Atlas Shrugged Tomfoolery

"Atlas Shrugged" is Ayn Rand's last and longest novel, the one she considered to be her magnum opus, and the one containing most of her ideology of "objectivism." This train-wreck of a book, first published in 1957, is still popular today; in this post I will try to explain why I find this troublesome.

Ayn Rand is dead, but her ghost still lingers around among libertarian and objectivist ideologues. She was born in 1905 under the name of Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum in Saint Petersburg to bourgeois parents who owned a pharmacy. When she was only 12 years old her life was turned upside-down by the October Revolution and the subsequent rule of the Bolsheviks under Lenin; her father's business was confiscated and nationalized, and the family fled into the arms of the White Army. When Russian universities were opened to women after the revolution, she was in the first group of women to enroll at Petrograd State University, but was later purged from that university alongside many other bourgeois students. It's easy to see how she developed a fierce hatred of communism and collectivism at this early age.

In 1925 she was granted a visa to visit the United States of America, and soon decided she wanted to stay there. Only problem was that America had strict anti-immigration laws at the time, which prompted her to change her name Alice O'Connor. Later still she adopted her pen name, the one by which we all know her: Ayn Rand. This short history of her early life may help us understand how she, in her writing and ideology, came to represent the exact and extreme opposite of the collectivist ideology she and her family suffered from. And her novel Atlas Shrugged is indeed her magnum opus with regards to this ideological extremism.

What's so extreme about her ideas and books, you might ask. Well, to give but one telling example, Rand subscribes to "ethical egoism," the idea that one ought to act only in one's own self-interest, which is one step further than psychological egoism, which holds that we have no choice but to act in our own self-interest, or rational egoism which holds that it's rational to act in one's self-interest. It turns egoism into a normative position, which makes it immoral to not act in one's self-interest. If you've read Atlas Shrugged, you'll know that all the protagonists therein are perfect examples of the most cold-hearted egoist megalomaniacs. And the problem I have is that these are indeed the heroes of this ill-begotten capitalist fantasy.

The producers, the "captains of industry" are the heroes, but they're placed in a dystopian future America where they rebel against a society that shackles and condemns them. Rand divides society into roughly three groups or classes: the producers, the looters and the parasites. Producers are the aforementioned heroes, the looters are the government institutions that "shackle" those heroes by taxing them and over-regulating their businesses, and the parasites are the rest, the consumers who "demand" the fruits of the producers' labor. In the story, the producers flee society to make their own capitalist Utopia in some hidden valley. Their evil plan is to leave the looters and the parasites to their own devices, as they are too incompetent and too stupid to run society or any successful business without the guidance of the singularly brilliant producers.

This wildly irrational plot promotes a couple of very dangerous ideas, first among which is the "Great Man Theory." This theory has been debunked countless times by historians and sociologists, but just a modicum of common sense will tell you that the likes of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos did not build up their businesses single handedly, but that they in fact have build their astronomical personal wealth and power on the backs of the engineers, scientists, strategists, economists and regular workers that work for them. The idea that removing a company's founder will crumble that company is too ridiculous to even entertain for a second. But in Rand's objectivist libertarian fantasy-world, the producers simply remove themselves from the society with the expressed intention to let that society die. And in her fantasy they succeed. The idea is literally to let all the parasites and looters go extinct, as some capitalist variation on the "final solution," to come back later and rebuild society in their own way.

If you haven't yet recognized it, this is only a few centimeters away from fascism. It's all there; a small group of "übermensch"-like ruling class who are at the same time superior, but under threat from inferior social groups. Hitler blamed the Bolshevist Jews, modern fascistoid reactionaries blame LGBTQ+, feminists, Antifa, Black Lives Matter and other marginalized fighters. Atlas Shrugged may rightly be labeled fascist propaganda, which is why it worries me whenever I see quotes like these:

As executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, I see the impact of Atlas Shrugged on a daily basis. I’m continually amazed by how many people, from every walk of life and every part of the planet, from high school students to political activists in countries from Hong Kong to Belarus to Ghana, eagerly tell me: “Atlas Shrugged changed my life.”
_{source: Ayn Rand Institute}

Thanks so much for visiting my blog and reading my posts dear reader, I appreciate that a lot :-) If you like my content, please consider leaving a comment, upvote or resteem. I'll be back here tomorrow and sincerely hope you'll join me. Until then, stay safe, stay healthy!