The first time I came across the mysterious name Ayn Rand was in a
coffee shop I used to spend my days in while skipping school.
Future philosophers, artists, laborers and drug dealers would swap
their wares and play cards over nursed cups of coffee. One
pretentious young thing I did not care for was reading a thick
doorstop called Atlas Shrugged. I asked her if it was good, she
awkwardly quoted Nietzsche, I went back to my card game.
The first time I attempted to read Atlas Shrugged, I was travelling
through Ireland with my girlfriend and her mother.
Despite my desire to shack up in Dublin, read Joyce, stay out late
with the locals, and subsist on a diet of haddock and Guinness, the
ladies had planned a very strict itinerary. So said, not much time
for Ayn. I did manage to make it 300 pages into the book (somewhere
between Belfast and County Claire), and didn't feel too bad about
putting it down. The story had reached it's apparent end, passing
through the normal landmarks of a novel; introduction, plot
development, conflict, resolution, climax, dénouement and closure.
Dagny had her railroad, Hank had his steel, they both won, and
everyone else lost.
And they kissed.
The End.
The superfluous 800 pages tucked in at the end struck me as a
somewhat long-winded epilogue, and probably not worth reading at
that.
Five years later, my general manager told me why his key chain was
shaped like a dollar sign. I scoffed. He pointed the last line on
the last page of the book. I scoffed. He shrugged. I decided I
would have to finish the book. (You know, I've always believed in
the old maxim Keep your friends close...)
I did not want to enjoy the writing of Ayn Rand. The combination of
the first 300 pages of the book I did get through, and the
etymology of her pen name convinced me she was a militant
capitalist, and a crummy writer. Her name derives from a
foreshortening of Aryan and her Rand (pronounced 'rained')
typewriter. Her characters are badly disguised vessels for her
dialectical arguments against socialism. The commies are always
"pudgy", "sweaty", "awkward", "shrill voiced", etc., while the
capitalist heroes are rugged, gorgeous, determined and successful.
It is long winded and pedantic. But beyond that, the novel
investigates a very important relationship that exists between
human beings on all levels of society: the very real difference
between thinking and doing.
This manager friend of mine tried to explain Rand's Objectivism
with a metaphor: "If you had a loaf of bread, and someone else did
not, you would not gain from giving your food to them, because you
would starve, and they would not have earned it".
(This rings of the other old maxim, Give me a fish I eat for a day,
teach me to fish I eat for years)
I, Satan's socialist advocate, asked "If I had more bread than I
could ever eat, is it better to give it away (despite no lesson
learned,) or to keep it as a matter of principle?"
And in that question is the crux of Ayn's distopia. In Shrugged,
there is superfluous wealth, but the question as to how to
redistribute it never arises. Redistribution is an evil, not to be
suffered by those who have created wealth. It is to be suffered by
those who were not strong enough, not smart enough, not determined
enough to become wealthy.
Why?
Because, as happens in most businesses today, those who work hard
and intelligently within a group of peers will always be singled
out and expected to carry more of the burden than their co-workers,
simply because they can.
The message in Shrugged is that a comunist society (in reality, not
on paper,) rewards hard work with more hard work, while those who
are lazy are asked for less.
How often have I imposed duties upon the person in my team who I
know can rise to the job, while the rest maintain the status quo?
(I'm not proud.)
When too many hard-working, intelligent people are asked to do too
much for too little, there will be revolt.
I see many employees come and go because they are lazy or can't
keep up; I see fewer (but still an alarming amount,) go because
they realize they are being taken advantage of. They usually go on
to start their own companies, or skip a few steps up another
corporate ladder to a position worthy of their creativity. If this
ability to promote (and be promoted) were sufficiently curtailed,
as it is in Shrugged, we might see Ayn's philosophy, perhaps even
her dystopia, come to light.
So, finally, I see the allure this book has to dis-disillusioned
teenagers; at the naive age of sixteen, every youth believes that
they are right, the rest of the world is wrong, and that
Objectivism supports their belief. I look back on the black-clad
philosophers in the Second Cup I used to haunt and smile, knowing
what only reality, and perhaps a 1,100 page book, can teach you:
There is no substitute, nor preparation, for hard work.