When Atlas Shrugs, People Listen... But Why?
The ones who got us into the economic mess we're in thought Atlas Shrugged was a primer for modeling a society--rather than just a work of (bad) fiction. Their solution to the problems they caused? Read Atlas Shrugged...
It is no small irony that conservatives, whose agenda is supposedly to make us all to live in the past, don't remember what the past was actually like. Take, for example. the sudden interest amongst the "Whiny Right" in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Lately, conservative pundits have been bringing up this book as a prescient window from the past into today's economic predicament. According to them, if we only followed the precepts Rand laid out in this book, the real source of our economic problems would just go away, and we would have a perfect laissez-faire capitalist society run by selfish people who only give a damn about themselves. And that, of course, would be good (according to them), because all of those outside of that group of people are just "moochers" who unjustifiably take the "wealth" these people produced (i.e., from the Ponzi schemes and the tangled mazes of fabricated fictional financial instruments they created).
There's just one problem with this sudden rise in cheerleading for Ayn Rand from the Whiny Right: Rand's doctrine was what these people followed during their stay in power over the course of the last thirty years! We did follow those precepts, and this is where they got us.
Even before Obama was sworn into office, the Whiny Right was already posturing about their love of Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged. Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal wrote an article back in January entitled Atlas Shrugged: From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years. He mentioned that during his stay at the Cato Institute (a libertarian spin farm posing as an "objective"--no pun intended--source of economic wisdom, with a bias against economic regulation as deep as the Institute for Creation Science's bias against evolution), they would call those who hadn't yet read Atlas Shrugged "virgins". (Perhaps this was meant to indicate that they hadn't yet been mindf--ked.) Moore opined that "if only Atlas were required reading for every member of Congress and political appointee in the Obama administration. I'm confident that we'd get out of the current financial mess a lot faster." But in stereotypical conservatives-can't-remember-the-past fashion, he forgets that the book was "required reading" for people like Ronald Reagan and Alan Greenspan, who might be considered the... shall we say architects (Howard Roarks?) of the economic debacle we are in today. In other words, reading Atlas Shrugged is not what will get us out of this mess, it is the very thing that got us into it.
(Of course, when Moore appeared on The Colbert Report during the "Doom Bunker" segment last week, he admitted that if something, somehow, were to prove that his ideas on economic policy and doctrine were wrong, "I would have to rethink everything I believe in." As Colbert noted, we can only pray that never happens... but there really isn't any need to when dealing with Whiny Right, is there?)
To use a metaphor of sorts, imagine that an expatriate from a foreign country--say, Russia--detested how food was made in her native country, had her own ideas about such things (for argument's sake, we'll call her "Rachel Raynd") and fled to come to America. Once here, she wrote a cookbook (entitled "Atlas Sauteed") describing the "right" way that food should be made, complete with recipes and photos of her completed creations. Millions of people bought the book (and also bought large SUVs and/or pickup trucks in order to carry the huge tomes back home), and praised it. The pictures inside the book "proved" that these were great magnificent delicious recipes. But when several prominent chefs decided to serve food based on the recipes in the book, thousands of people suffered severe food poisoning and became extremely ill. Not heeding these somewhat obvious warnings, the chefs continued to prepare food according to these recipes, and many more became ill. When a government agency ("No, no, please no!!!!") came in and shut down the establishments using these recipes, the proprietors became enraged--"Why are WE being punished because other people got sick?"--and announced their idea of a solution. There was a cure for what befell all those sick people. Where would we find this cure? Why, in the back of that same cookbook! (In fact, in the last 60 or so pages, in which chef Jean Gaulte decries the notion that the illness of the people he fed is his concern--these, after all, were not productive people who created meals, these were simply the people who paid for and ate them. Mere human beings, not chefs like him!)
What is the allure of this book? Rand is a horrific author, even more tediously verbose than... well, than me. 
Her capabilities in constructing an engaging narrative and producing poetic metaphor are severely limited. (How much "metaphor" can you squeeze out of "A = A"?) Her philosophy is derivative and unoriginal, and most of those she cribs from would spin in their graves if exposed to her work. And that philosophy is not conveyed to us through action (as a good author would do) but through plodding speeches offered up by her flawless heroic fictional characters.
So why do conservatives see this book as a bible, a primer on how society should be organized? Perhaps it is the same set of factors that leads fans of Lord of the Rings (et al) to show up to movie premieres (or for that matter, to work) in full costumed regalia, to take on the names of their favorite characters... in other words, these Randroids are just another set of nerds who believe their pet favorite fantasy fiction (which is all Atlas Shrugged is) is real! Good fantasy and science fiction work because their stories may be fictional, but they resonate metaphorically in the real world. Atlas Shrugged simply pretends that the fantasies of the author are reality. It is a pathetic eugenic fiction vainly attempting to rationalize the notion that society can be divided up into productive people and "moochers", and that only members of the former group are "deserving".
