What happens when all the leading industrialists go on strike? Why would they go on strike in the first place?

Ayn Rand (1905 – 1982), born into a privileged Russian family, knew she wanted to become a fiction writer by the time she was 9. She left the USSR in 1925 to study in the US and never returned. She developed her own philosophy of life, “Objectivism” (www.aynrand.org), but did not write huge books of philosophy to explain it. Instead, she developed her ideas through fiction, making them available to a wide audience. She is best known for her two novels “Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged”. 

 

In “Atlas Shrugged”, leading industrialists on the West coast of America find themselves living in a system that leeches off them. Society requires them to be selfless and giving to the point of destroying their productive capacity. The novel opens with a powerful picture of a childhood friend of one industrialist, now a faithful employee, handing out a coin to a beggar as he goes home in the evening. He chooses to go down Fifth Avenue (New York) because, “not more than every fourth one of the stores was out of business,” so he finds it a cheerful walk. The picture of the decay of a capitalist society brought about by its own greed is startling because we don’t expect it and also because of the economic shaking that has brought such scenes to pass for real in so many parts of the West.

 

 

Dagny Taggart, the female protagonist, is the mover and shaker in the largest railroad company in America. How ironically prophetic: the world in which we live is vulnerable precisely at the point of transport of goods and people. The fascination in this long novel (1069 pages) lies in trying to figure out how smart and capable people of immense wealth could be overwhelmed by those who depend on them. Who is it that really holds the power? The creators of wealth or the consumers? It is actually possible to feel sorry for the leading industrialists who find themselves at the mercy of a grasping system of government that has the population brainwashed to believe that producers of wealth owe them a living. 

This is a rich, complex novel that, more than anything else, questions the basic values of consumerism. Oops – Ayn Rand wouldn’t appreciate that: she did say that man is a heroic being “with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life.” Ah, but there’s the problem: can individual happiness be an unqualified purpose? See? She’s even got me talking philosophy now! This long novel reads smoothly and quickly. And it is so relevant to today!

 

(Review by Sandra Fernado)