#erikhillreviews #erikjosephson #booktube #aynrand A great book for philosophical discussion! CONTACT & FOLLOW ME: erikhillreviews@gmail.com goodreads.com/erikhillreviews
My opinion is that Atlas Shrugged is a piece of timeless art! I just recently finished the Audio Book. It was suggested to me by a coworker while on break in our manufacturing job one night. I had just finished a rant on how we were surrounded by employees who just refused to show any spark of thought and how new company policies from management with no idea of production were leading to our destruction. What's interesting is that Rand thoroughly lays out every counter to any argument against her theories. They are there to see for those who can see and understand. It's no joke that the book is a deeply philosophical undertaking. However, the negativity I've seen towards this book is that being expressed by those who are incapable of understanding its philosophical meaning. I laugh at every negative review imagining they are the words of a Bertram Scutter.
It is funny how there are a group of people who criticize this book that sound exactly like the villains of the story. Ironically, this puts Ayn Rand exactly where she wants to be - in the position of John Galt. I think that's one reason why this book has had such staying power.
@@user-mw6fh5oj2c Rand did not advocate any kind of "-cracy". She identified the core aspects of the human life process, and as a consequence of that she identified what a government needs to do in order to protect that life process in a social context, and it wasn't anyone "ruling" anyone else. She proposed a system in which the actions of living are protected by a set of identified fundamental truths codified as the guiding foundations of a republic, not by the ever-changing permissions of a collective or a dictator. All people who choose good life-sustaining actions benefit in such a society whether they are talented and goal directed or unambitious and limited; they benefit to the extent that they are conscientious about taking action to live.
This book really did alter how I look at some things. Her ethics may seem controversial, but I thought she did a good job of articulating them and laying out her logic. The speech that Francisco makes about money actually made me pause and stare off into space for a while, thinking. Literarily it may not be all that great (although I did find her prose quite striking at times), but as a work of philosophical fiction it's actually pretty marvelous, and worth more consideration than I think a lot of people give it. Good review. :)
Rather than divide the characters into good guys and bad guys, I divide them as follows: 1. Producers: Individuals who produce quality goods and services, like Hank Reardon, Dagny Taggard, and Ellis Wyatt. 2. Supporters: While they don't have the ability to produce like the Producers, they can provide excellent support via ability and hard work. Two examples are Eddie Willers and Gwen Ivens (Reardon's Secretary). 3. Moochers: Individuals who use emotional force to take from the Producers, using guilt and fear to get what they want. This is how Reardon's Family operates. 4. Looters: Individuals who use non-emotional force (such as physical, legal, and political) to take from the Producers. (Added) Examples of this are the following individuals: James Taggard, Wesley Mouch, Dr. Floyd Ferris, and Cuffie Meggs.
@@YashArya01 The reason I added Supporters to the classifications is to fill a hole that I saw in the classifications for characters like Eddie Willers who don't produce like the Producers (like Ken Danniger) and they aren't Moochers (like Phillip Reardon) or Looters (like James Taggard).
@@Solitaire001 as long as you're careful to explain what you mean, as you are here, I don't see something necessarily problematic with your usage. Just understand that Eddie Willers is also producing. He's not as original, innovative, or brilliant, but he's still productive.
That certainly was an interesting read. A lot of people get caught up in the apparent oxymoron in the title that they completely dismiss it. It's too bad.
Thanks for the review Erik - I don't read as much fiction as I'd like, and I'm quite interested in philosophical or deeper thoughts, so this sounds like a good one to check out! There are a lot of people who dislike her or her work, or her philosophy, but I've learned it's important to evaluate things on our own... and you finding something useful in it is enough to make me want to give it a shot.
Try Max Stirner. Ayn Rand misunderstood Max Stirner's "Einzige" - Stirner was an individualist mystic in his "The Only One and It's Possessions" who infuriated Karl Marx and the Capitalist establishment.
Right but you can see what "the dollar" is really about for him, it's because he wants to do research without connection to human survival, he wants knowledge for its own sake, and if no one will pay him to do that, he'll sell out to the looters, lend them his prestige in return for "security" (so he thinks).
It only seems long and repetitive after you get the point of the book. The book does a great job exposing as many kinds of situations the looters and the producers could interact with one another, in all subtile details. Sometimes the looter is the husband and the wife is the producer. Sometimes it's the other way around. Sometimes the looter is the rich and the poor is the producer. Sometimes it's the other way around. The line between good and evil crosses through every other human distinction imaginable.
To be clear, don't you mean that it seems long and repetitive until you get the point of the book? Aren't you saying that it's only the people who don't see the subtleties that see it as long and boring?
This book and the poem you mentioned are about selfishness. The trouble is altruistic culture has manipulated our understanding of the word selfishness to make it a negative thing. Loving yourself using your mind and being productive are necessarily selfish endeavors. Selfishness just means prioritizing your self interest, what could be more in your interest than living a life of rationality and loving the people close to you?
Very valid points. For a lot of people selfishness is evil by definition. So when someone comes out with a book titled "The Virtue of Selfishness," it seems so absurd that everything else is dismissed outright.
@@erikhillreviews Rand's point is deeper than challenging how "a lot of people" see selfishness. Her deeper point is that the modern conception of it is nonsensical. It's not just that the meaning isn't deep enough, it's that the modern conception blends things that are not essentially the same, like a petty thief and someone who does not give to charity--it can't even work as a unit of thought because it is confused.
@@johnhatchel9681 Rand's ideas are not a description of natural inclinations. They are identifications of fundamental truths and no one lives according to them by natural inclination. To live her ideas requires thought and effort. To think is a choice, we don't do it automatically. There are endless examples of people who live thoughtlessly and follow their "inclinations" to self-destruction.
Enjoyed that little review. Maybe it's time for me to reread this book? I think there's a lot of accuracy in what Rand was saying; however, as I think you might have been suggesting(?), with the advantage of 70 further years of hindsight, maybe lacks a little precision, here and there.
Yep, that sounds right to me. I wonder what would happen if you found an indisputably talented writer that was well regarded in literary circles and you tasked them with rewriting the main ideas of Atlas Shrugged in their own style. An interesting experiment that we'll never know the answer to...
Your main complaint of villains being flat, or good and bad guys, pros and cons, being obvious, is not a flaw but an intended consequence of Rand's philosophical work underlying the story. Many people mention this issue, but it is rarely explained well. So here is my cent. Essentially, Rand sought to point out that naturally good and evil would have seemed complicated, and hence characters in stories would be multi-faceted and difficult to judge, if the moral philosophy at large in the culture is confused and contradictory. Which she argued it was, through altruism. She also argued that in all art, including writing, the artist inevitably projects their sense of life in their product. Moral values held by the artist being part of that, affecting their writing. But. When your moral philosophy is clear and consistent, you have no trouble discerning rather quickly the character of people you are introduced to. Including characters in stories. Objectivism has the clearest and best moral philosophy ever devised, and so Atlas Shrugged is the way it is in this regard, just as other works are as they are.
I see your point and in other places in this comment section, I feel like I've been making that same argument. You can't say that Picasso isn't a good artist because his paintings aren't realistic. He's not trying to draw a picture of photographic accuracy. A lot of misplaced complaints. What I was referring to in the video is some of the way things played out for the villains, which I think goes back to my issue with her ending. James Taggert comes to mind. I'm okay with flat characters and their representative role, but the way his character ended was over the top for me.
3:36 the book was, in fact, well-researched. From Wikipedia: To depict the industrial setting of Atlas Shrugged, Rand conducted research on the American railroad and steel industries. She toured and inspected a number of industrial facilities, such as the Kaiser Steel plant, visited facilities of the New York Central Railroad, and briefly operated a locomotive on the Twentieth Century Limited. Rand also used her previous research for an uncompleted screenplay about the development of the atomic bomb, including her interviews of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which influenced the character Robert Stadler and the novel's depiction of the development of "Project X".[
And I think that definitely shows in the book. Thanks for the excerpt. Also, I knew that she based Stadler on Oppenheimer, but I didn't know she interviewed him! I would have loved to listen in on that conversation.
Ayn Rand misunderstood Max Stirner's "Einzige" - Stirner was an individualist mystic in his "The Only One and It's Possessions" who infuriated Karl Marx and the Capitalist establishment.
One of the main subplots that I found the most interesting but seems to be very overlooked is her search for the free-energy technology engine and then the demonstration of the free-energy weapon. HELLO!!!!
I agree, that is overlooked. I forgot about that weapon until you mentioned it. Maybe it's because it's in book 3 and the conversational energy of the readers is all used up in the first 350,000 words :)
You will know whether Rand’s ideas are for you based on your personal emotional response to either her heroes or especially her villains both of whom clearly express their deepest premises.
Read it once and listened to it twice. A champion of individualism and it seems each generation, particularly those who are intelligent, seem to rediscover this and other Rand works as they resist the chains of collectivism and self sacrifice in the name of the so called greater good👀👀👀👀
@@erikhillreviews I was dealing with depression after returning from Viet Nam and ended up in a psych ward and after talking to one of the doctors he gave me Atlas Shrugged to read and that’s how it started.
