Category Archives: Atlas Shrugged

In the wake of Donald Trumps ascent to dominance in the GOP, conservative leaders blame Republicans for the calamity. But they shouldnt.

Before we turn to why they shouldnt, consider why they do.

There are many reasons Donald Trump is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, writes Dennis Prager, but the biggest reason is this: The majority of Republicans are not conservative.

David French observes that the party of Lincoln is in ruins, calls for conservatives to stay firm in their opposition to Trump, and scolds GOP leaders for supporting this reprehensible man.

Jay Cost says the Republican party of 2016 is a spectacular failure:

Lacking sufficient organization and largely bereft of vigilant leaders, it has proven itself incapable of refining and enlarging public views around a principled commitment to the national interest. It is little wonder that a demagogic, ill-informed outsider like Trump is on the cusp of capturing its most important nomination. The party lacks the strength to resist him.

And Matt Walsh chastises Trump-supporting Republicans who

turned out in droves for a left-wing vulgarian who, when hes not bragging of his adultery or fantasizing about dating his daughter or mocking POWs and the disabled, has taken to perpetuating conspiracy theories about how his former opponents father killed JFK.

Underscoring the insanity of supporting this mess of a man, Walsh recalls that Trump said himself, he could shoot someone in the middle of the street and these people would still follow himand, nevertheless, millions of Republicans have voted for him. There is no complaining now, Walsh concludes:

We cant whine about our demise. We chose it. Well, some of us did not choose it, yet we live in a country where millions of our fellow Americans did . . . And here we are. Thanks, Republicans.

Thats an indication of where conservatives are placing the blame.

First, let me acknowledge a kernel of truth in what these conservatives say: Every Republican who has supported or voted for Donald Trump is partly to blame for the political ascent of this repulsive, power-lusting opportunist. During the primaries, Republicans had the alternative of supporting and voting for Ted Cruz, a flawed but essentially good candidate, whose ideas and positions on the most pressing issues of the day were infinitely better than anyone elses in the race. So, shame on Republicans who had the means of knowing this, yet supported Trump (or anyone else) instead of Cruz.

But the political rise of Trump is not merely the fault of Republicans. It is also, and more so, the fault of conservativesespecially conservative leaders, both old and new.

The seminal act of conservative culpability in this regard took place in 1957, shortly after the publication of Ayn Rands Atlas Shrugged.

In the pages of her revolutionary novel, Rand had handed conservatives, and the world in general, an observation-based, demonstrably true philosophy that, in addition to providing principled guidance for choosing and pursuing life-serving values at the personal level, also provides a rock-solid foundation for supporting and defending freedom and capitalism at the political level. This book was a godsend to everyone who loves life, loves America, and wants to advance the ideal of a government dedicated to protecting individuals rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.

What did conservatives do with this gift? They shat on it.

Two months after Atlas was published, William F. Buckleys popular conservative magazine, National Review, ran a review of the book, penned by ex-communist Whittaker Chambers. The reason for the scare quotes around the word review in the previoussentence is that it was not a review but a lie. A big lie. Indeed, it was and remains an unsurpassed (although often aspired to) model of intellectual dishonesty, injustice, malice.

The screed claimed, among myriad additional lies, that From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: To a gas chambergo!

To those who have read Atlas, that one claim is sufficient to convey the jaw-dropping depths of dishonesty involved in the so-called review. For those who havent read Atlas, Ill indicate briefly, without spoiling the plot of the novel, how obscenely dishonest this claim and the entire review it represents are.

Atlas is a story about the role of reason in human lifeabout the fact that the individuals reasoning mind is his only means of knowledge and his basic means of livingabout the principle that each individual is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of othersand about the principle that being moral consists in using ones mind to pursue ones life-serving values while respecting the rights of others to do the same.

Among the countless ways in which these ideas are vividly depicted and illustrated in Rands thousand-page novel, the heroes of Atlas take an oath, which they all uphold unwaveringly: I swearby my life and my love of itthat I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

As part of their commitment to living by this oath, the heroes call for a government that does one thing and one thing only: protects the rights of all individuals by banning physical force and fraud from social relationships so that everyone can act on his own judgment, produce goods and services, trade them with others by mutual consent to mutual advantage, and flourish in a land of liberty.

Also as part of their commitment to living by the principle that no one should ever sacrifice or be sacrificed for anyone, the heroes in Atlas, time and again, refuse to cooperate with government officials or unscrupulous businessmen who seek to violate anyones rights for any reason in any way whatsoever.

From this book, the reviewer for National Review heard a voice commanding: To a gas chambergo?

He did not. He lied.

He lied to discredit Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged. He lied to stop people from reading her work or taking her ideas seriously. And William F. Buckley and the editorial staff at National Review not only published this big lie and stood by it in 1957; they also have republished it repeatedly since then, most recently just a few years ago.

Following this initial conservative big lie about Rands ideas, similarly malicious treatments of Rand and her philosophy became the modus operandi of the leaders of the conservative movement. To this day, with few exceptions (Ted Cruz being one), if conservative leaders dont ignore Rands ideas (as Dennis Prager, Jay Cost, and Matt Walsh do), they misrepresent her ideas (as Daniel Flynn, Roger Scruton, Anthony Daniels, Andrew Klavan, Bill Whittle, and countless others do).

With their commitment to ignoring or maligning Rand and her philosophy of rational egoism, individual rights, and laissez-faire capitalism, leaders of the conservative movement have decisively severed themselves and their movement from any affiliation with the one philosophy that could support freedom, capitalism, and the American republic.

Before we turn to the results of such evasions and malice, lets briefly consider the motivations behind them.

If youre a professional intellectual (e.g., a philosopher, an economist, a journalist, or a political talk show host), and if your aim is to defend capitalism, and if an extremely careful thinker writes books with titles such as Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal and The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, might you have a professional responsibility to examine this thinkers arguments and to determine whether her views are true and worth sharingor false and in need of (honest) dismantling?

Why, then, have conservative intellectuals chosen instead to ignore or misrepresent Rands ideas? Why wont they consider the principles of her philosophy, take them straight, represent them accurately, and either acknowledge that they are trueor explain where Rand erred?

Here, we can only speculate. But I think the answer is rather straightforward.

Almost to a man, conservative intellectuals seek to anchor capitalism in religion, faith, and altruism. Rand, however, sawand demonstratedthat doing so is impossible. She showed that capitalism, the political-economic system of individual rights and self-interest, can be supported only by a morality of individual rights and self-interestnamely, rational egoism. Rand further sawand demonstratedthat for a morality to be valid, it cannot be derived from supernature via revelation or faith; rather, it must be derived from actual nature via observation and logic. And Rand not only demonstrated these (and many related) truths; she did so with such clarity and concretization that there is no way to analyze her works and point out where she erred in any substantial or fundamental waywhich is why no one has.

