“Thought—he told himself quietly—is a weapon one uses in order to act... Thought is the tool by which one makes a choice... Thought sets one's purpose and the way to reach it.”
— Narrator (referring to Hank Rearden)
Atlas Shrugged (Part 1, Chapter 7, Page 214)
In our book club, some time back, we read Atlas Shrugged. Atlas Shrugged is one of my favorite books of all time. It came to me at the perfect point in my life. I was in my mid-30's, politics were ripe with corruption and dissention, I was bored, disgusted and disillusioned with most authority figures, and I was ready to sink my teeth into some nice free-the-world-get-off-my-back-and-out-of-my-pockets rebellion. It gave me everything I wanted and more.
“The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence... The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law.”
— John Galt
Atlas Shrugged (Part 3, Chapter 7, Page 1,062)
I was involved in a long commute at the time, and so I bought the book on CD. It was something like 45 discs, or maybe 52, anyway, it was a lot. But, I had a lot of driving to do and so it worked out for me. There were several points during the course of the listening that I would get to where I was going and ended up either a: driving around a little longer or b: pulling into a parking spot and hanging out in the car for another 10 minutes to finish the disc or the chapter.
“...through all the generations of political extortion, it was not the looting bureaucrats who had taken the blame, but the chained industrialists, not the men who peddled legal flavors, but the men who were forced to buy them; and through all those generations of crusades against corruption, the remedy had always been, not the liberating of the victims, but the granting of wider powers for extortion to the extortionists. The only guilt of the victims, he thought, had been that they accepted it as guilt.”
— Hank Rearden
Atlas Shrugged (Part 3, Chapter 5, Page 933)
I became completely embroiled in the life of Dagny Taggert. Everywhere I looked I saw evidence that I was living in an Atlas Shrugged society. I made comparisons continually. Always looking for the true motivation and meaning behind things. While I did not ascend to the level of conspiracy theorist, I did become suspicious of anyone selling me a line, whether it was with sales people or politicians...or anyone else for that matter.
“The symbol of all relationships among such men, the moral symbol of respect for human beings, is the trader. We, who live by values, not by loot, are traders, both in matter and in spirit. A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved.”
— John Galt
Atlas Shrugged (Part 3, Chapter 7, Page 1,022)
I wanted to be Dagny Taggerts friend. I wanted to scoff and berate her brother for being such a sleezeball. I wanted to live fresh and free running through the world making discoveries and creating inventions and contributing things that mattered. I was ready to buy stock in Rearden Metal and kick his wife Lillian to the curb. These were my kind of people, my kind of take-charge-quit-your-whining characters. They worked hard, and they earned their keep...and they were betrayed...and often, and so everytime there was an upturn I cheered, and everytime a lowturn I booed.
“...joy is the core of existence, the motive power of every living being... it is the need of one's body as it is the goal of one's spirit...”
— Hank Rearden
Atlas Shrugged (Part 2, Chapter 6, Page 564)
That's all I'm going to say about the story. You'll have to read it, or listen to it, yourself for the rest.
“The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world.”
— John Galt
Atlas Shrugged (Part 3, Chapter 7, Page 1,054)
If you don't have time to read it I highly advise getting it on audio and enjoying it. Great story for a variety of reasons. Be prepared though because there are a lot of very vehement Atlas Shrugged and Ayn Rand haters in the world.
It's the kind of book that, generally, people either love or hate, usually with equal passion. People who hate it though, tend to become unreasonable when you try to discuss the theories and ideas. They tend to accuse you of insensitivity, selfishness and lack of social awareness. They throw around the idea that if you like the book you have bought into its philosophies and practices hook line and sinker and then, in turn, if you don't live the philosophies of the book, that you are a hypocrite. Really, it's more productive to have a hearty and animated discussion over the things that were read and how you could see them right or how you could see them wrong. Unfortunately it often becomes a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
To like the book, even to love the book, does not mean that you are an Ayn Rand Kool-Aid drinking son of a gun, it just means that perhaps you get it. You get a different vision, and maybe--just maybe--you think that people should work more and bitch less.
