Book Review: Atlas Shrugged

Allow me to confess: I never intended to read this book, and I knew almost nothing about Ayn Rand beforehand. I had read Yudkowsky’s Guardians of Ayn Rand, which was not flattering to Rand, and later I heard someone say they could tell Atlas Shrugged was “garbage” after three pages. I was curious what it was that didn’t impress people and decided to find out. However, after three pages it didn’t seem like garbage at all, and I ended up reading long enough to want to learn the book’s mysteries, such as why businessmen kept disappearing, and what was causing the deterioration of the world. I was downloading it one chapter at a time from a random website, in such a way that there was no way to tell how long it was in advance.

Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957, turned out to be longer than I could possibly have imagined: 1168 pages. It’s about 3.10 megabytes of plain ASCII and more than half a million words. It is 2.7 times as long as the Arthur C. Clark trilogy “2001: A Space Odyssey”, “2010: Odyssey Two” and “2061: Odyssey Three” (these are 1.13 MB in total). It’s the kind of book that invites comparisons with the distance to the moon, and if I wrote like Rand does, I would sprinkle nine such comparisons throughout this review. The book is divided into three parts of ten chapters each, but it is certainly not a trilogy, since important mysteries are stretched out from nearly the beginning until nearly the end, like the men who fought so hard over a penny that they invented copper wire.

Reportedly, it sold 29 million copies by 2013, with almost 3 million copies purchased for distribution to schools by the Ayn Rand institute. In 1991, Atlas Shrugged was number two behind the Bible in a survey asking for “the most influential book in the respondent’s life”. (No percentage is given and I don’t have more recent data.)

I spent over 80 hours reading this, and if I knew its size in advance, I would not have bothered. Seeing Scott’s call for book reviews is the only thing that made me read all the way to the end, though I couldn’t help skipping sentences and paragraphs sometimes.

This review has minor spoilers. Also, I decided that no one else should have to go through what I did, so I prepared a condensed version of the story for this review on a separate page, because I don’t think reading it is worth dozens of hours of your time — but it might be worth two, if only for the value of pretending you have read an entire book by Ayn Rand. I think the story could have fit in one-fifth the word count and still have told the same story equally well.

While Ayn Rand was influential in the development of modern American libertarianism, she rejected the label herself. This quote from Wikipedia doesn’t explain why to my satisfaction:

All kinds of people today call themselves “libertarians,” especially something calling itself the New Right, which consists of hippies who are anarchists instead of leftist collectivists; but anarchists are collectivists. Capitalism is the one system that requires absolute objective law, yet libertarians combine capitalism and anarchism. That’s worse than anything the New Left has proposed. It’s a mockery of philosophy and ideology. They sling slogans and try to ride on two bandwagons. They want to be hippies, but don’t want to preach collectivism because those jobs are already taken. But anarchism is a logical outgrowth of the anti-intellectual side of collectivism. I could deal with a Marxist with a greater chance of reaching some kind of understanding, and with much greater respect. Anarchists are the scum of the intellectual world of the Left, which has given them up. So the Right picks up another leftist discard. That’s the libertarian movement.

Are what she calls “libertarians” the same as a modern hardcore “all taxes are theft” libertarians? That’s not how it sounds to me.

The book is set in some indeterminite future time, “centuries” after the industrial revolution and “centuries” after the fictional Nathaniel “Nat” Taggart built a transcontinental railway across the United States. Taggart built his railroad with no government handouts, and proudly held his goal to be making a profit.

Despite the passage of time, Rand’s future world looks as it would if all human innovation had stopped on a dime in 1957. Wired telephones, telegraphs, radio broadcasts, television and newspapers are the only major forms of communication; typewriters (with carbon copies!) are the primary means of writing; trains are powered mainly by coal but often by deisel; passenger trains are preferred over airplanes; computers don’t exist; prices are plausible for 1957; and many skyscrapers are beginning to crack and crumble from old age and neglect.

