Atlas Shrugged: The Hidden Context of the Book and Film

Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates. – Mark Twain

There was nothing else even remotely interesting at Blockbuster — so we rented ATLAS SHRUGGED.

Well, after all,  I often talk about Ayn Rand and her passionate followers, who have effectively taken over the U.S. Libertarian movement, influencing much of the rhetoric we hear from the American Right… though none of the policies have ever been actually enacted during Republican rule. I’ve published both scholarly papers and popular articles about Rand’s fiction and philosophy.

So, I thought, why not give her acolytes one more shot at selling me on her biggest, most-central tale? An honest person does that. Whereupon, with a sigh, but opening my ears and mind, I slid the disk into the player….

== For the record ==

First a couple of honest disclaimers:  1) It may seem that I am aiming most of my critical attention, lately, at “right-wing authors.” (Last time I dissected Frank Miller’s travesty “300,” showing how it tells outright historical lies in service of a deeply anti-American theme. ) But I do notice foibles of the left!  For example, I promise soon to offer up that long-awaited piece about James Cameron’s beautiful but misguided film, AVATAR.

2) As one of the few sci fi authors who delivered a keynote at a political party convention – indeed it was the Libertarian Party – I may seem somewhat of a “heretic” to the Rand-followers who now dominate the LP. But no one can deny my ongoing campaign to get folks to read Adam Smith, the founding sage of both libertarianism and liberalism.

Like Smith, I believe in fair and open competition – the greatest creative force in the universe and the process that made us.  Encouraging vibrant, open rivalry – in markets, democracy, science, etc – is one reason to promote universal transparency (see The Transparent Society ), so that all participants may base their individual decisions on full knowledge. That positive aim – also preached by Friedrich Hayek – should be the goal of any sane libertarian movement… instead of fetishistically hating all government, all the time, which is like a poor workman blaming the tools. Anyway, a movement based on hopeful joy beats one anchored in rancorous scapegoating, any day.

(Smith also favored feeding and educating all children, for the pragmatic reason that this maximizes the number of skilled, adult competitors, a root motive of liberalism and a role for government that is wholly justifiable in libertarian terms.)

For my full, cantankerously different take on the plusses and minuses of contemporary libertarianism — and other oversimplifying dogmas — have a look at this essay: Models, Maps and Visions of Tomorrow.

Only now, with due diligence done, let’s get back to ATLAS SHRUGGED: THE MOTION PICTURE.

== Rand’s Books… and the Movie ==

Despite my low esteem of Ayn Rand’s simplistic dogma, I do rate THE FOUNTAINHEAD as by far her best book. In its smaller and more personal scope, that novel offered a pretty effective (if melodramatic) portrayal of  uncompromising genius having to overcome the boneheaded doorkeepers of art and architecture — two realms that are always beset by bullies and villainy.  In that tale, the hero’s adversaries came across as multi-dimensional and even somewhat plausible, if also a bit cartoonish. Indeed, the 1950s Gary Cooper movie was pretty good, for a Rand story.

Alas, in contrast, ATLAS SHRUGGED takes on civilization as a whole — all of its institutions and enlightenment processes, top to bottom — calling every last one of them corrupt, devoid of hope, intelligence or honor. Moreover it proclaims that the vast majority of our fellow citizens are braying, silly sheep.

(Consider this irony; a movement propounding that all people can and should think for themselves also teaches its adherents to openly despise their neighbors as thinking beings. A party that proclaims fealty to market forces also holds that the number of deciders and allocators can and should be very small. In other words, you can have Hayek or Rand. Not both.)

But pause a moment. How does the book hold up, strictly from the perspective of writing and art? Well… I won’t mince words. ATLAS SHRUGGED royally sucks as a novel, with cardboard characters, rivers of contrived coincidence and dialogue made of macaroni. (Can you dig a 70 page SPEECH?) Of course, none of those things matter if your taste runs to an endless smorgasbord of resentment. In which case the speechifying is mother’s milk!

Heck, the left produces plenty of polemics just as turgidly tendentious. In fact, I just pretty much described The Handmaid’s Tale.

Given such source material — and universal boos from both critics and the viewing public — was I surprised to find that the movie version of Atlas Shrugged bites, at the level of basic film 101 storytelling?  For example, it is only in the last five minutes that the director deigns to clarify a core villain! As for the “heroes”… well, their famously emotionless “I don’t give a crap” mien may work for campus geeks. But not in cinema, where passion propels.

