3,921 words

Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

There are many reasons to think that we are living in the world of Atlas Shrugged. Doesn’t it seem today as if literally everything is broken or in freefall? Manufacturing, transportation, infrastructure, public safety, the justice system, housing, education, the food supply, journalism, the arts, and more — these are broken in our world of today, and broken in the world of Atlas Shrugged. But how they got broken is, in many ways, quite different from what Rand depicts.

For example, one element in Atlas that is eerily reminiscent of the present day is the loss of manufacturing, and its consequences for towns and cities. Rand’s characters several times encounter entire towns that have dried up due to industry shutting down. In the novel, this is because socialism has made it impossible for businesses to function. In the reality of present-day America, however, this blight is due not to socialism, but to precisely what Rand championed: laissez-faire capitalism and “free trade.” In an essay, Rand wrote the following:

The essence of capitalism’s foreign policy is free trade — i.e., the abolition of trade barriers, of protective tariffs, of special privileges — the opening of the world’s trade routes to free international exchange and competition among the private citizens of all countries dealing directly with one another. During the nineteenth century, it was free trade that liberated the world, undercutting and wrecking the remnants of feudalism and the statist tyranny of absolute monarchies.

But it is free trade — specifically, the ending of protectionism in the name of “globalization” — that has resulted in American manufacturing drying up, where it proved incapable of competing with goods produced more cheaply abroad. It is laissez-faire that has also allowed prosperous American businesses to send manufacturing overseas, employing foreigners (usually at subsistence wages) and depriving Americans of jobs. Those ghost towns that now dot our landscape are the result of John Galt’s policies, not Wesley Mouch’s. And, if anything, the devastation is more extreme than what is depicted in the novel. Even Rand did not anticipate what has happened to Detroit.

In truth, the Western world has now mostly turned away from the economic socialism skewered by Rand in Atlas. Objectivists like to give Rand some of the credit for this, but that is simply hogwash. The credit goes to reality: Those systems simply could not be made to work, no matter how good their advocates’ intentions. European Communism collapsed a lot quicker than anyone expected it to, but this was not due to a shift in ideology. Rather, it happened because the people impoverished and oppressed by Communism simply wouldn’t take it anymore.

One thing that must never be forgotten about Rand is that unlike other twentieth-century critics of the Left, and other dystopian novelists, Rand actually had first-hand experience of Communism. She was 12 when the Soviets came to power, and 20 when she finally escaped to the West. And she experienced the regime at its worst, in the days when starvation was a real possibility — and Rand and her family did almost starve. This should be borne in mind when one reaches the later chapters of Atlas, in which Americans are reduced to starvation and barbarism. Rand had seen this. She knew what she was talking about.

As the daughter of a bourgeois shopkeeper, she was initially expelled from her university (then later reinstated). An intemperate political remark made in a moment of anger caused Rand to lie awake all night, waiting for the door to be kicked in by the secret police. She saw, up close, how the Left operates when given total power, and what devastation it wreaks. She passionately hated the Left all her life, and her analysis of it deserves to be taken very seriously.

Those on the Right are divided in their response to Rand, however, and on the radical Right discussion is dominated by the fact that Rand was a Jew. I find this, quite frankly, to be the least interesting thing about her — though I concede that how, or whether, Rand’s work served Jewish interests is a topic that needs to be discussed. Nevertheless, everyone on the Right ought to concede that she is a peerless critic of the Left. All of her novels feature insightful and often wickedly funny commentary on Leftists and Leftist ideology. However, it is particularly in the analysis of Leftist psychology that Rand excelled — a point to which I will return later. Rand probably didn’t need Nietzsche to arrive at the conclusion that the Left is moved by ressentiment; she could have generalized it from the abundance of empirical evidence she regularly encountered in her youth.

Nevertheless, the Left has changed in ways that Rand did not predict, and is now quite different (at least superficially) from how it is depicted in Atlas. Especially in the United States, the Left has now mostly shifted away from economic socialism. It has shifted from a concern with economic inequality, to real or imagined inequalities of other sorts. I remember a Marxist sociology professor once telling me that the three pillars of Marxist sociology are “race, class, and gender.” But the concern with class has now almost entirely fallen away.

Rand loved to lampoon — in both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged — the Left’s rhetoric about “the little guy” (or “the common man”). Today, the Left deserves to be criticized — among other things — for insufficient concern about “the little guy.” Today, the Left considers it a victory if an affluent black lesbian gets appointed White House Press Secretary, or an Ivy League-educated poofter snags a job as Transportation Secretary, or a popular Disney character gets “reimagined” as non-binary, or a woman with Down’s Syndrome becomes a lingerie model, or a statue of Robert E. Lee gets melted down, possibly to be transformed into a harvest of bronze dildos.

