America's Most Dangerous Book: Atlas Shrugged
Trickle-down economics doesn't work, but trickle-down ideology certainly does.
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I was 27, newly married, and working a low-paying job in retail when I got a letter from a shadowy organization that called itself the Neo-Tech Society. The letter referred to me by my first name and informed me that the Society's elders had been keeping a close watch on my life. They had determined that I would make a fit candidate for Neo-Tech membership; I was a rare individual, the letter claimed, uniquely suited to harness the ancient secrets of wealth and happiness guarded by the Society.
I had never been targeted so aggressively by scammers before, and I must admit the letter briefly intrigued me. I was poor and it hurt, and Neo-Tech's audacious appeal to my poverty and ego sliced me directly in my softest spots.
A quick bit of google searching revealed Neo-Tech's founder — Frank R. Wallace — to be both a huckster and a plagiarist trading on the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand. Wallace's "personalized" invitation to join the Neo-Tech Society proved to be nothing more than a sales pitch for his exorbitantly priced self-help book: The Neo-Tech Discovery.
While I quickly dismissed Wallace as the scam artist he was, Ayn Rand's Objectivism seemed more substantive to my immature mind. She preached a gospel of self-reliance and a rejection of social neediness that aligned with my ill-formed conservative politics (which I later renounced). It is within that context that I first read Atlas Shrugged — Rand's most successful and influential work.
A Brief Overview
Atlas Shrugged is Rand's dystopian vision of an American society imperiled by stifling market regulations and a socialist ethos. Railroad magnate Dagny Taggart fights uselessly against the tide of social collapse, while other barons of industry mysteriously disappear, leaving their companies and their country to fail.
Dagny discovers that these industrialists — the "prime movers of society" — have organized a "strike of the productive geniuses" and have intentionally left the "moochers and looters" to destroy America with their "irrational" and predatory preference for "neediness." She decides to join them in their secret society in Colorado and there meets John Galt, the strike's organizer, with whom Dagny predictably falls in love.
Dagny values action based solely on facts and regards anyone who fails to meet her standards with contempt. She is a clear stand-in for Rand, who was just as merciless as Dagny in her personal relationships.
Finally, Dagny helps Galt seize control of the world's radio waves. Galt announces a new capitalist order unfettered by religion, the "sanction of the victim," or any other "irrational" disruptions to free markets and private property. After his speech, the lights go out across New York City, signaling that society can't survive without the titans of industry.
Despite Rand's Fervor for Pure Reason, 'Atlas Shrugged' is Patently Absurd
Rand's America is a fantasyland of capitalist triumph. American industry in Atlas Shrugged consists wholly of sole-proprietorships built from the ground-up by resourceful people motivated only by production. Dagny is at home among these demigods of the factory; curiously, though, she does not build her railroad but inherits it instead.
The reality of big business in America is something altogether different — it is a series of publicly traded and faceless conglomerates managed by executives who would never deign to work the assembly line.
Rand's heroes all care more about 'product' than 'profit,'; no analysis is required to demonstrate the preposterousness of that representational assertion. Dagny and company are deeply romanticized ideals of the American Gilded Age of industrialization and thus bear little resemblance to modern CEOs and other corporate chiefs. Strange, then, that Atlas Shrugged is the political-science manual of choice for so many conservative pundits and politicians — more on that in a moment.
Rand's morality is also ludicrous; she views the world in stark absolutes; you're either a productive achiever, a humble servant to greatness, or a looter. Tellingly, the debilitated sick and elderly make no appearances in Atlas Shrugged; in Rand's taxonomy of the human, such people could only be looters — those living on the work of others. She does not include them in the ideal community of "Galt's Gulch," and one wonders what Galt will do with such "weaklings" when he takes over the world. Frankly, the Nazi response to "weakness" seems to be Rand's tacit preference. As Galt puts it:
"Ever since I can remember, I had felt that I would kill the man who'd claim that I exist for the sake of his need — and I had known that this was the highest moral feeling."
Of course, no one is claiming that Galt or anyone else should exist only to serve the needs of someone else. It is a typical distortion of the right born in a childish notion of freedom; it is an ideology antithetical to the "pure reason" so esteemed by Rand. Galt sees himself as a victim of the looter's mob, which is constituted by everyone who lacks the gratitude to know their place.
The "mob" is also everyone with a vote, and Galt's suggestion that any democratically arranged government intervention is tantamount to enslavement means that he's not just revolting against "socialism" but against democracy itself. Galt puts words in the mouths of those he views as antagonists, promises to murder them, and claims that he would enjoy the "highest moral feeling" after. "Who is John Galt?" the novel asks over and over. Apparently, he's Hitler.
Rand's extremism in the economic sphere is contrasted with her conventional Old Testament personal values. For example, Rand invests her industrialist-heroes with untainted honesty and work ethic. Hank Reardon, Dagny's business partner and lover, refuses to use government regulation in his favor, preferring "honest" competition instead. Likewise, Dagny encourages her competition to stay in the fight — she doesn't want her railroad to win by government fiat. Rand's heroes are thus idealists committed to doing things "the right way" (provided "the right way" includes wrecking civilization and slaughtering political opponents).
Few of Rand's heroes, however, have real-life counterparts. America's most famous companies all have long histories of shortcuts, frauds, and consumer endangerment. McDonald's success story, for example, is a tale told in court documents, lawsuits, and massive settlements with plaintiffs. Despite losing cases on intentional wage depression and falsified nutritional information, McDonald's continues to thrive; honest wages and advertising are no prerequisites for success in the real world.
