I have just finished reading Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged” and have to admit that I am exhausted. The book was published in 1957 and I feel like I have been reading it since then. It is by far the longest and most taxing book I’ve ever read. It has to be up there with the Bible but I haven’t read the Bible so the comparison is moot and I understand the English in Atlas Shrugged is a little easier to understand. Atlas Shrugged is over a thousand pages of tiny writing, tiny to the extent I couldn’t read it at night. I like to read in bed but either my eyes, my glasses or the bulb in the bedside lamp or combinations of all three were not up to the task.
If you know anything at all about Ayn Rand you will know she was a philosopher/novelist who also wrote many works of non-fiction. Her novels were vehicles for the promotion of her philosophy of objectivism. And didn’t she make sure the philosophy shone through. At regular intervals her main characters in this book are given the opportunity to expound on the virtues of the various facets of objectivism culminating in the main character’s 56 page speech to the people of America. Let’s see Leonardo Dicaprio or Matt Damon memorize that. I read the first few pages then the first line of each paragraph for the final 50 pages. That was hard enough. As she explains it:
“My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”
Fair enough. None of this compulsory altruism crap – conservatism with Adam Smith’s invisible hand wearing an iron glove.
The base line of objectivism relates to three axioms – existence, consciousness and identity. So all of those hippies who went off to find themselves were actually onto something although I’m sure they would be heading for Comrade Andrews’ Democratic Socialist Republic of Victoria and their soon to be legislated euthanasia laws if they knew what they were aligning with. When you think about it, why do you think about it and what’s the point. Who am I and why am I here even though I know I’m here and I know who I am, I think, and why is 42 the answer to the ultimate question of life the universe and everything. In my view, philosophy can be described in one word; one letter actually – “I”. So enough of that.
The most interesting thing about the book in my view, is the thematic parallel with what’s happening in Australia and other western democracies at the moment. Large numbers of millennials, bless them, (and their cold war warrior fellow travellers ) due to a glitch in the education system, have never heard of Venezuela, think Che Guevara was a heroic freedom fighter and somehow or other have common cause with clapped out leftists like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn and socialist wannabe’s (in the best Animal Farm tradition) like Bill (Mr Thompson) Shorten. I bet some of them even feel sorry for Kim Jong Un because he’s being abused by that sexual predator, warmongering, scumbag of an American president. No, not Bill Clinton, Donald Trump.
If you read the comments after opinion pieces in the Australian newspaper you may have noticed someone called “Chris” refer to Shorten as Mr Thompson plus a few other cryptic (and direct) references to this book. Ayn’s Mr Thompson is in charge of America and wants everyone to be brought down to the lowest common denominator where equality rules. Take a bow Bill, you’ve starred retrospectively in a book which figures in numerous lists of the top 100 books of all time but not the BBC’s list funnily enough. Perhaps because they recognise themselves in the book, along with most state run and indeed, main stream media and it’s not a complimentary comparison.
Shorten, sorry, Thompson and his crew spend the duration of the book either wreaking havoc on society and industry by implementing things like the Equalization of Opportunity Act which belies its name because of its restrictions on opportunity or disavowing any responsibility for the ensuing chaos. They all at one time or another, some multiple times, channel Bart Simpson with their “you can’t blame me, it wasn’t my fault, you can’t prove anything ”entreaties”. Meanwhile as the country and the world go to shit as the socialism experiment moves inexorably down the path of nationalisation, plummeting productivity and riots, the good guys start to disappear, go on strike actually, which of course, exacerbates the problem.
Any pimply faced millennial socialists who can read and have got well and truly into the book will eventually realise that socialism is really communism with fewer guns. But the Berlin Wall fell last century so we’re going to get it right this time, aren’t we comrades. That old saying that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is for squares, man.
I wonder sometimes what it would be like if the productive people ever did strike. I firmly believe that if the world was populated by empathetic wealth redistributors – you know, the earnest, green, humourless, virtue signalling, safe space seeking student types, redistributing an ever decreasing quantity of wealth, the human race would be extinct in a generation. Everybody would be hugging and nobody would be building anything.
There are a lot of people like this. They know who they are but they know not what they do. Didn’t someone rather famous say something similar once?