Wow, it's great this story has been so helpful for you. I do think it's a very uplifting central message. Also, that sounds a like a fascinating conversation for it to end with a prescription for Atlas Shrugged :) @@michaelwelsh7362
I would say the most therapeutic thing about the central theme of Atlas is you don’t need to, and really shouldn’t depend on the collective, particularly in association with government and bureaucracy. As much as possible you should rely on yourself. Your most reliable collective, if your fortunate enough is your family. Government, while necessary for certain things like national defense, border security, which by the way they suck under this administration, maintaining national parks, which they currently suck at as well, and some level of regulation of commerce and transportation, federal government is too impersonal to deal effectively with education, health, crime and punishment, and many other issues that are more effectively handled at state and local levels.That is why states rights were always above federal encroachment because the people could more easily hold state and local politicians accountable for their policies.
I just finished it and honestly I assumed going in that a book this long would at least have some nuance. It misses the mark hard as an example of the political philosophy presented as every capitalist is a perfect chad who is always the most correct, smartest, most talented person in the room. John Galt basically says “I’m right and everyone who disagrees with me secretly knows they are wrong and hate everything.” Disco Elysium is a very pro-communist piece of media but even it spends a good chunk of time critiquing its own ideology.
I had never before heard of Disco Elysium, but that was a very interesting wikipedia read, thanks! As far as the book goes, I think the book is getting at a deeper theme beyond the capitalist/socialist battle. I think of this as an examination of the black and white as opposed to the gray in between. So I agree, this isn't a novel about nuance and it certainly isn't even-handed. Ayn Rand wasn't trying to be.
A bit strange to see so many who like to jump on the bandwagon of criticism of Rand. Atlas Shrugged was the second most influential book of the 20th century in a poll.
Who voted and who were they? Which countries were involved in selecting? I don’t believe readers in the UK would have voted it so highly because it has almost no profile here. I know no-one who has read it, and I was a Lit student.
@@richardking3206 I saw this reported probably shortly after the turn of the century. It’s the kind of thing that some people either in literature or popular culture like to do after a century ends. I don’t remember the parameters of the poll, it may even have been one of the magazines that were still in popular circulation at that time, like Time or Life magazine. I’m sure if your really interested it is easy to use the internet to find out the details but it did say that Atlas Shrugged was voted the second most influential book of the 20th century after the Bible. Don’t know how many people you know who read the Bible these days but that is what was being reported in the article about 23 years ago🤷♂️🤷♂️🤷♂️ Pp
This raises an interesting point. I'm so curious how much this book is read outside of the United States. I know it's less, of course, but I would love to see the numbers.
I found some information on this from a quick google search. Apparently, it was a 1991 poll from a random sample of Book-of-the-Month club subscribers. www.libertarianism.org/articles/how-influential-atlas-shrugged
That was a good article and I thought it was interesting that Ayn Rand was referred to as the first libertarian which I would say is fairly accurate and that polling suggest that less and less people identify as either Democrat or Republican and more identify as Libertarian. I don’t believe Rand or her writings are going away anytime soon and that’s a good thing for humanity.
I remember many years ago, any list of the best books in the world based on US survey, would include Atlas Shrugged, and any list of the top 10 authors of the world, would include Ayn Rand, right up there with Shakespear, James Joyce and Tolstoy. So I sought out Atlas Shrugged, found a dusty second-hand copy (I was only a poor student at the time), prepared myself for a profound revelation, only to find it a work that promotes and celebrates selfishness and misanthropy.
@JD-vj4go A child could understand it. It's absolute nonsense. Only fools like you take it seriously. Hopefully you'll mature out of out it before further contribute to it.
I love this book. I love the way Rand writes. It is beautiful. I've never understood the Ayn Rand hate. Even if you don't like her philosophy she was still a beautiful writer.
I can see complaining about the repetitiveness in the writing and the heavy-handedness in pressing the theme on the reader. But I actually thinks she uses that to her advantage to create her world. It works for me personally, anyway. I remember the first time reading Ayn Rand. I had never read anything written in quite that style before and that's one thing that really drew me in.
I think one reason she did push topics at times (repetitiveness) was because this was more of a philosophy book for her. She decided to take her philosophy and place them within her characters. They lived by her philosophic standards. Sometimes philosophy does need to be pushed a bit.@@erikhillreviews
@@erikhillreviews Already been done--see The Martian. Oh he's not Galt, but he IS a man who makes a commitment to use reason to solve the problem of survival.
My mom made me read this book as a young teenager and I have repeated this with my own kids. I attribute a lot of my success to her. I believe the US would be way better off if this book were required reading for middle school.
The novel sends ridiculous conflicting messages. For example, why are the villains more successful with women than the ostensible heroes? And why is it moral & heroic when the Chad characters like Ragnar & Francisco destroy material wealth, but it's evil & contemptible when the ugly characters like Cuffy Meigs do it?
Interesting questions. I think the point of the book is that there are the producers who are capable of producing wealth and looters that are incapable. The book makes the case that it's moral for the producers to destroy their own inventions/businesses because they are the creators. It's immoral for the looters to insist that the producers have a moral obligation to produce according to their abilities. The immorality isn't tied to wealth destruction per se. To your first point, which villains are successful with women? James Taggert sure isn't. I suppose the relationship ideal within this world is between Dagney and Hank Rearden. What other examples are there?
Several of the novel's villains have girlfriends, while most of the men who joined Galt's strike mysteriously lack women in their lives. It's like Rand inadvertently portrays what often happens in the real world: The bad boys get the girls, while the moral, responsible chumps have to go without female companionship, sometimes for their entire lives. They might become financially successful by filling their lonely hours with extra work, but they still come home to empty beds.
If you ever decide to try again, consider watching the Ayn Rand Institute "Atlas Project" videos as you go along, they are very helpful for understanding the book.
As an avid reader of novels my entire life I found Atlas Shrugged so dry and lifeless I could barely make it to page 300 before throwing the book across the room… Sometimes I wonder if there’s ever been anyone that read it all the way through…When you see the kind of politicians that fawn over this book you get the impression they never read it, it just sounds good to them because of her cruel politics 😂😂😂
Even though I liked the book overall, I can see where you're coming from about the writing style. Also this is one of those books that if the first couple hundreds of pages aren't interesting to you, there's no point in making it all the way to the end. I, however, did make it all the way through.
I gave up after 700 pages. Show me don’t like a didactic academic through unidimensional straw men tell me. She should write Marvel comics. If you’re vindictive can you also be a hero? Can anyone succeed not serving someone? Glad to hear the last 500 pages I didn’t finish were anticlimactic repetitious.
Thousands of people read this book all they way through and many, including myself, multiple times. It seems, if you are a fan of her philosophy it would be easier and more enjoyable. I don't recommend it if you're not familiar with her philosophy. If you're a fan of the welfare state and everything else wrong with the world today, this will never be for you. If you want to give it a chance, read "Anthem" (one or two day read), "The Virtue of Selfishness" (non-fiction), maybe "Fountainhead", then "Atlas Shrugged", or...forget it. We're already too far gone. A.S. describes the current world perfectly, except there is no John Galt to save it.
I disagree. I think it's mostly a dumb book. The biggest problem is that it's all a big straw man argument. She doesn't seem capable of arguing against all the liberal ideas she seems to hate without presenting grotesque exaggerations of them. The guy who makes the rails, for example, is being forced by the government to share his alloy with the rest of his industry, in the name of fairness - a ridiculously over the top policy that doesn't exist anywhere. And it gets so much worse than that. At one point, a woman commits suicide rather than talk to a social worker. There's just no way I can take this book seriously. As I said, it's a dumb book.
I think the exaggerations are by design. She wasn't going for realism. Side note, I think the polarized nature of the country (and the world in general) is turning more and more into a grotesque exaggeration, so who knows. We may be in Ayn Rand's universe in the next decade or so.
In ayn rands world only the truly execptional, gifted,talented , creative, are of value ..the common muck of humanity are to erve.. there is one other consideration the superior, are not bound by the rules that control the commons ,any pain or destruction caused by their determination to succeed regardless of cost to others, is just tough,,, her and h.l.menken , the twin gods of the exceptionalists, ayh rand was ecommended to me by americans in london in the sixties , they were so at odds with the times i did not give it much thought ,but to observe tgat ,the ideas did not appeal... did a whole generation have their values screwed by these and others , and now we see the full flowering, ..those who think otherwise or have different values do not matter..... SUPPORT UKRAINE FREE AND AT PEACE
Love is the answer, altruistic kindness towards others. This is strength, and objectivism utterly misses this point. No multi-cell organism can live without peer-to-peer interaction among cells The same is true with people.
Objectivism does not reject kindness towards others. It specifically rejects self-sacrificing for others aka altruism as understood by the man who coined the phrase, Auguste Comte. Comte felt that you should put others before yourself so much that he didn't believe in human rights. It was okay to rob, steal and murder as long as you were doing it for the betterment of mankind. It contrasts greatly with Ayn Rand objectivism. Objectivism is a philosophy about love, a philosophy about respecting the rights of others and loving yourself. A philosophy about loving others, not discriminately but with trueness. Universal love is a distortion. An abuse of the term. You should love your wife more than you love others. You should marry people you love instead of marrying people out of altruism. What a horrible life it would be if you never cared about yourself or your values and constantly lived for others.