He enjoyed the sight of a prosperous street; not more than every fourth one of the stores was out of business, its windows dark and empty. - Chapter 1

The book never once mentions communism, socialism or collectivism, but aside from the United States, most of the countries mentioned are “people’s states” and the others are about to turn into them: The People’s State of Mexico, The People’s State of Norway, The People’s State of France, the People’s State of England, the People’s State of Portugal, the People’s State of Turkey, the People’s State of China, the People’s State of Germany, the People’s State of Chile, the People’s State of India, and the People’s State of Guatemala. In Part 3 Chapter 4, Argentina becomes a People’s State.

Keep in mind that the book was published after many years of McCarthyism, at the tail end of the Second Red Scare, which I’m told lasted from the late 1940s through the 1950s. Rand clearly thought that communism was a serious threat, despite already being fairly unpopular among Americans (an unpopularity she promoted eagerly). The book eventually gets around to spending ample time attacking communist ideas, but what she attacks is her own interpretation of its most superficial elements, like the phrase “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

Quick reviews from 1957

It is probably the worst piece of large fiction written since Miss Rand’s equally weighty “The Fountainhead.” - Robert R. Kirsch LA Times, 1957

[…] a book every businessman should hug to his breast […] But how the shabby little left-wingers are going to hate it! - Paul Jordan-Smith, Los Angeles Times, 1957

Gigantic, relentless, often fantastic, this book is definitely not one to be swallowed whole. Throughout its 1,168 pages, Miss Rand never cracks a smile. Conversations deteriorate into monologues as one character after another laboriously declaims his set of values. - Newsweek, 1957

There is much good sense in this book and it deserves more careful consideration than it is likely to get. […] The worst thing in her book is her denunciation of what she calls mysticism […] No, Miss Rand, a mystic is a man who insists upon using those areas of his mind which you block off. - Edward Wagenknecht, Chicago Daily Tribune, 1957

Miss Rand’s villains resemble no one I have ever encountered, and I finally decided to call them “liberals,” chiefly because I can’t imagine whom else she might have in mind. […] America is plunged into a catastrophic depression, caused by the government’s infernal meddling with the economy, and most of the other nations of the world have become People’s States, whose inhabitants are actually grubbing up roots to keep themselves alive. The last sparks of industrial competence are concentrated in the minds of two dozen — at most — American businessmen, who manage to hold the globe aloft in spite of the best efforts of governments everywhere to bring it down. - Donald Malcolm, the New Yorker

It runs 1,168 pages, and you won’t want to miss one word. […] You’ll say it can’t happen here — but it’s happening every day and we sit still while watching our rights as humans being whittled away. - Hedda Hopper

Source

Characters

This book is mostly about the characters in it; the world and the plot are incidental in comparison. Here are the main characters in the first half of the book:

  1. Dagny Taggart, Vice-President in Charge of Operations for Taggart Transcontinental, and a descendant of Nat Taggart. She loves railroads more than anyone, because they act as the arteries and blood cells of the country. Her dream in life is to run Taggart Transcontinental.

  2. Francisco d’Anconia, a descendant of Sebastian d’Anconia, who built a copper mining empire centuries ago. Each generation of d’Anconia grew the empire slightly larger than the last, but Francisco d’Anconia was a hard-working genius who managed to grow the business far more quickly than his ancestors. But Francisco’s behavior changed about ten years ago:

    At the age of twenty-three, when he inherited his fortune, Francisco d’Anconia had been famous as the copper king of the world. Now, at thirty-six, he was famous as the richest man and the most spectacularly worthless playboy on earth. He was the last descendant of one of the noblest families of Argentina. He owned cattle ranches, coffee plantations and most of the copper mines of Chile. He owned half of South America and sundry mines scattered through the United States as small change.

