Here’s why (and most of this I’m making up as I go, so bear with me). We no longer make anything in this country really. Or stuff we make (like cars) we don’t make very well. So instead, people get wealthy by becoming things like lawyers and investment bankers. Basically just collecting wealth from the labor of others or by extending credit to people so they can live a lifestyle that fullfills their sense of entitlement.
I should rephrase what I wrote before. Our society doesn’t try to redistribute wealth “among all the workers”. It’s just that for the past decades we have been telling all the workers “you deserve this”. I mean no one thinks it’s out of the ordinary that Al Bundy, an uneducated shoe salesman fuckup should live in a 2400 sq ft home in a Chicago suburb next to a professional couple with no children. Also, the focus seems to be on making sure the workers don’t lose their jobs, not making sure companies run well and are managed properly. Certainly there is a practical issue of having thousands of auto employees suddenly out of work. But why should we as a society sustain businesses that are unprofitable?
They didn’t have to go anywhere…they simply had to stop working. So…where? They went home and stayed there, keeping their heads down until things started to get better (which wasn’t all that long in the book…after things really started to go TU everything fell apart). What did they do for food, clothing, necessities, power? Who knows…maybe they stole it or maybe magic food fairies brought it to them. Maybe large numbers of people starved, or…well, whatever. We just don’t know except that it was really bad when the lights of New York went dead.
And it’s one she DID address, albeit obliquely. Remember what was happening in New York towards the end of the book? The only thing she didn’t address was the details of what people did…she definitely addresses the big picture aspects (i.e. they walked away from their jobs and didn’t go back).
But let me ask you this. How much of the top management have to leave your company with no replacement before your company can no longer function as a going concern? My current company is a large Fortune 500 company so I know fuck-all about how it works. But take my previous job in a mid sized $1 billion consulting firm. In my group there is a managing director, 5 managers and about 20 staff (assume other groups run in a similar manner). The MD and managers are responsible for generating new business, managing clients and directing the staff. If the 6 of us just up and leave, how much longer would the staff have work to do once their existing projects wound down? How many would have the wherewithall to go find new clients or generate new business? Without new revenue, eventually the company would run out of cash for the payroll.
Are you seriously calling her an “elitist” because she spent more time on her main characters than on minor characters? When the entire crew of a train abandons it in the middle of the desert, because it’s impossible for them to proceed, do you really expect her to describe in detail what happens to every member of that crew? She did describe that there were accidents, there was violence, there was starvation and all kinds of shortages. Other countries had already collapsed. How many more pages do you want to read, beyond 1,168?
The problem here is that those “checking out” would be just as equally susceptible to these accidents, violence, and starvation. In what conceivable circumstance would people intentionally make themselves vulnerable in this way? This is what undermines her thesis. Given the premise of the book, what these people do is really the crux of the issue. Do they allow themselves to starve? Or do they essentially create an alternative economy? By not addressing these questions, Rand has basically created a fantasy rather than anything based on rationality or objectivity.
Well, it helps if you read the book. Things are falling apart already and ‘society’ is putting more and more on those who remain. They are also giving them less and less (while diverting more and more to other things). So, in that ‘conceivable circumstance’ people might intentionally decide to drop out and let things hang. After all, if things are going to be bad anyway…
I think we are at the nit-picking stage at this point. You are now dinging on her because she decided not to go into small levels of detail that really had nothing to do with the STORY. I understand that many of you in this thread did not like her writing style or her message. That’s fine. But this is sort of getting ridiculous, no? ‘Well, she didn’t tell us what each of those workers would do! Did they starve? Did magic unicorns bring them food? What happened to them? The fact that she didn’t tell us is a clear indication of…well, something. I mean, what was she thinking?? Did she think she was writing fiction or something???’