@@gsockpuppet2490Your comments are laughable. Who would marry someone and not love them? You think people marry for altruistic reasons? Rand’s beliefs stem from a childhood and early life in a family trauma. It wasn’t her family’s fault what happened, but the revolution was a response to a means of government that was not meeting the needs of the people, they were being cruelly ignored and left to die by the Tsar’s totally uncaring rule. There were several attempts at revolution there before the successful one. Sadly, with Lenin dead the despot Stalin was able to take control. What the Russians then had was a despotic regime struggling to make sense of an economy and ruling class that was dealing with a country desperately lacking in almost everything necessary for the 20th century. Their only guidance was avoiding what the Tsar had done (but much like the English Civil War aftermath, the people could only repeat what they had before), and a bit of theory. Rand didn’t actually think about the causes of the revolution, merely reacting against what her own family had lost. When she got to the US she saw the opposite and was taken up by the elite there so saw the good side of it and praised it. I have yet to see her philosophical musings in a thought out manner, much as a Philosopher might. What she espouses isn’t a philosophy, it’s a gut response to her family getting lost in social turmoil. If wonder if she’d have been so vociferous about things if she’d fallen on hard times and had to live rough in the US?
Would you say that someone who gives themselves outrageous physical challenges just for the sake of figuring out what they're capable of accomplishing are selfish? If not, why not? Serious question, I'm curious what people have in mind when they use the term selfishness.
@@erikhillreviews Selfishness is the natural state of things, a part of our instinctive nature. Not bad in itself, but can not be called a virtue. A virtue is something that requires sacrifice. Sometimes we sacrifice for ourselves and that is a virtue in the sense that we have to love ourselves to be capable of loving others.
@@norwegian24 Selfishness as Ayn Rand conceived it requires effort and reasoning to understand what is in your interests. Her ethics names seven primary virtues which are applications of reason to specific spheres. These are no more automatic than is reason itself. Rand also identified a fallacy of conceptualization: the "frozen abstraction" in which the person takes a single example as defining a category, for instance if someone were to say that furniture means tables and anything else isn't furniture. Another example would be taking altruism as synonymous with morality, when there are many different moral codes that have been proposed.
The book is an attempt by an untalented writer to put together a mystery, science fiction, dystopian novel, melodrama and action stories and manages to fail at all of them. The characters are totally unrealistic and speak like robots. There are no happily married people in the entire 800 pages and no children. When it came out the reviews were trying to outdo each other in saying how awful it was. There are plot holes that any author might have fixed before publishing and each character has long long long speeches that can go on for tens of pages. Other than that.....
I don't think there's anyone who believes that the dialogue is realistic or that people really do have such long winded speeches in real life. But I'm curious - what plot holes did you have in mind?
I loved this book, I read it for the first time very recently. While I think she takes her viewpoint to the furthest possible place and that is too far I have to agree with the fundamental premise that it’s the people who invent, build and supply the essentials and the comforts of the modern world who really make things happen rather than the whining talentless moralisers.
I agree, and I think that taking her viewpoint to the furthest possible place is the point of the book. Ayn Rand wasn't going for realism, and in fact she has said that she didn't like books that did go for realism. She was going for what she called "romantic." I think a lot of people miss that.
Either way it slotted itself neatly into the number 2 slot of my all time favourite books. Also, I like telling people I like it because you often find they have a negative opinion of it but haven’t read a word.
Personally, I find giving Atlas Shrugged 4 stars considered purely as a novel to be insane. Wooden characters, clunky writing, having a character give a 90-page monologue that's just her spouting off her personal philosophy in a way that's comically indulgent and borderline unreadable. Completely disregarding any thoughts on objectivism, the book itself seems as if it was barely intended to function as a coherent narrative work. There are countless great novels that articulate a philosophy or worldview, but they do it in a way that feels organic because they're written by a competent writer. Imagine 1984, except partway through Winston Smith just gives a 30,000 word monologue expounding Orwell's personal philosophy -- just explicitly telling you, the reader, that democratic socialism grants maximum freedom and how authoritarianism is bad and how fascists manipulate the working class. Or if Offred just got up on a table and gave a three hour monologue about the patriarchy controlling women's minds and bodies and how that's totally not cool. To quote Garth Merenghi apparently channeling Ayn Rand, "I know authors that use subtext and they're all cowards." Like if Atlas Shrugged, as a piece of narrative fiction, is 4 stars, what is Blood Meridian? 10 stars? Do Faulkner and Twain start getting 20+ stars? But hey, different strokes I guess.
You bring up some very good points here and I see where you're coming from. I stand by my 4 stars, and I apologize for the long response in explaining why. First of all, I think you’re right that Blood Meridian had much better writing, and to be clear about what I mean by better, I think of it as ease of replication. Would it be more intimidating to write a chapter in a Cormac McCarthy book or an Ayn Rand book? One is obviously easier than the other. However, I think there’s a limitation in judging books on this scale. I’m going to use the example of horror movies. A general rule is that you want to create believable, 3 dimensional characters in stories. If you don’t, then you won’t care what happens to them and you won’t care about the story. This is generally true. But horror movies don’t have the same objectives as drama stories. I don’t watch a horror movie because I want to meet characters that I genuinely care about or the experience of watching a horror movie would be, well… horrifying. I like scary movies because of they way they can create an atmosphere through subtle details. In a lot of cases, I think the movie is better when the characterization is poor, because otherwise the movie is focusing on the wrong thing. Some lines of critique of a book are basically just asking the book to be something different than it is. Ayn Rand wasn’t trying to be Faulkner or Twain. She was creating an atmosphere of a world where people casually give hour-log monologues to each other about money. Personally, this works for me in the context of the story and it’s partly because I think the points the characters are making are interesting. (Though to be fair, there is a lot of repetition in this book, so this isn’t universally true.) Would you say that there is no proper place in any book for 30k word monologues? I give stars trying to keep in mind what the goal of the book was, among other things. You can argue that the goal wasn’t particularly worthwhile, but I think she was by and large successful at accomplishing what she set out to do.
@@erikhillreviews "no proper place in any book for 30k word monologues? " Not in a work of fiction that's trying to possess a shred of believability or actually function as a story. If you're disregarding the book's function as an actual piece of prose, and treating it merely as a vehicle for her philosophy, then I think it still fails. It relies on extreme, unrealistic contrivance. Galt's speech is a part of that, but the ideas in the novel only work because the average person is a completely dehumanized dreg, absolute morons, mentally invalid takers and parasites, and not in a realistic way (who are also are supposedly willing to listen to someone blather for hours on the radio.) They're not people, they're cartoons. They're cardboard cutouts whose sole purpose is to support her repurposed Great Man Theory. Even the direct subordinates of these Great Men are too stupid and incompetent to do anything when the bosses run off to create a capitalist paradise that happens to rely on a literal free energy macguffin, a free energy macguffin which is the only thing that actually allows them to exist independently of society at large and justify Rand's philosophy. May as well have had it rely on John Galt finding a magic lamp and binding a djinn to his will. Again, just staggering contrivance. The world does not and cannot exist as Rand conceives it, its overly simplistic in a way that's completely untethered from reality (which I think is neccesary to justify a philosophy as vapid as objectivism, but I'm trying not to make this about objectivism even if I think it's poorly conceived and in contradiction with itself within her own fiction, especially Fountainhead). If this were laid out as a philosophical tract without the pretense of being a work of fiction, the suppositions it would seem laughable. It's the narrative prose equivalent of Rand's frequent use of circular logic. I contrasted it with 1984 or Handmaid's Tale because they also deal with dehumanization, but the complexity and humanity of the characters is seen clearly in those works. The conflict between the dehumanization and their inherent humanity is core to the work. It's part of what makes them work as narrative fiction, which, incidentally, means their ideas are likely to be internalized even if the reader is completely unaware they're being presented a philosophical or political argument. Twain, Atwood, Orwell, Salinger, Vonnegut, yadda yadda, (I feel like I could list a hundred authors here), they're all also presenting ideas. Sometimes very big ideas. And they do it without trafficking in unbelievable contrivance. In my opinion, the book is basically the Battlefield Earth of objectivism. But, hey, again: different strokes, different folks.
@@garr123 You criticize the book for being unrealistic, which I think is very easy to acknowledge. She isn't going for realism. Her objective is to take a piece of reality and plant it in the fantastical world that she's invented, full of two dimensional characters. I would say the same thing about Lord of the Rings, by the way. Those characters are all flat (with perhaps one or two exceptions). You know who is good and you know who is evil. It's a style choice and it doesn't necessarily make the book poorly executed. Ultimately, I think you're right, though. Different strokes. I thought it was an interesting way to present the idea of reason and self (or rather self-esteem) as the highest virtue.
Ayn Rand is proposing a real philosophy intended to be used in the real world that we really live in yet humanity as presented is as nuanced as Orcs in Middle Earth. This isn't a good defense of the book. @@erikhillreviews
I don't understand, this book writes itself everybody's already selfish and not altruistic. The ones who pretend they are altruistic are just trying to bamboozle everybody. I don't hold her in high praise, it's just too easy to write a book like this lol
I can see your point in that she doesn't really steel man the other side of the argument. The antagonists are all idiots and the protagonists always win the argument. However, I think there is something in this book that would actually be hard to replicate. She creates a sense of an interesting world with these very simple building blocks. I think that's why Atlas Shrugged has had such staying power over the years.
I can see your point complaining about Ayn Rand being listed next to the greatest writers who have ever lived, but the book isn't anti-kindness. I see the book as about being the master of your own fate and the captain of your own soul, to paraphrase Invictus. I think the more reasonable form of the argument against the morality of Atlas Shrugged is to question the morality of a philosophy that is indifferent about whether you are kind to others.
