It so happens that I am liable to read a good book more than once. That is why I have bookshelves. After three weeks of intense struggle, I have finished Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Let me assure you and myself - I will not read it again in at least twenty years.
Don't get me wrong, it is a very good book. Long and thorough in its philosophy. As the author states in her postscript, I am sure there exists men like those in the book. However, I am none of them and don't adhere to her way of objectivism in any manner. In fact, the book shows such a lack of faith in social structures in such a perverted way I cannot even begin to tell you how fed up I was at moments while reading the book.
It contains litanies of such length and scope, filled with a denigration, defamation of the need for common social structures and perverts social responsibility into bleak and idiotic morons. One such PART of a chapter ran for close to a hundred pages - a radio speech made by one of the supermen in her book. It has taken me more than a week to just read that part due to repeated arguments of irrefutable truth but little value.
How to sum up a book of 650 thousand words? It is a good book, a good story - but completely fantastic and not the least - bitter and full of defeatism.
Yes, I believe in taxes. Yes, I do believe that we all have a responsibility to give, freely to a common cause - with no immediate or even probable gain for our own good. No, the state must be more than protection to do your best. Of course our society fails horribly sometimes in giving the individual free reign for our creativity and ability. However - I do not agree on the premise that the laborer who "just lends his muscles"does not return more than his hours to society than an investor who "does not get paid for his ideas in proportion to their values".
And the view of women? Hah. Dagny Taggart might be a main character, but she is led by her womanly feelings and inability to detached of them. She is beautiful in all her evening dresses, so simple they flow around her body in action, as she run from crisis to crisis. She is a supporting character in her own struggle and must always be explained why she is insecure, why she must call them - the three great students of physics and philosophy - to rescue her love at the altar of destruction.
Those three men, like sons of a great mind are supermen - a Norwegian pirate, a South-American nobleman, a prodigy of invention.
How can you claim that you are free to get as high up as any other just by your ability? No - ability is not enough and it is naive to think that one should start anew - rip open society, kill off all those who are slaves just because they are slaves. And how about the land you use as an industrialist? Is that yours? How about an education system that is open for all? How about the libraries that let man be free to pursue his thirst for knowledge? How do you propose to finance it? By donations from someone lives by the tenet that he only gives away what is no importance?
I do not adhere to a full relativity of values. There are things we must firmly put as truth, as good. However, an objectivism stated on the individual knowledge of what makes him happy? Reality only as what one can produce by the singular mind, by stating that nothing else than the utilization of natural resources is of import? That there is no value in culture? Calling thousands of years of culture flawed, stating that only Aristotle had SOMEthing right and can be forgiven for his few faults? No.
Yes, society is flawed. Yes, a planned economy is very seldom good. But I really think there are too many flawed premises in the book to take it serious as a model of how society is, could be, should be.
Pitiful. Naive. Hateful.
