Posted on 02/02/2019 2:07:03 PM PST by huckfillary
Tomorrow is Ayn Rand’s birthday. A lot of people read and become taken with Rand as teenagers. In polls, her books Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead are routinely near the top of “most influential” lists, and organizations like the Ayn Rand Institute, the Atlas Society, and others study and promote her ideas with missionary zeal. What gives? Why?
In some circles, she is loved. In many others, she is hated. After all, she led what looks like a pretty miserable life punctuated by a long and bizarre affair with her protege Nathaniel Branden. As Bryan Caplan put it, many of her followers were (and are) “sour.”
But Caplan also puts Rand squarely in the Russian-Philosophical tradition of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy and the romantic tradition of Victor Hugo. Rand’s style made a lot more sense to me after I had read The Brothers Karamazov, and you can tell from Les Miserables that she was reading and re-reading it as she was writing Atlas Shrugged.
But most interestingly, and here again I agree with Caplan, Rand clearly understands what would later be called public choice theory—she published Atlas Shrugged in 1957, and it wouldn’t be until 1962 that the foundational text in public choice theory, James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock’s The Calculus of Consent, would be published—and she has a very keen grasp of predictable but unintended consequences.
I don’t love Atlas Shrugged because I see myself as some kind of hero in the old of John Galt, Henry Rearden, Dagny Taggart, or Francisco d’Anconia. The book captivates me because of how well it all holds together. To borrow the title of a book by the conservative lion Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences. Atlas Shrugged is excellent precisely because it traces and explains exactly how some ideas lead to different consequences.
Consider just one of the villains from Atlas Shrugged: Eugene Lawson, the “banker with a heart” who made loans based on applicants’ “need” and not on the profitability of the loan. I put “need” in quotes because like a lot of economists I don’t really believe in “needs” because there are substitutes everywhere and a lot of different ways to solve problems.
In any event, Lawson makes loans based not on the careful evaluation of the creditworthiness of the borrowers and the expected profitability of their proposals. He is not, in short, like the heroic, compassion-bankrupt banker Midas Mulligan.
But alas, Lawson finds himself—and his depositors, and his customers—ruined. He doesn’t learn, of course, and finds ways to blame everyone but himself for his problems. It’s a pattern I recognize in myself and try to fight or avoid. Eugene Lawson? Not so much.
What’s most interesting in her discussion of the “banker with a heart” is that Lawson is also clearly a banker without a brain. And even this might be too kind: Rand argues implicitly that he doesn’t have a heart, either.
On what basis? The philosopher David Schmidtz has said that if your argument is that your heart is the right place, it isn’t. In Lawson’s case, he’s fundamentally rejecting a binding constraint on reality: you can’t prosper by producing things that are worth less than the resources used to produce them. What’s more, every dollar Lawson wasted on a bad project was a dollar he could have lent to someone abler or someone with a better idea. It’s hard to see how this would have led to an outcome worse than the poverty and misery Lawson’s enlightened, heart-led lending left in its wake.
Atlas Shrugged is captivating because it shows us some of the limitations of meaning well. You can’t reshape the world according to your aesthetic when that aesthetic is at odds with objective facts and constraints on reality like “something must be produced before it can be consumed.” Stubborn efforts to ignore these constraints on the part of characters like Eugene Lawson, James Taggart, and Wesley Mouch created a world that finally collapsed under the weight of its own corruption. And that, I think, is the book’s most important lesson: reality is non-negotiable, and efforts to resist are bound to end badly
I think Ayn Rand is due for a resurgance. The truth of her ideas becomes more obvious every day.
“All you need is Rand
(All together now)
All you need is Rand
(Everybody)
All you need is Rand, Rand
Rand is all you need”
You are correct, Mr. Galt.
Do you know why Atlas shrugged? He didn’t know the answers, and he didn’t have a clue on how to find them.
Touche.