Isn't it funny how the advocates of this philosophy all happen to imagine themselves, objectively of course, to be the productive, intelligent ones who are taken advantage of by the other worthless moochers who just don't work as hard as they do? How did that happen?)
Poking fun at Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged is kind of like shooting fish in a barrel. Stephen Colbert's segment on the subject last night, Rand Illusion, was dead on, mocking the book's ridiculous conceit about the "people who make society work" (you know: the CEOs, the hedge fund managers, the politicians, and the pundits) going on strike and creating their own island nation--a nation, as Colbert describes it, "of self-interested, Type-A, me-firsters who will never suffer the indignity of working in the interests of anyone else". Matt Ruff also parodied Rand's philosophical ideas in his book Sewer, Gas, and Electric.
But the most poignant mockery of Randroidism comes from Douglas Adams, best known as the author of the five-book Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "trilogy". In one of those books, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Adams describes a race from the planet Golgafrincham, who had a similar idea to the one in Atlas Shrugged, only in reverse. They decided their species could be divided up into three groups: the "A" group being the brilliant (self-proclaimed, of course) leaders, scientists, artists and so on, the "C" group being those who worked, who did and made actual concrete things of value, the "B" group being everybody else--the hairdressers, management consultants, TV producers, insurance salesmen, telephone sanitizers, etc.--whom the wise "brilliant" people objectively deemed useless. And the brilliant people "invented spurious tales of impending doom" conveyed to the masses leading to an announcement that everyone would need to leave the planet, and that the three designated groups would be gathered onto their own respective "arks", with the "B-Ark" leaving... er, shall we say, "first". Thus the remaining people of Golgafrincham, having "rid themselves of the useless third of their population, ... stayed firmly at home and lived full, rich, happy lives... until they were all suddenly wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone."
Maybe such a scenario, or a variation of it, really is in our best interests. Perhaps, if the self-proclaimed brilliant deserving people did go on strike, did stop inventing specious manufactured ways of "creating wealth" from vapor, we would be the better for it. And perhaps if they did go off together to an island and form their own nation based on their social and economic "principles"... it would be the best season of Survivor ever!
But if they bring their guns with them, it probably wouldn't last more than a few episodes.
- Colbert Nation - Tonight's Word: Rand Illusion
- Atlas Shrugged: From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years (from The Wall Street Journal)
- Ayn Rand entry on Colbert's Wikiality web site
Hilarious and very well said!! Here's an interesting article on what really might have prevented our current situation and what may be a better way to model economics going forward, from the scientific publication Seed Magazine.
Ecology of Finance
Comment by Misanthropic Scott — March 12, 2009 @ 1:23 pm
The definition of selfishness?
The CEO's, hedge fund managers, the politicians, are not type-A men as you so subtley suggest. Is running a company into the ground in ones self interest if you are the CEO? Is investing billions in shady sub-prime mortgages in anyones self interest? Is selling your country to the highest bidder (lobbyist) in one's own self interest?
Your article addresses these men as the heroes of Ayn Rand's writings and the architects of the mess we are now in. But what you refuse to aknowledge is the government regulations that made all of this current crisis possible.
You forget, if you have read Atlas Shrugged, that the politicians were the plague, that the regulations of the polticians is what ultimately caused the debacle.
Read the book then talk about it. When you think you must find the root of whatever cause you seek to discover. Logic has a beginning and an end.
Comment by firsthander — March 13, 2009 @ 4:52 pm
Shall we start from the beginning, Firsthander?
The "Type-A" label was not my invention, that was from Colbert's lucid description. As a part-time type-A myself, I can't really see why that label is something you see as an issue.
"Is running a company into the ground in ones self interest if you are the CEO?" Sure, absolutely, if you get a golden parachute in the hundreds of millions when the company goes down and no accountability for your actions as you move on to the next company you run into the ground without any consequence to your own career.
Again, it was not "government regulations that made all of this possible," it was the notion that the regulations we DID have in place were irrelevant and ought to be ignored or even dismantled, one of the prime legacies of Reaganomics. Why do you people think blaming everything bad on the government and absolving corporate criminals of responsibility is a reasonable argument? Distrusting the government but trusting corporations is like distrusting institutionalized medicine but trusting drug dealers.
I do not "forget" at all that in Atlas Shrugged "the politicians were the plague"--I simply note that Atlas Shrugged is a work of fiction that is not reflective of reality, and that statements about who Rand considered to be the plague are irrelevant gibberish. She was the author of a fictional book with cardboard characters that did not represent the real world. That you think it WAS representative of the real world is the source of the problem here.
