parts, otherwise I would have thrown it out long ago. What's wrong with that? I will tell.
About the plot. Bad socialists are destroying the country's economy, the heroine is trying to save the business and along the way find out where most entrepreneurs and creative people have gone.
So that you understand this is the plot of the book, which was divided into three parts, where each has 400+ pages. How did it happen? And it's simple, most of the books are monologues and a love triangle. I'm not kidding, she just repeats her ideas, without presenting anything new in them, and they are all based on "Objectivism is good, Capitalism is cool, and the rest is shit on the sole."
There are two ideas that are being preached here. I like the first one: "Love what you do." This is a good idea, but I absolutely don't like the second one, namely the philosophy of objectivism. In short, what it means: "Spit on everyone, think only about your success, the rest is just a hindrance, and that's when you'll be the best." There's nothing wrong with the idea itself, but here's how it's presented. All people who come up with their ideology and philosophy have one distinctive feature, their worlds work only if there are ideal people and work only on paper. That communism sounded good only on paper, that objectivism works only under "superhumans" and convenient circumstances.
There are no characters here, only puppets who speak the author's ideas. And she used a cheap move. All the positive characters are all handsome in a row, they seem to have come out of fashion magazines, and all the negative ones (I repeat all) are ugly and scary, like ugly bastards from Hentai. And at the same time, I also think that the economy in this world is collapsing because of the positive characters, because they just reveled in how great they are, and they did not bother to train their workers. So that you understand, they fixed all the problems themselves, not the workers. Of course, the economy will collapse from such leaders.
The text here is bad. He looks like a man with no experience in writing, trying to be like the thinkers of the 20th century. And if you thought the sex scenes from "50 Shades of Grey" were terrible, you just haven't read this book.
This book is terrible. It was written by a woman who didn't understand economics, who thought she was a philosopher. She claims that without Atlanteans, the world will collapse. So let's see, the creator of the TVs died, but they still exist and they have progressed, Steve Jobs died, and the Apple campaign is still there and making good money, everyone who created the light bulb died, but they still exist. Most of the things created a long time ago are still there, and their creators "Atlanteans" have long died. I wonder why our world hasn't collapsed yet. And the best answer to the idea of this book is the game "Bioshock", which showed what would happen if such a world existed.
P.S Guys, I didn't know that you have such posts published monthly. I just read the book and shared my opinion about it, I didn't know there were hundreds if not thousands of them here. And I am not a communist, not a socialist, not someone to be offended by opposing views that do not correspond to any philosophy or economics. It's just a review of a book that I don't like.
by mystery5009
16 Comments
Generally speaking the only people who seem to think Ayn Rand’s work has any literary merit are those who completely agree with the political views she uses her books to promote.
This is a very popular opinion between philosophers and economists. Ayn Rand is despised and completely ignored in those fields.
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I’ve heard it said that in hell, everyone gets a copy of Atlas Shrugged, but for every page you read, John Galt’s speech gets 2 pages longer
I’ve truly never understood how anyone likes *Atlas Shrugged*. Everything of any merit from it is already in *The Fountainhead*, which is much shorter, despite also being a bit of a tome, and better qualified as an actual story. Who read that and thought “this was mediocre, I wonder what it would be like 50% longer?”
>She claims that without Atlanteans, **the world will collapse**.
If this were true, she should have explained why they needed to bomb the fucking factories on their way out. If the economy couldn’t survive without them, why did they have to destroy the means of production? I know the logic is a petulant “I built this, so nobody else can have it if I’m leaving,” but for her philosophy to be true it should not have mattered since her claim is that the Atlanteans are the means of production instead of simply rent seekers.
It’s the thing I find completely and utterly hilarious about the whole thing. She literally destroys her own philosophy in the political propaganda she wrote because she clearly couldn’t see how the world would collapse if the owners fucked off but left the mechanisms of production behind. It’s doubly funny because the corporate structures would have kept churning along if the owner just vanished and eventually ownership would be shifted to someone else.
A few specific things have long stood out to me from this book:
* One of Our Heroes, Hank Rearden, is a textbook domestic abuser (he neglects and eventually even beats his wife) and adulterer and is framed completely sympathetically throughout
* Dagny Taggart’s character arc is literally eventually no longer seeing other people as human beings, save for other Exceptional Geniuses like her. The scene where this culminates is where she is giving a rousing speech to her workers – workers who have been nothing but enthusiastically loyal to her family’s company and her personally – and realizes she can no longer distinguish their faces one from another. They have become faceless objects to her. Our *primary protagonist’s* arc is losing her connection to the majority of humanity and then abandoning them to die. She even does this to her assistant Eddie Willers, who is the stand-in for the highly competent everyman who is nevertheless not a superhuman Ubermensch.
* The most infamous scene in the book is when a horrific train accident occurs where exhaust fumes in a long tunnel asphyxiates all the passengers and crew. Rand gleefully and meticulously describes their various sins for why they deserve to die. These sins are such as a mother who needs welfare to feed her children, a businessman who accepted a government loan to start his business, and a professor who teaches an altruistic philosophy that Rand disagrees with. This is what Rand thinks of normal people.
