- Rand, Ayn.
Atlas Shrugged.
New York: Dutton, [1957, 1992] 2005.
ISBN 978-0-525-94892-6.
-
There is nothing I could possibly add by way of commentary on this
novel, a classic of twentieth century popular fiction, one of the most
discussed books of the epoch, and, more than fifty years after
publication, still (at this writing) in the top two hundred books by
sales rank at Amazon.com. Instead, I will confine my remarks to my
own reactions upon reading this work for the third time and how it
speaks to events of the present day.
I first read Atlas Shrugged in the summer of that most eventful
year, 1968. I enjoyed it immensely, finding it not
just a gripping story, but also, as Rand intended, a thorough (and in some
ways, too thorough) exposition of her philosophy as glimpsed in
The Fountainhead, which I'd read
a few years earlier. I took it as an allegorical story about the
pernicious effects and ultimate consequences of collectivism and the
elevation of altruism over self-interest and need above earned rewards,
but viewed the world in which it was set and the events which occurred
there much as I did those of Orwell's
1984 and
Heinlein's
If This Goes On—:
a cautionary tale showing the end point of trends visible in the
contemporary world. But the world of Atlas Shrugged, like those
of Orwell and Heinlein, seemed very remote from that of 1968—we
were going to the Moon, and my expectations for the future were more
along the lines of
2001 than Rand's
dingy and decaying world. Also, it was 1968, for Heaven's sake, and
I perceived the upheavals of the time (with a degree of naïveté and
wrongheadedness I find breathtaking at this remove) as a sovereign antidote
to the concentration of power and oppression of the individual, which would
set things aright long before productive people began to heed Galt's call
to shed the burden of supporting their sworn enemies.
My next traverse through Atlas Shrugged was a little before
1980. The seventies had taken a lot of the gloss off the bright and
shiny 1968 vision of the future, and having run a small business for the
latter part of that sorry decade, the encroachment of ever-rising taxes,
regulation, and outright obstruction by governments at all levels was
very much on my mind, which, along with the monetary and financial crises created
by those policies plus a rising swamp of mysticism, pseudoscience,
and the ascendant anti-human pagan cult of environmentalism, made it
entirely plausible to me that the U.S. might
tip over into the kind of accelerating decline described in the middle
part of the novel. This second reading of the book left me with a very different
impression than the first. This time I could see, from my own personal
experience and in the daily news, precisely the kind of
events foreseen in the story. It was no longer a cautionary tale but instead
a kind of hitch-hiker's guide to the road to serfdom.
Curiously, this reading the book caused me to shrug off the funk of
demoralisation and discouragement and throw myself back into the
entrepreneurial fray. I believed that the
failure of collectivism was so self-evident that a
turning point was at hand, and the landslide election of Reagan
shortly thereafter appeared to bear this out. The U.S. was committed to a policy
of lower taxes, rolling back regulations, standing up to
aggressive collectivist regimes around the world,
and opening the High Frontier with economical, frequent, and
routine access to space (remember that?). While it was hardly
the men of the mind returning from Galt's Gulch, it was good enough
for me, and I decided to make the best of it and contribute what I
could to what I perceived as the turnaround. As a footnote,
it's entirely possible that if I hadn't reread Atlas Shrugged
around this time, I would have given up on entrepreneurship and gone
back to work for the Man—so in a way, this book was in the causal
tree which led to
Autodesk and AutoCAD. In
any case, although working myself to exhaustion and observing the
sapping of resources by looters and moochers after Autodesk's
initial public stock offering in 1985, I still felt myself surfing
on a wave of unbounded opportunity and remained unreceptive to
Galt's pitch in 1987.
In 1994? Well….