Finally, logic begins with fundamental statements of fact that are the foundation for a process reaching a valid conclusion. Your statements here begin and end with the assumption that Rand's ideas represent a valid image of the world and how it works. The results of conservative politicians over the course of 30 years employing her ideas to the detriment of us all proves that this is not the case. Therefore your argument is not founded on logic. Saying that it is doesn't make it so. Saying "read the book" only serves to support your contention if you assume a priori that the book is true. Kind of like what some people do with the Bible, y'know? (Not surprising, given the way Objectivism is no different than any other religion.)
Comment by Rich Rosen — March 13, 2009 @ 5:44 pm
Firsthander,
I agree with Rich. You've got it all backwards. Of course running a company into the ground can be in the CEO's self interest. The issue with the subprimes in particular made it so, many times over. Before everyone realized they were toxic waste to be avoided at all cost, what people saw in them was a way to buy the subprime known shitty mortgages, "insure" them with credit default swaps (which were unregulated, of course) and then account for them as if they were insured by a real insurance company. This allowed them to take 10 years of profit in a single year and to award themselves (and the traders that work for them) 10 years of bonuses in a single year.
So, yes, it is absolutely in the self-interest of the CEO and the traders to buy crappy mortgages and reap very short term benefits and then suffer the awful fate of being paid many millions of dollars to go away. That is what acting based on self-interest leads to.
I have had some bizarre conversations with self-proclaimed Objectivists. Imagine someone who actually has a dog and thinks that animals are all stimulus/response in a B. F. Skinner way. If you believe that, why have a dog? If you believe that, I wouldn't want to be your dog. I can't even really imagine someone who has a cat feeling that way. Though, many who do not have cats seem to think they're not social creatures. They're wrong, of course. But, I can understand the misunderstanding. Cats are social in ways that many people have trouble recognizing. But, at least one of these cultists actually had a dog. How much more obviously can anyone show their emotions and thoughts than a dog does? Everything is so out in the open with dogs. And yet, these people have come to believe that non-human animals have no feelings. I couldn't believe that a conversation with these guys about morality could actually have a whole pile of these morans asserting very strongly that we have no moral obligation to animals.
It seems to me that the whole Objectivist thing really gives people strange ideas, as strange as those of fundamentalists from any of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic sects and stranger than most run-of-the-mill, non-foaming-at-the-mouth, members of religions. I know that Objectivists tend to espouse atheism (as I do) but Rand's tenets embody all the very worst aspects of religion in general. I recall that I once referred to her as "L. Rayn Hubbrand." It seemed very appropriate at the time ... and still does.
Comment by Misanthropic Scott — March 14, 2009 @ 9:32 am
Another great article noting how following Rand's philosophy is possibly the worst idea ever:
The Last Person On Earth To Turn To Now Is Ayn Rand
Understand what "Going Galt" really is: the people with power, accumulated through inheritance, deception, collusion, or coercion, who have control in one form or another of the "means of production", tell the rest of the world that they will only resume their work -- which provides goods for people, employs people, etc. -- if they get their way, if the world agrees to follow their stilted self-centered view of how society and its underlying economy should work.
This is nothing but economic blackmail. Contrary to the notion that Going Galt is some noble proud effort by the true elite to show society how it ought to work -- it is a telling example of the stupid, selfish, whiny, crybaby behavior of these unworthies, these people who bitch about government "entitlements" given to people (like health care, police protection, education, etc.) when they themselves feel entitled to get their childish whiny way.
The reason they hate unions is because unions form a wedge that the people who do the actual work for these lazy slobs use against their employers' unabrogated power.
The reason they whine about the terrible "trial lawyers" who sue corporations when their actions cause others harm is because they don't believe they SHOULD be held accountable for such things.
The reason they hate government oversight is because such oversight, if applied robustly, would put constraints on the kinds of deceitful things they do to make a profit.
When we hear these people bemoan the terrible awful government regulations impeding them from "doing what they want", know what it is that they want - to act with impunity, to absolve themselves of responsibility to those who employ, to those they sell their products to, and to society at large.
They want to Go Galt? I say hell, they should go for it. I'm all for starting a movement encouraging those B-Ark charlatans (to use Adams' metaphor) to run off to an island and form their own society -- is there a word for a "society" comprised solely of the anti-social? -- which would disintegrate under its own weight in microseconds. The reality of Atlas Shrugged is that its pompous cardboard anti-social characters are the antithesis of anything resembling a hero, that despite Rand's fantasies about how the world really works, the world they would produce if left to their own devices -- and thank goodness we don't! -- would be a hell on earth. Rational selfishness is, as we've seen from the actual behavior of these rationally selfish fools, as oxymoronic as military intelligence -- or that other forcibly conflated term, "compassionate conservatism."
