By Ayn Rand

Here’s where the live blogging gets a bit messy: by recapping as we go through it, we often decide to either not mention or put off mentioning something until it proves itself important. But the whole John Galt thing is sort of gradually gaining in importance, so there hasn’t been a good time to really address it head-on (yet) and we probably should have mentioned it beforehand. So, to catch up, here’s a quick run-down of John Galt: Continue reading →

The following has been making the rounds on Facebook, though it was quoted in the Rolling Stone interview from October 2012:

Can’t say that I disagree, though I am a bit disappointed at the graphic for the cheap shot of using a particularly unattractive photo of Rand.

—Anna

One of my problems with this book is the way that it’s dated. I increasingly get the sense that this book is fighting a war that’s already been won. Ayn Rand is right and society acknowledges it: inventors who create impressive things can and should be rewarded richly by being able to monetize their inventions. Standing up for yourself, declaring your motives and taking pride in your accomplishments, is not only accepted but encouraged. Inventing, and being rewarded for it, is standard. Think of the way society looks at Steve Jobs or at Bill Gates. They’re impressive people and society respects them greatly. From the perspective of the 1950s, maybe this argument still needed to be made. From the perspective of 2013, though, it’s going too far and turning into bullying.

This is not the fault of Rand or her book, but (as her own arguments go) fault is not actually the issue at hand. It doesn’t matter whether there is fault, what matters is that there is a problem that needs to be addressed. The problem is that the book argues that wealthy business owners need to be given more rights and freedoms than they currently are. In the world of Atlas Shrugged, those wealthy business owners are being severely prosecuted. It makes sense to give them more rights, i.e. stop prosecuting them. But we’re not in a society that hates inventors and hates people who make money. We’re in a society where the banks demand bailouts, where the Disney corporation demands control of the intellectual property of a man half-a-century dead, and corporate theft is a standard practice to quash start-up companies.

I think Ayn Rand would be rolling in her grave regarding some of the people who use her arguments to rationalize their behaviors.

Anyway, first a summary of events (it’s only short in comparison to the chapter itself), and then a bit more about how Rearden, despite being rather awesome in this chapter, is also being incredibly blind, and how Francisco has fallen off the deep end.

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Once again Atlas Shrugged has made the news – this has seriously been a very timely reading! An Idaho lawmaker has proposed a bill requiring every high school student in the state to read and pass a test on Atlas Shrugged before graduation.* I had a series of reactions:

• Ugh, those poor students! Oh, man, those poor teachers!

• You know what, this is totally going to bite him in the ass. I have never heard of a single person who’s favorite book turned out to be one they read as a requirement. There’s something about the simple fact of the requirement that takes away a lot of the inspiration from reading.

• Considering the somewhat explicit and very uncomfortable sex scenes, the PTA would be howling! Actually, this specific lawmaker would probably be howling just as loudly about any other book that contained similar passages. (Although given the Republican Party’s recent comments on rape, perhaps they wouldn’t be all that bothered.)

*I linked to Fox Nation because I thought we should have a supporting view of it (though they actually seem pretty noncommittal), but you should also check out the “Pic of the Day” on the right  column, because it is super cute!

—Anna

In this chapter, Rearden just begins to touch on some issues that I hope Rand intends to delve into further.

First, is the definition of “success.” Success is not just making money, or the characters would have accepted the various deals the corrupt officials keep offering them. Oddly, for all that they would deny it vociferously, the characters appear to define success as earning public accolades. They don’t go out seeking it, but they sure are upset when they don’t receive it. Unearned accolades are, of course, for parasites like Jim Taggert et al., but having earned those public accolades, they had better get them. Rearden touches on it, when “He thought—in bitter astonishment and for the first time—that the joyous pride he had once felt, had come from his respect for men, for the value of their admiration and their judgment. He did not feel it any longer. There were no men, he thought, to whose sight he could wish to offer that sign.” If you can’t define success as people looking up at you in awe, what does success mean?

Second is their ignorance of people as a resource that can be developed. Again, Rearden touches on this, when he wonders, “We who were able to melt rock and metal for our purpose, why had we never sought that which we wanted from men?” I have wondered this too, given the amount of times they complain at how hard it is to find good workers. All these men fresh out of college aren’t anywhere near as experienced as their veteran workers. Why don’t you train your own workers?

Meanwhile, Francisco remains an idiot savant. He has wonderful skills at all things, and he continues to make these Faustian arguments that have just enough truth to seem right, huge amounts of flattery to ease their way into Rearden’s psyche, and vast numbers of fallacies to stick in my craw.

So a quick summary of events and then a bit more of reaction from me:

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Given the recent Super Bowl, I have a sports metaphor for you:  Dagny and Rearden are like Olympic-grade field and track athletes who have stumbled onto a professional football field. They are extremely fast, they are extremely strong, they can get that ball from one end of the field to the other with no problem… and they have no clue why those referees keep on yelling at them, or why those other guys on the field are working together and even strategizing. There are two different competitions going on here, but Dagny and Rearden aren’t willing to learn the rules of football and the rest of the world isn’t willing to give up the game in order to celebrate pure individual strength.

In some ways, this book seems to foretell the shift our society went through in the way it treats information. We are so inundated with information, in today’s world, that someone’s attention is a valuable resource. Marketing firms make and spend fortunes focusing attention. Facebook is monetized based on the idea that people and corporations will pay money in order to get the attention of various demographics. Dagny and Rearden are the dinosaurs in this new economy. They are the takers rather than the makers when it comes to attention. They demand it of others, but they don’t give it to anyone else. That is why they are currently failing so hard. They ignore their “men in Washington” and their boards of directors just as they ignore the vast majority of people. Dagny even states that she doesn’t think her brother’s new wife is worth the attention it would require to form an opinion of.  The economy based on a currency of time and attention is something that she and Reardon are completely unaware of. They wander through the marketplace, wondering why no one will barter with them, when they so obviously have nothing to give.

Anyway, a quick summary of events and then a discussion of money and logic and why Francisco is an idiot.

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