Ayn Rand, the author of Atlas Shrugged. You either love her or hate her!
But I read Atlas Shrugged without knowing that you were supposed to love her or hate her. I just knew that it was a title that kept popping up here and there, in a number of different contexts, and so eventually, I felt I had to read that book that so many people seemed to be talking about!
And my reaction was:
'Wow!... I've never looked at it this way before!... This woman is bright!'
Afterwards, when talking about this book, I discovered the strong emotional reactions people have to her. I also discovered how - as can be expected when feelings run hot! - most people had a rather incorrect idea of what she had actually said, and what she actually believed.
One common misunderstanding of her that I came across was this one:
"She claimed that rich people are some kind of altruistic, highly talented, good-hearted super-humans that if left alone will never do anything bad, but only use their talents and riches to improve the world."
This is not what she said.
Ayn Rand said that there are exactly TWO ways to become rich in this world. No more and no less. The first one is to be pretty much what was described above: Talented and productive. You produce some kind of value that people are prepared to pay for, willingly! They buy whatever you are producing, and feel that they have made a good purchase; that they got good value for their money. You get rich and they get satisfied. Everybody wins.
The second way to get rich, also the last way, since there are only two, is to loot somebody else who is productive. There are no other ways, she said! The value has to come from somewhere - it doesn't just fall from the sky or spring out of thin air. And so if you are rich, then either you produced that value or you stole it.
She also said that it's not necessary that the person you loot be richer than you, or as rich as you. She said there is also the Indian Maharaja: The only rich person in a country of poor. Because no matter how poor a population is, there is always enough to loot for ONE person to be rich! And she said the problem in our societies is that too many people want to be that Indian Maharaja. You often find them in politics. They don't care about the prosperity of society! They don't care if society plummets into utter despair! So long as they can steal enough from it to be rich, themselves. And the problem with this, of course, is that there can be only one Maharaja... So the only thing they will succeed at is to make society poorer, to the detriment of all. Everybody loses.
“When a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law, men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims, then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.”
Ayn Rand - Atlas Shrugged
Another misunderstanding of Ayn Rand that I came across was this:
"She's such a hypocrite! She wrote 'The Virtue of Selfishness' only as a desperate attempt to justify why she didn't help her poor relatives back in Soviet, after she got rich in America."
Let me show you another quote from Atlas Shrugged:
“People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on."
Ayn Rand - Atlas Shrugged
Tell me: Can somebody who writes a quote like that be a hypocrite? No, I would say. Because a person who feels that a quote like that rings true wouldn't WANT to lie... It would be an act of self-abdication. Of making oneself the world's slave, condemned to trying to fake the kind of reality that the world approves of. Ayn Rand doesn't care what you approve of! She stands up for HER OWN beliefs.
The quote continues, in the book:
“There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.”
This reveals even clearer how very strongly she feels about any kind of dishonesty or of bending the truth. But I intentionally put this separate from the lines before it, because I don't feel it fits the context! The lines before are a cool, logical reasoning - this is a sudden outburst of emotion! And as Virginia Wolf writes, in A Room of One's Own: "An angry writer is a bad writer". Ayn Rand is often a bad writer, because of her anger seeping through. She was, after all, an illegal refugee from the Soviet Union, and she is angry with her motherland, oh how angry she is!...
And I believe this is why most people love her! Not because they understand what she really meant with her philosophy, but because they share her anger towards communism and socialism! Because the villains in Rand's books do come out as very Soviet communist-like... That was the face of evil, to her. But when American Christian right-wing politicians expressed love for her philosophy, she protested! They were far too limiting of people's freedom for her. For one thing, she was sex positive, perhaps even polyamorous in her ideology, although those terms didn't exist at the time. She was also a staunch atheist and advocated abortion rights. American Christian Conservatives were, of course, far from this! Had she grown up in the USA instead of the Soviet Union, perhaps they would have been the paint that she painted her villains with? Who knows.
And had that been the case, the left-wing would have been the ones who loved her! Now, sharing a common enemy with her.
Ironic, though. Isn't it?
I warmly recommend you read the book. Not as a novel! It's not a great novel (although the story is also captivating), and you would have to put up with her anger, which gets rather bitter, at times... But in her good moments, Ayn Rand is, indeed, a very bright woman. She has some very clear thoughts, well worth reading for oneself, rather than through the lens of somebody else who either loves her or hates her, probably for the wrong reasons... đ
