Atlas Shrugged

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Summary: Ann Rand Is The Gratest
Review: This life changing book by Ann Rand changed my life, she is the gratest and most smartest of philsopers!

Any girls out there who intrested in a objectovest MAN can wright to me!

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Summary: UberVulcans on Strike!
Review: Ayn Rand's masterpiece Atlas Shrugged depicts humanity polarized into ubermenchen who direct the world- and socialist "looters" and "moochers" who free-load on their productivity. As the Jungian INTj personality type vanishes from the world to an explanation nameless, the planet atrophies into a chaos. Lurking is the ominous question - who is John Galt?

Philosophical rants are expounded in a clumsy storyline. Serious philosophers are curious about Rand's abandonment of the analytic/synthetic distinction, denial of a priori knowledge, the eccentric treatment of universals, the incompatibility between egoism and rights, and much more! But enough of philosophy! Let us take a look at the verisimilitude of Objectivism when applied in various domains.

1) Economics. Laissez-faire economists champion the *subjective* theory of value introduced by Menger and Jevons independently back in 1871. Randian assurance of "objective" values is analogous to LTV proponents' "objectified labor." Rand's statement that "the good is an aspect of reality in relation to man" is tantamount to Karl Marx's rationally determined "use-values." That all rational entrepreneurship must satisfy the *needs* of customers in a capitalist economic configuration is ignored. "If you build it, they will come," even if it is Crystal Pepsi, the XFL, et cetera.

2) Physics. Objectivism lacks compatibility with Einstein's theory of relativity, Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, quantum mechanics, et cetera.

3) Music. Before one exalts Richard Halley-- remember that Rand had stated that musical taste could not be objectively defined. The implication that fifths and fourths are ethically superior than tritones and half-steps, the sonata-allegro form is "better" than techno music, that the heroic portions of Wagner's Ring cycle *should* be listened to instead of the tragic sections - are all unsound.

4) Mathematics. Is A always A? Pythagoras thought so. Two "irrational" individuals independently came to an opposite conclusion describing rates of change- Sir Isaac Newton developing his "Method of Fluxions" and later G.W. Leibniz's independent discovery of "Differential Calculus."Objectivism lives in a three-dimensional fantasyland in a universe that has at least four dimensions. Two centuries later Euclid's fifth postulate broke down as C. F. Gauss, Johann Bolyai, and N. I. Lobachevsky showed that parallel lines CAN intersect.

5) Biology- The Nietzschian "Will to Power" Rand is fond of is not applicable in biology and cannot be construed as a foundation for an ethical system. The *environment* selects what survives. Darwin destroyed the idea of A is A with respect to species over a hundred years ago - populations exist in a state of change, simultaneously A and ~A.

6) Psychology. Dispositional motivation (free-will) cannot exist in a world where the law of causality is assumed. Consciousness is fluid, and an unconscious exists. Rand supports "Cartesian materialism" - one central "mind," while evidence indicates that some sort of parallel processing occurs in the human brain.

7) History. Aristotle DOMINATED the middle ages. Meanwhile, in other "pestholes" around the world, as Rand called them-- the commercial Muslims were inventing checking, the Chinese were using paper money, the Indians were introducing new concepts to Mathematics, et cetera. Like other civilizations before them, the European powers established economic domination by force - from the Spanish in the Americas to a novel innovation: the joint stock company. Of noble origins, it once served the purpose of advancing the mercantile, colonial, and state-building objectives of the Tudors and Stuarts. Who are Rand's "looters?" The many puppet governments installed by the imperialist powers are an excellent place to find the answer to this. Note that capitalism and the nation-state are a unity historically and economically.

Upon completion of this book, make sure that one does not hold any of the "inherently dishonest ideas" above. Symptomatic of "evasion" of reality, they exemplify pure "evil." NEVER compromise Objectivist ideas- others might get the funny idea that it is some sort of cult...

Rating:
Summary: Enlightening and Fascinating
Review: Possibly the most important work of literature you will ever read. One can try to dipute her philosophy, but the more one lives life in reality, he realizes that she was right about nearly every thing she says. Great book, should be mandatory for all high-school English classes.

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Summary: What others fail to address
Review: What so many critics of Atlas Shrugged, and Rand, fail to cover is the concept of FORCE.