So, people who desperately want Rand to have erred about what is necessary to defend freedom and capitalismand who are unwilling to face the fact that she got these matters righthave two choices: (1) They can ignore her ideas; or (2) They can misrepresent them and thus appear to have acknowledged and dismissed her ideas, while actually having dismissed strawmen.

Why are conservatives unwilling to face the fact that Rand got these issues right? Again, we can only speculate, but, given the nature of Rands ideas along with uncontroversial facts about conservatives, the answer appears clear.

Rands philosophy opposes religious dogma and exposes it as baseless; thus, conservatives who are unwilling to challenge religious dogma cannot bring themselves to give her ideas a fair hearing. Conservatives, by and large, were taught, from Sunday school onward, that reason cant deliver the deepest, most important truthsonly faith can. They were taught that being moral consists in obeying Gods commandments, that selflessness is good and selfishness is evil, that we are our brothers keeper, that we must be openhanded toward the poor and needy, that we know all of this because the Bible tells us soand that none of this is to be challenged.

Well, Rand challenges all of it. And she not only challenges it; she also disproves itby proving (or demonstrating) the contrary in each respective area. For instance:

Conservatives who encounter Rands demonstrations and proofs are thus faced (implicitly or explicitly) with questions such as:

And conservatives answers to such questionsin conjunction with their willingness or unwillingness to face the scoffs and scorn that likely will come their way if they embrace the truths Rand discovereddetermine whether they (a) choose to embrace or at least grapple with her ideasor (b) choose between ignoring or misrepresenting them.

Again, this is speculation. But I cant think of another plausible explanation for why so many conservativesand virtually all conservative leaderseither ignore or misrepresent Rands ideas. (If you know of another plausible explanation, let me know.)

Now, how has the conservatives dismissal of Rands ideas paved the way for the political ascent of Donald Trump?

To answer that, we need only answer the question: What happens when the leaders of a political movement ostensibly dedicated to defending individual rights, freedom, and capitalism ignore the only demonstrably true moral and philosophic foundation for those valuesand, instead, pretend that such values can be defended by means of religion, faith, and altruism?

The answer is: They fail. And they leave a vacuum where the philosophic defense of capitalism should be.

Here we need not speculate, because its simple historic record.

During the past several decades, when conservative-championed political representatives have held office in the White House or Congress or both, they have (in the aggregate) increased government intervention in the economy, increased regulatory burdens on businesses, increased government spending, increased taxation, increased the size and scope of the welfare state, and generally increased rights violations by the government. (For examples of all of this, see The American Right, the Purpose of Government, and the Future of Liberty; The Republicans Opportunity to Restore America . . . and Their Obstacle; Altruism: The Moral Root of the Financial Crisis; The Creed of Sacrifice vs. The Land of Liberty; The Rise of American Big Government: A Brief History of How We Got Here; and The Decline and Fall of American Conservatism.)

Well, when conservative leaders through their representatives in government expand rights-violating policies for decades on end, what do the citizens who were counting on those leaders to constrain government and reduce spending and cut taxes come to think of the ideas behind the movement? Naturally, they come to the conclusion that the ideas arent practical, dont work, and need to be replaced.

Replaced with what?

The answer to that is wide open and depends on what is available and easily digestible when the rebellion begins.

Most Americans are not professional intellectuals. They are not philosophers, economists, journalists, or political talk show hosts. Rather, they run or work in restaurants, doctors offices, tech companies, or countless other kinds of businesses that provide the material goods and services we need in order to live and prosper. In other words, Americans have areas of specialization, and they dont have time to investigate and grapple with every philosophic, economic, or political theory someone claims is true. They count on professional intellectuals to do the heavy lifting in those areas and to convey the essentials in laymans terms so that chefs, waitresses, doctors, and engineers can understand them sufficiently for their purposes. Just as professional intellectuals count on doctors to treat cancer and to explain the essentials of that process in laymans terms, and just as professional intellectuals count on engineers to make electronic devices and to explain in laymans terms how they work, so too doctors, engineers, chefs, and the like count on professional intellectuals to do their job. Its called division of labor.

But conservative intellectuals havent done their job. They havent identified and conveyed the essential ideas and principles necessary to support and defend freedom, capitalism, and America. Theyve chosen instead to ignore or misrepresent those ideas so as to avoid scoffs, scorn, or having to reconsiderwhat they learned in Sunday school. (Thank God the Founders werent conservatives.) And because conservative intellectuals failed to do their job for decades, those who had been counting on them to do their job went looking for someone else to professionally defend freedom, capitalism, and America.

Who did they find?

Well, when Americans looked around to see who might be offering new ideas about how to limit government to its proper function of protecting rights, they saw no professional intellectuals with such ideas. What about Ayn Rands ideas and the handful of professionals who advocate them? Intellectuals from both the progressive left and the religious right had already discredited Rands ideas in the minds of their readers and listeners. Ayn Rand? Isnt she the materialist who says its morally wrong to help other people? Well, thats all I need to know about her and her philosophy. And: Wasnt Rands big book Atlas Shrugged about why men of ability should send lesser people to gas chambers? Thats monstrous. How could anyone even consider her ideas?

So freedom-loving Americans saw no professional intellectuals prepared to defend individual rights, capitalism, and America on solid ground. And they were not about to turn to that horrible Rand person.

Where did they turn?

They looked past professional intellectuals. They looked for a problem-solver of a completely different variety. They looked for someone who is not a conservative but nevertheless is pro-freedom, pro-business, pro-capitalism, anti-left, and maybe even politically incorrect to boot. They looked for someone in the public eye who will say it like it is and cut deals and make America great again.

Enter Donald Trump.

Unlike conservatives, who drone incessantly about Judeo-Christian ethics and the virtues of sacrifice and humility, Trump is a bold, brash, money-loving businessman. Sure, hes crudebut thats good, Republicans figured, because it makes the left apoplectic. And, yes, hes inconsistentbut thats OKtoo, Republicans figured, because hes a pragmatic, reality-oriented businessman who gets things done. And, best of all, they figured, Trump is not a conservativeso hes not going to retry those godforsaken conservative principles that have failed for decades on end to make America great again. Hes going to ditch principles and do what worksand thats what we want.

In short, Trump-supporting Republicans see him as a new, bold, non-conservative problem solverand as a big middle finger to the conservative leaders who have repeatedly let them down. Conservatives, these Republicans have said, Youre fired! Were hiring Trump!

Some may say my analysis is oversimplified. It is not. Nor does it exonerate Trump supporters. They are partly to blame for this nightmare. But conservative intellectuals bear the lions share of responsibility.

That conservative leaders havefor nearly sixty yearsignored or maligned the one philosophy that can support and defend individual rights, capitalism, and the American ideal is an observable fact. That conservatives could have embraced Rands philosophy and used it as a rock-solid foundation for their efforts to establish and maintain a rights-protecting government and a free society is clear as day to anyone who reads Rands work. And that the failure of conservative leaders to do so paved the way forand indeed necessitatedthe rise of someone to fill the void is a matter of natural law: In political philosophy, as in physics, nature abhors a vacuum.

