I have sh*t to say, so I am going to try a different format here and bold the points I am trying to make.
I read Atlas Shrugged because I believe in reading all sorts of influential works, even though I know the direction in which the book has been influential and I know that it does not reflect my philosophy nor my views on society. All the same, I’ve found that reading things like this helps me form better arguments for my own points. Plenty of people told me I didn’t need to read it and that I would gain nothing from it. They were broadly correct. That is my first takeaway from Atlas Shrugged: it is exactly the book you think it is. There is no secret sauce here, none of the arguments magically make more sense when they are on the page vs. when they’re quoted on Reddit. This book was written for people who already believe the book’s message, and it exists to enforce that they are correct.
This brings me to my second takeaway: I have never in my life read a book where the characters undergo less growth. At the beginning of the story, Dagny Taggart and Hank Reardon believe in the value of individualism, that the government is evil wasteful and corrupt, and that people should be rewarded for their innovation and industry through market forces. Everything that then happens in the story goes on to reinforce these views. What’s the big deal, you ask? Individualism, government austerity, and rewards for labor all sound good, or at least something that should be debated. And you’re right! We should have a debate about all these things, because that is how you find a sensible middle ground between individualism and the common good, government austerity and the social safety net, market economics and controls against monopoly.
But Atlas Shrugged is not a book that invites debate. That should shock you, given how popular it is with the Debate Me Bros. I say it is not good for debate because it is a story built on absolutes, to the point of faith. When I read Conscience of a Conservative, I was surprised at how little effort Goldwater puts into convincing the reader of his point. He starts from the standpoint that you already believe market forces are the best way to run things, and he goes on from there. Atlas Shrugged is the same way. Every character who goes against the story’s themes is a caricature, every government figure is a megalomaniac who understands nothing but greed, and every main character is a gigachad who oozes sexuality in the form of raw business acumen. Quick aside: I had no idea this book would be so horny.
A counterpoint to this is that the book is not considered a novel (at 60 f***ing hours on Audible, they’re right, it’s not a novel it’s a textbook) it’s meant to be a parable. The problem with this is that parables are for children, and the people who take this story seriously are entirely adults. No one would win debates on Reddit with story excerpts from Hansel and Gretel. To this point, the story does not work without magic. Dagny Taggart is basically a Jedi. If she focuses on something, it happens, it’s just a matter of when. Time and again she makes things happen through The Force, er–force of will. Additionally, Reardon Metal is like mithril, lighter than anything anyone thought possible, cheaper to produce, and able to build things no one has ever seen. John Galt’s motor, this incredible thing he could have built that would usher in post-scarcity, but that he refused to build unless he’d make a profit from it, is like the power systems in Star Trek. If you have that kind of motor, you can make an argument for any sort of society around it, and Star Trek does this! In Star Trek, you have basically the same conditions as in Galt’s Gulch: everyone is able to pursue what they want, everyone lives in plenty, and mankind has pursued a glorious future. But they’re also a broadly collectivist society, where everyone has access to everything via replication, and where the Federation government has strong guidelines on how to behave that help everyone. None of this is argued for or against in the core series, and Atlas Shrugged is the same way. Both are postulates about a way to live, and this book needs to be viewed as fiction of the same class, even though I think Star Trek is much better.
The people who tend to like this book tend to be very well off, and oftentimes have worked and sacrificed to get where they are. It should be unsurprising that this book is popular with that crowd, because Rand makes the explicit point that wealth is a measure of intelligence, alongside her repeated points that greed, or more generally self-interest, is good. Talk to me after the current presidential election and we’ll audit the ways in which this is preposterous. This though is one of the points that becomes an explicit statement during Galt’s exhausting monologue near the story’s climax. This is honestly another aside, but it helps to understand why this book is so popular with the crowd with which it’s popular. Other points she makes are that gold is the only absolute medium of exchange, and a society in which we need to exchange cash for everything, even favors from our neighbors, is a utopian society. This is almost identical to the utopia laid out in The Truth Machine by Michael J Casey and Paul Vigna, an unapologetically pro-crypto text that shares the same faith-based arguments as Rand and Goldwater. All of this philosophy is cut from the same cloth, made of absolutes and deterministic statements. One more aside here because it amuses me: John Galt at one point states that refusing to do your own thinking is the greatest sin a man can commit, so every crypto-bro turned AI-bro who thinks AGI is going to magically do all sorts of things for them is living in direct opposition to Rand’s explicit teachings.
Finally[ish] what’s the scariest word to conservatives? Communism. Rand lived in Imperial Russia during the Bolshevik revolution. There is no question this influenced her writing, and that is understandable! She was twelve years old when her family’s source of income was taken away, and in subsequent years they nearly starved. To her, Communist Russia was a nightmare from which she could not wake, until she came to the USA. For the US to turn into Communist Russia then was like her recurring nightmare. Atlas Shrugged details a future US that undergoes a revolution like this, and in that sense it’s easy to see why the story reads as a warning against government overreach and the dangers of nationalization. The problem with this is that she wrote this story in 1957. During World War Two, the US nationalized industry, imposing wage controls that in conjunction with unions, led to the greatest time of middle class prosperity in American history, and critically the government returned control to private industry after the war, ending the nationalization. A core premise of Atlas Shrugged is that government creep is constant. The government takes more and more and more, and eventually it becomes a dystopian dictatorship. But Rand was living in America in a time of relative plenty as a direct result of the government not doing this! You would think that someone whose philosophy advocates Reason as humanity’s greatest asset would figure this out.
So after reading Atlas Shrugged, I am proud of myself for making it through, but annoyed I didn’t listen to everyone who insisted there was nothing new I would find from this. They were right. If you, like me, find yourself wondering if there’s more to this book and that you should give it a read, there is not. You know everything you ever need to know about Atlas Shrugged from what you have already heard about Atlas Shrugged. One bit of praise I will offer though is that the writing style is not as bad as I was told it was. Rand makes an interesting enough story happen for a lot of it. I found myself caring about Dagny Taggart’s railroad. It wasn’t until I saw the trailer for part 1 of the movie adaptation that I realized how boring is the story when taken at face value. Actual finally: Ayn Rand received Social Security and worked with Joe McCarthy during the blacklisting, something that is shown in the novel to be tantamount to evil. Please leave this review understanding that once again, a conservative thought leader claims one thing while behaving in an entirely different way.
I do not recommend this book.
