Jul 12, 2024
What is the deal with atlas shrugged?
The title is a stroke of genius, but what's even better is the title drop in the actual book itself. Protagonist, confused, stressed, and listless, is talking to the anti-hero, frustrated and desperate for any sort of relief from the absurdity of his situation trying to singlehandedly uphold American industry for the last 500 pages. Anti-hero goes, "If you saw Atlas, sinews straining, body trembling, with the world on his shoulders only getting heavier the more he exerts himself, what would you tell him?" Protagonist is lost for words. Anti-hero replies, "To shrug". Applause. Rand Paul's parents punch the air. An eagle sheds a tear.
modern_sunlight1 year ago
>I have always heard the name of this book tossed around, and it is such a cool/important-sounding title This is so true. I've never read it but it's a top ten title of all time. The man cursed to carry the entire weight of the world is moved to exert, and he exerts indifference
@cropdustderecho > nobody ever moans about their prose being bad because their books usually wrap up by the 270 page mark That is uh... actually a really good point. Jack London's The Iron Heel is "Atlas Shrugged for Socialists" and I remembered it feeling pretty dense and a little long. But I just checked and it's 264 pages, while Atlas Shrugged is 1,168 pages! And tbh I can't recall the ending of Atlas Shrugged, I must've tapped out and simply inferred it was a "the good guys win" ending, because Rand is nothing if not Hollywood. It's a very fair literary criticism to point out that Rand was also a heavy amphetamine user, which really tells you how little self discipline she had to still look like that on a heroic prescription of benzedrine.
IMO it's a book for young people. Someone once told me that it's like reading pornography, and I think it's dead-on. I read it when I was a teenager, and it was probably one of the most influential book in my life. I honestly don't think I would have formed the personality over time to make this site, for example, if I didn't read it. When I read it now, it makes my eyes roll. Especially some cringey parts of the book where the hero's journey is spelled out so clearly that it just makes you yawn a bit. But if you're 15/16, filled with ambition, overestimate yourself and underestimate others, have the reaching hand of desire that extends further than yourself, it's a book that charges you with ambition. You also have to remember not everyone reading the book is an American. I read it as a citizen of an authoritarian east asian country that has collectivism built into its fabric. Then you encounter a book that elevates the individual to the highest pedestal, a book that shows what one man can do in this world. A true pornography of the individual. That is quite different from an American, who was told their entire lives that they were an individual, reading the book. No matter how silly it has since become, it's still an important piece of fiction in the American cultural zeitgeist IMO.
cropdustderecho1 year ago
nobody ever moans about their prose being bad because their books usually wrap up by the 270 page mark
Great sex scenes and sexual pathologies, ostensibly a critique of socialism and the state while ironically sharing all of the bolsheviks panglossian core beliefs about the uncomplicated nature of engineering, technology, top-down hierarchies, and will to power. The writing is not as bad as people say, they're just making the classic mistake of inverting libertarianism (a. well known pussy repellent) in the hopes that it attracts puss. It absolutely does not. The writing style is didactic, ideological, and dense, but so are Orwell, London, etc. and nobody ever moans about their prose being bad because those authors do not scare the hoes. Her stuff about american industrial might and individualism and capitalism and genius is all fantasy. Rand entered american culture through Hollywood, no easy feat for a woman with a busted face who developed a theory of beauty that said she was the hottest woman alive (really) instead of hitting the gym to lose the tire around her midsection + kankles. Any response above complaining about her prose without providing comparisons with other ideological novels of ideas of her contemporaries is just repeating something someone told them. It's a style that hasn't aged well, but she was hardly alone, yet that seems to be the standard critique. I wouldn't recommend any of Rand's writing other than We The Living and the short story Red Pawn, but those are about Russia in the 1920s, something she actually understood and experienced. If you possibly can, get the ebook version she later censored herself with the Neitzsche quotes in front of chapter headings where she's explicit about her beliefs being anti-humanist and anti-democratic. Obviously that wouldn't sell in liberal democratic christian humanist america, so she softened it a lot to better fit the anti-communist market niche.