Yet the same old patterns still exhibit themselves, patterns Rand saw way back when Lenin was in charge. The Left is always in search of some “other” to liberate. The proletariat ultimately proved to be a disappointment: When left to their own devices, they simply would not reliably vote the way that liberals wanted them to. So, the Left moved on. They moved on to blacks, then women, then gays, then the transgendered, then back to blacks, and now it seems they may be poised to liberate pedophiles and zoophiles. Concern for the working class has now been replaced by open scorn and contempt for them — by an undisguised elitism and classism. It used to be that the Left consisted of radicalized workers and limousine liberals. Now the Left is a strange coalition of limousine liberals, the black underclass, and the sexually non-conforming.

If Rand’s villains were around today, they absolutely would pass the “Equalization of Opportunity Bill.” Only we all know that it would have nothing to do with economic inequality, and everything to do with masking or denying the one sort of inequality that cannot actually be abolished: natural inequality; the inequality of the races and the sexes. The measures used by our current Leftists to combat such inequality are uncannily similar to what Rand experienced in the Soviet Union. Only if Rand were a young woman today, she would not lose her place in school to the child of a prole; she would lose her place to a BIPOC.

Rand is famous for her critique of altruism and self-sacrifice. The Leftists in Rand’s novels are constantly enjoining others to be “unselfish,” to put the interests of others ahead of one’s own, to sacrifice the private good to “the public good,” etc. And this is foisted on people through guilt — by making the successful, for example, feel guilty for their success; and by telling them that their guilt might possibly (just possibly) be expunged if they agree to serve the interests of the unsuccessful. This kind of thing runs throughout The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

But reading it today is jarring, because now you hardly ever hear anyone talk about “unselfishness” or “sacrifice” — not even from the pulpit. And you seldom hear anyone shamed just for being rich or successful. We have become an unapologetically selfish society: We are, as a colleague of mine once put it, “windowless monads” obsessed with our feelings, desires, grievances, and “issues”; convinced that the emptiness inside us can be filled by the accumulation of wealth and consumer goods. Leftism has morphed into a kind of religious cult for many such people. It allows them to feel good about themselves merely by parroting its slogans, and never demands that they actually change their lives.

Nevertheless, the same rhetoric about sacrifice and the same attempt to “guilt” the successful still survives in one area: our public discourse on race. It’s not businessmen who are the targets today, as they are in Atlas, but white men — any kind of white men, rich or poor. Again, class drops out of the picture. All white men are damned, whether they are Elon Musk or the guy who bags your groceries. All the rhetoric of Rand’s villains is now directed against one race. Sacrifice? Yes: Whites, and only whites, must sacrifice for the sake of others — or, more specifically, for the other. Whites must feel guilty for their successes of all kinds — and must sacrifice their wealth, their safety, their children’s future, and even their countries to those who could never have created what they have created.

The following passage from Galt’s speech has, of course, nothing specifically to do with whites and their current plight, but it has now taken on an entirely new significance:

You have reached the blind alley of the treason you committed when you agreed that you had no right to exist. Once, you believed it was “only a compromise”: you conceded it was evil to live for yourself, but moral to live for the sake of your children. Then you conceded that it was selfish to live for your children, but moral to live for your community. Then you conceded that it was selfish to live for your community, but moral to live for your country. Now, you are letting this greatest of countries be devoured by any scum from any corner of the earth, while you concede that it is selfish to live for your country and that your moral duty is to live for the globe. A man who has no right to life, has no right to values and will not keep them.

It is through guilt that whites are persuaded to sacrifice their interests for “any scum from any corner of the earth.” Rand’s villains propagate the idea that the successful do not deserve their success; that wealth is mostly a result of accident, of being in the right place at the right time. And this is exactly the message that is communicated to whites today: Your superior cultural achievements are nothing to be proud of and you cannot take credit for them. They are merely the result of “white privilege.” And, of course, just as classical Marxism argued that the middle class becomes rich by exploiting the proles, so the neo-Marxists of today (misleadingly dubbed “cultural Marxists”) argue that white success is due to exploitation of non-whites.

