The internet is full of parodies, etc., but there really aren't many people who dislike the book and are also capable of persuasively arguing against it without resorting to religious authority or mocking sneers (or both).

Why? Probably because most people haven't read the book. It's not the easiest read. There are great audio versions, but audiobooks are generally viewed with disdain by literary types...

Its because most people don't spend time objectively studying topics/philosophies they don't have a positive bias towards.

Also, the objectivists they're speaking to/at aren't always looking for dialog as much as "scoring points".

You can sometimes, with work and patience, introduce ideas that threaten someone's worldview. But I think people's efforts to do that are as rare as their efforts to objectively study ideas they aren't biased towards.

Galts speech is too drawn out, I skipped over it after 2 pages (it's like 20 pages). Way too much repetition.

Characters are fairly stiff.

For a good month or two after reading I was a selfish shit. In this I think I'm not alone.

It's pretty difficult to find issues with the philosophy espoused in the book, I think the only thing worth criticizing is how poorly it is as a novel (as a political treatise it's a pleasant read).

You can use reason to evaluate actions based on moral principles of low complexity, but you simply can't derive those principles. In terms of formal logic, you need at least one true statement about the morality predicate in order to derive other true statements about it, you can't start from nothing.

Considering that a lot of philosophers rely upon concepts like God, I think Rand's is a lot better developed than people give it credit for.

Rand's notion that humans have brains like animals have claws, and that brains are useful b/c they allow us reasoning, thus reasoning is good (to humans) like claws are good (to an animal)... I think that's a fairly persuasive claim, unless you would argue that human self-deception is more valuable than objectivity...

I would grant that you are correct that reasoning is a utilitarian good (for humans) just as claws are a utilitiarian good (for tigers), but it does not follow from this that reason can derive a notion of moral good.

/not an objectivist

http://home.sprynet.com/~owl1/rand.htm

I have found some obscure philosophical arguments that seemed to be based on a misunderstanding or different interpretation, or making a mountain out of what I think is a molehill. But those are in the minority.

Almost all the criticism I've found seems to take a very shallow, "soundbite" perspective. eg: to presume that the book opposes charity, advocates meanness or evil, etc.

Near as I can tell, there is a huge cult who hates Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged, and the reason seems to be that her book clearly and logically demolishes the philosophy they espouse.

They cannot address it honestly because that would bring up the actual issues in their philosophy and likely many people would see that Atlas Shrugged shows them to be fallacious.

So, instead, they attack her with ad hominem and derision and refuse to be honest about what the book actually said.

The main theme of Atlas Shrugged, as I saw it, is that really smart/creative people are often used and abused by people in power, and that if all the smart/creative people left, that society would collapse.

Now, any attractive philosophy needs to have at least a grain of truth to be popular--and I fully agree that people are abused and manipulated by those in power. I identify as a smart and creative person, so of COURSE I want to be the one calling the shots, and not some idiot!

Where Rand falls short is in idolizing capitalism and taking an idealistic view of human nature. She also misses that if ANY large enough group walked out on society, it would grind to a halt--and that includes truck drivers, janitors, or whoever. It's called a strike.

The reality is that people are born into situations that make it possible to be smart/creative. The studies on this are conclusive--just giving a poor kid an extra year of preschool raises their chance of graduating high school, and their salary 35 years later. It's a fact that you were born to parents who taught you well as a young child that makes you smart enough to be arguing the merits of Ayn Rand.

This all destroys her core axiom that people who are the smart and creative builders of society are that way because of some inner moral purity, and therefore they deserve to be treated fairly--and the rest of society be damned, because they aren't as hard working/moral/whatever. The truth is that smart people are equally likely to be selfish (and lazy!) jerks; "enlightened self interest" is a fantasy that doesn't exist outside of possibly a few individuals and Rand novels. Looking at the other side, people without money or advanced skills frequently will vote against their own economic interests in order to vote their beliefs.

You can't base a real system of government on wishful thinking--ask the USSR how that worked out. Ironic that Rand came from that background only to espouse her own philosophy equally based on wishful thinking...but I digress.

