Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
My rating: 2 of 5 stars Ayn Rand’s seminal work presents what she calls “The Ideal Man.” She suggests that the Ideal Man is someone who takes this vow: “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 me” (979). Rand proposes a form of radical Egoism where the promotion of the self is the means by which happiness is achieved. She called this philosophy, or way of being, “Objectivism.” Objectivism teaches: 1. Metaphysics: “The task of man’s consciousness is to perceive reality, not to create or invent it.” 2. Epistemology: “Man’s reason is fully competent to know the facts of reason.” 3. Human Nature: “Man is a being of volitional consequences.” 4. Ethics: “The proper standard of ethics is: man’s survival qua man–i.e., that which is required by man’s nature for his survival as a rational being…Rationality is man’s basic virtue.” 5. Politics: “Men must deal with one another as traders, giving value for value, by free mutual consent to mutual benefit.” 6. Aesthetics: “Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value judgments” (1074-75). Atlas Shrugged (1957) is designed to articulate this worldview in a masterfully told story about Dagny Taggart, Vice-President in Charge of Operations for Taggart Transcontinental. Taggart presents a vision of reality consistent with Rand’s proposed version of it: each man is responsible for himself and for no other, and his happiness lies only within achieving something of meaning and value. Unlike the ensemble of characters who surround her in New York, Taggart believes that she can cause the world to run simply by willpower: it it within her own volition that meaning and purpose can be created. To help her in this quest for meaning, Rand created Francisco d’Anconia and Hank Reardon, two close friends of Taggart who are also industrialists in their own right. In the face of rising government and social interference to live for the other (often through extreme government legislation and restriction and a general feeling of living in an “enlightened age”), d’Anconia’s collegiate companion, John Galt, established a place for “true men” to live in the wilderness of Colorado and work for only their own advancement. Their mantra is to live only for themselves and their own happiness, not as a group, but as individuals. Over time the people of the United States grow disillusioned as the government continues issuing new Directives in an attempt to quell the growing unrest and resentment at the failure of the social experiment of Need as the determining factor for distribution (read: people are pissed at socialism). Rand suggests that such moralism effectually killed the spirit of man–and it is up to the industrialists to relight the “motor of the world” and live only for themselves as rational beings in pursuit of their own happiness. When they do so, they then have the ability to throw off the shackles of oppression and live like true men. Rand's entire philosophical system is boorish and repugnant, especially to Christians. However, the first two-thirds of the book are very well-written and an enjoyable story (the last third is sermon after sermon, endless moralizing about the virtues of selfishness)--thus why the book receives the 2-stars it deserves. View all my reviews
0 Comments
|
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |