I was going to write about The Wizard of Oz this week, but it seems there’s a certain amount of kerfluffle going on about people who want to traipse down a different kind of yellow brick road.
According to The New York Times, there’s been whole new flood of cries of GO GALT! Among Libertarians and conservatives in the US.
For those of you who might not know, John Galt is the criminal mastermind…er…I mean the hero of Ayn Rand’s highly influential novel Atlas Shrugged. And I am really sorry to report he, it, and she fall into the category of things that don’t go away.
Atlas Shrugged is science fiction. It is also set in an alternate universe. I say this because the people in this book do not act like human beings as we know them.
The book is really big, and the plot is really strange, but I’ll try to fish out the relevant parts.
John Galt is built on the scale of Doc Savage or Kimball Kinnison in terms of male human perfection. You don’t actually meet him for most of the novel. He, instead, remains in the shadows. From those shadows, he urges captains of industry to destroy their industries and retreat to his secluded valley until the rest of the world falls into ruins and they can come out again and take over.
Yes, he’s the hero. He’s not only the hero, he’s the most amazing paragon of genius and humanity the world has ever known.
Starting to see why I say this is an alternate universe?
The central premise is that all the destruction and mayhem Galt is causing is really beneficial, because Galt is Superior, and he’s ensuring that other Superior types are able to throw off the chains of government and taxes and inferior people who might try to make them pay taxes and obey laws. See, if you are truly Superior, you don’t have to obey laws (or pay taxes). You only have to obey Natural Law. Natural Law is what has made you Superior, and Natural Law says that because you are Superior you only have to do what you want to (because of course, your wants are Superior too). If you want to give someone else your money, that’s fine, but if someone, anyone, makes you give up any part of your money, or your absolute freedom, that’s the ultimate in evil and against nature, and you are justified in doing whatever you want to them. Like blowing up railroads, burning down oil wells, blowing up buildings, etc., etc.
No, I’m not kidding.
But John Galt does not just destroy things and convince captains of industry (who can be seen to be Superior in that they are, well, captains of industry) to vanish. In true SF superhero style, he has also invented a generator that runs on static electricity. Apparently, if you’re Superior enough, you really CAN change the laws of physics.
The whole thing ends happily. Governments collapse, pointless people die, Galt and his followers emerge and dance (metaphorically anyway) in the ruins.
Now, I don’t blame Rand for writing in this vein. The woman was from a White Russian family that got run out of the country during the Communist Revolution. You will notice, if you look at Shrugged and her other big, famous novel The Fountainhead her heroes tend to do what those who fled the Soviets did; they burn their fields and run (I will say, in terms of those fleeing Stalinism; can’t blame them in the least. Would have done the same myself).
Rand became really, really popular during the Cold War and particularly during the McCarthy era. The fact that she not only had physically fled Stalinism, but was able to write about it with overwhelming passion made her a sure-fire hit. That her novels held up capitalists, individualists and rich, pretty people as the highest life forms on the planet brought it all home. She affirmed and exaggerated what US culture held dear (if you were able to overlook the little fact of her being an out-loud atheist).
There is, unfortunately a portion of human nature, bolstered by the ever-flourishing cult of the individual in the US that really wants to believe 1) They have come to wealth and prominence entirely by their own merits, owing nothing to their family, gender, color or simple good timing, or 2) That the only reason they have not risen to prominence is that inferior people or governments of inferior people have held them down. The upshot of believing either 1 or 2 is that you believe that you don’t owe nuthin’ to nobody. This, ultimately, is is what Rand wrote about and preached about and she had, and still has quite the following.
Witness that in face of the threat of the wealthy in the US being taxed at a rate much lower than the wealthy in any other developed nation on the planet to fund programs for things they don’t need or use, like clean air, clean water, sustainable power and uncontaminated food, sales of Atlas Shrugged are apparently way up, and people across the blogosphere are being urged to GO GALT!
What I want to know is exactly which part of this scenario are the rich people in our real world being urged to emulate? We will assume that they are not actually being urged to blow up railroad tunnels and set fire to oil wells. We will further assume they are not being expected to violate physical reality. We will also suppose they are not being urged to engage in any of the weirdly rationalized sex-partner hopping that goes on, although I’m less certain about that one.
So, we are left with people urging people (especially rich people) to cease all productive activity to keep their money away from the mean old government. Then when the rest of us choke on all that clean air, clean water, sustainable power and uncontaminated food, and realize the error of our ways, they can come back out and save us all by…well, no, they wouldn’t save us, because Galt only saved Superior people like him and the rest of us could, to use an old expression, go to hell in whichever way we choose..
See, in the worlds created by Ayn Rand only the ideologically and economically pure are worthy of survival or sympathy. Nobody else counts. Let me say that again: Nobody else counts, especially if they want you to pay taxes, or change your blueprints, or, judging from the length of the things, edit your manuscripts.
Based on all this, I guess my reaction to the New Galtist movement is this: Go ahead.