The whole reality, in my opinion, is much bigger than just smart people being exploited: EVERYONE should be treated fairly, and no one should be exploited. Rand entices smart people by telling them that they're special, and that THEY are the ones should should be running the world. And to some degree I can buy into this. ;)

But not to the exclusion of helping others--and the sad truth of the matter is that charities can NOT do enough simply from voluntary contributions to support those who weren't as lucky in selecting their genes, and that means that taxes and government social programs are a necessary part of the moral behavior of society.

As are government rules that protect workers, or that protect the food supply, or that protect the environment, and the other things that libertarianism/objectivism would have us do away with.

She argues for pure, unregulated capitalism, and that's just completely insane. There's too much corporate influence in government as it is, and not enough regulation. Unless you think oil spills are fun, and don't mind the environmental damage that big Ag causes, and think that miners SHOULD be risking their lives for low pay, and on and on...

The reality is that the market spectacularly fails under some circumstances, and that government is necessary to regulate it.

There. I've said it. Let the libertarian downvoting commence...

The basis of your entire argument is deeply flawed.

The book is about the looters that want something for nothing, to the extent that they will steal from the people that are hardworking. It's about Dagny and Hank not wanting to just quit on society because they care about the work they've done and the lives they've built for themselves.

It's Rand's argument that's flawed: When you start from nothing, you can't achieve greatness except by raw luck. This has been shown again and again in economics game theory experiments, and it proves out in observations of real people.

Is it not passion that inspires someone to work three jobs, just to barely support their family? To come to a country where you don't even speak the language and take jobs that pay less than the legal minimum wage, living packed in like sardines, again just so that you can send most of the money back to your family? You can find hundreds of thousands of hard working, passionate people who are living close to or under the poverty line. In Rand's version of reality, those people would all be rich, and only the lazy ones would be poor.

Sure you can point to a few people who've dragged themselves up from really crappy conditions to multi-millionaires. But they're the exception--and it's not because they were the most hardworking, but a combination of hard work and luck.

It sounds like you think that somewhere Rand said all hardworking, moral people would become rich and the rest are lazy or immoral.

I'm pretty sure she did not.

I'm not sure of where it is you think poor people are demonized in the book.

But objectivist politics does blame poor people for their plight--or at best, simply ignores them and leaves them to their fate. "Not my problem" seems to be the general response.

I submit that, until everyone has been given equal opportunities to forge their own destiny, it's immoral to remove the safety net. And that even if people really did have equal opportunities to succeed, that it benefits society to prevent the people who really screw up from starving and living on the streets.

And to do that you need money, which means (at a minimum) taxes. And you also need regulations to protect workers from being exploited--which means no laissez-faire capitalism.

The problem is that if I took your challenge seriously, I'd spend lots of time researching what you said, as well as other perspectives, and...well... Like I said, sounds like fun, but I need to spend my energy on my fledgling business instead. Think of it this way: I'm trying to BE a character in a Rand novel that takes control of his own life and benefits from his own creativity and passion. Or something like that. :)

Also, if we both turned out to be too set in our ways, I think the likely result is that we'd drill down to how our sets of personal axioms contradict each other--really core personal assumptions and views of the world that, to each of us, are non-negotiable. And while I find that kind of thing interesting (see, e.g., George Lakoff, Moral Politics), the net result would be somewhat disappointing--an agreement to disagree.

Thanks for the offer, though.

But you haven't correctly stated the premise or conclusions or provided arguments that rebut he argumentsbitbhas made.

You just assert that socialism is necessary because you assert the market fails. You never give any reason. You conflate government actions with capitalism and then rail against corporate influence.

If you read it it was long enough ago or you weren't aging close enough attention. What you've given us is the knee jerk ideological reaction of every liberal who hears that Rand doesn't hate capitalism.

You haven't actually addressed the book, or what Rand said.

For instance, she didn't blame those exploiting the smart people, as you put it, she blamed the smart people for believing they should themselves be exploited.

Also, to say that Rand didn't "blame" those doing the exploiting is simply wrong: She portrayed those doing the exploiting as evil and without morals (which to her is synonymous). Maybe you can't "blame" a person who is acting out of their nature, but that's a semantic argument. She also said that the smart/hard working people had a choice, and so equally blamed them for going along with being exploited--and that much of her message I agree with, in that I quit my job to start my own company.