(A deeply ironic and smirk-worthy “oops” appeared on the cover of the DVD version, blurbing ATLAS SHRUGGED as a saga of “courage and self-sacrifice” — which would be the ultimate Randian sin!)

== A High Point ==

One sequence of this film does stand out.  I’m a sucker for lyrical cinematography, especially when it involves beautiful scenery, or else a love-ode to fine technology.  And there’s about ten minutes in ATLAS SHRUGGED when we get both, as the male and female leads ride their new super-train along shimmering rails made of miraculous metal, speeding across gorgeous Rockies and over a gasp-worthy bridge.

The emotional payoff — two innovators triumphing over troglodyte naysayers by delivering an awesome product — portrayed Rand’s polemical point in its best conceivable light.  (I am all for that aspect of the libertarian dream! Indeed, it is the core theme that makes THE FOUNTAINHEAD somewhat sympathetic and persuasive.)  So, for ten minutes, we actually liked the characters and rooted for them.  Significantly, it is the portion when nobody speaks.

Alas, though. The film then resumed a level of simplistic lapel-grabbing that many of us recall from our Rand-obsessed college friends — underachievers who kept grumbling from their sheltered, coddled lives, utterly convinced that they’d do much better in a world of dog-eat-dog.  (Using my sf’nal powers, I have checked-out all the nearby parallel worlds where that happened; in those realms, every Randian I know was quickly turned into a slave or dog food. Sorry fellows.)

Ah well. Let’s  set aside the pathetic storytelling, crappy direction and limp drama to appraise the film on its own, intended merits. On what it tried to be. A work of polemical persuasion.

== The Core Polemical Purpose ==

ATLAS SHRUGGED is, after all, an indictment of modernist, enlightenment, Smithian-liberal civilization. To Rand, this “great experiment” has all been one big mistake, doomed to expire from its own internal contradictions.

(I use that Marxian expression deliberately. For, in significant dialectical ways, Ayn Rand was deeply influenced by Karl Marx–virtually an acolyte, in fact. Thematically, she simply changes the list of villains, but keeps the nearly identical scenario of bourgeoise decadence, guild protection and teleological decay.)

Hence we witness society making one dismal choice after another — an endless chain of socialist or meddlesome-statist outrages against individual initiative. Laws that punish or seize companies who “compete too well.” Or civil servants trying to force faux-equality on everybody, crushing the truly creative wealth producers.

Indeed, if I ever witnessed our nation passing the kind of insane bills that are reported in this film (piled one-after-another, every five minutes), heck, I’d be looking for John Galt myself!

Yet, I’m enough of a libertarian to know that foolish things do happen! Witness Europe, mired in nanny-state entitlements, eight week vacations and a “right to retire” as young as 55.  Self-defeating regulations prevent companies from firing workers, with the consequence that they seldom hire new ones! As for the movie’s heroine, Ayn Rand chose a railroad heiress for good reasons. The old Interstate Commerce Commission (dissolved by the democrats in the late 1970s, but still a horror when she wrote) was the classic exemplar of a government bureaucracy “captured” by lordly oligarchs and used as a tool to squelch competition.

In other words, the endless litany of “leveling” crimes against creative enterprise that roll across the page/screen in ATLAS SHRUGGED aren’t entirely without real-world analogues! Her fictional crimes against creative enterprise are based on a genuine complaint… that Rand-ites regularly exaggerate more than 100-fold, alas, into caricatures and absurd over-generalizations.

To see this danger expressed far better – and more succinctly – than Rand ever managed, read the terrific Kurt Vonnegut story: Harrison Bergeron. Other expressions of legitimate libertarian worries can be seen in the fiction of Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein. They have a point.

Okay, the core worry is a valid one and somebody in society should keep warning us! Though ideally, someone with common sense and proportion, alas.

I mean, gee whiz. Ayn Rand railed against the ICC… and it was eliminated! Canceled, rubbed out, utterly erased by the very same democratic processes that she and her followers despised. Competition among railroads was restored and it was done by a mix of pressure from a savvy public and resolution by genuinely reform-minded politicians. If Ayn Rand were writing the book today, a railroad would not have been her chosen archetype.

I wonder: did anyone making the film ever ponder this? Did any Randians notice at all?

== A Remarkable Chain of Ironies ==

I guess I sound pretty harsh. Only now, let me do one of my famous contrary swerves and openly avow something that Ayn Rand gets right. Despite gross exaggeration, she pretty much nails the basic problem!

