Atlas as an Avenging God

An analysis of the ideas of the novel, Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

Anyone who has ever read a Christian-fundamentalist Rapture-Tribulation novel will find an eerie, reminiscent echo in staunch atheist, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Just as God takes all the "true" Christians to Heaven just before the Tribulation, the hero of Atlas, John Galt, takes all the people of intelligence, those who are productive, and, who all hold the same values, those Galt calls "moral," away from the world. As things fall more and more badly apart in a "tribulation" of irrationalism, the productive heroes of intellect and morality are safe in a "heaven" of industrial excellence.

The men of ability have gone on strike against a world that valued altruism more highly than brains. It starts when the heirs of the Twentieth Century Motors decide to start a social experiment and put their company on the basis of "from each according to his ability to each according to his need." John Galt, a young engineer in the company gets up and says, "I'll put a stop to this. I'll stop the motor of the world."

Ayn Rand, who has a gift for drama, managed to express her philosophy in the form of a very dramatic and action-packed epic. Her writing dialectically juxtaposes opposite types of people to make her point which is the most extreme advocacy of individualism and opposition to altruism ever stated in print.

Since altruism is one of those sacred cows that nobody dares to question the value of and, since much evil has been done in it's name, an unabashed challenge to altruism is sorely needed in the world. Anyone who doubts this need should examine the history of Jim Jones' People's Temple for an example of how wrong the concept can go. They upheld the belief that nobody had the right to have anything that everyone else didn't have. Under the guise of their philosophy, they forbid parents to buy their children Christmas presents. Instead, the church bought presents for all the children, which, naturally, couldn't possibly be as personalized and loving as gifts from the parents would have been. Families were further pressured to form or move into communes so that everyone could be put on a subsistance-level of consumption while all in excess of the bare necessities was collected by the church which supposedly had everyone's best interests at heart. Well, we all know how this one ended. Rand couldn't have written a more stinging indictment of the ethics of altruism than Jim Jones etched on the walls of time.

Since abuses of altruism clearly show how wrong we can go with this value, is our only alternative to embrace a world of laissez-faire capitalism, abolish all government welfare programs and let people sink or swim on their own? That's what Rand would have us believe. The industrial heros of Rand's universe are all slim, dynamic, attractive and ethical in a very rigid way. Everything is very literal with them. A promise is a promise. Hank Rearden finds himself stuck in a loveless marriage because he didn't see any ethical way to break his wedding vows unless his spiteful wife would agree. He also refuses to accept gold from the pirate, Ragnar Dammeskjöld, because it's "stolen" (although he only takes it from "looters" of the "welfare state" which Rearden also disapproves of).

Rand's philosophy is stated most completely and didacticly in a speech made by John Galt that covers 60 pages in the book. Here, he lays it all out. There are two basic axioms, "existance and consciousness." "To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of non-existence, it is to be an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes.... A is A. A thing is itself. You have never grasped the meaning of (Aristotle's) statement. I am here to complete it: Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification." Thus, the universe is completely objective in nature. Contradictions cannot exist. The way to know the universe is through the senses and reason. Man is distinguished from other creatures by his ability to think. But thinking is a choice.

"A being of volitional consciousness has no automatic course of behavior. He needs a code of values to guide his actions. 'Value' is that which one acts to gain and keep, 'virtue' is the action by which one gains and keeps it. 'Value' presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? 'Value' presupposes a standard, a purpose and the necessity of action in the face of an alternative. Where there are no alternatives, no values are possible.

"There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or non-existence — and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not: it depends on a specific course of action. Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist. It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies; its chemical elements remain, but it's life goes out of existence. It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil."

...

"Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice—and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man—by choice; he has to hold his life as a value—by choice; he has to learn to sustain it—by choice; he has to discover the value it requires and practice his virtues—by choice.

"A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.

"Whoever you are, you who are hearing me now, I am speaking to whatever living remnant is left uncorrupted within you, to the remnant of the human, to your mind, and I say: There is a morality of reason, a morality proper to man, and Man's Life is its standard of value.

"All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil."

So everything deriving from the mind is good and everything that "blanks out" reality is evil. It's as simple as that. The rest of Rand's philosophy is built upon this basic foundation.