Donald Trump is now the standard-bearer for the Republican Party because when conservative leaderswho, by their chosen profession, had a responsibility to identify, convey, and apply a viable philosophy to support rights, freedom, and capitalismwere handed a philosophy that clearly could do so, they ignored or maligned it. And they did so for decades.

Republican presidential candidate Trump is a product of conservative leaders evasions. Hes their Frankenstein. Hes their fault.

Have other factors contributed to the rise of Trump? Yes, many other factors have. But conservatives evasions are the fundamental cause. If conservative leaders had embraced rather than ignored or misrepresented Ayn Rands ideas, conservative efforts to defend freedom, capitalism, and the American ideal would have been anchored in an irrefutable moral and philosophical foundation; thus, America would now beor would at least be headed in the direction ofthe rights-protecting republic it is supposed to be. In such a context, a vulgar opportunist such as Trump couldnt garner political support from any sizable portion of the population. Instead, hed be using the best words to complain about the difficulty of cutting deals without the coercive power of eminent domain.

So the point here is not that no other factors have contributed to the political ascent of Trump. Rather, the point is that the fundamental cause of his ascent is the evasions of conservative leaders.

What is the solution to this problem?

There is no quick fix. Conservatives evasions have plunged America deep into a swamp of unprincipled politics and philosophic confusion. The only way out of the muck is by means of a new movement led by new intellectuals. The intellectuals needed for this movement are those who are willing to look at reality, to think for themselves, and to embrace and convey the philosophical, moral, and political ideas that actually support a system of individual rights, freedom, and capitalism.

In other words, the solution is for new intellectuals to do what conservative intellectuals should have done but have refused to do ever since 1957: Read Ayn Rands works, see whether her ideasmake sense, and, if they do, embrace them and use them to argue for a return to the American ideal of a government that does one thing and only one thing: protects rights.

Those who want to learn about Ayn Rands ideas can profitably start almost anywhere in her corpus. If you like fiction, you might start with We The Living, The Fountainhead, or Atlas Shrugged. If you prefer nonfiction, maybe start with Philosophy: Who Needs It, or The Virtue of Selfishness, or Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

If you want a quick overview of Objectivism, see What is Objectivism? For an article-length primer on Rands morality of self-interest, see Atlas Shrugged and Ayn Rands Morality of Egoism. And for a systematic presentation of her theory of rights, see Ayn Rands Theory of Rights: The Moral Foundation of a Free Society.

Wherever you start, know this: Rands ideas challenge the fundamental ideas youve been taught about philosophy, religion, morality, rights, and politics. And bear in mind that Rand is the first to point out that you should not accept her ideasor anyones ideasunless they make sense to you. As she puts it: The most selfish of all things is the independent mind that recognizes no authority higher than its own and no value higher than its judgment of truth.

But if you give her ideas a hearingrather than listen to conservatives who misrepresent them as a matter of courseI think youll see that they make sense, that they are grounded in perceptual reality, and that they support freedom, capitalism, and the American ideal like nothing youve encountered before.

If you do come to see that Rands ideas are sound, you can then join the movement that should have been soaring since 1957 but that conservative leaders chose to cripple with their dishonestythe movement dedicated to supporting individual rights, freedom, and capitalism by reference to the observation-based moral and philosophical foundations on which these values depend: the Objectivist movement.

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How Conservatives Begat Trump, and What to Do About It - The ... - The Objective Standard

Meredith Jorgensen is News 8s Lancaster County reporter.

She joined the News 8 team in July 2003. Merediths goal is to tell the stories of the people of the Susquehanna Valley. She covered the tornado in Campbelltown, Lebanon County, and the Amish School Shooting and the Empire Building Collapse in Lancaster County.

Meredith has won several Associated Press awards and was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2010.

She grew up in St. James, Long Island, N.Y. After graduating from Smithtown High School, she attended Ithaca College in upstate New York, where she majored in broadcast journalism.

She spent a semester in London and interned at NBC'S London bureau. Before joining News 8, Meredith worked for Blue Ridge Cable in Ephrata, anchoring "CNN Headline News Local Edition." Shes a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.

Meredith makes her home in Lancaster, with her husband Chris and their dogs, Barlie and Molly. Throughout high school and college, she was an avid cross country runner, hurdler and heptathlete.

But Meredith has recently found sitting down to be quite enjoyable.

Her favorite movies are "The Departed" and "When Harry Met Sally."

Her favorite books are "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand and Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang by Chelsea Handler.

She looks forward to meeting many of you in the months and years to come. Please e-mail her at mjorgensen@hearst.com.

See more here:

Meredith Jorgensen - KCCI Des Moines

Meredith Jorgensen is News 8s Lancaster County reporter.

She joined the News 8 team in July 2003. Merediths goal is to tell the stories of the people of the Susquehanna Valley. She covered the tornado in Campbelltown, Lebanon County, and the Amish School Shooting and the Empire Building Collapse in Lancaster County.

Meredith has won several Associated Press awards and was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2010.

She grew up in St. James, Long Island, N.Y. After graduating from Smithtown High School, she attended Ithaca College in upstate New York, where she majored in broadcast journalism.

She spent a semester in London and interned at NBC'S London bureau. Before joining News 8, Meredith worked for Blue Ridge Cable in Ephrata, anchoring "CNN Headline News Local Edition." Shes a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.

Meredith makes her home in Lancaster, with her husband Chris and their dogs, Barlie and Molly. Throughout high school and college, she was an avid cross country runner, hurdler and heptathlete.

But Meredith has recently found sitting down to be quite enjoyable.

Her favorite movies are "The Departed" and "When Harry Met Sally."

Her favorite books are "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand and Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang by Chelsea Handler.

She looks forward to meeting many of you in the months and years to come. Please e-mail her at mjorgensen@hearst.com.

Read this article:

Meredith Jorgensen - KCRA Sacramento

WASHINGTON Although America's political system seems unable to stimulate robust, sustained economic growth, it at least is stimulating consumption of a small but important segment of literature. Dystopian novels are selling briskly Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" (1932), Sinclair Lewis' "It Can't Happen Here" (1935), George Orwell's "Animal Farm" (1945) and "1984" (1949), Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" (1953) and Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" (1985), all warning about nasty regimes displacing democracy.

There is, however, a more recent and pertinent presentation of a grim future. Last year, in her 13th novel, "The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047," Lionel Shriver imagined America slouching into dystopia merely by continuing current practices.

Shriver, who is fascinated by the susceptibility of complex systems to catastrophic collapses, begins her story after the 2029 economic crash and the Great Renunciation, whereby the nation, like a dissolute Atlas, shrugged off its national debt, saying to creditors: It's nothing personal. The world is not amused, and Americans' subsequent downward social mobility is not pretty.

