Like with The Fountainhead, I read Atlas Shrugged to become better adjusted from my weak, by-default liberal background. Confronting myself with what, in theory, I didn’t subscribe to, was and has been a very big help in seeing more faces of complex issues.
General Results
Atlas’ characters tilted me toward the right a pretty decent deal. In believing now that the world operates a little more as Rand sees it and a little less as, say, Obama does, I am both scared of what I didn’t know and motivated to move forward very forcefully to survive within it.
As a prime example, the Galt speech had quite a profound effect as most of what it said had already been addressed one way or the other, just not in such concentrated form. Reading through it – and it took a few sessions – was dazing; it knocked me out mentally perhaps as it was designed to do to people who didn’t see eye to eye with him.
This reaction seems to be usual. I am no exception, really. To add some of my personal tastes, four points that stood out the most are as follows:
Condemnation of Sacrifice: Disagree
Rand believes that sacrifice is wholly destructive to the rational man, and as such includes it as a demand of the antagonists quite transparently. I feel like even amid an individualistic drive, sacrificing as an investment: giving up a measly amount of short term pleasure for that which one foresees to be much much larger fits with rational self-interest. I have tried to find worthy opportunities that fit this description.
Could be missing something but I can’t agree fully here.
Sexual Thoughts: Wow
Being attracted to the mind is something that at a few points in life I have had the luxury of enjoying very much and very frequently. When minds I am attracted to are scarcer, not really in terms of anything as broad as intelligence but rather as a matter of fit, life becomes frustrating. The way attractiveness and sexual motives are portrayed here are quite agreeable. One exception may lie in how far she takes the claim that sex is not at all animalistic but rather is that ultimate expression of humanity. Not in today’s world.
Labeling, Naming, Physical Appearances
That all paternalistic laws are labeled for their hoped-for results, that the fittest businesses are named for their owners, and that all the heroes are ripped became very apparent soon into the book. Once it was obvious that this was no coincidence I wondered how well these correlations manifest today. Some yea, some nay, but most notably as the incidences continued it became funnier. Why laugh, I wonder?
Resemblances to and Borrowings from Bioshock and Lost
The insertion of various themes, characters, and places like Galt’s Gulch into our collective conscience has, I’m sure, helped many readers of Rand put other fiction and real world events in better perspective. Personally, Bioshock 2 and recent episodes as well as previous installments of both have been greatly enhanced by “witnessing” Atlas.
Cheers, Ayn. I am not a GQ labeled ARA but you have roped me in somewhat.