May 2011

Ellis Weiner, who wrote the Atlas Shrugged parody Atlas Slugged Again has a little post up about what inspired him to write the parody.

But Atlas Shrugged is a 1,000-page, 643,000-(I counted them)-word diatribe against an imaginary enemy that, unlike Lord of the Rings or the Harry Potter books, insists it’s about “reality.”

The government of the U.S., such as it is, has no executive, legislative, or judicial branches. There is no president, Congress, or Supreme Court. Instead, a corrupt cabal of bureaucrats issues edicts based, ostensibly, on the rationale of a whiny five-year-old (“It’s not fair!”) while essentially safeguarding their own power, but which go unchallenged by individuals, states, or corporations. Europe is unrecognizable, since most of its countries have become quasi-socialist “People’s States.” This is a world in which salvation arrives in the form of a reclusive engineer who is begged to “save the economy.”

In other words, the geo-political world in which Rand wants us to admire her heroes is not our own, or even (like that of 1984) a plausible, allegorical variant of our own, but a third-rate science fiction dystopian future, complete with imaginary technology, which, by definition, makes comparison to today’s world impossible. The U.S. of Atlas Shrugged is about as real and realistic as Narnia, and capitalism is to Atlas Shrugged what Quidditch is to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone: a fictional construct, vaguely similar to something we have in real life, used for purposes of drama and entertainment.

That about sums it up.  I’ve also read Weiner’s parody, which is very funny.  And the more you know about Objectivism, the funnier it is.  There are more than a few inside jokes.

I think it’s a shame, by the way, that the author of Anthem and We the Living, both of which are very good books, had to turn into such a polemicist. The Fountainhead is still a decent potboiler.  But I can barely read Atlas Shrugged anymore.  Mostly because it reminds me of far too many years I spent being a Rand acolyte.  I was never, thank God, a full blown Orthodox Objectivist, but I was definitely pretty obsessed.

It’s worth mentioning, though, that Rand was, in some ways a pretty compelling thinker and had some ideas I still carry with me.  And there were two important things she taught me: first, that moral actions and practical actions should, if you look in the long term, be one and the same and second, that ethical dilemmas should be focused on day to day living, not fantastical situations that you’ll never encounter in real life, like the Trolley problem.

I might add, too, that the character of Peter Keating in The Fountainhead is one of the best projections of the dangers of selling out I’ve ever read.  His character arc is both tragic and all too common in real life.

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