    “the rebirth of […] the world — has to start here, in the United States. This country was the only country in history born […] as a rational product of man’s mind.” - Francisco d’Anconia

  3. Henry “Hank” Rearden is Ayn Rand’s new-money hero, who built the most important steel business in the United States on the outskirts of Philadelphia. His company, Rearden Steel, is supplied by Rearden Ore, Rearden Coal, and Rearden Limestone. Rand portrays Rearden as a lone genius (a concept I regard as a dangerously disheartening myth) who develops an incredible alternative to steel that contains copper and is “half the weight”, “twice as safe”, and “will last three times longer than any other [metal]”, plus it’s good for building anything from chicken wire to railways to microphones to airplanes.

  4. James “Jim” Taggart, President of Taggart Transcontinental, is Dagny Taggart’s brother. At first, James’ primary skills appear to be refusing to make decisions, deflecting, and making illogical statements. We later learn that the board elected him president “in the same manner as they refused to walk under a ladder, to propitiate the same kind of fear. They talked about his gift of ‘making railroads popular,’ his ‘good press,’ his ‘Washington ability.’”. James is a deft influence-peddler, friends with all kinds of Washington elites. James also hates competition almost as much as he seems to hate himself, and is angry that oilman Ellis Wyatt “double-crossed” Taggart Transcontinental (who ran one tank train per week for him on their old track) by doing business with Phoenix-Durango instead (who lets him run two tank trains every day).

Aside from these main characters there are many secondary ones, such as:

As you can begin to guess, Rand had essentially two kinds of character: those of positive affect, and those of negative affect. Almost everyone is either a Rational Man of Action Who Seeks A Life of Joy (usually book-smart), or an Irrational Buck-Passer Who Blames Others For Zis Problems While Mumbling About Fairness And Morality (occasionally book-smart). In Part 1 of the book, the good guys rarely speak of morality while the bad guys speak of it frequently. Eventually the good guys develop a moral code based simply on thinking through their own intuitions (which are informed by their experience and their distaste for the bad guys). The evidence vindicating their philosophy is simply the obviousness of how wrong the Buck-Passers are, and the obviousness of how right the Men of Action are. (Buck-passing is so common that phrases similar to “I couldn’t help it” appear 38 times, “blame” appears 75 times, “fault” 29 times.)

Note that Lillian, James, Ferris, Stadler and Hank’s mother are quite different from each other in terms of their speech and skills, but they are all mostly devoid of likeable qualities. Good characters like Dagny, Rearden, Wyatt and Cherryl Brooks likewise vary, but end up with identical values. Both types are selfish, one openly, one secretly. Both types think of themselves as victims of the other type. No characters have any meaningful altruism; those who claim to posess any are just lying to themselves.

On the whole, Rand’s “bad” characters are something like Joe McCarthy’s outgroup at the bottom of his death spiral of hate.

No black or asian people are mentioned in Atlas Shrugged, and there are few women of significance aside from Dagny and Lillian. One might hope that Rand or her future world is “color-blind”, but I don’t think so: at one point Boyle casually uses the word “Spic” when speaking to James.

Review

I have to credit Rand for having some understanding of evil and irrationality. Rand at least understood that every man is the hero of his own story - her villains don’t believe they are villains, and would (almost) never stoop so low as to use physical violence to get what they want. This, even though Rand clearly and frequently labeled everything about them as “evil”, and every government policy as the use of “force” - if you’re familiar with American libertarianism, you can’t fail to notice how close Rand’s worldview is to theirs. Indeed, the central plot clearly demonstrates, albeit with few details and low plausibility, just how forceful and destructive government policy can hypothetically be.

Rand also wrote skillfully the foolish, exaggerated doubletalk of her villains. I was genuinely impressed, because I have no idea how to speak like the most mentally stunted rabble on YouTube, while Rand seems to have done it effortlessly — though of course it is only the Buck Passers who ever speak so illogically.

However, as I read her book, I felt like one of her heroes, who at first is dimly aware of something wrong in the world, something that makes them uneasy, something that can’t possibly be true because it is such an unspeakable evil — but which, in the end, turns out to be completely real and every bit as bad as they could have imagined. In the same way, I became aware of something deeply disturbing in her writing, dimly at first, but something I could only grasp fully around the three-quarter mark.

