Misadventures in the Ayniverse

A few years ago, I felt the need to re-read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.  I had read the book back in high school, but that was (ahem, ahem) years ago, and the only character I could remember by name was John Galt himself.  But then, somebody made a movie out of it, in three parts, and I watched the first two parts and was totally lost. Plus, Rand's principles were gaining some renewed traction in the real world, particularly among corporate execs and tea-party pols.  So I thought that if I read the original again, I would have a better understanding of what I was hearing and seeing.

The Story, Such As It Is...

Well, first off,  this is a very long book--about 1,100 pages in the paperback edition--and over half of it is various characters brooding and having sudden epiphanies about life, the universe and everything.  If all that were gone, the story would have been a much more pleasant read.  There is a railroad mogul named James Taggart, who is a tool in more ways than one;  his unmarried sister Dagny is a vice president of the railroad, and is the real brains of the company (in a flashback we find out that she sneaked away as a teenager to get a railroad job;  as a result, she knows just about everything there is to know about how it all works).  The government is trying to tell them how to do business, and it's hurting the company's profits and irritating Dagny no end.

Elsewhere we have Hank Rearden, a steel magnate who has just invented a new type of alloy, which he calls Rearden Metal.  It's better in every way than conventional steel, and is therefore expensive.  The government wants Rearden to share his formula with other steel-makers, and they've passed a law to make him do it.  This irritates Rearden no end.  Adding to his woes are a controlling mother and a parasitic brother, both of whom live with him and his wife (who, of course, doesn't love him or understand his enthusiasm for his craft, but does love his money and the lavish lifestyle it provides).

As lesser characters we have Francisco d'Anconia, a free-wheeling playboy who actually has a pretty shrewd business sense;  Wesley Mouch, who is supposed to be Rearden's "man in Washington" (lobbyist), but who goes quisling and thereby gets a good start up the greasy pole of politics;  and Ragnar Danneskjold, an honest-to-goodness Viking who has been a latter-day Terror of the High Seas...but only to government shipping.

Hiding behind the scenes for most of the book, we have John Galt, an inventor who disappeared years ago.  But somehow, his name has crept into common parlance:  when asked a question for which there is no answer, the average man will shrug and reply,  "Who is John Galt?"

Dagny meets Rearden at a party;  she also meets Rearden's wife, who is wearing a bracelet made of Rearden Metal.  After Dagny admires the bracelet, Mrs. Rearden gives it to her--not as a friendly gesture, but because she doesn't like it;  it's not made of real precious metals, after all!  Dagny and Rearden click, and they make a deal for Rearden Metal to be used on one of the Taggart rail lines.  One thing leads to another, and they have an affair.  Rearden would like to divorce his wife, but for some reason, this is nearly impossible;  but after she betrays him once too often--honestly, I can't remember what that last straw was, but Rearden orders his lawyers to find a way to ditch her, no matter how much it costs him, either in money or reputation.

Francisco misleads a bunch of investors into a copper-mining deal that was designed to fail (they're all "looters," so they deserve it), but he makes sure to warn Dagny not to get on board--but James ignores her warning and loses a bunch of money, irritating Dagny yet again!

Meanwhile, an oil baron named Ellis Wyatt has his dander up because the government is interfering with his business, and he's had enough.  So he disappears...but before he does, he sets his latest oil well on fire;  it burns both night and day and gains the name "Wyatt's Torch."  That's when Dagny begins to realize that the real creative people in every field have been dropping out of sight for quite a while, and the whole country has been going to pot ever since.

(The rest of the world has pretty much gone Communist--every other country you hear about in Atlas Shrugged is now a "People's State of Such-and-so."  The USA is better off than all these other countries...but not by much, and not for long!)

Dagny and Rearden head for...I think it's Pennsylvania, in search of Galt's invention:  a machine that harnesses the static electricity in the atmosphere so it can be used to power machinery.  Such a machine would solve America's energy woes, but the two lovers never bring it back.  I can't remember why--eleven hundred pages, remember?  But I do remember that Dagny was horrified that in this depressed area, the only horsepower to be found came from actual horses, and that Rearden looked admiringly on an open field and said that what it really needed was for someone to build a big factory there!