Rand was traumatized by communists as a child. She watched thieving, evil fanatics steal her father's shop and make them slaves to the state. You've completely missed the point.
I'm willing to have a discussion with you about the philosophy of Objectvism, I myself don't adhere to it fully as I reject Rand's politics for the politics of Murray Rothbard but I am well read enough on the rest of the philosophy to discuss it with you so you can have a better understanding.
Ayn Rand didn't have the foggiest notion of how humans, or the economy, actually work. She had an idealized view of these grand heroes who created everything, and were besieged by those who were jealous of their success. Unfortunately this has spawned a bunch of billionaires who think of themselves as victims (Elon Musk, anyone?), threatened by the clamouring crowds. The truth is humans are a social species, and have always worked collaboratively to create the world as it exists."Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead" arre romantic fiction. They may be very good romantic fiction, but romantic fiction nevertheless.
I was actually thinking of Ayn Rand when Elon Musk recently said that he refused to move the Twitter HQ from San Fransisco with the rationale basically to the effect of- the city needs me. I thought every Ayn Rand fan must be pulling their hair out and mailing him copies of Atlas Shrugged. Anyway, I think it's true that humans are a social species, but I don't think it invalidates what Ayn Rand is trying to say in Atlas Shrugged. Serious question (and something that I'm still trying to put into words myself)- What do you see as the central message of this book?
@@erikhillreviews The central message of everything Rand wrote was to reconcile the built-in contradictions in capitalism. That's why she stressed so heavily the idea that selfishness worked because capitalism made it useful. But Rand and her acolytes really had no idea of how humans and their societies work. Her view was an idealized vision, laced with hero worship. Problem is, there are no heroes, and the truth is that people achieved some of the benefits of capitalism through strenuous struggles, often against armed force. The story of the hero who pulls himself by his own bootstraps, and achieves great things is wonderful reading, but in the real world, a very small group of people have accumulated a vast amount of wealth, and they're hanging on to it, John Galt be damned. My answer to the Randian types is, fine, go with it, but first rid yourself of all of the goods that have been produced by cooperative effort, then go off and live in the woods. Come back to me when you've earned your first millioin. 99.99% of people left on their own in such circumstances wouldn't last 3 weeks. A few might make a month or two, and, given the person is on a tropical island with plent of food handy, a couple might last a year or two. I'll let them take a copy of Atlas Shrugged with them to while away the hours.
Thank you! You answered my question very precisely and completely. I found it fascinating. I think my takeaway from Atlas Shrugged is slightly less economic. When I think of the central message of Atlas Shrugged, I think of an emphasis on reason and the individual as the fundamental virtue. The moral imperative on us as human beings is to use our mind and our ability to reason to pursue what we conclude is virtuous, and that pursuit should never be handed over to someone else or compromised. The transcendentalist movement comes to mind. "It is the beauty within us that makes it possible for us to recognize the beauty around us."
I believe there is confusion over the concept of selfishness and Rand would have been better off using the word self interest instead. Psychologist Otto Rank said human beings are inherently self interested and I believe that’s what Rand really meant. If pursuit of your self interest harms others then you are selfish but if it doesn’t then you are a libertarian and people pursuing what they are interested in are usually doing a better job because not only are they interested in what they are doing but are passionate about it, which in the end benefits everyone.
My opinion? I think Ayn Rand suffered from PTSD to the detriment of us all. She hated Stalin only because he attacked her. She was as ruthless and as heartless as he was. Maybe she had become a pathetic psychotic sociopath as a result of her experience at the behest of Stalin. Maybe she was that type of sick personality all along and it just took the horrors of the Russian revolution to bring it to the forefront. Intelligent psychotics can also be extremely talented and persuasive and convincing communicators.
Many of the complaints about this novel come about through applying the standards of naturalism to the book. We are deeply steeped in naturalism in our culture. Rand wasn't just not a naturalist, she was against naturalism as a debased anti-conceptual approach to art. Rand didn't write didactically, and her characters are rich realizations of fundamental principles. They will only seem "flat" to someone who only has that word in their vocabulary to describe a person who doesn't have what Rand called "mixed premises". Our world is full of mixed people, that's what we're used to, it's what our literary standards hold as good and interesting. But Rand wasn't interested in recreating something haphazard. She wanted a complexity full of characters each showing how certain principles work out against each other. In most cases you see how they come across on the surface at first, and over time you see deeper into their motivation, until the fundamental principles are revealed. For lesser characters of course there may not be time for a progression. What she is showing you in her characters is an inductive progression by which you can identify over time what are the premises each person operates on. If you aren't used to thinking that way they will just look like unchanging unconflicted types, i.e. "flat". What you're missing is how the evidence builds over time to understand what core ideas are driving these people, that's the progression for many of her characters. Of course some of the characters have their own progression toward understanding, i.e. Dagny, Rearden, Cheryl, even Jim Taggart in the perverse slow grind of coming face to face with his real self. Anyway this is the same pattern as any brand of Rand criticism, it is mostly done from the point of view of our culture's common values, and she absolutely stood apart from that. This is not about whether you will agree with her, but rather it's about understanding her. You simply never will if you don't study her foundational premises and arguments. Anyone interested in getting the most out of the book might find a lot of value in the Ayn Rand Institute Channel's video series of discussions about the book, it's called "The Atlas Project".
Very good explanation, thank you! You can't make a fair criticism of something that you don't understand. I can go along with someone saying they don't like Picasso, but if their reasoning is that his paintings aren't realistic, then the argument doesn't make any sense. Picasso wasn't trying to do a photo-realistic painting just like Ayn Rand isn't trying to put real life on paper. She specifically talked about how authors shouldn't do that.
@@erikhillreviews One can even unpack the issue of "real life". When we look out at the world we identify what we are seeing. Depending on our ideas, we may identify aspects of a personality as just a series of instances: Mary smiled at me on Tuesday; Mary gave me her pickle on Thursday; Mary told me I am an idiot on Friday, etc., or we may look for patterns, i.e. "Mary seems to like me to some extent but she can get pretty mad at me sometimes--what is it in her thinking that might be causing that combination?" In real life, Rand was looking for patterns and fundamental premises in people. She believed that Art is inherently selective and reflective of the artist's fundamental values. For her that meant consciously stylizing the world, not by making things up from nothing, but by identifying the essentials in people, the principles she had identified as operative in real people--and dramatizing their effects by showing characters who operate on those principles consistently. So there's a sense in which she even was writing about "real life", just not in an unselective hodgepodge of disintegrated observations.
My opinion is that Atlas Shrugged is a piece of timeless art! I just recently finished the Audio Book. It was suggested to me by a coworker while on break in our manufacturing job one night. I had just finished a rant on how we were surrounded by employees who just refused to show any spark of thought and how new company policies from management with no idea of production were leading to our destruction.
What's interesting is that Rand thoroughly lays out every counter to any argument against her theories. They are there to see for those who can see and understand. It's no joke that the book is a deeply philosophical undertaking. However, the negativity I've seen towards this book is that being expressed by those who are incapable of understanding its philosophical meaning. I laugh at every negative review imagining they are the words of a Bertram Scutter.
It is funny how there are a group of people who criticize this book that sound exactly like the villains of the story. Ironically, this puts Ayn Rand exactly where she wants to be - in the position of John Galt. I think that's one reason why this book has had such staying power.
Yeah. Most people who don't understand her philosophy tend to strawman her.
Not everyone can be a John Galt, Dagny Taggart, etc. Most ppl are mediocre, Ayn wants America to be a meritocracy which is not realistic.
@@user-mw6fh5oj2c Rand did not advocate any kind of "-cracy". She identified the core aspects of the human life process, and as a consequence of that she identified what a government needs to do in order to protect that life process in a social context, and it wasn't anyone "ruling" anyone else. She proposed a system in which the actions of living are protected by a set of identified fundamental truths codified as the guiding foundations of a republic, not by the ever-changing permissions of a collective or a dictator. All people who choose good life-sustaining actions benefit in such a society whether they are talented and goal directed or unambitious and limited; they benefit to the extent that they are conscientious about taking action to live.
WHO IS JOHN GALT?
This book really did alter how I look at some things. Her ethics may seem controversial, but I thought she did a good job of articulating them and laying out her logic. The speech that Francisco makes about money actually made me pause and stare off into space for a while, thinking. Literarily it may not be all that great (although I did find her prose quite striking at times), but as a work of philosophical fiction it's actually pretty marvelous, and worth more consideration than I think a lot of people give it. Good review. :)
Thanks! And agreed, there's definitely a lot to think about here. What really is the relationship between morality and money?
Rather than divide the characters into good guys and bad guys, I divide them as follows:
1. Producers: Individuals who produce quality goods and services, like Hank Reardon, Dagny Taggard, and Ellis Wyatt.
2. Supporters: While they don't have the ability to produce like the Producers, they can provide excellent support via ability and hard work. Two examples are Eddie Willers and Gwen Ivens (Reardon's Secretary).
3. Moochers: Individuals who use emotional force to take from the Producers, using guilt and fear to get what they want. This is how Reardon's Family operates.
4. Looters: Individuals who use non-emotional force (such as physical, legal, and political) to take from the Producers. (Added) Examples of this are the following individuals: James Taggard, Wesley Mouch, Dr. Floyd Ferris, and Cuffie Meggs.
