Sunday, November 02, 2008

A Review of Atlas Shrugged

I just finished listening to the unabridged Atlas Shrugged on 42 (!) CDs. I'll admit I abridged the thing myself as portions of it were rather tiresome, but I would bet that I heard about 90% of the book.

Premise: If you haven't read the book, the general theme is that as the government increases the tax and regulatory burden on the productive to serve the needy, more and more productive people opt out of society (going John Galt in modern parlance). They recognize that they are becoming beasts of burden for everyone else and they simply quit and disappear from society. The end result is catastrophic.

Summary: For me, the book is a classic. The themes within it are timeless and as I read it, I saw applications of it throughout my life. At work, at home, in the elections, the concepts of Atlas Shrugged are everywhere. I consider myself pretty well-read, but this book revolutionized the way I see many things. Despite its immense size, I highly recommend it.

Random Thoughts

In the book, none of the main characters have children. This allows them to behave like children. Going full on John Galt and opting out of society is an act of petulant childishness that is possible only if you have no tie to the future. Children tie you to the future and force you to remain in society and try to make it as good as it can be. While I see the themes of this book being played out with greater and greater strength in the US, there is not much of a chance I would go John Galt in that way.

Of course, Tuesday may change all that. Who knows.

The conflict in the book is cultural, not personal. Society is divided into producers and looters. The popular culture within the book and within America today takes from the producers and gives to the looters. As the plot progresses, more and more is taken from the producers to give more and more to the looters. The majority of Americans, both in the book and in real life, speak in terms of "need" as the primary motivation for action and disdain those who produce.

Example: Millions of Americans are without health insurance. They need it. We must take from the producers and give to the needy that they may have health insurance. At no time is the concept of "What have they done to earn it?" ever raised.

In the book, producers can understand the looters' mentality, but not the other way around. Looters see producers as evil and greedy. This is like the popular view of Exxon in real life. Looters do not understand that producers are the key to civilization until enough of them drop out and society begins to fall apart. Even then, they cling to the concepts of rewarding need and punishing greed as they increase the load on the ever-dwindling set of producers.

Example: California today.
Discouraged by high costs and strict regulations, just under 60 percent of California business leaders interviewed for a new study said they have policies to restrict job growth in the state or move jobs to other locations in the United States....

The consulting firm [Bain] interviewed chief executives or senior managers of about 50 small, medium and large companies with extensive operations in the state.

About 40 percent said their companies have an explicit policy to move jobs elsewhere in the United States, with Texas cited as the most frequent destination. Not counting those companies that must stay in California, such as retailers or health care providers, the proportion of businesses that said their policy is to move jobs rose to 55 percent.
Hmmm. I guess there's more than one way to go John Galt. I have to admit, I have considered moving to another state when I retire...

Like I said before, the problem in the book is cultural. Even when confronted with the concrete results of their actions, the looters can't see the causes. As society crumbles they continue to speak in terms of what they need. The politicians continue to speak in terms of the government developing new plans to deal with one crisis after another when, in fact, the crises were created by government plans in the first place.

Example: The recent financial catastrophe was generated by the quasi-governmental mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac deciding to change their strict loan purchase policies and begin buying subprime loans. People needed to be able to buy houses and it was unreasonable to expect them to earn the houses. Now that mortgage defaults are skyrocketing, the government is working on mortgage bailout plans for needy borrowers who can't afford the homes they bought.

In the end, it is the looters' philosophy that fails. The collapse of society is a result of the doomed culture of consumption over production. All kinds of policies and government arrangements are tried, but nothing stops the inexorable decline of civilization because their mindset is centered around need.

If you go back and watch the debates, particularly the Democratic primary debates, I think you'll see this exact mindset on display.

In the end, the keys to success - hard work, thrift, skills and education, personal responsibility and so forth - allow the producers to escape the cataclysm. I won't spoil the book and reveal how. Here in the real world, a mix of Dave Ramsey, St. Thomas Aquinas and a solid set of valuable skills allow you to go John Galt in a variety of ways while the looters among us spiral downwards.

More on that in later posts.

8 comments:

Kelly the little black dog said...

A movie version of Atlas Shrugged is expected to come out in the next year or so. It will be interesting to see if it stays true to the novel. I saw the Fountain Head for the first time a few weeks ago. The script was adapted from the novel by Rand herself. While i found the film very interesting to watch, the dialogue was so bad it made the film virtually unwatchable. You make a good observation about all of Rands protagonists, which is they are immature, extremely selfish, and self-absorbed. The whole purpose of her novels was to express her personal philosophy.

Dean said...

KT,
I'm glad you read and enjoyed the book. In my travels, I found that among my peers "Atlas Shrugged" was a far more revered and widely-read book than the supposed counter-culture classic "On the Road" (which I did enjoy).

As much as I despise the term "should be required reading for (fill-in-the-blank)-schoolers", this book gets about as close to me making that statement as any other book.

Kelly, I understand Angelina Jolie is supposed to be in it (Dagny Taggart?). As much fun as it would be to break out my "Viva La Reagan Revolucion'" T-shirt while watching it at the theater, I'm not sure if the book will translate to an entertaining screenplay.