Every advance in technology that saves labor and increases output is good and beneficial. In his most primitive state, Man was a hunter and gatherer. He did not change the face of the earth at all. He only took from it the minimum he needed to survive. He hunted for meat and gathered what edible plant life was around and had no surplus. He also had no crime, no war and very little hierarchy. This changed with the advent of animal husbandry and agriculture. Animals were tamed and domesticated and plants were deliberatedly cultivated. While Rand claims all progress on earth has been due to individuals of superior intelligence and initiative, it is questionable whether this first step away from "primitivism" was the result of an individual. Society at that time was tribal. In a way, tribal life was very friendly to individualism. Every member of a tribe was an individual the way every member of a family is an individual. Each has hir quirks, hir strengths, weaknesses. Each has something to give. And every member of the tribe was accepted as an individual. On the other hand, in some ways, tribal living must have been inimical to individualism. The tribe had it's ways, handed down from generation to generation. Nobody was expected to deviate in any significant manner from the tradition of the tribe. Life was much more collective than it is in a modern, industrial society. The tribe hunted together, farmed together, raised children together, etc. For the first time, however, there was a surplus of goods, more was available than bare subsistance. There also developed a more hierarchical society and more conflict.

We have come a long way from the tribe. China produced a great civilization behind closed walls. City-States in Greece sprang up, producing a golden age of arts and philosophy. Rome had it's moment of triumph and decadence. Feudalism in the Middle-Ages followed the decline of Rome. Christianity took over as the dominent religion of Europe. The Renaissance brought a breath of fresh air and change to all that had been stagnent in Medieval times.

Nothing has changed the face of the Earth as drastically as the Industrial Revolution. What used to be an agrarian economy supporting a few cities is now transformed to the complex, industrial world of today. The human population increased in response to the demand for labor and the heightened ability to pay for the additional people. It is this that Ayn Rand considers the major boon of the "men of mind." To her thinking, the Industrial Revolution was the greatest thing to happen to mankind ever in the history of the world.

"The machine, the frozen form of a living intelligence, is the power that expands the potential of your life by raising the productivity of your time. If you worked as a blacksmith in the mystics' Middle Ages, the whole of your earning capacity would consist of an iron bar produced by your hands in days and days of effort. How many tons of rail do you produce per day if you work for Hank Rearden? Would you dare to claim that the size of your pay check was created solely by your physical labor and that those rails were the product of your muscles? The standard of living of that blacksmith is all that your muscles are worth; the rest is a gift from Hank Rearden."
It never occurs to Rand that, along with the boons, the Industrial Revolution also brought hardships, especially to the working class whose productivity was so increased by the factory. Whole families had to rise at 4:00 a.m. or even earlier to walk to factories where they worked 12 or 16 hours a day, children as young as 4 among them. The work was much unhealthier than work on a farm. Kids could do chores on their family farm with no ill effect. But working at an assembly line and matching their movements with the movements of machines made for very unhealthy development. Did people choose of their own free will to move from the farm to the city? In many cases, no. The economy, which took on a life of its own, forced them to go where the jobs were. Some of these jobs, such as coal mining, produced well-documented health disasters such as black lung. I would hardly call this a boon.

It is now time to look at a factor which Rand totally ignores in her book. Whose Earth is it and who has the right to determine how it may be changed? While men of "mind" certainly did create big industry, they couldn't have produced a thing without the resources of the Earth. Who produced the resources of the Earth? Not them! The resources are here, a free gift of Nature (or God if you prefer) for anyone to use as s/he sees fit. They are here for the animals and plant life as well as humanity. The first humans lived in harmony with the rest of life, taking only as much as they needed and leaving the rest intact. The farmers cultivated what was once wild forest, destroying hunting for those who would have continued as hunters. That's what caused the first conflict between Native Americans and the white settlers. The settlers had a concept of private property which the Natives didn't fathem. To the Natives, land was there for everybody to use but not to own. The white man believed he could own the land. How? By what right? Did he create the land? How, then, does he come to own it? The first settlers just grabbed whatever land belonged to nobody which was all the land on the American continent. The Native Americans didn't individually own any land. They had no deeds. They just lived on the land they had been born on. Since the land "belonged to nobody," the white settlers just staked claims to the parcel of land they each wanted to have and those claims were recognized by the white colonial government they had established. This is actually the origin of land ownership in the United States. Whatever has been done to distribute land and natural resources since then, buying and selling it, could not have happened if it hadn't been for an original expropriation of the land by the original settlers. While Rand tries to go all the way down to basic principles to demonstrate the rights of industrialists to own the world, she never deals with the sticky problem of land and how anyone got it in the first place. And yet, note how arrogantly she proclaims the value of the industrialist's contribution:

