Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
Press 1 if you would like to wait on hold for 3 hours and 45 minutes for a representative. Press 2 if you would like to listen to a recording of our website. Press 3 if you are so disgusted with this process that you just want to give up.
Option 3 is more and more tempting these days…
Atlas Shrugged is on many college admission essays that I wonder how often this very review with be plagiarized. Hi, Harvard and Oxford!
Before I really get into this 1,000+ page tome, GoodReads, can you do me a favor and give out badges when we read 1,000+ page books?
Readings books of this size is like climbing Mount Everest, and it is an event worth celebrating. As an aside, I would also like to see a lifetime pages badge.
Anyways…
In some respects, Atlas Shrugged is more relevant today than when it was first authored. It speaks to the weariness of overachievers as they go about the world with so many people not doing a good job.
Why does it take 45 minutes to buy a single loaf of bread at the store?
About two years ago, I ordered a treadmill for under the desk. After meticulously following the instruction manual, the belt would jump forward then slide back. The situation was especially dangerous because there were no handrails. After spending 30 minutes on the phone, I was told that the product was sold by a third-party seller. Up came the chat box where the seller tried to get me to load the 300-pound treadmill into my car, drive it to UPS, haul it in on my bare shoulders, and pay at my expense to ship it back to China. Let’s just say that didn’t happen…
COVID is now the blanket excuse for everything. People now make TikToks about quiet quitting, brazenly describing with pride how they intentionally do a bad job.
Withdrawing completely from society is so tempting, hitting Option 3.
Another point raised in Atlas Shrugged is how the government, non-businesspeople who don’t really understand the situation are making the rules governing business. This really resonated with me but in a slightly different way.
Most countries ban human-genome editing. In the US, the FDA prohibits DNA-editing.
Sorry, you probably fell asleep. What am I talking about?
A bunch of scientists at the FDA in their gilded white towers decided that people with life threatening genetic conditions cannot be cured before they are born. It is easy to pass such a sentence onto other people.
Have they bothered asking the person who has had two heart surgeries, can’t control their left leg, is covered head-to-toe in rashes, takes 14 pills a day, spends 4 hours a week at the hospital, is told by the very same United States government that she can work with restrictions while her heart was stopped, literally dead, treated as a pariah by society with no support, and it all could have been avoided if just one gene, ALDH4A1, was tweaked before she was born? No. No, they haven’t.
There are so many parallels between gene editing and Rearden Metal.
However, Atlas Shrugged is deeply problematic.
This book needs to check its premises.
Ayn Rand subscribed to a philosophy known as Objectivism and referred to the poor as “takers” and “refuse.”
In Atlas Shrugged, only two women are overachievers: one is a wife of an overachiever and the other is the granddaughter of the company founder.
What if Dagny was born poor or of color? What if she had a major illness or accident?
How do I really feel about this book? Take my hand. Let’s go back in time…..
Once upon a time, there was a young but poor scholar who attended a snobby, expensive elite university.
The financial aid officer told the scholar that she would have to drop out because her parents could not help with tuition.
One day, the scholar took out her sharpened pencils and turned her notebook to a fresh, clean, crisp page, arriving early to her psychology class. Her classmates consisted of the uber-wealthy of America, the types who have summer houses and fathers who work as CEOs of global corporations.
As she waited for class to begin, raised voices broke the stillness of the classroom. Two distinct voices engaged in an argument, turning to shouting, and then escalated into threats of violence.
“I’m going to throw this book at you!”
The young scholar leapt to her feet and bolted out of the room, intent on helping, while the rich students were still giving each other awkward stares and shifting uncomfortably in their seats.
She quickly located the students in question, determined that they were merely playing, and high-tailed it back to class.
As the scholar returned to her seat, her rich classmates turned their attention to her, smothering her with the same question, “What happened?”
Before the scholar could respond, the psychology professor burst into the classroom, exuberant, an enormous smile crossing her face.
“Lisa is the first person in seven years to respond to this experiment.”
Is there room in these esteemed academic institutions for the virtuous?
You say who is John Galt. I say who is Lisa of Troy.