Penalizing ability (= whites) and rewarding failure (= blacks). The men of ability (= whites) must be penalized to support the incompetent (= blacks). Its déjà vu all over again. And all of it is possible because of “the sanction of the victim,” one of the most important concepts in Atlas Shrugged. Galt explains this in his speech:

Then I saw what was wrong with the world, I saw what destroyed men and nations, and where the battle for life had to be fought. I saw that the enemy was an inverted morality — and that my sanction was its only power. I saw that evil was impotent — that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real — and that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it. . . . [T]hroughout men’s history . . . from the extortions of loafing relatives to the atrocities of collectivized countries, it is the good, the able, the men of reason, who act as their own destroyers, who transfuse to evil the blood of their virtue and let evil transmit to them the poison of destruction, thus gaining for evil the power of survival, and for their own values — the impotence of death. I saw that there comes a point, in the defeat of any man of virtue, when his own consent is needed for evil to win — and that no manner of injury done to him by others can succeed if he chooses to withhold his consent. I saw that I could put an end to your outrages by pronouncing a single word in my mind. I pronounced it. The word was “No.”

The present situation, in which whites are now under attack and their existence in their native lands is now threatened, has come about entirely because we have allowed it to. We allowed ourselves to be controlled through guilt. We were prepared to believe the worst about ourselves, while simultaneously agreeing to see the best, and only the best, in our inferiors. What is now happening to us has happened because we sanctioned it. And now, when it may already be too late, the imperative — the only hope — is to withdraw that sanction. We must take Galt’s advice when he says:

The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it. Withdraw your sanction. Withdraw your support. Do not try to live on your enemies’ terms or to win at a game where they’re setting the rules.

There are signs already that many whites, especially young white men, are “going on strike”: choosing not to go to college — or at least not to major in any of the most “woke” disciplines; avoiding professions in which wokeness is enforced; refusing to join the military; ceasing to patronize woked-up professional sports; ceasing to patronize woke cinema or to buy woke comics; ceasing to date, rather than deal with brainwashed women; boycotting products with woke advertising, etc. Rand was right about how it’s the men of the mind who move the world — the great inventors, scientists, explorers, artists, philosophers, industrialists, entrepreneurs, and architects. But most of these men were — and are — white.[i] The Atlas that needs to shrug is the white race.

Rand didn’t arrive at this realization for several reasons. First, the America in which Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged was overwhelmingly white. In the 1950 census, 89.5% of Americans identified as white (today it’s between about 71% and 60% — depending on whether Hispanics are strictly distinguished from whites). There is not a single non-white character in Atlas, not even a porter on the Taggart Comet. The Frankfurt School had just gotten a foothold in the US, and the anti-white rhetoric of today would have been inconceivable when Rand was writing. Plus, she consciously repudiated “racism” and what would be called today “identity politics,” stating (in an essay published in the 1960s):

Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men.

Add to this, finally, the fact that Rand was a Jew, who could not have felt a strong affinity for the whites around her, no matter how solid her ideological commitment to America and Americans. The altruism Rand critiqued was a product of Christian universalism, and she was right to think it perverse. There is something monstrous about being told that one must live for others — as such; or to sacrifice one’s happiness for others — as such. But when one lives in an ethnically homogeneous society surrounded by others like oneself — in effect, in the midst of a large, extended family — one feels a strong sentiment of sympathy. And this motivates us, at least some of the time, to act altruistically: to help others, to put the good of the whole above one’s own private good, and, in extreme cases, even to sacrifice one’s life for others.

These actions are not motivated by commitment to an ideology, or fear of the disapproval of some authority figure; they flow, again, from innate, natural, and pre-rational sentiment. Rand seemed constitutionally incapable of having such feelings — and probably least of all for the goyim, even though, by all accounts, she had very little conscious sense of Jewish identification. But as we learn more and more about our species, and bury the old myth of the blank slate even deeper, we realize how little our actions and feelings have to do with what is consciously held. Rand’s heroes are all Aryan supermen, and her husband was a very Nordic-looking Irishman. But the man to whom Rand was most passionately attracted, the man with whom she carried on a torrid love affair during the writing of Atlas, was Nathaniel Branden, born Nathan Blumenthal — a Russian Jew, just like Rand.

I have been discussing how Rand failed to anticipate a major change in the Left: the shift to a focus on race, and to anti-white vitriol. There are a few other points worth mentioning. Rand also didn’t predict today’s environmental extremism — at least not in Atlas Shrugged, but it would be very much at home there. What she called the “anti-conceptual mentality” is certainly on display in liberal plans to achieve “net zero emissions” by such-and-such target date, but without any reliable alternative waiting in the wings to take the place of coal, natural gas, and petroleum. Is it really possible that electric cars and trucks will be affordable by those target dates, and will it really be practical for entire economies to rely on them? Blank out — as Rand would say.