Some say "But Rand hated altruism!" True. "But she didn't care about the needy!" Perhaps so. "Shouldn't we show compassion for the hungry and poor?" Very possibly. "Well there! You've admitted that we should be altruistic!" Not necessarily.

What the advocates of "altruism" don't mention is that true altruism is voluntary. Isn't it ironic that the "altruists" advocate government redistributing wealth under threat of force, and then have the nerve to call it "altruism"? What's so altruistic about government forcibly taking a portion of your wealth without your consent? They say they advocate altruism, compassion, and caring. What they really advocate is government forcibly taking a portion of what you worked for.

Perhaps Rand hated altruism in all its various forms, but I suspect she would have been perfectly willing to let someone voluntarily give away their own wealth to the needy, if that was what they wanted to do. What she ultimately rejected was the notion that an individual, or a collective, have the right to take what someone else earned, under threat of force, for the purpose of a "good intention".

You wanna help the needy? By all means, do so. I regularly give to local charities because I WANT TO. But don't think you have the right to take what someone else has earned just because you think it's for a "good cause". I give of my wealth VOLUNTARILY, but I certainly don't have the right to take what you've earned just because I think it's a good idea.

Forced altruism isn't altruism at all.

A cannot be non-A.

That's the true lesson of Atlas Shrugged.

Rating:
Summary: Life Changer
Review: Best book I have read in my life without a close 2nd..not even The Fountainhead.

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Summary: Great story but...
Review: I have read "We the living", "The fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged" and I believe that Ayn Rand is a gifted writter.

Her characters are very powerful and interesting and it is truly amazing that she can maintain the suspense in novels of such length. Perhaps her only problem is that she can sometimes be repetitive.

However, from a philosophical standpoint, please, hold your horses.

Ayn Rand wishes to convince us about the benefits of capitalism and her view of humanity at it's best through emotive speeches, rather than with reason.

John Galt and Howard Roarke, the heroes, are so courageous and intelligent that it is impossible not to admire them (and to agree with them). Their enemies, on the other hand, are depicted as the lowest king of scum, so it is equally impossible not to hate them.

But, would people be as convinced of her views if they were taught to us by a dull philosophy professor with a drinking problem and a stranged family, for example? Likewise, what if Hank Rearden, the industrialist of the novel, had been shown hiring thughs to subdue disgruntled workers, rather than being the boss of Happy Inc.?

It should be clear to everybody that it would have been possible to write an equally emotional and credible book, pitting hateful plutocrats against honest valiant socialists, fighting for the rights of the "oppressed".

This might sound nonsensical to those who have communism in fresh memory, but it probably isn't the case to those who also remember capitalism at its worst (i.e. child labor at the beginning of the industrial revolution, or today in Southeast Asia).

As it turns out, there are plenty of reasons why liberal democracies paired with market economies and free trade are superior than totalitarian socialist states. However, none of these reasons are mentioned, described or explained in Ayn Rand's book (and we should be thankful for it, because they are boring).

So, enjoy "Atlas Shrugged" and the rest of Ayn Rand's books, because they tell great stories, but do not think of them as life changing reading(and certainly not as "the second most influential book after the bible").

Rating:
Summary: A classic
Review: This is not a "life changing" book. Nor is it the well-written, well-oiled Great American Novel many consider it to be. But it is one of the most interesting, most colorful, and most insightful books I've read in a long time.

The book is ostensibly about a railroad executive who finds that she needs to fight to get the freedom to do what is in her best interest. Obstacles, from the incompetance of her brother, the railroad's president, to the government's insistence to enact "People's legislation", frustrate her and her fellow indistrialists. Eventually, the government's meddling causes widespread dissonance in the economy, and, eventually, to a breakdown of transportation, food distribution, etc. The mythical figure of John Galt, a slang phrase ("Who is John Galt?"), used to convey a feeling of hopelessness, figures in the plot as she tries to track down the origin of the phrase. The book spirals into a succession of exiciting events, and you have a full range to choose from: political power plays, factory riots, mine explosions, physical torture, you name it.

The high points of this book are not merely good, but great. As another reviewer pointed out, damned if she doesn't make steel production and railroad operations exciting! The above synopsis sounds a bit heavy-handed--more on that later--but everything is done gradually and piecemeal so that you're halfway through a crisis before you stop to think about its consequences.