So--that said--be aware.
“He was a man who had never accepted the creed that others had the right to stop him.”
— Narrator (referring to Nathaniel Taggart)
Atlas Shrugged (Part 1, Chapter 3, Page 59)
Most of the women in my book club group really enjoyed it, though there were a few dissenters, which is good because it makes for a lively discussion. During the course of our discussion, we talked about how great it would be if it were made into a movie. We talked about who should play what character, and who shouldn't, and 3 years or so later...here we are.
The new Atlas Shrugged movie will be released as a trilogy, with the first movie being released on April 15th, 2011...Tax Day...couldn't be a better choice.
I am so excited for this to come out I can hardly stand it. Bring on Dagny and Hank, and James and Francisco, and of course John Galt..no doubt we will still always ask "Who is John Galt?"...but now their will be a face to go with the name. ;)
http://www.atlas-shrugged-movie.com/
“Fight for the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence of that which is man: for his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the Morality of Life and that yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth.”
— John Galt
Atlas Shrugged (Part 3, Chapter 7, Page 1,069)
— Narrator (referring to Hank Rearden)
Atlas Shrugged (Part 1, Chapter 7, Page 214)
In our book club, some time back, we read Atlas Shrugged. Atlas Shrugged is one of my favorite books of all time. It came to me at the perfect point in my life. I was in my mid-30's, politics were ripe with corruption and dissention, I was bored, disgusted and disillusioned with most authority figures, and I was ready to sink my teeth into some nice free-the-world-get-off-my-back-and-out-of-my-pockets rebellion. It gave me everything I wanted and more.
“The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence... The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law.”
— John Galt
Atlas Shrugged (Part 3, Chapter 7, Page 1,062)
I was involved in a long commute at the time, and so I bought the book on CD. It was something like 45 discs, or maybe 52, anyway, it was a lot. But, I had a lot of driving to do and so it worked out for me. There were several points during the course of the listening that I would get to where I was going and ended up either a: driving around a little longer or b: pulling into a parking spot and hanging out in the car for another 10 minutes to finish the disc or the chapter.
“...through all the generations of political extortion, it was not the looting bureaucrats who had taken the blame, but the chained industrialists, not the men who peddled legal flavors, but the men who were forced to buy them; and through all those generations of crusades against corruption, the remedy had always been, not the liberating of the victims, but the granting of wider powers for extortion to the extortionists. The only guilt of the victims, he thought, had been that they accepted it as guilt.”
— Hank Rearden
Atlas Shrugged (Part 3, Chapter 5, Page 933)
I became completely embroiled in the life of Dagny Taggert. Everywhere I looked I saw evidence that I was living in an Atlas Shrugged society. I made comparisons continually. Always looking for the true motivation and meaning behind things. While I did not ascend to the level of conspiracy theorist, I did become suspicious of anyone selling me a line, whether it was with sales people or politicians...or anyone else for that matter.
“The symbol of all relationships among such men, the moral symbol of respect for human beings, is the trader. We, who live by values, not by loot, are traders, both in matter and in spirit. A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved.”
— John Galt
Atlas Shrugged (Part 3, Chapter 7, Page 1,022)
I wanted to be Dagny Taggerts friend. I wanted to scoff and berate her brother for being such a sleezeball. I wanted to live fresh and free running through the world making discoveries and creating inventions and contributing things that mattered. I was ready to buy stock in Rearden Metal and kick his wife Lillian to the curb. These were my kind of people, my kind of take-charge-quit-your-whining characters. They worked hard, and they earned their keep...and they were betrayed...and often, and so everytime there was an upturn I cheered, and everytime a lowturn I booed.
“...joy is the core of existence, the motive power of every living being... it is the need of one's body as it is the goal of one's spirit...”
— Hank Rearden
Atlas Shrugged (Part 2, Chapter 6, Page 564)
That's all I'm going to say about the story. You'll have to read it, or listen to it, yourself for the rest.
“The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world.”