But if you're going to accuse me of lying straight out, then there's no real point in arguing. Your responses also didn't address what I actually said--I gave specific examples as to how the market has failed, and blamed the LACK of action of the government on corporate influence. WHY the market fails is far more complicated than can be discussed in a single blog comment--THAT it fails should be sufficient to make my point. The disasters I listed are all caused by too much reliance on libertarian/objectivist principles of absolute laissez faire capitalism. A government that properly protected its citizens and the environment wouldn't have allowed any of the above to happen.

If the reason for that is that you can't see ANY argument as decent, regardless of merit, then there's no point in engaging.

I had an argument with someone a while back that felt like this--I'd give a dozen rational statements that supported my side, and the response was always an attack on a tangential point in one or two. I'd try to dig deeper, and again the argument would derail in a bizarre manner. I think that in situations like this it means that the person responding that way SO MUCH wants to believe his or her side that any challenge is met with an overkill response of rationalization. I think this is where the term "Fractally Wrong" comes from.

From time to time I feel myself reacting that way to a question. I treat it as a warning: There's something that I WANT to believe, that I take as a matter of faith, that I don't really think is true, so my rationalization engine gets kicked into overdrive, and I get angry and the person challenging my assumptions to boot.

I am NOT accusing you of this to attempt to hurt your position. Your responses were not nearly of the magnitude of that past debate opponent. But if things that I -- or anyone else -- is saying cause an extreme emotional response (say, to accuse them of lying rather than just addressing their points), and you feel the need to write out pages of reasons why the other person is wrong without actually dealing with their points directly, then I urge you to perform a bit of self evaluation. See if you might not actually believe your position as rationally as you think you do.

Because when you reply in anger, it makes me feel that I'm attacking a matter of faith rather than a carefully considered position. And when I reply in anger, it says, to me, the same thing about me.

I may be a bit obsessive about writing long answers, but I'm not feeling angry right now.

/tangent

"The window frame trembled with the speed of the motion, the pane hung over empty darkness, and dots of light slashed across the glass as luminous streaks, once in a while." What?

"What she felt in that moment contained, as one nameless part of it, the knowledge of the beauty in the posture of his body as he held her, as they stood in the middle of the room high above the lights of the city"

Again, what?

"This is the world and the core of it, this is what made the city – they go together, the angular shapes of the city and the angular shapes lines of a face stripped of everything but purpose – the rising steps of steel and the steps of being intent upon a goal – this is what they had been, all the men who lived to invent the lights, the steel, the furnaces, the motors – they were the world, they, not the men who crouched in dark corners, half-begging, half-threatening, boastfully displaying their open sores as their only claim on life and virtue – so long as he knew that there existed one man with the bright courage of a new thought, could be given up the world to those other? – so long as he could find a single sight to give him a life-restoring shot of admiration, could he believe that the world belonged to the sores, the moans and the guns? – the men who invented motors did exist, he would never doubt their reality, it was his vision of them that had made the contrast unbearable, so that even the loathing was the tribute of his loyalty to them and to that world which was theirs and his."

Open sores? Why not just choose a suitably racist epithet.

A 50 page speech? Would anyone listening to that (other than in the fake world that the book is set in) actually be awake?

These I got from just googling around, I don't have the book handy. I'll leave you with a quote from an actual writer, Salman Rushdie:

"No. I am not--and have never been--influenced by Ayn Rand. In fact, I pity anyone who is influenced by Ayn Rand. It's almost as bad as being influenced by Dan Brown."

And finally you can go read George Orwell on why the kind of prose that Rand writes, isn't just bad, it's evil. The same way Mein Kampf and the Communist Manifesto are evil:

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm

"As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse."

If you're looking for delicious, eloquent prose, try Fitzgerald or Joyce. Rand's feat with Atlas Shrugged was different -- not just literary. She wrote a tremendous novel of ideas. As I mentioned in one of the other threads, imagine if all of the world's philosophers wrote significant works of fiction to help explain their ideas to the general public!

Also, I don't think that the existence of authors whose strength is the beauty of their prose diminishes Rand's accomplishment in the least. Hers is a different accomplishment and there is room on the book shelf for both.

Notice you ares attempting to argue against a philosophy by using cribbed quits of prose and making the claim that the prose is bad!

Now you can argue that someone needs to read the full novel and all of the not-real-world alt-historic details in order to understand that, yes, in that world completely imagined by Ayn Rand, her philosophy would make sense.

