Sat Jan 18 2025 07:00:00 AM EST
How would I describe Atlas Shrugged? We all know the stereotype of the basement dwelling neckbeard with his hundreds or thousands of intricately hand painted warhammer figurines. Imagine you see that a tabletop battle scene is being staged with its masses of unique, interesting looking characters in different strategic positions with unique strengths and weaknesses. You watch this neckbeard spend hours to set the table up like an incredibly complex chess board. This might get your imagination excited. Think of all the great stories that you could tell, how are all of these moving pieces going to interact? I was about 700 pages in when I realized the story I was going to get is "The good guys beat the bad guys because they are more good and the bad guys are stupid and bad." Most of the characters in this book are completely pointless, adding nothing to the story. The characters which the author wants you to like ('good guys') speak as if they have brain damage. I don't think Rand understood how human people speak in social situations. The children are no exception. Rand wrote about children as if she had never met one. One example is when she writes that children do not fear nature and fear needs to be taught. Children are objectivists by nature and need to be taught to fear the dark. What?
The writing style is what you would get from a student who expects a better grade with a higher word count. It is annoyingly verbose and includes combinations of contradictory adjectives that were written to sound intelligent without really saying anything. The worst example is the chapter "This is John Galt Speaking" which is 64 pages straight of Ayn Rand through the alpha megachad in her book seizing all radio waves and forcing everyone in the fictional world as well as anyone who has to read the book to listen to 3 hours of her most unhinged rant. In a way this is my favorite part of the book because even in her fantasy world the only way to get people to listen to her preaching is to force them against their will. So what is the book actually about?
Atlas shrugged follows a woman railroad executive of remarkable talent and work ethic although not conventionally attractive. Instead of using the character's given name, I will refer to Ayn Rand's self insert charcter as simply Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand lives in a world filled with despair where most people are incompetent losers of low moral character looking to steal from those around them who are better. They do this using the state and claim they do it for the public good. Despite her unparalleled intellect and work ethic her railroad continues to fail because of this government intervention. There are 3 men with the mental and physical prowess of demigods and they all love her desparately because this is Rand's utopia fantasy. The beginning of the book includes a flashback to her childhood where Megachad #1 climbs a rock with her and then rapes her but it's ok because he deserves it. They shack up for a while as they become titans of their respective industry. She likes trains. One day he disappears so Ayn Rand moves on to Megachad #2. Throughout these hundreds of pages many characters are introduced, don't bother remembering their names because it doesn't really matter. Megachad #2 hates his wife and resents everything about her. He invents a magic metal. Ayn Rand becomes Megachad #2's mistress. They build a train track out of the magic metal. All the smart industrialists are disappearing and nobody knows why. They discover the ruins of a magic motor that runs on free energy. They try to find the inventor of the motor. The kid that Ayn Rand hired to try and repair the magic motor disappears. She tries to follow him by plane and crashes into a capitalist utopia. This was the one part of the story that was kind of cool. So she finds that all the disappeared industrialists fled to a secret city which I will call 'Libertarian Hogwarts'. The purpose of Libertarian Hogwarts was to build a world free from theft and extortion. It is then that she finds Megachad #3 who is the greatest Chad of all. He created the magic motor but decided that the world of looters didn't deserve it so he conspired with all the good people to no longer sustain a parasitic society at their own expense. This is why Megachad #1 disappeared but always loved her. She doesn't really care about him because she found somebody better. Megachad #2 has been flying the country side for the 2 months or so she spends in Libertarian Hogwarts but she doesn't really care. Since Megachad #3 is the most alpha she has ever seen she now belongs to him and becomes his house servant. The time comes to make a decision and she decides to leave and she can never come back, or maybe she can later so this is not a very consequential decision. She wants to work on her failing railroad some more. Megachad #3 also leaves to follow her. The government makes a superweapon to hold the population hostage. This is not really mentioned again until the last few pages of the book. The wife Megachad #2 hated and cheated on for years blackmailed him to sign away the rights of his magic metal to the government. Ayn Rand is blackmailed by Megachad #2's wife to say the government controlling everything and enslaving the population is a good thing. Instead she reveals on the radio that she has been hooking up with Megachad #2. Then she immediately goes to tell Megachad #2 that she loves Megachad #3 now but Megachad #2 stops her to profess how he will love her forever and he already knows that she has moved on.
Moral of the story: "I love you until I find somebody better and if you have a moral system which makes you feel bad you should reject that moral system."
