Is Atlas Shrugging?

The comparisons and contrasts to Rand's opus are legion, but no less accurate.

Atlas’ shoulders are getting tired. Perhaps the shrug is just around the corner.

So many of our foundational institutions are now failing in achievement of their stated goals. For all the “infrastructure spending”, most of which is going to welfare and social engineering, infrastructure is collapsing.

But it isn’t like we weren’t warned.

Read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand and then read The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek, two books the pair well together.

Here’s Rand’s character Dr. Simon Pritchett opining on the “Equalization of Opportunity Bill”:

“Oh, that? [said Dr. Pritchett] But I believe I made it clear that I am in favor of it, because I am in favor of a free economy. A free economy cannot exist without competition. Therefore, men must be forced to compete. Therefore, we must control men in order to force them to be free.”

“But, look . . . isn’t that sort of a contradiction?”

“Not in the higher philosophical sense. You must learn to see beyond the static definitions of old-fashioned thinking. Nothing is static in the universe. Everything is fluid.”

Rand’s themes promote the supremacy of the individual mind over the collective and she described the philosophy of Objectivism thus: it is “the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.” While Rand uses wealth, steel, railroads, and mines as examples, she is excoriated for glorifying materialism…but it isn’t about materialism. These examples combine to form an allegory for the productive nature of the human mind. Rand’s message is about the danger of the enslavement of the human mind to the will of the collective and she succinctly illustrates that enslavement must occur in order that collectivism/Marxism/communism may be implemented, the success of so called “progressivism” must necessarily begin with the surrender of the individual intellect.

Thinking of this, I was reminded of a few exchanges in Rand’s masterpiece, Atlas Shrugged. There is a discussion about the Equalization of Opportunity Act at a dinner party at Hank Rearden’s home. This act was ostensibly promoted as a means to “give everybody a chance” in business by outlawing ownership of multiple businesses. It was a thinly veiled attack on successful industrialist, Hank Rearden, and his company, Rearden Steel. It is a pretext to a path for the government to take over his business and therefore wrest the productivity of Rearden’s intellect from him.

Dr. Simon Pritchett is the prestigious head of the Department of Philosophy at Patrick Henry University and is considered the leading philosopher of the age. He believes that man is nothing but a collection of chemicals, reason is a superstition, it is futile to seek meaning in life, and the duty of a philosopher is to show that nothing can be understood.

In the book, Balph Eubank is called “the literary leader of the age”, despite the fact that he has never sold more than three thousand copies of his books. At Hank Rearden’s party, Eubank expounds:

“… Our culture has sunk into a bog of materialism. Men have lost all spiritual values in their pursuit of material production and technological trickery. They’re too comfortable. They will return to a nobler life if we teach them to bear privations. So we ought to place a limit upon their material greed.”

“But, Mr. Eubank,” asked the young girl in the white dress, blushing desperately, “if everything is frustration, what is there to live for?”

“Brother-love,” said Balph Eubank grimly.

He complains that it is disgraceful artists are treated as peddlers, and that there should be a law limiting the sales of books to ten thousand copies because “[T]his would throw the literary market open to new talent, fresh ideas and non-commercial writing. If people were forbidden to buy a million copies of the same piece of trash, they would be forced to buy better books.”

Sounds a lot like Democrat socioeconomic policies to me. They want to restrict your energy sources to force you to one they can control with the flick of a switch (electricity).

The themes set forth in the words of Rand’s characters are realized in our sociopolitical reality of today:

• Life is suffering; Man only exists to serve the collective, there is only “brother-love”.

• Man must be controlled to be free.

• Everything is fluid and relative, there are no rules except the ones the government makes, of course.

• Limits must be placed on Man’s ability to consume to force “wisdom” via shared privation (Hayek warned that “equality” under collectivist rule was simply shared misery).

• The collective must tell man what to believe via restriction of ideas because, like children, most citizens cannot adequately direct or manage their own lives.

• Servile incompetents are elevated to positions of influence and power. People like Pritchett and Eubank would be abject failures in productive life (Hayek also warned that the worst get on top in collectivist schemes).

It isn’t difficult to see and hear these themes in the current liberal theology of social and economic “justice”, Keynesian economic policies, anti-capitalism, health insurance “reform”, financial “regulation” and “progressive” tax policies or the elevation of dutiful incompetents to positions of authority.

Rand’s detractors assert that Objectivism is evil, selfish, and wrong. Agree with Objectivism or not, the accuracy and transcendence of Rand’s depiction of the collectivist looters is absolutely striking given what we have witnessed during the Obama and Biden administrations and the everyday actions of Democrats and the media.

Our collectivist/Marxist/communist countrymen hate Rand, not due to Objectivism, rather due to her sharply focused picture of their modus operandi and true intent.

Far from being some sort of a “conservative fantasy” (as an acquaintance of mine calls it – although she has never read the book), Atlas provides a window to the dark, power mad soul of the modern American progressive.