That said, this book really attempts to do two things at once. It attempts to tell a great story, and it attempts to establish and preach Rand's philosophy. In the first count she does exteremly well. With a few exceptions, every page is significant and exciting. This, from a book that is over 1,000 pages long! The exceptions, however, are the few monologues that permeate the book just enough to make it notable but not enough to drag the story down. The famous diatribes--most notably Fransisco's "money" speech and the 80-page (!) radio address--are not nearly as eloquent or interesting as many Rand followers believe it to be, though the points are quite valid.

And--this is a nitpick, to be sure--I dislike books that overuse noted words. For "The Catcher in the Rye," it was "Phoney;" in "Atlas Shrugged," it's "looter." Everyone's a looter in AS: It's true, but everyone uses the word so much that it becomes meaningless.

As a philosophical tome, Rand does the job, I'd say, 80 to 90 percent as it should be. Her arguments are convincing, they are not "extreme," though I will admit that she's quite inflexible. A is A, as she says, and anything deviating from that--i.e., anyone that disagrees with her--is absolutely wrong and not worth thinking about. I agree with most of it, but with the Rand followers I talk to, there's no argument--it's Rand or nothing.

Translated in book terms, the story supports her philosophy, and you don't know it--no "Pilgrim's Progress" bash-over-the-head nonsense. I wouldn't quite call it subtle, but it doesn't turn you away. The only disappointment is during the radio address, when Rand discusses religion (to which she is violently against)--this seemed to be soapbox preaching, not because it's about religion, but because religion was not an issue *at all* throughout the book. (at least directly; Rand supporters would argue it's essential to her philosophy. That may be true, but it's bad prose.) It's as if she forgot about it, so at the last minute stuck it in.

In the end, though it is well worth the read. Be prepared to skip a few pages now and then--and don't let anyone tell you they didn't--but it's not necessarily because it's boring. This book is anything but boring.

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Summary: WORDS HYPNOTIZE
Review: Like the snake in "The Jungle Book" singing "Trust In Me," Rand's words have a hypnotic effect that lull the reader into deadly sleep. She will convince you that she is being perfectly reasonable when she says that selfishness is a virtue, and that "man's ego is the fountainhead of human progress." As a matter of fact, she will make YOU feel like a brainless idiot for NOT being a "capitalistic pig." Some significant observations in reviews I have read here on amazon.com are that this book is second in popularity only to the bible, and Rand is wildly anti-religion. When you get to the part where her hero erects an enormous golden statue of a dollar sign (think "golden calf"), be afraid.

Rating:
Summary: The Truth Hurts
Review: If public schools had anything to do with genuine teaching, learning, or responsible citizenship, this book would be required reading in every one of them. Unfortunately this is contrary to their whole premise; teachers and professors alike will avoid the subject as uncomfortably as they would Hustler Magazine, as if that were the kind of work this book contained. Ayn Rand herself would surely object to having anything forced upon anyone anyway ... even this. Only a few chance wanderers at bookstores and on the net will see these priceless revelations. Some will quibble about how they would have done it better; the fact is they did nothing but a few paragraphs of faultfinding prose; Ayn Rand did 1168 pages of desperately needed reason for our time, clearly defining the Achilles' heel not only of a nation, but of almost every citizen therein as well. Whatever relevance it held in 1957, when we had not marched so far down this dark path, it holds even more today. There's little hope that a John Galt might spring up somewhere and save us; the only hope for any us is to learn and understand these principles - the same principles for which a ragtag army risked everything in 1776. The warning is that if you do read, and understand, the personal change it will evoke may be so dramatic as to actually be painful. People you never doubted as friends may prove to be turncoats ... including yourself. That's the experience I had; I was driven to see my own part in desecrating the world's one great hope, the United States of America. As bad it's been, though, I still feel better for having known; better still I wish I'd known far sooner. Whatever you pay in dollars for this book the personal cost may be greater, but the return to you is still the best of all: truth over safety, for the rest of your days.

Rating:
Summary: The best Rand novel out there.
Review: Simply the best book I have ever read. I don't want to say to much, lest I not give this novel the credit it deserves. I'll simply say that it changed my life forever. For those of you who cherish your lives and your freedom: it would be a good idea to read this book. For those of you who don't: you MUST read it.