Libertarian Hogwarts seemed interesting but they never actually do anything there. We later find out that the supposed alpha Megachad spent 12 years simping for Ayn Rand working at the lowest level of a physical laborer on her railroad watching her get railed by other dudes. Every male of quality in the book is hopelessly in love with Ayn Rand. The male characters all have a homoerotic worship of alpha Megasimp. It reads like an installment of Sonichu. One of the characters whose name is not worth remembering gets drunk, takes over the doomsday machine and accidentally detonates it. This kills a lot of people and destroys a large part of the country but has little to no impact on the story. Alpha megasimp gets imprisoned and tortured as a result of Rand's incompetence. The torture was cheesy and consisted of shocking him in one part of his body and then shocking him in another part of his body being careful not to kill him. This was actually one of the better parts of the book until the torture machine breaks and he explains to the stupid, bad people how to fix it so they can keep torturing him.
Next comes the worst rescue plan maybe in all of fiction. The plan unfolds as follows: Ayn Rand walks up to the guard at the front door of the secret government torture facility. She tells him she's in charge now and he needs to let her in. He can't decide if he's more afraid of letting her in or getting in trouble for not letting her in since she's important. Ayn Rand shoots the guard in the heart in cold blood rationalizing that because he was indecisive his life had less value than that of an animal. This Ayn Rand character seems like a nasty lady. Because she used a silenced pistol nobody knows that a firearm has been discharged. The megachads assemble where they carry out the next phase of the plan. They walk in the door counting on the fact that these security guards who have orders to shoot on sight will recognize them as famous industrialists and be confused. Then they shoot the security guards with silenced pistols. Rand writes "the Brutes, private or public, who believe that they can rule their betters by force, will learn the lesson of what happens when brute force encounters mind and force." Because they have silenced pistols, the other people in the building are unaware that firearms have been discharged. Megachad 2 is able to shoot guns out of peoples' hands. She writes about guns as somebody who clearly knows nothing about guns. One of the pointless characters who is mentioned starting around the middle of the book is a pirate. This seemed promising except that he doesn't do anything until the last few pages when he climbs a tree and then jumps through the window of the torture facility to shoot one of the guards. They fly back to Libertarian Hogwarts and we learn on the way they had an entire air force and were prepared to go to war to save the alpha megasimp. Society collapses according to his plan and he immediately decides it's time to go back into the real world with everybody else.
I found her commentary on economics generally agreeable. As a philosophy there is almost nothing there except vanity. Rand calls humility a protective rag of vice and pride the sum of all virtues. To understand objective reality is to be able to shape it to our will. Man is great and we should do whatever we want at any time, that is pretty much it. The book tries to create an equivalence between the materialist and the Christian referred to respectively as the mystics of muscle and the mystics of spirit. The book presupposes that man emerged from an era of superstitious savagery with mankind believing that physical nature was ruled by the whims of unknowable demons to discover nature was firm and predictable, to trust man's knowledge giving source to modern industry and scientific precision. Rand writes that these powers are then placed under the power of unknowable demons. Essentially she is saying that science and modern industry were created by secularism and then controlled by religious mystics. That's an interesting theory but it chooses to ignore the objective reality in the history of science. The book as we know it was invented in the 2nd Century by Christian monks in Egypt as papyrus sheets bound between wooden covers. This is also called a codex. The printing press was invented by devout Christian Johannes Gutenberg in the 15th century where it was used to mass print the bible. The history of institutions of higher learning is almost entirely Christian. The first universities were established by Catholic monks starting in Italy and moving throughout Europe from the 11th to 15th centuries. The scientific revolution occurred between 1300 and 1700 AD. Secular humanism did not come around until the 19th century. Isaac Newton, Kepler, Galileo, Robert Boyle, and Copernicus were all devout Christians. The scientific method was created by a Christian named Francis Bacon. Previous scientific though was largely influenced by Aristotle and Plato who viewed nature as random and chaotic. As a result they performed deductive reasoning with little value placed on experimental data. So many of the founders of fields of science and discovery are Christian, one who wasn't was an anomaly. All investment into the discovery of the universe was undertaken by Christian scholars until the French Enlightenment. One of the prerequisites for science is the idea of intelligibility which states that there is an objective truth, that nature is rational and can be understood because it was created by God with a rational mind. There is much more that could be said on that subject. Men of Science, Men of God a book by Henry M. Morris covers the subject well.
In conclusion, 2/10. Do not recommend.