Almost every time the book or film depict some betrayal of human competitive ingenuity, it happens like this:

A conspiracy of “old money” oligarchs gathers in conniving secrecy, exerts undue political influence and misuses government power for their own, in-group self-aggrandizement. Except for a few, pathetic union stewards, the ruination of market forces is stage managed from the top. The squelching of entrepreneurial enterprise and the corruption of trade is always executed by villainous old-guard capitalists! Moguls who don’t want any rivalry from rambunctious newcomers.

Now think about that. Socialists do come under derision from Rand, but mostly as ninnie, do-gooder tools of the scrooge-oligarchs!  In fact, this is where her followers get things right!  Anyone who considers the long, lamentable epic of human history will recognize this as the ancient pattern, pervasive across 99% of cultures — with the most prevalent sub-version being feudalism.

What Randians never explain is how getting rid of constitutional-enlightenment government will prevent this ancient curse from recurring. (Were the oligarchs stymied in ancient China, Babylon or Rome, where liberal constitutions were absent?) Indeed, enlightenment governments are the only force that ever kept the feudal sickness partially in check! Exactly as prescribed by Adam Smith.

(Name another society that ever made more libertarians, hm?)

In other words, by her very own premise, the answer isn’t for creative people to “go on strike.” It is to fix the tool (government) by yanking it out of the hands of conspiratorial criminals who have improperly seized it.  You do that with transparency, with light. Not by blaming the tool and throwing it away.

== You Are Getting Very Sleeeeepy… ==

Oh, but more ironies abound! Here you have a polemic about individualism, that portrays one accomplished CEO after another “gone missing”… dropping out of sight after each one listens to a solitary pitchman from a utopian community, who croons “Come. Follow me and joiiiin usssss.”.

Um, let’s see. When have we heard that before? Drop everything. All your past loyalties and the companies you’ve built. Stop fighting for your family or country. Listen to this incantation and follow our charismatic leader to the special society he has built, just for the exclusive elect, like you!

Good lord, does she have to make the hypnotism-cult thing quite so explicit? So very much like Jim Jones and David Koresh? Did you know that Rand-followers who recite her catechisms light up exactly the same parts of the brain as other true-believers pronouncing passages from the Bible or Koran or Hindu Sutras? And these are not the corners of cortex used by scientists while performing analytical or “objective” reasoning.

But you don’t need any of that to conclude we’re dealing with a cult. Just follow the recruitment process used by John Galt. (Who surreptitiously sabotages successful companies in order to drive their owners into his arms! Oh, criminy.)

Yes, I’ll admit that Ayn Rand at least portrays technology as good. That gives her points over the dismal Tea Partiers, or Fox, or the equally dismal (though far less-numerous) science haters of a ditzy-fringe far left.  Alas, she treats technology like something magical. Lone inventors weave a spell and suddenly there’s a new metal or new motor. The vast intricacy of collaboration, development, supplier networks, and infrastructure is both a topic to Rand and an excuse for incantatory over-simplification.

But it is science that truly gets short shrift. Ayn Rand’s lack of any reference to scientific research that might support or falsify her assertions about human nature should send alarm bells clanging. Her ignorance of Darwin, for example, is almost identical to Marx, but much less excusable, given when she lived.

The analog to Rand is not the scientist Darwin, but the rhetorician Plato. Sure, she claims to prefer Aristotle. But in both verbal process and reasoning style, she is Plato’s truest heir.

==Ayn Rand on Privacy==

All right, veering briefly aside from Atlas Shrugged, let’s see what Rand says about privacy, a topic I happen to know a lot about:

“Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.” 

Of course, there is a level at which Rand is simply stating the obvious. That autonomy and long lives arose as our technology and civilized complexity improved. When food surpluses were meager, only a tiny aristocracy could be subsidized and unchained from the land. But a mixture of science and continental peace mixed with our ability to trade goods and services till even science fiction authors can now pretend we are producers of a primary product, worthy of being fed by farmers.

As for the quote itself: as usual, Ayn Rand mixes some core truths of the Enlightenment with mystical teleology.  The rise of the individual – never steady or even – has been a core theme of the West, ever since the Renaissance, and especially the Enlightenment. But this progression isn’t fated, ordained or even natural.

Rand looks at a couple of hundred years and one quarter of the planet, and assumes the trend is unstoppable. But Huxley and Orwell – backed up by Malthus and Darwin – showed us what’s “natural.”  The diamond-shaped social structure that we take for granted can all-too easily slump back into the oligarch-dominated pyramid.

