So I’m reading Atlas Shrugged (slowly…I like the story but it’s a bit of an arduous read). So far about a quarter of the way into it. I get that she has a hard-on for self made people and industrialists, but what is her philosophy on the middle classes? The people who actually do the day to day work for the Taggert Transcontinentals and Rearden Steel and whatnot?
Basically all the main characters are either business owners or assorted “looters and moochers” - corrupt government officials, shady reporters, mooching family members, lazy intellectualists and so on. There seems to be little told from the point of view of the laborers.
In other words, in Rand’s Objectivist society, what is my motivation? If I work my ass off and Rearden Steel ships a couple of extra of extra rails, I don’t see another dime. She seems to imply that they should be indebted to their employers for being industrius enough to successfully run the companies that hire them, but that only makes people work just hard enough not to get fired.
I’m no objectivist, but I believe that the reward was the satisfaction for a job well done. Dagny and Hank weren’t in it for the money, that was a byproduct.
She exalts people of all classes who want to do the best job that they can. You will see it throughout the book you are reading (and in The Fountainhead as well…which I actually recommend you read over Atlas Shrugged. It’s a bit easier to read as the story is a bit more compelling IMHO).
There are a few references throughout the story to the common working people…and she portrays them in a good light if they are hard working and doing their best. As the story unfolds you will find that many of the main characters actually take menial jobs in fact.
To do the best you can, to always strive to be the best you can be. If you are a day laborer you should strive to be the best day laborer you can be. If you run a corporation you should strive to be the best CEO you can be. You should ask nothing from anyone else and be compelled to give nothing to anyone else that isn’t of your own free will.
Well, you probably would, as Rand is all about a sort of aristocracy of excellence. If you DO work your ass off and you preform well then most likely you will be rewarded. However, the point is you should do the best job you can for yourself.
No…she feels that people should be grateful to some extent for the folk who’s minds and who’s efforts created those businesses. However, people should work hard and do the best job they can simply for their own pride in themselves and their work.
She is all about not killing off the golden geese, especially in Atlas Shrugged…and about teaching the people who are actually doing the work that they ARE important and not just slaves to society. It’s a different way of looking at things. Remember though when she wrote those books Russia had become the Soviet Union and it seemed that all of Europe was going to go Communist as well…and since she was from Russia and had seen the horrors of Communism first hand she was attempting to write a philosophic counter argument in the form of a fictional novel. Take the book in that context.
Don’t worry if you don’t get it yet. By the three-quarter point of the book, your face will be bloodied from Rand’s incessant beating you over the head with her point. By the time you get near the end, there will be a Webster’s definition of a screed that lasts for so many pages that I ended up swooning and reeling as I flipped through it very much like Shelley Duvall in The Shining, when she finally reads Jack’s manuscript.
Rand doesn’t think much of the middle class at all except as sheep to be there for the superman captain of industry. I don’t mean to give anything away, but clearly if it is not possible for the upper echelon of society to be replaced if they go on strike, if nobody from among the lesser lights can step up to fill the void should Atlas decide to shrug, then there must simply be something inherently deficient about them (or us, as I should say).
It’s certainly a clownish philosophy that does not merit the metropolitan phone book treatment she gives it in Atlas Shrugged.
What amuses me however is how similar that all sounds to the rhetoric of the USSR :). The Soviet Union was all about collective achievement, but the exhortations were along the lines of being the best worker you can be, for both self-fulfillment as well as the greater good of society.
Rand’s whole shtick was based on fantasy economics. Among many other errors, she believed that the executives who ran companies were also the ones who invented products, undertook risky explorations, and did important physical labor. Hence, since the rich executives were the ones who did all of the work, everyone else had to bow down in gratitude to them. In reality, of course, most executives have little or no experience in research and development, and they certainly don’t do physical labor.
Well, the key difference is that in the Soviet Union the workers and peasants were expected to strive for the good of society…and were paid essentially the same regardless of how well they did their jobs (by category at least and leaving aside the communist caste system). In Rand’s philosophy however individuals strive for their own personal reasons, and are rewarded by the amount of effort and/or skill they have…not by some table or chart made up by some petty bureaucrat.
It’s a significant difference in world view IMHO, and only looks similar superficially.
Having slogged through Das Kapital I have to say that, contrary to Hentor’s assertions it was a much easier read. It wasn’t nearly so humorous though…
:dubious: Did you READ the book(s)?? Because your assessment is pretty much horseshit in several different ways (for those of us who DID read the books). She heaped plenty of scorn on executives who didn’t do a good job…and a lot of her characters, especially the main ones, weren’t rich executive types. The books were about an aristocracy of excellence…not about rich fat cats being the be all and end all.
Isn’t the point of the book that the elite could choose to go on strike with John Galt and society would be unable to replace them? Doesn’t that mean that elite businessmen are inherently special people, and that middle class stooges could never work hard enough to replace them? Her philosophy strikes me much more as a caste system than one of meritorious upward mobility. After all, if Atlas could shrug, and we could just find someone else to hold up the world, then Atlas would find himself out of a job.
I made no assertions about Atlas Shrugged being easier to read than Das Kapital. I’ve never read Das Kapital. Atlas Shrugged is without a doubt a tedious piece of shit, though.