Good point! That's a great way to distinguish the characters.
Supporters are also producers. The difference is of degree, not kind. Moochers and looters are different in kind.
I like how nuanced this conversation is getting. So you would define Eddie Willers as a producer, just at a small scale? @@YashArya01
@@YashArya01 The reason I added Supporters to the classifications is to fill a hole that I saw in the classifications for characters like Eddie Willers who don't produce like the Producers (like Ken Danniger) and they aren't Moochers (like Phillip Reardon) or Looters (like James Taggard).
@@Solitaire001 as long as you're careful to explain what you mean, as you are here, I don't see something necessarily problematic with your usage. Just understand that Eddie Willers is also producing. He's not as original, innovative, or brilliant, but he's still productive.
The virtue of Selfishness book is by far one of her greatest works out there.
That certainly was an interesting read. A lot of people get caught up in the apparent oxymoron in the title that they completely dismiss it. It's too bad.
Agree.
Haha. You could review a book called Jennifer Governent by Maxx Barry. 😉
Thanks for the review Erik - I don't read as much fiction as I'd like, and I'm quite interested in philosophical or deeper thoughts, so this sounds like a good one to check out! There are a lot of people who dislike her or her work, or her philosophy, but I've learned it's important to evaluate things on our own... and you finding something useful in it is enough to make me want to give it a shot.
Happy to help! I'd say it's definitely worth checking out the first part at least. Ayn Rand is very good at sparking debate.
Try Max Stirner. Ayn Rand misunderstood Max Stirner's "Einzige" - Stirner was an individualist mystic in his "The Only One and It's Possessions" who infuriated Karl Marx and the Capitalist establishment.
The part that really hit me about this book was that scientists would sell themselves out for the almight dollar - it was quite the eye-opener.
Are you talking about Dr. Stadler?
@@erikhillreviews- yes, I had to check because it has been quite a while since I read the book, but that's the one.
Right but you can see what "the dollar" is really about for him, it's because he wants to do research without connection to human survival, he wants knowledge for its own sake, and if no one will pay him to do that, he'll sell out to the looters, lend them his prestige in return for "security" (so he thinks).
It only seems long and repetitive after you get the point of the book.
The book does a great job exposing as many kinds of situations the looters and the producers could interact with one another, in all subtile details.
Sometimes the looter is the husband and the wife is the producer. Sometimes it's the other way around.
Sometimes the looter is the rich and the poor is the producer. Sometimes it's the other way around.
The line between good and evil crosses through every other human distinction imaginable.
To be clear, don't you mean that it seems long and repetitive until you get the point of the book? Aren't you saying that it's only the people who don't see the subtleties that see it as long and boring?
This book and the poem you mentioned are about selfishness. The trouble is altruistic culture has manipulated our understanding of the word selfishness to make it a negative thing. Loving yourself using your mind and being productive are necessarily selfish endeavors. Selfishness just means prioritizing your self interest, what could be more in your interest than living a life of rationality and loving the people close to you?
Very valid points. For a lot of people selfishness is evil by definition. So when someone comes out with a book titled "The Virtue of Selfishness," it seems so absurd that everything else is dismissed outright.
Nailed it!
Rand describes the natural inclinations of human beings.
@@erikhillreviews Rand's point is deeper than challenging how "a lot of people" see selfishness. Her deeper point is that the modern conception of it is nonsensical. It's not just that the meaning isn't deep enough, it's that the modern conception blends things that are not essentially the same, like a petty thief and someone who does not give to charity--it can't even work as a unit of thought because it is confused.
@@johnhatchel9681 Rand's ideas are not a description of natural inclinations. They are identifications of fundamental truths and no one lives according to them by natural inclination. To live her ideas requires thought and effort. To think is a choice, we don't do it automatically. There are endless examples of people who live thoughtlessly and follow their "inclinations" to self-destruction.
Enjoyed that little review. Maybe it's time for me to reread this book?
I think there's a lot of accuracy in what Rand was saying; however, as I think you might have been suggesting(?), with the advantage of 70 further years of hindsight, maybe lacks a little precision, here and there.
Yep, that sounds right to me. I wonder what would happen if you found an indisputably talented writer that was well regarded in literary circles and you tasked them with rewriting the main ideas of Atlas Shrugged in their own style. An interesting experiment that we'll never know the answer to...
Your main complaint of villains being flat, or good and bad guys, pros and cons, being obvious, is not a flaw but an intended consequence of Rand's philosophical work underlying the story. Many people mention this issue, but it is rarely explained well. So here is my cent.
Essentially, Rand sought to point out that naturally good and evil would have seemed complicated, and hence characters in stories would be multi-faceted and difficult to judge, if the moral philosophy at large in the culture is confused and contradictory. Which she argued it was, through altruism.
She also argued that in all art, including writing, the artist inevitably projects their sense of life in their product. Moral values held by the artist being part of that, affecting their writing.
But.
When your moral philosophy is clear and consistent, you have no trouble discerning rather quickly the character of people you are introduced to. Including characters in stories.
Objectivism has the clearest and best moral philosophy ever devised, and so Atlas Shrugged is the way it is in this regard, just as other works are as they are.
I see your point and in other places in this comment section, I feel like I've been making that same argument. You can't say that Picasso isn't a good artist because his paintings aren't realistic. He's not trying to draw a picture of photographic accuracy. A lot of misplaced complaints. What I was referring to in the video is some of the way things played out for the villains, which I think goes back to my issue with her ending. James Taggert comes to mind. I'm okay with flat characters and their representative role, but the way his character ended was over the top for me.
3:36 the book was, in fact, well-researched. From Wikipedia:
To depict the industrial setting of Atlas Shrugged, Rand conducted research on the American railroad and steel industries. She toured and inspected a number of industrial facilities, such as the Kaiser Steel plant, visited facilities of the New York Central Railroad, and briefly operated a locomotive on the Twentieth Century Limited. Rand also used her previous research for an uncompleted screenplay about the development of the atomic bomb, including her interviews of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which influenced the character Robert Stadler and the novel's depiction of the development of "Project X".[
And I think that definitely shows in the book. Thanks for the excerpt. Also, I knew that she based Stadler on Oppenheimer, but I didn't know she interviewed him! I would have loved to listen in on that conversation.
Ayn Rand misunderstood Max Stirner's "Einzige" - Stirner was an individualist mystic in his "The Only One and It's Possessions" who infuriated Karl Marx and the Capitalist establishment.
I've never heard of him before. Sounds interesting!
Who is John Galt?
Well said, well said...
I’m going to order this and “The virtue of selfishness” right now, Sounds like they can probably help me a lot. Thanks man great review!
Glad I could help! Let me know what you think of those two, I'm curious :)
Who is John galt?
He'll let you know
Impressive, thoughtful review -thanks
Thanks, and happy to help!
One of the main subplots that I found the most interesting but seems to be very overlooked is her search for the free-energy technology engine and then the demonstration of the free-energy weapon. HELLO!!!!
I agree, that is overlooked. I forgot about that weapon until you mentioned it. Maybe it's because it's in book 3 and the conversational energy of the readers is all used up in the first 350,000 words :)
You will know whether Rand’s ideas are for you based on your personal emotional response to either her heroes or especially her villains both of whom clearly express their deepest premises.
It's true, she does leave it very out in the open.
You would make a good Hank Reardon. Good book.
I don't know if you could give me a better compliment than that! Thanks!
3:55 Extremely efficient?! I’ll say! It’s a motor that makes static electricity available to man. Thats a whole new level of science fiction.
That's a good point, though I'm not sure who considers atlas shrugged a science fiction novel. Very cool idea, anyway.
Read it once and listened to it twice. A champion of individualism and it seems each generation, particularly those who are intelligent, seem to rediscover this and other Rand works as they resist the chains of collectivism and self sacrifice in the name of the so called greater good👀👀👀👀
Out of curiosity, how did you discover Atlas Shrugged in the first place?
@@erikhillreviews I was dealing with depression after returning from Viet Nam and ended up in a psych ward and after talking to one of the doctors he gave me Atlas Shrugged to read and that’s how it started.
Wow, it's great this story has been so helpful for you. I do think it's a very uplifting central message. Also, that sounds a like a fascinating conversation for it to end with a prescription for Atlas Shrugged :) @@michaelwelsh7362
I would say the most therapeutic thing about the central theme of Atlas is you don’t need to, and really shouldn’t depend on the collective, particularly in association with government and bureaucracy. As much as possible you should rely on yourself. Your most reliable collective, if your fortunate enough is your family. Government, while necessary for certain things like national defense, border security, which by the way they suck under this administration, maintaining national parks, which they currently suck at as well, and some level of regulation of commerce and transportation, federal government is too impersonal to deal effectively with education, health, crime and punishment, and many other issues that are more effectively handled at state and local levels.That is why states rights were always above federal encroachment because the people could more easily hold state and local politicians accountable for their policies.
Agreed. I've always thought that the more local the government is, the more efficient it can be. @@michaelwelsh7362
I just finished it and honestly I assumed going in that a book this long would at least have some nuance. It misses the mark hard as an example of the political philosophy presented as every capitalist is a perfect chad who is always the most correct, smartest, most talented person in the room. John Galt basically says “I’m right and everyone who disagrees with me secretly knows they are wrong and hate everything.” Disco Elysium is a very pro-communist piece of media but even it spends a good chunk of time critiquing its own ideology.
