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Atlas Shrugged popular again

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Statue of Atlas, that became the cover illustration for Atlas Shrugged. Is the Third Option a variation on this theme?

Atlas Shrugged (1957) broke the rules and got very bad reviews. So why is it so popular today?

Atlas Shrugged – the strikes against it

Ayn Rand’s signature novel has several things wrong with it:

  1. It runs to more than 1100 pages.
  2. It has so many characters that one truly needs a scorecard to keep up with them.
  3. It has a speech that easily would need three hours to read out loud from start to finish.
  4. It takes the omniscient point of view. Worse, it often shifts point-of-view several times in one scene, or even one sentence. Almost any recognized literary agent in practice today says that an author shouldn’t do that.

So why is this novel so popular? No publisher in his right mind would buy it today. No publisher would buy it even from an author in its own stable. Even if that author had another word-of-mouth best-seller (The Fountainhead) to her credit, they still wouldn’t buy it. Why Bennet Cerf at Random House bought it, probably no modern acquisition editor can figure out.

But Cerf picked a winner. It ranks 7th in literary fiction sales, 13th in science fiction, and 19th in classical fiction at Amazon.com. Now the first of three films has come out (because it takes at least three films to do it justice). Why?

Who is Atlas, and why does he shrug?

 

Young woman reading Atlas Shrugged on a subway

Atlas Shrugged speaks to all of us. It speaks to anyone who has a friend or relative constantly “touching” him for money. It speaks to us all on April 15 of every year. It speaks to anyone who has ever wished that he could say, “I’m out of here.”

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It speaks to them best of all in this scene. A genius steelmaker and inventor listens as someone offers him a way out of endless servitude:

“[I]f you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders—what would you tell him to do?”

“I…don’t know. What…could he do? What would you tell him?”

“To shrug.”

The man getting that advice is one of the heroes of the novel. The two heroes are trying their best to keep their businesses, and the economy, alive when the government does everything to skim loot off the top of it. In the end, they each discover that every time they “do something” to make a bad policy work anyway, they give the government yet another excuse to make more bad policies. And he has to pay for them, in taxes, wasted effort, and any of a hundred other ways. Finally, they do what the adviser wants them to do: quit. Or rather, go on strike, as others have done before them.

Atlas and his enemies

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Atlas Shrugged was a best-seller when it first came out. But no commentator, liberal or conservative, thought it would ever be relevant. The people had elected Ike, not some politician running an administration of moochers and gangsters as in Atlas Shrugged. No one dreamed that the people would elect someone like that.

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Today millions of ordinary people realize that their fellow voters did elect such a President. In 1972 George S. McGovern ran and lost—badly. In 2008 Barack Hussein Obama ran and won.

What’s more, readers of Atlas Shrugged can spot all its villains in today’s headlines, or their own lives. They can spot the crony businessmen who toady to Washington for special favors or inside trades. They have probably dealt with the science adviser who abuses his grant-making authority and the peer-review process. They already suspect that the government is poisoning the drinking water. And now they say they are Taxed Enough Already!

In fact, they are already looking for the shadowy anti-villain in the novel: the leader of the strike of the men of the mind.

Who is John Galt?

That’s what everyone asks in Atlas Shrugged: who is the man who said that he would stop the motor of the world? What did he mean by that?

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To the Atlases in the novel, he is the one who clears things up for them. He tells them what kind of burden they carry, who lays it on them, and that it’s OK to lay it down. And he tells them something else: that as soon as they all withdraw their support, the system of looters and gangsters will collapse of its own weight.

As the novel plays out, it makes sense. In the face of businesses relocating overseas, it makes sense. To people who decide not to make too much money, so that they will stay out of higher income-tax brackets or avoid the ObamaCare mandate, it makes sense. To people watching crotchety old once-favorite TV actors openly telling people to get on the dole, or join an organization of “dole” agitators, it makes perfect sense.

So people reading Atlas Shrugged ask, not who is John Galt, but where is he? One may wonder how much more time will pass before someone says, “I am he! I will stop the motor of the world!”

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Conclusion

Atlas Shrugged was ahead of its time 54 years ago. Now time has caught up with it. That is why it is so popular today.

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That’s not to say that it’s perfect. Your editor will explore that later.

Featured image: this statue of Atlas became the cover illustration for the 50th anniversary edition of Atlas Shrugged. Photo: Lee Gillen, CC BY-SA 2.0 Generic License.

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Terry A. Hurlbut has been a student of politics, philosophy, and science for more than 35 years. He is a graduate of Yale College and has served as a physician-level laboratory administrator in a 250-bed community hospital. He also is a serious student of the Bible, is conversant in its two primary original languages, and has followed the creation-science movement closely since 1993.

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Michael R. Brown

One of the strangest tricks in recent years is the left claiming that evading certain fiscal calamity by cutting some welfare is a total embrace of Rand. And if a Republican Christian acknowledges the economic/political wisdom in “Atlas Shrugged,” he must agree with all of Rand? This is the of the strangest interpretive constructs in recent memory. Is the same treatment accorded to Jews who love and recommend Tolstoy? Or atheist leftists who might recommend “Les Miserables” for its depictions of the poor?

Very well, let’s apply the critics’ own premise to themselves. Since Rand herself agreed that her philosophy formed an integrated whole, the critics in agreeing with that premise of hers commit themselves to agreeing to the totality of her thought.

[…] familiar? It should. Richard M. Nixon tried the “Ninety-day Wage and Price Freeze.” President Obama has already […]

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