It's written in this immensely rigid prose which always tries to get to the point in the most roundabout form that the charm wears off by the time you're halfway through before subsequently getting progressively more and more grueling. The story beats are also a bit trite and easily discernable once you get what Rand's trying to do, and her bleeding heart soapboxing about the virtues of libertarianism and her unending invocation of the phrase "at the end of the barrel of a gun" every other page doesn't do it any favors. I will admit that she does have a talent for pinning down the exact art nouveau-type aesthetic she fawns over flawlessly, and she can get some good work done with imagery and establishing an atmosphere, but that comes at the expense of foregoing any sort of ideological or artistic subtlety or nuance entirely. Rand's blatant self insert (a Sisyphean, meritocratic woman tragically relegated to remain second in command to incompetent morons) is also used as an outlet and avatar for her rape fantasies so make of that what you will. The Fountainhead is essentially an abridged Atlas Shrugged without the 80 page treatise on objectivism, including the rape fantasies. That said, the "dystopian" elements are admittedly pretty cool, and I think Rand portrays the prospect of an actual competency crisis really well. The blatant political caricatures are also too obnoxiously blatant to not be amusing. Doesn't get any more subtle than "Weasel Mooch".
Ayn Rand, the author, was a major proponent of laissez-faire economics in the United States through her novels. Additionally, she created objectivism—essentially the idea that there is an objective reality and that humanity has an innate drive to improve this. She believed that anything other than laissez-faire would hinder our ability to improve society. Fountainhead is the most overt, but all are extremely obvious in their philosophy. I picked up Atlas Shrugged as a library discard, and it's pretty tedious. At its core, you have a pretty interesting plot but it's heavily bloated with prolonged speeches and unnecessary scenes. She's controversial because of those aforementioned economic and philosophical ideas. She's come to be associated with American libertarians, a group that doesn't have the best reputation. Additionally, she was against social security, all taxes, a minimum wage, child labour laws and other popular measures. There's a story that she died broke and on social security, which contributes to a public perception of her as a hypocrite, but it's not true. She died a millionaire (plus there's been significant inflation over the past 40 years,) and collected social security because she had paid for it earlier—she thought of it as taking what was rightfully hers.
Been a while since I read it, but near the end there is a 60-page monologue that explains Rand's entire philosophy at length. The whole book kinda feels like that; like one incredibly long lecture. If you agree with it, then it probably is fun, but if you have any doubts to the libertarian ideology, it will make no attempts to win you over. I still recommend you read it if you can put up with the length, as it has been an incredibly influential book on conservative ideology. Up until probably Obama, every single conservative politician in the US would talk about how much they loved Rand.
tyrone_magnum1 year ago
I genuinely know nothing about it. I went into a used bookstore the other day, struck up a conversation with the uber conservative owner of the store, and he urged me to read it. He said it changed his life. As per his advice I bought a 5 dollar used paperback copy, and when I went home to read more about it I was shocked to find that it is so universally hated. I have always heard the name of this book tossed around, and it is such a cool/important-sounding title, so I assumed it was some heralded piece of important literature. Can someone please enlighten me before I read 1000 pages of this?
If you wanna see it extrapolated out into what it would look like a accelerated reality that has some fantastical elements to it, watch the storyline of the original Bioshock (the one about the underwater city) on YouTube, on any one of the no-/low-dialogue "Let's Play" channels. You've got an anarcho-capitalist city founder and an anarcho-communist psychologist as the ideologues, and the pragmatic back-channel services opportunist that profits from the infighting and ends up leading a coup of his own by getting the population addicted to drugs. I never read Atlas Shrugged, more than a few pages, but am familiar with the libertarian anarcho-capitalist types, and sufficed it to say that while there may be some novel concepts in there, the anarcho-capitalist concept should mainly just be thought of as a means to get more money rather than a legitimate system of government, because truth-be-told, a world without rules can fall to the Tragedy of the Commons real quick...