I had never before heard of Disco Elysium, but that was a very interesting wikipedia read, thanks! As far as the book goes, I think the book is getting at a deeper theme beyond the capitalist/socialist battle. I think of this as an examination of the black and white as opposed to the gray in between. So I agree, this isn't a novel about nuance and it certainly isn't even-handed. Ayn Rand wasn't trying to be.
A bit strange to see so many who like to jump on the bandwagon of criticism of Rand. Atlas Shrugged was the second most influential book of the 20th century in a poll.
Who voted and who were they? Which countries were involved in selecting? I don’t believe readers in the UK would have voted it so highly because it has almost no profile here. I know no-one who has read it, and I was a Lit student.
@@richardking3206 I saw this reported probably shortly after the turn of the century. It’s the kind of thing that some people either in literature or popular culture like to do after a century ends. I don’t remember the parameters of the poll, it may even have been one of the magazines that were still in popular circulation at that time, like Time or Life magazine. I’m sure if your really interested it is easy to use the internet to find out the details but it did say that Atlas Shrugged was voted the second most influential book of the 20th century after the Bible. Don’t know how many people you know who read the Bible these days but that is what was being reported in the article about 23 years ago🤷♂️🤷♂️🤷♂️
Pp
This raises an interesting point. I'm so curious how much this book is read outside of the United States. I know it's less, of course, but I would love to see the numbers.
I found some information on this from a quick google search. Apparently, it was a 1991 poll from a random sample of Book-of-the-Month club subscribers. www.libertarianism.org/articles/how-influential-atlas-shrugged
That was a good article and I thought it was interesting that Ayn Rand was referred to as the first libertarian which I would say is fairly accurate and that polling suggest that less and less people identify as either Democrat or Republican and more identify as Libertarian. I don’t believe Rand or her writings are going away anytime soon and that’s a good thing for humanity.
Atlas shrugged. A book about Villains who don't know they are villains and heroes who don't want to be heroes
Haha, that's a good way to summarize it. Nice.
2:33
Thoughts?
I remember many years ago, any list of the best books in the world based on US survey, would include Atlas Shrugged, and any list of the top 10 authors of the world, would include Ayn Rand, right up there with Shakespear, James Joyce and Tolstoy. So I sought out Atlas Shrugged, found a dusty second-hand copy (I was only a poor student at the time), prepared myself for a profound revelation, only to find it a work that promotes and celebrates selfishness and misanthropy.
You should buy a copy of Das Kapital. You never know when you'll need emergency toilet paper.
@@johnhatchel9681 I'm gonna guess you have never taken the time to read and understand Marx.
@JD-vj4go Yes, I've read it. I understand it. It's nonsense. It was written for naive little children. It belongs next to Dr Suess.
@@johnhatchel9681 So you didn't understand it. Got it. Doubt you read it.
@JD-vj4go A child could understand it. It's absolute nonsense. Only fools like you take it seriously. Hopefully you'll mature out of out it before further contribute to it.
4:30. There’s not a single superfluous word in Atlas Shrugged.
I would be impressed if someone could write a 500 word short story without a superfluous word, let alone a book with 645,000 words.
I love this book. I love the way Rand writes. It is beautiful.
I've never understood the Ayn Rand hate.
Even if you don't like her philosophy she was still a beautiful writer.
I can see complaining about the repetitiveness in the writing and the heavy-handedness in pressing the theme on the reader. But I actually thinks she uses that to her advantage to create her world. It works for me personally, anyway. I remember the first time reading Ayn Rand. I had never read anything written in quite that style before and that's one thing that really drew me in.
I think one reason she did push topics at times (repetitiveness) was because this was more of a philosophy book for her. She decided to take her philosophy and place them within her characters. They lived by her philosophic standards. Sometimes philosophy does need to be pushed a bit.@@erikhillreviews
Ppl hate on the book bcuz it represents individual responsibility and achievement. Much easier to be a victim/mooch today 🎉
Her philosophy for life was I ME MYSELF...UNHINGED NARCISSISTIC SOCIOPATH
People don't usually like the writer if the content is against their views. Who cares if it's beautiful lol.... Hitler was a great speaker 😅
This novel is great, and your review is greater love it
You just made my day. Thanks!
Good review
Reality is about survival. Good luck surviving on your own.
A John Galt-like character as the only person on the planet - that sounds like the premise of an interesting science fiction story. I'm intrigued.
@@erikhillreviews Already been done--see The Martian. Oh he's not Galt, but he IS a man who makes a commitment to use reason to solve the problem of survival.
Rand doesn't say you have to survive on your own. Collectivism and altruism are not the same thing as voluntary cooperation.
@@AndSendMe Good example! And I was right to be intrigued, I loved that story :)
@@erikhillreviews If you read Rand's Romantic Manifesto, you may gain significant insight into why. 😁
My mom made me read this book as a young teenager and I have repeated this with my own kids. I attribute a lot of my success to her. I believe the US would be way better off if this book were required reading for middle school.
Did you read the entire thing as a young teenager? That would be impressive. I wish I would have known about this book when I was a young teenager.
Bro your mom is a legend ans you know that
The novel sends ridiculous conflicting messages. For example, why are the villains more successful with women than the ostensible heroes? And why is it moral & heroic when the Chad characters like Ragnar & Francisco destroy material wealth, but it's evil & contemptible when the ugly characters like Cuffy Meigs do it?
Interesting questions. I think the point of the book is that there are the producers who are capable of producing wealth and looters that are incapable. The book makes the case that it's moral for the producers to destroy their own inventions/businesses because they are the creators. It's immoral for the looters to insist that the producers have a moral obligation to produce according to their abilities. The immorality isn't tied to wealth destruction per se. To your first point, which villains are successful with women? James Taggert sure isn't. I suppose the relationship ideal within this world is between Dagney and Hank Rearden. What other examples are there?
Several of the novel's villains have girlfriends, while most of the men who joined Galt's strike mysteriously lack women in their lives. It's like Rand inadvertently portrays what often happens in the real world: The bad boys get the girls, while the moral, responsible chumps have to go without female companionship, sometimes for their entire lives. They might become financially successful by filling their lonely hours with extra work, but they still come home to empty beds.
If you ever decide to try again, consider watching the Ayn Rand Institute "Atlas Project" videos as you go along, they are very helpful for understanding the book.
As an avid reader of novels my entire life I found Atlas Shrugged so dry and lifeless I could barely make it to page 300 before throwing the book across the room… Sometimes I wonder if there’s ever been anyone that read it all the way through…When you see the kind of politicians that fawn over this book you get the impression they never read it, it just sounds good to them because of her cruel politics 😂😂😂
Even though I liked the book overall, I can see where you're coming from about the writing style. Also this is one of those books that if the first couple hundreds of pages aren't interesting to you, there's no point in making it all the way to the end. I, however, did make it all the way through.
Yaron Brook also threw the book across the room, and now he's one of her biggest advocates haha.
I gave up after 700 pages. Show me don’t like a didactic academic through unidimensional straw men tell me. She should write Marvel comics. If you’re vindictive can you also be a hero? Can anyone succeed not serving someone? Glad to hear the last 500 pages I didn’t finish were anticlimactic repetitious.
Thousands of people read this book all they way through and many, including myself, multiple times. It seems, if you are a fan of her philosophy it would be easier and more enjoyable.
I don't recommend it if you're not familiar with her philosophy. If you're a fan of the welfare state and everything else wrong with the world today, this will never be for you. If you want to give it a chance, read "Anthem" (one or two day read), "The Virtue of Selfishness" (non-fiction), maybe "Fountainhead", then "Atlas Shrugged", or...forget it. We're already too far gone. A.S. describes the current world perfectly, except there is no John Galt to save it.
@Blackwindzero I didn't know that!
I disagree. I think it's mostly a dumb book. The biggest problem is that it's all a big straw man argument. She doesn't seem capable of arguing against all the liberal ideas she seems to hate without presenting grotesque exaggerations of them. The guy who makes the rails, for example, is being forced by the government to share his alloy with the rest of his industry, in the name of fairness - a ridiculously over the top policy that doesn't exist anywhere.
And it gets so much worse than that. At one point, a woman commits suicide rather than talk to a social worker.
There's just no way I can take this book seriously. As I said, it's a dumb book.
I think the exaggerations are by design. She wasn't going for realism. Side note, I think the polarized nature of the country (and the world in general) is turning more and more into a grotesque exaggeration, so who knows. We may be in Ayn Rand's universe in the next decade or so.
Have you ever read a book that was so poorly written? Plots are abandoned, characters have no character, and logic is pretty much abandoned
Any specifics jump to mind? What's the worst aspect of the book, if you had to choose one?
Only Ernest Heingway books made more more bored and more disgusted. Give me HP Lovecraft or Kafka anyday over this woman!
I do like Kafka and Lovecraft.
In ayn rands world only the truly execptional, gifted,talented , creative, are of value ..the common muck of humanity are to erve.. there is one other consideration the superior, are not bound by the rules that control the commons ,any pain or destruction caused by their determination to succeed regardless of cost to others, is just tough,,, her and h.l.menken , the twin gods of the exceptionalists, ayh rand was ecommended to me by americans in london in the sixties , they were so at odds with the times i did not give it much thought ,but to observe tgat ,the ideas did not appeal... did a whole generation have their values screwed by these and others , and now we see the full flowering, ..those who think otherwise or have different values do not matter..... SUPPORT UKRAINE FREE AND AT PEACE
Once again the attack on Rand via outright falsehoods.
