An unintended benefit of 'Atlas Shrugged'

The ignorance of certainty:
One more (unintended) lesson from Atlas Shrugged

DAN ROTTENBERG

Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s 1,200-page celebration of greed and selfishness, is “one of the most influential business books ever written,” according to the New York Times. Fifty years after it first appeared, Rand’s novel still ranks among the top 400 on Amazon.com’s best-seller list (compared to Jack Welch’s Winning, recently found languishing at No. 1,431).

Generations of Fortune 500 chief executives have taken heart from Rand’s glorification of heroically productive industrialists who wage seemingly endless war against sniveling bureaucrats, parasites, socialists, altruists and other “looters.” Atlas Shrugged is said to have inspired the careers of such luminaries as Alan Greenspan, Camille Paglia and Hugh Hefner. (Whether this is praise or criticism is unclear.)

“Atlas Shrugged is a celebration of life and happiness,” wrote the young Greenspan in a letter to the New York Times shortly after Rand’s novel was published in 1957. “Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should.”

Adam Smith said it first

In a world where billions of gullible people go belly-up for philosophies like “Love thy neighbor as thyself” and celebrities grow rich and famous on jingles like “All You Need is Love,” no doubt Atlas Shrugged provided a valuable reminder of a basic insight first articulated (albeit less angrily) 181 years earlier by Adam Smith: “By pursuing his own interest [the individual] frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.” But the book’s most valuable service (to me, at least) hasn’t yet been acknowledged in any of the 50th-anniversary encomiums I’ve read, to wit: Atlas Shrugged inadvertently provides the most vivid demonstration I’ve found of the mind of the true believer— of left or right.

The novel’s heroine, Dagny Taggart, like her alter ego Ayn Rand, is no seeker after truth; she already knows the truth. She has no curiosity about what others think or believe, because anyone who disagrees with her is, by definition, wrong. Dagny’s mission is to pound her truth into other people’s thick skulls, if only those imbeciles will listen to her.

She and her like-minded allies— John Galt, Francisco d’Ancona, Hank Rearden et al.— spend most of the book lecturing their lessers on the evils of socialism, altruism and religion and the virtues of free enterprise. The possibility that Dagny and her elite pals are fallible humans who might be mistaken about anything and might benefit from listening to others is a possibility she and they refuse to consider. How could they be mistaken, when everything these libertarians do— from the music they compose to the orgasms they reach— is beautiful and uplifting?

Oh, for an audience

In the best libertarian tradition, Dagny and her fellow rugged individualists oppose all forms of government coercion. Yet the thing they need most in order to achieve their utopia is a captive audience. How does one capture a nationwide audience without coercion? You could do it through persuasion, I suppose, or entertainment or even outright bribery. Not Dagny and her crew. The climax of Atlas Shrugged— the true believer’s ultimate fantasy—occurs when Dagny and her fellow free-enterprisers seize control of the “national broadcasting studio.” Having finally commandeered their audience, they proceed to deliver— you guessed it— a 57-page lecture on the evils of socialism and the virtues of free enterprise.

Since their truth is incontrovertible, once people have been forced to hear the truth they must acknowledge it. The possibility that people might flip off their sets, or switch to a progressive rock station, or mow the lawn or go shopping— or listen to John Galt’s lecture but take away a different message than what he intended— does not occur to Dagny’s cardboard heroes.

They remind me of my daughter Julie, who, as a tot, developed an ingenious method for commanding my attention at the dinner table: Instead of crying or banging on her plate, Julie would reach over from her high chair, take hold of my chin and turn my face in her direction. Smart thinking for a two-year-old, but an incomplete strategy for mature adults.

When ACT-UP stormed the Welcomat

This hunger for an audience is precisely the sort of thinking I encountered from true believers of the left back in 1991 when ACT-UP demonstrators stormed my office at the Welcomat (now Philadelphia Weekly) to demand that I publish their manifesto on my paper’s front page. And they weren’t about to stop there.

“If only we could have the front page of the New York Times for one day,” the demonstration’s leader later remarked to me, “imagine what we could accomplish!” I remember thinking: “What you would accomplish is a sharp decline in the Times's circulation.”

Most people, the late Penn political science professor Edward Janosik used to observe, think of the political spectrum as a straight line, with extreme leftists at one end and extreme right-wingers at the other. In fact, Janosik said, it’s more like a horseshoe: The extreme left and right are actually closer to each other than they are to the moderates in the middle. That’s why it’s so easy for a true believer to jump from left to right (Norman Podhoretz, say) or from right to left (like Barry Goldwater’s former speechwriter Karl Hess). A moderate, discovering the error of his ways, tells himself that he might be mistaken in the future as well, and therefore it behooves him to listen respectfully to other people’s views. The true believer reaches no such conclusion: He just clings to a new set of beliefs with the same old tenacity. The hunger for combat matters more than the issues involved.

This is a matter of psychology, not philosophy. But don’t take my word for it. Read Atlas Shrugged.



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