Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
It’ll take a while, maybe another hundred years, but eventually (I hope) this book will fall right out of every top 10, top 100 list of books, as more and more folks understand it as an economic tract instead of a novel. (Consider maxims like “Money is the barometer of a society's virtue.”) Certainly, economic tracts deserve a place in the literary canon, alongside works like Marx's Das Kapital or Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, but I don't believe Atlas Shrugged deserves to nestle with Lolita and Crime and Punishment (which manages to be philosophical without being a tract). Not just because Atlas Shrugged is a work of propaganda, but also because as fiction, it's not a work of creative significance. It's a step above the psychobabble of L. Ron Hubbard to be sure, but those two authors have more in common (in motivation if not in philosophy) with each other than they do with Nabakov or Dostoevsky.
Libertarians love Rand because she consistently represents their worldview. In fact, many folks with varying philosophical backgrounds admire her; surely, however, they haven't considered the full implications of what she’s saying. Rand's most popular maxim was spoken in Atlas Shrugged and detailed in her collection of essay, “The Virtues of Selfishness": “I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another human being, or ask another human being to live for mine.” I guess this mantra approximates "Do unto others as best suits yourself," which essentially means letting folks fend for themselves. I wonder in this post dotbomb era, in this age of Enronism, whether Rand might change her tune about the respective merits of capitalism and selfishness. What I see makes me ill. The rich getting richer off the backs of the poor even as they, the rich, know their enterprise is going down the drain. Unchallenged, capitalism uses people up. Beats the shit out of them, frankly. I'm no commie but I do believe that the idea that capitalism is a neatly and simply a superior operating principle, elegant in it's efficiency--that idea is born of naïveté, and perhaps, greed.
By all accounts even Rand didn’t live by her popular maxim. Even she was more human than that. These sentiments are glib and simplistic; they might appear sensible at first blush, but raise chilling repercussions when you consider their ramifications. It sends a chill down my spine when so many describe it as the book (second only to the Bible, according to a joint survey conducted by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club) that most changed their life. Her philosophy of Objectivism may be pro-individual (and I consider myself a strong individualist and even share many sentiments with libertarians) but I believe it’s anti-human. Principles of individualism have to be balanced with principles of community. (Capitalism has to be balanced with elements of socialism, if you like, not to conclude that these systems are always so easily divided.) We need a balance. That sounds simplistic and glib too, doesn’t it?
