Atlas Shrugged

by Ayn Rand, critiqued by Elanor

I am disappointed. I read the first 500 pages of this 1,167 page book. I took my time, I didn't skim a single word. Ayn Rand's writing is good enough to bear close reading, for the first half of the book. The problem was, the story should have ended at page 501. I did not need another 600 pages pounding the same single idea into my head. Her claim might have been interesting at first, as was the alternate timeline in which the world had been overrun by socialism, but as the plot progressed, her characters became flatter instead of gaining more depth.

Then around page 550 came a six-page-long encomium (poem in praise of an abstract quality) on, of all things, money. To Ayn Rand, money is the representation of the human spirit; it is that which gives mankind the dignity that separates us from beasts. I could not take her seriously after that.

My attention was temporarily recaptured, later, when Rand began to spatter her characters' dialogue with specifically Christian terminology in order to present these values as misguided and, in their most extreme forms, evil. In Rand's world, charity is the worst sin, selfishness the highest virtue. The savior of humanity lives by these words: "I swear--by my life and my love of it--that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."

I do not believe Rand is entirely wrong. She has only misunderstood the concept of charity. She sees it as "alms;" she believes the weak attempt to leech love off of the strong by imposing upon them a sense of guilt at the suffering around them. She spends way too many pages explaining this belief. In some ways, she is right, and in those ways, her massive novel is only an interminable expansion on C. S. Lewis's short sentences in The Great Divorce, something to the effect of: "misery cannot be allowed to blackmail joy."

However, Rand's perspective falls short of the truth of human nature because she is completely individualistic. If the highest virtue is for each person to live solely for his own sake, then the only relationships between individuals can be those of trade--which she fully admits and recommends. She says love should not be "given" to another person for nothing; she implies it is shameful to love a human being for nothing but "himself;" rather, it is good and right to exchange virtue for love as if paying for an order of steel railroad tracks.

Atlas Shrugged lacks depth because it does not take into account the nature of relationships between human beings. The highest state of existence is not one man standing alone at the top of the world looking back on what he has achieved; it is instead the man who gives up the world for the sake of another human being.

I came to the book expecting to find truth; I did not.