Florence Darkly, a millennial, is a "single mother" but such mothers now outnumber married ones. Newspapers have almost disappeared, so "print journalism had given way to a rabble of amateurs hawking unverified stories and always to an ideological purpose." Mexico has paid for an electronic border fence to keep out American refugees. Her Americans are living, on average, to 92, the economy is "powered by the whims of the retired," and, "desperate to qualify for entitlements, these days everyone couldn't wait to be old." People who have never been told "no" are apoplectic if they can't retire at 52. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are ubiquitous, so shaking hands is imprudent.

Soldiers in combat fatigues, wielding metal detectors, search houses for gold illegally still in private hands. The government monitors every movement and the IRS, renamed the Bureau for Social Contribution Assistance, siphons up everything, on the you-didn't-build-that principle: "Morally, your money does belong to everybody. The creation of capital requires the whole apparatus of the state to protect property rights, including intellectual property."

Social order collapses when hyperinflation follows the promiscuous printing of money after the Renunciation. This punishes those "who had a conscientious, caretaking relationship to the future." Government salaries and Medicare reimbursements are "linked to an inflation algorithm that didn't require further action from Congress. Even if a Snickers bar eventually cost $5 billion, they were safe."

In a Reason magazine interview, Shriver says, "I think it is in the nature of government to infinitely expand until it eats its young." In her novel, she writes:

"The state starts moving money around. A little fairness here, little more fairness there. ... Eventually social democracies all arrive at the same tipping point: where half the country depends on the other half. ... Government becomes a pricey, clumsy, inefficient mechanism for transferring wealth from people who do something to people who don't, and from the young to the old -- which is the wrong direction. All that effort, and you've only managed a new unfairness."

Florence learns to appreciate "the miracle of civilization." It is miraculous because "failure and decay were the world's natural state. What was astonishing was anything that worked as intended, for any duration whatsoever." Laughing mordantly as the apocalypse approaches, Shriver has a gimlet eye for the foibles of today's secure (or so it thinks) upper middle class, from Washington's Cleveland Park to Brooklyn. About the gentrification of the latter, she observes:

"Oh, you could get a facelift nearby, put your dog in therapy, or spend $500 at Ottawa on a bafflingly trendy dinner of Canadian cuisine (the city's elite was running out of new ethnicities whose food could become fashionable). But you couldn't buy a screwdriver, pick up a gallon of paint, take in your dry cleaning, get new tips on your high heels, copy a key, or buy a slice of pizza. Wealthy residents might own bicycles worth $5K, but no shop within miles would repair the brakes. ... High rents had priced out the very service sector whose presence at ready hand once helped to justify urban living."

The (only) good news from Shriver's squint into the future is that when Americans are put through a wringer, they emerge tougher, with less talk about "ADHD, gluten intolerance and emotional support animals."

Speaking to Reason, Shriver said: "I think that the bullet we dodged in 2008 is still whizzing around the planet and is going to hit us in the head." If so, this story has already been written.

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A wry squint into our grim future - Montana Standard

By George F. Will

WASHINGTON Although Americas political system seems unable to stimulate robust, sustained economic growth, it at least is stimulating consumption of a small but important segment of literature. Dystopian novels are selling briskly Aldous Huxleys Brave New World (1932), Sinclair Lewis It Cant Happen Here (1935), George Orwells Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949), Ray Bradburys Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and Margaret Atwoods The Handmaids Tale (1985), all warning about nasty regimes displacing democracy.

There is, however, a more recent and pertinent presentation of a grim future. In her 13th novel, The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047, published last spring,Lionel Shriver imagined America slouching into dystopia merely by continuing current practices.

Ms. Shriver, who is fascinated by the susceptibility of complex systems to catastrophic collapses, begins her story after the 2029 economic crash and the Great Renunciation, whereby the nation, like a dissolute Atlas, shrugged off its national debt, saying to creditors: Its nothing personal. The world is not amused, and Americans subsequent downward social mobility is not pretty.

Florence Darkly, a millennial, is a single mother, but such mothers now outnumber married ones. Newspapers have almost disappeared, so print journalism had given way to a rabble of amateurs hawking unverified stories and always to an ideological purpose. Mexico has paid for an electronic border fence to keep out American refugees. Her Americans are living, on average, to 92, the economy is powered by the whims of the retired, and, desperate to qualify for entitlements, these days everyone couldnt wait to be old. People who have never been told no are apoplectic if they cant retire at 52. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are ubiquitous, so shaking hands is imprudent.

Soldiers in combat fatigues, wielding metal detectors, search houses for gold illegally still in private hands. The government monitors every movement, and the IRS, renamed the Bureau for Social Contribution Assistance, siphons up everything, on the you-didnt-build-that principle: Morally, your money does belong to everybody. The creation of capital requires the whole apparatus of the state to protect property rights, including intellectual property.

Social order collapses when hyperinflation follows the promiscuous printing of money after the Renunciation. This punishes those who had a conscientious, caretaking relationship to the future. Government salaries and Medicare reimbursements are linked to an inflation algorithm that didnt require further action from Congress. Even if a Snickers bar eventually cost $5 billion, they were safe.

In a Reason magazine interview, Ms. Shriver says, I think it is in the nature of government to infinitely expand until it eats its young. In her novel, she writes:

The state starts moving money around. A little fairnesshere, little more fairness there. ... Eventually social democracies all arrive at the same tipping point: where half the country depends on the other half. ... Government becomes a pricey, clumsy, inefficient mechanism for transferring wealth from people who do something to people who dont, and from the young to the old which is the wrong direction. All that effort, and youve only managed a new unfairness.

Florence learns to appreciate the miracle of civilization. It is miraculous because failure and decay were the worlds natural state. What was astonishing was anything that worked as intended, for any duration whatsoever. Laughing mordantly as the apocalypse approaches, Ms. Shriver has a gimlet eye for the foibles of todays secure (or so it thinks) upper middle class, from Washingtons Cleveland Park to Brooklyn. About the gentrification of the latter, she observes:

Oh, you could get a facelift nearby, put your dog in therapy, or spend $500 at Ottawa on a bafflingly trendy dinner of Canadian cuisine (the citys elite was running out of new ethnicities whose food could become fashionable). But you couldnt buy a screwdriver, pick up a gallon of paint, take in your dry cleaning, get new tips on your high heels, copy a key, or buy a slice of pizza. Wealthy residents might own bicycles worth $5K, but no shop within miles would repair the brakes. ... High rents had priced out the very service sector whose presence at ready hand once helped to justify urban living.

The (only) good news from Ms. Shrivers squint into the future is that when Americans are put through a wringer, they emerge tougher, with less talk about ADHD, gluten intolerance and emotional support animals.

Speaking to Reason, Ms. Shriver said: I think that the bullet we dodged in 2008 is still whizzing around the planet and is going to hit us in the head. If so, this story has already been written.

George F. Will is a syndicated columnist for The Washington Post (georgewill@washpost.com).

Read the original:

George F. Will: Slouching into dystopia - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Though she died in 1982, huge numbers of people still come to Ayn Rand through her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and their lives are changed as a result. No wonder. These novels assert the nobility of using your mind to reach your full potential. They make self-belief cool.

