Posts Tagged ayn rand
Review/reaction: Atlas Shrugged
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.
Review/Reaction: The Fountainhead
Literary review and criticism never really came easily to me so don’t expect a penetrating masterpiece of things never before said.
Characters
I relate to aspects of both Keating and Roark as well as nuances of numerous other characters. To find myself in opposite and multiple characters speaks to the complexity of humans vis a vis characters, or viewed another way, it reveals my indecision as to what kind of person I am. As to the character I would like to emulate more or eventually become, Dominique Francon or Gail Wynand would be the choice.
Dominique in particular reflected my persona because she didn’t mind irrationally subjecting herself to extended anguish at times.
The liberal, altruistic, and cultured establishment
I was drawn to Rand’s treatment of the establishment’s self image. Happily, the unabashedly self congratulatory tone taken by Toohey in his speeches and reviews was ridiculed extensively. Moreover, my disdain for artistic criticism as an instrument of power and influence in disguise was repeatedly piqued. It’s very hard to enumerate why a work is “awful,” or “bad,” people just tend to trust the reviewer.
Two speeches in particular, that of Toohey on altruism and Roark in defense of the pioneer, were amazing. Toohey’s cast doubt on my affinity to social liberal policy and Roark’s helped me come to terms with why I am so deeply in love with the (common noun) big city. The imagery at the end of the book, wherein Dominique ascends above the established buildings like banks, churches, and apartments, was thus very moving and fitting. Roark wins.
Although he won, per se, expressing his truth in such a destructive form as he did was easily beyond what my set of beliefs would realistically allow. Perhaps it is this hesitancy that allows the left to maintain a hold on people who would otherwise defect; it leverages internal moral leanings as Rand suggests it exploits.
Man over nature / Individual over collective
Right now I see a beautiful sunset, the likes of which I cannot remember seeing before. Nature is indeed beautiful. I am only able to see it, though, because of the Embraer vessel in which I fly, thanks to UAL Corp., and due to man’s progress in science and industry.
Still left to consider are the government wrought enablers. The FAA allows for takeoff and landing. Birmingham’s airport authority, although incompetent in its loss to Atlanta many moons ago, keeps the shared land running. Even, for example, the US military, or whatever peacekeeping entity that affords me the security to value an arrangement of colors in the sky instead of worrying about immediate survival, is partly to thank for this experience.
Nature, individuals, and collectives all create beauty and progress in harmony. To argue for the extermination of one, in my opinion, is to prove blindness to their synergy. We may miss the mark on the mix but should reallocate, incrementally, when possible.
Atlas remains.