In the novel, the great evil is something that superficially resembles communism (I guess she would call it “collectivism”; at one point she even uses the word “irrationalism”). Without explanation, this evil has conquered the government, the public school system, academia, and the media. But the great evil I saw was something very different, very dangerous, and very… well, very common, ordinary, and banal.

You see, at first I thought that Rand’s story was about some kind of conspiracy, a giant power play. I thought that she was hiding some great secret that would be revealed later in the book, something that would make sense in a world that I could imagine.

By the end of Part 2, I recognized the book’s great flaw as one big logical fallacy. If I could have described the book in two words, they would have been “false dichotomy” — or perhaps “strawman argument” — because there really are only two kinds of characters, Rand’s ideal human, and its opposite. Since no other kind of person exists in her world, there is no Plato for her Aristotle: no one rational enough to argue against her objectivist ideology or poke any holes in her arguments.

TV villains routinely do things that don’t make any sense: the villain who repeatedly murders his own lieutenants, for no other reason than to demonstrate evilness; the villain who kills someone for knowing about the existence of incriminating documents, instead of simply burning the incriminating documents.

Rand’s villains follow the same pattern, but with senseless goals instead of senseless violence, and so the government issues “directives” that would make no sense to most people: they have been chosen for their evilness. And not just any evilness, but specifically those Rand opposes, things like redistribution of wealth, irrationality, red tape/regulations, and “fairness”. Red tape and regulations are often framed as reduced freedom, so it’s notable that Rand never describes them that way (she simply says “red tape” and “regulations”), but I don’t know what significance to attach to a lack of framing. And Rand tends to distort “fairness” (and “equality”) into something superficial, absolute, uneven, and unfair, ensuring that it is unworkable, demotivating, and hurts some people and companies dramatically while benefiting others. The villains (except Dr. Stadler) can figure out how to scheme, connive and control other people, but their brains fail at any other task. In particular, none of them can fathom Rand’s ideology.

The directives are also arbitrary, undemocratic, foolish, destructive and unfair, but these are not the kind of adjectives Rand uses explicitly or spends the book ranting about; instead, such negative attributes play an implicit role, bestowing negative affect on the Buck-Passers.

Consider these directives issued at the end of Chapter 10:

The railroads of the country were ordered to reduce the maximum speed of all trains to sixty miles per hour — to reduce the maximum length of all trains to sixty cars — and to run the same number of trains in every state of a zone composed of five neighboring states, the country being divided into such zones for the purpose. (red tape, charity toward labor unions, superficial fairness)

The steel mills of the country were ordered to limit the maximum production of any metal alloy to an amount equal to the production of other metal alloys by other mills placed in the same classification of plant capacity — and to supply a fair share of any metal alloy to all consumers who might desire to obtain it. (red tape, superficial fairness)

All the manufacturing establishments of the country, of any size and nature, were forbidden to move from their present locations, except when granted a special permission to do so by the Bureau of Economic Planning and National Resources. (red tape / regulations, irrationality)

To compensate the railroads of the country for the extra costs involved and “to cushion the process of readjustment,” a moratorium on payments of interest and principal on all railroad bonds — secured and unsecured, convertible and non-convertible — was declared for a period of five years. (redistribution of wealth)

To provide the funds for the personnel to enforce these directives, a special tax was imposed on the state of Colorado, “as the state best able to assist the needier states to bear the brunt of the national emergency, “ such tax to consist of five per cent of the gross sales of Colorado’s industrial concerns. (redistribution of wealth)

When I read this, I thought: give me a break! The U.S. is having economic difficulties, so the solution is to cut production? To shift trains from areas of high demand to areas of low demand? To arbitrarily punish railroad bondholders?

