AB3A's Journal: Atlas Shrugged

Though reasonably well read, I had somehow managed to miss Ayn Rand's Classic, Atlas Shrugged. I finished reading it for the first time just a few days ago.

The villians are right on target. I enjoyed the descriptions and stories around surrounding Balf Eubank and Bertram Scudder. The image building exercises by most of these characters were painfully close to the real thing. Orrin Boyle's steel companies were funny too.

I did note a few glaring flaws in the book: A utopian view such as Rand's can only work when everyone else plays along. Honesty and integrity in business are in far shorter supply than it might first seem.

Her characters have extremely well tuned senses of integrity and honor. Her villians are busy deluding themselves in to believing that black is white. What she doesn't talk about are those who weasle out of stuff bit by bit. Worldcom/MCI and Enron didn't become such spectacular failures overnight; they happened because of short term greed that got out of hand.

It also assumes that industry doesn't use any support from government, when in reality, it has to --even if that intersection is merely the printing of money by the federal reserve, policing the streets, and defending the country. The book presumes that the law can act reasonably well in cases of intellectual property. We know from recent history, that sadly, this is not true.

Technological issues aside, his book is still somewhat dated. Long term, and low level exposure to toxins was something medicine was just beginning to discover in the 1950s. Clearly issues of how companies often lied to their employees and to the public had not yet been exposed.

On the other hand, she completely missed the widespread business of leeching lawsuits by mooching lawyers. Apparently while writing about business, she completely neglected the legal profession and what it has become.

It's also clear that Rand had never been exposed to sciences such as Quantum Physics. There are limits to what a person can know about a situation and when they can know it. This is probably one of the biggest flaws in Rand's hero characters. They seem to be aware and in command of too much detail. Her heroes could only be described as micro-managers.

Rand should have used a more ruthless editor. There is too much redundancy and the pace of the book is slow at times.

However, overall, this is still an incredibly far-sighted book. Given its age and its subject matter, I'd say that it has worn its first half century pretty well.

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[Red Warrior]

Not that what you wrote was wrong (it wasn't), you need to remember that all of Rand's fiction was prmarily intended as a morality play to advance her Objectivism philsophy, with telling a realistic story being a distant second.
btw, I agree it was hard to read.

Re:filter

[AB3A]

I agree. However, I think she went out of her way to beat her readers over the head with this philosophy. Various concepts were repeated and repeated and repeated...