Rands heroes are individualists who live by their own creative talentsexisting for no one else, nor asking others to exist for them. They are rebels against the establishment and its ways. They do not conform to social norms, but stand by their own vision and truth: a vision built on their own values and a truth built on fact and reason, not on the false authority of others. They are the creative minds who discover new knowledge, who innovate, drive progress and consequently benefit all humanity.

But minds cannot be forced to think. Creativity, and therefore human progress, depends on people being free to think and act in pursuit of their own values. That is a powerful case for liberty, values, mind, reason, creativity, entrepreneurship, capitalism, achievement, heroism, happiness, self-esteem and pride. And against the life-destroying consequences of coercion, extortion, regulation, self-sacrifice, altruism, wishful thinking and refusing to use ones mind.

Nowhere do Rands ideas change more lives than in her adopted United States, where her novels tap into the American ideals of self-reliance and individualism. In the early 1990s, a decade after her death, a survey by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club rated Atlas Shrugged as the most influential book after the Bible. Today, Rands ideas are taught in colleges across America and discussed in academic and popular journals. Institutes and groups have been set up to promote her ideas.

Her ideas are accelerating in other English-speaking countries too, such as the UK (where 20,000 Rand books are sold each year), Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and India, where English is widely spoken. Even Indian footballers and Bollywood stars acknowledge her influence on their lives.

Beyond the English-speaking countries, Sweden, a country of just 9.5m people, leads the world in Google searches for Ayn Rand. About 25,000 copies are bought each year in Rands native Russia, another 13,000 a year in Brazil, 6,000 in Spain and 1,000 each in Japan and Bulgaria. Even in China, some 15,000 Rand books are bought each yeara number which, given that countrys economic and intellectual awakening, can only increase.

All this gives Rand a significant impact on the political debate. In the United States, many of those she inspired rose into public office. Former US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan (1926-) was an early member of Rands inner circle. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (1948-) shows his new clerks The Fountainhead movie. Politicians such as former Congressman Ron Paul (1935-), his son, Senator Rand Paul (1965-) and House Speaker Paul Ryan (1970-) cite Rand as an influence. Even President Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) described himself as an admirer of Ayn Rand.

Nor is this only a US phenomenon. Annie Lf (1983-), leader of Swedens Center Party and former Enterprise Minister, helped launch the Swedish translation of The Fountainhead, calling Rand one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th Century. Rands ideas were praised by the reformist Prime Minister of Estonia, Mart Laar (1960-), and influenced Australias Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser (1930-2015), along with many other past or current political leaders.

What other novels have had such an impact on events, more than half a century after their publication? And what other novelist?

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Is Ayn Rand still relevant 35 years on from her death? - The Adam Smith Institute (blog)

GEORGE F. WILL Washington Post Writers Group Published: March 5, 2017 12:00 AM CDT

WASHINGTON Although America's political system seems unable to stimulate robust, sustained economic growth, it at least is stimulating consumption of a small but important segment of literature. Dystopian novels are selling briskly Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" (1932), Sinclair Lewis' "It Can't Happen Here" (1935), George Orwell's "Animal Farm" (1945) and "1984" (1949), Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" (1953) and Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" (1985), all warning about nasty regimes displacing democracy.

There is, however, a more recent and pertinent presentation of a grim future. Last year, in her 13th novel, "The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047," Lionel Shriver imagined America slouching into dystopia merely by continuing current practices.

Shriver, who is fascinated by the susceptibility of complex systems to catastrophic collapses, begins her story after the 2029 economic crash and the Great Renunciation, whereby the nation, like a dissolute Atlas, shrugged off its national debt, saying to creditors: It's nothing personal. The world is not amused, and Americans' subsequent downward social mobility is not pretty.

Florence Darkly, a millennial, is a "single mother" but such mothers now outnumber married ones. Newspapers have almost disappeared, so "print journalism had given way to a rabble of amateurs hawking unverified stories and always to an ideological purpose." Mexico has paid for an electronic border fence to keep out American refugees. Her Americans are living, on average, to 92, the economy is "powered by the whims of the retired," and, "desperate to qualify for entitlements, these days everyone couldn't wait to be old." People who have never been told "no" are apoplectic if they can't retire at 52. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are ubiquitous, so shaking hands is imprudent.

Soldiers in combat fatigues, wielding metal detectors, search houses for gold illegally still in private hands. The government monitors every movement and the IRS, renamed the Bureau for Social Contribution Assistance, siphons up everything, on the you-didn't-build-that principle: "Morally, your money does belong to everybody. The creation of capital requires the whole apparatus of the state to protect property rights, including intellectual property."

Social order collapses when hyperinflation follows the promiscuous printing of money after the Renunciation. This punishes those "who had a conscientious, caretaking relationship to the future." Government salaries and Medicare reimbursements are "linked to an inflation algorithm that didn't require further action from Congress. Even if a Snickers bar eventually cost $5 billion, they were safe."

In a Reason magazine interview, Shriver says, "I think it is in the nature of government to infinitely expand until it eats its young." In her novel, she writes:

"The state starts moving money around. A little fairness here, little more fairness there. ... Eventually social democracies all arrive at the same tipping point: where half the country depends on the other half. ... Government becomes a pricey, clumsy, inefficient mechanism for transferring wealth from people who do something to people who don't, and from the young to the old which is the wrong direction. All that effort, and you've only managed a new unfairness."

Florence learns to appreciate "the miracle of civilization." It is miraculous because "failure and decay were the world's natural state. What was astonishing was anything that worked as intended, for any duration whatsoever." Laughing mordantly as the apocalypse approaches, Shriver has a gimlet eye for the foibles of today's secure (or so it thinks) upper middle class, from Washington's Cleveland Park to Brooklyn. About the gentrification of the latter, she observes:

"Oh, you could get a facelift nearby, put your dog in therapy, or spend $500 at Ottawa on a bafflingly trendy dinner of Canadian cuisine (the city's elite was running out of new ethnicities whose food could become fashionable). But you couldn't buy a screwdriver, pick up a gallon of paint, take in your dry cleaning, get new tips on your high heels, copy a key, or buy a slice of pizza. Wealthy residents might own bicycles worth $5K, but no shop within miles would repair the brakes. ... High rents had priced out the very service sector whose presence at ready hand once helped to justify urban living."

The (only) good news from Shriver's squint into the future is that when Americans are put through a wringer, they emerge tougher, with less talk about "ADHD, gluten intolerance and emotional support animals."

Speaking to Reason, Shriver said: "I think that the bullet we dodged in 2008 is still whizzing around the planet and is going to hit us in the head." If so, this story has already been written.

George Will's email address is georgewill@washpost.com.