It was… just… too… stupid. Could she think that the Buck-Passers really would push through a plan this idiotic, with no concern for the next election? The book later indicates that the directives were the result of trading favors and power plays in Washington, but there is no explanation of how special emergency powers would be used only to grant a grab-bag of demands by special interest groups that will obviously make the emergency worse. Does Rand expect her readers to believe something this stupid? Well, the book was influential, so I guess she did, and I guess she was right. And I guess this is forgiveable, given the idea Rand had in her head that the entire United States was pervaded by some sort of naïve Marxism. (She communicated this only subtly at first, which confused me, but perhaps right-wing audiences could pick up her signaling immediately.)

By the time I reached Part 3 Chapter 4, it finally dawned on me: she was not hiding any great conspiracy, and there would be nothing to finally explain the behavior of her characters sensibly. Consider this snippet from Part 2 Chapter 1:

Then, Wesley Mouch had issued another directive, which ruled that people could get their bonds “defrozen” upon a plea of “essential need”: the government would purchase the bonds, if it found the proof of the need satisfactory. There were three questions that no one answered or asked: “What constituted proof?” “What constituted need?” “Essential— to whom?”

One was not supposed to speak about the men who, having been refused, sold their bonds for one-third of the value to other men who possessed needs which, miraculously, made thirty-three frozen cents melt into a whole dollar. […] Then it became bad manners to discuss why one man received the grant defreezing his money, while another had been refused.

Rand sometimes uses the kind of language you see in partisan editorials. How many editorials have you seen saying “no one is asking” a question that the editorial itself, and many others like it, are asking? “One was not supposed to speak about”? “it became bad manners”? Rand is attacking political correctness 40 years before it became fashionable!

But it’s more than that: she uses statements like these as statements of fact. This is not a mere smear piece; it’s a novel to promote her worldview. She never tried to smear communism or “collectivism” — she won’t even use those words. Instead, this is literally the way she viewed the world.

She wrote a book the length of nine ordinary novels. Can you imagine? Can you imagine how much of her life she much have sunk into this? To write something so empty, with villains so completely ridiculous, in a world where the people in power consistently do things don’t make logical sense? To fully invest in the premise that communism/collectivism is the literal opposite of rationality?

The scary realization I came to, finally, was how vacuous the book really was. Not her heroes, mind you — her heroes embodied the philosophy of her life, a life that she lived earnestly and honestly. But her villains! Holy crap! Eventually, she fleshed out her villains in great detail — never to the same extent as her heroes, but still, the level of detail leads me to believe that she truly believed that people like this are commonplace.

Oh, maybe she understood that in real life there are no perfectly horrible people. But I think she thought that that there is only one perfect good and perfect evil, and that her novel describes them both. She saw human beings, not as the complex nuanced variety that they are, but on a simple continuum from “good to evil”, “objectivist to collectivist”, “capitalist to communist” and “rational to irrational” respectively. To the extent that her characters have any secondary dimensions that can vary independently of the first, those dimensions are intellect, an ability to “talk straight” (heroes always talk straight, but certain government-aligned characters can also do so: Dr. Stadler, Fred Kinnan and maybe Mr. Thompson), and sexual liberation (only Hank Rearden was simultaneously good and not sexually liberated, but this changed as the book went on).

Given the extreme value she placed on honesty (even many bad characters are relatively honest), I think she was describing her actual belief about how evil socialists actually are, and I think the world in her book was what she feared would actually happen if they actually controlled academia. The book drops many hints, never in any detail, that there have been generations of children indoctrinated by schools and colleges, in essence, not to think.

Furthermore, given that her future world contains no technological advancements, her premise might have been that they were already in control of academia by 1957 (however, the story is incoherent in this regard: five amazing — and probably impossible — new inventions appear over the 12-year course of the story, which I cannot reconcile with the stagnation that came before). Google’s first result for “what Rand believed about the real world” backs this up:

Rand herself stated, “My characters are never symbols, they are merely men in sharper focus than the audience can see with unaided sight. … My characters are persons in whom certain human attributes are focused more sharply and consistently than in average human beings”

While Rand’s heroes are certainly self-centered and somewhat greedy, they often seem less greedy and more fair than her villains, who lust after power, which is not described as “greedy”. Rand tries to convince readers that greed is good by comparing it to something worse that is not called greed; similarly, she labels foolishness as fairness so that fairness looks bad.