They weren’t. There’s a passage in the book where labor councils (or whatever they were called) were screaming “Send us men!” and were getting a glut of busboys and janitors and other unskilled types, when what they really wanted were skilled tradesmen and managers and whatnot. Men of ability were taking their abilities off the market and going instead for jobs of little or no responsibility because it was safer - anyone willing to take on even a little responsibility was going to held accountable for the inevitable failures of the system. This abdication is a recurring theme, dramatized (among other places) by the efforts of everyone to pass the buck when Kip Chalmers demands a train to take him to San Francisco, leading to the disaster that destroys the Taggart Tunnel, with the blame falling on the junior assistant station manager who signed the order.
Fiction is fine. Fantasy is fine. In fact, it can be great. But you don’t see people holding up “Interview With the Vampire” or “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” as an expression of some serious idea on how we should structure our government and economy or as evidence of the truth of some philosophical idea espoused by the author.
Because when a society collapses, *everybody *is in danger. That’s why the people in the valley were at the point of staying there, because the outside world was getting to be unlivable. When business are closing and people aren’t getting paid, and there’s nothing to buy anyway, there’s really no reason to go on working. Especially when you’re the guy who’s going to be blamed for things beyond your control. And then a law is passed, saying that you’re not even allowed to quit. When people like James Taggart and Wesley Mouch are in charge, society is doomed, and you’re better off working at McDonald’s . . . or less.
Besides, the implication was that the government dole was still in operation until things totally fell apart (though of course things were getting scarce, even food). Bryan Ekers has it right…basically people of ability decided that they didn’t want to help prop up the system or be the fall guys when things went tits up…so, many of them took menial jobs if they couldn’t afford to do nothing and still live. There were mentions of frozen trains, of delivery trucks abandoned (and looted) by the people supposed to be driving them, etc etc. People were simply leaving work and not coming back.
Are you seriously saying that fictional works can’t be taken serious, or have a serious message??
That’s straight up allegory, isn’t it? Well, that’s even easier. We can look at the historical events that it’s based on and see if there are any glaring inconsistencies. I’m sure it could be made subject to analysis for internal inconsistency as well.
I’m saying that if you claim that it should be taken seriously, then you have to be willing to subject it to logical analysis. And if it doesn’t hold up, you can’t cry “fiction.”
I can claim that Harry Potter is a representation of how things should work, but when it comes right down to it, I have to deal with the fact that magic doesn’t exist.
So, if the author doesn’t dot every I and cross every T and go into every detail their works can’t be taken seriously? That there can’t be a serious message otherwise?
I’m not crying fiction…I’m pointing out that this is a WORK of fiction, and that the crux of the story doesn’t revolve around this nit pick. You’ll have to explain why the fact that she glosses over this particular thing has any bearing on whether her works should or should not be taken seriously because frankly this particular aspect of the argument seems pretty thin to me.
ETA:
Yeah…but the thing here is that Harry Potter isnt supposed to be a serious work of philosophic fiction…it’s supposed to be merely for entertainment. You seem to be lost on this point.
You know, whoever wrote the Bible didn’t go into details about all the people and animals who drowned during Noah’s flood. There’s no description of the individuals who perished in Sodom and Gomorrah. And the horrible deaths of Pharaoh’s army when the Red Sea engulfed them. I guess we shouldn’t consider the Bible a serious work of philosophic fiction.
So, you’re okay with someone taking great liberty with reality, but not minor liberty? I view Rand as an artist. Of her fiction, Anthem uses the broadest strokes. The Night of January 16th and We the Living are much more realistic. Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead take minor liberties in my estimation. But she’s like a painter experimenting with different styles. She doesn’t aim for Michelangelo-like realism, nor Daliesque exaggeration. She’s more like Picasso, who explored a range. His early work was very realistic, his later, well, more of what we associate with the man.
I just came across this quote:
Art is a use of indirect means to communicate from one person to another. - Leo Tolstoy.
I think either you’re uncomfortable with the degree of “indirectness” in AS or you’re so opposed to her philosophy you must find fault with her artistry. Or both.