Love is the answer, altruistic kindness towards others. This is strength, and objectivism utterly misses this point. No multi-cell organism can live without peer-to-peer interaction among cells The same is true with people.
Objectivism does not reject kindness towards others. It specifically rejects self-sacrificing for others aka altruism as understood by the man who coined the phrase, Auguste Comte. Comte felt that you should put others before yourself so much that he didn't believe in human rights. It was okay to rob, steal and murder as long as you were doing it for the betterment of mankind. It contrasts greatly with Ayn Rand objectivism. Objectivism is a philosophy about love, a philosophy about respecting the rights of others and loving yourself. A philosophy about loving others, not discriminately but with trueness. Universal love is a distortion. An abuse of the term. You should love your wife more than you love others. You should marry people you love instead of marrying people out of altruism. What a horrible life it would be if you never cared about yourself or your values and constantly lived for others.
@@gsockpuppet2490Your comments are laughable. Who would marry someone and not love them? You think people marry for altruistic reasons? Rand’s beliefs stem from a childhood and early life in a family trauma. It wasn’t her family’s fault what happened, but the revolution was a response to a means of government that was not meeting the needs of the people, they were being cruelly ignored and left to die by the Tsar’s totally uncaring rule. There were several attempts at revolution there before the successful one. Sadly, with Lenin dead the despot Stalin was able to take control. What the Russians then had was a despotic regime struggling to make sense of an economy and ruling class that was dealing with a country desperately lacking in almost everything necessary for the 20th century. Their only guidance was avoiding what the Tsar had done (but much like the English Civil War aftermath, the people could only repeat what they had before), and a bit of theory. Rand didn’t actually think about the causes of the revolution, merely reacting against what her own family had lost. When she got to the US she saw the opposite and was taken up by the elite there so saw the good side of it and praised it. I have yet to see her philosophical musings in a thought out manner, much as a Philosopher might. What she espouses isn’t a philosophy, it’s a gut response to her family getting lost in social turmoil. If wonder if she’d have been so vociferous about things if she’d fallen on hard times and had to live rough in the US?
@@gsockpuppet2490 Well said.
Selfishness can not be a virtue. Virtues must be exercised!
Would you say that someone who gives themselves outrageous physical challenges just for the sake of figuring out what they're capable of accomplishing are selfish? If not, why not? Serious question, I'm curious what people have in mind when they use the term selfishness.
@@erikhillreviews Selfishness is the natural state of things, a part of our instinctive nature. Not bad in itself, but can not be called a virtue. A virtue is something that requires sacrifice. Sometimes we sacrifice for ourselves and that is a virtue in the sense that we have to love ourselves to be capable of loving others.
@@norwegian24 Selfishness as Ayn Rand conceived it requires effort and reasoning to understand what is in your interests. Her ethics names seven primary virtues which are applications of reason to specific spheres. These are no more automatic than is reason itself. Rand also identified a fallacy of conceptualization: the "frozen abstraction" in which the person takes a single example as defining a category, for instance if someone were to say that furniture means tables and anything else isn't furniture. Another example would be taking altruism as synonymous with morality, when there are many different moral codes that have been proposed.
The book is an attempt by an untalented writer to put together a mystery, science fiction, dystopian novel, melodrama and action stories and manages to fail at all of them. The characters are totally unrealistic and speak like robots. There are no happily married people in the entire 800 pages and no children. When it came out the reviews were trying to outdo each other in saying how awful it was. There are plot holes that any author might have fixed before publishing and each character has long long long speeches that can go on for tens of pages. Other than that.....
I don't think there's anyone who believes that the dialogue is realistic or that people really do have such long winded speeches in real life. But I'm curious - what plot holes did you have in mind?
@@erikhillreviews chalking the statute. Try remembering that one
I loved this book, I read it for the first time very recently. While I think she takes her viewpoint to the furthest possible place and that is too far I have to agree with the fundamental premise that it’s the people who invent, build and supply the essentials and the comforts of the modern world who really make things happen rather than the whining talentless moralisers.
I agree, and I think that taking her viewpoint to the furthest possible place is the point of the book. Ayn Rand wasn't going for realism, and in fact she has said that she didn't like books that did go for realism. She was going for what she called "romantic." I think a lot of people miss that.
Either way it slotted itself neatly into the number 2 slot of my all time favourite books. Also, I like telling people I like it because you often find they have a negative opinion of it but haven’t read a word.
So true! It's so funny how people are so against something they know so little about. @@stuartbennett4301
Long and boring ??
Are you saying that you think it's long and boring? I think we can all agree that it's long.
Sorry I forgot rapey
Yeah, that part's weird. @@leek988
Personally, I find giving Atlas Shrugged 4 stars considered purely as a novel to be insane. Wooden characters, clunky writing, having a character give a 90-page monologue that's just her spouting off her personal philosophy in a way that's comically indulgent and borderline unreadable. Completely disregarding any thoughts on objectivism, the book itself seems as if it was barely intended to function as a coherent narrative work.
There are countless great novels that articulate a philosophy or worldview, but they do it in a way that feels organic because they're written by a competent writer. Imagine 1984, except partway through Winston Smith just gives a 30,000 word monologue expounding Orwell's personal philosophy -- just explicitly telling you, the reader, that democratic socialism grants maximum freedom and how authoritarianism is bad and how fascists manipulate the working class. Or if Offred just got up on a table and gave a three hour monologue about the patriarchy controlling women's minds and bodies and how that's totally not cool.
To quote Garth Merenghi apparently channeling Ayn Rand, "I know authors that use subtext and they're all cowards."
Like if Atlas Shrugged, as a piece of narrative fiction, is 4 stars, what is Blood Meridian? 10 stars? Do Faulkner and Twain start getting 20+ stars?
But hey, different strokes I guess.
You bring up some very good points here and I see where you're coming from. I stand by my 4 stars, and I apologize for the long response in explaining why.
First of all, I think you’re right that Blood Meridian had much better writing, and to be clear about what I mean by better, I think of it as ease of replication. Would it be more intimidating to write a chapter in a Cormac McCarthy book or an Ayn Rand book? One is obviously easier than the other. However, I think there’s a limitation in judging books on this scale.
I’m going to use the example of horror movies. A general rule is that you want to create believable, 3 dimensional characters in stories. If you don’t, then you won’t care what happens to them and you won’t care about the story. This is generally true. But horror movies don’t have the same objectives as drama stories. I don’t watch a horror movie because I want to meet characters that I genuinely care about or the experience of watching a horror movie would be, well… horrifying. I like scary movies because of they way they can create an atmosphere through subtle details. In a lot of cases, I think the movie is better when the characterization is poor, because otherwise the movie is focusing on the wrong thing.
Some lines of critique of a book are basically just asking the book to be something different than it is. Ayn Rand wasn’t trying to be Faulkner or Twain. She was creating an atmosphere of a world where people casually give hour-log monologues to each other about money. Personally, this works for me in the context of the story and it’s partly because I think the points the characters are making are interesting. (Though to be fair, there is a lot of repetition in this book, so this isn’t universally true.) Would you say that there is no proper place in any book for 30k word monologues?
I give stars trying to keep in mind what the goal of the book was, among other things. You can argue that the goal wasn’t particularly worthwhile, but I think she was by and large successful at accomplishing what she set out to do.
@@erikhillreviews
"no proper place in any book for 30k word monologues? "
Not in a work of fiction that's trying to possess a shred of believability or actually function as a story.
If you're disregarding the book's function as an actual piece of prose, and treating it merely as a vehicle for her philosophy, then I think it still fails. It relies on extreme, unrealistic contrivance. Galt's speech is a part of that, but the ideas in the novel only work because the average person is a completely dehumanized dreg, absolute morons, mentally invalid takers and parasites, and not in a realistic way (who are also are supposedly willing to listen to someone blather for hours on the radio.) They're not people, they're cartoons. They're cardboard cutouts whose sole purpose is to support her repurposed Great Man Theory. Even the direct subordinates of these Great Men are too stupid and incompetent to do anything when the bosses run off to create a capitalist paradise that happens to rely on a literal free energy macguffin, a free energy macguffin which is the only thing that actually allows them to exist independently of society at large and justify Rand's philosophy. May as well have had it rely on John Galt finding a magic lamp and binding a djinn to his will. Again, just staggering contrivance.
The world does not and cannot exist as Rand conceives it, its overly simplistic in a way that's completely untethered from reality (which I think is neccesary to justify a philosophy as vapid as objectivism, but I'm trying not to make this about objectivism even if I think it's poorly conceived and in contradiction with itself within her own fiction, especially Fountainhead). If this were laid out as a philosophical tract without the pretense of being a work of fiction, the suppositions it would seem laughable. It's the narrative prose equivalent of Rand's frequent use of circular logic.
I contrasted it with 1984 or Handmaid's Tale because they also deal with dehumanization, but the complexity and humanity of the characters is seen clearly in those works. The conflict between the dehumanization and their inherent humanity is core to the work. It's part of what makes them work as narrative fiction, which, incidentally, means their ideas are likely to be internalized even if the reader is completely unaware they're being presented a philosophical or political argument.