Rand’s writing is common, ordinary, and banal in the sense that it often sounds like I would expect an anti-communist editoral from the 1950s to sound. What does the book have to say about the teachings corrupting the men of her future world? It’s the same pithy phrases those editorials would have used to describe the teachings of communism (and irrationalism, if that were a real thing), things like “individual ability is of no consequence” and “the law of causality [is] a superstition” — that’s all, nothing else. It’s as if everything she knows about her enemies came from short “opinion” pieces in local conservative newspapers.

The great flaw of the book, then, is not Rand’s ideology per se, but her approach to reasoning. She created the weakest strawmen she could think of, with the weakest backstories — like houses built on stilts — and then acted as if knocking them down was a victory for her rationality. Among all her reasoning mistakes, this was the cornerstone: a mistake that blocked her from noticing any other mistake. But I guess I can forgive her, as 1957 was more of an epistemic wild west. As Yudkowsky put it,

Max Gluckman once said: “A science is any discipline in which the fool of this generation can go beyond the point reached by the genius of the last generation.” Science moves forward by slaying its heroes, as Newton fell to Einstein. […] An aspiring rationalist in 2007 starts with a huge advantage over an aspiring rationalist in 1957. It’s how we know that progress has occurred.

Blind Spots

One other systematic error jumps out at me: Atlas Shrugged is written as though key elements of human society are invisible to Ayn Rand.

The book is overwhelmingly dominated by individuals - individualists on the one hand (good, thing-oriented), and collectivists on the other (bad, people-oriented). The interesting part is that while she considers physical systems in some detail, social systems and institutions are thoroughly ignored.

She mentions a few times the churn of trade: how ore is moved by rail to steel mills, how ball bearings are made and shipped to factories that use them, how trains and rails and sidings and signals and platforms help ship goods around the country. Rand seems to understand both the importance of heavy industry and its functional details, and she does a better job than I could of casually explaining them.

Yet political structures seem entirely off her radar: the electoral college, first-past-the-post elections, the court system, the president, the constitution, the bicameral congress, city councils, the ways candidates can and cannot get campaign funding - such structural elements and institutions of government are never discussed, as though Rand believes they simply don’t matter. For example, the only purpose of the national “legislature” is to hand over emergency powers to Wesley Mouch and the Head of State, with no explanation of how or why this happens.

The story seems to be meant as a cautionary tale, so it is strange that the book never more than hints at any altered political structure in the United States, and never has anything to say about what happened to cause the changes. It’s all “causeless” (to borrow a word she used 29 times in the book).

Nongovernmental institutions are largely ignored as well. Not a single news organization has a name; they are simply “the press” and they seem uniformly to speak as one voice with the Men in Washington about “fairness” and “greedy corporations” and “helping the needy”. There is a “union” of railroad companies, but their main role in the book is to vote against competition with an “anti-Dog-eat-dog rule” (no motive for passing this rule is given at first, but eventually there is a vague explanation that it was a backroom deal among the Buck-Passers). The book’s main role for colleges and universities is for them to close as the economy collapses. Banks don’t really play a role either. Nonprofit organizations are rare, and useless at best. Workers’ unions play a minor role supporting foolish, but ironically self-interested policies.

Even the ancient institution of the family is ignored. Slowly, virtually every competent leader of every major company “vanishes” (quits and hides) as well as numerous important managers, and later, most industry veterans break the law when they quit and hide. What about their families? Why don’t they have families? The story wouldn’t work very well if they did. (Exactly one mother who “vanished” is mentioned in the book; she says her “profession” is motherhood, but there is no mention of who pays her salary. She’s married, so we are left to wonder how this “profession” would work for single moms.) Ditto for friends; the story relies on the “good” characters having such extreme individualism that they will gladly (and I mean gladly) leave friends and coworkers behind.