Only Enlightenment methods ever offered an alternative hope. Rand followers take it for granted. Indeed, they assume that we can dismantle the processes and structures that Adam Smith prescribed, that made the Enlightenment work in the first place.

They bear a burden of proof that we would not just slump back into the condition that prevailed, for thousands of years, before Smith and his colleagues came along.  In America, that slump is already well underway.

== The Posterity Problem ==

But the best is saved for last.  I hope at least a few libertarians – those most-favored with our greatest human trait, curiosity – have hung with us to this point.

Elsewhere, I’ve revealed the biggest and most telling red flag about Ayn Rand – one that I’ve not seen mentioned elsewhere. It is that none of her characters, at any level or in any way, ever indulge in the most basic human project, bearing and raising and loving children.

There is a reason that Rand absolutely and consistently avoided any mention of procreation — because writing in even one member of a next-generation would shine searing light upon the biggest flaw of her hypnotic spell, revealing that her “fresh” tale is actually the oldest one in the human saga.

Look, we all know this about aristocracy — that it seldom breeds true. In the past, royal or aristocratic houses would grow fat, lazy and decadent. England’s Plantagenets managed to stay virile for 400 years but most lines devolved much quicker. Oligarchs had to make inheritance-of-privilege state policy! They gave top priority to quashing open markets, science, democracy or equal justice! Because any of these liberal processes might engender new competitors to rise, afresh, from below, exposing the spoiled great-grandkids to dangerous rivals.

Yet, even so, there was some churn! A violent form of social mobility.  Inevitably those decadent houses got toppled by new, fresh blood. By vibrant competitors who grew lean and tough in exile. Who trained and gathered their forces in the woods, then swooped in to storm the castle!  And thereupon established a new lordly line.

This ancient cycle is the very essence of what Ayn Rand stands for.  Her characters are the brash, virile, sturdy, innovative barbarians, born free and ready to seize destiny in their own two hands, ripping fortune out of the clutches of pathetic old-fart lords who are spent and bereft of might. It’s the oldest story, writ-new and draped with modernist garments. Even in her portrayals of sex, the closest parallel is a godlike Viking lord who kicks down the door and takes what he desires. Because he is the grandest thing in all directions. And because he can.

It is an ancient mythos that resonates deeply in our bones and especially within pasty-skinned, pencil-necked nerds, who picture themselves as Achilles, as John Wayne, as Ender Wiggin, as Harry Potter or some other demigod. An old, old formula that was mined by A. E. Van Vogt and L. Ron Hubbard and Orson Scott Card and so many others.

But therein lies a problem!  It’s the romantic Phase One of the old cycle that Rand admires – the rise of a self-made buccaneer who seizes lordship from decadent, inbred fools.

Phase Two – what happens next – she never talks about. She averts her eyes and the reader’s attention.

Why do none of Rand’s characters ever have kids? Because they’ll inherit the olympian status wrested by Howard Roark or by Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden. Sons and daughters of demigods, they will assume privileges and power that they never earned through fair competition. They will take lordship for granted as a right of blood, and use it to squelch new competitors from rising to face them on a level playing field. It’s what happened in 99% of human societies.

Ayn Rand faces a steep burden of proof that “this time it’ll be different.” A burden she never picks up. Rather, she shrugs it off.

If there are offspring, then the reader might become consciously aware of this inevitable outcome. and realize: “Hey, I’ve seen all this before. It’s the same old boring-human pattern, and nothing new, after all.”

== The Problem Is People… ==

Oh, but maybe I am reading too much into this aversion toward kids. After all, as the recent film reminds us, Ayn Rand was pretty much an equal opportunity hater of people, in general. (As evidenced by her passionately-admiring defense of the horrific murderer William Edward Hickman.)

Just look at how brothers are portrayed in ATLAS SHRUGGED.  Always treacherous, small-minded, parasitical and craven. Clearly, Rand is no Nazi, no believer in the paramountcy of blood. Sons, daughters, brothers and sisters? Neighbors? Strangers? Spouses? Co-workers? Civilization? Bah, who needs em. Who needs anybody?

Well? I said she ignores Darwin and this is consistent! Reproductive success? Fie and feh!

Her ubermensch demigods are less like “lords” – obsessed with establishing an inherited clan of privilege – than they are pirates – superior in boldness and in mind, going wherever they like, taking what they deserve by the very essence of what they are.

And hey, doesn’t everybody love a pirate?

Yoho. That’s the life for me.