— John Galt
Atlas Shrugged (Part 3, Chapter 7, Page 1,054)
If you don't have time to read it I highly advise getting it on audio and enjoying it. Great story for a variety of reasons. Be prepared though because there are a lot of very vehement Atlas Shrugged and Ayn Rand haters in the world.
It's the kind of book that, generally, people either love or hate, usually with equal passion. People who hate it though, tend to become unreasonable when you try to discuss the theories and ideas. They tend to accuse you of insensitivity, selfishness and lack of social awareness. They throw around the idea that if you like the book you have bought into its philosophies and practices hook line and sinker and then, in turn, if you don't live the philosophies of the book, that you are a hypocrite. Really, it's more productive to have a hearty and animated discussion over the things that were read and how you could see them right or how you could see them wrong. Unfortunately it often becomes a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
To like the book, even to love the book, does not mean that you are an Ayn Rand Kool-Aid drinking son of a gun, it just means that perhaps you get it. You get a different vision, and maybe--just maybe--you think that people should work more and bitch less.
So--that said--be aware.
“He was a man who had never accepted the creed that others had the right to stop him.”
— Narrator (referring to Nathaniel Taggart)
Atlas Shrugged (Part 1, Chapter 3, Page 59)
Most of the women in my book club group really enjoyed it, though there were a few dissenters, which is good because it makes for a lively discussion. During the course of our discussion, we talked about how great it would be if it were made into a movie. We talked about who should play what character, and who shouldn't, and 3 years or so later...here we are.
The new Atlas Shrugged movie will be released as a trilogy, with the first movie being released on April 15th, 2011...Tax Day...couldn't be a better choice.
I am so excited for this to come out I can hardly stand it. Bring on Dagny and Hank, and James and Francisco, and of course John Galt..no doubt we will still always ask "Who is John Galt?"...but now their will be a face to go with the name. ;)
http://www.atlas-shrugged-movie.com/
“Fight for the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence of that which is man: for his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the Morality of Life and that yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth.”
— John Galt
Atlas Shrugged (Part 3, Chapter 7, Page 1,069)
6 comments:
AAAAHHHHHH!!! No more Atlas Shrugged!!! I am definitely a hater. Ayn Rand and the book! I mean, really, who writes a 40 page speech!?!? And I read every single page of that bear. (Although I do say when I want to impress people that I don't read just fluff, I drop that I read this a couple of years back, and not for school.) he hehheheh....
You and your emnity with Atlas Shrugged has always cracked me up.
I get your point, and yes, I agree that the editor of the original manuscript could have helped trim the fat a bit...BUT...I stand by it and really liked it.
Besides, you're a thick book hater anyway...I swear one of these days I'm choosing War and Peace as my book choice... ;)
War and Peace huh? Bring. It. On.
Defending the Burden of Atlas
Wow, "a hater"--based on what? "Who writes a 40-page speech?"--you mean like a State of the Union address? Because that's the essence of what it is. A problem is context for grasping its inclusion, such as it is, in the novel--i.e., the times in which she wrote, being amongst only a handful putting forth a then-foreign Aristotelian viewpoint (let alone its application to modern polticoeconomic thought).
As it now stands, her type of thought has so permeated the culture in so many variegated ways, the necessity of presenting the skeleton of a new form of such philosophy is less necessary for the body that's grown around it. She herself--if you're familiar with more of her non-fiction work--would've preferred to tell the story without the need--but few if anyone would've "gotten it" back then (and, to see the virulent misinterpretations that plagued the critical media, the intelligentsia still didn't get it--which is what necessitated the non-fiction works that followed). In fact her literary intent, following Atlas, was to write suspense-thriller-type fiction, returning in a new way to how she started. Furthermore, the issues encountered within Atlas required Rand to stop and address problems in philosophy preventing her from fully answering the inherent questions: this “stop” lasted about two years. In the process, Rand found she had to erect the entire theoretical structure of a whole system of thought (work began by Aristotle); once accomplished, she then produced all the necessary answers to issues suggested in the novel. What remains is a dramatized essence of this work (Galt's speech). What is not well known is the concept that everything in that “State of the Union” delivery completely corresponds to, and illustrates, something elsewhere in the novel. (I know of at least one professor that developed an entire course exploring just this concept, passage by passage—and how nothing in Galt's radio address remains extraneous to the concept.)