What with the eruption of the most recent financial crisis, the veer toward the
hard left in the United States, and increasing talk of productive people opting
to “go Galt”, I decided it was time for another pass through
Atlas Shrugged, so I started reading it for the third time
in early April 2010 and finished it in a little over two weeks, including some
marathon sessions where I just didn't want to put it down, even though I knew
the characters, principal events, and the ending perfectly well. What was different,
and strikingly so, from the last read three decades ago, was how astonishingly
prescient this book, published in 1957, was about events unfolding in the world
today. As I noted above, in 1968 I viewed it as a dystopia set in an unspecified
future. By 1980, many of the trends described in the book were clearly in place,
but few of their ultimate dire consequences had become evident. In
2010, however, the novel is almost like reading a paraphrase of the history of the last quarter
century. “Temporary crises”, “states of emergency”,
“pragmatic responses”, calls to “sacrifice for the common good” and
to “share the wealth” which seemed implausible then are the topics of
speeches by present day politicians and news headlines. Further,
the infiltration of academia and the news media by collectivists, their
undermining the language and (in the guise of
“postmodernism”) the foundations
of rational thought and objective reality, which were entirely beneath the
radar (at least to me) as late as 1980, are laid out here as clear as
daylight, with the simultaneously pompous and vaporous prattling of
soi-disant
intellectuals which doubtless made the educated laugh when the book first
appeared now having become commonplace in the classrooms of top tier universities
and journals of what purport to be the humanities and social sciences. What once
seemed a fantastic nightmare painted on a grand romantic canvas is in the
process of becoming a shiveringly accurate prophecy.
So, where are we now? Well (if you'll allow me to use the word) objectively,
I found the splice between our real-life past and present to be around the
start of chapter 5 of part II, “Account Overdrawn”.
This is about 500 pages into the hardback edition of 1168 pages, or around
40%. Obviously, this is the crudest of estimates—many things occur
before that point which haven't yet in the real world and many afterward
have already come to pass. Yet
still, it's striking: who would have imagined piracy on the high seas to be
a headline topic in the twenty-first century? On this reading I was also
particularly struck by chapter 8 of part III, “The Egoist” (immediately
following Galt's speech), which
directly addresses a question I expect will soon intrude into the public
consciousness: the legitimacy or lack thereof of nominally democratic
governments. This is something I first wrote about in 1988, but never expected
to actually see come onto the agenda. A
recent
Rasmussen poll, however, finds that just 21% of voters in the United States
now believe that their federal government has the “consent of the
governed”. At the same time, more than 40% of U.S. tax filers
pay
no federal income tax at all, and more than a majority receive more
in federal benefits than they pay in taxes. The top 10% of taxpayers
(by Adjusted Gross Income)
pay more than
70% of all personal income taxes collected. This makes it increasingly
evident that the government, if not already, runs the risk of becoming a racket
in which the non-taxpaying majority use the coercive power of the state to shake
down a shrinking taxpaying minority. This is precisely the vicious cycle which
reaches its endpoint in this chapter, where the government loses all legitimacy
in the eyes of not only its victims, but even its beneficiaries and participants.
I forecast that should this trend continue (and that's the way to bet), within
two years we will see crowds of people in the U.S. holding signs
demanding “By what right?”.
In summary, I very much enjoyed revisiting this classic; given that it
was the third time through and I don't consider myself to have changed
all that much in the many years since the first time, this didn't come
as a surprise. What I wasn't expecting was how differently the
story is perceived based on events in the real world up to
the time it's read. From the current perspective, it is eerily
prophetic. It would be amusing to go back and read reviews at the
time of its publication to see how many anticipated that happening.
The ultimate lesson of Atlas Shrugged is that the looters
subsist only by the sanction of their victims and through the product
of their minds, which cannot be coerced. This is an eternal
truth, which is why this novel, which states it so clearly, endures.
The link above is to the hardbound “Centennial Edition”. There are
trade paperback, mass market paperback,
and Kindle editions available as well. I'd avoid the mass
market paperback, as the type is small and the spines of books this thick tend to
disintegrate as you read them. At current Amazon prices, the hardcover isn't
all that much more than the trade paperback and will be more durable if
you plan to keep it around or pass it on to others. I haven't seen the Kindle
transfer; if it's well done, it would be marvellous, as any print edition of
this book is more than a handful.
April 2010 