In fact, please go ahead. Take yourself and whoever you can persuade to go with you and go away. I’m begging you. Go somewhere else and put your economic theories to a rigorous test, and don’t mind me, I’ll be over here selling tickets and popcorn (Hey, that’s entrepreneurism! Maybe I’m Superior too!)
See, there’s one little problem with taking Rand’s philosophies as a road map for creating a new economy. The people in Rand’s books don’t care about other people. In fact, that’s the great virtue. In the Wonderful World of Rand, the fewer people you care about, the more demonstrably Superior you truly are.
Now, in this world, we call people like that sociopaths. And, somehow, I’m thinking trying to build up a self-contained society based on the behaviors of sociopaths is not going to work real well.
So, you guys go. Take your Reardon metal, and your Galt Generators and your Roark Blueprints and go to your valley and wait for John Galt to tell you what to do. We’ll be right here when you come back.
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I guess that it would have been torture for Aynd Rand to live in the Danish welfare state, which is based on the premise that those with the widest shoulders (economically speaking) carry the heaviest load – for the good of society.
For someone who has grown up in a nation shaped by the social democratic movement, Rand’s philosophy is simply appalling beyond words. I happily pay my 40% taxes so that I can enjoy free healthcare, free education (even at university), a stipend for studying and welfare if I happen to be unfortunate enough to lose my job. This might be the ultimate evil in Rand’s philosophy but thie system is not perfect but it has worked for decades and my nation is among the richest and safest in the world so I guess we did something right *wink*.
Ms. Zettel is a self-described science-fiction and fantasy writer, and it certainly shows in this review. For if “Atlas Shrugged” really said most of the things that Ms. Zettel claims it does, I would hate the book myself. Fortunately for the millions of fans of the novel, it most assuredly does not. I would invite them to actually read the novel for themselves and find out why it remains a bestseller after fifty years in print.
Clarify: What does being a SF or Fantasy writer (self admitted or not) have anything to do with well . . . anything?
Simply that Ms. Zettel’s “review” bears very little resemblance to a book that I happen to know a great deal about. It is a fantasy caricature of Rand’s novel. Even leaving aside her interpretations and philosophical views entirely, I could list a number of blatant factual inaccuracies in her review — inaccuracies about the book’s plot, its characters, and its author. The careful reader will note a complete lack of any quotation marks in her commentary; that isn’t accidental, since she simply makes things up. When we get to her interpretations of Rand’s philosophy, Ms. Zettel goes from caricature to complete psychosis: Nobody truly familiar with Rand’s views will find any resemblance to them in what she has concocted here.
However, rather than waste my time correcting all of her errors and distortions, I would simply counsel any fair-minded person to read “Atlas Shrugged” for himself and draw his own conclusions. Having done so, the reader will then grasp why Ms. Zettel’s work remains in authorial obscurity, while Ayn Rand’s classic novel stood at #6 on Amazon’s “Literature & Fiction” sales rankings yesterday (March 14, 2008), more than fifty years after its publication in 1957.
Oops, I meant March 14, 2009 — not 2008.
As I see it this column was meant as a satire of Rand’s work – not a review!
I agree with you that the plot of ATLAS SHRUGGED is intricate. Nothing that’s over 1000 pages long can be simple. It is most definitely influential and it sells in huge numbers. It is philosophically dense, and it is meant to be. It is the main manifesto of the Objectivist philosophy which Rand created. I’m not going to argue any of that.
However, I disagree with the philosophy presented in the book. And I don’t like the writing.
There are, of course, alternate interpretations of the philosophical premises stated in the book and the quality of the writing. Obviously there must be, because there are Objectivist societies around the world and if there weren’t we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
What I have given here is my interpretation of the philosophies and characters stated in the book. I do not agree with Rand’s ultimate ideas of anti-altruism or that creative people have a higher calling and duty that is far beyond that of others whom she classes by such names as looters and moochers. The world and our interwoven network of humanity is far more complex and nuanced than she allows for in her philosophical outlook.
Nobody is above or apart from the rest of humanity. We did not come from nowhere, and we do not proceed into nothing. What affects my neighbor, in the end affects me. I may be more talented, I may be smarter but I am not more human than the other 6 billion people on this planet. Rights are not granted by Nature or by anything else beyond human beings, and if I decide I have the right to leave my neighbor abandoned by the railroad tracks for any reason I choose, I better look out, because one day my neighbor will decide he’s justified in doing the same to me.
Just wanted to add that Rand’s work in terms of philosophic content is not given much credence in my part of the world. Her books are virtually unknown in Scandinavia and they aren’t studied at either the literature or philosophy department. I’m not vary familiar with her work but her Objectivist “philosophy” strikes me as a somwhat amateurish attempt at countering Marxist thought by resorting to some of the more striking of Nietzsche’s ideas of the Übermensch.
No arguments there, and I’m not surprised she’s not much known in your part of the world. Like I said, her rise to prominence in the US was very much part and parcel with the anti-Soviet feelings that ran more than a little amok during the Cold War. Plus, the cult of the individual has a lot less social credence outside the US than inside it.