WASHINGTON POST WRITERS GROUP

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George Will: A wry squint into our grim future - NewsOK.com

Jennifer Burns

Ayn Rand is dead. Its been 35 years since hundreds of mourners filed by her coffin (fittingly accompanied by a dollar-sign-shaped flower arrangement), but it has been only four months since she truly died as a force in American politics. Yes, there was a flurry of articles identifying Rand lovers in the Trump administration, including Rex Tillerson and Mike Pompeo; yes, Ivanka Trump tweeted an inaccurate Rand quote in mid-February. But the effort to fix a recognizable right-wing ideology on President Donald Trump only obscures the more significant long-term trends that the election of 2016 laid bare. However much Trump seems like the Rand hero par excellence a wealthy man with a fiery belief in, well, himself his victory signals the exhaustion of the Republican Partys romance with Rand.

In electing Trump, the Republican base rejected laissez-faire economics in favor of economic nationalism. Full-fledged objectivism, the philosophy Rand invented, is an atheistic creed that calls for pure capitalism and a bare-bones government with no social spending on entitlement programs such as Social Security or Medicare. Its never appeared on the national political scene without significant dilution. But there was plenty of diluted Rand on offer throughout the primary season: Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Carly Fiorina and Ted Cruz all espoused traditional Republican nostrums about reducing the role of government to unleash American prosperity.

Yet none of this could match Trumps full-throated roar to build a wall or his protectionist plans for American trade. In the general election, Trump sought out new voters and independents using arguments traditionally associated with Democrats: deploying the power of the state to protect workers and guarantee their livelihoods, even at the cost of trade agreements and long-standing international alliances. Trumps economic promises electrified rural working-class voters the same way Bernie Sanders excited urban socialists. Where Rands influence has stood for years on the right for a hands-off approach to the economy, Trumps America first platform contradicts this premise by assuming that government policies can and should deliberately shape economic growth, up to and including punishing specific corporations. Likewise, his promise to craft trade policy in support of the American worker is the exact opposite of Rands proclamation that the essence of capitalisms foreign policy is free trade.

And theres little hope that Trumps closest confidants will reverse his decidedly anti-Randian course. The conservative Republicans who came to power with Trump in an almost accidental process may find they have to exchange certain ideals to stay close to him. True, Paul Ryan and Mike Pence have been able to breathe new life into Republican economic and social orthodoxies. For instance, in a nod to Pences religious conservatism, Trump shows signs of reversing his earlier friendliness to gay rights. And his opposition to Obamacare dovetails with Ryans long-held ambitions to shrink federal spending. Even so, there is little evidence that either Pence or Ryan would have survived a Republican primary battle against Trump or fared well in a national election; their fortunes are dependent on Trumps. And the president won by showing that the Republican base and swing voters have moved on from the traditional conservatism of Reagan and Rand.

What is rising on the right is not Randian fear of government but something far darker. It used to be that bright young things like Stephen Miller, the controversial White House aide, came up on Rand. In the 1960s, she inspired a rump movement of young conservatives determined to subvert the GOP establishment, drawing in future bigwigs such as Alan Greenspan. Her admirers were powerfully attracted to the insurgent presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater, whom Rand publicly supported. They swooned when she talked about the ethics of capitalism, delegitimizing programs like Medicare and Medicaid as immoral. They thrilled to her attack on the draft and other conservative pieties. At national conferences, they asked each other, Who is John Galt? (a reference to her novel Atlas Shrugged) and waved the black flag of anarchism, modified with a gold dollar sign.

Over time, most conservatives who stayed in politics outgrew these juvenile provocations or disavowed them. For example, Ryan moved swiftly to replace Rand with Thomas Aquinas when he was nominated in 2012 for vice president, claiming that the Catholic thinker was his primary inspiration (although it was copies of Atlas Shrugged, not Summa Theologiae, that he handed out to staffers). But former Randites retained her fiery hatred of government and planted it within the mainstream GOP. And it was Rand who had kindled their passions in the first place, making her the starting point for a generation of conservatives.

Now Rand is on the shelf, gathering dust with F.A. Hayek, Edmund Burke and other once-prominent conservative luminaries. Its no longer possible to provoke the elders by going on about John Galt. Indeed, many of the elders have by now used Randian references to name their yachts, investment companies and foundations.

Instead, young insurgent conservatives talk about race realism , argue that manipulated crime statistics mask growing social disorder and cast feminism as a plot against men. Instead of reading Rand, they take the red pill, indulging in an emergent internet counter-culture that reveals the principles of liberalism rights, equality, tolerance to be dangerous myths. Beyond Breitbart.com, ideological energy on the right now courses through tiny blogs and websites of the Dark Enlightenment, the latter-day equivalent of Rands Objectivist Newsletter and the many libertarian zines she inspired.

Once upon a time, professors tut-tutted when Rand spoke to overflow crowds on college campuses, where she lambasted left and right alike and claimed, improbably, that big business was Americas persecuted minority. She delighted in skewering liberal audience members and occasionally turned her scorn on questioners. But this was soft stuff compared with the insults handed out by Milo Yiannopoulos and the uproar that has greeted his appearances. Rand may have accused liberals of having a lust for power, but she never would have called Holocaust humor a harmless search for lulz, as Yiannopoulos gleefully does.

Indeed, the new ideas on the right have moved away from classical liberalism altogether. American conservatives have always had a mixed reaction to the Western philosophical tradition that emphasizes the sanctity of the individual. Religious conservatives, in particular, often struggle with Rand because her extreme embrace of individualism leaves little room for God, country, duty or faith. But Trump represents a victory for a form of conservatism that is openly illiberal and willing to junk entirely the traditional rhetoric of individualism and free markets for nationalism inflected with racism, misogyny and xenophobia.

Mixed in with Rands vituperative attacks on government was a defense of the individuals rights in the face of a powerful state. This single-minded focus could yield surprising alignments, such as Rands opposition to drug laws and her support of legal abortion. And although liberals have always loved to hate her, over the next four years, they may come to miss her defense of individual autonomy and liberty. Ayn Rand is dead. Long live Ayn Rand!

Jennifer Burns is an associate professor of history at Stanford University and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.

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Jennifer Burns: Randian philosophy losing cachet among modern conservatives - Norwich Bulletin

A A

George F. Will

Although Americas political system seems unable to stimulate robust, sustained economic growth, it at least is stimulating consumption of a small but important segment of literature. Dystopian novels are selling briskly Aldous Huxleys Brave New World (1932), Sinclair Lewis It Cant Happen Here (1935), George Orwells Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949), Ray Bradburys Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and Margaret Atwoods The Handmaids Tale (1985), all warning about nasty regimes displacing democracy.

There is, however, a more recent and pertinent presentation of a grim future. Last year, in her 13th novel, The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047, Lionel Shriver imagined America slouching into dystopia merely by continuing current practices.

Shriver, who is fascinated by the susceptibility of complex systems to catastrophic collapses, begins her story after the 2029 economic crash and the Great Renunciation, whereby the nation, like a dissolute Atlas, shrugged off its national debt, saying to creditors: Its nothing personal. The world is not amused, and Americans subsequent downward social mobility is not pretty.