"Every man is free to rise as far as he's able or willing, but it's only the degree to which he thinks that determines the degree to which he'll rise. Physical labor as such can extend no further than the range of the moment. The man who does no more than physical labor, consumes the material value-equivalent of his own contribution to the process of production, and leaves no further value,neither for himself nor others. But the man who produces an idea in any field of rational endeavor—the man who discovers new knowledge—is the permanent benefactor of humanity. Material products can't be shared, they belong to some ultimate consumer; it is only the value of an idea that can be shared with unlimited numbers of men, making all sharers richer at no one's sacrifice or loss, raising the productive capacity of whatever labor they perform. It is the value of his own time that the strong of the intellect transfers to the weak, letting them work on the jobs he discovered, while devoting his time to further discoveries. This is mutual trade to mutual advantage; the interests of the mind are one, no matter what the degree of intelligence, among men who desire to work and don't seek or expect the unearned.

"In proportion to the mental energy he spent, the man who creates a new invention receives but a small percentage of his value in terms of material payment, no matter what fortune he makes, no matter what millions he earns. But the man who works as a janitor in the factory producing that invention, receives an enormous payment in proportion to that mental effort that his job requires of him. And the same is true of all men between, on all levels of ambition and ability. The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the values of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him but receives the bonus of all their brains. Such is the nature of the 'competition' between the strong and the weak of intellect. Such is the pattern of 'exploitation' for which you have damned the strong."

WOW! Lucky janitors! I guess it's their banner day and they still want more? How dare they? Shouldn't they just accept the gift of industry however it is presented, on whatever terms the wonderful industrialist wants to present it? So what if children grow up deformed working in factories from the age of four. So what if people get black lung or cancer or any of the other industrial horrors they have had to deal with. They are out of the forest where they were just collecting enough to feed themselves for the day. What's a little (alright, a lot) disease to that?

The ethical problem which Rand has ignored is the fact that these peons of industry never had the opportunity to make a choice about the kind of world they got to live in. Their "betters," as Rand keeps calling them, took land and transformed it into something where survival could only be had on their terms. How did they get the land? They took it because they could. They had guns and the Natives only had bows and arrows. While Rand emphasizes the voluntary nature of "free enterprise" and condemns violence, there could be no private ownership of land without violence. Or, when Rand/Galt says only the initiation of violence is wrong, did she have in mind that the Natives initiated violence by trying to drive the settlers off their land once they realized their hunting resources were disappearing? Wasn't that violence really initiated by the men who moved in and changed the face of the Earth without any choice on the part of those who had lived there for centuries, not only the people, but the animals as well.

Rand believes that any claim or demand made by the have-nots on the haves is a demand that the haves wipe themselves out. She refers to advocates of the Welfare State as "murderers." Any interference with "free enterprise" on the part of the government is considered an act of violence since the State has the power of guns behind it. Mind you, when the State uses those same guns to enforce property rights, it is completely legitimate. But, as we have seen, "property rights" have a big, black question mark over them considering their origin. In this perfect, moral society Rand envisons, such a question mark is inexcusable. Rand says, "All property and all forms of wealth are produced by man's mind and labor." But the ore used to produce Rearden Metal wasn't produced by any man or any mind. Without it, there could be no Rearden Metal.

Doesn't the fact that they changed the face of the Earth bring with it any obligation on the part of those who now "own" it to those who don't? What has been done to animals, I won't even go into deeply. That's a whole 'nother can of worms. But, just considering human beings, industrialists cannot claim that, but for industry, the workers would be worse off. They would be living in a state of Nature rather in an industrial society. They would be able to make a living on their own terms and that of Nature. They would not be employees of big industry. They would belong to themselves as would the Earth. But Rand asks, "What permits any insolent beggar to wave his sores in the face of his betters and to plead for help in the tone of a threat?" Would he have those sores if not for the intervention of Rands "benefactors of humanity?"