Comment by Sviergn Jiernsen — March 16, 2009 @ 9:05 am
Thanks to Mike Huben, keeper of the Critiques of Libertarianism web site and blog, for linking to this post in his own article on what's wrong with the Going-Galt "movement". He also links to two great cartoons on the subject from In Contempt Comics and from Some Guy with a Website.
Comment by Rich Rosen — March 17, 2009 @ 11:45 am
Rand's book was a moral argument about productive and responsible people, rather than "the wealthy" or "powerful" who want to coerce others into paying for them. What you are attacking is something else, i.e. Strawmen.
Of course Colbert realizes that there is a rather nasty, but not altogether unfair, portrayal of people just like him in the book, and he wouldn't want anybody reading that and associating it with the benevolent and progressive ways of destroying America now in vogue.
Of course Atlas is a piece of fiction, some people are bound to misinterpret it, some find it inspirational with ominous parallels to real world happenings, some find it badly written and one-dimensional.
I have yet to meet any conservative or libertarian who saw this piece of fiction as "their Bible", and I hope I never will.
Comment by AuH2O — March 22, 2009 @ 3:47 am
Thanks for your comment, AuH2O. (I get it, GoldWater. LOL!) Somehow, it never fails during an argument about Rand that someone introduces the "straw man" fallacy by referring to other people's "straw man" arguments that are, in fact, not straw men at all. Kind of a logical Moebius strip inside an Escher painting.
Yes, AS was a moral fable about "productive and responsible people", but the story line erroneously conflates the very two groups you mention as if they were one. It would be either naive or disingenuous to claim that the "moral" of the book was merely a social one, which is what you seem to be implying. And the point is that this "moral" is speciously founded on that erroneous conflation, applying the adjectives "productive and responsible" onto a class of people who are generally unworthy of those labels.
Who among us has in their lives NOT had to deal with the "unproductive and irresponsible"? - Family members who won't deal of their own problems and force you to take care of things for them with a total lack of appreciation on their part, friends who consistently get themselves into trouble owing to their irresponsibility leaving it to you to rescue them, colleagues who don't do their fair share and burden you with the bulk of the workload. But Randists take this experience and extrapolate that the entire human race is justifiably divided into the "productive and responsible" (a group that just happens to include them) and everyone else, and building from that a eugenic rationalization for greed and selfishness. They pretend that the human experience can be distilled into a division between them, the supposedly productive and responsible, and the rest of the world. This is not reasoning worthy of a label etymologically derived from the word "objective". This is just crybaby whining about how they are underappreciated and underrewarded relative to everyone else.
Getting down to specifics, I'm curious as to precisely what you mean when you talk about people "just like" Colbert and a "nasty but not altogether unfair portrayal" of such people in Atlas Shrugged. This sounds like a snide ad hominem innuendo made in a deliberately unclear way. What portrayal are you referring to? Which characteristic are you maligning? And you speak of "destroying America" in an equally unclear manner. What exactly is destroying America? Again, obviously what brought America to the state we are in now IS the actions of people who believed Atlas Shrugged WAS a textbook for how economies and societies ought to be structured. We can thus, objectively, say that the presumptions upon which their socioeconomic principles rest are flawed. I would thus conclude that an effort to continue employing such principles is the force that would be considered to be destroying America. (What is it that keeps some people from admitting that? A total obstinacy about admitting they're wrong and accepting the very notion of change?)
Atlas Shrugged does not have "parallels" to real world happenings, if anything it has what would best be called "perpendiculars" that butt head on INTO the wall of reality, hard. The only thing "ominous" here is the rabid dogmatism of those whose pathological dogma failed us all in its real world application, as they insist that we all cling to that dogma as fiercely as they do--lest we be accused of "destroying America".
Rand's most glaring flaw was her stilted binary thinking: either society works to help its members (bad) or it lets its self-proclaimed geniuses have their way and do what they want no matter what the consequences (er... good?). No surprise that those who find her philosophy reasonable share that trait. If you're trying to say that Atlas Shrugged is simply about some sort of conflict between "productive and responsible people" and their supposedly unproductive and irresponsible counterparts, this is simply not borne out by the storyline, and it is certainly not the opinion of most of the book's fans. The point, if any, of Atlas Shrugged is to draw a rationalized social demarcation between the so-called "productive and responsible" and everyone else, dividing worthy from unworthy, using this as a justification for pretending that their lives are not enmeshed in and dependent on society as a whole. This is a "point" founded in loaded biased irrationality.
J. K. Galbraith noted that "the modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." Randists seem to think they have found it but, objectively speaking, they have not. Not by a long shot.
Comment by Rich Rosen — March 23, 2009 @ 1:03 am
From a mutual friend who usually prefers to remain anonymous on blogs, there is apparently a programming language based on the morals of Objectivism called Objectivist C.
http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Objectivist_C
Comment by Misanthropic Scott — October 30, 2009 @ 3:23 pm