Florence Darkly, a millennial, is a single mother but such mothers now outnumber married ones. Newspapers have almost disappeared, so print journalism had given way to a rabble of amateurs hawking unverified stories and always to an ideological purpose. Mexico has paid for an electronic border fence to keep out American refugees. Her Americans are living, on average, to 92, the economy is powered by the whims of the retired, and, desperate to qualify for entitlements, these days everyone couldnt wait to be old. People who have never been told no are apoplectic if they cant retire at 52. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are ubiquitous, so shaking hands is imprudent.

Soldiers in combat fatigues, wielding metal detectors, search houses for gold illegally still in private hands. The government monitors every movement and the IRS, renamed the Bureau for Social Contribution Assistance, siphons up everything, on the you-didnt-build-that principle: Morally, your money does belong to everybody. The creation of capital requires the whole apparatus of the state to protect property rights, including intellectual property.

Social order collapses when hyperinflation follows the promiscuous printing of money after the Renunciation. This punishes those who had a conscientious, caretaking relationship to the future. Government salaries and Medicare reimbursements are linked to an inflation algorithm that didnt require further action from Congress. Even if a Snickers bar eventually cost $5 billion, they were safe.

In a Reason magazine interview, Shriver says, I think it is in the nature of government to infinitely expand until it eats its young. In her novel, she writes:

The state starts moving money around. A little fairness here, little more fairness there. Eventually social democracies all arrive at the same tipping point: where half the country depends on the other half. Government becomes a pricey, clumsy, inefficient mechanism for transferring wealth from people who do something to people who dont, and from the young to the old which is the wrong direction. All that effort, and youve only managed a new unfairness.

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Will: Novel posits scary view of current course - The Columbian

Several years ago, Miss Ayn Rand wrote The Fountainhead. Despite a generally poor press, it is said to have sold some four hundred thousand copies. Thus, it became a wonder of the book trade of a kind that publishers dream about after taxes. So Atlas Shrugged had a first printing of one hundred thousand copies. It appears to be slowly climbing the best-seller lists.

The news about this book seems to me to be that any ordinarily sensible head could not possibly take it seriously, and that, apparently, a good many do. Somebody has called it: Excruciatingly awful. I find it a remarkably silly book. It is certainly a bumptious one. Its story is preposterous. It reports the final stages of a final conflict (locale: chiefly the United States, some indefinite years hence) between the harried ranks of free enterprise and the looters. These are proponents of proscriptive taxes, government ownership, labor, etc., etc. The mischief here is that the author, dodging into fiction, nevertheless counts on your reading it as political reality. This, she is saying in effect, is how things really are. These are the real issues, the real sides. Only your blindness keeps you from seeing it, which, happily, I have come to rescue you from.

Since a great many of us dislike much that Miss Rand dislikes, quite as heartily as she does, many incline to take her at her word. It is the more persuasive, in some quarters, because the author deals wholly in the blackest blacks and the whitest whites. In this fiction everything, everybody, is either all good or all bad, without any of those intermediate shades which, in life, complicate reality and perplex the eye that seeks to probe it truly. This kind of simplifying pattern, of course, gives charm to most primitive storyknown as: The War between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. In modern dress, it is a class war. Both sides to it are caricatures.

The Children of Light are largely operatic caricatures. Insofar as any of them suggests anything known to the business community, they resemble the occasional curmudgeon millionaire, tales about whose outrageously crude and shrewd eccentricities sometimes provide the lighter moments in boardrooms. Otherwise, the Children of Light are geniuses. One of them is named (the only smile you see will be your own): Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastian dAntonio. This electrifying youth is the worlds biggest copper tycoon. Another, no less electrifying, is named: Ragnar Danesjold. He becomes a twentieth-century pirate. All Miss Rands chief heroes are also breathtakingly beautiful. So is her heroine (she is rather fetchingly vice president in charge of management of a transcontinental railroad).

So much radiant energy might seem to serve a eugenic purpose. For, in this story as in Mark Twains, all the knights marry the princessthough without benefit of clergy. Yet from the impromptu and surprisingly gymnastic matings of the heroine and three of the heroes, no childrenit suddenly strikes youever result. The possibility is never entertained. And, indeed, the strenuously sterile world of Atlas Shrugged is scarcely a place for children. You speculate that, in life, children probably irk the author and may make her uneasy. How could it be otherwise when she admiringly names a banker character (by what seems to me a humorless master-stroke): Midas Mulligan? You may fool some adults; you cant fool little boys and girls with such stuffnot for long. They may not know just what is out of line, but they stir uneasily. The Children of Darkness are caricatures, too; and they are really oozy. But at least they are caricatures of something identifiable. Their archetypes are Left-Liberals, New Dealers, Welfare Statists, One Worlders, or, at any rate, such ogreish semblances of these as may stalk the nightmares of those who think little about people as people, but tend to think a great deal in labels and effigies. (And neither Right nor Left, be it noted in passing, has a monopoly of such dreamers, though the horrors in their nightmares wear radically different masks and labels.)

In Atlas Shrugged, all this debased inhuman riffraff is lumped as looters. This is a fairly inspired epithet. It enables the author to skewer on one invective word everything and everybody that she fears and hates. This spares her the playguy business of performing one service that her fiction might have performed, namely: that of examining in human depth how so feeble a lot came to exist at all, let alone be powerful enough to be worth hating and fearing. Instead, she bundles them into one undifferentiated damnation.

Looters loot because they believe in Robin Hood, and have got a lot of other people believing in him, too. Robin Hood is the authors image of absolute evilrobbing the strong (and hence good) to give to the weak (and hence no good). All looters are base, envious, twisted, malignant minds, motivated wholly by greed for power, combined with the lust of the weak to tear down the strong, out of a deepseated hatred of life and secret longing for destruction and death. There happens to be a tiny (repeat: tiny) seed of truth in this. The full clinical diagnosis can be read in the pages of Friedrich Nietzsche. (Here I must break in with an aside. Miss Rand acknowledges a grudging debt to one, and only one, earlier philosopher: Aristotle. I submit that she is indebted, and much more heavily, to Nietzsche. Just as her operatic businessmen are, in fact, Nietzschean supermen, so her ulcerous leftists are Nietzsches last men, both deformed in a way to sicken the fastidious recluse of Sils Maria. And much else comes, consciously or not, from the same source.) Happily, in Atlas Shrugged (though not in life), all the Children of Darkness are utterly incompetent.

So the Children of Light win handily by declaring a general strike of brains, of which they have a monopoly, letting the world go, literally, to smash. In the end, they troop out of their Rocky Mountain hideaway to repossess the ruins. It is then, in the books last line, that a character traces in the dir, over the desolate earth, the Sign of the Dollar, in lieu of the Sign of the Cross, and in token that a suitably prostrate mankind is at last ready, for its sins, to be redeemed from the related evils of religion and social reform (the mysticism of mind and the mysticism of muscle).