Meanwhile, the managers of corporate giants like Bear Stearns, Enron, and AIG have ruined lives by the millions, but few have faced criminal consequences for their malfeasance. The list of corporate corruption in America is frankly inexhaustible: see GM and Ford's aid to the Nazis during WWII for a point of departure into the 'crimes of the industrialists.' Then, pick your favorite company and search 'history of corruption' for further reading. Rest assured, you won't run out of stories.
American railroads in the Gilded Age were especially disreputable, which makes them a strange choice as a symbol of American industrial triumph as depicted in Atlas Shrugged. Frankly, incorruptible corporate saints like Dagny and her friends don't exist in the real world, yet Atlas Shrugged posits that we, the moochers and looters of society, criminally injure these fictional archetypes through democratically decided regulation and taxation. Simultaneously, Rand remains utterly silent on how democratic institutions foster business in America. For an author who championed rationality above all, her "magnum opus" is an irrationally scripted farce.
Why 'Atlas Shrugged' is so Dangerous
Despite its utter lunacy, conservative 'intellectuals' still prize Atlas Shrugged as the movement's most coherent, forceful, and entertaining summation of libertarian principle. Former Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan, was an early Rand acolyte. In response to the New York Times review of Atlas Shrugged in 1957, Greenspan wrote:
"'Atlas Shrugged' is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should."
No word from Greenspan on who gets to divide the creatives from the parasites; presumably, he would refer to Rand's judgment on the matter. Greenspan put his Objectivist training to work in American monetary policy for decades. Following the financial crisis of 2008, he confessed that he was "shocked" and "distressed" to learn that his novelist mentor may have been wrong about macroeconomics.
Despite Greenspan's sheepish renunciation of Rand, Atlas Shrugged nevertheless continues to compel devotion among high school graduates like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. Former Speaker of the House and career politician, Paul Ryan, also champions Rand's philosophy. He claims that Atlas Shrugged was the reason he got into public service; he also made the novel required reading for his staffers.
That Ryan has never run a business or even worked for one makes his choice of inspiration a peculiar one, and his collegiate profession of faith in Rand seems most irrational considering the career he eventually chose. Nevertheless, the "virtue of selfishness" was the underlying creed of Catholic Ryan's policies and leadership in Washington.
American politicians, pundits, and bureaucrats aren't the only ones worshipping at the altar of Rand, either. Influential Austrian economist and fascist sympathizer, Ludwig von Mises, praised the novel's elitism in a 1958 letter to Rand:
"You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the efforts of men who are better than you."
Mises captured the fundamental thesis of Atlas Shrugged perfectly: most people exist as instruments for the industrious and should be made to recognize their abject inferiority. That this sentiment flatly contradicts John Galt's conviction that no one's life — especially his — should be reduced to the needs of others seems never to have crossed the minds of Rand, Mises, Ryan, or the poorly educated talking heads who trumpet Atlas Shrugged to the very "masses" they abhor. "Know your place," these voices chant in one accord; sadly, far too many of the "masses" have heard and obeyed.
Ayn Rand: 'Champion of Reason'
It is fitting, I think, given Rand's bellicose advocacy for free markets, pitiless self-interest, and private property rights, that I came to her by way of a charlatan selling overpriced self-help books derived directly from her work. I bought Atlas Shrugged because of Frank R. Wallace's marketing scam for Neo-Tech. Would Rand approve? Without Wallace's lies, I might never have found "the truth." How would Rand account for such peculiarities?
Furthermore, if Rand was as amenable to facts as she claimed, how would she reconcile the fact of climate change with her insistence on unregulated industrial production? Would it simply be a case where, as Greenspan would have it, the parasites rightly perish while the wealthy "producers" use their vast resources to survive?
Similarly, would Rand forbid international cooperation on pandemic response or deny government assistance to those financially distressed by coronavirus closures? If so, what incentives do the 99% have to agree to such an arrangement? Where do their self-interests lead?
Sadly, rational self-interest appears to have little influence on human behavior or ideological commitment. Judging by the sheer number of climate change deniers and anti-maskers in America, roughly half of us have fully embraced Rand's selfish 'ethics' and her strained relationship with reality. That most people have never read a word of Atlas Shrugged matters not; trickle-down economics doesn't work, but trickle-down ideology certainly does.
Self-Made Delusion
I've saved the most inexplicable example of Rand's break with reality for last. During a party thrown for Hank Reardon, one of Dagny's collaborators, Francisco d'Anconia, waxes philosophical about money and then segues into a tribute to America's virtuous history:
"…to the glory of mankind, there was, for the first time in history, a country of money — and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man's mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being — the self-made man — the American industrialist."
No fortunes of conquest? No slaves? Only self-made men? By way of what travesty of reason did Rand arrive at these conclusions? Rand and her characters need more than history lessons — they need elementary math, freshman psychology, and antipsychotic drugs.
Clearly, despite Rand's claims to unobscured reason, Atlas Shrugged is an exercise in pure myth, and one wonders how long her voice will continue to persuade the "deplorable masses" that her fictions are truth.
P.S. — I'm Guilty, Too
Earlier, when I said that former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has never worked in the private sector, I pulled a Rand and fibbed. When he was a teenager, Ryan briefly worked as a driver for Oscar Meyer. That's right: Ryan was the Wienermobile wheelman — I'll let you make of that what you will.
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