OPINION:
Novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand published her masterpiece “Atlas Shrugged” in 1957. Despite the nearly 70 years that have elapsed since, the book, depicting a world of contradictions, seems more real than fiction today.
Rand imagined a civilization slowly suffocating beneath the weight of its own contradictions. It is a world in which the engines of progress were sabotaged by the very institutions entrusted with their preservation, where ambition was treated as an offense, excellence as an inconvenience and sacrifice as a moral obligation imposed upon those who had already given the most.
Rand’s dystopian vision seems to cast an increasingly long shadow across America. The names have changed, the technologies have advanced, and the machinery of modern life has grown immeasurably more sophisticated. Yet beneath the glittering surface of prosperity, the same tensions remain: the struggle between individual freedom and institutional control, between productive achievement and political privilege, between those who build the world and those who presume to command it and — yes — tear it down. “Rule or ruin” is their abiding goal.
People were interested in these podcasts
In “Atlas Shrugged,” Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden fight to preserve their enterprises against a rising tide of regulations, political machinations and bureaucratic interference. They are not defeated by a shortage of intelligence or imagination, but by a society that increasingly regards their accomplishments as resources to be appropriated rather than achievements to be celebrated.
Their struggle is both economic and existential: They are fighting not merely to keep their businesses alive but also to defend the right to create something meaningful in a world determined to make creation a guilty act.
Is our own society entirely removed from this predicament? Consider the entrepreneur watching a lifetime of labor disappear beneath mounting costs, the small-business owner navigating an endless labyrinth of regulations, or the skilled worker who discovers that diligence no longer guarantees success.
Meanwhile, politically connected corporations may find shelter in subsidies, favorable policies and privileges inaccessible to their smaller competitors. It is the perversion of justice while bureaucratic corruption is encouraged.
Does the denigration of Elon Musk by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York Democrat, sound familiar? In Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s world, success equals failure, dependency equals freedom and independence equals rebellion. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez prefers the enforced peace and harsh discipline of the gulag, where no freedom is allowed. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, meet Big Brother.
Now, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich is calling for the nationalization of Mr. Musk’s SpaceX and Starlink. Why? Because he wants to silence Mr. Musk. Also, simple greed and envy.
Mr. Musk is productive while Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is destructive, but in her twisted and corrupt world, she, the destructor, is celebrated while Mr. Musk is denigrated.
Rand distilled her philosophy into Francisco d’Anconia’s memorable declaration: “Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue.”
The government in “Atlas Shrugged” is not an obvious totalitarian one, with its evil in full regalia. Rather, it is a nanny state in which each new law or restriction alleviates some immediate difficulty. One by one, freedom gives way to expediency, responsibility to entitlement and principle to political convenience, each time becoming more pernicious.
Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism places reason, individual rights and rational self-interest at the center of a flourishing life. In “The Objectivist Ethics,” collected in “The Virtue of Selfishness” (1964), she argued that human beings must be free to pursue their own rational values rather than exist as instruments of another person’s or government’s purposes.
In “Atlas Shrugged,” inventors, industrialists and visionaries disappear from public life, withdrawing their talents from a society that condemns them even as it depends upon them. Their absence exposes a truth that prosperity can obscure: The lights do not remain illuminated by magic. Somewhere, someone must invent, build, repair, organize and, yes, buy and sell.
In our world, such withdrawal may be quieter. It can appear in the exhausted professional who abandons a vocation, the entrepreneur who relocates in search of greater freedom, the gifted graduate who no longer believes that excellence will be rewarded or the worker who gradually surrenders ambition after years of feeling invisible.
No dramatic rebellion is necessary. Sometimes, decline begins with a thousand private decisions to stop caring because of the burden of corrupt government.
John Galt’s oath expresses the uncompromising individualism at the novel’s core: “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”
These words are not simply a celebration of selfishness in its crudest form. They are an intellectual declaration against compulsory sacrifice. A society built upon freedom can still cherish generosity, fellowship and public service, provided that they emerge from conviction rather than coercion.
“Atlas Shrugged” is not a precise map of our present, nor is every contemporary crisis evidence that Rand’s prophecy is unfolding. Still, its central question remains unsettlingly relevant: How long can a civilization demand the fruits of achievement while eyeing achievement itself with suspicion?
Life does imitate art.
• Craig Shirley is an American historian and author. He has written multiple critically acclaimed books on President Reagan.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.