Electric cars can be recharged, but what will produce the energy they rely on? What will charge the charging stations? Blank out. Wind and solar power are reliable when the wind is blowing and the Sun is shining. But what about when they’re not? Blank out. Can businesses reliant on fossil fuels survive the transition? “You’ll do something,” is the answer the looters give to Hank Rearden in Atlas Shrugged, when Rearden tells them that his company will not survive under new regulations. As the month of November 2023 says in my Social Justice Kittens Calendar, “Our job is to demand solutions, not provide them.”[ii]

The vegans, New Agers, and the let’s-all-eat-bugs wackos are uncannily anticipated, together, in a passage in Atlas I cannot resist quoting at length (if only to demonstrate to skeptics that Rand really did have a sense of humor). Businesses are screaming to the government that they are running out of copper wire, nails, and paint, but . . .

. . . thirty million dollars of subsidy money from Washington had been plowed into Project Soybean — an enormous acreage in Louisiana, where a harvest of soybeans was ripening, as advocated and organized by Emma Chalmers, for the purpose of reconditioning the dietary habits of the nation. Emma Chalmers, better known as Kip’s Ma [Kip Chalmers is the politician killed in the Taggart Tunnel disaster], was an old sociologist who had hung about Washington for years, as other women of her age and type hang about barrooms. For some reason which nobody could define, the death of her son in the tunnel catastrophe had given her in Washington an aura of martyrdom, heightened by her recent conversion to Buddhism. “The soybean is a much more sturdy, nutritious and economical plant than all the extravagant foods which our wasteful, self-indulgent diet has conditioned us to expect,” Kip’s Ma had said over the radio; her voice always sounded as if it were falling in drops, not of water, but of mayonnaise. “Soybeans make an excellent substitute for bread, meat, cereals and coffee — and if all of us were compelled to adopt soybeans as our staple diet, it would solve the national food crisis and make it possible to feed more people. The greatest food for the greatest number — that’s my slogan. At a time of desperate public need, it’s our duty to sacrifice our luxurious tastes and eat our way back to prosperity by adapting ourselves to the simple, wholesome foodstuff on which the peoples of the Orient have so nobly subsisted for centuries. There’s a great deal that we could learn from the peoples of the Orient.”

Yes, in many ways Rand did not anticipate how the Left has changed — nor could she have anticipated it. But I would maintain that her analysis of Leftists’ underlying psychology and motivations is as valid as ever. For example, the real or imagined plight of those “others” the Left would liberate is used, in every case, as a stick to beat the decent, hardworking, middle-class folk that most Leftists were raised by, and whom they passionately hate. And in every case, the result of “liberation” has been destruction: rising crime, the ruination of cities, riots, the breakdown in relations between the sexes, declining morals, the violation of the innocent, and, more recently, the often hilariously funny and surreal drift into the La La Land of transgenderism. It’s one thing to go mad, but Leftists want to take all of us with them. Having to wake up every day in a world gone insane is another kind of oppression, and I feel it every morning. Honestly, for all the faults of Atlas, I have found that rereading the novel has been a source of strength for me.

Rand did not see Leftists as misguided idealists. As I’ve mentioned, she thought that their motivation was ressentiment — and that their agenda, sometimes conscious and sometimes unconscious, was destruction. Destruction for destruction’s sake. Weak, spiteful, resentful mutants raging against life, nature, health, happiness, and decency. Just the other day, Elon Musk referred to liberalism as a “death cult,” and Rand would heartily agree. Me too. If somebody asked me to name the all-time most evil Rand villain, I wouldn’t name Ellsworth Toohey, or James Taggart, or Wesley Mouch, or Floyd Ferris, or Mr. Thompson, or any of them. I’d name George Soros — a villain Rand herself might have considered implausible.

Are we living in the world of Atlas Shrugged? Actually, it may be worse than that.

P.S. You owe it to yourself to read this utterly unique and thrilling book. But avoid at all costs the trilogy of films based upon it. They are a sad, abysmal travesty of Rand’s novel — dimwitted and in terrible taste.

Notes

[i] Charles Murray’s book Human Accomplishment, The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences 800 BC to 1950 (2003) is an attempt to quantify the achievements of individuals and cultures from around the world in the arts and sciences. Murray’s procedure here attempts to be as objective as possible, relying on a calculation of the amount of space devoted to certain individuals in reference works. These include sources written by non-Europeans. The results are quite interesting. About 97% of accomplishments in science occurred in Europe and in North America. Indeed, 72% of the significant figures listed in Murray’s book hail from a mere four countries: Britain, France, Germany, and Italy.

[ii] The Social Justice Kittens Calendar, by Sean Tejaratchi, features actual quotations from actual Social Justice Warriors.