Ragnar Danneskjold meets up with Rearden on a dark road, tells him that he has been robbed, and offers him a bar of gold "about the size of a carton of cigarettes" as a partial payback for what the "looters" and "moochers" have stolen.  When Rearden, horrified by this self-styled pirate, refuses the offer, Ragnar drops the bar and leaves.  (I should point out here that although Rand did her research on railroads and the steel industry, she never bothered to find out what gold in that quantity would weigh.  If it's a standard-sized cigarette carton, a gold bar of that size would weigh over a hundred pounds!  And Ragnar was just holding it out in one hand, no strain!  A similar error is made later in the book, when Dagny is paid with a small gold coin that feels "weightless" in her hand.)

Meanwhile, the government has discovered that Rearden Metal can be weaponized in a very nasty way;  so, since Rearden has refused to share the formula, they start buying it all up.  James Taggart sells the metal that was used for rails in one of the company railroads in order to gain some extra money for the company.  He also meets a shop girl who thinks he's grand and brilliant, and this impresses him so much that he marries her.  She later regrets the union once she sees what a creep James really is, and she flees his house, rejecting the world around her and committing suicide.

Francisco now comes to Dagny and tells her that he will now be "disappearing" as well;  she can't come because she's not ready yet, but he implies that her time will come.  She doesn't get it, but she finds a clue and follows someone else who is apparently "disappearing" as well, and when she sees his plane actually disappear, she follows, and lo and behold, she finds herself in a hidden valley called "Galt's Gulch" where she meets John Galt (and immediately falls in love with him, only to discover that he has been angling for her as well) and some of the other creative folk that have gone missing (who proclaim that they are "on strike" and call her a "scab").  Galt sends Dagny back to the outside world, telling her that he is going to reveal his agenda soon.  And he does:  he takes over the airwaves, and for the next 60-odd pages, John Galt proclaims his philosophy to the world.  (I started skimming after 10 pages--I was perfectly able to get the gist of it that way.)

Galt's broadcast causes chaos, both in the government and among the ordinary people;  this, coupled with various failed government policies, causes American society to pretty much break down.

Agents of the government capture Galt and torture him, but Dagny and Rearden rescue him (even though he had warned Dagny to stay away).  Rearden realizes that Dagny has found her soul mate in Galt, and releases her with no apparent regret.  And the end of the story has the three of them looking out over a devastated country, ready to come back and remake it into a new Objectivist utopia.

That's the story, pretty much.  I'm surprised at how much I have forgotten...but even more so, I'm surprised at what I remember, and why.  For example:

Dagny is travelling on one of her high-speed trains, and as she's walking through a corridor, she finds one of her conductors ousting a stowaway.  The train is on a tight schedule, so they will not stop to let the man off;  he will have to jump, and it will probably kill him.  Dagny stands uncaring as the man prepares to jump...but she notices that even now, he clutches his bundle of belongings as though they were worth everything.  This causes Dagny to spare the man and let him stay;  she even feeds him and talks with him, and this stowaway just happens to know the untold story of the failed auto company where John Galt worked!  What struck me about this was just how Dagny's mind worked;  she was ready and willing to let a human being die, just to preserve her company's profits, until she saw that he valued his possessions!  I just think that's a weird reason to have compassion on anybody.

One of the tramp's stories about the auto company stuck with me, as well.  The company has gone socialist in the extreme, which means that everyone is paid the same amount no matter what his job is or how hard he works.  But there are times when someone might want or need something extra, and then the entire company gets together and decides whether to allow the extra expenditure or not.  According to the tramp, there was an old man there who liked jazz, and wanted to buy some jazz records, but at the same time, another worker wanted braces for his daughter's teeth.  (Rand makes sure that we know that this is a most unpleasant child;  in the Ayniverse, one must truly be worthy of help, or he/she is just another moocher!)  The daughter gets the braces, and the old man, stung by this injustice, turns to the bottle for solace (why he didn't save the booze money to buy his records, I don't know).  One night, while walking drunk down the street, he meets the girl, and he punches her in the mouth!  Which, of course, knocks all her teeth out.  The whole thing sounded horrifying to me, mainly because a child should not be blamed for the decisions of adults.

Oh, and then there's the beggar (moocher) to whom James Taggart gives a $100 bill.  The man snarls at Taggart instead of thanking him, but the weird thing to me was the bill itself.  Was Taggart giving him that much money to be generous, or because inflation was through the roof?

Why The Hell Did I Start This, Anyway?!

This was a very tough read.