Sort of. The point of the book is that society needs the people who are the creators, the one’s who create new ideas, processes, etc etc. It’s about the struggle between making such men and women slaves to society (and thus killing off the geese the lay the golden eggs) vs letting those folks be free to create and build.
Your take is sort of like the Cliffs Notes version.
No, not at all. For one thing it’s not about ‘elite businessmen’…simply about elite PEOPLE. John Galt isn’t a businessman at all…he’s an engineer and scientist. Howard Rourke isn’t an elite businessman either…he’s an architect.
Well, that’s because you either didn’t actually read the book(s) or you just weren’t willing to actually READ them. Galt was the son of a poor iron worker (IIRC), and Rourke’s dad was a rivet catcher working on buildings or some such. These are the main characters, mind…and yet you didn’t seem to pick up on this sort of crucial fact.
True…if you could find another Atlas. If there wasn’t a Bill Gates I’m sure that there would still have been a Microsoft, ehe? It’s so easy even a cave man could do it, to be sure. Funny that no one (but Apple…who had some other individuals who sort of did the deed for them) has done it yet, ehe?
shrug (heh!) Too each his own. I’m sure there are books you have read and enjoyed that I would have been militantly meh! about as well. Honestly, Atlas Shrugged was NOT one of my favorite books by Rand (though I still enjoyed it and recently bought the unabridged audio version for my Zune). I actually enjoyed Fountainhead MUCH more. Nor is Rand my bestest most favoritest author either…though again, I have enjoyed her works, even though they are quite over the top sometimes and admittedly can be tedious at times as well.
I thought it was interesting that Rand framed the book with the character of Eddie Willers. I can’t imagine that such a rigorous author would have done that for no reason.
I’ll leave the interpretations to you, but there are several characters (Owen Kellogg and Cherryl Brooks spring to mind) that I think speak to your question.
FWIW— I think it is unfortunate that Rand overwhelmed her subtler story lines with her tendancy toward bombast.
To the OP: She pretty much split humanity into three groups, workers, leaders, and thieves. Workers are just normal people who are happy to do whatever but aren’t ever going to really do anything original by themselves.
No. My take is my take. Even in your summary, you say that society needs the creators. If they take a hike to a fancy retreat, as the book says, the rest of us are sunk. In other words, these elite are irreplacable.
Are you in fact saying that when I said I read the book I was lying? I certainly did read it, and I think that the origin of the characters is overwhelmed by the bombast - it was about 20 years ago that I read it, so others may forgive my neglect of historical reference. Why then, if leaders can rise up from such humble beginnings, should society be harmed in the least if some of them want to take off? Seems like a contradiction.
But we don’t need a “Microsoft”. We need personal computers, and Bill Gates certainly isn’t the only one to develop PC technology. Whoever he bought MS-DOS from might point that out to you.
Am I seriously the only one in this thread who actually read this book? She doesn’t put people into those three classes. Workers for instance would be refined into those who are experts at what they do, those who do a good job and take pride in their work and those who just sort of get by. It’s a continuous scale as opposed to a rigid caste system.
Think of Red in Fountainhead or Eddie in Atlas. Or the engineer for the train on the John Galt line. There are a lot of examples of an aristocracy of excellence among workers as well as among the elite leaders…and a similar level of appreciation of that excellence from Rand.
In fairness, that sort of thing might once have been more common than it is now. The Fountainhead was published in what, 1944? A lot has changed since then. No cite, but the “CEO class” we see running businesses in 2009 didn’t exist to this extent in 1943. Rand lived in a world where a lot of industrialists were really industrialists. Management as a science did not come into vogue until after World War II. You didn’t have CEOs with no background in their business making millions of dollars while presiding over failed corporations, at least not like you do today.
The Fountainhead isn’t a great novel but you can’t blame its author for not being able to peer into the future. An Ayn Rand born 65 years later than she was, writing “The Fountainhead” in 2009, would likely write a book with many differences from the one actually written in 1944.
Ayn Rand comes under a huge amount of fire on the SDMB and I don’t quite understand why. We don’t have any Objectivists here that I know of, so there’s nobody taking her side unreservedly. Her novels aren’t great literature but I’ve read worse; if you want to start theads about the shittiest novels in the English language it’ll be a very long time before we get to Ayn Rand. Her philosophy has some obvious areas that can be argued against, but that’s true of all philosophers. What the hell is the bee in people’s bonnet about this particular dead white person?
But that’s not the point of the book. Yes, if the creators were to actually go on strike (something that would never happen…this IS fiction after all, ehe?) then society would be less for it and perhaps would sink. Without the guy who created the wheel or fire (or all the other things we take for granted) human society would still be roaming the plains hunting and gathering…and without even stone tools (for which we have some other nameless individual to thank).
THAT is the point of the books. I was merely pointing that out to you.
Only you would know that Hentor…I was just pointing out that if you DID read it you certainly didn’t get it.
I forgive the fact that you might have forgotten some of the details, especially since you seemed to have taken an instant dislike of the book. However, you sort of missed several of the central themes given some of your assertions.
The point of the book is that ALL of them decided to take off. They went on strike. Again, this is sort of the central theme of the book. Yeah, it’s an impossibility…but it’s fiction and she was trying to make a point.
Oh, I don’t know…because it generated billions of dollars in revenue and provided hundreds of thousands (or more) jobs both directly and in related industries? It changed the entire face of computing and business? Little things like that?