It’s not just a bad book with bad characters and bad prose. It’s a stain on political philosophy. Rand’s belief system is quite literally about severing your human connections with others.
You and most people. I’d be more curious reading from someone who actually mostly likes it.
Officer Barbrady: “Yes, at first I was happy to be learning how to read. It seemed exciting and magical, but then I read this: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I read every last word of this garbage, and because of this piece of s**t, I am never reading again.“
Now you should play Bioshock again for the parody and cleansing
I read it YEARS ago and loved it. Funny thing is I think the only reason I enjoyed it was because I had no idea that she was promoting an ideology and didn’t 100% understand what I was reading (I was young). I just enjoyed this weird story and different writing style. I sometimes wonder what I’d think of it if I picked that book up now as someone who very much does not align with any of the author’s beliefs
John Rogers said, “There are two novels that can transform a bookish 14-year-kid’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish daydream that can lead to an obsession with its heroes, which can result in an emotionally stunted adulthood. The other involves orcs.
Hell of a title though.
I love the intense drive the characters have… a lot. But the concepts are ridiculous. But I can separate the two. It’s the undying pursuit of one’s craft that I enjoyed.
This has gotta be an extremely popular opinion in this sub, right? Feels like preaching to the choir.
If you want to understand *why* Atlas Shrugged is so profoundly messed up, you have to view it in the context of Rand’s extremely traumatic upbringing.
She was born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum in Imperial Russia in 1905. Her childhood is spent living in a Tsarist regime that is constantly teetering on the brink of collapse, but nevertheless with a gradually strengthening middle class of educated people and entrepreneurs that the Tsar wants to foster, but is also extremely vary of, and a massive number of uneducated lower class workers and peasant that *everyone* looks down on. Her own family is fairly successful however and her father owns his own pharmacy. But everywhere around her is simmering social unrest being tamped down on by the Okrana, the Tsar’s secret police that spies on everybody and arrests and harrasses anyone who has any vision of a future Russia that isn’t incredibly conservative and imperialistic.
This is her childhood. Then when she is twelve years old, the entire system collapses in the October Revolution, and suddenly it’s the socialists and ultimately the Bolsheviks that are in control. Her father’s pharmacy is confiscated and they lose everything. She graduates from high school while living as a refugee in Crimea, which is the territory of the Whites at the time. The whites aren’t very nice either, being mostly anti-semitic monarchists. Life is very much not easy for her family.
After the Whites lose the war, her family returns to St. Petersburg. Their property is never returned to them and they have to essentially start from zero in a society that is now full-on communist, Lenin is in charge and the social class(and faith, although she never really identifies as Jewish everyone else sees her that way) she belongs to is scorned by the majority of the people around her. Her graduation from university is delayed since anti *bourgeoisie* elements within it want to purge it of all students of the wrong background, and it’s only after protests from visiting western scholars that she is allowed to graduate. The Soviet Union is still in shambles after the Civil War in every possible respect, with widespread famine and violence everywhere.
She makes it out in 1926 by obtaining a visa to visit family in the US. She never goes back. However, after obtaining her American citizenship she is unable to get her parents or any of her sisters out of the Soviet Union. They live the rest of their lives there and as far as I know, she never reconnects with them.
She had fallen in love with the emerging artform of the cinema while still in Russia, and moves to Hollywood only a few months after arriving in the US. She is 20 years old.
Can you imagine the effect of that on a young woman that has almost certainly been seething with rage at everything that has happened to her and her family up until then? To suddenly be transplanted to fkn Hollywood during it’s golden age, with it’s studio moguls, glitz, glamour and hustle culture?
She then spends the rest of the 1920s and all of the 1930s trying to make it in Hollywood as a screenwriter, with not much success. Her career as a novelist, much like that of say, George R.R. Martin is a fallback – if she had been able to make a secure living writing movie scripts I doubt we would ever had gotten any of her books. She lives through the incredibly tumultuous 1930s in the US, the Great Depression, an FDR administration that seems to be warming up to social programs and left-leaning policies to get the US out of the depression that scare her and remind her of the social unrest that led to the communist takeover that ruined her youth, and gets involved in Republican and eventually Libertarian politics. At the same time she gets hooked on Benzedrine that was prescribed to her by a doctor. She remains a regular user of it for the next thirty years. Keep that in mind – the person writing *Atlas Shrugged* is almost certainly doing so while consuming copious amounts of amphetamines.
The post-war years are then dominated by her adopted home of the United States being locked in an existential cold war with the Soviet Union, the force that, again, ruined her youth and seems to be constantly looking to reach out and ruin her life again via nuclear armageddon. And everywhere she looks, anyone who advocates for even the tiniest steps towards a more egalitarian or socially minded society is someone who might just, in her mind, tip everything towards a collapse and full on communism in American.
I’d suggest you re-read the book, not as the treatise on political philosophy that it was intended to be, but as a look inside the trauma-ravaged mind of a woman that spent the vast majority of her life being scared of the “everyman” taking anything and everything she had away from her.