Cute as a joke but inaccurate. He shrugged because he realized he didn’t need to carry the world on his shoulders.
He discovered individual responsibility is the way to success not making allowances for people or handicapping the strong to assist the weak.
Rand ping.
A single individual cannot carry the world, the people just carry themselves.
I love me some Ayn Rand. Her atheism is wrong but she gets almost everything else right.
I decided to read her because I got into arguments with a Rand fan and wanted to do opposition research to undermine him. I started reading her stuff and was like, wow, she makes some great points.
She rattled my cage and provoked a crisis in my thinking and for that I am grateful to her.
It bothers me that those who run the country, the media, all information, show by their actions and words utter ignorance on any of what Rand has ably shown. Universities ignore these truths, which would be actually helpful for new generations to learn. How sad.
Happy birthday. Wish our nation could make any use out of her works! It’s folly to ignore this stuff.
Yep, and it’s not like you have to totally commit to her position. But you should at least be familiar with her arguments, which are powerful.
They’re not ignorant (largely), they’re evil. They acknowledge Ayn Rand was right, but do the opposite out of spite of mankind. Pure effing hate drives them.
I’ve been trying to get my 19 year old to read The Fountainhead. I’ve even offered him money to read it.
Happy 114th Ayn.
Your comment is little confusing.
The Title “Atlas Shrugged” is symbolic. Atlas carries the world on his shoulders in mythology. The book illustrates the premise that we, as individuals, are responsible for our own actions & decisions and we must remain true to ourselves and our values. We need not and should not warp ourselves because others demand it, nor should people be given things, positions, purchase orders or power from a sense of fairness. Those things must be earned by actions and achievements. In condoning parasites we enable them and damage society as a whole.
When Atlas shrugged he realized that he was not being noble carrying the world; he was betraying himself and enabling the destructive force of “social justice”. Atlas needed to let the world stand on it’s own, step away like the protagonists. Atlas,the protagonists, then were free to pursue their own goals, cooperating with like minded self sufficient individuals, unburdened by false guilt.
Which is the sign of both a great author and an open minded reader. The idea of *not* presenting challenging speakers or writers at schools is the very antithesis of this philosophy.
“Rand’s style made a lot more sense to me after I had read The Brothers Karamazov ...”
Well, she was quite long-winded so there’s that. I will always love Atlas Shrugged for being a fun page-turner that captures so much of what the Left is about. Rand is great for a young person wanting to read something in which libtards get wrecked.
Character development was not one of Rand’s strong suits, but she made up for it with names like Wesley Mouch, who could be the prototype for Schmuckey Schumer or Nasty Piglosi.
How long have you suffered from humor-deficit disorder?
The point that Publius and I make in our book on the topic is that Atlas didn't really shrug in that eponymous work, he had only begun to. Until the bridge went down Dagny Taggart was still fighting a valiant and futile battle against a suicidal culture. When it did so toward the end of the book, that was the shrug, and the disaster to follow is only hinted at through such exemplary mini-disasters as Starnesville and the 20th Century Motor Corporation. The hammer was on the way down as Galt drew his dollar sign in the air, but it hadn't landed yet.
Part of the problem with AS as a work of literature is that past that point the work devolved from a novel of ideas into an action novel written by a Hollywood scriptwriter, which Rand was, (and a damn good one, and it wasn't even her native language). Exciting but at points preposterous. It adds tremendously to the reader's enjoyment but detracts, I think, from the novel's gravitas. Just my $0.02.
I'm dipping back into it chapter by chapter to see if I've changed my mind since Pub' talked me into the project nearly a decade ago (how old does that make you feel, bud?) I haven't. Rand couldn't have read Marcuse prior to the writing of AS but she had him captured perfectly. A lazy student could cut entire sections of AS pertaining to the villains out and paste them into a paper in any Grievance Studies class in the country and get an A, and get away with it because the professor would rather die than have read the thing.
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