"The justification of sacrifice, that your morality propounds, is more corrupt than the corruption it purports to justify. The motive of your sacrifice, it tells you, should be love—the love you ought to feel for every man. A morality that professes the belief that the values of the spirit are more precious than matter, a morality that teaches you to scorn a whore who gives her body indiscriminately to all men—this same morality demands that you surrender your soul to promiscuous love for all comers."
I suppose Mother Teresa is one of those "whores" who "surrenders (her) soul to promiscuous love for all comers." But Mother Teresa genuinely loved the people she helped. She saw each of them as Jesus. "That which you do to the least of them, you do to me." If she hadn't been a Christian, she may have expressed this metaphore in other terms, seeing the divine spark in each person she helped. But, whatever the terms, there is true love, a mystical, agape love which Rand doesn't understand. To her, all "altruists" are really hypocrites. The "altruists" in Atlas Shrugged are cheap opportunists who seek to out-manuver each other in grabbing the wealth, supposedly in the interests of humanity but really for themselves. This is not altruism. Rand's "altruists" are completely selfish (in the usual meaning of the word). Rand didn't write about a Mother Teresa because she probably never believed such a person could exist. People could only pretend to be like her. Rand has written an essay called "Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal." In the same vein, she could write about "Altruism: the Unknown Ideal" since it doesn't really exist in her opinion.

What can we conclude? Certainly most people are not like Mother Teresa. Nobody should be expected to live with that degree of devotion and sacrifice unless that person is genuinely called to it. But we can be inspired by her example and realize that such love is really possible. For the rest of us, we live some sort of balance between selfishness and generousity. Most of us put ourselves first. And that's alright. Rand is right to that extent. We certainly are entitled to live for our own benefit and decide for ourselves how much we choose to do for others. But, as a society, we cannot expect people to sink or swim without any help. There are many disabled who can't work even if they want to. There are certainly children who deserve a chance to be something other than fodder for a machine. Government welfare programs distributes the burden of helping those who can't help themselves among everyone who has a surplus, the extent of the contribution depending on the extent of the surplus. Rand considers this unfair since all wealth accumulated through free enterprise is the product of the owner of that wealth. We have seen the flaws in that reasoning. Government Welfare is evil according to Rand. She says, "They proclaim that every man born is entitled to exist without labor and, the laws of reality to the contrary notwithstanding, is entitled to receive his 'minimum sustenance'—his food, his clothes, his shelter—with no effort on his part, as his due and his birthright." But only those who can't produce for themselves are entitled to this assistance. Not just anyone who wants it. The government has strict criteria for determining who is really needy and who is just faking it. Those who need assistance are disabled, the very young, the very old and those who find themselves unemployed through no fault of their own since the economy is very complex and beyond the control of any single person.

Nobody should be a "sacrificial animal" to altruism. Giving a part of our wealth to those less fortunate doesn't make us sacrificial animals. It only makes us members of society which we all certainly are regardless of how much of an individualist someone fancies himself. The state enforces private property but it shouldn't keep people from starving? I submit that Rand has failed to meet the burden of proof for that claim.

This essay started with a comparison of Atlas Shrugged with fundamentalist Christian novels about the Rapture and Tribulation. Consistently with that, Atlas Shrugged ends in classic fashion with all the sinners (advocates of the Welfare State) dying in an armagedden while the saints (the creative people of intellect) watch the mass death, awaiting their chance to reclaim the Earth. "'The road is cleared,' said Galt. 'We are going back to the world.'" Meanwhile, Eddie Willers, a character of normal intelligence but with the same ethical views as the superheroes goes down with the ship, er, I mean train. Vainly trying to start a failed engine after the passengers and crew have abandoned it to joined a wagon train, "he collapsed across the rain and lay sobbing at the foot of the engine, with the beam of a motionless headlight above him going off into a limitless night." Nor, we are told, will the folks on the wagon train fair much better. "The men of that caravan—thought Eddie indifferently—looked too mean-minded to become the founders of a secret, free settlement, and not mean-minded enough to become a gang of raiders; they had no more destination to find than the motionless beam of a headlight; and, like that beam, they would dissolve somewhere in the empty stretches of the country."

That Rand doesn't even spare the good man with average ability should give her followers pause. What kind of philosophy doesn't reward all of it's advocates? Oh, it's the "looters'" fault that he had to die, you may say. But the superheroes had it within their power to rescue him. They just didn't think of it. He is expendible like the sympathetic black character who dies while the blond hero and heroine ride off into the sunrise. Such is the paradise of intellectual achievement offered by Rand. When she says she would let those of "no value" die, she really means it. And she strikes the people dead with the judgemental vehemence of a biblical Jehovah. Although she doesn't believe in God, Rand certainly seems to identify with him.

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