But that says nothing about the applicability of the main point to the world we actually live in. If this is a discussion about fan-fiction rather than political economy, I'll yield the floor.

Step 1: read the book

Step 2: summarize/criticize it

It's not high literature, it's got some flaws, but it's got some great messages - it'd be a shame people who have contradictory politics just throw all those great messages out.

Let's stick with the Lord of the Rings comparison. If Ayn Rand wrote it, Aragorn and Gandalf would have just hopped the first boat west and let the world fend for itself, because hey, what's the world done for them?

If you were born in America with access to a good education, you're in the luckiest 1% of anyone who ever lived anywhere, and that's all before your 10th birthday. The message of Atlas Shrugged, that these people are 100% self-made and the world owes them something for their hard work, is entitled bullshit.

Atlas Shrugged addresses the morality of capitalism. If you want to criticize it, you should be clear what you're criticizing. You seem to have an axe to grind with some subset of Americans, but I'm not sure how that relates to Atlas Shrugged.

In my opinion, legitimate criticism would take the form of an argument against capitalism or an argument that shows how some other economic system is actually far better from a moral standpoint (not just in intention but in results).

Guess what? If you do that, I'll just take your job. 4 weeks of transition and we'll be rolling again.

That's called being the boss. You're accountable and the people who are smaller than you can snipe, you can be bigger than that or you can be one of them.

I find it hard to believe that anybody who's actually had any responsibility in their life would ever get behind taking your ball and going home to spite people.

Nobody expects this of painters, poets, or writers because it is understood that their creative acts are done with love and personal importance.

But creation is creation, whether it's an alloy or a painting or a poem. Rand's point was that it is the same driving force that moves humanity forward.

The question is whether you think of it as something that should be coveted and respected (like, say, the musings of a Poet) or if you simply look at the distribution of wealth and declare that all that is unimportant, that the creative person should care more about helping others than about pursuing his/her work.

The point of the book was not to suggest that people leave, but to show how the morality described in the book could stand alone as first principles of an improved society. The book is a novel of ideas and not (as you seem to have taken it) as a literal prescription for how individuals in society should act.

I can't see why anyone has a problem with someone else just asking to be left alone.

As I understood it, the message of Atlas Shrugged is that no one owes anyone else anything except by voluntary agreement. The only people who owe Dagny anything are her passengers, and they owe her only train fare.

(The only exception being that everyone owes a small amount of tax money to pay for public goods, e.g. police protection.)

You should really read a book before criticizing it.

Any CEO who wants to "go galt" can go right ahead -- they'll be replaced easily enough.

Rand is well aware of this point. You seem unaware that the fundamental conflict in the novel is between strikers (Galt, Wyatt) and scabs (Dagny, Reardon). For the strike to be a complete success, it is necessary for most/all of the high value scabs to go on strike so as to make replacing strikers difficult.

As for whether you owe society anything, I recognize that your moral principles are different from those of Rand. I'm just curious whether your criticisms of her go beyond simple disagreement.

As far as "beyond simple disagreement", I guess "strenuous disagreement"?

The fans of Rand philosophy seem to hate the idea of union employees striking for dental care for their kids but have no problem attempting to shake down the system if you're already rich. I totally do not understand this.

Similarly, I think the whole "everyone's replaceable" thing is a fundamental part of reality that anyone over the age of 14 should have figured out. I find it ironic when I get told that if I were older and less idealistic, I'd come around to Rand's viewpoint. Seems to me she's the idealist, except it's bizzaro idealism that fetishises selfishness.

Finally, as I said elsewhere in the thread, the novel's viewpoint on leadership clashes pretty strongly with my own viewpoint on leadership. Leadership's not about what's in it for you, it's about what's in it for the group, or else you're a bad leader.

"Needless to say, men have a right to organize into unions, provided they do so voluntarily, that is, provided no one is forced to join."

http://www.nathanielbranden.com/catalog/articles_essays/labo...

Presumably she agreed with him, since she published it in the Objectivist Newsletter.

And yes, you are quite correct that Rand's novels tend to be idealistic and fairly unrealistic. They are merely parables designed to explain/promote her philosophy.

[1] He was her biggest fan when he wrote that. He got kicked out of the cult a few years later, when Rand found out he was banging someone besides her and his wife.