Rose said...

Prophetic, really. Business owners and producers are prepared to hunker down and ride out a Barack presidency. Many will close up operations and move overseas. They waited out Carter, and they will do it again.
(vizenes)

Anonymous said...

Imagine reading the book rather than simply listening to the CD.... It's safe to say the sex scenes can be skipped without missing anything. Will see if Angelina Jolie changes that in the movie ;-)

I don't know that the lack of family makes a big difference. Domestic responsibilities would have just gotten in the way of the story without contributing much ("sorry, I have to delay shipment of the latest Reardon Metal while I take the kids to soccer"). If there had been family and kids, the characters would have still worked hard and thrown the rug rats in the back of the plane as they flew off to Galt's Gulch.

And I found my copy of Atlas... was down in my office with the computer books.

Anonymous said...

Well, when I read Atlas Shrugged back in middle school I was pretty startled by the sex scenes - You see, the book had been recommended by our school librarian, and I wasn't expecting there to be *any* sex scenes in a book that she recommended, you know what I mean?

I guess I was a little bit off on my estimate of 60 CDs for an unabridged version, but not by as much as I thought. The thing is, Rand also wrote "Anthem", which is *way* shorter (only a bit over 100 pages), and makes most of the same points in a much punchier fashion.

K T Cat said...

Kelly, I'm not sure if I'd want to see Hollywood's take on Atlas shrugged. Even if they remained true to the story (and ran off to vomit in between takes in lefty shock over the pro-profit themes of the project) the dialog is terrible. Everyone makes speeches at each other; they don't talk like normal humans.

The wonder of the book is the clarity of it's theme, not the characters or the dialog. The characters have all the humanity of characters from medieval morality plays.

It would be interesting to see how Hollywood handled the gradual destruction of society, though.

Jim C. said...

There is a deeper problem with the human condition, in that people don't actually "produce" anything that didn't exist in natural forms previously. We just rearrange it to suit our particular needs. Much of what's being called production is actually depletion, but credit debt masks the net loss.

Too many of the so-called "producers" are simply looting nature and the "looters" are just along for the ride. Neither group is living sustainably with 6.8 billion people on Earth, growing by close to 80 million per year (as of 2010). The ability to cut down trees, scrape the oceans of fish, drill for liquids and dig for ore doesn't mean anything is really being "produced." Equally important, much of that massive extraction would not be possible if we weren't depleting millions of years of solar energy in a few centuries via oil and coal.

Ayn Rand's greed ethic can only last until physical resources reach a critical depletion level. Then, you find out what a shell game it's been. Evidence abounds that this point has already been exceeded and it's time to get off the growth train (Taggart analogy intentional). Man-made extinctions, overfishing, deforestation, water depletion, soil erosion, pollution, AGW, etc. are not signs of progress unless one is totally obsessed with GDP data-flow as a measure of goodness.

Human population growth and greed is stripping the planet of physical resources but economists keep pretending that money itself is a viable resource. Can you eat, drink or breathe cash? No. Most of what we call modern progress has been made possible by cheap FINITE fossil fuels, and people like Rand (who didn't care about protecting the environment) don't understand that nature is critical to our survival.

The whole concept of endless economic growth on a finite planet is a Ponzi scheme. The scale is now so large that people are trapped inside growthism with few options but to wait for its collapse. Many just don't care, but global peak oil production (coming within this decade) will reveal how fragile the whole scheme has always been.

A finite planet can't sustain perpetual economic or population growth. Nature would be fine without people, but the converse is not true. Rand's vision of the human mind as the center of the universe is small-minded and biologically absurd. Until people stop excusing avarice and live in balance with nature, there will be no Utopia.

Jim C. said...

Reality check: People don't actually "produce" anything that didn't exist in natural forms previously. We just rearrange it to suit human needs. Much of what's being called production is actually depletion, but credit debt masks the net loss.

Too many of the so-called "producers" are simply looting nature and the "looters" are just along for the ride. Neither group is living sustainably with 6.8 billion people on Earth, growing by close to 80 million per year (as of 2010). The ability to cut down trees, dredge the oceans of fish, drill for liquids and dig for ore doesn't mean anything is really being produced.

The Randian greed ethic can only last until physical resources reach a critical depletion level. Evidence abounds that this point has already been exceeded and it's time to get off the growth train (Taggart analogy intentional). Man-made extinctions, overfishing, deforestation, water depletion, soil erosion, pollution, AGW, etc. are not signs of progress unless one is totally obsessed with GDP data-flow as a measure of goodness.

Most of what we call modern progress has been made possible by cheap FINITE fossil fuels, and people like Rand (who was against environmental protection) don't understand that nature is key to our survival. The whole concept of endless economic growth on a physically finite planet is a Ponzi scheme, and global peak oil production (coming this decade) will reveal how fragile the whole scheme has been.

Rand's vision of the human mind as the center of the universe is small-minded and biologically absurd. Until people live in balance with nature, there will be no Utopia.