Twain, Atwood, Orwell, Salinger, Vonnegut, yadda yadda, (I feel like I could list a hundred authors here), they're all also presenting ideas. Sometimes very big ideas. And they do it without trafficking in unbelievable contrivance.
In my opinion, the book is basically the Battlefield Earth of objectivism.
But, hey, again: different strokes, different folks.
@@garr123 You criticize the book for being unrealistic, which I think is very easy to acknowledge. She isn't going for realism. Her objective is to take a piece of reality and plant it in the fantastical world that she's invented, full of two dimensional characters. I would say the same thing about Lord of the Rings, by the way. Those characters are all flat (with perhaps one or two exceptions). You know who is good and you know who is evil. It's a style choice and it doesn't necessarily make the book poorly executed.
Ultimately, I think you're right, though. Different strokes. I thought it was an interesting way to present the idea of reason and self (or rather self-esteem) as the highest virtue.
Ayn Rand is proposing a real philosophy intended to be used in the real world that we really live in yet humanity as presented is as nuanced as Orcs in Middle Earth.
This isn't a good defense of the book.
@@erikhillreviews
Again, I would agree with you. Atlas Shrugged isn't at all nuanced. It isn't supposed to be. @@garr123
It's boring
Are you referring to the prose, the plot, or the underlying philosophy? And in what way?
"Atlas shrugged" = "Mein kampff"
Reasoning?
If you've ever had a knitting needle shoved into your brain and then swirled around a bit, you might think this book isn't shit.
There are plenty of worse books to save that burn for.
I'm sorry you didn't understand it. Wait a year and try again, maybe?
I don't understand, this book writes itself everybody's already selfish and not altruistic. The ones who pretend they are altruistic are just trying to bamboozle everybody. I don't hold her in high praise, it's just too easy to write a book like this lol
I can see your point in that she doesn't really steel man the other side of the argument. The antagonists are all idiots and the protagonists always win the argument. However, I think there is something in this book that would actually be hard to replicate. She creates a sense of an interesting world with these very simple building blocks. I think that's why Atlas Shrugged has had such staying power over the years.
Kindness is weakness and greed is good. No wonder why this book resonates so much with American conservatives.
I can see your point complaining about Ayn Rand being listed next to the greatest writers who have ever lived, but the book isn't anti-kindness. I see the book as about being the master of your own fate and the captain of your own soul, to paraphrase Invictus. I think the more reasonable form of the argument against the morality of Atlas Shrugged is to question the morality of a philosophy that is indifferent about whether you are kind to others.
Rand was traumatized by communists as a child. She watched thieving, evil fanatics steal her father's shop and make them slaves to the state. You've completely missed the point.
This comment seems very bad faith
Oppression is freedom and starving is abundance No wonder Karl Marx resonates with American liberals.
I'm willing to have a discussion with you about the philosophy of Objectvism, I myself don't adhere to it fully as I reject Rand's politics for the politics of Murray Rothbard but I am well read enough on the rest of the philosophy to discuss it with you so you can have a better understanding.
Ayn Rand didn't have the foggiest notion of how humans, or the economy, actually work. She had an idealized view of these grand heroes who created everything, and were besieged by those who were jealous of their success. Unfortunately this has spawned a bunch of billionaires who think of themselves as victims (Elon Musk, anyone?), threatened by the clamouring crowds. The truth is humans are a social species, and have always worked collaboratively to create the world as it exists."Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead" arre romantic fiction. They may be very good romantic fiction, but romantic fiction nevertheless.
I was actually thinking of Ayn Rand when Elon Musk recently said that he refused to move the Twitter HQ from San Fransisco with the rationale basically to the effect of- the city needs me. I thought every Ayn Rand fan must be pulling their hair out and mailing him copies of Atlas Shrugged. Anyway, I think it's true that humans are a social species, but I don't think it invalidates what Ayn Rand is trying to say in Atlas Shrugged. Serious question (and something that I'm still trying to put into words myself)- What do you see as the central message of this book?
@@erikhillreviews The central message of everything Rand wrote was to reconcile the built-in contradictions in capitalism. That's why she stressed so heavily the idea that selfishness worked because capitalism made it useful. But Rand and her acolytes really had no idea of how humans and their societies work. Her view was an idealized vision, laced with hero worship. Problem is, there are no heroes, and the truth is that people achieved some of the benefits of capitalism through strenuous struggles, often against armed force. The story of the hero who pulls himself by his own bootstraps, and achieves great things is wonderful reading, but in the real world, a very small group of people have accumulated a vast amount of wealth, and they're hanging on to it, John Galt be damned. My answer to the Randian types is, fine, go with it, but first rid yourself of all of the goods that have been produced by cooperative effort, then go off and live in the woods. Come back to me when you've earned your first millioin. 99.99% of people left on their own in such circumstances wouldn't last 3 weeks. A few might make a month or two, and, given the person is on a tropical island with plent of food handy, a couple might last a year or two. I'll let them take a copy of Atlas Shrugged with them to while away the hours.
Thank you! You answered my question very precisely and completely. I found it fascinating. I think my takeaway from Atlas Shrugged is slightly less economic. When I think of the central message of Atlas Shrugged, I think of an emphasis on reason and the individual as the fundamental virtue. The moral imperative on us as human beings is to use our mind and our ability to reason to pursue what we conclude is virtuous, and that pursuit should never be handed over to someone else or compromised. The transcendentalist movement comes to mind. "It is the beauty within us that makes it possible for us to recognize the beauty around us."
Objectivism is poorly-written drama that fails in its attempt to justify Social Darwinism, aka "Devil take the hindmost".
I believe there is confusion over the concept of selfishness and Rand would have been better off using the word self interest instead. Psychologist Otto Rank said human beings are inherently self interested and I believe that’s what Rand really meant. If pursuit of your self interest harms others then you are selfish but if it doesn’t then you are a libertarian and people pursuing what they are interested in are usually doing a better job because not only are they interested in what they are doing but are passionate about it, which in the end benefits everyone.
My opinion?
I think Ayn Rand suffered from PTSD to the detriment of us all. She hated Stalin only because he attacked her. She was as ruthless and as heartless as he was.
Maybe she had become a pathetic psychotic sociopath as a result of her experience at the behest of Stalin. Maybe she was that type of sick personality all along and it just took the horrors of the Russian revolution to bring it to the forefront. Intelligent psychotics can also be extremely talented and persuasive and convincing communicators.
Out of curiosity, what examples jump to mind when you think of the ruthlessness and heartlessness of Ayn Rand?
Her problem was with authoritarian evil of Marxism, not one man.
Many of the complaints about this novel come about through applying the standards of naturalism to the book. We are deeply steeped in naturalism in our culture. Rand wasn't just not a naturalist, she was against naturalism as a debased anti-conceptual approach to art. Rand didn't write didactically, and her characters are rich realizations of fundamental principles. They will only seem "flat" to someone who only has that word in their vocabulary to describe a person who doesn't have what Rand called "mixed premises". Our world is full of mixed people, that's what we're used to, it's what our literary standards hold as good and interesting. But Rand wasn't interested in recreating something haphazard. She wanted a complexity full of characters each showing how certain principles work out against each other. In most cases you see how they come across on the surface at first, and over time you see deeper into their motivation, until the fundamental principles are revealed. For lesser characters of course there may not be time for a progression.
What she is showing you in her characters is an inductive progression by which you can identify over time what are the premises each person operates on. If you aren't used to thinking that way they will just look like unchanging unconflicted types, i.e. "flat". What you're missing is how the evidence builds over time to understand what core ideas are driving these people, that's the progression for many of her characters. Of course some of the characters have their own progression toward understanding, i.e. Dagny, Rearden, Cheryl, even Jim Taggart in the perverse slow grind of coming face to face with his real self.
Anyway this is the same pattern as any brand of Rand criticism, it is mostly done from the point of view of our culture's common values, and she absolutely stood apart from that. This is not about whether you will agree with her, but rather it's about understanding her. You simply never will if you don't study her foundational premises and arguments.
Anyone interested in getting the most out of the book might find a lot of value in the Ayn Rand Institute Channel's video series of discussions about the book, it's called "The Atlas Project".
Very good explanation, thank you! You can't make a fair criticism of something that you don't understand. I can go along with someone saying they don't like Picasso, but if their reasoning is that his paintings aren't realistic, then the argument doesn't make any sense. Picasso wasn't trying to do a photo-realistic painting just like Ayn Rand isn't trying to put real life on paper. She specifically talked about how authors shouldn't do that.
@@erikhillreviews One can even unpack the issue of "real life". When we look out at the world we identify what we are seeing. Depending on our ideas, we may identify aspects of a personality as just a series of instances: Mary smiled at me on Tuesday; Mary gave me her pickle on Thursday; Mary told me I am an idiot on Friday, etc., or we may look for patterns, i.e. "Mary seems to like me to some extent but she can get pretty mad at me sometimes--what is it in her thinking that might be causing that combination?" In real life, Rand was looking for patterns and fundamental premises in people. She believed that Art is inherently selective and reflective of the artist's fundamental values. For her that meant consciously stylizing the world, not by making things up from nothing, but by identifying the essentials in people, the principles she had identified as operative in real people--and dramatizing their effects by showing characters who operate on those principles consistently. So there's a sense in which she even was writing about "real life", just not in an unselective hodgepodge of disintegrated observations.
WHO IS JOHN GALT?