I'm mostly concerned with the "Going Galt" bit, which I'm either understanding as originally conveyed or every summary I've read from both ends of the political spectrum was egregiously wrong. So if you'd like to correct me on what "Going Galt" means, please feel free. It looks to me like a total cop-out abdication of responsibility that would change precisely nothing - because everyone's replaceable.

Frankly, the ending is a bit unsatisfactory on a few levels. First, it's not a prescription for how to run a society (it's a small utopian community in the mountains) and yet the book ends quickly at that point so we're left wondering how it turned out.

It was necessary as a plot element, but it's really the denouement rather than the climax of the book.

I recommend you buy the unabridged audio version of the book and give it a read while driving, commuting, etc. It has fairly good production quality and is a fairly effortless read on audio.

When I re-read it my reaction was that Rand uses some hyperbole in places where I (if I were the editor) would have recommended a slightly softer touch... but of course she is writing to the first time the reader encounters the story and she wants to be sure to lay down a solid plot foundation early so that the rest of the book can progress.

What I found remarkable about the book was that it's a pure novel of ideas. One can only imagine (while drooling) how amazing it would be if all the world's great thinkers had written a few books of quality fiction to help illustrate their ideas. So in my opinion Rand should get points added for the fiction work, not points subtracted.

Is the book in the fantasy section? Does it have a disclaimer "this context is nothing like the real world so don't apply any of these philosophies"? As I understand it, the book is attempting to make a point about the real world.

I'm saying that point is totally ignorant of how the real world works, particularly how leadership works.

The book is a novel of ideas and is, as such, an abstraction. You should not try to interpret it as a prescription for how society should work.

I think what you're looking for is some sort of political treatise or pamphlet. Atlas Shrugged is an argument about the morality of capitalism. If you are looking for more than that in it you'll be disappointed.

I do recommend you take my advice and read it though... I generally have a policy of reimbursing people in beer for the amount they spend on a paperback version. I'm sure that I or someone else would happily extend that offer :)

On other occasions Rand explicitly said the strike in AS was a 'if, and only if' situation and not applicable to the present world (ie. not justified. ie. not in anyone's interest). The point was that socialism/altruism had taken such a firm grip of the nation (and the rest of the world) that any grand enterprise that still existed merely prolonged the agony by feeding the ruling parasites. Once the protagonists finally realized this, they went on strike.

The strike worked because society had reached a point where those producers genuinely were irreplaceable, in that their likes were no longer being bred/trained by the industries. The book (and history) is littered with examples of the types of laws/systems responsible for this talent drought, and the young people who find themselves on the resulting scrapheap.

Isn't that the plot of every Charles Dickens novel ever?

A moments thought, if you know anything of Rands works, would demonstrate this to you. If you read The Foundtainhead, then you know that Roark gave up work for years because he had higher values in life than simply to maximize his income. And Atlas Shrugged was about a man who did the same, and took a bunch of others with him -- not because they thought this was the best way to optimize their long-term money making potential, but because the rest of the world had come to regard them, being creative and productive individuals, as chattel. (You might also recall that while there were a number of titans of industry, one was a composer, another was a professor, another an train engineer, etc.)

I don't know what it is about Rand that makes people think they're entitled to sling nonsense about her views around without the slightest effort at substantiation. You say Rand's is a "fairy tale land where everybody is always capable of making rational decisions with perfect information" and "Markets are always perfectly efficient". This is your fairy tale about Rand's views. I studied all of Rand's works quite extensively from about the age of 17 to 27, and I'm confident you cannot demonstrate that Rand held such views.

Rand gave up $0.07/copy in royalties to make sure Galt's speech was included in the book.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/189415/word-count/nicol...

Roark, in the Fountainhead, also turns down money (and shuts down his company) to preserve his artistic vision.

I really don't know where you got this idea from.

http://www.silverbearcafe.com/private/aynrand.html

The quote has nothing whatsoever to do with maximizing profits. It's about watching the flow of money to determine what kind of society you live in.

Where did I get it wrong?

Well, just as the Marx fairy tail is studied, I think the Rand fairy tail (and it is) is good for thought too.

Sounds like it's going to be hilariously bad.

If any of the critics you see from leftists who attack it used these arguments than I'd respect that. However, they just assert some nonsense and then engage in adhominem and it is really pretty tragic.

http://www.angryflower.com/atlass.gif