That Dollar Sign is not merely provocative, though we sense a sophomoric intent to raise the pious hair on susceptible heads. More importantly, it is meant to seal the fact that mankind is ready to submit abjectly to an elite of technocrats, and their accessories, in a New Order, enlightened and instructed by Miss Rands ideas that the good life is one which has resolved personal worth into exchange value, has left no other nexus between man and man than naked selfinterest, than callous cash-payment. The author is explicit, in fact deafening, about these prerequisites. Lest you should be in any doubt after 1,168 pages, she assures you with a final stamp of the foot in a postscript:

And I mean it. But the words quoted above are those of Karl Marx. He, too, admired naked self-interest (in its time and place), and for much the same reasons as Miss Rand: because, he believed, it cleared away the cobwebs of religion and led to prodigies of industrial and cognate accomplishment. The overlap is not as incongruous as it looks. Atlas Shrugged can be called a novel only by devaluing the term. It is a massive tract for the times. Its story merely serves Miss Rand to get the customers inside the tent, and as a soapbox for delivering her Message. The Message is the thing. It is, in sum, a forthright philosophic materialism. Upperclassmen might incline to sniff and say that the author has, with vast effort, contrived a simple materialist system, one, intellectually, at about the stage of the oxcart, though without mastering the principle of the wheel. Like any consistent materialism, this one begins by rejecting God, religion, original sin, etc., etc. (This books aggressive atheism and rather unbuttoned higher morality, which chiefly outrage some readers, are, in fact, secondary ripples, and result inevitably from its underpinning premises.) Thus, Randian Man, like Marxian Man, is made the center of a godless world.

At that point, in any materialism, the main possibilities open up to Man. 1) His tragic fate becomes, without God, more tragic and much lonelier. In general, the tragedy deepens according to the degree of pessimism or stoicism with which he conducts his hopeless encounter between human questioning and the silent universe. Or, 2) Mans fate ceases to be tragic at all. Tragedy is bypassed by the pursuit of happiness. Tragedy is henceforth pointless. Henceforth mans fate, without God, is up to him, and to him alone. His happiness, in strict materialist terms, lies with his own workaday hands and ingenious brain. His happiness becomes, in Miss Rands words, the moral purpose of his fife.

Here occurs a little rub whose effects are just as observable in a free-enterprise system, which is in practice materialist (whatever else it claims or supposes itself to be), as they would be under an atheist socialism, if one were ever to deliver that material abundance that all promise. The rub is that the pursuit of happiness, as an end in itself, tends automatically, and widely, to be replaced by the pursuit of pleasure, with a consequent general softening of the fibers of will, intelligence, spirit. No doubt, Miss Rand has brooded upon that little rub. Hence in part, I presume, her insistence on man as a heroic being With productive achievement as his noblest activity. For, if Mans heroism (some will prefer to say: human dignity) no longer derives from God, or is not a function of that godless integrity which was a root of Nietzsches anguish, then Man becomes merely the most consuming of animals, with glut as the condition of his happiness and its replenishment his foremost activity. So Randian Man, at least in his ruling caste, has to be held heroic in order not to be beastly. And this, of course, suits the authors economics and the politics that must arise from them. For politics, of course, arise, though the author of Atlas Shrugged stares stonily past them, as if this book were not what, in fact, it is, essentiallya political book. And here begins mischief. Systems of philosophic materialism, so long as they merely circle outside this worlds atmosphere, matter little to most of us. The trouble is that they keep coming down to earth. It is when a system of materialist ideas presumes to give positive answers to real problems of our real life that mischief starts. In an age like ours, in which a highly complex technological society is everywhere in a high state of instability, such answers, however philosophic, translate quickly into political realities. And in the degree to which problems of complexity and instability are most bewildering to masses of men, a temptation sets in to let some species of Big Brother solve and supervise them.

One Big Brother is, of course, a socializing elite (as we know, several cut-rate brands are on the shelves). Miss Rand, as the enemy of any socializing force, calls in a Big Brother of her own contriving to do battle with the other. In the name of free enterprise, therefore, she plumps for a technocratic elite (I find no more inclusive word than technocratic to bracket the industrial-financial-engineering caste she seems to have in mind). When she calls productive achievement mans noblest activity, she means, almost exclusively, technological achievement, supervised by such a managerial political bureau. She might object that she means much, much more; and we can freely entertain her objections. But, in sum, that is just what she means. For that is what, in reality, it works out to. And in reality, too, by contrast with fiction, this can only head into a dictatorship, however benign, living and acting beyond good and evil, a law unto itself (as Miss Rand believes it should be), and feeling any restraint on itself as, in practice, criminal, and, in morals, vicious (as Miss Rand clearly feels it to be). Of course, Miss Rand nowhere calls for a dictatorship. I take her to be calling for an aristocracy of talents. We cannot labor here why, in the modern world, the pre-conditions for aristocracy, an organic growth, no longer exist, so that the impulse toward aristocracy always emerges now in the form of dictatorship.

Nor has the author, apparently, brooded on the degree to which, in a wicked world, a materialism of the Right and a materialism of the Left first surprisingly resemble, then, in action, tend to blend each with each, because, while differing at the top in avowed purpose, and possibly in conflict there, at bottom they are much the same thing. The embarrassing similarities between Hitlers National Socialism and Stalins brand of Communism are familiar. For the world, as seen in materialist view from the Right, scarcely differs from the same world seen in materialist view from the Left. The question becomes chiefly: who is to run that world in whose interests, or perhaps, at best, who can run it more efficiently?

Something of this implication is fixed in the books dictatorial tone, which is much its most striking feature. Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal. In addition, the mind which finds this tone natural to it shares other characteristics of its type. 1) It consistently mistakes raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before it. 2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked. There are ways of dealing with such wickedness, and, in fact, right reason itself enjoins them. From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: To a gas chambergo! The same inflexibly self-righteous stance results, too (in the total absence of any saving humor), in odd extravagances of inflection and gesture-that Dollar Sign, for example. At first, we try to tell ourselves that these are just lapses, that this mind has, somehow, mislaid the discriminating knack that most of us pray will warn us in time of the difference between what is effective and firm, and what is wildly grotesque and excessive. Soon we suspect something worse. We suspect that this mind finds, precisely in extravagance, some exalting merit; feels a surging release of power and passion precisely in smashing up the house. A tornado might feel this way, or Carrie Nation.

We struggle to be just. For we cannot help feeling at least a sympathetic pain before the sheer labor, discipline, and patient craftsmanship that went to making this mountain of words. But the words keep shouting us down. In the end that tone dominates. But it should be its own antidote, warning us that anything it shouts is best taken with the usual reservations with which we might sip a patent medicine. Some may like the flavor. In any case, the brew is probably without lasting ill effects. But it is not a cure for anything. Nor would we, ordinarily, place much confidence in the diagnosis of a doctor who supposes that the Hippocratic Oath is a kind of curse.

Review from The National Review, by Whittaker Chambers

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Atlas Shrugged | Ayn Rand | Conservative Book Club