The problem still remains, though, that when Randian thinking fundamentally and explicitly challenges many cultural traditions going back, say, two-and-a-half thousand years (e.g., orthodox Judeo-Christian ethics, the modern German philosophical thought from Kant on down, Existentialism to the French Deconstructionism, et al, all of which have dominating influences in the West), you will be met with the ferocity of such enmity almost automatically. That type of knee-jerk reaction on a society-wide scale is less prevalent now, but is still just as polarized, enraged and seething when it does occur.
Tellingly, no one seems to routinely criticize other writers in similar fashion--which leads me to conclude that Rand in particular engenders such enmity far beyond mere aesthetic criticism. As a singular obvious example, one of our greatest novelists, Victor Hugo, routinely interrupts his novels to give us extensive, long historical essays to provide further background for his stories. Brilliant information in their own right, no one would argue that the stories are in any way lacking without them (Rand herself, who wrote an introduction to one of his novels, makes the same point). Yet does anyone ask, in dismay, something tantamount to: "who writes 40-page essays and inserts them into their novels?”
In other words, it's uncommon for critics to address Rand with the same attempt at objectivity habitually leveled towards other prominent writers. Or, if the world were indeed crumbling into a dystopian second Dark Ages, would we be surprised if a prominent thinker might give a 40-page equivalent in a podcast to clarify why Western civilization now has far less legitimate excuses than the Roman Empire for wholesale implosion? The point is, when it comes to Rand, it's often emotionally “deuces wild” in a manner unimagined in addressing any other novelist (or philosopher, for that manner).
What continues to surprise me, though, is not how violently over-the-top the reactions can be (something expected when a writer tries to drill explicitly to the essence of so many cherished beliefs), but how such a certainty of hatred arises from persons who never read Rand (!)--who instead rely on hearsay or media smear campaigns (a type of unapologetic second-hand behavior that escapes my comprehension). (Or how such reactionary vitriol arises from persons that read one of her novels as a teenager, with no further exploration either of her thought, or the phenomenal work by the plethora of professors and intellectuals that have painstakingly and honestly explored and elaborated on her ideas over the many decades since her death).
The above reminds me of a passage that Sam Keen wrote in his book Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination (1986, Pg 26):
"The art of propaganda is to create a portrait that incarnates the idea of what we wish to destroy so we will react rather than think, and automatically focus our free-floating hostility, indistinct frustrations, and unnamed fears."
As a side note, however, I will tell you that upon becoming so familiar with the concepts (primarily through non-fiction works, not only by her but the aforementioned others), I would skip most of the speech on subsequent readings. But I became fascinated anew when I found out that all of it had intricately worked ties to other parts of the novel (and also by the fact that whenever I re-read any of it, I realized I now understood something that either wasn't clear to me before, or that I didn't understand at all).
In closing, I think Tracy should be applauded for Posting here as she did: even though the culture in general is less hostile, the remaining hostility still boils over in today's intellectual and media cauldrons, and therefore sometimes requires a rare courage to invest so explicitly in any of Rand's core ideas.
If it surprises most that Atlas has been polled to be second only to the Bible as our most influential Western work, one need only realize that a good deal of her ideas already exist implicitly in concepts of “Common Sense”--which itself is a remnant of Aristotle's Laws of Logic, the shoulders upon which Rand squarely stands. Aristotle can thus surely be thought of as the original Atlas metaphorically holding up the world--and when civilization shrugged off that Atlas, the Western world descended into those cheerful centuries known as the Dark Ages.
Treat2TrainTim--I remember reading your comments back when you first wrote them and really taking them to thought. I meant to reply, but didn't for who knows what reason.
I just came back to it again, tonight. And loved what you wrote. Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts and theories and perceptions. Nicely done, and something to continue to think about.
For the record: Atlas Shrugged is still one of my favorite books, and one that continues to have an influence on me. :)
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