It is not until Part 2 Chapter 6 that we learn that Rearden Steel actually has a union, and this is mentioned only because the head of the union quits:

The first man to quit at Rearden Steel was Tom Colby, rolling millforeman, head of the Rearden Steel Workers Union. For ten years, he had heard himself denounced throughout the country, because his was a “company union” and because he had never engaged in a violent conflict with the management. This was true: no conflict had ever been necessary; Rearden paid a higher wage scale than any union scale in the country, for which he demanded—and got—the best labor force to be found anywhere.

Given the decline of unions in the decades since 1957, it’s interesting that Rand takes unions so much for granted that the existence of a union at Rearden’s company isn’t important enough to mention for several hundred pages. Notice also that Rand’s hero pays high wages. No doubt this is not because Rearden is “fair” (one of Rand’s four-letter words, alongside “practical”) but because he wants to buy “the best” people. Yet wouldn’t he be able to pay lower average wages if there wasn’t a union, and keep more profit for himself?

Hank Rearden publicly tells everyone that he only cares about making money, and does not shy away from lavish spending on himself and family or friends, but it’s clear that Rand’s heroes are not nearly as greedy as they could have been. Atlas Shrugged has nothing like a telecommunications firm using a monopoly on telephone wires to keep rates high, nothing like an Apple corporation extracting 30% of sales on all apps made by other companies, nothing like a John Deere corporation trying to prevent “unauthorized” parties from repairing tractors, no patent trolls, no old-money people living well off interest from a diversified portfolio without working for a living.

Protestors Criticized For Looting Businesses Without Forming Private Equity Firm First - The Onion

This is not the kind of book that would consider whether it is a grave injustice for the government to use tax money to build paved roads in front of the houses of the taxpayers, allowing any yahoo with a car to freely drive past houses that don’t belong to him, on roads that don’t belong to him, or whether the government can ever be justified in putting sewers or fresh-water pipes or copper wires or fiber-optic lines under these roads using (gasp!) funds from income taxes.

Nor does the book consider whether children have a “right” to an education and, if so, whether it’s okay for the government to pay for educating the children of the unemployed. Should there be standards for food and drug safety? Rand never mentions the FDA or anything like it. Should there be a government-assisted health care system? No one ever gets a serious illness (or mental illness) in the book, let alone someone who just lost a job. Would the private sector ever pay for a a national census, or an LHC, or research on ancient languages (which might offer insights into human theory-of-mind)? What about problems like overfishing the Atlantic ocean, or global warming?

The pirate Ragnar Danneskjöld, one of Rand’s “good” characters, treats income tax as simple theft, and his friends tacitly agree. We can speculate that he would insist that the water pipes must be built and owned by one person or corporation, to be rented out to those who depend on it at any price the market will bear; that children should only be educated if the necessary funds are given freely by private citizens; that the street is a proper home for a schizophrenic who loses a job; that if people want food safety standards or don’t want overfishing, they should somehow (how?) come up with a contract among themselves to arrange it. But Rand’s actual solution to such questions is to ignore them.

Instead, Rand sticks to the easy question: which is better, a “greedy” unionized steel manufacturer trying to sell the country cheaper, stronger metal than everyone else, or filthy collectivist scumbags making secret backroom deals in an effort to steal from the rich and give to the lazy? Ironically, the structure of Rand’s book has exactly the effect she decries in her enemies: it shields her from having to think about any hard questions whatsoever. She describes villains whose minds are twisted into pretzels by their illogical ideology, but her book’s entire world is twisted into a pretzel to fit her ideology.

