Atlas Shrugged

I finished Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged a couple of weeks ago and have been procrastinating writing this entry ever since. Partly because of the complexity of the ideas she presents, partly because I still need to think more about them and partly because I was being lazy.

The main idea behind the plot can be summarized with this quote:

“Mr. Rearden”, said Francisco, his voice solemnly calm, “if you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down on his shoulders - what would you tell him to do?”
“I … don’t know. What … could he do? What would you tell him?”
“To shrug.”

And the ‘Atlases’ are, according to Rand, the ‘materialists’, those that dedicate themselves to a productive activity:

“Dagny, we who’ve been called ‘materialists’ by the killers of the human spirit, we’re the only ones who know how little value or meaning there is in material objects as such, because we’re the ones who create their value and meaning. We can afford to give them up, for a short while, in order to redeem something much more precious. We are the soul, of which railroads, coppers mines, steel mills and oil wells are the body - and they are living entities that beat day and night, like our hearts, in the sacred function of supporting human life, but only so long as they remain our body, only so long as they remain the expression, the reward and the property of achievement. Without us, they are corpses and their sole product is poison, not wealth or food, the poison of disintegration that turns men into hordes of scavengers. Dagny, learn to understand the nature of your own power and you’ll understand the paradox you now see around you. 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. Wherever you are, you will always be able to produce.

During the first 200 pages I was quite bored, but then I started getting more into the story and the reading went faster. Unfortunately, the book is way too long, and Rand is not a good enough writer to justify 1.100 pages of repetition of the same ideas. And the end was simply ridiculous, in the style of the worst kind of Hollywood movie where you know beforehand that in the end all the ‘good guys’ beat hell out of the ‘bad guys’ and live happily ever after. However, I am glad to have read it, as it contains many interesting thought-provoking ideas around Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism which she summarized as:

My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

Many of her ideas seem appealing to me, but I feel that sometimes she takes them a bit too far, and the passages where she exalts America and insults other countries are just outrageous. For example:

Who is enslaved by physical needs: the Hindu who labors from sunrise to sunset at the shafts of a hand-plow for a bowl of rice, or the American who is driving a tractor? Who is the conqueror of physical reality: the man who sleeps on a bed of nails of the man who sleeps on an inner-spring mattress? Which is the monument to the triumph of the human spirit over matter: the germ-eaten hovels on the shorelines of the Ganges or the Atlantic skyline of New York?
[...]
When some barefoot bum in some pesthole of Asia yells at your: How dare you be rich - you apologize and beg him to be patient and promise him you’ll give it all away.

If you are interested in getting acquainted with Rand’s ideas, maybe some shorter book of hers is better than Atlas Shrugged. For example, Josh Kaufman suggests For the new intellectual as a replacement for Atlas Shrugged in his “Personal MBA” Program book list.

Below are some bits that called my attention.

On the value of work

“Dagny, there’s nothing of any importance in life - except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It’s the only measure of human value. All the codes of ethics they’ll try to ram down your throat are just so much paper money put out by swindlers to fleece people of their virtues. The code of competence is the only system of morality that’s on a gold standard.”

On the meaning of money

“So you think that money is the root of all evil?” said Francisco d’Anconia. “Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and five value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?”

On what moves man

Man’s motive power is his moral code.

On thinking as an act of choice

To remain alive, he must think.
But to think is an act of choice.[...]

On the importance of volition

The name of this monstrous absurdity is Original Sin.
A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If a man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral.

Sacrifice

A sacrifice is the surrender of a value.

Material values

And what do you think are material values? Matter has no value except as a means for the satisfaction of human desires. Matter is only a tool of human values.

Love and it’s relationship to values

Love is the expression of one’s values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.

Reason as an absolute

Moral perfection is unbreached rationality - not the degree of your intelligence, but the full and relentless use of your mind, not the extent of your knowledge, but the acceptance of reason as an absolute.

The value of work

When you work in a modern factory, you are paid, not only for your labor, but for all the productive genius which has made that factory possible: for the work of the industrialist who built it, for the work of the investor who saved the money to risk on the untried and the new, for the work of the engineer who designed the machines of which you are pushing the levers, for the work of the inventor who created the product which you spend your time on making, for the work of the scientist who discovered the laws that went into the making of that product, for the work of the philosopher who taught men how to think [...].