Now, don't get me wrong.  I'm not afraid of long books.  I can gulp down a good one in a matter of days--less if I'm on vacation.  But Atlas Shrugged took over a month to finish, mainly because it's badly written.  It's so jingoistic it makes your teeth hurt, none of the characters is even remotely likable, and even the love scenes are cold and unfeeling.  Everything is all about logic and reason, and although Rand doesn't appear to espouse eugenics, the philosophy of the Ayniverse is social Darwinism in the extreme.  And the system of government that her protagonists are ready to implement is actually plutocratic fascism.  Francisco d'Anconia voices this perfectly when he says that a society is doomed to fail when the bulk of its money is in the hands of non-producers.  Of course, you wonder how anyone's going to be able to buy what is produced unless they have money, but oh, well, that's life in the Ayniverse.

There are also invisible--or nearly so--elements in the book.  There are no disabled people in Atlas Shrugged, so I don't know how Rand felt about them.  Children are mostly either shadowy hide-behind-mama's-skirts types, or they're vandals...except for two children that Dagny meets in Galt's Gulch.  That pair sound like they stepped out of a Hitler Youth poster!  The elderly are either broken people, or they're bitter.  The Ayniverse is clearly not for any of these.

I had to keep reminding myself that I started reading the book so that I would understand the "new" politics being espoused by the corporate wogs and extreme conservative politicians.  Well, when I finished, I did.  It all boils down to...

Supply-Side Economics--Giant-Sized Package

The only reason I don't think Reagan got his ideas for Reaganomics from Atlas Shrugged is that I don't think he could have slogged through it.  After all, it's not a Western, and there are no monkeys in it...okay, just kidding.  But even Reaganomics is kind and gentle compared to what Rand was proposing.  She hated unions, child labor laws, and government regulation of any kind on business.  That would include environmental controls.  The book was written before the effects of DDT on birds' eggs were discovered, and before industrial pollutants were causing the Cuyahoga River to catch fire, and even before smog became a real issue;  but even if she had known about all that, I don't think Rand would have cared.

Just as battle plans never survive contact with the enemy, so no philosophy survives unscathed when practiced in real life by real people.  And supply-side economics of any stripe goes wrong almost at once, and the longer it is practiced, the worse things get.  We have been practicing SSE for almost 40 years now, and the results speak for themselves:  jobs sent overseas, leaving fewer living-wage jobs for Americans;  wealth concentrating into the hands of a smaller and smaller group of people;  control of the government going to those with the most money to spend on campaign contributions.  We have become, in practice if not in name, a plutocracy.  Neither party can be held blameless for this--NAFTA was passed during the Clinton administration, and although it looked good on paper, Perot turned out to be totally correct about that "giant sucking sound."

But bad as this all is, the Ayniverse would be even worse.  No unions allowed--which means every business would be like Walmart.  And what if an employer's idea of your worth isn't the same as yours?  Well, you quit and go somewhere you'll be appreciated, right?  But if you have a family to support, you can't just hit the road with your pack on your back.  And even if you're single, you won't have enough money to just up and move!

Your child, young adventurer that she is, might decide to become a welder at 13.  She might even be good at it...at least until she forgot a crucial step (as kids do sometimes--ever eaten a kid's batch of cookies with the wrong amount of flour, or no sugar?) and ended up blinded, crippled, or dead.  But that was the kid's decision, right?

And you can forget about clean air or water, or food safety, or indeed any sort of limit on the way businesses operate.  If people get sick and die, well, they were the weak ones.  Anyone who protested would be a whiner, not worth listening to...and the government would always be on the side of the businesses.

Is This Scaring You Yet?

Or maybe it sounds like paradise.

My bet is that the way you react to Atlas Shrugged reflects your attitude toward several things:  money, self, and industry.  Rand, you see, idolized them all.  People in the Ayniverse  have no intrinsic worth;  they must prove themselves to be worthy before they are acceptable, and the worthiest of all are the ones who can make money by creating something.  Those who work for the creative ones are still worthy, but lower in class;  and lowest of all would be those who either can't or won't work.  Every society has its lazy people, and in the Ayniverse their fate would be grim--they would be allowed to starve.  Well, serves them right...but remember the invisible disabled people I mentioned earlier?  Do they deserve to starve?  How about orphans?  Oh, but without child labor laws, they can be put to work, right?

So yeah, I'm scared.  Because if the Ayniverse comes to pass, it will truly be the end of the world as we know it...but no one will feel fine for long.

Because even a producer can't survive without clean air, water and food.  And gold isn't edible.