The story provides glimpses of people who are able and willing to work hard, but end up poor and destitute anyway, but it never asks itself whether Rand’s preferred form of government would sometimes produce such outcomes and whether, if so, it would be just. Moreover, the story relies on the secrecy and perfect conviction of the deserters; it never tries to figure out whether her utopic ideas would work in any other context. I won’t spoil the ending, but the book also never considers whether heroes acting morally could have engineered a vastly better outcome than the one in the book. A dramatic ending is valuable in fiction, but her heroes never consider other courses of action; I think Rand was motivated not to look for other options.

I appreciate Ayn Rand’s understanding of people who care not about trading favors, about smalltalk and social pleasantries, about beating others down, people whose dream is to do good work, to accomplish great things, and to live happily — people like me.

Yet it strikes me that at least two of the heroes of the story, Francisco d’Aconia and Dagny Taggart, are people who inherited a fortune and a grand opportunity to succeed in life. And we see the same phenomenon in real life, of course, in people like the Koch Brothers or Donald Trump or these 16 billionaires who inherited their money. Could Francisco and Dagny have been as important as they were, had they not been born into a family dynasty? In the world of Atlas Shrugged, I don’t think so, but this is a question that Rand’s heroes never ask. What about a hypothetical objectivist utopia? At least among those who won an equal amount in the genetic lottery of life, does Rand imagine there could be anything close to equality of opportunity in her ideal world? It’s hard to tell.

Probably the hardest question the story asks of its readers is whether adultery can be condoned in a loveless marriage. Rand’s answer is a resounding “yes”. Rand would probably think it better for the would-be adulterer to inform the other spouse of his intended action in advance, but it’s not directly stated. Rearden keeps his affair secret from his wife and everyone else, but he only handles it that way because he originally believes in a 1950s-style moral code that condemns sex and is divorce-averse, viewing marriage vows as a solemn, joyless duty that one cannot be seen breaking. Rearden eventually comes to his senses and realizes that his moral code had been wrong, and that his affair is right and just after all.

Closing remarks

Eventually I decided that the existence of such a strange book was not surprising after all, nor was its popularity. The world contains many unusual individuals. Ayn Rand was one; so are many of the people reading this. But whether they become famous and influential depends on whether their message resonates with people, and Rand combined the respectable appearance of a philosopher with beliefs that were similar to popular ones.

“There is always an easy solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.” - Misquote of H. L. Mencken

Successful scientists and philosophers have been attracted to finding simple explanations and rules, and there are good reasons for this and good reasons to seek them out. Ayn Rand found an attractively simple philosophy of savages versus heroic men, which rubbed off onto American libertarianism.

“Collectivism is the tribal premise of primordial savages who, unable to conceive of individual rights, believed that the tribe is a supreme, omnipotent ruler, that it owns the lives of its members and may sacrifice them whenever it pleases.” - Rand’s Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

“My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.” - Appendix to Atlas Shrugged

Scott Alexander taught me another, even simpler philosophy that I think works much better: consequentialism, and its more specific incarnation, utilitarianism. A FAQ that explains consequentialism was the first piece of Scott’s writing that I ever saw; without it, I might not read SSC today (er… what’s that? it’s “ACX” now? And the X is pronounced “ten”? Okay, whatever.)

Like the Mandlebrot set, consequentialism is a simple idea with infinitely intricate, well, consequences. For example, I have learned the value of deontological ethics through the lens of utilitarianism, in light of the practical capabilities of human beings and the impracticality of enumerating every possible action and predicting the consequences of each.

But, hell, this is just a book review, so I won’t get into it. I will say, though, that if you’re sympathetic to objectivist and libertarian philosophies, you’d better give consequentialism serious consideration as well. And for those who have already made up their mind, just make sure that this quote does not sound like you:

“I have held the same philosophy I now hold, for as far back as I can remember.” - Afterword, Atlas Shrugged

This might have something to do with her father’s pharmacy being seized by Bolsheviks when she was 12. But regardless of what your beliefs are, always having held the same beliefs is deeply suspicious: we are not born with a map of reality in our minds, and the first map we build is sure to contain errors. If you’re still stuck on the first interpretation of morality you ever learned, make sure that you at least know How To Actually Change Your Mind.