Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

The joke that became a project

I have experienced the whole of Atlas Shrugged twice, first as an audiobook in my mid-twenties, right after my daughter was born. I walked her in the pram for hours with the book in my ears and listened while I cooked dinner. A few years later I read it again on Kindle.

It started as a joke. A friend from my military service had The Fountainhead on his shelf. I said something about the size of it, and he said: then you should read Atlas Shrugged. So I did. I read Anthem afterwards, but never finished The Fountainhead.

What the book is

The novel runs on a simple engine. The people who build things, the engineers, the industrialists, the ones who keep the trains running and the steel pouring, quietly stop. There is no revolution. They leave, one at a time, and the country rots in their absence.

Everyone keeps asking the same question. Who is John Galt? Nobody means it. It is what people say instead of saying nothing, a shrug with words attached, and the book is the answer to a question nobody believed had one.

The speech earns its pages

I was warned about the speech before I reached it, and the warning was accurate. It goes on, and on, and on. I read it over several sittings.

It was worth it. The speech is the book. Everything before it asks who John Galt is, and an answer to that question has to be given room. A few neat sentences in a footnote would not carry a thousand pages of build-up. Rand put the whole argument in one place, and I think she was right to.

"In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst. ... Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. ... The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours."

• John Galt, Atlas Shrugged, Part Three, Chapter VII

The people

Dagny Taggart is brilliant and predictable, and honestly I found her a little boring, which feels unfair to say about the most capable person in a very long book. She is not the character I connected with, and I think that is part of why the length wore on me.

Hank Rearden is a better character and a worse man. His marriage is where the book's morality shows a hole. Being true to yourself is not the whole of it. Morals are also about the promises you made and the people you made them to, and he walks out on both.

Francisco d'Anconia I liked. He tore his own company down rather than let it fall to people who could not run it, and I felt for him. It still cost more than he counted. The company was not only his. His father built it, and generations of engineers kept it standing. He took their work too.

John Galt answers the mystery, then goes back to working on his engine, which was satisfying and deflating at once. It makes him a brilliant engineer, just a man. The Gulch trades freely, so it is not the dependence the book condemns, but it is dependence. To build the world's best engine you need thousands of people, and not all of them can be Dagny or John Galt.

Underneath them all is Eddie Willers, and Eddie is the one I cared about. He is a good man, good at his job, loyal to Dagny, and he is left behind. He does not know how to run the machine himself, but he knows his job and he loves it. His ending is cruel, and fitting, and the truest thing in the book. Watch Eddie.

The ideas

The idea that hit hardest is not economic. It is that not being useful leads to despair. The common man is the saddest thing in this book, and I recognised the type: the brother, the wife, the politicians, the crowds waiting to be carried. A lot of people spend their lives like that, and it hollows them out.

Then there is the sanction. "The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it." The looters here rarely take anything by force. They are handed it, year by year, by people who cannot be bothered to refuse. That is the sharpest observation in the novel, and it does not need the politics.

And then the oath, which I have a harder time with.

"I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."

• John Galt, Atlas Shrugged, Part Three, Chapter VII

Take the first half. In a social and professional sense it holds. I will not spend my life making another man rich, and I do not like being dependent on others any more than I like others being dependent on me. But I live for my children, and taken at face value, that is exactly what the sentence forbids. Family is missing from the oath, and from the book.

The second half rings truer. I would never ask a man to give up everything for my gain, though with family the same offering is understood to run both ways.

So I agree with the direction and not with the absolutes.

Dagny's brother is where the two collide. She leaves her family behind, and I would not. The book draws them as exact opposites with no ground between them, and that never convinced me. Give the man a job where he works outside all day and watch his outlook change. The book is not interested. It needs him to be a position rather than a person.

Where it fails

The romances do not work. Rand is not a romance writer, and none of them convinced me.

The brother and the mother are the weakest thing here. Archetypes never bothered me, this is a book of extremes and should be read as one. Those two are unconvincing even as archetypes, because they exist only to be the opposite of Dagny.

And it is long. I enjoyed the writing enough to stay with it, but I would not argue with anyone who put it down.

Where it lands today

Production, money and ideas cross borders faster than they ever have. The people who make things can leave, and increasingly they do. What holds a country together is not its borders but the willingness of capable people to keep building inside them. That willingness is not a law of nature. It is a choice, renewed daily, and it can be withdrawn.

Rand's warning is not that the looters win. It is that the producers stop caring. We are not there yet, but the signs are around us, and they are worth reading as signs rather than prophecy. I am still an optimist, for as long as I can be.

Verdict

Atlas Shrugged is a warning told from the side of the people who build, and it should be read the way it was written, as an argument. Taken in moderation, it is one of the more useful books I have read. Taken as a programme, it is as extreme as the thing it attacks.

I am not an Objectivist. I am not a socialist either. It depends on the scale, the people, and how it is governed. Nothing should be handed out for free, and nothing should be made unavailable.

Four out of five. Read it for the argument, take the argument in moderation, and remember Eddie Willers on the way out.