It’s kinda weird that the anti-Soviet feelings had such a strong and paranoid expression in the US – compared to my country, where we were very very close to the USSR. However, Denmark also has a very strong social democratic tradition.
I grew up during the last years of the Cold War and the threat was very present to us. Air raid drills, instructions on how to behave in case of radioactive contamination, Soviet u-boats ending up stranded in the Swedish skærgaard, etc. After the fall of the USSR, secret documents actually showed that my country would have been the first target if the Soviet Union ever were to move against Western Europe.
That’s an interesting question, and like most interesting questions, it’s got a complicated answer.
I’d say it’s got two major roots. The first is that since the connection of the lower 48 states, pretty much the only country that had posed a serious threat to us that we couldn’t strike directly back at was the USSR. Our safety had always laid in our being on the other side of the ocean from anybody strong enough to really strike at us, and we have this little tendancy to go to war with anyone who does cross that ocean. But we couldn’t do that with the USSR.
The fact that we are very much stronger than our immediate neighbors has also not required us as a culture to have to learn to get on with our neighbors as well and continuously as Europeans have.
The other root was and is cultural. The eminty wasn’t one-sided. The US as a nation really was Target #1 for Soviet rhetoric, and we returned the favor. And, of course, the US is very strongly Christian and the official atheism of the USSR did not, and does not, go down well at all.
And then there’s the branches of the tree, which are economic, and the fact that Stalin did turn around and break agreements at the end of WWII and really was expansionist at least for awhile there and did talk like he wanted to take over the world and we were the only game in town that might be able to stop them, even if we had to incinerate the planet to do it…and..and…and…
Like I said, complicated.
The good old days.
Sarah I’m not sure if History necessarily shows ‘Europe’ getting along with each other at a rate that could be construed as better or more efficient than we do with our neighbors. Europe has a pretty long history of not getting along with each other. If we flip that and use a Soviet Russia as an example, certainly we had the the ability to lean on people in our Hemisphere, but it’s not like Canada is/was going to bed at night thinking we would invade them (as Trin say was a close to reality in her country)
Also, ‘peace’ in Europe I think has at least a little to do with the U.S.’s actions in the last century in that Hemisphere.
Jay: Heh. I remember when the Berlin Wall came down and realizing the world I’d grown up in had in some ways just ended and I made one of the few predictions I’ve ever gotten right. I said at that time one day we’d look back on the Cold War as a simpler time.
As to the rest, I take, and cede the point. What I was trying to say is that the fact that the US doesn’t have to worry about being physically threatened by its neighbors that has made for a qualitative difference in outlook for the country as a whole. Just as it makes a difference whether you’re the giant or living in the shadow of the giant.
Being a stuent of all things historical I know that Europe has had a very long history of violent conflict – something that a lot of people tend not be aware of because of the unprecedented longevity of this present peace. In fact, Denmark is one of the European countries that quantative has been involved in the most wars if you look at it from the perspective of centuries. They were short wars, however, and often with Sweden who remained the arch-enemy until the 19th century and the advent of pan-scandinaviaism, then the main enemy became Germany, a country that 18th century Denmark had a much closer cultural connection to. Go figure!
What’s interesting about the attutide during the Cold War in Denmark is not only the need to be careful but also, in some respect, a streak of pragmatism that is very Scandinavian (I think it is also quite important that Denmark is an extremely secular society). A lot of stuff also played out behind the scenes, the intelligence service did a lot of surveillance and there existed people who in a very real way wanted a Communist Denmark (it was quite lucky that we were mainly liberated by the British, apart from one easterly island “liberated” by the Russians, and nobody were sure if they wanted to leave again). It is only now, under the aegis of the present so-called liberalist government that there has been fostered an anti-socialist atmosphere, but it is also something that somewhat resembles Don Quioxte’s fight against the windmills because the threat of Communism is dead and gone and all the revolutionary socialist types have since become pampered fat-cats (or as we say in Danish, “pampere”). So it is really just a lot of hot air from a government who was a great supporter of George W. Bush. And they’re still in power – but that’s a whole other issue. Suffice it to say that my country sadly has become a lot more intolerant, narrow-minded and stifling and it just makes me incredibly sad.
It’s interesting how it keeps coming back, isn’t it? Over here, people are starting to call Pres. Obama a socialist.
Sigh.
Yes it is, but it is also a bit funny – especially here in Denmark where the “Red Menace”, though at one point very real, is dead and gone. What’s left is simply posturing. It’s actually becoming a much used strategy of the present regime – high-blown rhetoric on some cultural/symbolic matter that has little significance in itself but is useful as a vehicle of self-promotion. Of course, sometimes it backfires, big time – case in point: the case of Muhammad cartoons, which led to trade boycotts and torched embassies.
Well, at least Denmark’s posturing didn’t lead it to invade anybody.
No, we just joined the US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.